Present Tense Fiction and the Flight from The Law

Liza Libes is entirely correct that the use of the present tense in contemporary literary fiction is meant to inhibit looking back and reflecting. Matthew Sutherland is not wrong that it is still possible to look back and reflect in a present-tense narrative. But that does not change the fact that the use of present tense is indeed meant to inhibit reflection.

Marshall McLuhan taught us that the medium is the message, that every element of a communication is saying something to the reader, including the choice of narrative style. It is possible for a good writer to subvert the message of the medium for effect. And it is not merely possible but likely that a naive writer will follow a popular method with no concept of the message it contains. None of this changes the fact that there is a message inherent in the choice of a present-tense narrative, and it is the message given to Lot’s wife, which she ignored at her peril: don’t look back.

Why not look back? Presumably neither the reader nor the writer will be turned into a pillar of salt if they pause to reflect on the events of a novel, so why the prohibition, or at least inhibition, of reflection? What is it that those who teach and encourage this style don’t want us to see? What is the name of that frightful fiend that doth close behind them tread?

It has many names, but here I will call it The Law.

Over the course of the last century or more, the literary world has moved its base of operations from the moral sphere to the psychological sphere. When literature operates in the moral sphere, every story orients its characters and their movements to The Law. Thus Hamlet exclaims in his anguish.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!

Hamlet here reflects. He looks both back and forward and agonizes over what to do. But from the beginning, he acknowledges that he is a man who lives under The Law, here represented by the canon of the Everlasting. He does not live according to The Law, necessarily, but he is conscious that he lives under The Law, under the eye of Heaven. The Law provides a fixed point against which every action taken, and every action contemplated, must be judged.

When we pause in a story to contemplate, this is the thing we are contemplating: was this done according to The Law? The Law is the reference point for every consideration of what has occurred and what may occur.

While Pride and Prejudice begins with a seeming mocking of The Law, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” It is not The Law itself that is mocked but Mrs. Bennet’s self-serving interpretation of it. Lizzy, after all, does not initially reject D’Arcy because he has bad breath or two left feet, but because she perceives that he has broken the laws of civility. And she does not finally accept him because she admires his broad chest or chiseled jaw, but because she discovers that he has been obedient to a higher law by rendering assistance where it was required and to a higher law still by not boasting about it. Lizzy selects her mate because she discovers him to be a man of The Law.

In one of the most famous closing lines in all of literature, Dickens has Sydney Carton say, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Why is it a far, far better thing he does than he has ever done? Because it is done in accordance with The Law. And why is it a far, far better rest he goes to? Because that is the reward for following The Law.

Similarly, Emma Micawber repeatedly proclaims that despite all her husband’s deceptions and improvident actions, she will never leave him. ‘Mr. Micawber has his faults. I do not deny that he is improvident. I do not deny that he has kept me in the dark as to his resources and his liabilities both,’ she went on, looking at the wall; ‘but I never will desert Mr. Micawber!’ Why not? Because she lives under The Law.

Psychology certainly plays a factor in literature that is created in the moral realm. Hamlet’s soliloquy is a brilliant exposition of his psychological state. But the role of the psychological in the moral realm is as an impediment to living in accordance with The Law. It is what pulls a character away from The Law and tempts them to violate it. It is what makes them fear to follow it.

The Law is a fixed thing, external to the character, the reference point against which the character judges himself and towards which he seeks to orient and justify his actions. It can take many forms. For Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, it is the law of the Catholic Church. For Captain Aubrey, it is the King’s Regulations and the traditions of the service. For Mowgli, it is the law of the jungle. For Hamlet it is the canon of the Everlasting. For Bertie Wooster, it is the code of the Woosters. For Lizzy Bennet, it is a truth universally acknowledged. And this is what it must be, for the duration of the story at least: a truth universally acknowledged by reader, writer, and character alike. As Tolkien says in On Fairy Stories, the laws that the narrator creates in their subcreated world are true in that world, and the reader believes them. The psychology of the character shapes how they live under The Law and what impedes them from abiding by it, but for stories in the moral realm, The Law is the fixed point around which the story is built and to which it is anchored.

For literature in the psychological realm, the order is reversed. If the character believes themselves to be living under The Law, this is regarded as a product of their psychological state. The law is not a common point of reference for reader, writer, and character. It is simply a phenomenon of the individual psyche.

It is not my present purpose to argue for the reality of The Law in any of its many guises. My only purpose here is to point out how great a difference it makes to the practice of literature whether or not The Law provides that common reference point for reader, writer, and character. An author who acknowledges any form of The Law as a thing that is real and independent from themselves will write a very different story in a very different way from one who regards The Law as simply a psychological phenomenon in the mind of the character.

One place we can see this difference is in the classical story form of the hero’s journey. In the original expression of the hero’s journey by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the cyclical model of the story included two refusals: the refusal of the call to adventure and the refusal of return. When Christopher Vogler adapted this model as a structure for movies, in The Writer’s Journey, he omitted the second of these refusals, the refusal of return. But if you look at many of the accounts of the hero’s journey on the Web today, you will see that most sources now also omit the first refusal, the refusal of the call to adventure.

Why? What is the function of the refusal of the call to adventure in the hero’s journey? Does it do anything other than slow down the action? Consider the difference the refusal of the call makes. Without it, the hero is at home in the normal world, minding his own business. The call for adventure comes. He immediately picks up his father’s sword and rushes out the door, not pausing to cancel the newspaper and feed the cat, so eager is he to plunge into the wilderness.

With the refusal of the call, things are very different. The hero is at home in the normal world, minding his own business. The call for adventure comes, and the hero says, “No!” He does not want to go. Eventually he changes his mind and reluctantly picks up his father’s sword, cancels the newspaper, puts out food for the cat, and departs. He doesn’t want to go, but he goes anyway. Why? Because he lives under The Law. There are reasons external to him that oblige him to go, even against his inclination.

This is a very different story from the one that omits the refusal. In the first, the hero goes willingly without a backward glance and gets straight to the hacking and hewing and wenching. In the second, the hero goes reluctantly and often pauses to look back wistfully and to consider the choices he has made. The first hero has no check upon his actions but those imposed in a practical way by nature or by his enemies. The second hero has a perpetual check upon his actions as his inclinations struggle against the demands of The Law. The first hero has no reason ever to look back. He only ever looks forward to the next obstacle, the next opponent, the next wench. The second hero has every reason to look back, for he is constantly torn between his inclination and The Law and constantly asking himself, as the reader may also ask, whether his actions are indeed in accord with The Law. The Law becomes the fixed point that anchors the spring of tension that drives the story.

The first hero here sounds very much like a character from genre fiction. Surely the same thing does not apply to literary fiction? But it does. The bifurcation between literary and genre fiction that has developed over the last hundred years or so is born of the same turn in literature from the moral realm to the psychological realm. The difference is that in genre fiction, the author applies psychology to maximize the appeal of the story to the appetites of the reader, while in literary fiction, the author invites the reader to join them in the psychological vivisection of a character. The character becomes like a patient etherized upon a table while the author shows the reader a lantern slide of their faults. This is actually just as much an appeal to the appetites of the reader as is the hacking and hewing and wenching of a cheap fantasy novel. It is simply an appeal to a different set of appetites.

Now, you might think that if the literary novel is engaging in the psychological vivisection of a character that it would have every reason and occasion to pause, look back, and reflect. But then, what would it look back to? What would it reflect about? What standard would it propose to compare the character’s actions against, since it knows not The Law? When the protagonist of a novel in the psychological realm dithers and questions their actions, these are psychological phenomena of the present moment. From a psychological point of view, they may be a rehashing of past actions, but from a literary point of view, they are not literary reflections; they are psychological phenomena of the present moment. Neither the reader nor the writer is reflecting with the character. They have no such common reference point as The Law. Reader and writer are observing the character dither in the moment. To actually look back, to actually reflect, would be to see and to acknowledge the frightful fiend that doth close behind them tread: The Law.

Without The Law to anchor the spring of tension, the cheap fantasy and the high literary novel alike can only rush on from the sensations of one moment to the sensations of the next. A pause to look back would only cause the rush of sensations to cease, and that is all that is keeping the story going. A novel in the moral sphere, on the other hand, can pause to reflect because the spring remains in tension, held fast by the anchor of The Law. Indeed, the pause and the reflection, if well executed, serve to remind the reader of the source of the tension and just how tightly the spring is wound. For what we call tension in literature is nothing more than this: will the character follow their own inclination, or will they conform themselves to The Law?

The shift of literature from the moral domain to the psychological domain has been going on for a long time. It is by no means complete, if only because the moral domain makes for so much better stories. But we can certainly identify one of its key moments in perhaps the two most famous poems to come out of the First World War. One of these is a much better piece of poetry than the other, but that is not the one most remembered or most often recited. That distinction belongs to John McCrae’s In Flanders’ Fields, which concludes with a plea to keep faith with The Law, here embodied as “the torch”:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By contrast, the far more poetically gifted lines of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, conclude with a bitter condemnation of The Law.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Again, my point here is not to argue that The Law is real and exists independent of any individual, nor yet to argue for or against any of the versions or interpretations of The Law that have existed throughout human history, or any of its fictional embodiments. Whether you regard The Law as an old lie or as the world’s great and saving truth, my point is simply that the question of The Law is fundamental to the structure of stories and how they are told. To return to McLuhan’s dictum, the existence or non-existence of The Law is one of the messages contained in the medium when the author – or a literary culture – adopts a literary style.

The Law, of course, exists in the domain of the objective. To claim that The Law exists is to claim that an objective reality exists of which we can have certain knowledge, even if the protagonist of a story may currently be blindly or wilfully misinformed about it. The way (a way, the principal way) in which this is expressed in the literary medium is through the voice of the narrator. An authoritative narrative voice establishes an objective reality with an objective value for The Law.

The postmodernist movement, which continues to dominate modern literature even if few writers can trace its maxims back to their source, denies the possibility of objective truth. For them, the only reality is the experience of the individual. To express this message through the literary medium, the voice of the narrator must be silenced. And that voice cannot be better silenced than by presenting a stream-of-consciousness present-tense account of the protagonist’s unfolding experience. To step back and reflect would be to implicitly suggest an objective world in which the experience of the individual could be considered and judged against some objective standard, against The Law. To remain only in the present moment is to deny that any such reality exists, that any Law exists that might form the basis of such contemplation.

So yes, Liza Libes is correct; the use of present tense weakens literature by removing the opportunity for reflection. But this is no accident or whim of fashion. It is a necessary bending of the medium to proclaim the message that there is no objective reality and no objective morality, that The Law does not exist, that there is only the experience of the individual in the moment and nothing else. It is this rejection of The Law, with its consequent loss of the anchor of the spring of tension, that weakens literature.

Again, I am not concerned here to dispute this position. I am here only to point out its consequences for literature and for the forms and methods of literature. The medium is the message, and if you deny that there is an objective reality or that part of that objective reality is The Law, then you will naturally avoid forms that implicitly suggest that such a reality exists and choose forms that implicitly deny it.

But this choice means that you cannot tell certain kinds of stories. Even at the turn of the last century, this divide was evident. In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

“The centre is not central.” In other words, The Law is not The Law. Without that objective point of view, without The Law – I speak of it here purely as a literary device – there cannot be an adventure. The spring of tension cannot be wound because it has no anchor. The story must, therefore, be dull because, without The Law, you can’t tell the hero from the dragon. The protagonist of a sober, realistic novel is an essential lunatic because he has no standard against which to test himself to determine if he is sane, to tell him if he is a hero or a dragon.

And this is also why his story is apt to be told in the present tense, because there is only the individual experience of the moment. To admit otherwise would be to let in the objective world, to let in the hero and the dragon, to let in The Law.

This is not at all to say, of course, that if you believe in the objective world, if you believe in The Law, that you have to write stories about dragons. That same hard objectivity of faerie can also be portrayed in more mundane settings, as Austen did, as Dickens did, as Shakespeare did. But the medium is the message, and such an endeavor is likely to involve the use of the past tense and of an assured authorial voice that has both the power and the patience to pause sometimes and reflect and to remind us of The Law, by which alone we can determine who is the hero and who is the dragon.

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Even those who believe most fiercely that they live by the law may deceive themselves as to its true dictates. In many novels, the thing that drives the story is the tension between The Law and the protagonist’s self-serving interpretation of The Law. Such is the case for Hannah Pendarves in The Wrecker’s Daughter.