Stories and Emails and Response-Times: Poetics of Textual Gift-Exchange in Sally Rooney’s Normal People

abstract:This article attempts to explain the alternate use of narrative tenses in Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel Normal People by contrasting the novel’s frequent reference to the use of contemporary online communication tools with the act of producing and receiving literary writings—the act whose value this novel clearly advocates—in terms of temporal difference in eliciting a response. I propose utilizing the anthropological concept of gift reciprocation and Bourdieu’s idea of the relationship between the nature of gift/exchange and the length of lag time until a response is received. My contention is that in Normal People the past tense, the established tense for storytelling and literature, represents a metaphorical invitation to a deferential and time-consuming gift exchange of texts, whereas the present tense is related unfavorably to instantaneous online interchanges of texts as mundane and quickly consumable commodities.