Twice recently on the radio I've heard people describing the plots of books in the past tense. "When he said that to his mother, he felt alone and afraid, I think." "When he went to the gravesite he looked for the grave of his grandfather, but could not find it; that's when he realized he was a Jew." I find these types of descriptions intensely disquieting. Both times I've had to change the channel on the radio and eventually have turned it off entirely. I wouldn't have thought that something I've always considered to be an issue of etiquette or style would affect me so viscerally, but these two instances have got me thinking about the literary-critical present – the convention that one describes the plots of books (and plays and poems) as if they were continuously happening. ("Falstaff begs Hal to recognize him, but Hal rebuffs him"; "Tom Jones simply cannot resist a complimentary overture.")
Why is it that we ("we" in this case being literary critics; academics; book-lovers of the extra-nerdy variety) describe the events of books in the present tense? I had some difficulty with a few of my students last semester on this issue. Many beginning writers – and some advanced ones -- phase in and out of the literary-critical present tense. There are moments, in fact, where even I will use the past tense to describe a book – but those moments are very limited, and are almost always in the past perfect and always related to the biographical or historical past:
"Years before," I might say, "Jonson had approached the problem of fakery from an almost entirely joyful angle. Now, however, at the end of his life, Jonson had come to reconsider the problem of untruths. In his last play, he approached the subject with an eye almost (for him) jeremiacal. In his last years the trickster became the prophet."
(I don't, by the way, really think any of this about Jonson. I'm just making things up. Actually, the biography I've given sounds much more like another Jacobean I wrote about recently: Donne. Also just a little like Cranmer.)
When I talk about plots, though, I always assume they are still going on; that each moment happens and continues happing, simultaneously. Every time I turn to that page, the experience is to be had again, and to be had differently. I can, of course, describe a specific experience, and then I describe it in the past tense, as "the first time I read this I hated it," but that again does not describe the events of the plot, but the events of a single, temporally bounded interaction between a specific reading and the text.
When I hear people talk about books in the past tense, then, it seems to me to freeze them in a way I'm uncomfortable with, as if they have been had, been used, and now are over. It's ideologically important to me to think about books as never really being over.
But it's more than that, really. Although I can point out that I believe reading is a sort of multiply-experienced act, the reaction of extreme discomfort I feel when I hear people speak about plots in the past tense goes beyond a critical or theoretical disagreement.
I used to get terribly upset as I neared the end of a book I loved. Each time, I feared that it would end forever; that I would not be able to return to the world. That fear has subsided somewhat, now, but I wonder if, in some way hearing these descriptions triggered it.
Because the real thing I think, when I hear people talk about books this way, is that they seem to be talking as if the characters were physical people. That is, as if the book really happened. Now, that I would have a problem with this is very surprising to me. I have always experienced fictions as quite viscerally real. I get desperately involved with books, movies, television, plays. I fall in love with fictional characters. I grieve for them as well. Fiction has the power to wound or elate me, deeply and phyiscally. And I don't think there's really anything untrue about those feelings. So I grieved for Xena: Warrior Princess. So Mr. Data from Star Trek was perhaps my first love. I'm okay with that. I'm more than okay – I value those experiences as deeply as, if differently from, many of the experiences in my physical life.
So why would I object to the use of speech that seems to support that sort of truthful engagement? The answer must be that I have read the past and present exactly opposite – that in fact when people use the past tense to describe fictions they are somehow killing the sense I have of books as living, affective experiences. That I feel – in some visceral, difficult-to-explain way – that one precisely must not treat the experience of fiction exactly as if it were the experience of real life, or one risks somehow depriving it of the very power it has to be life.
Counterintuitive. But, now that I've arrived at this point, I see that it fits in precisely with the (now increasingly massive) project I have about idolatry and the life of the image. See, the thing is, images (I use this term in a way that includes all fictions) can live. We know that. They move us, they move themselves, they seem, in situations in which they have become overflowing or overdetermined (images of the dead; particularly affective images) to go beyond themselves in a way that is logically impossible. When I feel deeply wounded by the characterization of Xena's death, I am responding to more than a storyline I find offensive or remembered grief at real people I have lost. I am responding to some sort of life in Xena herself.
But Xena the character. Not Xena the real person. Xena is alive for me, but precisely because she is not a "real person." Does that make sense? Not yet, but it wil, I hope. What I mean is that the life of the image – the representation/character/ picture/fiction that affects us deeply – cannot coexist with the life of a physical person. This is part of what The Picture of Dorian Grey is about. Dorian's picture is alive – but it's alive in the way that a real person would be alive, not in the way that pictures can or should be alive. When Dorian's friend first paints it, it is alive in the image-way. People are entranced by its beauty beyond what would normally happen when they view a painting. They experience the painting as artistically transcendent. (I'm uncomfortable about that word, but I'm going to leave it for now.) But when the transfer of…whatever it is…occurs, Dorian Grey's picture becomes alive in a way that is an abomination. (We discussed this to some degree in terms of celebrity – and, of course, in my case, idolatry, last semester.)
This exchange of life is also part of what happens when Cleopatra stages her own death in the last scene of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. In her last act, she makes herself into a statue. In so doing – at least, as I argue it – she kills the image-life of the pictures other people have been making of her (like Enobarbus's description, or like the triumph she imagines Caesar staging). Because Cleopatra gives her own death a life (image-life) of her own choosing, she deprives of life (kills, makes less affective and effective) the images others would make of her. Or at least, she partly does.
So. When I hear book plots described in the past tense, I feel they've been killed; been stopped from the possibility of living. Paradoxically, the more a book character seems like a real person, the less possibility she or he has to have the transcendent life possible to fiction. And I don't want that. No, not at all. And so I turn off the radio.
I also, however, don't want to be confusing, and I am fairly afraid that I have been. Oh well. I'm not getting quite this abstruse (that's probably a lie) in my paper, so I've inflicted it all on you instead. And now I am ending it. (In the continuous present.)
Labels: idolatry, reading, representation, writing
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