Present Tense Is Passe

[tartysuz]

Or, that's what Philip Pullman would like to see.

I completely agree with him that the use of solely the present tense in longer work limits temporal textures, making for tedious reads. But he goes on to a larger issue:

It's an abdication of narrative responsibility, in my view. The storyteller, in film or novel, should take charge of the story and not feel shifty about it. Put the camera in the place from which it can see the action most clearly. Make a decision about where that place is. Put it on something steady to stop that incessant jiggling about. Say what happened, and let the reader know when it happened and what caused it and what the consequences were, and tell me where the characters were and who else was present – and while you're at it, I'd like to know what they looked like and whether it was raining.

But taking charge of the story is the one thing that some sensitive and artistic storytellers don't want to do. They've come to feel a timorous uncertainty about the right-on-ness of something so politically dodgy as telling a story in the first place. Who are we to say this happened and then that happened? Maybe it didn't, perhaps we're wrong, there are other points of view, truth is always provisional, knowledge is always partial, the narrator is always unreliable, and so on.

"If I just relate now what's happening now," the writer seems to say, "I can't be held to account for it. It's the way things are. I'm just standing close to the action as it happens. I'm not editing or anything. It's really real."

Source: The Guardian.

This is actually why I like to think that Inception had a definite end: otherwise, it's narrative wankery. While an indeterminate end might seem clever, it actually takes away from the fact that narrative arcs were successfully completed in the movie -- no small feat in the world of Hollywood movies.

Comments

[chibifrieza.livejournal.com]

I have to say I agree with you there. You use what you need to to make it come out the way it wants to.