The Second Person: A Point of View?
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in Narrative Prose Fiction.

1. Protean-"You"

"Narrative theory," writes Andrew Gibson, "has repeatedly constructed the space of the text as a unitary, homogeneous space, determined by and organised within a given set of constraints" (Gibson, 1996: 7). To greater and lesser extents, the last four chapters, particularly the fourth chapter, have been concerned with describing many of those constraints. Readers have been trained (both formally and informally) in how to read closely to discover a text's unities, its genres, its thematics, its underpinning point of view, its plot, and so forth, pursuing a selective blindness to elements too out of place. More than this, "literalising" this space, readers by and large expect to find these unitary spaces, to find worlds that are whole, seamless, logical, "natural" like (they imagine) their own world.

Whereas I have been concerned in these previous chapters with a broad description of the strategies readers and critics use in making sense of "second-person" textuality, in the next two chapters I want to look more closely at a particular feature or function of the "second person" that has already been touched upon and that seems to evade this drive towards unity and homogeneity. This feature is the "second person's" shape-shiftiness. I will look in particular at propositions about the "second person's" Protean nature made by Lois Oppenheim, Darlene Hantzis, and Brian McHale. In this chapter I will focus on Oppenheim's and Hantzis's respective propositions that the "second person" produces for literary audiences an intersubjective experience of reading. In this, Oppenheim and Hantzis make valuable contributions to the theorisation of the narrative "second person" in their foregrounding of the role played by narrative "person" in the constitution of the reader's subjectivity, and in their recognition that the "second person" may constitute a radically disruptive influence on dominant modes of subjectivity. In the following chapter, I will offer a reading of Daniel Gunn's novel Almost You (1994) that illustrates Hantzis's "second-person" point of view proper, but will conclude the chapter by turning to 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.

McHale's suggestion in "You Used to Know" (1985) is that undecidability and ambiguity are fundamental to the reader's experience of particular narrative-"you" texts. Some of the most interesting discussions of the "second person's" fluidity accept this first proposition and set out to find moments of simultaneity and synthesis, positing that a new unity emerges from the midst of the "second person's" ambiguity. These critics propose that the peculiarity of such "second-person" narrative - as a correlative of the deep ambiguity of the pronoun's reference - is its constitution of an intersubjectivity. To return to Phelan's questions about the statement, "You are unsure of how to react" (see above), the ways in which the reader responds

are frequently an important dimension of reading second-person narration: when second-person address to a narratee-protagonist both overlaps with and differentiates itself from an address to actual readers, those readers will simultaneously occupy the position of addressee and observer. (Emphasis added, Phelan, 1994: 351)

Similarly, the French critic Pierre Deguise makes the observation that the "vous" within La Modification is at once author, character and reader and so becomes a "vous synthétique" (cited in Morrissette, 1965: 23 n.48). This concern with the possibilities of simultaneity and synthesis is in part a contemporary critical response to (and development of) traditional notions of narrative subjectivity and authority. It is a response, that is, to critical traditions which figure narrative agents (especially the narrator) as self-identical and relatively stable and therefore as providing readers, themselves construed as self-identical and coherent social agents, with stable, distinct modes and positions of subjectivity to identify with. The Protean "second person," on the other hand, seems to "eliminate the analytical explanations that were the framework for the novel in the early part of this century" (Oppenheim, 1980: 31). Placed in their stead are descriptions and experiences of modes of textual and social subjectivity that many critics argue are quite unlike Cartesianism's coherent, stable and knowing self. As I will argue later, however, the notion of intersubjectivity is itself problematical in relation to a critique of the logic of Cartesianism and traditional narrative authority. To borrow from Dianne Elam's expression of reserve towards the notion of intersubjectivity, far from deconstructing the dominant notion of the subject, the notion of intersubjectivity might finally do no more than reconfigure it, returning literary and cultural criticism to positions they most energetically wish to evacuate (Elam, 1994: 126 n.26). 78 Both Lois Oppenheim and Darlene Hantzis, I suggest, address themselves to the problematical emergence of a reconfigured subject. Both, however, also offer cogent and insightful discussions of the effects of the "second-person" narrative pronoun.

2. Intersubjectivity and Phenomenology

In Intentionality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Study of Butor's La Modification (1980), Lois Oppenheim argues in part that the "second person" undercuts the witness function of the "third-person" narrator by standing somewhere indeterminate between the "first" and the "third," its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting our accustomed explanations of narrative and denying us access to omniscience as a category - denying us access, that is, to the fundamental, authorising subject who has access to all knowledge and who stands at the centre of knowledge. She claims that Butor has delivered a text that from the outset defeats critical certitude to put readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty. But for Oppenheim, this place of doubt, it becomes clear, is only a small place, an antechamber that leads to new certainty, to new existential truths about the individual's Being-in-the-world predicated not on Cartesian transcendent subjectivity but on phenomenological intersubjectivity.

Oppenheim addresses herself centrally to the experience and subjectivity of the person who opens a novel to read the lines:

Standing with your left foot on the grooved brass sill, you try in vain with your right shoulder to push the sliding door a little wider open. (Butor, 1958: 9)

Her central thesis is that "second-person" narrative complexly provokes the reader's participation in the novel in an ambiguous reader-narrator-character relationship in which the reader oscillates in identifying with the implied reader (thereby experiencing the "you" in terms of direct mesofictional address), the "you"-character, and the voice speaking the "you" (Oppenheim, 1980: 33). 79 That the reader might identify with the voice saying "you" seems a startling claim, though in fact it is not. Butor himself, writes Oppenheim, argues that the "vous" simultaneously manifests the protagonist's interior voice (as a displaced "je" ["I"]), and the exterior voice of an author.80 Other critical discussions of "second person" novels, and in particular Morrissette's and Salvatori's respective analyses of La Modification and If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, have made the same suggestion (see page 38-39 above). Less remarkably, to identify with the speaker of the "you," with the narrator, is essentially to embrace the (ideological) strategy of classical omniscient narration and the realist text. This calls upon the reader to take up a position in relation to the events spoken about that replicates the position explicitly and implicitly articulated by the narrating voice. But what Oppenheim describes is not merely a structure of fluid and open-ended identification. Rather, she argues for the importance of the reader's participation and the degree to which his or her participatory role "is required in the ultimate constitution of the text" (Oppenheim, 1980: 157), because only with the involvement of both reader and writer can the "passage of the creative enterprise from one to the other" come about (Oppenheim, 1980: 159). She also sees the reader's participation in terms of what he/she brings to the text of his/her own understanding of reality, seeing this as vital to the text's "ultimate completion" (Oppenheim, 1980: 163). Oppenheim characterises this participation as "an author-character-reader intersubjectivity resulting from the intentional structure of consciousness" (Oppenheim, 1980: 157).

Oppenheim sets out to demonstrate "to what degree writing necessitates intersubjectivity," arguing that intersubjectivity occurs as the "intimate relation between the work and the social world and the author of the work and the reader," and further, that this intersubjective activity of the author and reader constitutes the text itself (Oppenheim, 1980: 159). She finds La Modification exemplary in this respect. The context of Oppenheim's argument is Husserlian phenomenology, and an exploration of her position necessarily entails a discussion of the chief assumptions phenomenology makes about the nature of subjectivity, the self, and knowledge. The phenomenologist begins with the precept that if knowledge of the world is to be valid, then it must "be derived from experience of the world rather than from the presumption of the existence of the world" (Oppenheim, 1980: 13). Applied to art and in particular literature, phenomenological approaches to analysis, even while circumspectly admitting to "the existence of conditioning forces (above all psychological and sociological)," tend to focus "on what the work manifests of the existential relation between the artist and the world" (Oppenheim, 1980: 14). Oppenheim prefaces her remarks with the observation that only in very recent times has the philosophy of art "begun to minimise truly the mimetic value of artistic expression" (Oppenheim, 1980: 11). For the most part, "reflecting the subject-object dichotomy inherent in the interpretation of reality," aesthetic theory has held that "the primary function of the artist's work is imitative" (Oppenheim, 1980: 11). The first work of phenomenology, writes Oppenheim, is to provide a methodology of investigation and explanation that eliminates the subject-object schism of the Aristotelian tradition of aesthetic theory and criticism. For Husserl, she writes, consciousness could be comprehended "only as consciousness of something and the experience of the 'In-der-Welt-sein' or Being-in-the-world was to replace the idea of an ego capable of conceptualising a world independent of it" (Oppenheim, 1980: 12). She writes that:

The conflict between a subjectivity which perceived the world as an extension of the ego and an objectivity which held that the world was the sum of the laws of nature has often been referred to as the major problem faced by philosophers at the turn of the century. In claiming that the validity of knowledge of an object is determined by the subject's intuition or direct experience of that object, Husserl was attempting to undercut the subject-object dichotomy through the development of an analytic method which emphasised the movement of a perceiving consciousness toward the object of perception. For Husserl it was the subject's act of "tending" an object that was to be considered rather than the perceiving subject as independent of the object perceived. Presupposition and a priori conceptualisation were eliminated as subject and object were to be understood in terms of the relationship between them. The subject-object and ego-world dichotomies were refuted by Husserl in favour of a theory of intentionality based on their interdependence. (Oppenheim, 1980: 12)

It might be noted before continuing that, on the face of it, Oppenheim's comments offer a criticism of classical Cartesian thought that may support the similar critique being undertaken by my own arguments. Oppenheim's Husserlian critique concerns a refutation of the ineluctable division between the ego and the world, between subject and object, that is fundamental to classical Cartesian thought. Certainly, the nature of the subject-object relationship assumed by the notion of subjectivity informing this thesis would have it that these two categories are much more closely interdependent than Cartesian thought allows. By the same token, however, my own arguments do not support the phenomenological assumption that the subject and object become indivisible moment by moment in the ego's experience of Being-in-the-world, that is, in the movement of an "intending consciousness" towards the objective world. My own arguments necessitate that, if always interdependent, the subject and object also always remain discrete categories. A more significant divergence between the Husserlian position and my own, perhaps, concerns the status of the self within the phenomenological method. The notion of "intentionalising consciousness" necessarily privileges the self as the centre of the system of knowing, because "intention" is always described as having its origin in the self and as "moving out" towards the objective world.

According to Heidegger, writes Oppenheim, "man's" fundamental characteristic is the "projection out of himself towards the world and it is through this projection that consciousness constitutes the world" (Oppenheim, 1980: 36). She puts the central Heideggerian position thus:

The world considered by itself is devoid of meaning. It is in the intentionalising movement of consciousness out of itself towards the world, defined as the total sum of objects perceived by consciousness, that the world becomes meaningful. (Oppenheim, 1980: 36)

It is also this projection that constitutes works of art and literature, not as objects, but "as the objective correlate of the artist's intentionalising consciousness" (Oppenheim, 1980: 13). Thus, the work of art is now to be taken as a concrete manifestation or projection of the artist's "intentional, and therefore existential, relation between the ego and the world" (Oppenheim, 1980: 13), that is, as "a complex totality of which the unifying essence is the author's mind" (Oppenheim, 1980: 30).

Suspending critique for the moment to allow phenomenology to argue its case, this notion of the relation between the text and the world is crucial to Oppenheim's sense of the literary text's intersubjectivity. If the text is no longer to be read mimetically as a reflection on an independent world and prior experience, but as the manifestation of an original experience, then it is necessarily an experience that is reconstituted (not reflected) on each reading of the text. As a direct consequence of the "transubjectivity of the image"that is, of another human subject's ability to respond intelligently (or more precisely, predictably) to "the intentionality of the linguistic expression of that image" (Oppenheim, 1980: 30)the engaged reader can "share the creative experience of the writer" (Oppenheim, 1980: 30). Oppenheim is at pains to stress, moreover, that this shared experience of the world as "intended" by the writer is always didactic, and that it is didactic in two senses. It is also clear, although she never makes this explicit, that Oppenheim conceives of this didacticism as serving a moral enterprise. She writes:

One the one hand . . . the creation of imaginary characters and fictional events serves to instruct us on the behaviour of the people we know and the adventures we experience. On the other hand, however, . . . [i]n adjusting his known reality to that presented in the novel, the reader not only learns more about the "real world," but - through his effort to experience the world along with the writer - he necessarily perceives the world differently than when he is not exploring and discovering it on someone else's terms. (Oppenheim, 1980: 19)

Oppenheim proposes that this second didactic level of the novel is where "the relation between the novel and reality is truly phenomenological," because it is at this level that "the reader's perception of the world is altered" (Oppenheim, 1980: 19). In Butor's own words, argues Oppenheim, La Modification is "a 'récit didactique' where the teaching specifically concerns the 'progrès de la conscience,'" and it is at the level of thetic awareness, of reflexive consciousness "deriving from the didacticism inherent in the second person[,] that the reader . . . participates in the phenomenological experience of the novel" (Oppenheim, 1980: 32). This experience, this modification, shared by the author, character and reader, is not merely a replication of the protagonist's change in moral or ethical outlook during the course of the novel. The modification also works at a more fundamental level as a movement toward greater self-awareness. "The phenomenological experience of the 'modification'," writes Oppenheim, "shared by author, character and reader, is precisely . . . the movement of the mind from one level of consciousness (non-thetic) to another (thetic)," that is, towards the insights of self-reflexivity, self-knowledge (Oppenheim, 1980: 144).

For Oppenheim, the position the "vous" holds in relation to the constitution of subjectivity is unique because it is always necessarily intersubjective, and it is this intersubjectivity that enables it to be open to the reader, narrator and character as a point of reference and identification. Oppenheim's argument grants the theorem that "you" necessarily implies "I," but she does not construe this in the simple subject-object relation of an addresser and an addressee. For her, it invokes a doubled dyadic relation between two subjects exchanging (criss-crossing) subject-object roles. This (potential) oscillation across a subject-object dyad, given its insistence on the immanent presence of a second subjectivity always standing in support of the addressed object, Oppenheim argues, "provides Butor with a means of dealing with the existential problem of the other" (Oppenheim, 1980: 32). It is through his use of the intersubjective "vous," she writes,

that Butor explores the dichotomy between spontaneous experience and reflexive consciousness (non-thetic and thetic thought). It is through the use of the second person narrative that the reader, as a participant in the novel, is obliged to experience spontaneously the ontological situation that Butor is working with. It is also through the "vous" form that the reader experiences that situation on the thetic level of consciousness. (Oppenheim, 1980: 32)

That is, the "you" helps the reader in coming into awareness or consciousness of this intersubjectivity. For Oppenheim, then, the "second person" provokes the reader's participation not only by facilitating the reader's identification with the character and/or the narrator's voice through its vocative appeal, but also by implicating the reader in the existential experience constituted by the text (Oppenheim, 1980: 32). Not only does the "second person" as it is used in La Modification draw the reader into the text through its "unique form of identification," making the reader "an accomplice in the action of the novel," but it also names the reader as the protagonist in a very specific manner (Oppenheim, 1980: 31). The "unfolding of the modification" is not merely an experience projected onto the figure of the character. Rather, the unfolding modification is also experienced both by the writer in the act of producing the text, and by the reader in the act of reading it (Oppenheim, 1980: 28). The text is intersubjective, amongst other reasons Oppenheim gives, because both writer and the reader partake of the experience of the text. The story that Delmont resolves to put into writing at the end of Butor's novel (that is, the book that the reader has just completed reading), writes Oppenheim, is "evidence of the movement from the 'lived experience' to the reflexive awareness" of Being-in the world, that is, of "Dasein" (Oppenheim, 1980: 144), and for Oppenheim, it is a movement, an epiphany, experienced by the reader as much as it is "experienced" by Delmont - and presumably by Butor.

If didacticism is one unique phenomenological quality of the "second-person" narrative pronoun, writes Oppenheim, its penchant for present-tense narration is another. She describes this tense as minimising the subject-object schism for its collapse of the dual time traditionally held to be inherent to narration, the "time of the telling" and the "time of the told," into one phenomenological moment characterisable as the projection of a "continuous present" (Oppenheim, 1980: 33). Oppenheim writes that:

To consider the passage of time in Butor's novel in terms of the traditional concept of time is to ignore what Butor has referred to . . . as the superimposition of several "times." . . . [T]he concept of past, present and future give[s] way in Butor's book to a phenomenological notion of time as a continuous present. (Oppenheim, 1980: 138)

Oppenheim argues that La Modification's non-linear temporality and its collapse of time into a "continuous present" are a criticism of linear reading and of the lack of self-awareness in the reader of his or her own necessary participation in literary texts, and that they are an "attack on the näivete of the passive uninvolved reader" (Oppenheim, 1980: 158). The "second person" narrative pronoun, "in forcing the reader to move with Delmont through a continuous present (which is paradoxically perceived through the fragmentation of time), Butor is obliging the reader to be aware of his own experience" (Oppenheim, 1980: 158). The suggestion that what emerges from this intersubjectivity is a new unity of self is made quite explicit by Oppenheim. In spite of the multiple intersubjective variations

of the author-character-reader relationship constituted by Butor's work . . . the intersubjective activity is consistently supportive of the developing ego-cogito and self-awareness of the "sujet parlant" [the speaking, knowledgeable subject]. . . . Delmont's voyage . . . leads to the awareness of consciousness (which results in the writing of the book) and the awareness of the terms of his existence (the relation between illusion and reality). . . . Delmont's journey, in other words, is a journey toward himself. (Oppenheim, 1980: 160)

The intersubjective relation between author, character and reader, Oppenheim claims, must be recognised as providing support for the movement toward oneself (Oppenheim, 1980: 160). "It must be understood, therefore, that Butor's novel does not depict a pathological movement of ego. The increase in self-awareness, the condition of the 'sujet parlant,' is achieved through the intersubjective activity of author, character and reader" (Oppenheim, 1980: 160-61). If the "modification" is not an "egocentric movement away from 'autrui' [the other], which would lead us to interpret Butor's novel as a psychological novel" (Oppenheim, 1980: 161), it nonetheless remains a centred self. Oppenheim argues that Butor's narration should not be characterised as either subjective (for its extreme internalisation of narrative perspective) or objective (for its minutia and density of objectifying detail), though both of these might be found to be illustrated in the opening line of the novel (see page 131 above). Rather, it ought to be characterised:

as expressive of the notion of presence, the primordial condition of being "present to." . . . The experience of "modification" is related [narrated] by Butor in such a way as to bring the reader into contact with reality rather than separate him from it as does descriptive language used for the purpose of representation. Rather than designating a reality outside of the experience of the novel, the "modification" reawakens in the reader what Heidegger refers to as "l'essence de l'ek-sistence qui est existentiale-extatique à partir de l'essence de la vèritè de l'être" ["the essence of existence . . . that springs from the essence of the truth of being"]. (Oppenheim, 1980: 165)

Oppenheim's proposition that the reader of La Modification spontaneously becomes the protagonist, constituting "reality" through Butor's projection of "intentional experience," therefore goes far beyond traditional explanations of reader identification and subject relations.

As I have suggested, however, the notion of "intentionalising consciousness" necessarily privileges the self as the centre of the system of knowing. "Intention" is always described as having its origin in the self. As has been bluntly observed by Eagleton, "if phenomenology secured a knowable world with one hand, it established the centrality of the human subject with the other" (Eagleton, 1983: 58):

The world is what I posit or "intend:" it is to be grasped in relation to me, as a correlate of my consciousness, and that consciousness is not just fallibly empirical but transcendental. . . . [T]he course of European history from the late nineteenth century onwards appeared to cast grave doubt on the traditional presumption that "man" was in control of his destiny, that he was any longer the creative centre of his world. Phenomenology, in reaction, restored the transcendental subject to its rightful throne. The subject was to be seen as the source and origin of all meaning. . . . (Eagleton, 1983: 58)

For Eagleton, phenomenology sheets home the origin of knowledge and the text to a discrete and self-identical "intentionalising consciousness." Oppenheim's own brief reference above to the "crisis" in philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century is revealing of the status awarded this ideal, originary subject within phenomenology. At other moments, she is much more explicit about its position at the centre of knowledge. "[I]t is from the ek-static projection of the self into the world that reality receives its meaning and it is precisely through this ek-static projection of "Dasein" [Being-in-the-world], the movement of the intentionalising consciousness, that existence reveals itself . . . " (Oppenheim, 1980: 35). Phenomenology and Oppenheim's practice of it within literary analysis therefore powerfully (re)institutes an ideal, originary "sujet parlant" [speaking subject] at the centre of knowing and at the centre of the experience of Being-in-the-world. This ideal subject (rather than Descartes's crucial separation of self and world) is the defining feature of Cartesianism as I describe it, and so Oppenheim's Husserlian phenomenology, too, needs to be recognised as articulating at its centre a deeply inculcated Cartesian fantasy.

3. Oscillating Intersubjectivity and Point of View

Darlene Hantzis, like Oppenheim, conceives of the "second-person" narrative pronoun as having the potential of constituting for the reader the experience of an intersubjective space; and like Oppenheim, Hantzis borrows a key image - a spatialising image of intersubjectivity as an oscillationfrom Léon Roudiez. The "second person," Roudiez writes, "allows for an ambiguous author-character relationship, with the reader oscillating between identification with the author and character" (cited in Oppenheim, 1980: 33; cited in Hantzis, 1992: 68). While the context of Oppenheim's notion of intersubjectivity is rooted in phenomenological philosophy and methodology and in a commitment to the phenomenological dissolution of the schism between subject and object, the context of Hantzis's argument is the literary field of point of view theory and, after Hopkins and Perkins's lead, what she names "dramatic analysis." 81 Dramatic analysis, writes Hantzis, is an analytical methodology contending that "narrative constructs a communicative situation in which someone speaks a specific discourse in a specific time and space in a specific textual world to one or more persons" (Hantzis, 1992: 38). It involves

an identification of who is speaking to whom, when and where, about what and why. Delineating these elements specifies the individual components of narrator, narratee, character, reader, the language that constructs them as well as their inter-relationships. (Hantzis, 1992: 39)

Hantzis's discussion sets out to isolate and describe a singular and exclusive object, "second-person point of view proper," which might be inserted into the practice of point of view criticism. Having constituted the "second person" as a term within a triumvirate of categories of points of view (i.e., of "first," "third," and "second person"), however, Hantzis subsequently argues that the "second person" is in fact radically different from its two companions. Her intention is not to critique or retheorise literary point of view per se so much as extend its analytical categories, and so her arguments continue to draw authority from the tradition of point of view criticism and from its established specular, spatial and anthropomorphic tropesthat is, from its metaphors of "looking," "standpoint," "person," and so on. Her conception of point of view, however, necessarily looks beyond what she identifies as "traditional" notions of point of view exemplified by the writings of Lubbock (1957) and James (1934) in the 1920s and 1930s, and later Friedman in the 1950s. The traditional approach, she writes, "equate[s] point of view with the perspective of the angle of vision from which the story is told," and consequently firmly locates the point of view "in the narrator or narrating voice" (Hantzis, 1992: 6). She broadly models her notion of point of view on Susan Sniader Lanser's as presented in The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction (1981), which "yields a conception of point of view as a combination of technique and ideology" in which the narrator "does not contain point of view, but participates in the production of point of view within the text" (Hantzis, 1992: 18). Like Lanser, Hantzis quite properly moves to separate narrative "person" from point of view so as to identify these as two distinct but closely related elements of narrative textuality, subsequently repeating Lanser's remark that "[Robert] Scholes and [Robert] Kellogg are not overstating . . . when they claim that point of view controls 'the reader's impression of everything'" (cited in Hantzis, 1992: 18). Lanser points out that many of the difficulties criticism faces in studying point of view stem from the nature of the concept itself.

Unlike such textual elements as character, plot, or imagery, point of view is essentially a relationship rather than a concrete entity. As it tends to evade stabilisation into the language of "things," it has been difficult to grasp and codify. Nor is point of view in narrative simply a question of a single, unchanging relationship between two static elements. If we understand point of view to concern the relations between narrating subjects and the literary system which is the text-in-context, then we confront a complex network of interactions between author, narrator(s), characters, and audiences both real and implied. (Lanser, 1981: 13)

A narrative's point of view is thus to be taken as more than just revealing the narrating persona's "angle of vision," diegetic involvement, veracity, and so on, to the reader. As "content," writes Lanser,

point of view communicates attitudes between personae - author, narrator, narratee, characters - a set of responses to a represented world, a representation that is itself an ideological construct. As aesthetic method, point of view reflects a system of artistic and literary conventions through which the culture permits the translation of social reality to artistic text. At a still deeper level, point of view has powerful potential for structuring discourse either to evade or to obscure censorship, that is, to respond to the conscious and unconscious effects of ideology on the production of consciousness and on its aesthetic verbalisation.

As a correlative of the rhetorical context between writer and reader, point of view is a structural manifestation not only of aesthetic ideology but of the ideology of literary production itself. (Lanser, 1981: 101)

One point that Hantzis takes from this is that point of view needs to be understood as being inscribed into the narrative's discourse at multiple levels, not merely at the level of the narrator's expressions. And crucially, it needs to be understood as instrumental in framing the reader's approach to the narrative and to the narrative voice itself. This framing might be understood not only as providing a range of interpretive contexts for the reader (as in determining "who the speaker is, what role s/he plays," and so on), but also in terms of the role played by point of view in constituting the reading subject him- or herself, because, as Lanser insists, "[a] full poetics of point of view in narrative will integrate not only the 'content' of textual ideology, but an awareness of point of view as ideological process" (Lanser, 1981: 102). Lanser's argument that point of view is "a complex network of interactions between author, narrator(s), characters, and audiences both real and implied" (Lanser, 1981: 13), moreover, provides Hantzis with a valuable ground for pursuing the notion that "second-person" narrative is productive of an intersubjectivity, because it more ably accounts for the possibility of the emergence of intersubjectivity than do traditional, narrator-controlled conceptions of point of view. Like Lanser, then, Hantzis proposes that if the figure of the narrator is to be taken as one of the principal factors in constituting a text's point of view, it cannot be taken as either identical with nor exclusively determining of the text's point of view. She writes, however, that given her focus on "who is speaking," her discussion necessarily assumes "the presence of a narrator in every narrative text" (Hantzis, 1992: 43), and that this narrator will always be "the consciousness, or persona, that produces the experience of the text by speaking it" (Hantzis, 1992: 43). Calling on the authority of "Wayne Booth and others," she proposes that the reader necessarily assumes an origin for the narrative text and inevitably construes this origin as a narrator (Hantzis, 1992: 43). It is to be assumed, of course, that Hantzis would allow that texts can have multiple (successive) narrators, but she would insist that each is understood as the origin of that passage of narrative discourse. Although she nowhere addresses this as a potential problem, it is also to be supposed that her thesis allows for so-called "narrator-less" texts such as Nicholson Baker's novel Vox (1992), which stands as close as is practicable to the "negative pole of narrator-presence[,] the pole of 'pure' mimesis" (Chatman, 1978: 166). Hantzis would find in these, yet, some principle of organisation, a demure narrator such as the agent common sense assures us must have transcribed and punctuated Vox's telephone conversation and who intrudes minimally to utter verbs of speech, such as "he said," to observe pauses and noises, as "There was a click," and finally to announce the end of the novel: "They hung up."

The problem of the nature of the narrator is one that I will return to below, but for the moment I would suggest that an interim step needs to be inserted between Hantzis's notions of origin and narrator so as to clarify the practice of reading being described. Within prevailing practices of reading, readers do indeed habitually assume the existence of an origin for the text's narrative discourse, because, commonsensically, every utterance must have a speaker, even where the utterance is explicitly authorised by an institution rather than an individual. Even Chatman's formulation of the "narrator-less" text falls finally to this position.

The teller, the transmitting source, is best accounted for, I think, as a spectrum of possibilities, going from narrators who are least audible to those who are most so. The label affixed to the negative pole of narratorhood is less important than its reality in the spectrum. I say "nonnarrated:" the reader may prefer "minimally narrated". . . . (Emphasis added, Chatman, 1978: 146-47)

This assumption also underpins Hantzis's notion of "dramatic analysis," deployed to account for "the voice that says you" (Hantzis, 1992: 47). But if it is true that readers tend to apprehend narrative discourse as having an origin, they will also ordinarily construe this origin as possessing a unity of identity, and do so under the self-assured presumption that such a unity will be found. In order to "recognise" and make sense of a text's (putative) origin, readers will endeavour, consciously or unconsciously, to understand it as a congruence of expressed "beliefs, attitudes, behaviours, desires, and interests" and it is this unity that is identified as expressing an identity, the identity of the narrator. It is the very nature of conventional, readerly narrative fiction that such unities will be in evidence. It is equally the case, however, that individual readers will frequently find quite different principles of unity, responding to the question, "who is the narrator," with very different summaries of "nature" and "personality." Lanser herself points out that in the same way that character can be construed/inferred from a succession of statements, so too is the narrator inferred from a succession of statements. 82 Depending on the types of information and statements the reader privileges, on the way in which the reader reacts to genre signs and to the text's inscription of ideology, on the reader's own knowledges and competencies, and so on, any one text may offer a number of plausible (and any number of implausible) unities or "origins." Thus if Chatman must insist that "[t]he narrator's presence derives from the audience's sense of some demonstrable communication," it should also be said that the audiences' interpretation of that instance of communication, in all its facets, can be greatly varied (Chatman, 1978: 147).

On the face of it, this is not necessarily at odds with Hantzis's or Lanser's description of the reading process, but clarifying their description helps reveal an alternative position. Where Lanser and Hantzis will continue to insist that this unity of identity is to be thought of transparently in terms of a persona - as an origin with "person-ality," however thoroughly elided that "person-ality" may be in the material of the narrative - I will insist that there is in fact no single "origin" as such. Nor is there a set of specific possible successive or simultaneous origins that may be uncovered by interpretation. Rather, so as to satisfy the expectations of the vraisemblable and so that we may find in narrative texts images we imagine to be ourselves, the material of the narrative provides merely the appearance of an origin.

For Hantzis, the reader's experience of "second person" intersubjectivity is produced principally through a feature I have already addressed a number of times: the undecidability of the identity of, firstly, who utters the "you," and secondly, who is addressed or referred to by the "you." This undecidability has a particular and crucial character within "second-person" point of view proper. The identities of speaker and of spoken-to are always shifting, always changing within a complex of mutually authorising, always fading selves. Recalling Hantzis's insistence on "the presence of a narrator in any narrative text" as the persona "that produces the experience of the text by speaking it," this oscillation produces an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading "first-" and "third-person" point of view texts. Traditional concepts of narrative subjectivity and authority figure narrative agents, especially the narrator, as stable and self-identical - and therefore as providing readers with stable, distinct modes and positions of subjectivity to identify with. The experience of reading conventional "first-" and "third-person" point of view texts therefore involves the experience of identifying and identifying with stable, authoritative identities. In saying "I," it is argued, the "first-person" narrator "confers subject status upon her/himself" (Hantzis, 1992: 74). Likewise, the "third-person" narrator

confers subject status on him/herself by speaking self-ish knowledge of others. . . . [T]he "s/he" of a third person point of view text and the implied "you" in a first person point of view text exists at the behest of the narrator to enable the narrator to be fully constituted as a subject. (Hantzis, 1992: 74)

The character who says "I" within "third-person" narrative, moreover, merely articulates and affirms the subject-status already accorded him or her by the narrator, one "knowing" subject addressing another, similar "knowing" subject, one as the origin and anchor of knowledge, the other as its recipient and guarantor (Chambers, 1989b: 36).

Hantzis's claim is that "second-person" point of view proper directly challenges the concept of subjectivity and narrative authority that underwrites "first" and "third-person" points of view. The experience of reading "second-person" point of view proper is different because the "second person's" oscillation hinders the production of a single, privileged subjectivity able to guarantee its own authority or the value of its knowledge (133). Hantzis writes:

Traditionally, the authority of the text is vested in a subject. The multiple subjectivity in second person texts resists the impulse to locate a single authorised textual voice, or indeed, textual vision. . . . Traditionally constituted texts offer an authorised narrator who authorises other subjects and the experience of the text. The narrator in these texts is granted subjective priority and, hence, privilege over other subjects. Second person point of view foregrounds the relational nature of point of view. Intersubjectivity refuses the assignment of subject priority and privilege. (Hantzis, 1992: 5)

Instead, proposes Hantzis, "[b]y surrendering a false claim to individual identity, the participants moment by moment function as subject guarantors for each other" taking it in turns, as it were, to be the other (Hantzis, 1992: 75). Conceived thus, "second-person" intersubjectivity implies

the possibility of a heterogeneous "discourse of others" in which subjectivity does not reside in the individual "I," but is a product of the relationship of multiple subjects housed in the "you." [Marianne] Hirsch articulates this . . . when she states that reading second person texts involves "a radical reorientation of ourselves and our place in the world: the reading process reveals a new vision of that world even while recognising our dependence on old habits." (Hantzis, 1992: 133-34) 83

As well as the multiplicity of the discourse of others, and as integral to this point of view's radical challenge to the authorised, originary subject, Hantzis also insists that "second-person" proper typically invokes a "multiple reality," the narrative discourse becoming subject to various forms of complication, amplification, repetition, alteration, opposition and so on (Hantzis, 1992: 114). Both elements - the "discourse of others" and "multiple reality" - are exemplified for Hantzis by Margaret Gibson's story "Leaving" (1978), a rumination from the point of view (as it were) of "the other woman" after the affair has ended.

In the fantasy of the man returning, the man always returns, and there is pleasure. There is no recrimination or indifference, no struggle. There is laughter. There is trust. There is generosity. In the fantasy of the man returning, you open the door of your apartment and there he is. He doesn't have a bouquet of roses, but sooner than you think, afterwards in bed, you realise you are the roses. Or you are in the kitchen making a sandwich for dinner and, in the fantasy of the man returning, he comes quietly out of the icebox or the broom close - the has been there all along - and without you hearing a footstep or his breathing, he is behind you, around you, his hands on your breasts.

This is your fantasy because you grew up with the story of the man returning, and there were differences. They thought you would be eager to see him. But when the man in the brown uniform, back from Britain or Germany and the war, opened the door, you stood behind your mother and would not go to him. . . .

And yours is the fantasy of the man returning because you are unwilling to admit that you are the one who leaves. (Gibson, 1978: 90)

Like Morse's "A Journey" (1988), "Leaving" has a highly generalised quality but reveals itself in the specificities that slowly accrue as one person's unique experience, the text itself emerging in some measure as an aspect of the avoidance of that experience. But more than this, as "second-person" proper, writes Hantzis, Gibson's story "doesn't give voice to an individual other woman" as a "first-" or "third-person" text would, but speaks with the multiple voice/s of potential/actual/symbolic other women (Hantzis, 1992: 113). Whereas "first-" and "third-person" narrators "would inevitably suggest a preferred reality" indeed, would rarely acknowledge so much as the possibility of alternatives - a "second-person" narration would remain open to difference, re-authorising the reality of the other woman/women moment by moment within its oscillation across the "you's" various subjects (Hantzis, 1992: 117). The narrator of "Leaving" declares: "You want him to leave quickly. You want him never to leave" (Gibson, 1978: 93). Such statements are no longer to be taken as contradictory; neither replaces, supervenes on or dominates the other. Rather, different realities, and more abstractly, difference itself, is incorporated within the intersubjectivity of "second-person" proper.

Again, I will flag my intention of problematising the notion of intersubjectivity in my final chapter, but for the moment will observe that the formulation Hantzis gives here opens directly onto the critique I will pursue there. To paraphrase Diane Elam, Hantzis's terms operate not as a deconstruction so much as a reconfiguration of conventional notions of the subject (Elam, 1994: 126 n.26). Manifestly, one of the "old habits" both Hirsch and Hantzis regard readers to be dependent upon is the conventional insistence of narrative entities to retain a sense of separateness, some sense of discrete identity and unity. This new awareness of the nature and function of "I" does not challenge the traditional notion and function of narrative authority Hantzis describes as operating in relation to "first-" and "third-person" points of view, but constitutes a challenge only in so far as it requires additions to what had been assumed to be a closed system of authority.

"Second-person" point of view proper, she writes, is constituted "when the narrator, character, narratee, and, consequently, the reader and author are simultaneously constituted in the pronoun 'you'" (Hantzis, 1992: 79). Hantzis develops Oppenheim's suggestion that part of the complexity of the "second person" is that it "draws the reader in but also pushes him outwards" (Hantzis, 1992: 69), arguing that the reader "continually places her/himself in and continually displaces her/himself from the 'you' while simultaneously placing and displacing others in and from the 'you'" (Hantzis, 1992: 69). Hantzis is speaking about a number of instances of identification here, each realised as a cycle of identification-displacement, and each a necessary constituent of the "second-person" point of view proper. In the process of identifying the "second-person" pronoun as referring deictically to him or herself as a metafictional or mesofictional addressee, a character, the narrator, and even the author, the reader binds him or herself into an intersubjective "collusion between subject positions" (Hantzis, 1992: 72). The surrender of identity, Hantzis argues, also applies to the reading subject because the reader's own status as a subject becomes integral to this point of view. She writes that the "second-person" point of view's process of identification and displacement "compels two significant responses: self/knowledge is challenged and difference is incorporated. The differentiation that allows displacement," she claims, "requires self knowledge. One differentiates oneself from another through investigation of self knowledge. Thus, second person point of view texts involve the reader in a continuous, intimate intrapersonal relationship" (Hantzis, 1992: 95). Once the "second-person" point of view's process of identification has been put in train, and as long as conventional narrative authority does not intervene, Hantzis insists, "the continuous, instantaneous nature of the process inscribes . . . the impossibility of a reader ever being wholly displaced from the 'you' to which s/he initially commits" (Hantzis, 1992: 70). And as a consequence of this process of identification, argues Hantzis, the engaged reader can participate not only in the certainties of identity and knowledge guaranteed by the stable subject typical of first- and third-person points of view, but can also experience the destabilising intersubjectivity of second-person point of view. Hantzis writes:

[The] act of reading allows individuals to "experience" the experience in a text. Oppenheim asserts that second person, in particular, enacts a phenomenological dimension in which to read really is to experience. Here, Oppenheim alludes to the intersubjectivity of second person texts in which the experiences are simultaneously attributed to all of the individuals housed in the multiple subject "you." (Hantzis, 1992: 95)

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