Thursday March 1, 2012
Tenses in fiction
RESPONSES
By FADZILAH AMIN
From today, MOE is answering readers’ queries in a new format. We will not be responding to every individual but will instead explain aspects of the English language based on problems raised by readers. We start off with the matter of the tenses used in writing and reviewing fiction.
A READER who wishes to be known as Haris drew MOE’s attention to the following problem, which may be a common problem to students and new reviewers of fiction, i.e. novels and short stories. He wrote:
I find it rather confusing when it comes to writing a review of a novel. I have seen writers using the present tense and then suddenly shifting to the past tense.
He referred to a short story, The Lotus Eater by Somerset Maugham, to The Necklace, an English translation of a short story from the French writer Guy du Maupassant, and to The Drover’s Wife, an Australian short story by Henry Lawson. Adapted versions of these stories were in fact texts used in the English language syllabus for Form 4 a few years ago.
The Lotus Eater is in fact written in the past tense, whether in its original version or the adapted version I found in Selected Poems And Short Stories, Form 4, published by the Education Ministry in 2000, and later used by students. Readers can find the original version here: maugham.classicauthors.net/lotuseater
The sentences that Haris quoted do not come from either version of the story, and might have been written by someone commenting on it. The writer has obviously mixed his tenses badly in those sentences:
1. “He has a simple life close to nature until his money runs out. Although he had planned to kill himself at this point.”
2. “In the end, he become crazy and lives like an animal. We do not know if he was happy in the last six years of his life, but he died the way he wanted.”
Even though a story is written in the past tense, we can still use the present tense to comment on it. We have to be consistent, but sometimes we will have to use the past tense when writing about events that happened before the time of the story. The sentences in 1, for instance, can be rewritten as:
“He leads a simple life close to nature until his money runs out. He has planned to kill himself at that point.”
I used the present perfect tense (a kind of past tense) to write about what the character has planned to do before the story begins. The original past perfect verb “had planned” should only be used in relation to a past tense.
We can also rewrite the sentences in 2 as: “In the end, he becomes crazy and lives like an animal. We do not know if he is happy in the last six years of his life, but he dies the way he wanted.”
Here, everything that happens in the story is written in the present tense, but the last verb “wanted” is in the past tense, because what the character “wanted” happened before the story begins.
Having said all that, I think, though, that it would be easier to write both sets of sentences in the past tense:
1. “He led a simple life close to nature until his money ran out. He had planned to kill himself at that point.”
2. “In the end, he became crazy and lived like an animal. We do not know if he was happy in the last six years of his life, but he died the way he had wanted.”
“We do not know” remains in the present tense, because that is about us looking at him and not about the character who has died.
The case of The Drover’s Wife is very interesting. The story is written in the present tense, but at certain points, when referring to events before the time of the story, the past tense is used. For example, the original version of what Haris quoted says (and I’ll quote the whole paragraph to illustrate my point):
She is not a coward, but recent events have shaken her nerves. A little son of her brother-in-law was lately bitten by a snake, and died. Besides, she has not heard from her husband for six months, and is anxious about him.
(alldownunder.com/australian-authors/henry-lawson/drovers-wife.htm)
Here, her character, and her present state of mind is written in the present tense, using the verb “is”. What has or has not happened before the present or up to the present is written in the present perfect tense (i.e. “have shaken” and “has not heard”), and what is clearly in the past during the time of the story is written in the past tense (i.e. the passive “was bitten” and “died”.)
Most of the story, however, is written in the present tense, which helps to make us feel we are there, with the drover’s wife and children and their dog, looking out for the snake:
The children are all asleep and she sits there still, sewing and reading by turns. From time to time she glances round the floor and wall-plate, and, whenever she hears a noise, she reaches for the stick.
When writing a review of the short story, it is possible to use the present tense, with some past tense verbs where necessary, but again, it would be easier to stick to the past tense when talking about events in the story.
A review, however, is not a re-telling of the plot of the story to the reader. Something of what happens in the story may be mentioned, but in addition, the reviewer must give his response to the story, his assessment of it, as well as his recommendation to readers of the review. All these are usually done in the present tense.
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