Living in the Present
An analysis of Tense Switching in Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'
(Université de Paris 8)
| For the good-enough reader, Angela Carter's use of tenses in her stories collected in 'The Bloody Chamber' has an odd quality. This is not because of the frequency with which she switches from one set of tenses to another, but in the way the switches are effected. |
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| I attempt to read Carter's stories in the light of the work of Weinrich, in particular his distinction between Narration and Commentary, of Lewis, and his conception of the different tenses as indicating a relationship of Closeness or of Distance between the enunciator and the object of her enunciation, and of the members of the school of Antoine Culioli. |
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| I look at the different ways Carter uses the possibilities offered by the English tense system, bringing a cinematic quality to her work. |
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| Tense switching in these works appears to trace out distinctions between the Animal and the Human, or between the world of the fairy tale and folk tale, and a more mundane universe that resembles or touches upon our own. |
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Part I : The Problem
Consider the following sentences:
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The first sentence contains a single inflected verb - dropped - which is in the simple past or preterit tense. The second sentence, which, as you can see, has been edited, contains two inflected verbs - watched and rids - the first of which is also in the simple past. The second, however, is in the simple present. This change in tense does not refer to any change in the real time in which the activities designated by the verbs occur - they are coterminous (while my father). Why, then, has the author chosen to switch from the past to the present in this manner?
First I would like to establish that this usage is not an isolated one in Angela Carter's short stories. Although it is rare to find a shift from Present to Past quite as flagrant as that which I have brought to your attention, it is nonetheless a procedure which she uses frequently. For example, the second story in the collection 'The Bloody Chamber', entitled 'The Courtship of Mr. Lyon', which is a variation on 'La Belle et la Bête', opens in the following way:
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. (ibid, p. 41) |
The status of 'possesses' is ambiguous, for it could indicate a generality about the girl, or be read as a kind of stage direction, either of which would justify the use of a different tense system. However, 'pauses' quite evidently belongs to the same level of action as 'the soft flakes floated down'. Within the context, this is a truly puzzling use of the Present Tense. The story continues, using the traditional Narrative tense system until the very last sentence :
Mr. and Mrs. Lyon walk in the garden; the old spaniel drowses on the grass, in a drift of fallen petals. (ibid, p. 51) |
This, though unusual in the context of the English language short story, is not inexplicable. It can be read as signalling that the narrative proper has been abandoned. The mood is similar to that induced by one of Charles Dickens' finales.
Another example comes from the story 'Puss-in-Boots', which is narrated by Puss himself. The passage I quote comes from close to the beginning of the tale.
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. (ibid, p. 68)(2) |
With the main verb of the first sentence, we need have no quarrel: the narrator addresses himself to the reader, using the Simple Present, which is a traditional usage of that tense. We then pass from commentary to narrative - Puss is to tell us the story of how he obtained the boots. The switch to a narrative tense - the Simple Past - is what the good-enough reader(3) would expect; 'made' comes as no surprise. It is, however, immediately followed by 'celebrate', which, referring to an action which one would expect to constitute the second link in a chain of narrative preterits, takes the reader aback.
In a number of the stories in the collection under consideration, the ratio of verbs in the Present Tense to verbs in the Past is unusually high. In 'The Tiger's Bride', for example, there are 523 uses of the Past as against 131 uses of the Present. In 'The Lady of the House of Love', a vampire story, there are 321 verbs in the Present as against 265 in the Past. In 'Puss-in-Boots', the ratio is even higher : 563 verbs in the Present as against 119 in the Past.
We may compare this with the tense frequencies found in a more traditional narrative: in 'The Man that Corrupted Hadleyberg', by Mark Twain, for example, we find that of 2,502 inflected verbs, 1,524 are in the traditional narrative tenses as against 978 in the Simple Present or associated tenses. In Faulkner's 'Delta Dawn', traditional narrative tenses account for almost 74% of all inflected verbs (853 out of 1157), whilst in Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher', of 639 verbs, 542 are in the Past Tense.
Carter is not, of course, alone in the high frequency with which she uses the Present Tense. Experimental uses of the English Tense system have become commonplace. Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, John Fante, Jerzy Kosinski and Christopher Isherwood, to name but a handful of modern authors, have all made extensive use of the Present Tense in their novels or short stories. In Grace Paley's story 'Faith in the Afternoon', for example, the Present Tense and its associated tenses account for a little over 50% of the inflected verbs.
What is peculiar to Carter's writing in the stories under analysis here is not simply the number of times she uses the Present, but the way in which she switches from the Present to the Past and back again. At first reading, one senses that the author flits from one tense set to the other very often, as she does in the passages quoted above. How does this compare with the tense switching frequency of other authors?
I can show through a statistical analysis that Carter's tense-switching is not deviant in its frequency. It is in the manner in which she changes from one tense to another that her work is unusual.
Part II : The Apparatus.
To help us in the task of analyzing Carter's use of tenses, I will refer to a certain number of linguistic sources and see how far their investigations of the English Tense System can help us. The first of these is the German linguist, Harald Weinrich. Weinrich suggests that European languages use two systems of tenses. One, which he refers to as the system of 'Commentary Tenses', is characterized by a high degree of tension, and signals to the receiver that the message is to be acted upon. The other, the system of 'Narrative Tenses', is a more relaxed mode, indicating that no immediate action is necessary. In English, the Simple Present belongs to the first system, whereas the Simple Past belongs to the second.
In a similar vein, Michael Lewis, in his interesting discussion of the English Verb, distinguishes between Close and Remote forms of the verb. Present Tenses indicate that the event referred to is immediate whilst Past Tenses place the event at a psychological distance. In Weinrich's terms, Angela Carter, in the first passage quoted above, passes from Narrative to Commentary. Both Weinrich and Lewis suggest that such a procedure implies that the emitter calls upon the receiver to switch from a position of relaxed attention to one of greater involvement.
Weinrich also suggests that it is useful to draw a parallel between the way a writer uses tenses and the way a film director uses a camera. The Present is something akin to a Close up, whereas with the Past, the camera draws back from the subject. In the case of the first passage quoted from 'The Tiger's Bride', we may imagine that, in cinematographic terms, we see the narrator in the background watching her father, who is in the foreground. Or perhaps we move from a long shot on the girl to zoom in on the man.
It is to be noted that Carter uses above all the Simple tenses. Of the 321 verbs in the Present Tense in The Lady of the House of Love, there are 22 examples of the Present Perfect, one of which is Progressive, and 3 examples of the Present Progressive. Of the 265 verbs in the Past Tense, 234 are in the Simple Past. The Simple Tenses refer to the simple truth value of the relation between the subject and the predicate which is affirmed by the emitter(5).
As Lewis puts it, the Simple Present refers to what the speaker sees as a timeless fact. The Simple Past also refers to facts, but these facts are seen as in some way remote. The remoteness may be in time (which is why we think of it as a Past Tense), in relationship, in possibility and so on.
Carter, then, can be understood to play with distance. In this, she is doing no more than authors have always done. As Weinrich points out, the writer of fiction who wishes to inject a greater degree of urgency into his narrative may often use one of the Commentary Tenses. However, the conventions covering such uses restrain them to a limited number of contexts;
- a) as we have already seen, the author may use the Commentary to establish a close relationship between the narrator and the reader. The British writer, Fay Weldon, uses this device abundantly.
- b) the author may employ a narrative device such as the use of Direct Speech(6) or an exchange of letters, as in the epistolary novels of the eighteenth Century. Diary entries function in the same way. Kosinski plays upon this in 'Steps' for example. Dialogue has often become internal monologue in the modern novel, and Fante's use of the present tense in his Bandini novels leans upon this usage.
c) by the use of metaphor, the author may switch between the enunciation of a closed and distant narrative and the evocation of eternal truths. This device is often close to a) above
d) the narrative present may be used in English if the narrator is presented as uneducated or lower class. It then is frequently reserved for the verbs of enunciation, as often in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, in which the verb 'to say' very often appears as 'he says' within the context of a series of preterits. West Indian patois, as presented in the earlier works of V.S. Naipaul, or in Jean Rhys's short story, "Let Them Call it Jazz", follows a similar convention.
Part III : The Analysis
Carter uses all these techniques. In the story 'The Bloody Chamber', the narrator, Bluebeard's wife, describes her honeymoon journey:
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.) |
The verb in the simple present returns us to the moment of narration, and the 'you' can be no other than the reader.
Carter uses Direct Speech, as we have seen, relatively sparingly and often enough in an ambiguous way which leaves the reader in some doubt as to whether, within the logic of the story itself, any communication has in fact taken place. Sometimes, it is simply that the author omits the punctuation. On other occasions, it is not clearly indicated that the words have been spoken out loud; the reader is left to guess as to whether they are uttered or simply thought by one or other of the protagonists.
Carter also uses metaphor quite freely; on occasion it serves as a switching device, enabling her to modulate from one Tense system to the other. In 'The Lady of the House of Love', for example, the traveller who is to be the victim of the vampire Countess, begins to suspect that all is not as it should be with his hostess:
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. |
Here the switch from Narrative Tense system to Commentary Tense system is operated through the metaphor with the glide from the Pluperfect through the Modal, which brings together the Remote 'would'(7) and 'have', which belongs to the Present Tense, and on to the Simple Present with 'is'. We may represent this schematically :
- (Preterit + have -en) to (Remote Modal + have -en) to (Present) to (Present)
which carries us from 'had', through 'have' to 'is'.
The Narrative Present as an indicator of the status of the narrator is also used. In the story 'Our Lady of the Massacre', in the collection 'Black Venus' (Carter, (a) 31 - 48), the narrator is a whore and convict, sent to the American colonies in the 17th Century. The narration switches back and forth between the tense systems in a way which mimics oral tale-telling, and which can be justified by the fact that although the woman may know how to write, she is not widely read and does not belong to the fully educated classes.
This justification does not in itself explain why the author switches from one system to the other at particular points in the narrative, but we shall leave the analysis of this text for another time. Here we may note that it is a strategy that Carter has used on other occasions than in the production of the stories collected in 'The Bloody Chamber' and for other genres than the fairy tale.
In 'Puss-in-Boots', the narrator is a cat, servant to a rakish young 'officer', and something of a wide-boy. His use of the Narrative Present establishes his street credentials - he is the pub raconteur whose jokey boasting keeps the company amused until the landlord closes down for the night. However, the fact that he is an animal points to another precious clue. In the final story in the collection, 'Wolf-Alice', a wolf-child has been brought back to a 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. (ibid, 119, underlined by me) |
Could Carter's use of the present tense, then, be related to the distinction between the human and the animal? Some signs may lead us to follow this hypothesis for a moment. The Countess, the vampire of 'The Lady of the House of Love' is largely associated with the Simple Present, and the narrative only switches to the Simple Past when the young Englishman makes his way into the story. At the end of the story, the Englishman releases her from her curse and she becomes human, after which, she dies:
She is not sleeping. |
On becoming human, the Countess quits the Present Tense to join the narrative stream of human time. It is not so much the distinction between animal and human which is critical to an understanding of the play with tenses within these stories, but the distinction between the human and the non-human.
Similarly, the werewolf of 'The Company of Wolves' (ibid, 110 - 118), when he appears as a dashing young hunter, is associated with the Narrative Tenses, but the moment of his metamorphosis, when he kills and eats Little Red Riding Hood's 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. |
In the last two passages, the good-enough reader will have noted that there has been a change in the point of view or putative origin of the text. In both cases we switch from a point of view inside the story (the young Englishman in the first instance, the grandmother in the second) to one outside the story - the external narrator. In cinematographic terms, we draw back from close-up to long-shot. Another way of putting it would be to say that we move from the time of the tale itself back to the time of its narration.
This may help explain why the relationship between the human and the Simple Past on the one hand and the non-human and the Simple Present on the other is not fully consistent. In the passage I have just quoted, a change of point of view from the grandmother watching the werewolf strip off his clothes, preparatory to becoming a wolf, to an external narrator ('The last thing the old lady saw ...') is accompanied by a switch from the Simple Present to the Simple Past, which then changes back to the Present with a general statement about the nature of the wolf.
When the girl enters the cottage and discovers the killer - although the text is ambiguous as to whether he is at this moment fully wolf or human - the writing weaves back and forth from the Simple Past to the Simple Present, the latter being used mainly in unpunctuated conversation :
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It is this weaving together of the two Tense systems which is characteristic of the writing of these tales, rather than any strict relationship - a tension between Narrative, which is characterized by the linking together of a series of events distributed in time, and what Weinrich has called Commentary, but which in the present instance is more of an epic system, outside time, a world in which archetypal characters and episodes are fixed, as it were, 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. It is as if Carter, in modernizing Perrault's fairy tales - although in many ways she returns to the traditional tales, which prior to Perrault's bowdlerized, boudoir versions, were far rougher and less amenable to the genteel morality of the 18th Century reading public(8) - had traced a delicate link between the way the modern reader/writer might tell a story and the magical world of werewolves, ghouls and vampires, much as Jack, throwing his beans out of the window, links with the beanstalk the world of working peasants and the other land in the sky where giants hoard their gold.
Thus it is that both events and characters within the stories are presented in a double aspect. The young Englishman of 'The Lady of the House of Love' is both a very ordinary young man taking a cycling holiday in Eastern Europe on the eve of the First World War, in which he is soon to be engulfed, and the magical hero who will release the maiden from her long sleep. Similarly, the maiden, a 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. (ibid, 104) |
In the first version of Beauty and the Beast, 'The Courtship of Mr. Lion', the tale opens, as we have seen, with a particularly striking use of the Present Tense and closes with another. The rest of the tale is, apart from the Direct Speech, recounted in the narrative tenses. Perhaps we are now ready to hypothesize as to the function of the Present Tense in this particular instance.
The young girl who pauses in her chores is first encountered as a creature of the land of fairy-tales - she is, as it were, not only the Beauty of this particular version of the tale, but that of all the others too, through Mme de Villeneuve to the darker tales that were disseminated by the oral tradition. From there, we descend into the specific version itself, with a modern motor car, bankers, shares and photographs, and a young woman who forgets her strange lover in the social whirl of London theatres, restaurants and opera houses.
The coda of a single sentence, in which Mr. & Mrs. Lyon walk in the garden, after Beauty has transformed the lion with a kiss, is not so much a return to the archetypes as an ironic recognition of the domesticated nature of this version of the tale, which ends in the kind of homely bliss with which Charles Dickens so often signed off his novels - the never-never land of suburbia rather than of magic.
This indeed may be one of the reasons why the tale is followed by a second version, in which Beauty, rather than transforming the Beast and reducing the wild to the tame, is herself transformed by the Tiger's harsh tongue into a Beast.
At certain crucial moments of her tales, the author abandons Tense altogether. In the following passage, from 'The Tiger's Bride', the Beast is to reveal himself to Beauty without disguise for the first time :
The reed bowed down in a sudden snarl of wind that brought with it a gust of the heavy odour of his disguise. The valet held out his master's cloak to screen him from me as he removed the mask. The horses stirred. |
The passage opens in the narrative tense system with which the author has recounted the protagonists' ride through the winter countryside on horseback. In the second paragraph, a modal verb leads us into the present which is justified by the general comment on the nature of tigers. In the third paragraph, with its echoes of Blake, there are no inflected main verbs at all - the text retreats completely from temporality; the camera moves in closer than for a close-up! We return to temporality with the voice of the narrator, Beauty, as the Beast penetrates her.
The use Carter makes of modal verbs is particularly interesting. Often they allow the author to slip from one system of tenses to the other in such a way that the reader hardly notices what is happening. In 'Puss-in-Boots', which is mainly narrated in the Present Tense, we find the following :
But has my master witnessed my triumph? Has he my arse. He's tuning up that old mandolin and breaks, as down I come, into song. |
The writer prepares us for the slide from the Narrative Present to the Preterit with two modals. Notice that the first of these, following the series of Present Tenses, links a remote modal ('would') with the first form of the verb 'have', which is of course closer to the Present than to the Past of the verb. The second, which leads into the series of Preterits, is a single, unadorned, remote modal. Carter returns us to the Narrative Present equally skillfully. Puss apostrophizes his own beloved as he listens to his master's song :
Tabs, up on the roof there, prick up your ears! For by its power I know my heart is in his voice. |
In this case, to pick up the metaphor of the film director once again, we may think of the movement of the text as a slow zooming out and then back in again. On other occasions, however, the author cuts directly from long shot to close-up, as here in 'The Erl-King' :
There was a goat of uncanny whiteness, gleaming like a goat of snow, who turned up her mild eyes towards me and bleated softly, so that he knew I had arrived. |
Conclusion
Finally, then, we can say that, in these stories, Carter uses the two basic tenses in ways that have little to do with Time itself, but a great deal to do with the playful tension that the author sets up between the world of 'reality' and the world of the fairy-tale archetype. She does this in a way which deviates considerably from the normal use of tenses in fictional narrative, both in her unusually frequent use of the Present Tense, and in the way she switches from Present to Past without strict regard to the conventions. The switching is done artfully, using techniques parallel to those employed in the cinema. Her considerable reliance on the Simple Tenses reinforces the presentation of a world consisting of unitary and basic truths proper to the fairy tale.
But the creation of this fairy-tale world is not the only function of tense switching. It also serves to cut from one point of view to another within the story's frame, much as a film director's use of different camera shots does. In these cases, the Present Tense is often associated with the human protagonists of the tales, rather than the inhuman - the grandmother about to be eaten, or the young man making plans for the neurotic young woman.
I would conclude with a short reflection upon the lessons that might be drawn from these adventures for linguistics. In so far as linguists try to discover the semantic rules which govern our use of the Tenses of a language, they must encounter the fundamental reflexivity common to all the social sciences. Ordinary members of the social groups studied are capable of acquiring the knowledge discovered by the scientist, of applying it, and, more particularly, of bending the rules in such a way that the work needs to be done again. In the case of a highly sophisticated practitioner, like Angela Carter, the linguist will find his regularities scattered and playfully rearranged. This does not nullify the linguist's task - but it does make it more interesting.
Notes
1. The full citation is : "The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more draughts of the firewater they call grappa, rids himself of the last scraps of my inheritance." I will come back to the question of how Carter modulates from one set of tenses to the other later; suffice to say for the moment that she here places two atemporal uses of the Simple Present between the Simple Past and the Simple Present that we have already noted.
2. We shall see that Puss is a special case amongst the narrators of the stories in this collection, who often uses a Narrative Present close to the oral narrative present which writers use to indicate that the narrator is 'of the people.'
3. The concept of the 'good-enough reader' is a borrowing from the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicot. In his work it refers to the real, flesh and blood woman who, dividing her time between her infant and her other worldly tasks and interests, is sufficiently attentive (and inattentive) to allow the child to progress from dependence to selfhood. The term is used to allow the sobriquet of 'Good Mother' to be reserved to refer to the fantasy projection of the infant, who desires a full-time maternal slave. The good-enough reader, then, is the sufficiently literate person who will take time out from his or her other pursuits to plunge into a novel or a poem, but who does have other things to attend to. Authors, and literary critics, sometimes appear to demand The Good Reader, rather than the 'good-enough reader'.
4. The expected frequency is calculated by multiplying the two totals corresponding to each cell and then dividing the result by the grand total of verb changes.
5. I am following here both the school of A. Culioli (as set out in Bouscaren et Chuquet and J. Guillemin-Flescher) and Michael Lewis.
6. Weinrich gives a nice example of this of this technique as used by Maupassant, and comments: Que ce dialogue, d'une tension extrême, soit inséré dans un récit, ne change rien à l'analyse. Au contraire, s'enlevant sur le fond du détachement propre au récit, il s'essaye autant que possible à y reintroduire, par irruption constante du 'discours direct', la tension de cet échange de paroles véhémentes.
7. On the distinction between Remote and Close Modals, see Lewis.
8. On the changes wrought by Perrault on the folk tales which were his original material see e.g. Jack Zipes and in particular the discussion of 'Little Red Riding Hood', (Zipes, 28-9).
9. The switch to the Past Tense here, leaving the demotic Narrative Present, has the effect of ennobling the presentation of the rather disreputable rake as he becomes a minstrel lover serenading his lady from the street as she sits in her balcony.
Statistical appendix comparing tense switching frequencies :
We will first study frequency of tense-switching in the stories in The Bloody Chamber. For the purposes of ease of presentation, I have here distinguished only two broad categories of Tenses. In the first, which, following Weinrich, I shall call Commentary, are included the Simple Present, the Progressive Present, the Present Perfect and the Modal Auxiliaries can, may, must, shall and will. In the second, which we may call Narrative, are included the Simple Past, the Past Progressive, the Past Perfect, the Subjunctive Mood and the Modal Auxiliaries could, might, should and would.
For the first story, 'The Bloody Chamber', we find the following distribution :
| Commentary | Narrative | Total | |
| Commentary | 125 | 152 | 277 |
| Narrative | 152 | 1337 | 1489 |
| TOTAL | 277 | 1489 | 1774 |
That is to say that of 277 Commentary Tenses, 125 were followed by a tense of the same category, and 152 by a Narrative Tense. Similarly, of 1,774 Narrative Tenses, 152 were followed by a Commentary Tense, while 1,489 were followed by another Narrative Tense. Thus 17.4% of all verbs were followed by a verb the tense of which was of the other category. This in itself does not tell us a great deal about the degree to which Tense Switching takes place, for it will be seen that where one of the two Tense systems is in a very small minority - as is the case here, where the Commentary Tenses account for only 15.6% of all verbs - there will automatically be only a low degree of switching. What we need to do is to calculate the expected frequency of switching if it were to be distributed in a random fashion, and then calculate the degree to which the real amount of switching differs from this expected amount.
Calculating the expected frequency for each case(4), we produce the following table :
| Commentary | Narrative | Total | |||
| Observed | Expected | Observed | Expected | ||
| Commentary | 125 | 44.50 | 152 | 232.5 | 277 |
| Narrative | 152 | 232.5 | 1337 | 1249.79 | 1489 |
| TOTAL | 277 | 1489 | 1774 | ||
We can then calculate an index of switching for the minority tense system by dividing the observed number of switches of the minority tense (here Commentary to Narrative) by the expected number:
- 152 /232 = 0.66
It can be shown that the result of this calculation will be 1 when the observed number of tense switches is equal to the number of expected tense switches and 0 when there are no switches at all. The result can be treated as an Index of Tense Switching, which allows us to compare one piece of writing to another.
So let us go on to compare 'The Bloody Chamber' with the next story in the collection, 'The Courtship of Mr. Lyon'. In this case, the index is 0.59, which suggests a lower degree of switching than in the first story. The other stories give the following results:
- The Tiger's Bride : 0.49
Puss in Boots : 0.55
The Erl-King : 0.41
The Snow Child : 0.75
The Lady of the House of Love : 0.30
The Werewolf : 0.20
The Company of Wolves : 0.40
Wolf Alice : 0.66
For 'The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyberg', the Index is 0.50. For 'The Fall of the House of Usher', the Index is 0.58, while for the Grace Paley story mentioned above, the figure is 0.6. This suggests, then, that whatever it is that appears strange about Angela Carter's use of the Tense System, it is not simply a question of frequency of switching; rather it is in the manner.
WORKS CITED :
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.
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