"The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction"
About this Quote
Time, for Penelope Lively, isn’t a neutral backdrop; it’s the sly substance fiction is forever trying to trap in a jar. Her opening move - “the present hardly exists” - is less philosophical flex than practical observation from a novelist who’s spent a career watching how quickly lived experience turns into story. The dash work matters: it mimics the slip she’s describing, the moment already vanishing as you name it.
Lively’s intent is to puncture the comforting idea that there’s a stable “now” we can stand inside and describe cleanly. If the present evaporates on contact, then realism’s promise of capturing life “as it is” becomes suspect. That’s the subtext: all narration is retrospective, even when it pretends to be immediate. A first-person present tense can try to perform nowness, but it’s still a crafted illusion. Time is “a tricky medium” because it resists being held still, and fiction’s job is to make that resistance legible.
Contextually, this fits Lively’s wider preoccupation with memory, history, and the way places carry layered pasts - concerns shaped by a 20th-century British sensibility steeped in aftermath, archives, and social change. She’s arguing for fiction as the art form uniquely equipped to dramatize time’s double action: it erases and it accumulates. Novels don’t just move through time; they expose how time moves through us, rewriting significance as soon as events have the audacity to be over.
Lively’s intent is to puncture the comforting idea that there’s a stable “now” we can stand inside and describe cleanly. If the present evaporates on contact, then realism’s promise of capturing life “as it is” becomes suspect. That’s the subtext: all narration is retrospective, even when it pretends to be immediate. A first-person present tense can try to perform nowness, but it’s still a crafted illusion. Time is “a tricky medium” because it resists being held still, and fiction’s job is to make that resistance legible.
Contextually, this fits Lively’s wider preoccupation with memory, history, and the way places carry layered pasts - concerns shaped by a 20th-century British sensibility steeped in aftermath, archives, and social change. She’s arguing for fiction as the art form uniquely equipped to dramatize time’s double action: it erases and it accumulates. Novels don’t just move through time; they expose how time moves through us, rewriting significance as soon as events have the audacity to be over.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
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