October 11, 1987

A Failing Grade for the Present Tense

By WILLIAM H. GASS

auline experienced many perils, but none to compare with the perils of the present tense. She was tied to tracks, left to teeter on window ledges, allowed to hang from cliffs by the lace in her pantaloons. Yet in the week while we waited for her bloomers to rip or the train to come, time held its breath as we held ours -in serial suspension; that is, we calmly ignored the pause in her plight as we went about our business, placing our modest cares in a parenthetical phrase; because, when the lace on her undies relaxed at last, when the train's hoot grew cruelly closer, or when Pauline's delicate balance seemed to have slipped beyond refooting, then her peril continued as if there had never been an interruption, not a shiver was missing, or a screech from a scream; and, in order to reassure us of this, the second episode would reprise the conclusion of the first, and so on, right through the fearful 15.

Later I would be taught to wonder - about the present, but not about Pauline - whether anything might have taken place between one tick and its following tock of which we were unaware (the fast fiddling of a group of most minute insects, for in-stance), or whether there might be cracks in events we didn't spot because they were passing by too quickly. Was the present a row of solid moments like a line of baby blocks (in which case there might be some infantile unevenness in the arrangement), or was it an uninterruptible whisssh (whereupon we had to wonder what our measurements meant - our eras, milliseconds, decades - what our divisions did)?

Suppose I were about to move my queen's knight, and, while my hand hovered above the head which the whole horse was, the frame froze, and my opponent and I rushed away in that infinitesimal interval for a set of tennis at fast forward, only to return in less time than it takes to tell: I to lift my knight from its square, my foe to wonder why and where - what then? Take this thought a little further. While one line of time is dit-dotting along, maybe others are passing at right angles between the dits like hair through a comb? How could one guess how huge the hiccup in Being was: perhaps, instead of a quick set of tennis, there was a long fall of empire, like that of Rome? We were taught to ask such questions, and we were taught not to smile when we did so, but to look profoundly concerned and immeasurably intense. Now we put our VCR's on pause and think no more about it. But what if God put us on pause while He spooned up a dish of Heavenly Hash? . . . and slowly dribbled over it a sweet excess of chocolate sauce?

The perils of the present tense are neither an orchestrated series of difficult moments like those which beset poor Pauline (the sort of assembled shots that make up ''film time''), nor the normal passage of experience from nonce to nonce (which adds up to ''life time,'' if we're lucky); it is the invention on the page of connections in language which denote, describe and relate events (verbal occurrences that we can call ''word time''); and, within which, the only lapse that can count as a crime is a lapse of grammar. Yet its perils are real; rescues are infrequent (unlike the case of plucky Pauline, who is always saved from the saw just ahead of the nick); and those that are reluctantly attempted are generally botched. The present tense is a parched and barren country. In the past, writers rarely went there.

Why do I warn you about the perils of the present tense? Because there is a lot of it going around. What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. In conjunction with the first person, in collusion with the declarative mode, in company with stammery elisions and verbal reticence - each often illnesses in their own right - it has become that major social and artistic malaise called minimalism, itself a misnomer. This is not the minimalism of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, or of Anton Webern and Kasimir Malevich, in which a few obsessively selected means are squeezed into a mighty More - that more, as Mies van der Rohe said, which is the large result of less. This is rather the less, less yields. This is modesty taken down a peg. Here we have the simple without the pretensions of simplicity, plainness without the pressures of an Amish or a Shaker ethic.

HOW does it happen that I have been alerted to this outbreak of the present tense, when, perhaps, you haven't? Not long ago I was asked to select stories by new writers for an anthology, and my initial survey of the field, taking me geologically about 15 years deep, uncovered the condition. Further researches at writing schools, the principal source of the contamination, underlined the seriousness of the situation and the extent of its ramifications. (I wrote ''underlined'' just now - quite wrong, it dates me - ''highlighted'' is the right term.) There were writing programs in a few universities before World War II, but it was only after that conflict that they began to multiply and flourish. They've been with us, roughly, 30 years, or a generation, as it is often measured. We are now experiencing the cumulative effects of their operations. You may have noticed the plague of school-styled poets with which our pages have been afflicted, and taken some account of the no-account magazines that exist in order to publish them. In addition, thousands of short-story readers and writers have been released like fingerlings into the thin mainstream of serious prose.

The most distant layer of my excavations turned up pretty much what one might expect: a scattering of subjects, persons, tenses, places. I ran into more males than females, and there was the usual number of initiation stories, family muddles, bittersweet affairs. As I advanced toward the present, however, the number of women writers increased, as did the number of fictions in the first person, and tales in the present tense.

Well, young people are young people, aren't they, I said to myself, so it is only natural that they write about themselves and their immediate problems. Adolescents consume more of their psyches than sodas, and more local feelings than junk food. On the other hand, these young people are in school, I thought, where they are presumably learning something. Is no indulgence denied them? What are their mentors doing? Standing in very loco and permissive parentis, it would turn out.

Meanwhile, as I read into the outskirts of the present, the present tense was taking over. By now (that Now I neared), of the 195 fictions I had examined, 81 were in the first person, and 52, in whatever person, were in the present tense. I was aware that my sample might be misleading in a number of ways, although it was a good deal more substantial than many telephone surveys reporting on public opinion. But the trend it observed - an increase in women, first persons and present tenses - went, as my investigations continued, through the roof.

The present tense has singulars and plurals, of course, and persons: I, we, you, they, he, she. Back before there was a present tense for writing purposes, if you wanted to risk it anyhow, you consulted the classic case: Katherine Anne Porter's ''Flowering Judas,'' which is in the third person present. Why would Porter want to put this story of a betrayal, this story of a fat Mexican revolutionary and the woman he wants, into the present tense? Certainly not because everyone else was doing it.

''Braggioni sits heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small for him, and sings to Laura in a furry, mournful voice. Laura has begun to find reasons for avoiding her own house until the latest possible moment, for Braggioni is there almost every night. No matter how late she is, he will be sitting there with a surly expression, pulling at his kinky yellow hair, thumbing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath. Lupe the Indian maid meets Laura at the door, and says with a flicker of a glance toward the upper room, 'He waits.' ''

WHAT we deem to be the present is elastic, sometimes approaching the instantaneous (it doesn't take long to say, ''He waits''), often consisting of what William James called ''the specious present'' (which is that amount of time and life felt to be immediately given in experience), but occasionally extending itself through weeks and months, depending on the frame of reference and the size of events. The present can last an eternity. ''The jig is up.'' For how long is this jig up? For Ever. Its overness is never over.

In Porter's piece the resources of the habitual present are exploited in a masterly way. Most events in life come round more than once, as Gertrude Stein's ''-is a rose'' does, moving from now to then and back again. Every night Braggioni comes, sits, pulls at his hair, thumbs strings and snarls a tune. Every night Lupe meets Laura at the door, glances heavenward, says, ''He waits.'' When Porter slips into the past, or advances to the future, she does so in order to emphasize the obsessive menace of the present, as repetitive as a firing squad. If something in the story is to occur uniquely, she reverts to the plain past to report it.

''A brown, shock-haired youth came and stood in her patio one night and sang like a lost soul for two hours, but Laura could think of nothing to do about it.''

So ''Flowering Judas'' is written in a thick present, a present made of a deep past. It lingers like an odor in a closed room, and does not dissipate but intensifies with time. This present becomes the story, and its choice, at first surprising, is thoroughly justified. Minimalists don't use the habitual tenses much, however. They like little that is thick. Not carpets. Not cream. Thinness is chic. If you are really passionate about the present tense, you can get it to play every temporal tune. Here is the way Raymond Carver starts a brief piece called ''Gazebo.''

''That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

''I go, 'Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop.' ''

It is easy to understand how a snappy beginning like this would appeal to the students. ''You should read R. Carver,'' they said at those times when past their workshops I drifted. So I did, and I was amused and edified. ''Let me recommend Proust,'' I said, just to share enthusiasms. Sure. ''You should read T. Wolff,'' they said - ''where it's at.'' Is that the brother of G. Wolff, I wondered. ''Dunno,'' they said, ''but T. is tops.'' O.K. And I was honestly edified and genuinely amused. Why imitate Proust? ''Try R. Musil, won't you,'' I suggested. Sure thing. Someday. ''Don't miss J. McInerney. On all night.''

''You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.''

And they hand me a list of a hundred authors each named Ann (or Anne). My enthusiasm wanes - for Musil, for Proust, for Literature. No. 42 of the Mississippi Review has been edited by David Leavitt. Called ''These Young People Today,'' it has some stuff in the present tense, of course. So I read the collection as a part of my researches. It is like walking through a cemetery before they've put in any graves.

Some say the movies are to blame, if blame there be. But movies are at best a once-a-week thing, and we all went when we were kids, and ate licorice gummies from a sack and shouted early warnings at Errol Flynn; but when we went to write we did as the painters did when photos first complexed the scene: we carefully avoided imitating them. Writers were released from popularity (in a commercial culture, no small thing); they were freed from the tyranny of story and all the trappings of the tale, if they chose to throw them off. Movies may melt the mind down, and they certainly lured many a talent onto the scotchy rocks with their money; however, there was no particular fondness for the present tense until television (and now the VCR) upped our exposure to pictures from two hours a week to six or 10 a day, and magazines lay down in a litter of images as though their pages had been blown about in the street.

THIS fondness for the present tense . . . well, what could be expected from the pop population: that's what is usually said; weren't they all - the young - into drugs and thugs, into strobes and films (as that sexist preposition puts it); weren't they into video and vibes and cars that go varoom, as well as words like ''varoom'' from their favorite cartoon balloons; and weren't they into skimpy swimmies and other visuals; and didn't they wear brand names on their tops, bottoms and bumpers, as if they had, themselves, been manufactured; they were definitely not into vocabulary or its verbalization; they only liked ideas after they had been drawn, and one of their ideas, the idea of history, was exclusively concerned with the passing of fads and crazes, and the instantaneous illumination or extinction of stars.

We should wonder rather at the return of the tough guy in this minimalist guise, the guy of few words, of laconic eyes and ears, with a heart of candy but a sweet both stale and hard, cynical in a sentimental sense, weary from the word ''go'' and half gone, who didn't defile his feelings with ideas, or talk them to destruction. His silences, therefore, were strong. His enemies were no longer red Indians or fierce bulls, nor did he go to war in exotic landscapes. Now his enemies were simply daily life.

The style of these stories, then, is soft tough. They are divested not only of adjectives and adverbs, but of words themselves, almost as if the authors didn't know any. Some warriors arm themselves for battle. These warriors, like wrestlers, strip. They write in strips, too. Images are out. It is fraudulent to poetize. Kept simple, short, direct, like a punch, the sentences avoid subordination, qualification, subtlety. Subordination requires judgment, evaluation; it creates complexity, demands definition. Henry James and William Faulkner had the temerity to put long sentences in their short stories, and these now old masters thought carefully about the relation of technique to reality, about relative weights of meaning and shifts of points of view and accreditation and authority and pacing and scene shaping, so that even if one seemed to toss one's words into a wordless void as Samuel Beckett does, those words as they fell would form constellations, and the mind they had been thrown from would have considered them with the same close concern it would give, say, to suicide.

IT is much easier to teach short fiction than long fiction for obvious reasons, so students bring episodes to class - vignettes, shorties - bits written over a weekend or a week. These stories are criticized by the teacher, of course, who is often gentle with the psyches of the students, and always looking for a way to say, pleasantly, unpleasant things. The writer's fellow students are under no such compunctions, however. They can be cruel, viciously competitive, clever and strategic. They can play favorites, form cliques, sandbag like seasoned poker players. In short, the students write largely in fear of the disfavor of their peers.

The students do not imitate the faculty. Writing teachers cannot be accused of turning out copies of themselves. The students, instead, write like one another. The teacher is nothing but a future recommendation. Only the exceptional instructors push their students much. No one is required to do exercises on the practice fields of fiction. No one is asked to write against the little grain they've got. Relations grow personal before they grow professional. And the community perceives each poet as a poet, each writer as a writer, making them members in this social sense, although they may not have written a worthy word. Here many hide from academic requirements and from intellectual challenge. There are always shining exceptions, of course, but on the whole the students show little interest in literature. They are interested in writing instead . . . in expressing a self as shallow as a saucer.

To whom and to what do they look? Not many years in front of them was Ann X or Barry Y (about whom there is still plenty of shop gossip), and just see where they are now - with stories appearing in The New Yorker, with a collection out from a prestigious press, with interviews, readings, nibbles from the films, an interesting divorce -fictionwise. Because few of the young people I met had the romantic aspirations my generation had, I decided that they lacked ambition. I was wrong. They have plenty of ambition, but it is of a thoroughly worldly and common-sense kind: they want to make it.

THE present tense, with its problems, will probably pass.

Writing programs, however, are very American and very successful, and will doubtless remain. It has been in their interest to feed their students into the commercial world of publishing somegrams feed their players to the pros. The present success of the short story, like the present success of the present tense, is not merely the consequence of a conservative atmosphere in our country (although it may substantially account for the absence of youthful idealism and general social concerns in this work); it is, in my opinion, the reflection of an established and dominant institution, with its connections, personality and structure. Times - they promise - change; writers come and go; fads, like that for the present tense, fade; but in the Detroits of our culture, the manufacture of writers continues.

As weary of the present tense as I presently am, I shall probably look back at it with longing when the fad for the future arrives. After all, Pauline's perils were expressed in gloomy expectations. So as I wait to be run over, I wonder what tense I shall be tied to next: the one near the saw? the ''just past'' that leaves like an angry lover? or the log that's approaching the falls?

William H. Gass is the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.