Now I’ve had some time to stew on the question of ‘tense’ and its relation to narrative voice, I’ve come to an unexpected conclusion:
‘Tense’ isn’t a part of narrative voice, unless you deliberately mess with it.’
I was struck by the number of books I’ve read recently in which the tense changes. ‘The Goldfinch’, (this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner) is a case in point. It starts in the past tense, but towards the end, the story catches up with the time frame of the narrator, and the last section of the book is in the present. What’s happening is that the story is being told faster than the time frame of the person narrating it is going forward, so that – in effect – the time frame of the story catches up with the time frame of the storyteller. That gave me a clue.
It’s all about the relative position of the two time frames (i.e. when the events are set on the one hand, and when the narrator is setting them down or telling them to us that determines the ‘right’ tense of the narrative.)
For all the narratologists out there: I’m proposing that a better way to look at ‘tense’ is in terms of the relation between the time frames of the fabula and syuzhet constructions.
Let me try to explain my terms. Imagine that the syuzhet construction is in a world from which the narrator is speaking/writing. The fabula construction is in the ‘real world’ in which the story took or is taking place. In any given chapter or scene, the events in the story (in the fabula) and the ‘telling’ event (in the Syuzhet world) each have a time stamp.
Most of the stories we read are in the past tense. That’s because most of the time the events in the story take place before the ‘telling’ event, so the narrative takes a past tense. However, if the two become contemporaneous, then the narrative naturally takes the present tense. (It’s also clearly possible, but unlikely, that the telling event could come before the story event, in which case ‘future tense’ would be appropriate.)
Now, as both the fabula and syuzhet have timestamps on the events within them, it is clear that the appropriate tense can change, especially in novels where the unfolding syuzhet construction jumps backwards and forwards between events in the timeline of the fabula construction (for example, when the narrator suddenly throws in a bit of backstory). It is my contention that this fluctuating relationship has an effect on the narrative construction, but not on ‘voice’ directly. A narrator can switch freely between describing the past and the present (or even the future) without their voice changing.
QED. Time for another coffee before some more editing.
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Now this sort of thing worries me. Do we really need to know about Russian formalism before telling a story in the way that it comes to us, or is it better to try the story out on other people and see if it works for them. A difference perhaps between competition writing and commercial writing?
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Don’t worry, I’m not trying to tell anyone how to write, just sharing some of my own writing process. I think us Russian structuralists would agree that most authors write in a structured way even if they don’t know that they are, or think about what they are doing, other than telling their story. Shakespeare, Dickens et al didn’t care two jots for what narratologists were going to say about their work. (They were both in it for a jolly good story and, more importantly, the money!)
The question we ought to ask about any theory is what the hell does it mean to anyone setting out to write something? Well, in this case, I think my theory, for what it’s worth, suggests this:
“Don’t think about tense when planning your work; think instead about who’s telling the story to whom and where are they when they are doing the telling. How this position relates to ‘when’ the events in the story took place, or are taking place, determines the natural tense.”
That’s not the whole theory, though. I’ll argue – in a blog that I’m yet to post – that some authors distort the ‘natural’ tense, i.e. they show us the relative ‘time’ of the action and the telling and then deliberately choose the inappropriate tense. There are some circumstances when you can get away with this, and even use it to enhance your story, if you are clever!
There are, however, also some traps that I’m pointing to. For example, although all narrative in the present tense represents a similar view told by the same voice, not all narrative in the past tense does. The distance (in time) between the event and the telling makes a big difference. There will be a fundamental difference in the ‘voice’ of the same narrator telling us about an event in his/her childhood if the ‘telling’ is five minutes after the event rather than fifty years after it, even though both versions are told in the past tense. (Note, however, it’s not the tense that is affecting the voice, it’s the timeframe in which the teller resides.)
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