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  • The Expansion of Tense
  • Mark Currie (bio)

Peter Brooks is one of several theorists and critics who have understood the “strange logic” of reading a narrative to be bound up with the “anticipation of retrospection”: “[i]f the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic” (23). He reaches this suggestion by combining two apparently separate traditions in narrative criticism, one that characterizes the tradition of telling as one in which “everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come” and the other for whom the action of a novel takes place before the eyes as a “kind of present” (ibid.). A fictional narrative, he seems to be saying, can do both of these things at the same time: it can ask us to decode events narrated in the past tense as a kind of present, and ask us to view those events as structured in relation to a future which is already there and waiting for us to reach it. It is clear that, for Brooks, the reason that a narrative can do both of these things, that is to experience the events of a novel as a kind of present and as a kind of past, lies in the fact that the future already exists, and the inference is that the anticipation of retrospection cannot operate as the master trope in the strange logic of what we might call, for want of a better word, life. In life, the future is open, unwritten, and susceptible to our intentions, desires and efforts in a way that cannot be said of narrative. [End Page 353]

The difficulty with this inference, however, is that, in fiction, as in life, as we experience the present, we have not yet reached the future in relation to which the present is structured, so that our anticipation of it can be no more than an imaginative projection into the unknown. In other words, the already-there-ness of the future does not seem to offer any material difference on which the experience of the quasi-present in narrative can be distinguished from the experience of the existential present in life, since the future in either case is the object of mere speculation and anticipation. It seems necessary to ask whether the notion of the anticipation of retrospection is any more the chief tool by which we make sense of narrative than it is the master trope of the strange logic of temporal experience in general.

The characterization of narrative in this argument requires some reflection on the idea of a future that is already there, waiting for us to reach it. There are two possible ways (both of which are concerned with tense) of approaching Brooks’s claim that, in narrative, the future is already there. On one hand, there is the notion of verb tense, whereby the time of an utterance and the time to which it refers are encoded in the verbs of a sentence, so that the quasi-present of narrative events carry within them the future time of their utterance in relation to which those events are in the past. In the case of a retrospective narrative, the past tense of verbs will structure the quasi-present of narrative in relation to the time of narration, even if that future time is not represented in the narrative. On the other hand it can be argued that the future in a narrative is already there in the sense that there are words still to be read which are already written, and events to which they refer which are still to come, but about which we can do nothing. Brooks invokes both of these ideas of the narrative future in his discussion, asking on one hand how much we depend, for our sense of the pastness of the action presented, on verbs...

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