spot of golden oil, even though I myself have never seen any window with such an appearance.
One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense. I myself have written several works of fiction in the present tense. Soon after I had read the autobiography in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil, I began yet another of the drafts that I had already begun of a work of fiction that I had for long had in mind. The draft then begun was in the present tense, and when I had completed the draft, five years later, it remained so. Had I simply imitated the technique, so to call it, of the autobiographer? Had I supposed that my using the present tense would cause my reader sometimes to pause, as I had once paused after having read that certain distant windows resembled spots of golden oil? Had I further supposed that my having paused at that moment was the result of my having observed that the windows mentioned in the text seemed at that moment as clearly visible and their effect on me as palpable as if I had been observing actual windows from an actual distance? If I had thus supposed, then I might well have believed that the reading of a work of fiction resembles the watching of a film and even that the text of a work of fiction ought to resemble a film-script. I prefer to suppose that my using the present tense was in some way connected with my having reported in the first paragraph of my first work of fiction that the chief character, a boy of nine years, is looking at a page of a calendar published by a religious order of the Catholic church in which calendar each of the twelve pages has in its lower half a grid of black lines on a background of yellow. For the chief character, the black and the yellow represent not a sequence of days but a map of remembered experiences in the provincial city where he lives; the black suggests the narrow strips of bitumen on the streets in the suburbs of the city while the yellow suggests the broad margins of those streets and the mostly unpaved footpaths, all of which are strewn with bright gravel from the former goldfields of the district. And just as he is able to follow any number of routes through the black and the yellow, so the boy, when he remembers, takes no account of any fixed temporal boundaries or sequences. As for the upper half of each page of the calendar, which is occupied by a coloured reproduction of some or another painting of Biblical scenes or characters, the boy has learned from his parents and his teachers that his and their world is overhung by an altogether superior world, and if he has not learned also that that world has no days and no nights then he could hardly have failed to suppose that a personage looking thence down at his, the boy’s, world would see not a record of something called time but a richly detailed map of an immense landscape.
For reasons that are no part of this work of fiction, I was required, thirty and more years ago, to read several books purporting to instruct readers in the techniques of fiction-writing. The books were divided into chapters with headings such as Plot, Characters, Dialogue, and Theme and Meaning. I long ago forgot most of what I read in the books, but while I was writing the previous paragraph I recalled something of what I read in a certain chapter headed Flashbacks and Time Shifts. I recalled not actual words but rather their import. I recalled the author’s advising the intending writer of fiction to prepare the reader before introducing into the narrative any so-called flashback or time-shift. Thus, the writer might have a character look out from a car or a train at an apple-orchard before introducing as a flashback a scene from the character’s childhood, which scene would have for its setting a garden overhung by an apple-tree. I can hardly believe that anything so foolish was once delivered as advice to intending writers. The author of the advice was himself a writer of fiction, although I forget his name and the titles of his two or three books, and I supposed, even when I first read his advice on flashbacks and time-shifts, that he had in mind, while he wrote, those films in which the pages of a desk-calendar fly back rapidly or in which the face of a staring or a sleeping character is obscured by swirling mists as a signal to the viewer that what follows is a scene from the past.
I am not about to assert, as the narrator asserted in a piece of fiction of mine first published twenty-five years ago, that time is non-existent and that what we denote by the word time is no more than our moving from one to another place in an infinite expanse. Instead, I restrict myself to claiming only that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, the setting of which is place after place in what I called earlier the invisible world. The reader might care to observe how easily he or she reads the following paragraph, even though the matters there reported have no temporal connection with the matters reported in this and the previous few paragraphs.
Soon after I had read, in a weekly news-magazine from perhaps twenty-five years ago, a reference to a certain castle or, rather, to a certain image-castle, I began, as I ought to have reported earlier, to write this work of fiction. And yet I was still, it seemed, not wholly free from the influence of films that I had watched long before and could hardly recall. I foresaw myself writing, for example, about a man who preferred not to draw the blind or the curtain of his room except on a certain few afternoons of the year. If I had gone ahead with my first, misguided scheme, this, the fifth section of the book, would have comprised a brief account of a man who never failed, during every year of his long life, to mark certain days in late spring or in early summer. Those had been the days during his childhood when he had felt urged to draw the blind in the single window of the loungeroom of his parents’ house in a provincial city in the north of this state and then to raise the window slightly so that the north wind would agitate the worn brown blind and would cause to appear in the dim room flashes of the fierce light from outside. Influenced, surely, by scenes from a film I had never seen nor would ever see – a film set in a castle known to me only from a single sentence in an article in a news-magazine – I foresaw myself writing first about a man who would enact, as though for the benefit of a watcher, some or another ritual from his childhood as a demonstration that his life was all of a piece. Perhaps I even envisaged him in his dim room, on a day of hot north winds, as handling again some of the collection of glass marbles that he had kept by him throughout his life – the same marbles that had represented racehorses in one of his childhood rituals. But this misguided scheme, as I called it, not only seemed more suited to film than to fiction but lacked an appropriate setting. And then I, who have never seen any sort of castle nor any sort of European scenery, saw in mind an image of the only building where my true subject-matter might come into being and, around the building, the only scenery likely to surround such a building; and I foresaw myself writing not about pretend-characters enacting pretend-rituals but about fictional personages writing, on day after day during year after year, in a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys having several wings and numerous windows and being surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside.
The discerning reader, whether or not he or she allows my claim that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, might well consider me inconsistent or even confused to have used the past tense of most of the verbs in this work. If these paragraphs report events, so to call them, in a timeless location or an eternal present, why am I not obliged to use verbs in the present tense?
If my mood were wilful, I might reply that my way of writing is intended to prevent even an undiscerning reader from trying to apprehend my subject-matter in the way that a viewer, or so I suppose, apprehends the subject-matter of a film. A more respectful reply might include the information that these paragraphs are examples of what I call considered narration and the claim that the reader of such paragraphs is entitled to suppose hardly more than that the narrator of the paragraphs was alive at the time when they were written and felt urged to report certain matters.
The reader’s entitlements are limited indeed, but of course he or she, while reading a considered narrative, postulates or supposes with little regard for any such limits. Many a reader, for example, might seem while reading to hear what might be called the voice behind the narrative or even to see what might be called the personage behind it. The narrator, of course, knows nothing of such matters but I, the narrator of this work of fiction, am hopeful that
