past tense - it "went" without saying?


I was reading a traveling novel and came across this sentence:



We all caught the metro back to the centre of town at about midnight, drunk and very happy. It goes without saying that the carriage was crammed full of people drinking beer and snogging.



The native-English author used "goes" instead of "went." My question is: Would it be awkward to say "It went without saying..."? I've googled both. Although "goes" appears a hundred times more than "went," there're still around 692,000 results of the latter.



Answer



It went without saying and it goes without saying differ in literary voice.


The past tense reflects a judgment made at the time that was considered obvious, i.e. it went without saying that I too was drunk and the girl on my arm was my girl


The present tense means the author writes the piece in a conversational voice intending the reader view what it is stated as obvious. (This sort of usage can also include things that are not so obvious in order to express elements of the narrator's personality, it goes without saying that I shagged her -- when we might not have inferred that but from the sentence we now know something about the narrator's personality).


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