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The Expansion of Tense

Peter Brooks is one of several theorists and critics who have understood the “strange logic” of reading a narrative to be bound up with the “anticipation of retrospection”: “[i]f the past is to be read as present, it is a curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic” (23). He reaches this suggestion by combining two apparently separate traditions in narrative criticism, one that characterizes the tradition of telling as one in which “everything is transformed by the structuring presence of the end to come” and the other for whom the action of a novel takes place before the eyes as a “kind of present” (ibid.). A fictional narrative, he seems to be saying, can do both of these things at the same time: it can ask us to decode events narrated in the past tense as a kind of present, and ask us to view those events as structured in relation to a future which is already there and waiting for us to reach it. It is clear that, for Brooks, the reason that a narrative can do both of these things, that is to experience the events of a novel as a kind of present and as a kind of past, lies in the fact that the future already exists, and the inference is that the anticipation of retrospection cannot operate as the master trope in the strange logic of what we might call, for want of a better word, life. In life, the future is open, unwritten, and susceptible to our intentions, desires and efforts in a way that cannot be said of narrative.