Sacred Site by Kim Fleet
Feeling tense? Author Caroline Rance’s blog at: http://www.carolinerance.co.uk/articles.htm has inspired me to consider the choice of tense in historical fiction, particularly whether it’s appropriate to write about the past using the present tense, or whether the past should stay in the past. I admit I love being provocative by using the present tense to portray historical events. It works for me in a couple ways. Firstly, often what I want to say is “Just because it’s in the past, doesn’t mean it’s over”, and the present tense is a way to avoid the linearity of time and create an impression of everything happening concurrently. When events in the past are unresolved, the present tense invites the reader to dwell on this. Secondly, the present tense brings the reader right into the action: they can’t distance themselves from a vantage point years ahead of the narrator.
Sacred Site is predominantly written in the past tense (even the bits that are actually in the past), though there is a section in the novel, set in the late 1800s, that is written in the present tense. This part of the novel is concerned with the early settlers in the region, and I use the present tense for a couple of reasons: to give immediacy to the ‘voice’ of the settler narrating the story, and to evoke consideration of the chains of action and reaction that are put in place at this point, which will reverberate for over a century. The present tense contributes also to the ‘unreliable narrator’: the character who thinks they know what’s going on, but they’re lying or they haven’t got the full picture. The past tense has an air of trustworthiness about it that I shy from: if someone’s looking back and relating a story, then they must know how it all turns out. I like to give expectations a bit of a shake up.
Unreliable narrators are all too familiar to me from anthropological fieldwork. It’s fascinating to see how people choose the events from their lives that they consider to be key, and how they choose to present them. People aren’t always heroes in their retelling of their lives, and I always used to ask several people for their version of what happened, and what was important. Suggestive, too, was the way that communities who had been studied over long periods of time by anthropologists seemed to form their own ‘community discourse’. Frequently I got the feeling that there was a standard response to anthropological questions (apart from the responses that are unrepeatable in a blog): particularly chilling when different people repeated the same incidents almost word for word, as if the story had crystallised, and I had to dig hard to shatter the outer shell and try and uncover what it was really about. Similar incidents are reflected in Sacred Site: the protagonist, Esther King, uses stories about family to get Aboriginal informants ‘warmed up’ before she tackles the more probing questions about culture and connections to land. With regard to the sacred site itself, the community she’s working with appears to have evolved a stock reply, not only to questions about what makes it sacred, but also to questions about the massacre that’s rumoured to have occurred there.
And there’s me dropping into the present tense, because it’s a peculiarity of fiction that in writing about a novel, the convention is to use the present tense. So blurbs and synopses are written in the present, as though the action of the novel is going on as we speak. Some philosophies of the text would argue that this is so: that the novel is incomplete without the reader, and that it only really comes into being when a reader engages with the text and creates it all anew. So there are as many versions of the novel as there are readers. Not sure what happens if you re-read a book, but I guess that would also count as a new version of it, especially if you’ve spotted/ discovered/ created new meanings in the subsequent reading that were invisible to you in the first.
All a bit mind blowing, isn’t it? Maybe I should stick to writing about cooking, and the problems of cats with their own ideas about editing manuscripts? Sacred Site had a few near misses when the cat stood on the delete key and then typed hghgghkjkdjkjhg across the page. In line with the best French philosophy of the text, I’ll let you bring your own interpretation to that!
Thanks for reading so far. Thank you also to Andrew for his interesting comment on yesterday’s blog. Until tomorrow, Kim