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Tense in Memoir
By memoirista | August 12, 2008
The following exercise in the invention of a style for my memoir turns out to be “academic.” That is, a professional reader found the switching of tenses a good way to lose the reader almost immediately. That I don’t want to do. I’m sure you don’t want to do it either. I am therefore advising you not to do any of the following.
I am leaving the post up because it may stimulate thought about style in memoir, and theories about style in memoir. This style, again, does not work.
* * *
I have restarted the memoir, titled either Had a Brain, or Thrown. The raw material is available, for a month or two more, on the web site www.hadabrain.net
This past month, I edited the raw material; in doing so I found myself searching for ways to amp up the impact of the accident itself, and the aftermath in the hospital. I found that what made sense to me was to use the historical present, rather than the narrative past, when the material was my own feelings and immediate perceptions at the time. That meant that some of the time, I used a narrative voice, and some of the time, I used my own “first-person” voice. The narrative voice is me, the historical-present is me, just a split between whether I’m telling, as clearly as I can remember, how I feel and what is happening around me, or what happened with other people in the story who were waiting at the hospital. The bit in bold above is the shift to what I call historical-present tense.
I edited it that way, and liked the effect, and then I thought–but it’s completely wrong to shift tenses in the middle, even within the paragraph. I’ve never seen it done, this could kill my book. In my uncertainty I cast around for editors, ask the people at Absolute Write for a critique, and look through the memoirs on my bookshelves. I pick up Angela’s Ashes, flip through the first slow page and half, which are in narrative voice–although McCourt is almost third-person, rather than first-person, in his description of Limerick. Then, when he moves the inner camera to the family, and Angela’s birth, he shifts into historical present mode, clearly first-person as family representative, silent in the corner, taking in the scene–although not yet born. Well, okay, I thought. I must have lucked onto that technique.
Parenthetically, another technique, used in fiction as well as memoir, is rendering thoughts as italics, rather than in quotation marks as internal dialogue. Augusten Burroughs uses it sparsely in Running with Scissors.
The effect of mixing the historical present, for the world of the author at the time of events, and the narrative past, as the more distant evocation of that past world, with descriptions that the author at the time of events would not necessarily need to know, want to know, or care about communicating–the effect of mixing these two modes of time is to give dimension and depth to the memoir.
Another effect is that the mixed tenses relieve the narcissism of the single author, single tense, single POV, by introducing a tense–the narrative past–that moves back from the immediacy of the historical present tense. Too much, and a reader would not care about the central character; too little, and I think that being inside the head of/the POV of the subject would be boring, unreadable, easily put down. All narrative past is slow moving. Jill Ker Conway uses narrative past and remembered dialog, in The Road to Courain, her coming-of-age memoir.
The way that McCourt uses the mix of tenses, as I read further into Angela’s Ashes, is to use historical present (generally) when it is his own memory telling us what happened, and narrative past when the grown man has done some research to be able to describe details that the boy (grown older) doesn’t remember on his own. That makes each paragraph a presentation from two slightly different perspectives–memory of direct experience, and gathered recollections, distilled.
When in my memoir I talk about the mountains, in Salt Lake City, Utah, or the flowering trees in Salt Lake City, in Philadelphia, and in Jerusalem, it is a more general recollection, not a specific moment. When I talk about the red linoleum floor in our apartment’s kitchen, or the 1950s style red-topped kitchen table, it is recollection, not a specific moment. But when I talk about Lucy, the tri-colored cat, catching a mouse, that is a single moment. I watch her play for twenty minutes, thinking the mouse is dead, let her play. I suddenly realize with horror that the mouse is still alive and trying to get away. I grab the cat, and tell Alyssa to get a shoe box. We put the rescued mouse into the shoe box, and put it in the only room that we can close off, so that Lucy cannot get to her prize, the bathroom. Alyssa and I each check a couple of times during the evening, and the mouse rouses a bit, so we have some hope that she’ll survive. In the morning, the mouse is dead. We take her outside and bury her, to keep Lucy from ever, ever, enjoying her catch.
If I needed to describe the Wasatch Mountains as they appear from the flat parts of the city, and I don’t have a good enough memory to do it, it would be possible to go back and describe them — to do research. Apricot trees came into flower in Salt Lake City fifteen years ago, and they came into flower on the corner where I live now in Philadelphia, last spring. Flowering almond came into flower in Jerusalem, the time I was there for the longest, on February 2d, TuBishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees. Flowering almond came into flower on Locust Walk at the University of Pennsylvania, in the past couple of years, in late November, in February, and in early April. Well, that mixed three flowerings into two years; the point is that the look of the tree doesn’t vary that much, and can be described either as recollection and scene setting, or as immediate emotional response, to the unexpected weather, and the delightful flowering tree that rejoices, as I do, in this out-of-season weather.
Fortunately, more than half of the memoir takes place in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania, where eith the settings are still there, or others are around who remember the details of the settings. I discovered this past week that one of the Salt Lake City hospitals–and possibly both–has changed its name from Holy Cross Hospital to ** Regional Medical Center **. The other hospital was Latter Day Saints (LDS) Hospital. I knew before I left Salt Lake that the City Council looked at the the hospitals in the city, and questioned whether they should be tax exempt, LDS Hospital in particular, as a place that did not provide any charity services. Perhaps the solution led to the secularization of all the hospitals within city limits. I’d have to do some research on that.
O r I can stay within the historical present. Those are the names of the hospitals as I know them. The jury is out on this one.
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Topics: theory and technique |
August 13th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Memoirista,
I LOVE the way you are using your blog to think through the challenges of writing your memoir while at the same time sharing your thoughts with readers. This is a fabulous and much appreciated use of a blog, that adds not just entertainment but insight in exchange for the time I spend reading it.
Jerry Waxler
Memory Writers Network
August 14th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Dear Jerry,
Thanks for writing again, and for your comment.
I will try to keep the quality of posts to the standard you describe, though I may not post that frequently!
All the best,
Memoirista