Present tense narration collapses event and telling into an immediate here-now

Evidence

Mantel makes clear the theological and ethical entailments of this grammatical choice. Writer Richard Lea notes the similarities of Mantel’s tense with Kevin Barry, who explains that the use of present tense in his recent novel about the life of John Lennon aspired to impart the impression of voice above all: “It is a case of trying to plant a voice inside the reader’s head, to make him or her hear the words as they read them … to make them read with their ears, essentially. You’re aiming to mesmerize.” Present tense is so prevalent in the twenty-first century that it envelops high literary works like Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations, John Banville’s The Infinities, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, but also YA chart-busters like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Present tense compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now. Autofiction and the perpetual present of the status update (What’s on your mind?) reinforce this grammatical functioning as a metaphysical index, instantaneity, and directness. Moreover, present tense often forecloses conclusiveness, judgment, or resolution, lacking hindsight and favoring openness or even nonsensical, unplotted, impressionistic indeterminacy. All this advances to things speaking for themselves, fluid streams, the voice of your own personality. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names present-tense narration as one concrete mechanism of immediacy: compressing event and narration into one temporal register.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of naming immediacy’s aesthetic features, and connects to her Jameson-debt judgment since tense compression is the formal signature of the causal economic thesis.