David Jauss on Present Tense in Contemporary Fiction.

 

The second question I have to now ask myself is a nagging one at best. It is the subject of present tense in contemporary fiction, which also goes along with the question of first person or third person, too. It's as if writers no longer have a choice on how to construct and shape their fiction, that we are now limited to first person and present tense, along with overly stylistic prose. I have probably read and analyzed this subject to death in the last five years. And yes, I wrote drafts in different tenses, then revised them, some half way through just to see how the story read and felt to me. Now I have to choose. How strange and small the world feels when I realized that David Jauss, someone I respect, had written this book and devoted a full chapter to the present tense. It's also funny to add that on Twitter the other day, author Phillip Pullman tweeted:

I don't care how many people enjoy it, fiction in the present tense is an ABDICATION OF NARRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY. I resent having to re-calibrate my entire attitude to time whenever I open a novel in the present tense. Away with them!

I just started laughing. The responses was just as funny, most of them defending present tense. Laughing. But still ponderous that so many books are, yes, written in present tense. I once attended a workshop years and years ago that was focused on viewpoint by David Jauss. He says all of this is about the "anxiety of influence" which I might add I first heard from Harold Bloom. It is really about psychology and since I have been studying psychology for a few years now, I can honestly say it's about how people feel about the past, and yes it's worse than anything William Faulkner could have said. Because these contemporary writers just want to erase the past, just as they feel they are erasing people and so forth. The sad thing, it's not true, even if you feel it philosophically or socially or politically, or any of that. Jauss and I agree that we don't have to look to literature to see this trendy and fashionable attitude toward Time and the Past. Just start talking about History. I am going to start laughing again.

The thing about fashion is it never really last, trends comes and go, and being fashionable is sometimes not wise. And one day, a bunch of new writers will come along, and their "anxiety of influence" will shape fiction in other ways.

And so I have to choose. Oh, well. I will be glad to have this behind me.