The tyranny of present tense
Philip Pullman1 believes that the usage of present-tense narrative is increasing, and that the increase is an unfortunate development. If I were to take a sample of my own work and the work I’ve seen published in recent years, I would have to agree.
It is not surprising that a first-person, present-tense style is increasingly common. The past decade has seen an explosion of Reality TV and the advent of true real-time communication, media and entertainment. It only makes sense that literature moulds itself on the zeitgeist.
Pullman is confident that this is a bad thing2. He says that “it is an abdication of narrative responsibility because if I just relate now what’s happening now…I can’t be held to account for it.”
He makes several other good points in the article that are worth considering deeply. The one I want to focus on is the idea of narrative responsibility. What is it?
He doesn’t leave it open to interpretation. He says, “The storyteller…should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. [Choose a perspective] from which [we] can see the action most clearly. Say what happened, and let the reader know when it happened and what caused it and what the consequences were, and tell me where the characters were and who else was present – and while you’re at it, I’d like to know what they looked like and whether it was raining.”
Shirking narrative responsibility consists, I think, of unnecessarily narrowing the reach of the intellectual experience by confining it to the immediate. Such a confinement is unnecessary because there is nothing physical that forces it. Such a confinement is potentially criminal because the job of the intellect is to rise above and to circle around ideas, that is, to freely explore them, not to view them as a child would a toy in a shop: with his face squashed against window, unable to see anything other than what has been put on display.
A recent short story I submitted to a competition was written in the first-person, present-tense. I was up against a nearing deadline and I chose the easy way out. Now, in hindsight, I realise that was a mistake. I think we tend to be drawn to real-time narrative because it feels easier. When we are required to think about very few details and only have to concern ourselves with a single, narrow perspective, the work becomes significantly less onerous. Further, when we embrace the unreliable narrator, all the requirements of diligence can be abandoned in the name of artistry. This is a dangerous situation for a writer to be in if only because we often break the rules without a perfect, practical knowledge of what the rules are and are thus almost sure to make a mess of things.
Footnotes:
1 Philip Pullman is the author of the marvellous “His Dark Materials” which can be thought of as fantasy science-fiction. In that series of books, he examines many deep issues, some of which include the structure of spiritual belief and the totalitarianism of religious institutions.
