I am traveling, visiting family this week in Maine and now Wisconsin, and as my family in Wisconsin doesn’t have wifi much, any thoughts on the shocking events of the last week will come after the weekend. I myself was reading Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, which comes out this fall and it was a perfect companion for making sense of these times: an emergency room visit at the novel’s beginning sets off an extended meditation on what Greenwell names as American irrationality, and while long-form fiction is a slow art, unsuited to responding quickly to current events, sometimes a novel can without planning arrive exactly on time. It comes out this September 3, from FSG. I’ll have more to say about it also next week.
For now, I offer the below, some thoughts on the Present Tense which were initially published on my TinyLetter back in 2016, and as it has been taken offline because that is the world we live in, I thought to bring it back here.
Piece, French, circa 1760(?), silk and metal thread, the Metropolitan Open Access Collection
I was putting together this essay on the Present Tense in 2015 when I received a message too late to include in it from Anthony Marra, most recently the author of Mercury Pictures Presents. With his permission it appeared in my previous newsletter, along with a few other quotes below and a list of suggested titles. Please add to the list in the comments, any books of fiction or nonfiction that you love in the present tense, and I hope you are enjoying
Anthony Marra:
I usually feel a bit like a defense attorney preparing for trial whenever when getting ready to discuss the present tense in class. The case against the present tense usually runs something like this: it’s airport thriller gimmickry, it’s an unnatural way to tell a story, and it allows no room for complexity, wisdom, or meaning.
On the first count, a few pages from David Mitchell or J.M. Coetzee—whose best novels are written in the present tense—usually does the trick.
On the second count, I’d point to the way we colloquially narrate stories with friends and family. I might give my students an example like this: “I went to a bar last night” and “So I’m at a bar last night, and you won’t believe it, I’m just sitting there, minding my own business, when in walks a horse.” The first sentence, in the past tense, is how you might respond to the question “What did you do last night?” The second sentence, in the present tense, is how you might respond if you really wanted to convey the sense of what last night felt like; if, in other words, you want to tell a story. Jokes and anecdotes, among the oldest narrative forms, regularly employ the present tense; far being unnatural, it’s the way stories are told before they are written down.
The question of building complexity, wisdom, and meaning in the present tense is the trickiest of the lot. Again, I don’t think anyone would claim Mitchell or Coetzee are lacking in complexity or wisdom, but it’s true that the present tense limits the retrospective meaning-making that literature can provide so beautifully. I’d argue that the present tense doesn’t reduce the potential for meaning or wisdom, but rather relies on the reader to play a more active role in its creation. In the past tense, the narrator sees farther than the reader. In the present tense, the reader sees farther than the narrator. More than that, to deny the validity of the present tense denies recourse to the narrative mode in which life’s great, aching dramas—heartbreak, illness, death, violence; in short, the stuff of much literary fiction—are often narrated narrated when spoken aloud. Anyone who has spent time in a twelve-step program is likely familiar with this. Someone might describe what they ate that morning for breakfast in the past tense, then switch to the present tense to describe a decades-old trauma. Once in the present tense, they might also switch from the first person to second person. I can’t speak to the psychology behind this, beyond guessing that narratively dislocating oneself in tense and POV makes the unspeakable speakable. Even after we have reconciled ourselves with the trauma, the narrative dislocation may still persist. The mode of narrating trauma can become trauma’s most lasting scar.
To wrap this up, I usually discuss the present tense with my students as part of a larger discussion about expanding one’s own arsenal of narrative possibilities. I’ve noticed a move-to-the-middle-of-the-road syndrome in some workshops, in which the rough and weird edges of a story (often where the real originality resides) get shorn away. The danger in limiting tenses, POVs, voices, and forms is mere competence, a story that everyone likes but nobody loves.
And then I came across two other quotes, in a thread on my Facebook about this topic from a year ago (via Facebook memories!).
I think the present tense, in nonfiction, can solve the issue of childhood recollection, where the adult voice is placed in the awkward position of speaking authoritatively at once about and as the child. In past tense, unless the authoritative air is questioned (What I seem to remember is…) this consistently comes off as over-precious, falsifying, self-mythology, no matter the content; the problem lies in the form. Present tense inherently asserts an understanding that this is step-by-step reconstruction from memory , exploratory, tentative, hypothetical, potentially fallible. –Shelly Salamensky
It is in the present that we make a memory. – Deleuze
Below, a partial list of works in the present tense, fiction and nonfiction.
Allison Amend – Stations West
Jami Attenberg – The Middlesteins,
Jane Austen – Mansfield Park (near the end)
James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time
Samuel Beckett – How It Is
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre (partial)
Italo Calvino – If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
J. M. Coetzee – Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace
Colette – Mitsou
Patricia Cornwell – At Risk
Charles Dickens – Bleak House (partial)
Geoff Dyer – The Missing of the Somme
Stephen Elliott – Happy Baby
William Faulkner – Light in August
Flynn – Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Carlos Fuentes – Aura
Mary Gaitskill – Veronica
Kristen Iverson – Full Body Memory
Mitchell S. Jackson – The Residue Years
A. K. Kennedy – On Bullfighting
Jean Hanff Korelitz – The White Rose
Agota Kristof – The Notebook
Peter Matthiessen – The Snow Leopard
Lorrie Moore – Self Help
Haruki Murakami – Kafka On the Shore (partial)
Walker Percy – The Moviegoer
Thomas Pynchon – Bleeding Edge, Gravity’s Rainbow
Jamie Quattro – I Want To Love You More
Jean Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight; The Wide Sargasso Sea
Alain Robbe-Grillet – Jealousy
James Salter – A Sport & A Pastime
John Updike – The Rabbit Trilogy
That’s so interesting. And yes! Controversial perhaps no more but once upon a time.
"The danger in limiting tenses, POVs, voices, and forms is mere competence, a story that everyone likes but nobody loves." That will stay with me. Thanks for sharing yours and Anthony Marra's thoughts and for the list!
I always enjoy what you share on writing.