Mixing tenses. Ex. Silence of the Lambs

I never read the novel, but that last sentence reads pretty poorly, not to mention the weird tense mixing. I'm sure he didn't write it that way unknowingly though.

That sentence is kind of tangled, and I sometimes think when people are praising Thomas Harris (especially Silence of the Lambs) they're often heavily influenced by the brilliant film adaptation.

I don't think Harris is a great writer. He's a handy conceptualist, so his stories can still be very engaging to read (which I obviously have), but as a tutor in composition, I wouldn't be looking to him for advice.

That said, I think sometimes you can mix tenses and it can lend urgency and nifty rhythms. It's all that useless old axiom - If it works, it works.


*spoiler ahead*






Case in point with Silence of the Lambs, the film has Clarice plug Buffalo Bill five or six times in the chest, after which he has the good sense to fall down, shudder, and die. In the novel, Harris plays the scene out pretty closely to the movie's interpretation, except that Bill, on the floor and full of hot lead, manages to croak, "How does it feel to be so beautiful?"

Puh-lease.

I never read Harris either, but I do recognise the technique.

First, I'll have to point out that there is no tense shift in the quoted paragraph at all. The -ing forms you see are all in un-tensed participle phrases; that is these verbs have no tense at all.

The effect is usually one image-snapshots (example: "A rose, lying the snow. Footprints, facing away. A single drop of blood, two footprints away." etc.) Notice how the first clause doesn't even have a verb to take the tense: "Lector's legs under him now..." The "were" is utterly unnecessary to get the meaning across. From then on, he cuts all tensed verbs (that is the helping verbs to the -ing verbs) until the "and" when Lector drives the iron door into him - a purposeful action in the chaos. My problem with the section is mostly the rather unprepared introduction of Pembry and insufficient scene setting, which could be because it's an excerpt. Also, I don't get much of an image from the "snap shots". For example, I have no clear image of Lector. That my be part of the intention, though; a series of apparently unrelated snapshots to simulate chaos. It doesn't work too well for me, but I might change my mind reading the entire scene. A lot depends on the image I already have in my mind when I get to that section.

It's not a tense shift so much, though, as an elimination of tense altogether.

Jeffrey Pace said:

I am going to post a paragraph from Silence of the Lambs. I notice Harris mixes past and present tense a lot in his writing. Obviously I would never question the talent of someone like Harris, but is this technically correct? Is it just a unique tool for an author to use?

"Boyle bent for the napkin on the floor. Fast as a snapping turtle the handcuff closed on Boyle's wrist and as he turned his rolling eye to Lecter the other cuff locked around the fixed leg of the table. Dr. Lecter's legs under him now, driving to the door, Pembry trying to come from behind it and Lecter's shoulder drove the iron door into him, Pembry going for the Mace in his belt, his arm mashed to his body by the door."

What do you think?

Click to expand...

Are you sure there wasn't a 'were' in that last sentence? 'Dr Lecter's legs were under him now...' If not, I'm afraid that last sentence isn't technically a sentence at all and really doesn't make sense. That sort of thing winds me up a lot as a reader.

And if he really does mix up tenses, I think that would be distracting too. Unless he's telling the story from two different perspectives? So you could have sections in present tense from the POV of one of the protagonists and then sections in the past as the narrator looks back on the events from later in life. That would work for me.

Dawnstorm nailed it. This particular sequence is an action scene, and Harris shifts into this seemingly present tense to heighten the immediacy -- and he does so very well.

Although I think Harris' form has suffered the past couple of books, I think Silence of the Lambs is really an excellent novel, and perhaps (despite its fame) an underestimated one. The central gambit -- an agent wheedling a killer in order to save someone else's life, the prisoner becoming dominant over the officer -- is so excellent that it's been copied a thousand times since. The scenes are quickly but vividly laid out: You don't have to have seen the film to know what Jame Gumb's house looks like, or to imagine the garage where the old car is kept, or to remember the broken, glitter-polished nails of the first victim. There's a lot of fine characterization for a thriller, and it isn't all for Clarice or Lecter. (I particularly remember a small scene in which the boss -- gahh, that character's name I forget -- is weeping after leaving the funeral home where his wife is being embalmed. Harris pulls out to show us the guy's driver, who sees his boss crying, knows his boss doesn't want to be seen that way, and so pulls around the corner to wait -- not only for his boss to stop crying but for him to get mad about the guy being late, so he'll think about something else and vent some of his negative energy on the driver. It's a small gift from the man to a superior he respects, at that person's worst moment, and it is both unexpected and very true.) Also, a lot of the language is excellent, never flowery but incredibly rich. (Somebody describes Clarice as a "winter sunset" of a girl, a phrase that I sometimes remember on winter evenings.)

And actually, he does mix past and present tense in SOTL, though not there. I remember the first time Lecter is spoken of; Harris writes something like, "In any civilized company, there is a pause, always, after the mention of the name." It's just a handful of sentences -- and I think they are all about Lecter, a canny, subtle way to suggest that Lecter's evil stretches beyond the boundaries of this story, almost beyond the book.

I think Harris fell too much in love with Lecter in the end. But SOTL and Red Dragon are as well-written as thrillers get, IMHO.

I think Harris is an enormous success because of his plot and character ideas, not because of the sentence-level felicities of his prose.

That said, that past-to-participle thing was very commonly used by writers of commercial thrillers in the 1960s through 1980s. I don't know as it would fly today, though.

Jeffrey Pace said:

FYI, for those of you who haven't scene it, you should check out the film Manhunter. It was the original Red Dragon and Brian Cox played Lecter (and did an amazing job)

In fact, in an interview, Harris claimed to have preferred Manhunter to SOTL claiming SOTL was too Hollywood.

Click to expand...

That's interesting. I couldn't get through Manhunter, because William Petersen was so howlingly bad, I honestly couldn't stop laughing.

I did see clips of Cox as Lecter and he seemed to have done a good job, albeit a different take on what we've come to know of Hannibal filmwise. I just like him anyway. Always good to watch.

ClaudiaGray said:

And actually, he does mix past and present tense in SOTL, though not there. I remember the first time Lecter is spoken of; Harris writes something like, "In any civilized company, there is a pause, always, after the mention of the name." It's just a handful of sentences -- and I think they are all about Lecter, a canny, subtle way to suggest that Lecter's evil stretches beyond the boundaries of this story, almost beyond the book.

Click to expand...

Yes, I think that's the kind of thing I was thinking of in the distinction between the narrator looking on, and the description of the action. The narrator uses a generic (gnomic) present tense to talk about timeless truths, or things that he sees now from a later perspective. But for the main action, he is recounting events in the past.

Jeffrey Pace said:

Ya think? I thought he did a good job. Certainly better than Ed Norton did. Maybe you're just so used to seeing Peterson on CSI

Click to expand...

Nope. Never seen an episode.

Absolutely and without reservation.