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
This column by G. M. Baker about the characteristics of 'moral' stories versus 'psychological experience' stories is so interesting. I'd never thought about this difference before, so my reading of it started with puzzlement, followed by some understanding and, finally, wonderment.
One thing I've thought about is this: An author can write a story including psychological experience (in either present or past tense), but the minute she introduces a moral dimension, then (as Baker puts it) The Law is invoked.
But the reverse isn't the same. A moral story can include any amount of psychological experience in any tense...and that doesn't change the fact that the moral element of the story remains.
I don't know how I'll use these ideas...but I'm happy I learned about them and will let them stew new juices in my writing.
I’m very sympathetic to the argument about present tense literature. I’m working on a book that alternates between the two (past and present) and I feel what you speak of.
But, by way of contradiction, what do we make of, say, The Hunger Games, told in present tense, but where The Law seems quite evident in the work?
Well, I make nothing of The Hunger Games, which I have not read. But it is, of course, possible for the medium and the message to be at odds with each other, sometimes, deliberately, sometimes not. It is also true that the medium is a complex, multifaceted thing and does not always boil down to one factor. This doesn't change the fact that the use of the present tense is part of literature's flight from The Law, but nor does it make it impossible for a present-tense book to embrace The law.
Interesting quote from Ursula K. LeGuin, in Steering the Craft, a book about writing:
I see the big difference between past and present tenses not as immediacy but as complexity and size of field. A story told in the present tense is necessarily focused on action in a single time and therefore a single place. Use of the past tense(s) allows continual referring back and forth in time and space. That’s how our minds normally work, moving around easily. Only in emergency situations do they focus very tightly on what’s going on. And so narration in the present tense sets up a kind of permanent artificial emergency, which can be exactly the right tone for fast-paced action.
Yes, this exactly. And it is also a state in which The Law is suppressed in favor of immediate survival, the state in which soldiers commit atrocities because there is no part of their mind available for reflection in the face of immediate threats to their existence. There is also an element of thinking fast and thinking slow here, I think. The Law requires thinking slow. Thinking slow suspends time, taking us out of the rush of immediate sensation. This is the natural domain of the past tense, which is, in some sense, the eternal tense, as opposed to the immediate tense, which we call present.
There is a parallel to this in the choice of a first-person vs third-person narrator. The use of the first person narrows the field in much the same way as the use of the present tense does. Combine the two, and you get a helter-skelter narrative style that is obviously popular today, and is entirely inimical to thinking slow, and to The Law.
Yes this! This makes loads of sense. I loathe present tense--it feels so very, very wrong, and grates on me, and I think this is a really big reason why.
Very interesting reflection on an important topic….Today there is another twist to consider: the story told by a character who is living in a lawless world. The past tense retrospective implicitly establishes a vantage point from the present on the past. A first-person retrospective implies the narrator’s own conclusions on lessons learned from experience. But in a lawless culture, part of the hero(ine)’s search is going to be in part a search for the law itself: that is, not only for a particular answer to a mystery, but for reliable evidence that there is a higher law. And the terrible possibility is that lawlessness is the only reality, which means there is no hope of justice or happiness. Such things as “justice” and “happiness” become meaningless. There are only inchoate struggles of will and appetite. But today even the law-abiding character must function in that inchoate environment which itself becomes the “dragon.” The hero is so to speak in the belly of the beast, trying to escape before being digested.
You make an excellent point. One use of present-tense narrative may be to kill The Law. But equally, it could be used to express dismay at the death of the Law, or, rather, dismay at discovering what life is like in the absence of The Law.
In some sense, this is the opposite of the fairytale, which uses chaotic magic to strip away the laws of nature, leaving The Law as the dominant source of order.
Wow, great article! I absolutely loathe present tense, and I'm always trying to figure out why. Is it objectively BAD somehow? Or is it a subjective taste, from which I have no grounds to criticize? This comes closer than I've been able to in pinpointing why I find it so hateful. I don't think this is the whole puzzle, but it's a good chunk of it. Also the immediate, frantic, gasping narration seems to defy beauty and order and thought--all the things that typically make me want to pick up a book to begin with.
This column by G. M. Baker about the characteristics of 'moral' stories versus 'psychological experience' stories is so interesting. I'd never thought about this difference before, so my reading of it started with puzzlement, followed by some understanding and, finally, wonderment.
One thing I've thought about is this: An author can write a story including psychological experience (in either present or past tense), but the minute she introduces a moral dimension, then (as Baker puts it) The Law is invoked.
But the reverse isn't the same. A moral story can include any amount of psychological experience in any tense...and that doesn't change the fact that the moral element of the story remains.
I don't know how I'll use these ideas...but I'm happy I learned about them and will let them stew new juices in my writing.
This is amazing.
Firstly, it explains why present tense novels are so terrible.
Secondly, it is interesting to see how society becoming secular has impacted books.
And it provokes many more thoughts.
I’m very sympathetic to the argument about present tense literature. I’m working on a book that alternates between the two (past and present) and I feel what you speak of.
But, by way of contradiction, what do we make of, say, The Hunger Games, told in present tense, but where The Law seems quite evident in the work?
Well, I make nothing of The Hunger Games, which I have not read. But it is, of course, possible for the medium and the message to be at odds with each other, sometimes, deliberately, sometimes not. It is also true that the medium is a complex, multifaceted thing and does not always boil down to one factor. This doesn't change the fact that the use of the present tense is part of literature's flight from The Law, but nor does it make it impossible for a present-tense book to embrace The law.
Interesting quote from Ursula K. LeGuin, in Steering the Craft, a book about writing:
I see the big difference between past and present tenses not as immediacy but as complexity and size of field. A story told in the present tense is necessarily focused on action in a single time and therefore a single place. Use of the past tense(s) allows continual referring back and forth in time and space. That’s how our minds normally work, moving around easily. Only in emergency situations do they focus very tightly on what’s going on. And so narration in the present tense sets up a kind of permanent artificial emergency, which can be exactly the right tone for fast-paced action.
Yes, this exactly. And it is also a state in which The Law is suppressed in favor of immediate survival, the state in which soldiers commit atrocities because there is no part of their mind available for reflection in the face of immediate threats to their existence. There is also an element of thinking fast and thinking slow here, I think. The Law requires thinking slow. Thinking slow suspends time, taking us out of the rush of immediate sensation. This is the natural domain of the past tense, which is, in some sense, the eternal tense, as opposed to the immediate tense, which we call present.
There is a parallel to this in the choice of a first-person vs third-person narrator. The use of the first person narrows the field in much the same way as the use of the present tense does. Combine the two, and you get a helter-skelter narrative style that is obviously popular today, and is entirely inimical to thinking slow, and to The Law.
Yes this! This makes loads of sense. I loathe present tense--it feels so very, very wrong, and grates on me, and I think this is a really big reason why.
In a short passage (an actual emergency for example) I think present tense can do great things. For an entire book, I find it hard reading.
Very interesting reflection on an important topic….Today there is another twist to consider: the story told by a character who is living in a lawless world. The past tense retrospective implicitly establishes a vantage point from the present on the past. A first-person retrospective implies the narrator’s own conclusions on lessons learned from experience. But in a lawless culture, part of the hero(ine)’s search is going to be in part a search for the law itself: that is, not only for a particular answer to a mystery, but for reliable evidence that there is a higher law. And the terrible possibility is that lawlessness is the only reality, which means there is no hope of justice or happiness. Such things as “justice” and “happiness” become meaningless. There are only inchoate struggles of will and appetite. But today even the law-abiding character must function in that inchoate environment which itself becomes the “dragon.” The hero is so to speak in the belly of the beast, trying to escape before being digested.
You make an excellent point. One use of present-tense narrative may be to kill The Law. But equally, it could be used to express dismay at the death of the Law, or, rather, dismay at discovering what life is like in the absence of The Law.
In some sense, this is the opposite of the fairytale, which uses chaotic magic to strip away the laws of nature, leaving The Law as the dominant source of order.
Wow, great article! I absolutely loathe present tense, and I'm always trying to figure out why. Is it objectively BAD somehow? Or is it a subjective taste, from which I have no grounds to criticize? This comes closer than I've been able to in pinpointing why I find it so hateful. I don't think this is the whole puzzle, but it's a good chunk of it. Also the immediate, frantic, gasping narration seems to defy beauty and order and thought--all the things that typically make me want to pick up a book to begin with.