Author, author / Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense

AUTHOR, AUTHOR

Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense

If every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value. What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness

Philip Pullman
Sat 18 Sep ‘10 00.06 BST

Last week, the Daily Telegraph printed a story headlined "Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher criticise Booker prize for including present-tense novels".

Not for the first time, a statement bellowed forthrightly in a headline became rather more muffled and provisional in the text below it, which carefully avoided having me say directly that I was criticising the Man Booker shortlist. I hadn't done that because I hadn't read the books. I'm quite prepared to believe that each of the listed novels that's told in the present tense is a miracle of literary art. What I did say, in an email to the Telegraph journalist who asked me about it, was that the use of the present tense in fiction had been getting more and more common, and I didn't like it.

Here's why. Like any other literary effect, the present tense is an expressive device; but expression works by contrast. Take this example from Jane Eyre: "They are making hay, too, in Thornfield meadows: or rather, the labourers are just quitting their work, and returning home with their rakes on their shoulders, now, at the hour I arrive. I have but a field or two to traverse, and then I shall cross the road and reach the gates. How full the hedges are of roses! But I have no time to gather any; I want to be at the house . . ."

That works beautifully because it emerges from the context of a narrative told in the past tense. Jane's sudden use of the present conveys as nothing else could the pressure of her feelings as she recalls the high intensity of that summer evening, of her return to the house of the man she hasn't yet admitted to herself that she loves: "I see the narrow stile with stone steps; and I see – Mr Rochester sitting there, a book and a pencil in his hand; he is writing.

"Well, he is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung: for a moment I am beyond my own mastery."

Bleak House is another 19th-century novel in which the present tense plays a big part, but again the effect of it derives from the contrast between the wide-ranging, all-seeing, intensely cinematic narration of the present-tense passages and the closely personal tone of the past-tense passages narrated by Esther Summerson. (I'd add the delicious doubt in my own mind about Esther's apparent mimsiness: why is she the only character never directly observed in the present-tense passages? Because she's much sharper than she seems and she actually wrote the whole thing, is my answer.)

But if every sound you emit is a scream, a scream has no expressive value. What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness. I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate.

I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses.

There's a close parallel here with the increasing use of the hand-held camera in cinema. Just like the present tense, the hand-held camera is an expressive device whose expressive power is being drained away by making it the only way of shooting a film. And I dislike that too, you won't be surprised to hear. I dislike it partly because it makes me feel sick, and partly because the camera never seems to be looking where I want to look, and partly because of the sheer monotony of texture that it brings, but mainly because of its falsehood. It seems to say: "We were there when these things happened. They were real. We didn't have time to adjust the focus on that shot or swing round in time to see who said those words or keep the camera steady. It was all happening there right in front of us. It was all urgent and real."

Well, of course it wasn't real and of course it wasn't urgent, and there was plenty of time to get the focus right, and if they'd wanted to they could have put the camera on a stand so it didn't shake about. They just wanted the film to look like a documentary when it wasn't one.

It's an abdication of narrative responsibility, in my view. The storyteller, in film or novel, should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. Put the camera in the place from which it can see the action most clearly. Make a decision about where that place is. Put it on something steady to stop that incessant jiggling about. 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.

But taking charge of the story is the one thing that some sensitive and artistic storytellers don't want to do. They've come to feel a timorous uncertainty about the right-on-ness of something so politically dodgy as telling a story in the first place. Who are we to say this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't, perhaps we're wrong, there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial, the narrator is always unreliable, and so on.

"If I just relate now what's happening now," the writer seems to say, "I can't be held to account for it. It's the way things are. I'm just standing close to the action as it happens. I'm not editing or anything. It's really real."

Hensher may be right when he says that some of the pressure towards the present tense comes from creative writing courses, and some from the influence of the film treatment. Some of it, as he also suggests, is simply fashion. No doubt it will pass.

THE GUARDIAN