What’s Past is Present: Tense and Time in “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason

April 6^th, 2018

By writing in the present tense, Bobbie Ann Mason recreates the real-world experience of time – of being caught in an ever-changing present, subject to a future not yet written. In Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers, she argues that this “uncertainty” is the form’s defining characteristic; unlike a past tense story in which the which the author has “sorted events out” and “judged” the greater whole, the present tense narrator is bound to time alongside the reader (33). In “Shiloh,” Mason codes this metatextual uncertainty into the text: her three main characters each engage in the authorial process of ‘sorting out’ past events to navigate and inform their perception of present defined by change. This essay will demonstrate Mason’s characterization of the present tense as a source of helplessness and trauma for Leroy; Mabel and Leroy’s nostalgic remembrance and resurrection of the past tense to cope with that helplessness; and Mason’s use of the word ‘past’ to contrast Leroy and Norma Jean’s movement through and beyond it.

Mason conveys the difficulty of being trapped in the present tense by contrasting Leroy’s memories with the stark realities of a present he is helpless to affect. When recounting the story of Randy’s death, Mason makes extensive use of the past tense, saying that they “were at the drive-in,” that “the baby was sleeping,” and that “the baby was dead,” suggesting that Leroy has put the past behind him (580). However, halfway through the memory Mason suddenly switches tense, saying that Leroy “remembers” handing Randy’s dead body to the nurse as “a present” – the only use of the word in the entire story (580). Mason continues, saying bluntly that “a dead baby feels like a sack of flower,” not felt (580). Leroy still feels the physical weight of his dead child – his present – in the present; he cannot integrate Randy’s body into the past tense; the memory – one of profound helplessness, in which Leroy could only watch events unfold – is appropriately stuck with him in a tense where even the narrator is blind to events until they happen – a tense in which “nobody knows anything,” and “the answers are always changing” (580). Leroy is further brought into an unwelcome awareness of his lack of control over the present through Kentucky’s new housing subdivisions, which force him to recognize how the farmers have disappeared, and how his fantasy of building an old-fashioned log house would now be “inappropriate” (582). The new subdivisions “depress” him not because they are “grand and complicated” as he suggests, but because they defamiliarize him to the present, forcing him into an awareness of how the town has changed outside his control. In her interview, Mason mentions that the uncertainty expressed through the present tense spoke to what people were “unable to make” of the “late twentieth century” (33). “Shiloh,” published in 1982, realizes this confusion textually through Leroy’s attempt to reconcile the rural South of his past with the modern suburbia unfolding before him, symbolically constructed by the reader’s movement through the text in the present tense. This conception of the subdivisions as symbolic of unwelcome change that Leroy cannot control informs the ending of the story, in which he, “trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up," instead becomes fixated on the “white slabs” of a cemetery – which he compares to a “subdivision site” (587). The subdivision-graves are not a distraction, but Leroy’s way of unconsciously processing his now uncertain present as it displaces and buries the reality he has known for years – his marriage. Mason foreshadows this comparison by describing Stevie Hamilton’s subdivision house as a “funeral parlor” made of “white-columned brick,” just like the white graves in that they both signal death, a transition to a present defined by absence and loss (580).

As Leroy experiences the present as a threatening place defined by change, the only way he can conceptualize a future for himself is by resurrecting the past tense, making him a mirror of his mother-in-law. While Norma Jean assumes an orientation towards the future, proposing hypotheticals for Leroy (that he “could get a job as a guard,” that he “could do a little carpenter work”) Leroy’s obsession with creating a log house reveals an orientation towards the past; he claims that “ever since they were married” – two months before Randy was born – he has promised to build Norma Jean a home (578). While Leroy claims that he wants to “create a new marriage” and “start afresh,” the only way he can conceptualize doing so is by bringing a lost past into the present, resurrecting his dream of a traditional family no matter how divorced it is from his present reality (579). Mabel shares this same impulse to recreate the past, and seems to be unconsciously inspired by Leroy in doing so, as she only brings up the idea of going to Shiloh after Leroy mentions his log house for the first time (581) and immediately after recalling her childhood memory of living in a cabin (585). She is attempting to resurrect and vicariously relive the promise of her honeymoon – “the only real trip she ever took” when her husband was still alive, just as Leroy’s dream stems from a time before he lost his son (581). In her reflections on tense, Mason suggests that the past is “appealing to a lot of Americans” as it is often more “cohesive” than the “fragmented, chaotic life” of the present (33). Despite the pain of their early marriages, Leroy and Mabel both find those memories hopeful and even regenerative because they have had years to examine them – the past is a familiar, cohesive reality. This informs an understanding of the one obvious connection Mason makes between the two characters in the text: Mabel casually remarks that she is “just waiting for time to pass” (583), and Leroy, after recognizing that he “is going to lose” Norma Jean, accepts that “like Mabel, he is just waiting for time to pass” (584). They both have difficulty navigating the present moment, and thus want to put it behind them; Leroy’s unpleasant loss of Norma Jean is going to happen, and that uncertainty scares him, and thus he wants to bring that future action into the past so he can view it with hindsight of memory. Caught in the present tense, they acknowledge their lives as an exercise of moving through time as it passes.

Mason further reinforces the idea of movement through time by threading the word ‘past’ through the story to reveal the true meaning of the ending, in which Leroy still finds himself overly involved in the past, while Norma Jean has learned to put it away. In the second last paragraph, Leroy claims to finally recognize the futility of his log house idea, switching from the past tense by resolving himself to future action, saying “he will” thrown out his blueprints (587). However, his next resolution to “get moving again” (587), implies that he was moving before, when he was on the road; when nothing ever changed in his marriage; when he was engaged in a constant exercise of driving “past scenery,” moving his present into his past while never taking “time to examine anything” (578). When he hobbles after Norma Jean, “children run past him,” once again putting the idea of having children into his recollections of the past, with Randy (587). For Norma Jean, however, movement is not merely a process of putting the past behind her, but of facing it directly before consciously putting it away. Like Leroy, she engages in a process of driving “past bluffs” and other scenery in Shiloh, but curiously, Mason enacts a drawn-out present tense to call attention to Norma Jean’s movement as she walks rapidly “towards the bluff,” the “past bluff,” facing it in an act of recognition (587). When she turns back to wave, it reminds Leroy of an exercise for her chest muscles – a reference linking the end of the story back to its opening, in which Norma Jean works on her pectorals, evoking an image of Wonder Woman: a character, like Norma Jean, that operates in recognition of the past while being constantly reinvented and given new forms (578). The act of waving her arms also recalls another of Leroy’s comparisons, in which he wonders if the goldfinches who “fly past [their] window” close their eyes when they fall as Norma Jean does in her sleep (582); she has been falling for years with Leroy, and at her lowest point, the dissolution of her marriage, she finally gains enough momentum to spread her arms, to “catch and lift” herself into a better future (588). Leroy, unable to escape the past completely, will fall forever past their window, putting it behind him but never rising away. He shows this in the last line, when he remarks that sky in which Norma Jean is about to take flight is the same colour as their “dust ruffle” – an object that enables him to “hide things,” or else hide away from them, back into the comfort of the past (588).

Ultimately, Mason blends form and content in “Shiloh” to enact a story faithful to the human relationship with time – where people are constantly reaffirming their own identities by acknowledging the forces that shaped them. The present tense by no means a gimmick, but a meaningful choice to give present, past, and future each an ontological reality within the text. As Mason noted, the popularity of the tense was in reaction to the uncertainty of life in the late twentieth century: but in a modern world no less chaotic, where individuals live even greater fragmented lives, it still serves a vital purpose by allowing us to speak to our times as we truly experience them.

Works Cited

Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver, editors. Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers.

University of Illinois Press, 1998.