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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.

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    The author is not saying that he found it unnecessary at the time to say that the carriage was full; he's saying that he finds it unnecessary to say so now. And don't ever believe the top-of-the-list number Google gives you; it's meaningless.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 20:57
  • idioms.thefreedictionary.com/it+goes+without+saying also NGRAM
    – mplungjan
    Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 22:06

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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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