Switching between past tense and historical present tense
When is it appropriate to switch between past tense and historical present tense when telling a story in first person? Should we try to keep the same tense throughout, or can narration be in historical present while reflection is in past?
For example, is the below passage acceptable? If not, I'm not sure what I could replace the past tense with to carry the same intent.
(historical present)
A thin, frail lady, at least sixty, stands next to the car. She is dripping with sweat, holding a child in her arms. She knocks on the window, puts her hands out and stares at us, hopeful to receive a coin. My uncle callously tells her to move and continues going his way. I, however, can’t get the image out of my head. Here I am, in an air-conditioned car, complaining about heat, while that lady begs the passers-by for her child’s next meal.
“Why did you just leave?!” I challenge my uncle.
“If I gave money to every beggar out there, we would have nothing. They are just unlucky to have never gotten a proper education,” he replies casually.
(past)
It was at that moment I understood how privileged I was to have the luxuries of an American life. It was at that moment that I swore to take advantage of my rare education and one day give others the same opportunities. My education became the only thing I knew I would never lose. I was nine years old.
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1 answer
It is perfectly acceptable to switch tenses generally, using each as it is appropriate to the thought being expressed.
One thing to note in regard to tenses is that the choice of tense has nothing directly to do with past, present, and future time. Rather, they have to do with events relative to the narrative point in time. Thus I might say,
Caesar crosses the Rubicon in 49BC. He will go on to make himself Emperor of Rome.
The events reported are long in the past, but the sentences are in the present and future tenses respectively.
Of course, the writer could have written in the past tense,
Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49BC. He went on to make himself Emperor of Rome.
The difference between the two is what we might call temporal point of view. In the past tense version, the narrative's temporal pointer moves forward leaving the reader in the time of Caesar's Imperium. The first version, though, fixes the temporal POV at the crossing of the Rubicon, at the moment of rebellion. The future tense sentence tells us why this moment is significant, but does not invite us to move on from the moment of the crossing.
The use of the present in fiction tends to focus us on the immediacy of experience, a kind of frozen present. The use of past tend to focus us on causality, on one event leading to the next (which is the normal mode of a story; stories are about causes and consequences).
Notice that in your example the effect of the frozen present is fractured by " I, however, can’t get the image out of my head." Getting an image out of your head is something that occurs with the passage of time, after the scene itself has passed out of sight. This phrase restarts the clock, forcing the reader to move on from the image of the lady with the child in her arms.
Prolonged passages of present tense are difficult for this reason. They tend to defy causality and portray a kind of fatalism. There is not this-because-this-and-therefore-this, only this and this and this, ineluctably.
So, acceptable, certainly, but difficult to do well.
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