Living in the Present
An analysis of Tense Switching in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'
(Université de Paris 8)
This is the version of the paper which I read at the Colloque 'Writing the Frontier' at the Université de Limoges, (October 20, 2001). It is both shorter, and, I feel, tighter, than my original paper, and the argument has changed somewhat. For a fuller consideration of the linguistic arguments, and some analyses of other passages from the book, see the first version.
There are those that detest Angela Carter's writings. Too Slick, they say, too precious, too meretricious. Sometimes, I'm tempted to agree ; the opening pages of 'The Bloody Chamber' seem to teeter on the edge of a facile pastiche of the True Romance novel - the appeals to the reader, the coy flutterings around the theme of lost maidenhead, the poor orphan who captures the heart of a titled millionaire.
But I suspect that Carter herself may have had a sharp answer to such misgivings ; why should it be more uncomfortable to recognize the affiliation that links Charlotte Bronte to Mills and Boone than it is to draw the line that runs - for example - from Henry V to all those boozy Hollywood cops, saved from the bottle by the call of duty - and/or an eligible princess?
If in recent decades we have recognized the permeability of the frontier that separates and joins the high and the low culture, perhaps we have hesitated and drawn back at some points along the border. Boys' games may be offered their entry tickets more easily than girls' games. Comic-book costumed heroes - Batman or the Silver Surfer - may be allowed to carry quite a load of cultural baggage, but the Karens, the Joans and the Sharons who flitted through the pages of Roxy or True Romance are forever condemned to inhabit that zone of the culture where, as one Romance publisher put it, the consumers can't read without moving their lips.
It may be, then, that a part of the difficulty that some have with Carter comes from the fact that she worked on the permeability of a particularly feminine sector of the cultural frontier. She can be conceived of as attempting to recapture the lost lands of her sex, and as writing, for herself and her fellows, a kind of archaeology of the female psyche, in which the fairy tales of the little girl, the Romances of the teenager, and then the sharper tones of the young adult, are scrutinised with the cold eye of the boudoir philosopher.
It is perhaps in the short pieces such as those collected in 'The Bloody Chamber' that this project can be most clearly perceived and is at its most discomforting. And it is also in these pieces that, as I shall try to demonstrate today, she made one her more remarkable stylistic experiments. I hope to persuade you that this is itself a part of her wider attempt to sap beneath the enemy lines - but not, boyishly, to plant bombs.
Let us look first at a sentence drawn from the opening passage of the third tale in the book : 'The Tiger's Bride'.
The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched ... while my father ... rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance.
I hope you will agree with me that this is rather odd. Even if we restore the full text, we will, I think, still find it unusual in its switching from Preterit to Present in this way. It's by no means the only occasion on which Carter does this kind of thing. For example, the second story, 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon', opens like this :
Outside her kitchen window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own; when the sky darkened towards evening, an unearthly pallor remained behind upon the winter's landscape, while still the soft flakes floated down.
This lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores in the mean kitchen to look out at the country road.
Notice her how the transmission from preterit to present passes through 'possesses', which could indicate a generality about the girl - a legitimate usage - to 'pauses', which is certainly within the same time frame as 'glistened' 'darkened' or 'remained'. I think we can say that 'pauses' is a truly puzzling usage.
Another example comes from the tale 'Puss in Boots' :
Do you see these fine, high, shining leather boots of mine? A young cavalry officer made me the tribute of, first, one; then, after I celebrate his generosity with a fresh obligato, ... down comes the other.
This instance is less puzzling ; Puss is using the rhetorical devices of the oral story-teller. As I hope to show, Carter plays in the stretch of territory that lies between 'normal usage' and the more surprising leaps - that triple-back somersault that Puss achieves in a critical moment of his own story - with which she dazzles the reader.
Now, I have actually counted the verbs in these stories, and I have grouped them into those which are narrative and those which are commentary tenses - to use Weinreich's terms (if you want to have a look at the results, you will find them in the appendix to the first version of this paper). I have also carried out a statistical analysis of the way in which Carter switches from one to the other, and compared this to tense switching in a number of stories by other authors, ranging from Mark Twain to Grace Paley. You will doubtless be happy to hear that this proved nothing at all ; what is odd about Carter is not the frequency with which she switches tenses, but the way in which she does it.
Other authors go from present to preterit and back again, but in general, use of the present as a narrative tense seems to follow a set of fairly widely shared rules. Carter flirts with these rules - and then breaks them. Look, for example, at the following passage :
It was cold. I drew my furs about me, a wrap of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.)
This, as you will recognize, is a pretty straightforward switch into the present, familiar to any 'good-enough' reader. The following passage, however, from 'The Lady of the House of Love' is more subtle :
Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fear-stiffened legs, but he is not a cat; he is a hero. A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself...
Carter here carries the reader from the Past of 'had he been', through the distant or remote modal 'would' into the present of 'is'. You may notice that the switch accompanies a change in the status of the young man - a point I shall return to.
Sometimes, as in 'Puss in Boots', the weaving back and forth between narrative and commentary mimics the oral tale - Puss's use of the Narrative Present establishes his street credentials - he is the pub raconteur whose joky boasting keeps the company amused until the landlord shuts down for the night. But it may be that the fact that he is an animal points to another clue : in the final story in the collection, 'Wolf-Alice', a wolf-child has been brought back to the village :
Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does not exist. Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
Could Carter's use of the present tense, then, be related to the distinction between the human and the animal? Look closer at 'The Lady of the House of Love'. In this tale, the Countess, who is a vampire aspiring to humanity, but ever dragged back by her appetite for blood to the state of the animal, hunting down her prey on all fours, is associated with the Present Tense : the narrative only switches into the preterite when the young Englishman who is to be her prince comes into the story. When he finally releases the Lady from her curse, and she becomes human, she dies :
She is not sleeping.
In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human.
In dying, then, she quits the timeless present to join the narrative stream of human time. The distinction is not simply between animal and human, then, but between non-human and human. This seems to be borne out by the werewolf of 'The Compmany of Wolves' ; when he appears as a dashing young hunter, he is associated with the normal narrative tenses, but the moment of his metamorphosis, when he kills and eats the grandmother, is told largely in the Simple Present :
He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and texture of vellum.
A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit but he's so thin you could count the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time.
He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.
The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed. The wolf is carnivore incarnate.
However, the good-enough-reader will have noticed that there has been a change in point of view or putative origin of the text in the last two passages. In both cases, we switch from a point of view inside the story - the young Englishman's view in the first case, the grandmother in the second - to the external narrator. That is, we move from the time of the tale itself to the time of its narration.
This may explain why it is that the relationship between the human and the preterit, on the one hand, and the non-human and the simple present on the other is not a fully consistent one. The last passage quoted above opens from the grandmother's point of view - in the simple present - then switches to the external narrator - and the preterit - and then, remains with the external narrator to make a general statement about the nature of wolves - in the present. When the girl enters the cottage and discovers the killer, the writing weaves back and forth between the two tense-systems, the present being mainly used in unpunctuated conversation :
No trace at all of the old woman except for a tuft of white hair that had caught in the bark of an unburned log. When the girl saw that, she knew she was in danger of death.
Where is my grandmother? There's nobody here but we two, my darling.
Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves ...
It is this weaving together of the two tense-systems that is characteristic of the writing of these tales, rather than any strict relationship - a tension between Narrative, characterized by the linking together of a series of events distributed in time, and Commentary, which, in the present instance is more of an epic system, outside time, a world in which archetypal characters and episodes are fixed in amber.
One may think of the time of the tale itself as a sort of wax works museum in which all events take place simultaneously and forever. The time of narration - the time when Beauty, forgetting the Beast, enjoys riding in limousines, going to the theatre and wearing fine dresses - the time when her face begins to show traces of change and decay - is not exactly the real world - it is more the time of another kind of tale, of the True Romance tale in which the boy next door may turn out to be as good as any prince - or at least, to be as good as one is going to get.
So it is that both the events and characters within the stories are presented in a double aspect. The young Englishman is at the same time a mundane hero of the modern, a good-looking, muscular fellow in his shirt-sleeves, mounted on a bicycle, and the magical hero who will release the maiden from her long sleep. Similarly, the vampire, who feeds, albeit reluctantly, on the blood of virile young men, is at the same time a neurotic young woman, victim of inbreeding and the tragic loss of her parents - which is how the hero sees her :
... and due to his heroism, which makes him like the sun, he sees before him, first and foremost, an inbred, highly strung child, fatherless, motherless, kept in the dark too long and pale as a plant that never sees the light, half-blinded by some hereditary condition of the eyes.
You will recall the passage from 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' ; we can now see that the young girl who pauses in the midst of her chores is first encountered as a creature of the land of fairy-tales - she is not only the Beauty of this tale, but also of all the others too, through Mmme de Villeneuve to the darker tales of the oral tradition. From there, we descend into a specific version, with bankers, shares, photographs and all the other accoutrements of the Modern Romance.
Carter's investigations of the frontiers between Art and art, or Culture and culture, is - in these tales - tied up with the way she uses tenses. Her gleanings and borrowings from two - closely related - genres - on the one hand, the fairy tale, and on the other the romantic fiction, stand as a deliberate challenge to the placing of boys' games at the centre of our imaginative lives, leaving the girls to occupy whatever corners of the playground are left to them.
But - and I do not have the time to fully develop this here - she does not simply substitute the skipping rope for the football. In the places where prince, princess, wolf and vampire encounter one another, it is just possible that men and women might recognize one another. And just before Little Red Riding Hood nestles her curls against the wolf's shoulder, her grandmother's bones beneath the bed :
She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps he will put the lice in her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony
The blizzard will die down.
The blizzard died down.
Carter had, I believe, read enough linguistics to know the status of that 'will'. Do present and past meet in that modality that points - perhaps - to a future?
WORKS USED :
Bouscaren, Janine and Jean Chuquet, Grammaire et textes anglais : guide pour l'analyse linguistique, Paris, Ophrys, 1987.
Carter, Angela, Black Venus, London, Chatto & Windus, 1985.
Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber, 1979, London, Penguin, 1981.
Guillemin-Flescher, Jacqueline, Syntaxe Comparée du Français et de l'Anglais : Problmes de Traduction, Paris, Ophrys, 1989.
Lewis, Michael, The English Verb : An Exploration of Structure and Meaning, Hove, Language Teaching Publications, 1986.
Paley, Grace, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, London, Virago Modern Classics, 1979.
Weinrich, Harald, Le Temps : le récit et le commentaire, translated from the German by Michèle Lacoste, Paris, Editions du Sueil, 1973.
Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion : The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, London, Heinemann, 1983.
If you wish to comment on this article, please write to tmason@timothyjpmason.com