The Second Person: A Point of View?
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in
Narrative Prose Fiction.
Abstract
Dominant dyadic structures of theories of point of view and narrative "person" have given little space for the exploration of narrative in the "second-person," but having become an issue for criticism and theory, the "second person" is bringing narrative theorists to re-examine their traditional distinctions and assumptions. Might the "second person" offer the next development in the tradition of point of view analysis, or a critique of the very assumptions inherent in that tradition? One approach involves seeing the metaphors of narrative "person" not as providing an analytical perspective on fiction, but as constituting part of the fiction-making process itself. Specifically, it involves seeing the metaphors of narrative "person" as strategies of naturalisation and anthropomorphism which act to maintain particular normative ideological/discursive structures. These strategies are deeply unsettled by the strangeness of some "second-person" narrative texts. Such an approach to the investigation of "second-person" narrative has implications for the way in which criticism conceives of "first-" and "third-person" narrative. Most significantly, it entails a critique of what might be called the hegemony of Cartesianism that deeply informs the metaphors of "person" and of the coherent, stable and knowable subject that this hegemony, whether explicitly or covertly, constitutes as the prior, authorising agent and condition of texts and reading.
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my warmest gratitude to the following people:
- Jene Lloyd Myles, for her immeasurable encouragement, criticism and friendship.
- Prof. Kelly Walter-Carney, for her generosity of spirit, and for permitting me ask so many bothersome favours - most of them errands in U.S. libraries and bookshops.
- Prof. Monika Fludernik, for her encouragement in respect to my two articles on "second-person" narrative:
"The Second Person: A Point of View?" Colloquy 1:1 (1996): 67-89; and
"Beyond the Brain of Katherine Mansfield: the Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative." Style 31:1 (1997): 96-117.
- I would also like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Wenche Ommundsen (principal supervisor) and Dr. Ron Goodrich (associate supervisor).
Preface
This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the "second-person" pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-"you." It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the "you" is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular - or a combination of these - so that readers find "second-person" utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the "second person" as a special case of narrative "person" that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional "first-" and "third-person" narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-"you" neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism's hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of "first-" and "third-person" narrative. The Protean-"you" form of "second-person" narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought.
Rather than founding a notion of "second-person" narrative and narrative "person" generally on Cartesianism's "self-ish" logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S. Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because I will argue that the effects of Protean-"you" arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject - the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative.
Most discussions of "second-person" narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of "second-person" narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the "second-person" pronoun. Two principal functions of "second-person" textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much "second-person" fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. I begin discussing this by looking at the two main paradigms of address and communicative relations adopted by literary critical theory with particular reference to the Cartesianism that has come to underpin both approaches - the metaphor of the conduit, and the model of prototypical conversation. I go on to suggest a third approach, drawing in particular on discussions by David Herman, Peter Jones and William Hanks that reconceive deixis as sociocentric rather than, as it is classically conceived, ego-centric.
Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a "you" can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all "second-person" narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the "second person's" outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and "natural" discourse that employ the "second-person" pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of "second-person" discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the "system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of 'mutual knowledge' produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world." All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read - that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read - into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of "person" is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic's recourse to "person" is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning - which this thesis in fact does - must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority.
Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about "second-person" narrative propose that the "second person's" most striking effects derive from the constitution of an "intersubjective" experience of reading in which the subject positions of the "you"-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity. Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel Almost You at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the "you" and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-"you" in Almost You is discussed in terms of "second-person" intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of "person." I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more "old fashioned" if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the "second person's" often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
I suggest that Protean-"you" texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of Almost You, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-"you" discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers' experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of "second-person" narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cartesianism's experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-"you" discourse arises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cartesianism's notion of self. Protean-"you" involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, Protean-"you" leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them.
I go on to propose that Protean-"you" narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative textuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing. Focusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative "person," I argue that narrative "person" is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for "first-" and "third-person" modes no less than for the "second." Where "second-person" narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional "first-" and "third-person" narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of totalisation, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cartesianism's hegemony of "person." It may be that the most significant insights "second-person" narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject - a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative "person," the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.
Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis. p. 51.
John Keats, The Letters of John Keats 1814-21. Vol. 1, p. 193.
