“On Wikipedia, you’d face censure for writing, “In Cloud City, Darth Vader confessed that he was Luke’s father.” But if you were to instead write, “Vader confesses that he is Luke’s father,” your change would likely go unnoticed. In a small corner of Wikipedia’s edit wars, the struggle against in-universe perspective’s temporality reveals some of the larger ways people process works of fiction. These peripheral slippages into the past tense suggest that the most obscure stories may seem most real to those who know them well.”
“Marginality has long been a hallmark of the real. Almost 50 years ago, the French literary critic Roland Barthes noted that “every narrative, at least every Western narrative of the ordinary sort nowadays, possesses a certain number” of seemingly “useless details.” In and of themselves, he explained, these bits of insignificant description mean nothing, signifying only the material reality of the more significant information around them.”
“When Flaubert describes an otherwise irrelevant barometer on the wall of a room, he does so to lend material weight to the imagined space. Naming this operation the “reality effect,” Barthes would go on to suggest that it has everything to do with the way we acknowledge what was or what has been. Traveling abroad, we tour ruined Roman villas not because they are inherently important, but because they stand in for the historical fact of a fallen empire. The smallest and most insignificant things, Barthes proposed, secure our faith in the larger ones.”
“When I teach writing, I stress the immediacy of art to my students. Fiction, I tell them, plays out in the perpetual present, a story making itself anew each time we read or tell it. When we write about a work in the present tense, we focus on what it does, on the ways that it whispers and shouts as we listen to it. With the present tense, we acknowledge that the work is a thing in itself, a subject in the grammatical sense: It is one that acts, albeit one impelled to action by its encounter with the reader. In the process, we maintain the conceit that art has a degree of independent and objective reality, and that, therefore, it can be examined, argued about, and discussed.”
“By contrast, the past tense suggests a certain naiveté. Put simply, where the present tense lets us discuss art in its own terms, the past tense leaves us unwittingly talking about ourselves. With it, we implicitly tell a story about our experience of the work instead of the work itself, narrating the events it describes as if they had happened to us. The independent work of art dissolves here, replaced by our own subjective entanglement with it. The world of the work and the world of the reader collide, resulting in something that feels neither fully fictional nor entirely real. While there is surely a place for descriptions of artistic experience, the past tense almost inevitably inclines toward the memoiristic rather than the critical. Stylistic choices, it turns out, have philosophical consequences that go beyond the merely aesthetic play of language on the page.”
“Above all else, the “Han Shot First” debacle serves as a reminder that small things matter. In such details, subjective experience coincides with objective reality, what we saw meeting that which demonstrably is. When Lucas and Disney manipulate minor features, they are unwittingly undermining the pillars of fan investment and belief. Above all else, these changes warp the weave of narrative time: Han shot first, but when we watch today he shoots second. And in the expanded universe Chewbacca was killed when a moon fell on him, but now he is alive again. The past tense belongs to the fans, the present to those who would rob them of both the thing they love and the earlier experience of loving it.”
“Wikipedia, the defining monument of knowledge today, has as much to do with the ways we were—with the things we’ve felt, sensed, and done—as with the things we know”
“In-universe perspective is a way of seeing through the eyes of our enthusiasm. Without that fervor, we might never be compelled to press an entry’s edit button in the first place. Like a scattered rebellion against an encroaching army, like the traces of a forbidden passion, those hints of belief, however accidental, strike me as testaments to the pleasure of fiction, a pleasure that hides behind every recorded fact. Ki-Adi-Mundi may not be real, but on the dimly lit edges of the Internet he always will have been.”