Chapter Five - Of What Is Past, or Passing, or to Come: Past-, Present- and Future-Tense Narration

Summary

Punctual Narration – The Present as “the sum of all”

George Garrett, Death of the Fox

Death of the Fox (1971), George Garrett's first entry into the realm of historical fiction, was at the same time his first deliberate departure from the conventions of the genre. While the completed novel was awaiting publication, Garrett issued the essay “Dreaming with Adam: Notes on Imaginary History” (1970), in which he represented his drawn-out project on Walter Ralegh as an inspiration for his reflections on historical fiction. As Garrett asserts in the essay, his book “has been a long time finding its form and coming to be” (1970: 409). Originally conceived as a biography, it eventually metamorphosed into a historical novel to which, as Joseph W. Turner put it, Garrett brought “generic self-consciousness” (1980: 45). The abundance of historical research on Elizabethan and Jacobean England and Ralegh in particular not only appeared to make the writer's initial plans superfluous, but also prompted him to append the existing factual knowledge on the subject with a resurrection of the man as a literary character. Commenting on the breadth of the novel and its profusion of detail, Martha Tuck Rozett describes Death of the Fox as “an enormous canvas from which Raleigh's life story emerges” (2002: 63). Garrett retains basic fidelity to facts but avoids duplicating the existing biographies. As Turner says in his discussion of Death of the Fox, “the novel must do something more, or other, than retell that story [of Ralegh's life]” (1980: 32). Besides comprising an imaginary component, Death of the Fox deviates from the biographical model formally – Garrett has replaced the continuous, sequential, chronological and uniperspectival format typical of biographies with fragmentariness, achrony and multiperspectivity. These innovations correspond to an unusual use of tenses: rather than the traditional past tense, which enables a retrospective account of an individual's life and times, the writer employs a combination of the present, past, and – to a lesser extent – also the future tense.