In Paul Auster’s 2006 novel Travels in the Scriptorium1 an old man known only as “Mr. Blank” finds himself locked in a little white room with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there.
This isn’t the most original scenario in fiction, but Auster was a conscientious writer and so he took care to present to his readers the mental and psychological realities of waking in an unfamiliar place with no clear memory of one’s past or even oneself. To do this, Auster employed present tense, and it’s clear that he didn’t make this choice randomly, nor was it (in my opinion) the wrong choice.
One of the most crucial outcomes of a narrative related entirely in the present tense is an implied inability to access the past. This blockade builds strength as the story progresses creating an anxiety that simmers in the reader’s subconscious. It is, in point of fact, painful and unnatural to be removed from even the immediate past. But it is almost catastrophic to be removed from the distant past.
Of course, it isn’t just the past that is walled off by the use of present tense, it is also the future and even the simple act of contextualizing events. In fact, nothing really matters much at all except the constant, pertinacious present.
It’s curious to examine, realistically, what the mind does and how it behaves when it has access only to the immediate present. For Auster he painted his hero — a seemingly intelligent man with a great desire to know what was happening to him — as being almost crippled by this narrative limitation. Auster’s books tend to be a little metafictional and so playing with narrative served to alter the nature of the character, and vice versa. Limiting Mr. Blank’s awareness to the present also limited Mr. Blank. This manifested not only in his personal knowledge, but also in his daily activities. Like a child, his lack of a past had magnified and even warped the importance of the immediate now to an almost ridiculous degree.
Although he is at first preoccupied with the mysteries of his situation, Auster’s Mr. Blank is repeatedly distracted from his investigations by little more than passing fancies. On one occasion, the slippery interaction of his stocking feet on the wood floor causes him to forget not just his examination of the locked door, but also his full bladder. He is a man hopelessly entrenched in the present moment, trapped by this far more than he is by his physical infirmities or a door that may or may not be locked.
However, Mr. Blank does have a vague awareness of his previous days in captivity. When he is introduced to a visitor, for instance, he is aware that he has met this person before. This is more than just a vague memory, but a solid reality which has nevertheless been blocked out, as if a surrounding wall encloses him within the current day, refusing him even one clear glimpse of the recent past. He struggles to recall details, to call up specific images, but all efforts are upended by uncomfortably intense emotions which abort all memory and keep him paralyzed in his terminally present condition. (It is suggested that these emotions cannot be processed or contextualized without access to his memories.)
Our hero’s entire existence and even his identity is contained in the present, as he has no memories of the past, save fleeting glimpses of his childhood, and he certainly has no way of knowing the future. All that matters to Mr. Blank is the immediate present, a present whose immediacy grows ever more immediate the longer the story goes on. Auster’s choice of tense served to reinforce not just the story, but the reader’s state of mind while reading it. Had the novel been written in past tense the reader would have been understood to be invited to interpret the events unfolding on the page based on knowledge of Auster’s other books or even previous chapters, or even, one might hope, with the real world. The limitations of present tense preclude any such considerations. The reader’s mind is trapped within each successive sentence, the relevance of which is often left frayed and faded by the time the next paragraph begins.
Tense, like any other linguistic tool or even language itself, is not a random matter. To say “I remembered her” conveys an entirely different idea from “I remember her” or even “I will remember her.” As obvious as this might seem, we, in our modern era in which language has become a fleeting, vanishing trend commodity, often forget that these choices echo within not just the meaning of our words but also the state of mind in which they place us.
Language has a way of building and then maintaining our existence. Words have power, we know this. But they do more than wound or soothe or even inform. Words shape and mold the fabric of our minds and allow us the tools and the medium with which we may know ourselves and the world around us. How we speak, both to others and within our own inner selves, informs our entire lives, our character, our mood, our personality, our memory. How we speak is, in turn, informed by the language over which we have command.
Our very awareness of our existence is informed, in part, by our ability to verbalize that awareness. It is said that memory formation is partly controlled by our ability to use words to describe, and therefore understand, that memory. This is why the formation of memories if often thought to start when language does. It follows, then, that the language we use, and the language in which we train ourselves to think, are important beyond measure.
Choosing present tense for a story — just like any choices one makes while writing — requires careful consideration, something that is increasingly absent from modern literary rigor. Most writers these days choose tense based on little else than “what feels right”, which, more often than not, results in a book that should have been written in past tense but which, instead, has been produced in careless present, without any thought for the mental state of the characters or the readers.
Surely it can’t matter that much, you might say. And perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if present tense slowly overtakes the literary world, and from there overtakes our minds, and then begins to coil like kudzu around the linguistic scaffolding that we have spent our entire lives building around our selves. But as I’ve already said, language matters. Reading builds not just our vocabularies but also our cognition. If the only books we bother to read are present tense, is it possible that we might become like Mr. Blank, detached from the past and imprisoned in an eternal, breathless carousel of successive nows?
Is it possible that this has already happened?
Ours is a society that has become imprisoned by the constantly updating feed, the real time representation of what we’re supposed to be thinking about right now but which might change in as little as a few seconds. Contextualizing any of these tens of thousands of updates with any that came before is cognitively impossible. Remembering all of them is beyond human capability. The only option left to the average person is to coast through existence on the only constant left to us: the current moment.
Perhaps present tense is more comfortable to modern readers — and writers — precisely because our sense of past and our sense of memory has already begun to fade and fray.
Books written in present tense which then attempt to guide their readers into a consideration of past events find themselves struggling under the uncanny weightlessness of the past’s relation to the eternal present of the narrative. Even the switch from present tense to past tense in these moments feels like a cognitive error. How can an eternal present pause its interminate procession long enough to recall the past? Present tense is not suited to stories that are meant to convey a narrative that relies upon the past to understand it. Nor is it suited to stories in which the characters find themselves frequently relying upon memory and considered recollections of past events to understand and contextualize their present circumstances.
As such, the growing use of present tense precludes such things from storytelling. The importance of memory and an abiding respect for the past are fading from the consideration of storytellers. All that matters, and all that is relayed, is what is happening right now.
Present tense is a valid and even occasionally appropriate way to tell a story, as is the case with Auster’s Travels In the Scriptorium, or books that heavily rely upon selling a plot twist, like Palahniuk’s Fight Club. It has also stylistically come to be prevalent in the neo-noir genre of writing (though I believe many of these books would benefit from readdressing that choice).
That said, present tense suggests a state of being in which the only thing of importance — both to the reader and to the characters — is the current moment. It conveys the sense that not only is the past inaccessible, it is also irrelevant. Using present tense creates in the mind of the reader and writer a state of thinking that disallows contemplation or consideration. There is no time to remember when we are chained to a narrative that pulls us without pause into each new now, forcing us to leave the past behind and never think of it again. Memories don’t just fade, they are never even encoded in the mind. The past is no longer a foreign country, as Hartley famously observed in the opening lines of The Go-Between, but rather, it never existed in the first place.
Mr. Blank, trapped in a relentlessly present state of mind, is unable to form memories beyond vague notions and he is unable to conceptualize what has befallen him with the content of his past. But what is even more distressing is the increasing awareness that this state of being has also robbed him of the ability to exist. That is, not only is he doomed to never understand why this is happening to him nor even what, specifically, is happening to him, he is also doomed to be forever uncertain of his own identity or personality. Therefore, he understands, he effectively does not exist. This condition in which he finds himself is conveyed by the deliberate use of present tense.
While the scourge of careless present tense might not have completely invaded the established norms of crime fiction, mystery novels, or other airport books, its prominence is growing. The last five winners of the Booker Prize were all written in present tense. Most of the dominant romantasy novels are written in present tense, as are most YA novels. The eternal, past-less now has begun to colonize the shelves of science fiction and fantasy. In terms of popular, trendy fiction, it’s difficult to find a book that has not been written in present tense. This present plague has even begun to spread to literary fiction where, once again, literary rigor is in decline. One can’t help but wonder if it isn’t so much a trendy, even ubiquitous, narrative device that is spreading throughout literature, but rather an increased dissociation from memory.
Perhaps the use of present tense is little more than another trend destined to be abandoned with the next update to our cultural consciousness. Or perhaps present tense will instead become the only way stories can be understood and therefore the only way in which they will be written. And then, perhaps, present tense will slip our minds out of contact with history, our own past, our very identities which are nothing if not the sum of our memories.
Robbed of past and of access to memory, how can we ever tell our stories? How can we even say that we exist?
This is neither here nor there, but as with most Auster novels, I don’t recommend this one. This is by far the most masturbatory of his novels. The main character is a literal self-insert who is, among other things, sexually pleasured out of pity and admiration by Paul Auster’s own favorite female characters from his previous books. I use it as an example because despite Auster’s storytelling and theme shortcomings, he did understand the functionality of narrative devices (such as present tense) and used them very well.
I always thought past tense worked for most stories because if a story is being told orally it makes perfect sense for it to be in the past tense. You don’t tell your friends something that happened to you in the present tense, that would make you look insane.
I wonder if that tendency toward living in the present is not just the hallmark of our civilization. Storytelling is, in its essence, a way to connect to the past of your own people. That's why cavemen painted their legends on wall, why celts had priests bards traveling through their villages to sing their myths and why every fairy tale begin with 'Once upon a time'. In a culture that has spent the last century joyfully destroying its own traditions, values, familial and cultural structures, etc... what is there to connect to? What is there except pleasure seeking, consumption and an eternal present?