Albertine Einstein Defies Helen Dunmore to Defend the Pluperfect.

Albertine Einstein, the virtuoso Time Traveller, celebrated for dancing effortlessly through Temporal Grammar, was astonished to read a denunciation of the Pluperfect tense by novelist Helen Dunmore ... a tense regarded by Helen as a form of writing too difficult to grasp for fragile novice scribblers cursed with the infirmitas feminei sexus.  

Albertine is versatile. Teleportation through the tenses is her medium. Even now she IS foreseeing that moment in the future when she WILL BE moved to recall with a shudder the occasion a decade earlier when she WAS first struck by Helen’s indefensible attack on what is possibly the temporal hoofer’s most practical narrative tense. 

Where?  When?

Quick fix for wannabe chickliterati.

Winter/Spring 2004 issue of MsLexia* magazine, page 40, Interview with Helen Dunmore. If this misnamed ‘Magazine for Women Who Write’ ever endorsed its own notion that women are pathologically disadvantaged by gender ‘from becoming successful authors’, then Helen Dunmore’s renunciation of the Pluperfect as too mystifying for Women-of-Very-Little-Brain and, in consequence, redundant, must take the cake. 

I write this with regret, and with a sense of betrayal, since two of my published contributions were singled out for generous notice (MsLexia supplements edited by Kate Clancy and Sara Maitland). Nevertheless, here is Helen’s let-out clause for the wannabe chickliterati she evidently dismisses as feeble-minded:

Helen Dunmore [explains the MsLexia interviewer] ... finds the present tense very useful for writing history. ‘You can move around in time very well from the starting point … the present tense allows you to maintain that sense of uncertainty.’ And, as the interviewer remarks, ‘It also allows you to write flashback without the clumsy “had had”s of the pluperfect.’  The Dunmore Method is then reaffirmed: ‘Use the present tense and first person if possible.’

The promulgation of this quick-fix childish formula for writing texts with the intention of their being categorised as adult literature strikes one as a stunt of jaw-dropping effrontery. 

Write in the permanent present tense?  Such a style, Albertine believes, is like being trapped inside the amnesiac’s Eternal Sunlight of the Spotless Mind with no syntactical mechanism for reverie. 

‘The Screaming “Hadhads” is a condition many writers fear,’ laughs Albertine, ’but I have never suffered from it. It’s a myth! I just don’t buy it. I never bought it. And I will not be buying it in the future.’

And, anyhow, Albertine asks, is mastering the Pluperfect so impossibly daunting?

The Gnomic Present Endures Alongside the Othered Past.

Albertine says, ‘As you know, in movies there is the weirdest rarely used device of a Double Flashback, where one Flashback dissolves to yet another Flashback earlier in time. My pondering this peculiarity prompted me to write to three eminent professional grammarians with two specimens of the pluperfect to ask them if the extracts set off any alarm bells.’

Albertine wrote:

Here are two examples of pluperfect-type expressions of narrative recalled from the past in the past tense.

Helen, who would very much have liked to know who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Correct?]

Helen, who would very much have liked to have known who the masked chorusgirl was who was running away so fast, said nothing. [Incorrect?]

Do you think, please, the correct example is slowly becoming defunct in favour of the more longwinded incorrect version?

Results? 

Guru-Grammarian-Gamma writes:

No opinion about what might be becoming defunct.  But I think I would say both versions are grammatically correct, and they have very subtly distinct meanings.

Guru-Grammarian-Beta writes:

I agree with Guru-Gamma. A Subtle difference in meaning. From which time aspect is each sentence uttered is the question; no comment on ‘defunct’ or not, both are still viable.

Guru-Grammarian-Alpha writes: 

I suspect the two versions will continue to co-exist – just as the gnomic present (Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun) endures alongside the past (Galileo believed that the earth revolved around the sun).

‘So there we have it,’ Albertine grins slyly. ‘Guru-Alpha asserts that this paradox of temporality, then, can be applied to the Pluperfect, and the correctitude of the two examples can prevail in a co-existent state. However, your closer reading of Guru-Beta will reveal this grammarian to be closest to the truth!’

A bell rang three times backstage. The orchestra struck up an overture. ‘Excuse me!’ Albertine flexed her virtuosic toes to ease any tenseness. ‘That’s my cue!’ Then the Dancer to the Music of Time was gone.

*For my views on MsLexia’s sickly, self-pitying title, see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/i-have-rendezvous-with-dread-at.html