In Defense of the Present Tense (2015)
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Personally I don't ever see myself reading a present-tense novel for pleasure. As a reader it makes me feel put-upon, as if the book is angrily demanding I approach it in a particular way. I tend to start reading faster and faster, subconsciously thinking I can outrun the narrator and get to a place where I can calm down.
Forcing an entire peoples to bend to some arbitrary semantics system is social engineering of the worst sort. Who knows what kind of ugliness has been unleashed onto the world- well, we already know. China is a perfect example of an entire culture completely obliterated once its language system was seized, and rewritten to suit the new regime's ends.
With this detachment from their history, their tradition has been rewritten completely. There's now no real reference point to illustrate how things were; how they've changed.
It's no similar to hoe American school-children are taught a watered-down "unbiased" (only the facts) versions of history. This ends with a failure to understand what the American culture really is, and its tradition is lost on the masses.
What's left is a public that can only comprehend the surface-level meanings, much less understand or create new words and concepts to rebel against their authorities.
It's not that hard to learn Traditional Chinese using Simplified Chinese either.
The bigger problem with Chinese is that it's often ambiguous, so semantic shift is inevitable.
At any rate, the Cultural Revolution did far more to make people less acquainted with their past.
Well, not really... trends are contagious. Awards are often given in alignment with the most current trends. Therefore young writers try to emulate them, and you'll witness a "talent drain", drawing authors away from writing literature of your preference.
I'm glad to see an article that tackles these issues instead of focusing on some "controversy" about whether it should be used at all.
For some reason, some readers have difficulty reading written stories in present tense, like you do. I don’t understand what makes written stories different from spoken stories.
I suspect we’ll see a lot more of it in the future just due to the popularity of novels like Hunger Games and Divergent.
Linguists use audio recordings to make transcripts and analyze the audio later... because people are exceptionally bad at remembering what they actually hear in real conversations. When linguists ask subjects questions about what they heard or said in conversations and compare the subjects' answers against the transcripts, the subjects' answers are often a poor reflection of the transcript.
This explains why you are not alone in thinking that it's jarring... the human brain is simply not good at remembering what is actually said in conversation. So you'll forgive me if I defer to the experts.
If you look at what linguists say about the present tense... well, there's a lot of ink spilled over the past hundred years. Transcripts of casual conversations show that people in real life telling stories set in the past will freely switch between present (the "historical present") and past tense so freely that it's almost shocking to see it written down. There's relative agreement that the present tense doesn't really indicate that something takes place in the present, but it's used more as a contrast against other tenses. This makes a lot of sense, because it's exactly how tenses like the pluperfect work--the pluperfect tense does not make sense in isolation and cannot be understood as referring to a specific point in time without context. The same is true for the present tense.
You got coffee at a bistro. "The coffee is hot" - nonsense "The coffee was hot" - makes sense
You SAW a woman at the beach. "That woman is beautiful" - sense? "That woman was beautiful" - potential insult?
Ordinary people in natural conversation will use the present tense to tell stories set in the past. So, “the coffee is hot” can sometimes mean that the coffee WAS hot.
It’s not something that we ordinarily notice or talk about, it just happens in ordinary conversation. So if we want to understand what “present tense” means, we have to take care to avoid being confused by the name, “present tense”. “Present tense” is just the name of a tense, but there are several different ways that it is used.
There is only one Damon Runyon, and always will be.
A writer probably wouldn't write something they wouldn't enjoy reading themselves.
“After A be will happen”
A novel is typically seen as a recollection of events that has been gathered after the fact, typically by an all knowing narrator or the main character.
“After A happened, B happened”.