Mixed Cases

Abstract

This chapter addresses novels which combine different usages of the present tense, either blending different aspects of the present tense like Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life or Richard Powers Orfeo, or combining them structurally to mark different narrative perspectives like Ali Smith’s Hotel World and How to Be Both, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings or André P. Brink’s Philida. The discussion of such combinations of present-tense usage serves to revisit and further refine the observations of the previous chapters and shows both the complexity of contemporary present-tense usage and its frequent disregard for mimetically plausible narrative situations.