The Second Person: A Point of View?
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in
Narrative Prose Fiction.
Summary
"Second-person" narrative, three decades after Wayne Booth noted that narrative person was surely literary criticism's "most overworked distinction" (Booth, 1961: 150), is a mode of story-telling that is increasingly being taken up as an object of analysis and theory within literary studies and narratology. Dominant dyadic structures of theories of point of view and narrative "person" have given little space for its exploration. The "second person" is now bringing narrative theorists to re-examine the distinctions and assumptions that Booth once hoped might peaceably be left at rest - a position, incidentally, that he has long since recanted. Can we, for instance, talk about a newly recognised "second-person" point of view that has come to stand, somewhat self-consciously, between its two companions? Or might the "second person" offer, instead, not the next development in the tradition of point of view analysis begun by Percy Lubbock and others early this century, but a critique of the very assumptions inherent in that tradition, such as narratology's crucial distinction between story and discourse? 1 Might it be that some modes of the "second person" mark the very limit and collapse of the project of narratology, which relies so much on this distinction? Darlene Hantzis, Irene Kacandes, Monika Fludernik, Brian Richardson, James Phelan, Uri Margolin and others have attested to the subversive and transgressive aspects of the "second person," each noting ways in which "second-person" modalities lend themselves to postmodern aesthetics and politics concerning the unseating of the autonomous subject, the fostering of multiplicity, the interrogation and dissolution of certainty, and so on. But their discussions also make clear that the "second person" holds more general and far-reaching implications for narrative criticism and theory than might be addressed solely under the rubric of postmodernist criticism. The "second person's" more traditionally modernist aspects and its many instances of radical ideological appropriation, as Fludernik suggests, implies that critics need to take a wider frame of reference (Fludernik, 1994c: 445). What is also required, I suggest, is a reconsideration of the metaphors of narrative "person" themselves, a reconsideration that postmodernist criticism, by and large, has neglected. One assumption in the discussion that follows is that an exploration of the "second-person" pronoun's narrative and discursive functions will have important implications for the ways in which contemporary criticism and theory conceives narrative "person" as functioning. It will require a clarification not only of the concept of the category of "person," but of the very way in which literary criticism approaches it.
By narrative "person" I mean, in the first instance, the traditional distinctions that refer to a more or less sustained (so-called) "first," "second," or "third-person" point of view, and a particular pronominal form's more or less stable relationship with the narrator. The narrated "person" of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, for instance, is the "first person," or narrative "I," and that of Tolstoy's War and Peace is the "third person," or narrative-"s/he." The narrated "person" of Butor's Second Thoughts (1958) [La Modification] 2 is "second person," or narrative-"you." It is not so clear, however, whether the narrative "person" of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy should conclusively be identified as the "third person" or narrative "s/he," even though this is the narrative's manifest form. This problem, I suggest, does not devalue the given, conventional definition of narrative "person," but rather underscores its felicitous vagaries. The absence, for instance, of the immanent narrator's self-referential "I" in Jealousy, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1982) and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood (1990), exactly as absence/silence, plays a significant part in the meanings made by each one of those narratives. It needs to be stressed, too, that in designating general categories of narrative modality, narrative "person" is quite distinct from grammatical "person" - although the narrative form predicates itself, as a metaphor, precisely on the grammatical. Whereas narrative "person" operates at the level of a narrative's structure, grammatical "person" operates at the level of the discrete utterance and refers to the linguistic distinction between the utterance's three possible participants: the necessary "first person" (who speaks) and "second person" (who is spoken to), and the "third person" (who may be spoken about). Narrative "person's" proper referent, moreover, as Gérard Genette has pointed out in a similar context in Narrative Discourse (1980), is not the narrator, but the "person" the narrator speaks about, the "first-person" narrator for example doing nothing so much as speaking about him/herself. Genette makes this observation when discussing his reasons for setting traditional systems of narrator-classification aside in favour of the almost algebraic system of hetero-, homo-, intra- and extradiegetic cases laid out in Narrative Discourse. Narrators, he writes, should be described in terms of their relation to the text-world and the story being told. Although this is far from a new insight,3 his model provides a felicitous set of terms that ensure that criticism's focus is on the broad issues of narrative relations rather than solely on what is to be assumed about a particular category of narrating subject. But if, in a bid for formalist precision, Genette's terms prove useful, they also neglect a great deal. Rather than follow his lead of setting narrative pronouns aside, therefore, I believe much is still to be gained by keeping those "persons" on centre stage - where they can be watched and their behaviour in narrative textuality can be accounted.
It is not an unfamiliar notion within twentieth-century literary criticism, for instance, that there are specifiable relations between narrative "person" and ideological social formations, including the way in which we conceive of our being and our being-in-the-world. Most broadly, there is wide sympathy for the position that "third-person" omniscient narration is intricately bound up with the "epistemological notion of objective truth and impersonal knowledge" (Bal, 1993: 297), and that in this and in many other ways it "tends to reify and 'naturalise' existing social relations" (Richardson, 1994: 320). Likewise, as Brian Richardson observes in "I etcetera," there has been considerable investigation of pronominal modality within twentieth-century writing, a practice that appears to have an antecedent in the predominance of confessional and autobiographical genres (including journals, travel tales and so on) within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing by women. It has been argued by Joanne Frye, amongst others, that autobiographical and other "first-person" narrative forms appear to articulate "subjectivist" rather than "objective" discourse, so that "to speak directly in a personal voice is to deny the exclusive right of male author-ity implicit in a public voice and to escape the expression of dominant ideologies upon which an omniscient narrator depends" (Frye, cited in Richardson, 1994: 321). But Richardson hastens to point out that many critics and writers in fact "question the subversive or liberatory value posited in the first-person pronoun," because, clearly, just as we do not find all "second-person" narratives radicalising, neither do we find all "first-person" narratives emancipatory (Richardson, 1994: 321). Dependent on how the "I" is conceived, "first-person" texts, too, can be deeply implicated in the maintenance of dominant and even oppressive social, ideological relations. As Luce Irigaray writes: "With men, the I is asserted in different ways; it is significantly more important than the you and the world. With women, the I often makes way for the you, the world, for the objectivity of words and things" (cited in Richardson, 1994: 322). The recognition that the "I" does not readily relinquish its self-ish authority helps explain why many writers have moved beyond "the closed universe of the first-person pronoun," as Richardson puts it, in search of a language or means of expression not already dominated by masculine grammar and social relations (Richardson, 1994: 322). 4 This search has involved, amongst other strategies, the invention of ideologically marked pronouns such as j/e (that is, Monique Wittig's transformation of "je" ["I"]), texts in which "first," "second" and "third-person" modalities freely alternate and conflate, and an embracing of the "fluid, interactive, and destabilising technique of second-person narration" (Richardson, 1994: 322).
Pronominal experimentation by twentieth-century writers notwithstanding, it would appear that criticism tends to construe the task of identifying the addressee and addresser of the "you" utterance as crucial. It thereby elevates the mere assumption that categories of narrative "person" are fundamentally stable 5 to a rule of fact. As Richardson notes, "[t]raditional narrative theory, perhaps implicitly based on the more nonfictional types of biography (third person) and autobiography (first person), has a difficult time comprehending forms that, like second person and impossible narration, do not or cannot occur in nonfictional narrative" (Richardson, 1994: 323). Indeed, many critics remain reluctant to cede legitimacy to the "second person" as a discrete mode of literary narrative, insisting that the "you" merely becomes an "I" or "s/he" in the reader's mind. For both Mieke Bal and Ann Banfield, for instance, the exception that proves the rule that narrative's most appropriate modes are "first-" and "third-person" narration is Butor's La Modification (Bal, 1996: 182; Banfield, 1982: 304 n.16). For Bal, the status of La Modification as a narrative rests on the failure of the "second person" to sustain itself: "without much effort, the reader 'translates' it into first-person format, which enables her to read on and process the text into story" (Bal, 1996: 181). Bal contends that Butor's "you" cannot "be subsumed by the reader's position, nor can it be construed as the addressee of apostrophe. . . . The 'you' is simply an 'I' in disguise, a 'first-person' narrator talking to himself" (181). Tested empirically against the actual experience of readers, Bal's propositions about La Modification are to be taken, at best, as hasty (see Kacandes's summary of responses to La Modification on page 5 below), but her reasons for arguing this position are striking and significant. The reader's "relapse" into the terms of "first-person" narrative comes about because Butor
fail[s] to take seriously what the second person is: to be, to act out, the essence of language. According to French linguist Emile Benveniste . . . the "essence" of language lies in deixis, not reference, because what matters in language is not the world "about" which subjects communicate, but the constitution of the subjectivity required to communicate in the first place. . . . Each utterance is performed by an "I" and addressed to a "you." This second person is crucial, for it is that subject that confirms the "I" as a speaker. Conversely, the "you" becomes an "I" as soon as the perspective shifts. It is only as (potential) "I" that the "you" . . . has the subjectivity to act, hence, to confirm the subjectivity of the previous "I." 6
What is lacking, in La Modification, is that very essential feature of deixis: the reversibility, the exchange, of the first and second person. (Bal, 1996: 181-82)
Like Bal, I see deixis as playing a central role in the most striking effects of "you," and issues of deixis in relation to "second-person" narrative and subjectivity will be taken up at length in the following chapters. In her search for what might in fact constitute "second-person" narrative (examples of which she finds not in literature, but in painting), she intuits that "[t]he narrator may be unstable, so much so that it might indeed be questionable for the readers whether this work can be labeled narrative. But while we hesitate and waver, producing more folds, the idea of narrative continues its epistemological work, and it has done more work than any 'rightful' labeling can ever do" (Bal, 1996: 200-01). This "work," for Bal, as for myself, is the contestation of the ontological certainty that is the staple of conventional "first-" and "third-person" narration. Yet, a further implication can be drawn from Bal's remarks. If it is the nature of the "second person" to act out "the essence of language," and if this essence concerns the constitution of the reader's subjectivity, then it must be that engagement with unstable modes of "second-person" textuality can place in doubt not only the subject status of the narrator, but the subject status of the reader.
The problem faced by readers of some "second-person" fiction, Bal's remarks notwithstanding, is exactly that it can deviate from the expected modes of "first-" and "third-person" discourse to such a degree that attempts to translate it back into "natural" narrative modalities flounder. The "second person" has a Protean, shape-shifting quality, a "sloppy identity" as Helmut Bonheim and others have called it, that can defeat our wilful attempts to specify and identify, as a hermeneutic imperative, to whom the "you" is uttered. This is the mode of "second person" that I will refer to as Protean-"you," a mode of narrative discourse that can defeat critical certitude to put 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. Put most simply, 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 its utterances are at once familiar and deeply strange, its engaged readers at one and the same time identifying with and repudiating a seeming direct, even intimate, address. Irene Kacandes observes about the initial reception of Michel Butor's La Modification, that "[s]ome readers passionately testified to their sense of being themselves addressed. . . . Others insisted that the vous could only refer to a protagonist . . . ; yet other readers just as intensely asserted that the pronoun ambiguously addresses both protagonist and reader" (Kacandes, 1993: 333). The notion that it can be difficult to fix the identity of the "you" is widely accepted by critics, though not all take this deferral of narrative closure, this lack of clarity, as some critics have it, as a creditable literary feature. In "The Abuse of the 'second-person' pronoun," for instance, Jonathan Holden privileges the written over the spoken - "literature" over "oration" - asserting that the "second person" can only work well when it constitutes a direct, unambiguous address to an audience (Holden, 1980: 1980). Less disapprovingly, James Phelan argues that in a statement like, "You are unsure of how to react," trying to fix on the referent of the you (let alone decide upon a credible narrating situation) "depends on a clear and stable distinction between an intrinsic, textual 'you' - a narratee-protagonist - and an extrinsic, extratextual 'you' - a flesh and blood reader" (Phelan, 1994: 350)back to chapt 5. The reader is expected (and expects to be able) to choose between these two distinct positions within successive instances of the "second-person" pronoun.7 Non-literary epistolary writing, as a genre, nicely illustrates this distinction. The separation between the addressee "you" and a storied "you" is absolute. There is the "you" who may be described in the writing, and the "you" being addressed by the writer of the letter: the former is explicitly recalled and/or reinvented, the latter is figured as geographically and/or temporally distant. Although the addressee is expected to identify him or herself with the storied "you" should he/she enter the letter (in reminiscences over shared past experience, for instance, or in projections of hypothetical future encounters as might occur in love letters), the "you"/narratee being directly and intimately addressed exists at the same discourse level as the writer/narrator. The "you" being recalled or imagined, on the other hand, stands at an embedded level, as an inscribed, textual subject. Even in literary epistolary novels, such as Jane Rule's This Is Not For You (1987), and the first and third sections of Butor's Degrees (1962), the appearance of this same separation is systematically maintained. Indeed, this separation frequently becomes integral to the narrative itself, the novel's actual reader understanding the narrator's characterisation of the embedded "you" as ironic, subjective, and even flawed. Occasionally, however, this conventional certainty partly or wholly evaporates, leaving it undecidable whether the "you" utterance refers to the protagonist or to the addressee/reader, the discourse at that moment blurring the expected boundaries (Phelan, 1994: 351).
The matter of the identity of the "you" is clearly only part of the problem. As Kimberly Nance observes, "[e]ven in an experiential model that offers a fairly straightforward reason why one might need to hear (a new version of) a well-remembered story of one's own experience, a key question remains to be answered: who is doing the telling?" (Nance, 1994: 371). Whoever the referent of the "you" utterance may be, what this shape-shifting quality also makes ambiguous is the origin of the narrative utterances, and it can make uncertain the stability and therefore the authority of that origin. The notion that this might present a particular problem for reading narrative is supported by Uri Margolin's observation that "whenever the identity of the textual speaker is unclear or shifting, the domain of reference of his [or her] speech will automatically be destabilised, as an ambiguity is thereby created concerning the persons and times being referred to" (Margolin, 1986-87: 187). When "the origin of the discourse is no longer ascertainable," writes Margolin, for instance when "indexical indicators contained in the text are insufficient, unstable, incompatible or first introduced and then canceled," as occurs time and time again in Protean "second-person" narrative, "the notion of the subject no longer finds any application" to textual discourse (Margolin, 1986-87: 208). All one has left is text. But having undermined its own status as "centre" and constituted for itself an unstable domain of reference, an unstable text-world, it is not only the Protean narrator's epistemological authority that is brought into question. The narrator also loses its ontological authority, its authority to posit anything at all - itself as well as the text-world - as being, let alone posit what might or might not be known about being. The notion that a Protean narrator might present such a problem is likewise supported by Culler's claim that "[o]ur major device of order is, of course, the notion of the person or speaking subject, and the process of reading is especially troubled when we cannot construct a subject who would serve as the source of the . . . utterance . . ." (Culler, 1975: 170). He adds that any work that does make it difficult to construct a speaking persona still relies for effect on the fact that the reader will try to construct for it an "enunciative posture" (170). For instance, are the utterances in the opening paragraph of The Brain of Katherine Mansfield (Manhire, 1988) (see page 112 below) those of an involved but self-effacing narrator (i.e., a disguised "I"), the utterances of some more or less omniscient entity telling a tale about others, or either of these two types of narrator addressing some form of narratee or reader? In "I etcetera: On the Poetics and Politics of Second Person Narrative" (1994), Richardson looks at a similar deep ambiguity in Nuruddin Farah's novel Maps (1986). Not only does the narration alternate between all three forms of narrative "person," there is also a slide in the identity of who utters "you." He writes:
Many passages suggest that a narrator-protagonist is referring to himself in the second person: "Alone, again, once you knew how to write your name, you would securely graft your name, born the same day as the tree, on its bark" (Farah, 1986: 63-64). At other points however the protagonist appears to be depicted externally: "You sit, in contemplative posture, your features agonised and your expression pained . . ." (Farah, 1986: 1). [ . . . ] Unlike Bleak House [which shifts between "first" and "third person"], in which Esther Summerson's first-person account can be neatly placed within a larger, extra- and heterodiegetic whole, the three narrations of Maps refuse to fall into any epistemological hierarchy. We cannot determine whether Askar is telling his story using three different pronouns or whether an extra- and heterodiegetic narrator is employing all three forms or whether two or three distinct narrators are at work. (Richardson, 1994: 319)
Richardson correctly argues that it is "precisely this irreducible ambiguity that gives [Maps] its peculiar tension" (Richardson, 1994: 319). I would suggest, however, that this tension occurs less as a result of the mere fact of a deep ambiguity than from the dialogue or quarrel between the will towards a synthesis of unity and stability, on one hand, 8 and, on the other, the impossibility of resolution (or more exactly, perhaps, the reader's sanctioning of irreducibility). In Maps, this tension becomes a resistance - an explicitly political resistance - to a dominating, univocal practice of reading that privileges particular forms of authority and legitimacy (articulated within the "first-" and "third-person" passages) over other, less oppressive forms of authority.
In adopting a critical attitude toward metaphors of narrative "person," it is not my intention to produce a model for reading narrative texts exclusive of those metaphors: indeed, they continue to be constitutive of my definition of "second-person" narrative. Even Genette's figures of mood and voice still respond to the questions "who speaks?" and "who sees?" The categories of narrative "person" (and the metaphors of "person" and "point of view" more broadly), being powerfully entrenched constitutive and interpretive categories, so thoroughly inform the social significance/signification of texts as to be inseparable from contemporary reading practices without simultaneously relinquishing social meaning. Rather, as Jonathan Culler suggests, the metaphors of "person" should be seen not as analytical tools but as integral to the making and reading of fiction itself (Culler, 1984: 6). The adoption of post-structuralist assumptions about subjectivity opens those metaphors of "person" and "point of view" to exploration as strategies of naturalisation and anthropomorphism, that is, as strategies whose function is to maintain particular normative ideological/discursive structures and the sovereignty of the knowing subject. The tension produced between particular modes of "second-person" narrative discourse and these prevailing and powerful ideological/discursive structures largely underwrites the "second person's" potentially radical, unsettling force. In relation to the clarification of "person," I will note that throughout the following chapters, the three narrative "persons" - "first," "second," and "third" - and "person" itself will be placed in inverted commas. I mark them this way with several intentions: to indicate their status as linguistic/literary/discursive categories; to self-consciously disrupt the naturalised position of metaphors of "person" in literary discourse; and to resist what I see as the centripetal pressure exerted by the context of my discussion to speak about "person" in a way that tends to sponsor the reader's sense of identity as an autonomous, unified subject. I will propose that one fruitful approach to the exploration of "second-person" narrative involves a critique of what might be called the "Cartesianism" that deeply informs metaphors of narrative "person," and of the self-identical, knowing subject that Cartesianism's notion of the self, whether explicitly or covertly, constitutes as the anterior, authorising agent and condition of texts and reading. This is a position that, in some ways, will pit me against still-powerful assumptions within the broad disciplines of literary criticism and theory - assumptions about the nature of literary discourse; about the ways in which the particular narrative function (or functionary) customarily called "the narrator" is to be conceived within literary texts; and crucially about the identity and subjectivity of that person out there moving his or her index-finger along the lines of this page. 9 It may be the case, certainly, that the critical practices that sponsor Cartesianism are by now roundly discredited in some theoretical circles. One might look, for instance, towards the writings of Michel Serres, Jean-François Lyotard, Lorraine Code, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari, amongst many others.10 To purloin a somewhat acerbic observation made by Mary Louise Pratt, however: literary criticism's ever-returning gaze to the text itself and the text's characters, narrators and narratees,11 its fascination with focalisers,12 filters and centres of consciousness13a fascination that remains current and influential in prevailing literary practice - reveals that much critical theory is indebted to Cartesianism's subtle hegemony, "which suggests that in addition to the dead horses being flogged, there must be some live ones running around escaping notice. Gazes must turn outwards, beyond the corral" (Pratt, 1982: 201).14
This thesis, then, looks at the functions and effects of the "second-person" pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluid and ambiguous modality that I will call Protean-"you." 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, modeled on Cartesianism's notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised by the practices of "first-" and "third-person" narrative. In my first chapter I will more fully define "second-person" narrative and Protean-"you" with particular reference to the paradigmatic addresser-addressee relations that literary criticism habitually applies to "second-person" narrative, and to the issues of Cartesianism and anthropocentrism of narrative discourse. The chapter summarises my arguments and situates them in the context of discussions of the "second person" by Uri Margolin, Brian Richardson, Monika Fludernik, Irene Kacandes and others, and outlines issues to be addressed in later chapters.
In my second chapter I will pursue the critique of Cartesianism more closely, arguing that criticism founded on Cartesianism's "self-ish" logic of unified, privatised identity cannot fully account for the deeply unsettling effects of Protean-"you." Drawing on Anthony Kerby, Michel Foucault and C.S. Peirce, I will outline the notion of subjectivity informing the arguments of this thesis. Essentially, this alternative conception of subjectivity is Peirce's notion of the semiotic self, in which 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, in a triadic relation of object, sign and interpretant, so that identity is never final, never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because in later chapters I will argue that Protean-"you's" effects arise in some part at least 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.
The third and fourth chapters focus on the modalities of the "second-person" pronoun in narrative fiction, and on the interpretive strategies readers bring to "second-person" textuality. In the third chapter, I will present three descriptive models, the first of which conceives of "second-person" narrative not in terms of an implicit communicative relation (that is, in the classical terms of who addresses "you" to whom), but in terms of a referential function (that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the "second-person" pronoun). The second and third descriptive models concern two principal functions of the "second person" in narrative fiction. The first is generalisation, which, I argue, is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the "sloppiness" of the pronoun's reference in much "second-person" fiction. The second principal function is that of address, 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. I develop a model that describes the depth of the effect of address experienced by the reader as arising within a relation between the force of the generalising function and the congruence/incongruence of the "second-person" pronoun's deictic profile and grammatical form. Such a model permits the critic/reader to construe categories of agency - the "you," the narrator, the reader and narratee, and the "no-body" of the figural - as "persons" engaged in or excluded from acts of virtual or actual communication, but at the same time felicitously disengages address from the model as a directly constitutive term under the assumption that a referential function is a prior condition for any address function.
In Chapter 4, I look further at how the radicalising potentials of "second-person" discourse are contained, with particular reference to notions of the mimetic relation between texts and the world, and to Jonathan Culler's notion of the vraisemblable. I will suggest that the conventionalising and naturalising work done by theories of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts is one buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of "person" is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. The critic's recourse to "person" is therefore in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. I argue that 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.
In Chapter 5, I address at length the problem of the "second person's" instability and "shape-shiftiness," looking in particular at Lois Oppenheim's and Darlene Hantzis's propositions that "second-person" textuality can produce an "intersubjective" experience of reading. Each proposes that this experience can radically disrupt dominant modes of subjectivity. In a reading of La Modification, Oppenheim discusses the "second person" in relation to the intentional projection of consciousness into the world and the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity. Whereas Bal supposes La Modification to be based "on a misconception of deixis" (Bal, 1996: 182), Oppenheim describes the novel as an exemplar of literature's capacity to engage the reader self-consciously in the phenomenological constitution of subjectivity. Adopting a Husserlian critique of Cartesianism's division between the self and the world, 15 Oppenheim claims that Butor has delivered a text that from the outset unsettles the reader by challenging traditional, Cartesian notions of the subject and subjectivity. Rather, the narrative-"vous" of La Modification complexly provokes the reader into participation in the phenomenological experience that Butor is dealing with, the novel being the objective correlate of Butor's own intentionalising projection of consciousness into the world. Hantzis, on the other hand, describes "second-person" intersubjectivity as the product of "second-person point of view proper." She stipulates that while the "I" in "first person" and the "s/he" in "third person" have fixed, determinate identities, the identity of the "you" in "second-person" point of view is indeterminate and will slide more or less freely across multiple referents: a dramatised character, the narrator, the narratee, the reader, even the author. She defines this indeterminacy as intrinsic to "second-person" point of view proper, and argues that the form necessarily represents a world that reflects a concern with the collapse of autonomous subjectivity and textual authority. She proposes that the experience of reading "second-person" point of view proper is different from that of reading conventional narrative because the "second person's" oscillations hinder the production of a single, privileged subjectivity able to guarantee its own authority or the value of its knowledge. It is a mode of narrative, she writes, in which "self/knowledge is challenged and difference is incorporated" (Hantzis, 1992: 65). While acknowledging Oppenheim's and Hantzis's respective contributions to "second-person" narrative critical theory, I go on to propose that both implicitly reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I discuss Hantzis's notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity at length, concluding the chapter by analysing a number of narrative texts in the light of her arguments.
In Chapter 6 I offer a reading of Daniel Gunn's novel Almost You (1994) that explores the fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-"you," discussing it at length in terms of Hantzis's notion of "second-person" point of view proper. My reading will illustrate the constant overdetermination of the "you" and the novel's narrating voice at length, and demonstrate 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. I will conclude the chapter, however, by turning to Brian McHale's discussion of what might be a more "old fashioned" if perhaps ultimately more far-sighted approach to the "second person's" often startling ambiguities: Keats's notion of negative capability. Whereas for Oppenheim and Hantzis the place of "ontological doubt" instituted by the fluidity of Protean-"you" discourse might be described as an antechamber that leads to new existential truths about the individual's Being-in-the-world, for McHale, critical incertitude is a value in and of itself. In a discussion of Thomas Pynchon's notorious Gravity's Rainbow (1975) a postmodern novel that blurs the same kinds of boundaries as Farah's Maps (1986), McHale looks at a number of interpretations that seem to have asked: how can one say what the story is really about if one cannot accurately describe the fundamental relationship between the speaker and the "you"? McHale, on the other hand, advocates a different approach, applying negative capability in preference to the enervating quest for certitude. He proposes that readers of Gravity's Rainbow and similar works should embrace the "you"-referent's undecidability and shape-shiftiness as essential to the mode's most striking effects - and therefore as something to celebrate. 16
In my final chapter, I argue for quite a different way of explaining the deeply unsettling discourse articulated by Almost You than that offered by the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity. I suggest that Almost You licenses all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in Chapter 6, but conclude that the myriad 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 do nothing so much as tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cartesianism's experience or sense of subjectivity. If so, then it is a situation that must leave the reader who is fully engaged by Protean-"you" discourse in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. But I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-"you" discourse arises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards the very subject they mock. Because of the allocutionary function carried by the "second person," Protean-"you" involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative. It therefore alerts us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects, yet at the very same time leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous, generating 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 will argue that narrative "person" is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact ineluctably ruptured, disparate, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. 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 (as addressed at length in my fourth chapter), and, in particular, Cartesianism's hegemony of "person." It may be, then, 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.
