Frank O’Connor was a prolific Irish author of the twentieth century. He wrote a great number of short stories, one of which is entitled My Oedipus Complex. This curious tale of mother, father, and son includes a sentence which gives us a chance to review not a phenomenon of Freudian psychology, but an equally curious complex in English grammar called the participle. Which of those two topics is the more compelling will be yours to judge.
The scene in O’Connor’s story is this: a young son has grown increasingly impatient with all the attention his father has been giving his mother (and mother, father) since the father’s return from war, and one night the young boy had reached his limit. Here is the passage, and it is the participle chattering in the second sentence that is the subject of our topic:
But at the same time I wanted him to see that I was only waiting, not giving up the fight. One evening when he was being particularly obnoxious, chattering away well above my head, I let him have it.
These two sentences contain, in fact, four participles (waiting, giving, being, and chattering), but it is only the last one, chattering, which will occupy our attention here. Participles, like Oedipus, are a curious force to contend with, being elemental in their own way in depicting rich attending circumstance. That is because participles combine in one grammatical device the properties (or genes, we might say) of both adjectives and verbs. That, in fact, is the technical definition of a participle: a verbal adjective, and it is just because of their distinct verbal character that a sense of background action can be brought into a linguistic picture.
The suffix –ing marks chattering as a present participle (there are also in English a past and a perfect participle), and this noting of the participle’s time is all important. We usually associate verbal time, or tense, with real time, an hour of the clock. When the boy in O’Connor’s story says at the end of the second sentence, I let him have it, the verb let (idiomatically meaning allowed) is in the simple past tense, and we easily and naturally understand it to mean that this action occurred before the time the boy was narrating the story and enunciating this sentence, albeit in a fictional world.
Participial time, however, does not point to chronology. Instead, participial tense is relative to the tense of the main verb of the clause in which the participle occurs: a present participle (its name notwithstanding) shows time contemporaneous with or subsequent to the time of the main verb, and a perfect participle shows time prior to that main verb. In our example, then, since the main verb let is in the simple past tense, the present participle chattering must be indicating an action that was occurring at the same time the boy took his revenge on his father. And we must surmise the same coordination of action in understanding the present participle being earlier in the same sentence: the father was being particularly obnoxious at the same time that he was chattering and at the same time his son let him have it (just exactly how I will leave to the story).
But how would the scene look if we changed the present participle chattering to its perfect participle having chattered? The grammatical change would mean that the chattering had occurred at some time before the boy acted. And if in this revision we retained the present participle being earlier in the sentence, the logic would suggest strongly that the father’s obnoxiousness, not his chattering, was the immediate cause of the boy’s action, his father’s having chattered a remote, but still contributory, antecedent influence.
Time, it seems, is both a grammatical and psychological reality, sometimes actual and sometimes relative—but always meaningful.
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