Pitching Tenses
December 22, 2009
I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s terrific new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. The narrator, a twenty-year-old college student from the Midwest, returns to her small rural town and observes this about the way they speak there:
They used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in, “I’d been gonna do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whoosed away again, beyond my grasp. “I’d been gonna do that” seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I’m sure there was one that meant “Hell yes, if I had a time machine!” People here could narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: “I’d been driving to the store, and I’d gotten out, and she’d come up to me and I had said …” It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never uttered to be anything but. Who else on earth spoke like this?
–Dennis
