The historical present tense yet again: Tense switching and narrative dynamics in oral and quasi-oral storytelling

The following paper is an attempt to extend the recent findings of discourse analysis in the area of conversational storytelling by supplementing the more narrowly (text-)linguistic approach with theoretical and structural considerations inspiredby the literary discipline of structuralist narratology. Rather than analyzing a new corpus oforal stories and drawing yet another set of conclusions from this new material, I willfollow the methodology of my own discipline, narratology, in (mostly) relying on available corpora and subjecting these to literary and theoretical criticism. In doing so, I will pretend that conversational narratives are äs worthy ofsustained interpretative analysis äs 'literary' works of an. As Stanley Fish has noted in a recent response (Fish, 1990) to criticism of bis 'Being interdisciplinary is so very hard to do* paper (Fish, 1989), interdisciplinary research usually fails to combine two disciplines into one; it usurps bordering areas into the magnetic field of its own theoretical and practical preoccupations. This portrait of interdisciplinary practice represents my own attitude towards linguistics, from which I keep receiving new ideas and models for the study of narrative. If I have decided to make my results availabe to linguists, it is because I hope some cross fertilization may take place for the other side äs well. More liberal students of language who are willing to look at conversational narratives äs narratives rather than texts will perhaps grant that oral storytelling might be determined by a more general narrative frame, a frame that determines the structure of stories and the functions of their linguistic properties. A word is here due at the very start about the wording Oral and quasioral storytelling' in the title. Like many other roughly equivalent terms this has its drawbacks. My theses involve a recognition that present-day conversational stories share a structure (and therefore the use of the 0165-4888/91/0011-0365 $2.00 Text 11 (3) (1991), pp. 365-397 © Walter de Gruyter 366 Monika Fludernik 'historic' present tense) with certain 'literary' narratives. This structure can be defined äs episodic, and it prevails in literary narrative up until the eighteenth Century. Episodic structure dominates in medieval verse and prose tales and is common äs late äs the early eighteenth-century novel. During the eighteenth Century, episodic structure is increasingly superseded by more discursive narrative forms and — in English literature at least — only survives in oral storytelling and in imitations of oral narrative in fictional dialogue. This history of the replacement of episodic narrative — eloquently proposed by Ermarth (1981) — can be argued to coincide with the replacement of verbal style by nominal style (Wells, 1960), or 'doric' by 'attic' prose (Halliday, 1987). In fact, Halliday makes an explicit connection between verbal and nominal styles on the one hand and the oral vs. the written on the other, linking Verbal' doric prose to the accumulative mostly paratactic language of Speech, whereas nominal attic prose is said to be intrinsically 'written'. Findings about the importance of the oral paradigm for early forms of written narrative have come in from analysts of epic poetry, many features of which can be described äs remnants of a still-valid oral pattern that has been transferred into written form (Foley, 1985; Bäuml, 1985; Fisher, 1985). Particularly for medieval narrative, which was sometimes still composed for oral performance, the gradual development of oral storytelling into written genres can be traced convincingly, and Fleischman's recent study of the historic present tense in Old French (1990) heavily relies on this connection between the oral and its 'literary' adaptations. It is on the background of such evidence for continuing Oral' patterning in written texts that I have decided to use Oral' and 'quasi-oral' storytelling for 'natural' or 'conversational' narratives on the one hand and 'literary', 'written' narratives which adapt the oral model on the other. The facts clearly undermine the oral vs. written and literary vs. nonliterary binarities. Indeed, my approach presupposes that oral tales are äs 'literary', that is to say äs carefully constructed, äs quasi-oral narratives, whose literary merit has long been acknowledged. This is not to say that any conversational narrative is äs 'aesthetical', äs 'good', or äs 'complex' and therefore äs worthy of sustained Interpretation äs literary narratives. However, once the specific techniques or oral storytelling have been recognized äs together fulfilling the same functions äs does the interplay of narrative techniques in the 'written' genres, there should no longer be any difficulty in substituting a continuum of forms and functions between the oral and the quasi-oral episodic narrative and in deepening our understanding of simple narrative forms across this artificial boundary. A last remark on the validity of my results for languages other than English is also in order. I frequently refer to the French passe simple/ Tense switching and narrative dynamics 367 imparfait distinction äs an analogue of the foreground/background dichotomy, and I also point to examples in German oral narrative. Moreover, comparisons are drawn between the uses of the historical present tense in present-day conversational stories and in Middle English and Early Modern English texts. I am in fact claiming that there is a common, general pattern of episodic narrative, at least for Indo-European languages, and that the historical present tense occurs at precisely specified points within this pattern in all these languages. However, since an examination of the validity of this thesis — which is based on my analysis of quoted material in various studies on the historical present tense — can be undertaken only by qualified philologists of individual disciplines (the classical languages, Old Irish, Russian etc.), I will merely point out equivalences where I have had reason to suspect they exist. Moreover, in the framwork of a mere article, ramifications of the pattern that I will introduce and discuss cannot possibly be dealt with in sufficient detail. The extent of the pattern's validity will necessarily have to be addressed in a monograph.