Although delivering a narrative in the present tense is by no means a modern technique, its popularity seems to be growing among contemporary novelists.
Many modern novelists shift between the past and present tense to distinguish between the multiple narratives they are presenting. In Justin Cartwright’s The Promise of Happiness, the present tense is used to describe the weeks following Julia’s release from prison, while anything that happened prior to that is told in the past, creating a kind of ‘flashback’ effect as events in the present cause the characters to remember incidents from their pasts.
A similar technique is employed by Ian McEwan in Saturday, where a single day in the life of Henry Perowne is narrated in the present, but with constant references to the past as he remembers it.
It is typical of such texts that the present tense narrative is linear, while the past tense one is not. The most obvious example of this is Sabrina Broadbent’s A Boy’s Guide to Track and Field. The present tense narrative describes Lem’s tube journey to work, with each chapter named after a tube stop: the linearity of this narrative is conveyed visually by the image of the Victoria Line, a segment of which appears at the beginning of each chapter. Conversely, the past tense narrative jumps all over the place, as various stimuli on the journey prompt achronological narratives. The past is narrated to us only as it is remembered in the present.
One of the effects of this technique is that it removes the illusion that the story ever actually happened. When third person narratives are told in the past tense, we can imagine, suspending disbelief, that the author is writing about real events. These present tense narratives shatter that possibility, creating instead the idea that we are watching events as they happen. In that respect it is a cinematic device; in many senses the authors are showing rather than telling us what is going on.
A different approach to this tense-shifting can be found in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is presented almost as an autobiographical narrative (as I argue elsewhere, elements of magical realism in a book do not necessarily detract from its plausibility). Sections of this book are narrated in the present tense, as Rushdie portrays the narrator at his desk, writing. The illusion here is that he is delivering his narrative as we read – he tells us what his wife, Padma, thinks of the narrative, and conveys their interactions.
These techniques are acceptable in fiction, which never claims to be anything other than illusory. In life writing, the present tense is more problematic. Chris Heath’s Feel: Robbie Williams follows a similar structure to the Cartwright, McEwan and Broadbent novels mentioned above. In the present tense we see Williams at his home in America, in the recording studio, in his car. In the past tense we are told about the rest of his life, but only as it pertains to the present. Williams’ life is told not chronologically, but as it comes up in conversation – he talks openly about his past, and one has the sense that it exists inside him all the time. But the autobiographical narrative he delivers in conversation with Heath never claims to be complete: it is prompted by memory, so that what we are left with is a portrait of how Williams is now, with due acknowledgement of the past that got him here.
Similarly, the autobiographical narratives presented in Theodore Zeldin’s books The French and An Intimate History of Humanity are presented as portraits, with events from the past narrated only when they contribute to our sense of what a person is like now. I discuss the kind of auto/biography offered in Feel and in Zeldin’s books in more detail in my examination of collaboration in Theodore Zeldin’s life writing.
I recently read Hanif Kureishi’s autobiographical My Ear at His Heart, which describes his experience of reading an unpublished manuscript (a novel, but one with obvious autobiographical details) by his father. His reading is described in the present tense, as though, when Kureishi writes his words, he does not know what will come next. This is, of course, an illusion – I imagine that, prior to writing, Kureishi had already read the manuscript a number of times, had planned his own book and decided what details he would include and what he would leave out. I find the use of the present tense more problematic in this work than in Zeldin’s or Heath’s, perhaps because Kureishi repeatedly gives the sense that he does not know what will happen next in the manuscript, whereas we know that really he does. It is a fallacy I myself have entertained when writing my Autobiographical Memories. In many of these pieces, I describe not only my memory of a past event, but also the moment when I remembered it; the modern day stimulus that triggered my memory. But the act of remembering is narrated in the present tense, as though it is happening as I write. This ignores the necessary transformation that happens between experiencing and writing: we not only write, we also think about it, decide what we want to convey, choose the best words for doing so. By the time I write, the act of remembering is also a moment from the past; something remembered rather than something present. In the end, I have realised, nothing is present: as soon as we perceive something it is past.
So the use of the present tense in writing is just part of the game of storytelling, which plays as much of a role in autobiography as it does in fiction.