In Book XI of Confessions, Saint Augustine highlights a familiar paradox: despite being immersed in time and constantly referring to measurements of it in daily life, we seldom ponder its nature; on the rare occasions when we do, time appears to us a tantalisingly elusive and definition-defying concept. Ever since Saint Augustine posed the question, definitions of time, as Russell West-Pavlov puts it, “have been perennially unsatisfactory” because “[t]ime is both eminently common-sensical and highly abstract at once” (2012: 4). What is normally accessible to observation is obviously not time itself but its effects; in everyday experience time is discerned insofar as it produces changes in human life. Hence, what Anna Plata calls “our folk understanding of time” involves viewing time with apprehension as an overwhelming, intransigent and ultimately destructive force, “bringing about irreversible changes to humans (including the human body); passing by and not coming back; leading to ageing and death and hence being perceived as threatening” (2018: 14). Notwithstanding the fact that time is a major question in philosophy as well as a subject of scientific inquiry, our daily cognition of it is typically so narrow that it not only leaves out the larger philosophical and scientific issues, but, as Mieke Bal claims, it does not encompass the long-term time of history either. Bal notes that “[t]he time that regulates our lives, by means of clocks, schedules, and other means of uniforming lives, is so incorporated, interiorized, or naturalized that it is difficult to imagine that there are conflicts built into it” (2009: 77).

Punctual Narration – The Present as “the sum of all”

George Garrett, Death of the Fox

Death of the Fox (1971), George Garrett's first entry into the realm of historical fiction, was at the same time his first deliberate departure from the conventions of the genre. While the completed novel was awaiting publication, Garrett issued the essay “Dreaming with Adam: Notes on Imaginary History” (1970), in which he represented his drawn-out project on Walter Ralegh as an inspiration for his reflections on historical fiction. As Garrett asserts in the essay, his book “has been a long time finding its form and coming to be” (1970: 409). Originally conceived as a biography, it eventually metamorphosed into a historical novel to which, as Joseph W. Turner put it, Garrett brought “generic self-consciousness” (1980: 45). The abundance of historical research on Elizabethan and Jacobean England and Ralegh in particular not only appeared to make the writer's initial plans superfluous, but also prompted him to append the existing factual knowledge on the subject with a resurrection of the man as a literary character. Commenting on the breadth of the novel and its profusion of detail, Martha Tuck Rozett describes Death of the Fox as “an enormous canvas from which Raleigh's life story emerges” (2002: 63). Garrett retains basic fidelity to facts but avoids duplicating the existing biographies. As Turner says in his discussion of Death of the Fox, “the novel must do something more, or other, than retell that story [of Ralegh's life]” (1980: 32). Besides comprising an imaginary component, Death of the Fox deviates from the biographical model formally – Garrett has replaced the continuous, sequential, chronological and uniperspectival format typical of biographies with fragmentariness, achrony and multiperspectivity. These innovations correspond to an unusual use of tenses: rather than the traditional past tense, which enables a retrospective account of an individual's life and times, the writer employs a combination of the present, past, and – to a lesser extent – also the future tense.

The objective of this book is to analyse a group of novels which are situated at the intersection of two tendencies in contemporary fiction: the evolution of the historical novel and the rise of present-tense narration. Whereas both have received critical attention – although the former to a much greater extent than the latter – their combination has not been researched so far. Historical fiction written in the present tense is a new phenomenon, worth investigating for two major reasons. On the one hand, it is yet another manifestation of the contemporary historical novel's multifarious forays into new forms of telling the past. On the other hand, together with a significant proportion of the fiction published today, it constitutes a challenge to a long-established writing practice as well as to the narratological axiom that the past tense is the natural and mimetic tense in narrative. Consequently, the emphasis in this study has been placed on the formal aspects of the chosen historical fiction.

The comment that Kate Mitchell made about neo-Victorian fiction may be extended to encompass all the historical novels discussed in the present study:

Although the marked choice of tense in the selected fiction draws attention to the issue of historical representation, it ultimately serves to make the past come alive in the present rather than foreground its elusiveness. Of What Is Passing: Present-Tense Narration in the Contemporary Historical Novel aims to reveal how the present tense helps to imaginatively reconstruct the past. This singular option regarding the temporality of narrative entails a number of strategies concerning the narrative structure and the choice of perspective, as well as specific questions of causality, coherence, teleology and narratorial reliability. These are going to be explored in detail in each novel.

Simultaneous Narration

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light

Joseph Brooker expressed a commonly held view when he called Hilary Mantel (1952–2022) “the most celebrated writer of historical fiction in Britain” in the twenty-first century (2015: 173). By that time, Mantel had published the first two novels of her Tudor trilogy, both of which were awarded the Booker Prize. More adulations followed on the completion of her third instalment in 2020 (cf. Rex 2020: 56). Sidestepping the issue of the past's essential unreachability, Mantel sets out to reconstruct the past plausibly in the realm of fiction and is determined to subordinate the fictional to the factual. Brooker praises the writer's depth of historical knowledge and the extensive research on which her reconstruction of the Tudor period is based (2015: 174). In the words of Lisa Fletcher, “the picture of the past offered by these weighty novels is one of plenitude rather than absence or lack” (2017: 40). As Renate Brosch observes, in Mantel's novels postmodern scepticism towards historical truth has been muted and metafictionality has been eschewed (2017: 165–166).

In keeping with Georg Lukacs's directive (1963: 40), Mantel's self-professed aim is to “recreate the texture of lived experience” (Mantel 2017b: 3), yet, in an obvious departure from his recommendation, she focuses on prominent historical personages rather than “mediocre” or “middle-of-the-road heroes” (Lukács 1963: 36–37). Frank Ankersmit once warned against the pitfalls and constraints of choosing famous figures as literary characters:

Simultaneous Present-Tense Narration and Vertical Past-Tense Embedding

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Since the publication of her first volume of poetry in 1961 and her first novel in 1969, Margaret Atwood (1939–) has become not only “a Canadian cult figure and celebrity,” but also a writer of international renown (Bouson 2010: 1). A wide spectrum of genres is one of the distinguishing features of her output – she is the author of numerous novels, poetry volumes, short story collections, children's literature as well as non-fiction books. Although much better known for her contemporary and dystopian novels, Atwood also has historical fiction to her name. Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000) marked what Alice Ridout calls a “historical turn” in Atwood's writings (2013: 294), before her interests shifted towards an imaginary future. However, despite its past setting, Alias Grace (1996) shares some of its themes with Atwood's other fiction: female identity and its social construction, power politics, questions of Canadian nationalism and Canadian identity (Bouson 2010: 2). This thematic overlap is underlain by Atwood's belief that we have the right to use history for the purposes of the present: “The past no longer belongs only to those who lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it” (Atwood 1998: 1516). As Coral Ann Howells observes, the contemporary context of Atwood's historical fiction is manifested in her postmodern scepticism towards the truthfulness of history, and in her critical interrogation of the Canadian past (2000: 150).

In her essay “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” Atwood placed her novel within the context of a genre which, in her view, was just emerging in Canada at that time, and claimed that it is the forgotten and the suppressed aspects of history that inspire writers the most: “The lure of the Canadian past, for the writers of my generation, has been partly the lure of the unmentionable – the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (Atwood 1998: 1509).

The status of the present tense in narrative remains ambiguous, and, indeed, may be related to the polarity of narratological positions vis-a-vis the mimetic versus non- or anti-mimetic character of temporality in fictional worlds. However, the use of this tense in fiction is still a new and only very tentatively mapped field in narratology. An evolution may be traced in the treatment of present-tense narration: from neglect and dismissal, to occasional studies of instances of its use as an anomaly, or literary experiment, to a grudging endorsement and a growing recognition of the potential of the present tense as a narrative tense. In the wake of the more and more frequent employment of this tense in fiction, a few attempts have been made at developing a theory and a methodology for the analysis of present-tense narrative. Admittedly, much of the work that has been done on temporality in narrative (some results of which were outlined in the previous chapter) is applicable to narrative in the present tense, but its singularity also calls for specific explorations. This chapter as well as the subsequent textual analyses aim to contribute to this emergent line of inquiry.

The relatively rare incidence of narration in the present tense, if compared with the prevalence of past-tense narration in literary history, stands in stark contrast to the universality of lived experience, which, as Mark Currie stresses, takes place in the present: “We inhabit the present, which is sandwiched between a fixed past and an open future” (2007: 5). The equivalence of presence and existence is reflected in the deployment of grammatical tenses: “‘has been’ and ‘will be’ are equivalent to ‘is not,’ since what ‘is’ must be rendered in the present” (Currie 2007: 8). The present functions as a crucial determinant of individual being; in the words of David Carr, “I am always ‘located’ in the now with respect to past and future experiences” (1986: 27).

In narratology, a long-established axiom is that, as Robert Scholes said, “narrative is past, always past” (qtd. in Cohn 1999: 96). It is widely accepted that narrative is subsequent to rather than contemporaneous with experience.

In a tradition going back to Aristotle's formulation, the distinction between history and fiction has been drawn along the lines of factuality: whereas the former represents what was, the latter is preoccupied with what might have been (Southgate 2014: 2). To a certain extent, historical fiction blurs the division by imposing evidential constraints on the invented component. However, historical fiction written in the present tense constitutes yet another variation on the manifold encounters between history and fiction – it tries to represent the past as if it were the unfolding present reality.

Whereas present-tense narration is a relatively new trend in fiction, the intention to offer the contemporary reader an illusion of immediate access to the past that underpins the present-tense historical novels in fact harks back to the origins of the genre as defined by Georg Lukacs (1963: 42; cf. de Groot 2010: 27). Indeed, this traditional model of the genre accords with what readers of historical fiction expect. The Historical Fiction Survey conducted by M.K. Tod in 2013 revealed that the feeling of authenticity in the recreated world and the sense of immersion in time and place continue to be the principal qualities sought in historical novels. “Bringing the past to life,” especially the lives of people, was quoted as the chief reason why readers appreciate historical fiction (Polack 2016: 28–29).

The use of the present tense to narrate the past is yet another means of achieving the effect of bringing the past back to life, within the realm of fiction. Irrespective of the fact that the departure from the widely adopted narrative past tense and the historical narrative's customary reliance on retrospection constitute formal innovations, in present-tense historical fiction realistic, immersive representation takes precedence over self-reflexivity and metafictional components. Thus, paradoxically, the new direction that the historical novel has embarked on may also be seen as returning to some of the stipulations that shaped the genre at its inception. Owing to the predominantly simultaneous narration, showing prevails over telling while the explanatory power of narrative gives way to the dramatisation of the past as an incomplete, ongoing and uninterpreted flux of events.