Past and present are two tenses that are two kinds of being and some late or just past twentieth century novelists elaborate that while a later generation largely does not.
Time is always ironic, As the past, ever mentally marked as the past, moves on to successive presents, the mind is capable of comparing the two and the many to see what is surprisingly the same and what is surprisingly different and decide which of these times are real and which of any number of them are false or simply one a paler image of the others. So to a Christian, what happened two thousand years ago remains lively and thinks of many present moments as replaying past dramas of atonement and salvation and the lifestyles of ancient Judea. The present is recapitulation. On the other hand, people can be amazed at how different things have become, fully aware and validated by the present, as when I reflect that a surgeon that saved my life a quarter century ago saved my still existent life while people just a few years before had died of the condition. The present, in that instance, is progress rather than recapitulation. Freud, for his part, thought the past was a very lively part of the present in that it spoke in symbols of what mattered in the past even if not part of present recollection. But the mind knows what it remembers and hath wrought what it may.
A particularly vivid example of the juxtaposition of the past and present so as to see what has changed and what not has changed as when one sees a new building in an old neighborhood so as to unsettle what the moment of the old place was or note how the incline of a street was the same it was many years ago and so also eerie in the juxtaposition. Famously, Odysseus finally comes back to Ithaca and might think that things had been seriously altered since he left but finds it surprisingly similar, Penelope still ruling the roost however contentious are her suitors and he able to reclaim his leadership in short account, when returning soldiers from a war often have to deal with broken romances and the need to create new fortunes that before the war they never thought to imagine, which happened to World War II G. I.s who now would go on to college and professional lives.
Another singularly apt display of the irony of time is in “Great Expectations" where Dickens delves into what would be the Freudian obsession with the overlap of past and present but without the sex. Pip is forever scarred by his encounter at a young age with Magwich, his trauma a combination of threatened violence, generosity and consequence, as well as his childhood association with Estella, both of which Pip tries to outgrow so as to become a middle class functionary, more dependant on the intervening mentorship of Jaggwes, who is not as dramatic a figure as his traumas but more consequential in forming Pip’s character. Dickens buries his own sentimentality that are prevalent in his earlier novels, especially in ”A Christmas Carol” where the past is just a moral reminder of what is left of Christianity, to a present of works and days. Put childish things behind you.
There are recently past novelists who also work to wrestle with the relation of past and present. John Updike is a realistic novelist however much he takes romance and religion seriously and is thought of as an unserious writer because he incorporates current events into his novels, so as to explain how that moment worked, as when he convinces the terrorist in “Terrorist” to give up blowing up his car and creating a great deal of damage. It seems sentimental rather than tough minded. In what I think is his best novel, “In the Beauty of the Lillies” (1996), he deals with all his weaknesses but the strength of the novel, as in his other novels, such as “Memories of the Ford Administration”, and “Couples”, he tries to deal with the particularity of a time, while in “Lillies” he wants to compare past and present times and does so by narrating a saga of four generations whereby each of the next one form their character by misunderstand a parent and so make a more plausible case than that offered by the Freudian drama without contradicting it.
The man in the initial generation in “Lillies” is forever bereft because he lost religious faith and left his calling as a minister to make do as an encyclopedia salesman, a fitting occupation for a nonbeliever, but he is spiritually weakened for life by his apostasy, however much the time is of the opposition between faith and science. His son remembers and retains the weakness of his father without appreciating the bravery of a person who abandons religion simply because it now seems to him to be untrue, the ex-clergyman refusing to pose as religious so as to have its rewards and position. His father would be no hypocrite. What the son learns is to be timid and unadventurous. He marries a girl who does not challenge him after relinquishing a romantic adventure and remains a minor postman rather than even take up the responsibility of heading a postal station. What he does have is a lively sexual life within marriage to his wife to replace any other ambitions.
The third generation is the daughter of the postman who inherits culturally a sense of sexuality but uses it to manipulate people, which is her misinterpretation of her father’s legacy. She becomes a film actress during a time of movie grandeur and accomplishes considerable art as a comedienne however much her personal life is tawdry and only intermittently providing a male figure for her own son.That son, bereft of direction, falls for a girl who is a member of a cult group and he joins it, becoming a leader in the group, and thinking that the cult leader was the real mccoy because charlatan as he may be the cult leader believed in his own calling, something like Jim Jones, a cult leader of that generation, and also possibly because the son had inherited his mother’s theatricality.
So each generation is in the spirit of its times and is different from each of the prior generations and do not understand them, the great grandson who readopts religion not apparently tied to the self defrocked pastor. Times are insular, the past forgotten and only coincidentally related however much the author offers the irony of religion redeemed. Only the author, or the Freudian analyst, knows. Time is a set of cubicles, each one a duration rather than what Aristotle thought: a yardstick for the measurement of change. You cannot go back again and so the past is past, to be succeeded by its own claustrophobic time and an amnesia about the past.
There is another way to garner the different textures of past and present than in using the device of a set of generations. That is what might be called a meta-fiction or a meta-novel which is when a narrative or story, real or imagined, is itself seen as an object of contemplation and regarded as a past and to be compared with another narrative or story, which is regarded as a present. That is different from the usual kind of novel which offers what tries to be an accurate account of people and their families and lives of people who are ordinary and therefore otherwise unnoticed and so different from the eminent figures, the heroes, who get worked into history books and epics.
A good example of a meta-novel is “Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife”, whereby the fictional Philip Roth tussles, supposedly, with the real one so as to establish the similarity and differences of the two identities. The presumed fictional character is to be separated, treated as a reality, a given, against which the “real” one contends. Such struggles are common in Roth’s middle career novels. A better example, however, is in a late novel of Roth, “The Plot Against America” (2004), which, as in much of Updike, is considered inferior because it is so topical, so much of its political point, but in fact is a meta-novel that is about the human condition rather than catastrophes past and imagined.
Here, I would take it, are at least three stories of different kinds of existence that Roth is contemplating in this novel. The first is the background story that everyone recognizes as the basis or take off from which Roth departs. That is the novel “It Couldn’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis which provided an imaginary future of what would happen to America if it was taken over by malignant forces and so regarded as a warning of Fascism. That is the background, the past, against which Roth’s novel is read and is therefore understood as the warning against an antisemetic set of atrocities perpetrated against America in an imagined world where Charles Lindburgh defeats FDR in 1940. The alternative history shows pogroms and suffering until the nation is restored to FDR when Canadian planes shoot down Lindburgh who is flying solo between events, as the imagination would believe. That is the prudential warning, akin to the Sinclair Lewis novel. That is what most commentators and many readers made of it. The third narrative is that which is in fact the real story which Roth offers in the novel of what would happen if Lindburgh had been elected. There would be set up an organization by a Jewish aide in the White House to assimilate young Jews into the American way of life, not to exterminate them. There would be some antisemetic riots but on the whole the police would quell them and a Gentile policeman would look after the Jewish citizenry. One of the Jews would even travel to one of the assimilationist campgrounds so as to rescue one of its Jewish members, even if that was thought to be a risky proposition, so fearful that the mother of the clan denies harbor of her own sister during the unrest because she was married to the Jewish man who had set up the assimilationist organization. The Jewish family had been needlessly hysterical and the message of the novel is that antisemitism is not all that bad in America, more a fantasy or fear than a reality, whatever the commentators and other readers might say, Roth tweaking his nose at those who misread him, that relation between Roth and his critics in real life another level or story and that the most present and abiding reality. There are no end of lists of reality that can be offered in a novel, some real and some imagined, and that is in the nature of both fiction and reality.
It should be noted that Roth is not into but is criticizing the apocalyptic novels before and the films later on which imagine an absolute chasm between the past as a remembered ordinary reality and the imaginary world of a horrific future. Roth was no doubt aware of Orwell’s “1984” which showed a new world where everyone was brainwashed and obeyed the dear leader. Roth might well have been aware of the movie “Panic in the YearZero” or "Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The point is that social dissolution is partial and readily enough restored, unlike what happens in the “Mad Max” movies. It should also be noted that Updike’s venture into science fiction imagined an America diminished after a Chinese-U. S. nuclear exchange but remaining socially organized even if dispirited to the point of a “spiritual malaise” which is the term used by Jimmy Carter to describe the cultural situation in America during his term. Such a condition, even if accurate, might be troubling but not catastrophic. Beware of overclaiming disaster in the future to contrast what will be to an ordinary past.
Here is another meta-novel of the period that is also insufficiently appreciated. It is P. D. James’ “Death Comes to Pemberley” (2011). James was popular in the Eighties and Nineties for her mystery stories which were taken to be of interest because she evoked the disquietude that would result from a murder but her novels were in fact noteworthy for an acute eye on the social structure in which the murder took place, like a convent or a school. She was always, however, a deep reader of Jane Austen and her pastiche of extending “Pride and Prejudice” to a time a decade after the marriages of Darcy and Elizabeth and Jane and Charles Bingley was a bit of a romp and a source of amusement because James so well mimicked the cadences of Austen’s sentences, the motives and situations of the people of the age and what might happen to those people a decade later, like a soap opera or “Downton Abbey” when the actors reunited for a sequel. The characters change and so, perhaps, do their costumes.. It is all very curious.
What gives the novel its depth is to think about what has altered and what has changed the same, the former time, which is the book, “Pride and Prejudice”, a stable entity necessarily in the past and so longlastingly unchanging, while the new intrusions of characters are a bit unsettling and need to be familiarized, adjusted to become included, as well as a new tone or kind of description, in that James adds on the description of a romantic woodland full of ghosts and other dangers, the spectacle of nature, something of which Austen herself had largely expunged as boring and superstitious, concerned as she was with life and property domesticated, which meant custom and reason bound.
The continuities with the past tableau are comforting. The two couples remain close friends and live nearby and the Bingleys visit with Darcy and Elizabeth regularly. Darcy and Elizabeth have three children and are devoted to one another and, as might be expected, have cordial but only occasional visits with Elizabeth’s family. Nor is it disquieting that there are some servants not mentioned in the original and it is at first merely anomalous that Darcy’s great grandfather had killed himself in a cottage in the woodland. That the masters of Pemberley would be considerate of their servants, even to being overly solicitous in hiding bad events from them, is in keeping with what is known of their character.
What changes all that to the point of Darcy thinking that his own estate had to become newly formed rather than familiar was a murder of an associate of the dreadful Mr. Wickham, a spectre from the past thought out of sight and mind but still the fly in the ointment or, if one prefers, the origin point of evil before and later. Wickham is suspected of killing his army buddy and the novel moves into being a police procedural, quite familiar in James’ novels. She includes a well fashioned portrait of the magistrate who takes charge of the proceedings at Pemberley, James erudite about Regency legal practices, but still interspersed with references back to the original book, as when Elizabeth is distressed about being reminded that she had been infatuated with Wickham and had offered bad advice to her friends about him.
James’ book at this point resolves itself into being whether the present murder or past resentments will come to dominate the stage.Will the key figure in the murder be Wickham, who is a figure from the past novel brought into the present novel or will it be Wickham’s friend who has been invented for and is in the present novel. Because both novels are constructed stories, James and the readers are fully aware that she has crafted a story rather than a fiction that a novel is reporting an account of events that actually happened, the reader is aware that James will make that decision and that the decision is of some moment. If James picks Wickham as the culprit, then the mystery is about the past, about how old things get dredged up and so James is filling out the old plot, as Roth also does, the James production is in Freud territory, of recapitulations and horrid secrets. But if Captain Denney is the culprit, James is implying that new things and events can happen that are coincidental to the past and so the reader has to move on and consider such things, to construct a new plot, which means to make a future.. In that case, we are, let us say, in the realm of H. G. Wells, who uses science fiction as a way to contemplate the future as something more than new devices.
I leave off providing what else happens in “Death Comes to Pemberley” because that would be a spoiler in that the novel is, after all, a mystery story part of the pleasure of which is to be surprised at the outcome. That is not so in the best of literature. “Oedipus Rex” is a mystery story but every attendant to the performance knew how it ended, what was uncovered, and all of us are still fascinated and find suspenseful about how the story moves to its conclusion. What can be said in the long descriptions James provides about life and customs in Pemberley is that a reader continues to find them engaging, perhaps because of the charm of the writing and also, like Janeites, because the Regency Period is so appealing while Victorian literature is about how dreadful and in need of change is the period. I want to remain comfortable in the Austen world despite its inequalities as well as people dying from common colds, and so “Pride and Prejudice” remains real, the past alive, more than a present of inferior fictions.
What can also be mentioned in the James book is that she extends beyond family life to note structures of social structural change just as Jane Austen herself did in her own work, as happens in “Persuasion” where a comical twist is put on the fact that estates are becoming less important than wealth as a way to define social prestige. Darcy, in “Death Comes to Pemberley”, keeps very busy managing his estate. He buys and sells parcels of land, keeps up a busy correspondence, supervises and visits the servants, makes sure there are Christmas presents for everyone, and visits the sick. But when the murder takes place, he moves into the back seat. Professionals, in the case of lawyers, take over, and doctors who can’t manage to do much more than acknowledge patients will get better or die, attend to all the medical crises. England is changing and estates are enclaves, Business and industry and politics and class strife will come to dominate, as we can say from retrospect.
All three of these late twentieth century authors seem dated in their concerns, what with their interest in comparing reality with its present consequences. Ishiguro fully embraces one fantasy or another, fully elaborating the constraints he sets for himself so as to make his fantasies seem real. There is no past or present, only those constraints for a storyset in the past or in the future. Jennifer Egan describes the atmosphere of a place so as to place it in a time not to compare times and Michael Chabon describes implausible things so as to make them plausible. McEwen is mainly interested in the varieties of sex and when in “Atonement” he offers the narrator as having altered the story to make it more satisfactory, that seems an arbitrary and unnecessary reconstruction of fiction when comparing fact to fiction and past to present in that way is at the heart of the matter for late twentieth century novelists.
It takes a while for critics to notice what were the distinctive and deep properties of a cultural period. The literary critics of the Forties and Fifties came to find the place of the High Modernists like Kafka and Lawrence and Joyce. It is now a quarter through the 21st Century that we evaluate the accomplishments of the Eighties and Nineties and their spillages afterwards. It will be a while before what is distinctive, fresh and deep about the novelists of that period. Or at least critics do the best they can in that they do not generalize from sampling novels of an era but just establish types of novels they find signifigent. Culture is such that it finds in each cultural period something fresh and distinctive and profound and culture, for which critics are its handmaidens also discovers that even after a bit of a lag.