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

1. Almost You

In this chapter I will rehearse and illustrate Hantzis's notion of "second-person" point of view proper by giving a reading of Daniel Gunn's novel Almost You (1994). This text forcefully illustrates the "second person's" slide across the addressee model's points of reference. Indeed, read in terms of Hantzis's definitions, and somewhat against her dictum that the emergence of "first-" or "third-person" narration within a narrative-"you" text will dispel the "second-person" point of view, Almost You appears to offer an example of the co-presence of "third-" with "second-person" narrative utterances in which the "third-person" strand seems to be successfully incorporated back into the "second-person" point of view's Protean oscillations.

My reading of Almost You in this chapter, however, is to be a straw reading - not a false reading, but one whose principal assumptions and conclusions I will argue against in my final chapter. A reading of Almost You in terms of "second-person" intersubjectivity does in fact produce a cogent and convincing explanation of the peculiar force this text carries. All of the features Hantzis ascribes to the "second-person" point of view proper, all expressible in terms of multiplicity, are present: multiplicity of "second-person" referentiality; deep ambiguity and multiplicity of the origin of the narration; a multiplicity of voice/s; and a multiplicity of (diegetic) realities, appearing not only as "amplification, alteration, opposition, complication and repetition" (Hantzis, 1992: 114), but as a clouding of the divide between "fact" and "fiction." With these multiplicities comes a loss of narrative authority - the loss of a knowing subject's authoritative control over the story's discourse - and the loss of the experience of identifying with the centred subject. My own reading agrees that these multiplicities and their relation to the "second person" can radicalise the reader's experience of subjectivity in reading the text. The notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity as a point of view, though, I argue, subtly and inescapably reasserts the authority of Cartesianism's "I" and its authoritative modes of subjectivity. This first reading of Almost You will therefore be concluded in this chapter by a discussion of Keats's notion of negative capability as discussed in McHale's "I Used to Know What These Words Mean" (1985), and answered more comprehensively in the following chapter by a second reading of Almost You rooted in poststructural thought.

Gunn's novel is composed of three narrative strands, each narrated ostensibly in the same voice, the first two constituting narrative-"you," the third presenting itself more conventionally as "third-person" narration. The first is a frame narrative which deals with the phenomenological present of the "you"-protagonist (who is otherwise unnamed throughout the text), narrated principally in what Genette calls simultaneous narration, narration in the present tense contemporaneous with the action (Genette, 1980: 217). 89 The second strand, narrated in the past tense, is this character's life story spanning the years from before his fifth birthday to the immediate past. And the third, also in the past tense (until the final moments of the novel) is a fable-like tale that introduces a second protagonist.90 The explicit narratee of all three strands, though, is the "you"-protagonist, each strand directly addressed to him to cast him sometimes as a participant in an implied dialogue, at other times as the recipient of story-telling. This "dialogue," however, is of a particular nature. Proceeding as paraphrase, as reported speech, the "you"-protagonist's illocutions always take the grammatical form of "you said" rather than "I said." The protagonist never speaks - is never permitted to speak - in his own right, and never utters a self-referential "I." What passes between the narrator and narratee may in fact be more akin to ventriloquism than dialogue, but the novel's sense of dialogic direct address is forceful nonetheless, and is instituted from the very first lines: "Listen: You are somehow still alive, however hard this is for you to believe. Object: Alive is not the word" (Gunn, 1994: 1).

The addressee, a moderately successful translator of literary texts experiencing the translator's equivalent of writer's block, is in the throes of a nervous breakdown, its roots, it seems, in Oedipal trauma. The catalyst for this breakdown is the discovery "during the year you spent in Paris researching for your translation of Giono" (6) of two novels by Georges Perec. The first is W ou le souvenir d'enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood], in which the narrator (like the "you"-protagonist himself) claims to have no memories of childhood (Gunn, 1994: 6). The second is Un homme qui dort [The Sleeping Man], "the Perec work telling of a man who tries to achieve a state of total indifference and blankness" (7). Un homme qui dort proves to be a second-person novel impossible to translate "faithfully" (certainly in the mind of the "you"-protagonist) precisely because the modalities of Perec's French "second-person" pronouns are not expressed by the lone "second-person" pronoun current in the English language.

How, you whined, could your translation be faithful when such a key element - the key element - was missing in the language you were targeting.

You hid behind that lacuna, hid behind it and at the same time inhabited it. (Gunn, 1994: 16)

Like Perec's "sleeping man," Gunn's protagonist, too, tries to put himself under erasure, tries to find "no-here." But W ou le souvenir d'enfance and Un homme qui dort do not in fact narrate the "you"-protagonist's life as a child and as he is now, in spite of his claim that they do so more closely than he ever could. They narrate, rather, the childhood and present with which he identifies: they represent the amnesia and erasure to which he aspires. "You were sometimes asked, in the days of your activity, why you never wrote in your own person. Translation, only translation, your name tucked away on the inside pages. You gave your spiel about how you had no childhood memories, no story, let alone a person" (Gunn, 1994: 26). Albeit charged with self-ironising wit, the claim to have "no person" becomes more than a barely veiled comment on his own self-worth and indifferent personality. What the reader might infer as being in some measure deficient or lacking within the life of the "you"-protagonist is the crucial support for the entity's experience of centred, stable subjectivity, that is, the support of stable "person-ality." However this might reflect on his loss of identity, on his hope that he will simply vanish from the world, the element that is saliently absent from his own speech (even from the ventriloquistic speech put in his mouth) is the self-referential "first-person" utterance, the statement of the type "I am" by which he might constitute himself as an autonomous speaking subject. He does, however, have a "past," a story, and far from being under erasure, the entire text speaks of the insistence of that story. Having withdrawn agoraphobic-like from friends and family to isolate himself in a near-derelict terrace in the poor quarter of an unnamed town, he is made to listen to his own life story being told back to him, and he is made to listen to an apparently fictional, fable-like tale about a simple-minded amnesiac named Himmel who comes suddenly awake in a Parisian garret and journeys together with a found lamb in vague search of a person who may be named Hermea, arriving at the door of the "you"-protagonist's own derelict terrace hideaway.

The fact that the third strand is in "third-person" narrative should immediately disrupt the intersubjectivity of "second-person" point of view proper for the way such conventional narrative discourse must ground the reader in the familiar experience of authoritative subjectivity and discrete identity. The modes of subjectivity offered by this third strand, however, are far from unambiguous. The narrator's identity and status as hetero- or homodiegetic, extra- or intradiegetic, remains undecidable, undercutting that authority and certainly undercutting the status of his knowledge. In his turn, without memory, without past, with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the world and his own circumstances, and owning a limited vocabulary, Himmel is described as an entity whose subjectivity is marginal indeed. What might be said is that he is an entity caught in the process of becoming a subject, "inventing an entire life for himself" (Gunn, 1994: 38).

It is significant in this respect, too, that Himmel's strand alternates freely with the first and second strands, the text abruptly and unsystematically alternating modes of "second-person" narrative and very conventional "third-person" narrative. Other texts that alternate "person," such as Farah's Maps (1986) and Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruze (1966), tend to sustain a single mode over longer passages and maintain systematic patterns of alternation from which inferences may be drawn regarding the relationship between a given narrative "person" and a particular level of a protagonist's consciousness. Almost You exploits no such systemic pattern - and indeed, exploits its lack, leaping between narrative strands seemingly arbitrarily. The fixity of identity assumed for Himmel's story for its "third-person" status does not disrupt the experience of intersubjectivity assumed for the "you"-protagonist's story. Rather, Himmel's story has its own ground of certainty thoroughly undermined.

Who utters these three strands and provides the frequently astringent commentary, however, is left deeply ambiguous, ensuring that the nature of the address becomes equally uncertain. These two ambiguities become all the more of an issue for the vigour of the "second person's" vocative function. The reader is faced with the crucial riddle of whether this ambiguous narrator's explicit and direct address to "you" and instructions to "listen," "look," "know," and so on, expose a narrator speaking to himself, even as an alter ego, or a narrator speaking to a discrete character, as the voice of an acerbic, belittling god. This is as it needs to be for "second-person" intersubjectivity to arise, and this deep ambiguity will be the focus of my reading.

What, then, is the reader to make of the relationship between the "you" and the narrator? The narrator of Almost You can be read as a deeply disturbed intra-homodiegetic narrator recounting his own story as a pathological waking dream. He can also be read as a deeply disturbing extra-heterodiegetic narrator forcing the distressed "you"-protagonist to examine his own life and harassing him with a mad tale about an amnesiac being led from France to Scotland by a juvenile female sheep (an almost-ewe!), the narrator turning the "you"-protagonist into some sort of ventriloquist's dummy besides as he is ordered to ask, think, and even shout out against the narration. Finally, neither reading is fully convincing, the narration is always in excess of either interpretation. Moreover, as much as we want to fix the identities in place, to do so might in fact be to work against the narrative's own strategies - and might be, dare it be said, to borrow McHale's subtext about criticism on Gravity's Rainbow, untrue to the text, because it would also appear to be the case that a great deal of the tension developed within the novel arises expressly from this undecidability of interpretation. If the unsettling force of Almost You does arise largely from this undecidability of the source of the utterance, then the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity as a point of view appears particularly applicable.

The reader hoping to participate in this intersubjective experience of reading and the reader seeking the critical certitude of an authoritative reading experience will both turn to the problem of who utters the narration. That the narrator should have such a strident voice is not immediately contrary to the notion of "second-person" point of view proper: intersubjectivity might abhor all "I"s, but narrators, characters, narratees/readers and authors, Hantzis argues, are nonetheless necessarily "subjectively present." Their presence within the circle of oscillation is fundamental to the institution of multiple subjectivity (Hantzis, 1992: 79). If Almost You is to participate in the intersubjectivity of "second-person" point of view, however, it must resist the certitude of totalising interpretations. To that end, the reader must test that the narrator of Almost You can be read as homodiegetic and heterodiegetic. The point, moreover, would be that the narration must invite the possibility of identity between the narrator and the "you" as well as dispel it.

2. The Narrator as Homodiegetic

An immediate problem arises when exploring the homodiegetic dimension of the narrator, in that two possible interpretations are available in which the "you" in some way masks the "I." The narrator may be autodiegetic, self-consciously talking to himself and telling himself stories, so that the narrator-narratee relation is simply one of identity or near identity, as in Kocan's The Treatment (1980); or the relation between the narrator and the "you"-protagonist may be that of "I" and "other I," of ego and alter ego - or better yet, of ego and superego, given the explicitly Freudian (Oedipal) subtext - so that the narrator-narratee relation is one of contiguity, as in Wolf's Patterns of Childhood (1990). This second case is homodiegetic, too, because the "you" and the narrator are not yet identical, but are closely allied and would be seen as having their basis in the same entity. The degree of congruence or divergence of consciousness/identity between the narrator and the "you," of course, is a crucial matter for interpretation in "second-person" texts. As Genette insists, the homodiegetic narrator's presence is highly variable, ranging the full continuum from fully intradiegetic to fully extradiegetic. In "second-person" point of view proper, identity and difference should oscillate more or less freely, in such a way that sometimes the narrator appears to be the "you," and sometimes seems not to be so.

If the narration were to be judged autodiegetic, the reader would expect congruence between the state of consciousness implicit in the narrator's speech and the state of consciousness displayed by the "you"-character. The present tense modality of the frame narrative would strengthen this expectation. As in Bright Lights, Big City, divergence of consciousness of the "I" speaking and the "I" spoken about is possible, of course, but only so much as might be allowed by notions of ironic comment, self-deprecation and self-parody, even self-delusion (requiring some measure of ironic reading on behalf of the reader), and so on. Certainly, many passages within the novel can be read precisely as a narrator speaking about his own life with a certain amount of self-knowledge and, with it, self-disgust.

Know: You have wished to speak and hear a single story. Know also: Against this story you have stitched up your lips and sealed your ears with beeswax. [ . . . ]

Translation was a means for you to speak and not speak, to hear and not hear. You were harnessed to the ship, and lashed to the mast, but with elastic thongs. . . . And yet when you read and reread the original, you could imagine that one day indeed you would speak, one day would hear, that day on which you would unstitch your lips and melt the beeswax in your ears. (54)

This version of the novel in some measure becomes a game of reluctant but driven self-revelation. In other places, however, the divergence between the narrator's and the "you"-protagonist's apparent consciousness is much more pronounced.

You lie motionless as a possum, only the eyelids fluttering on your nervous pink eyes. And when this stillness becomes unbearable, you jump up, as if the threat were removed, and dash again, like a headless chicken this time, from room to room. Repeating to yourself as you do so: right then left, left then right; trying to work up a rhythm, to put the words to the remnants of a pop tune rattling round your head.

Then, breathless, you lie supine again, your motionlessness not hiding the frenetic inner activity necessary to ward off the invasion of anxiety. Frenetic and unsuccessful. . . . (115)

The character here would seem to lack the presence of mind to narrate this passage - certainly not as autodiegetic simultaneous narration. Likewise, the state of mind implicit in the parenthetical, authorial intrusion within the novel's final paragraph seems far removed from the character's state of distress at that moment.

Think now: you are somehow still alive, even if alive is not quite the word. In the afterlife. Time, you must admit, has not been killed.

Think now: You are not God, nor Gott. You, untranslated.

Claim: Never ending because never beginning; never beginning because never ending. (Biblical ring to this, very quaint!) Know: Only, if possible, interrupted. Claim: Impossibly. Listen now: Hector knocking at your door. (135-36)

If the reader insists on reading the "you" strictly as a dissembling "first-person" narrator, insisting that he is autodiegetic, the reader must also assume that the narrator is being ingenuous in the ironies he brings to the frame narrative and to his self-characterisation, describing himself as much less self-aware, capable and knowledgeable than he is as narrator.

It quickly becomes clear that the narrator knows all he needs to know about the "you"-protagonist to satisfy the needs of storytelling. But the question is raised: does he know more? Notwithstanding the omniscience he claims over Himmel's story, and the royal shadow of authority this casts over the other two strands, the narrator in fact reveals no more than the protagonist himself might say and know if candidly honest with himself and in self-possession of his own memory. The narrator professes no knowledge of what peripheral characters - family members, partners, colleagues - within the first two narrative strands might think, say or do out of sight and earshot of the "you"-protagonist, and indeed, reveals in places that the direct source of at least some of his knowledge is the "you"-protagonist. Speaking about the "you"-protagonist's father's workshop, for instance, the narrator is clearly led in his description of how the tool peg-board was given its shadows by the "you's" own conclusions. "Into an enormous piece of hardboard perforated with thousands of regularly spaced holes he had inserted hundreds of curly hooks, and upon these he had hung his tools, then (you presume) drawn lines round them, removing the tools thereafter and stencilling in their shapes in matt black paint" (32). Indeed, the narrator at one point seems at pains to mask appearing to know no more than the "you"-protagonist even while sardonically declaring it patently evident. "Know (what should be obvious): The passage of Himmel and the almost-ewe through the countryside of England is not for your ears; you who never touched foot in that land except on your way through it to and from the Continent. . . ." (90). The device being put in play to enable the "you's" story to be told might therefore be seen as similar to the strategy exercised by the narrator of Patterns of Childhood - a conceit of pretending, for whatever symbolic, thematic or rhetorical gain to the narration, to be "other" than the person whose story you are telling. In Patterns of Childhood, the conceit is explicitly spelt out, presented as the narrator's conscious act effectively shutting down the possibility of ambiguity and oscillation of narrating identity. In spite of the manifest congruity of the narrator's and the protagonist's range of knowledge, on the other hand, Almost You offers no conclusive evidence that such a game of conscious obfuscation is in play.

3. The place of the Other "I"

The conceit might yet, though, be read as unconscious, one side of the protagonist's self standing beyond voluntary control dressing down another side. Almost You's narrator himself invites such a reading:

Ask: Why is it that you are being given suggestions, instructions, even orders-and by whom? How is it that you have no choice but to hear and obey? Why do the fingers in your ears not block them out, even when reinforced by the loud humming in which you intermittently indulge? (24)

So, even jamming his fingers into his ears won't silence the narrator's voice? "Quiet! Against the wall with you, head squeezed between your knees, tongue pinched between your teeth! Obey!" (126). It must be coming from inside his own head! And it would be coming independently of his conscious thoughts. Established conclusively, this too would close down the oscillations necessary to "second-person" point of view proper.

The finality of this conclusion, however, is fleeting - as ephemeral, indeed, as "second-person" point of view itself. These "suggestions, instructions and orders" remain deeply anomalous. They are a forceful mark of the implied dialogue that passes between the narrator and the "you"-protagonist, but this exchange is characterised by a differential in power and status that becomes all the more striking - and all the more oppressive - as the narration progresses. This is not yet incongruous with an interpretation of the narratee-narrator relationship as "I"-"other I," as long as the critic/reader can construct a reason for this differential. If plugging the "you"-protagonist's ears does not stop the hectoring, story-telling voice, then perhaps the reader should take the narrative discourse as a madman's internal dialogue - certainly the notion must be explored.

The textual support for such a reading is provided by Almost You's Freudian subtext, the "I"-"other I" relationship unfolding around an Oedipal theme. Gunn's use of the Freudian Oedipal dynamic is perfectly true to the modele - specially as Freud constructed it earlier in his career in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1977) 91 - and to the model's case studies. To an extent, the novel even reads like a text-book fictionalisation of a classically formed pathology. The explicit self-consciousness and literariness of Gunn's Oedipal drama, however, begs reiteration of Barbara Creed's warning to earnest audiences of another self-consciously Freudian text, David Lynch's film Blue Velvet. The same grave cautions apply. Like Blue Velvet, Almost You "threatens to make interpretation redundant, so openly does it flaunt its Freudian themes and narrative. . . . The narrative is liberally dotted with Freudian signposts, often humorously treated . . . [which] suggests a deliberate trap for the earnest or unwary theorist" (Creed, 1988: 95). Lesley Stern, too, argues that the type of analysis such a text invites might best be termed "compulsive analysing," which she defines as "a resistance of the analyst to a particular analysis in which he is involved, inciting him to overinterpret or offer ready-made interpretations" (Stern, 1992: 78). Stern proposes that the analyst who isolates a dream or a fragment of a dream from its context "is merely 'seeking to enjoy a gossamer omnipotence'" (Stern, 1992: 78).92 To novelise a case study is exactly to isolate a dream from its context. Although the characterisation of literary characters may suggest specifiable Freudian theoretical motifs, literary characters are not "psychoanalysable" as "actual people." The only properly clinical move might be to make hesitant propositions about Gunn himself in the light of the Oedipal phantasy articulated by his novel.93 Such an analysis, though, could not proceed legitimately without the direct involvement of Gunn himself, and even with his participation, the unconscious and repressed heart of Gunn's phantasies as played out in Almost You might still remain all but irretrievable, its latent material thoroughly overdetermined and revised. One would wonder, moreover, at the point of such an exercise. What such a novel can contrive to offer the psychoanalytically literate reader is an illustration of a particular psychical drama. And like any sophisticated technical diagram, the greater part of it will be on display. In so far as it is an illustration, as a specific and limited account of a male's Oedipal drama, there is nothing at all to be "psychoanalysed," nothing to be "discovered;" the reader can only annotate, paraphrase, take notes.

In Almost You, then, a five-year-old boy, perhaps standing at his parents' open bedroom door, or inside the room itself, even lying in their bed, watches his parents make love and is present as his father dies of a heart attack.

Ask (but expect no answer - and get off the floor when spoken to!): Does the memory of the closed door that morning, the memory which originates Memory, not conceal a door open - wide open on your implication in the death?

Were you in fact not sleeping (negligently, in dereliction), but rather present in the parents' bed, or standing by the open door listening while the father, in flagrante delicto, was attacked and destroyed? (Gunn, 1994: 110)

To summarize a complicated "plot," Freud argued that as the child comes to differentiate its own body from others in the first weeks and months of life, the breast is completed, as it were, as the nourishing, caring mother, an entity whose function is to satisfy the child's needs - of self-preservation and sexual pleasure. 94 The mouth will have emerged in this first phase of psycho-sexual development, in the oral stage, as the first organ to make libidinal demands on the child's mind. The mother, offering the breast, has become the child's first love object and "seducer." The child passes next into the anal-sadistic phase, pleasure now sought in the exercise of mastery (characterised both as aggressive behavior, such as biting the breast, and as mastery over the body, as control of the sphincter) and in the excretory function (with the eroticisation of the mucous membrane of the anus). Then at around four or five years of age the child passes into the final of these three stages of psycho-sexual development, the phallic phase. Erotogenic focus reorganises around the genitals and the boy's Oedipal drama opens in its fullest. His relations with the mother become more explicitly genitally sexualised, his own sexuality - and pleasure in sexuality - now centring on the phallus and on the genitalia that act as its signifier. Led by instinct and observation of his parents, the boy will want to possess the mother physically and to supplant the father, now his direct rival. The mother, Freud argues, will become aware of the boy's advances, which manifest themselves in onanistic phantasies of sexual activity, but also in more innocuous behaviour such as contriving to share the parents' bed and even direct avowals of intent to wed her. The mother will try to curb his new-found interest, forbidding him from handling his genitals and threatening that they'll be taken away, cut off by the father. What should happen next is that, under the influence of the castration complex, the boy renounces both rivalry with the father and libidinal, sexualised love for the mother, establishing in their place a more vicarious relationship with the mother through firm identification with the father. To identify with the father, moreover, is to affirm in the male child's own (unconscious) mind the possession of the phallus. But in Almost You, this double renunciation and the institution of identification with the father is not completed - because his unconscious wish to supplant the father succeeds spectacularly. "For everyone the story has to start somewhere," says the narrator. "Your own start was murderous, stinking . . . of some petty Oedipal triumph" (128). In the "you"-protagonist's unconscious, moreover, the usurpation of the father is far from opportunistic. It is aggressive and violent, the achievement of psychical wish-fulfilment every bit as real to the unconscious mind as the achievement of physical action.

It might be observed in this context, too, that the scene of the death of his father, as a scene of sexual intercourse between his parents, coincides with what Freud called the Primal Scene. It is one of three scenes of primal phantasy that in some measure form the syntax of all dreams and phantasies. 95 Freud describes the scene of love-making between one's parents as the scenario through which the phantasist resolves the problem of his or her own creation/origin. It is the scene which is transformed into fantasies as wishful as "foundling" and "princess/prince" scenarios (emerging in myth and literature as, say, Moses, Snow White, and the younger Oedipus himself) - or as scenes of monstrous and traumatising genesis (as, say, Frankenstein). The conflation of the scene of his "petty Oedipal triumph" with the Primal Scene of his own origin offers a further psychoanalytical explanation for the protagonist's claim that he lacks a "beginning." The act of "murdering" the father while the father is making love to the mother corrupts the Primal Scene to such a degree that it can only be returned to as an explanation of his own genesis with considerable - and unacceptable - psychic pain.

A second story also needs to be summarised: that of the superego. The organisation within the psyche of the id, ego and superego, if never occurring in isolation from the Oedipus complex, nonetheless proceeds independently of it. The failure of the individual to move to the successful conclusion of the Oedipus complex does not perforce entail a similar failure in the development of the superego. In fact, gleaning the "you"-protagonist's "petty Oedipal triumph," psychoanalytic arguments might lead the literary critic to expect to find in him a superego that is vigorous indeed. If Freud is to be believed, the "you"-protagonist must feel himself to have a great deal to be ashamed of.

The id, Freud writes, "contains everything that is inherited . . .above all, therefore, the instincts which originate from the somatic organisation" (Freud, 1979: 2). The aim of the id first and last is pleasure - and the lack of unpleasure - whether through the satisfaction of libidinal pressures or by the exercise of the death instinct (in its desire to avoid unpleasure). As the child matures and is influenced by the external world, one segment of the id is reorganised as an intermediary between the id and the external world: the ego. "In consequence of the pre-established connection between sense perception and muscular action, the ego has voluntary movement at its command. It has the task of self preservation . . . [performing] the task by gaining control over demands of the instincts" (Freud, 1979: 2). The ego is also the "reality-testing" part of the psyche, the element of the psyche that has the task of internalizing reality (Freud, 1979: 56). (For a text such as Almost You in which the pronoun "I," the ego's means of naming itself, is all but absent, this is a significant point indeed - in Almost You, the nature and "truths" of reality, too, become all but unnamable: reality-testing fails). As the child matures further, a third reorganisation of the psyche comes about: the superego. The superego evolves through the influence of other people and of society and of the rules and conventions of society and community.

The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. The superego receives later contributions from parent substitutes and their successors. (Freud, 1979: 3)

It is the ego's task to satisfy the demands of the id and superego as best it can to resolve the tensions within the organism that each in its own way continually generates. The danger to the ego, juggling psychic energies, is that id's and superego's demands might become overwhelming (Freud, 1979: 56-57). The id's expenditure or cathexis of energy toward pleasure can outstrip the ego's anticathexis, and the superego's demands for propriety can become "so great that the ego is paralysed with relation to its other functions" (Freud, 1979: 30) - including the function of self-preservation. At this point, the entire organism is put at jeopardy.

Of course, it is perhaps beside the point that Freudian psychoanalysis would not countenance the notion that a superego might constitute itself as a unity able to engage self-consciously in such interlocution and be identifiable as The Narrator of the "you"-protagonist's story. Literary fiction takes liberties with such "truths," its proclivity toward verisimilitude, strong though it may be, being frequently set to the side - certainly in smaller ways, leaving the broader assumptions underpinning the authority of mimesis and the vraisemblable unquestioned. Almost You should not be read as a clinical case study. It is a novel, and in so far as it is a novel informed by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, it is also a diagram of a particular Oedipal dynamic. It would be no more adequate to criticise Almost You for its clinically inappropriate personification of a superego than it would be to criticise Julian Barnes's "The Stowaway" (1989) for its use of a woodworm as a narrator. Alternatively, to assert a rationale for a superego's coherence as a narrator and sustained interlocutor, to propose, for instance, that Almost You's "superegotistical" tale-teller achieves coherence as an hysterical, or even schizophrenic, voice-from-within, seems only to pander to the wishfulness of critical certitude and of discovering - grasping at - keys to the text's meaning. Sanctioned by literary license and supported by overabundant textual evidence, the reader need do no more than read the "second-person" address within Almost You as a vigorous superego's address to a self mortified by Oedipal shame, as an unstable individual's involuntary address to himself. Essentially, I suggest, no rationalist or scientific/medical justification is asked for.

That the "you"-protagonist wants the mother, and that his wish generates a great deal of psychic tension (expressed as guilt, anxiety, self-destructive behaviour and so on), is clear: "Do not forget: anticipation of the awful inevitable moment when your mother would call you for bedtime" (56). But he must also be fully aware, both consciously, having "dabbled in Freud" (52), and unconsciously, as a male within such society, of what ensues from the violence of patricide. He still therefore aspires, as much as desires, to identify with the father - to stand beside him rather than supplant him. "The father had ulcers, you would watch the can be emptied of its medicinal white powder. You hope yet to develop them, but a chronic colitis is so far the best you have managed" (89). The "you"-protagonist's wish to be the father is even played out as an impaired identification with Oedipus's father, Laius, as a phantasy about his own death and his abhorrence of the biological possibility of becoming a father, entrenching him even deeper into Oedipal drama - a story now not only of patricide, but, given Laius's instruction that his infant son Oedipus be murdered, also of infanticide. His professed fear of becoming a father is that the child would kill him (29). "It remained uncertain only whether you would be killed by conception, by parturition, or by the child grown to age five. It did not occur to you that you might, like Laius, have to wait until your child was old enough to wield a weapon and slaughter your bodyguards" (52). For this fear he decries himself as a child murderer, having not only killed his father when a child, but also "killed" children merely through his refusal to father them. It even happens that his own name becomes strange to him because it is also the name of the father - "not just surname, but Christian name as well" (23). As an adult he could only sign his name inside the cover of his published translations "with trepidation" (100). The vastly overdetermined act "to translate" is itself, moreover, identified by the protagonist as a sublimation, even substitution, of fatherhood, "appear[ing] to you a wild and youthful displacement of your dilemma" (15). We are told: "You watched over your second-language offspring with an attentiveness which drove to distraction the woman who was unlucky enough to hope you might become the father of her children" (69). But such father-identification can only ever be incomplete for the "you"-protagonist, the narrator observing early in the novel that, "[f]or reasons some obvious, some less so, the place assumed by everyday fathers was inaccessible to you" (10).

A great deal turns on this inability to identify with the father as the proper Oedipal road to the mother, because, in its failure, the psyche organises another relationship in its place, one in which the "you" identifies with the mother. To permit the heterosexual cliché (as Freud insists on doing), if the place assumed by everyday fathers is on top of the mother, the logic of the drama of identification being played out leaves only one other position available to be adopted: the position under the father, the position of the mother. Identification with the mother is articulated a number of ways, not the least is a generalised feminisation of the character. "Your voice is so high and so hoarse-sounding that even on the rare occasions when you did not have a sore throat you were often mistaken for a woman on the telephone" (68). Feminisation occurs, too, as a barely unconscious identification of himself as castrated - as the girl identifies herself, Freud asserts, in her own Oedipal drama. The protagonist dwells upon the likeness of an abdominal scar left by the correction of an infantile inguinal hernia to the scar of a spayed kitten. The kitten's "fixing," an act arranged by the mother, is construed by the protagonist not only as an injury to the animal, but as a humiliation (62) - again, just as the girl, for Freud, construes her own "castration" as a humiliation perpetrated against her by the mother.

The "you"-protagonist's feminising identification with the mother is expressed even more sharply in the libidinalisation of the protagonist's anal organs and desire "to be cruelly penetrated, right to the tripe of your lonely divine entrails" (11). Where the desire to be the father has failed, what can be observed is that the desire to be had by the father has established itself in its place. The conflation of the female genitals and the (particularly his) anus is made explicitly evident in his conception - his "fear" - of the female genitals and the anus as being "divided by a wall [that is] fine and . . . snippable" (52). The desire to be penetrated reveals itself too in descriptions of the "you"-protagonist experimenting with homosexual phantasies and as possessing "many elements of the caricature homosexual formation" (64). Crucially, the "you"-protagonist is also described as being unable to bring the (mere) act of homosexual seduction to fruition in his imagination: "[T]he unbuttoning of tweed, the removal of the leather pouch or fig-leaf-these scenes, despite your undeniable yearning to be penetrated, had you cursing a resistance which you found impossible to budge" (64). Throughout the novel, the homosexual act is in fact performed with extravagance, both actually, if mechanically (i.e., as medical procedures), and in his unconscious, where it will nonetheless be experienced as real indeed, but always with the "you"-protagonist positioned in a passive and masochistic role. His seduction phantasies fail because the seduction is construed as being mutual, and so unacceptably posit him as an active (i.e., masculinised) participant. Whenever his desire to be penetrated is symbolically fulfilled, he is seen to be passive. "Lying on the trolley, waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect, downing the tubeful of KY Jelly in your gullet, thinking about the cameras which were about to be pushed down your throat and up your rectum, you were - what? Happy? - for the first time in months . . . " (90). His desire to be penetrated is acted out most comically in his decision to demand an endoscopy, "at a loss for how else to provoke an intervention of suitable violence" (90). But the endoscopy stands not as a diagnostic intervention to uncover the origin/cause of his colitis (an ailment mysteriously persisting since early childhood, from about the age of five), 96 but as a transformed enactment of onanistic libidinal desire. At its most black, the desire for penetration becomes masochistic, crashing across the line between the id's desire for pleasure and desire for absence of unpleasure into the death-wish. At school, being punished for whatever wrong-doing, he would try to provoke his teachers further, their punishment never "sufficiently severe."

On each stroke of the clachan or taws the teacher would order, Repeat after me. You repeated; adding after the final word a barely audible snigger, which was sufficient, you were confident, to undo the sadist's satisfaction.

Know: All were frustrated; this too could not last.

The teachers because they could not eradicate your triumph which they enshrined in their flogging. Because however hard they flogged they could neither kill definitively the dead father, nor resurrect him either. Because they would not dare carry out the punishment they were convinced a proper father would administer: push their big prick up your tender rump and fuck you to death.

And you, simply (simply!), because you found in them not masters, but rather cowards - even more cowardly than yourself. (107-08)

The "you"-protagonist is described as having been a rebellious student, reacting against his teachers, particularly male teachers, for their function as father-figures and for their failure to perform the roles he imagined to be theirs. He would invite punishment, invite beatings, so as to frustrate the teachers for their failure to discharge the roles (he) laid out for them, and to frustrate himself for failing to find in them the mastery not only of the father, but of the lover, that is, his mother's husband. But if the protagonist and his teachers are frustrated in these acts, as we are told, it is not for the ineffective administration of punishment. What in fact "could not last" - as it is almost wistfully put - is satisfaction.

Here, then, opens the ground upon which an ego-superego dialogue might arise, a conversation about guilt and shame and (self-)punishment - a conversation in which the superego castigates the ego relentlessly, enumerating sin after sin. The "you"-protagonist's deeply rooted feelings of "boundless" guilt (26) and "predilection for admission and confession" (104) originate precisely at the moment of his father's death (6). "You have always, from when memory started, had a penchant for admission and confession" (104). This urge to confess has a double return. The first is the benefit of constant deferral of Oedipal guilt:

Confess: You have continued to hope that by heaping ashes on your head, and by hogging the culpable element in every situation (including the present non-situation), you may divert attention - your own included - from the opprobrium and guilt which would fall upon you were your real crime to become apparent. (56-57)

Driven (riven) by his superego, hoping to hide his most heinous offense by admitting to all others instead, the protagonist holds himself "[r]esponsible for all crimes" (10) such that "[t]he debt increased the more you paid, for in paying you only endorsed your guilt" (2). And their enumeration "makes you yearn and itch, like a cat for a post. It is physical" (11). More than simply physical, it is sexual, libidinal, a wish formed "[s]omewhere behind your scrotum . . . " (11). This, then, is the second return provided by the urge to confess: confession maintains his sense of guilt and shame. If the protagonist is unable to dissipate the unpleasure of deep-seated guilt produced by his superego one way, then another must be found at all costs. Investing guilt with libidinal energy is a bid to translate unpleasure into pleasure. As the superego-narrator would have it, the "you"-protagonist gets a great deal from opprobrium and reproof. "Hear: Procrastinator! Scullion! Mopus! Lotus-eater! Slug! Drink up these appellations; insults are your manna" (89).

It may be, then, that the narrating voice of Almost You does "originate," so to speak, from the protagonist himself, that it comes from "inside" his own head, as the voice of an alter ego, the voice of a superego. The seeming dialogue of criticism and subjugation that dominates the novel, and the story of approaching death through self-neglect within the frame narrative, can be characterised precisely as an acting out of the superego's work - work now become pathological - and the ego's failure to preserve the organism.

4. The Narrator as Another

The protagonist is no stranger, clearly, to the sense of being a "divided," self-alienated individual.

Hear again: It is impossible to be intimate with you!

Of course, you agreed. Had been experiencing for decades what the unhappy woman had only just discovered. (7)

Can the entire text, though, really be characterised and totalised as the internal discourse of a madman? Time and again, the language of the text itself puts the question: can reading the narrative as a dialogue between an unstable self and a vigorous superego explain the nature of the narrating voice? If the text constitutes a self-effacing narrator's own intimate, albeit heavily mediated, recollections and reflections, need they be narrated with a modality of voice that is so formal and with an authority and peremptoriness apparently quite uncharacteristic of the protagonist himself? The relentlessness of the obloquy, the strangeness and "literariness" of the grammar and syntax, and the disparity of the two (and more) voices seems to exceed such a reading. As in Farah's Maps (1986), while many passages suggest some form of self-address and identity between the narrator and protagonist-narratee, in other passages the protagonist appears to be addressed and depicted from the outside. This is felt nowhere more strongly, perhaps, than in the parenthetical interjections and interpolations that pepper the entire text, particularly within the Himmel tale, often intruding as direct, vocative address. "[Himmel] opens his new book, and reads words at random (or in any case not your choice)" (25). After the protracted convergence of Himmel's and the protagonist's worlds, moreover, precisely at the point at which their stories reel on the verge of collapsing into one another in the last lines of the novel, a final intrusive, parenthetical utterance decisively and derisively (if still inconclusively) (re)asserts the narrator's "otherness" by breaking into the pathos of the protagonist's despair. "You, untranslated. Claim: Never ending because never beginning; never beginning because never ending. (Biblical ring to this, very quaint!)" (135-36).

Moreover, it is not in the nature of the superego to tell fictions: Himmel's tale in its entirety is anomalous. The superego's function is to censure. If one might totalise and then license the superego to tell stories, the stories should yet be about morals, ethics, propriety: they should yet, perhaps, more resemble the brief, prescriptive and direct form of La Fontaine's fables, each one tagged by a blunt moral, than resemble the developed psychological and allegorical drama of the French nouveau roman. Unhelpfully for a superego-narrator, the later form is more likely to pose than explicate moral dilemmas, its typical articulation of postwar, Modernist anxieties obliterating the former's confident, neo-Classical Manichean clarity. If the literary reader may be licensed to grant that a superego may be constituted as The Narrator of the "you"-protagonist's present and past story, it is less certain that this should be extended to the third narrative strand. Within that strand particularly, the ambiguities concerning the narrator-narratee relationships and the origin/s of the narrative discourse are so inextricably entwined that doubts regarding the narrator's identity with the protagonist press forward.

There is, for instance, the strong sense of omniscience that pervades the novel, and that leans heavily both on the narrator's authoritative tone and on the third strand of narrative, Himmel's fiction. Couched in the classical "third-person" discourse of conventional story-telling and structured much more simply than the first two strands (as linear, episodic narrative), the narrator seems at liberty to exercise utter control over the invention of Himmel, the ewe and their fable. Indeed, the "you"-protagonist confirms this in his bids to take over its telling, resisting the direction it takes under the narrator's "authorship" - or more precisely, resisting the tale's opaque, disfigured teleology. 97 On the first occasion he invents a context for the tale, willfully forcing it into the generic frame of crime fiction and the noir thriller. Struck on the skull by a bullet after overhearing a plot to kidnap scores of children, Himmel escapes but without his memory. "Such a melodrama, whatever its manifest weaknesses," we are told - though whether the notion originates with the narrator or the protagonist is finally unclear" - at least would have some impulsion, some goal, a proper measure of the carrot and whip" (52). The story would become the hunt for Himmel, a "poor victim . . . ignorant of how he escaped from the alley (as you are), find[ing] himself in his garret, without memory, a killer on his trail, and the fate of two score children dependent upon him" (51). Under conventional generic plotting, the entire third strand would come under the controlling, economical trope of the innocent ignorant of his own peril, providing for the tale the predicability and comfort of verisimilitude and a "realistic" plot. There seems a fundamental difference, however, between the "you"-protagonist's and the narrator's story-telling: the narrator has both ability and authority; the "you"-protagonist has neither. Although the narrator's seeming omniscience in respect to his telling of the "you"-protagonist's story may in fact be a deceit, the fact of this deceit does not finally dispel the impression of omniscient authority. If the narrator in fact reveals nothing that the "you"-protagonist could not know already, he nonetheless nowhere disavows the possession of greater knowledge. In fact, regardless of what the narrator comes to reveal, by and large he makes his revelations in such a way as to give quite the opposite impression, seeming to imply that the "you"-protagonist lacks knowledge. The narrator frequently, for instance, directs the protagonist to ask himself a specified question, that is, autocratically directs the protagonist's self-interrogation, but in such a way as to imply his own prior possession of the answer and greater knowledge than the protagonist himself.

There are several questions you would care to ask.

Ask: Why is it that you are being given suggestions, instructions, even orders - and by whom? [ . . .]

These and others: questions you would care to ask. Only you may not; you can not. (24)

The narrator's impression of omniscience, then, legitimate enough in the Himmel tale, insinuates itself deeply into the other two strands of narrative quite aside from the actual amount and nature of information the narrator does reveal.

There is also the matter of the unrelenting imperatives that dominate the narrator's language, utterances that direct the "you"-protagonist to "listen," "object," "listen" again, "obey," "claim," "concede," "admit" - these alone uttered before the reader turns the first page. They are verbs that often carry a similar effect to the "verbs of consciousness" Monika Fludernik singles out within McInerney's Bright Lights Big City (1986) as preserving "a residual perspective of zero focalisation" even within a text that so closely "concentrates on the protagonist's flow of experience" (Fludernik, 1994c: 451). Gunn's verbs, as imperatives (many of which are themselves verbs of consciousness), like McInerney's, imply that the utterance as not spoken or thought by the character, but by another - and indeed, a controlling - consciousness.

So so so so so. That is so, this is so, you are so, Himmel is even becoming so. Think: You wish to leave it so, at that, him at that, her at that, especially yourself at that.

But know: You are not done; and are so craven that you most probably never will be done.

Divulge: In the inventory of the possessions you brought with you to here - no-here - you chose to neglect mention of the binoculars. . . . (Ask: By what curse was the father's Christian name given to the second son?). (Emphasis added, Gunn, 1994: 65-66)

Utterances like the following, moreover, seem to imply a fore-knowledge regarding how the story will proceed - that is, imply retrospective narration, the story's events already past (in spite of the present tense of the utterance). "Know for the umpteenth though not yet ultimate time: You were born of death, his death, the father's" (2). The very frequency of these imperative utterances, too, particularly when they turn to interrogation - "ask," "admit," "divulge" - acts at once to objectify the protagonist and to continually reassert the differential status between the speaker and the spoken to, rendering (rending) them apart from one another. They contribute to the sense of unity and uniformity around which the sense of the text's narrating voice is organised, providing this voice with much of its sense of independence, immanence, aggression and knowledgeableness. Their number also establishes the imperative utterances as an element of the novel's structure, such that they quickly become predictive, become part of the expected course of the novel. They become a specifiable convention of the text itself. The reader begins to find the text unfolding - and comes to expect that it will continue to unfold - as a type of catechetical question and answer exchange, this exchange lending the narrative textuality a sense of structural directionality and purpose not unrelated to that which the "you"-protagonist had hoped for when framing Himmel's tale as a thriller. As there, it provides a teleology, promises an end that will explain in a stroke all the paradoxes and ambiguities that go before - promises structural closure just as the thriller promises the closure of revelation and clarity. Part of the game of the novel is that the text fails to honour this promise, Himmel rapping unaccountably at the door of the protagonist's bolt hole.

It may be timely to recall, again, that my argument here is in some measure ingenuous. The position I will finally take towards Almost You's imperative utterances is quite different. Although elements of the speaker's persona may be inferred from many of the imperative utterances, it is not the case for many more of them, nor does the sense of imminence and persona they lend the voice convincingly resolve the problem of the narrator's identity and diegetic relation. As Andrew Gibson might have it, these unrelenting imperatives have no clear origin except the text itself (Gibson, 1996: 176). This is not to say that the reader should move to the fall-back position of identifying their origin in the organising hand of some variety of implied or actual author. As I will argue, the matter is considerably more complex.

Let us continue, however, pro tempore, to search for the origin/s of these imperatives in a narrating subject, as a reading for "second-person" intersubjectivity would have us do. Indeed, something very curious and helpful to the case emerges from amidst these imperative utterances and their bullying interrogation. It is something, too, that shadows the narrator's conceit of omniscience, and may even be hinted at in the absence within the text of typological and grammatical marks of direct quotation. Paradoxically, it also seems something of which the protagonist himself is in some measure conscious. "When you wrote your English version you could always tell yourself - and you did - that the words were dictated by another" (54). The paradox is that in this reading the "you" in fact achieves the erasure of agency and subjectivity he yearns for. He becomes a ventriloquist's dummy. All speech in Almost You can be read as being embedded, indirect, paraphrased - leaving the act of citation open to abuse. Senko Maynard has insightfully observed that:

Contrary to the assumption that direct quotation represents someone else's verbatim speech, . . . quoting is a creative activity, primarily controlled by the quoter. . . . [O]ne might seriously question the idea that direct quotation provides a place where two autonomous voices - representing the quoter and the quotee - are heard in equilibrium. (Maynard, 1997: 381)

Although the use of quotation, whether direct or indirect, "is a strategy which overtly signals multivoicedness of discourse" (382), it may be that it finds its raison d'être in a "self-enacted pseudo-dialogicality similar to the ventriloquist's performance" (Maynard, 1997: 391). Almost You can be read as exemplary of Maynard's observation, because throughout the text, the narrator puts words in the protagonist's mouth. The protagonist is made - directed, told, ordered - to speak, and then told what to say.

Ask, despite yourself: does he not require - and even deserve - a name? Should some endearing appellation not be conferred upon him, despite your reluctance and hostility?

Shout: No! (Gunn, 1994: 13-14)

As Margolin puts this issue, the speech of a global narrator - assuming this to be a global narrator - is by definition monologic. All textual utterances attributed by the narrator to his/her addressees or referents "are embedded, that is, merely quoted or mentioned, within his speech, or at most fused with his speech as in indirect speech or free indirect discourse. As a result, we will never know whether the listeners of the man from underground 'really' say the things he quotes them saying" (Margolin, 1984: 185). As ventriloquism, moreover, all the questions posed by the narrator become in some measure rhetorical, already answered or else lacking a genuine invitation to respond: a point that the narrator seems content to announce himself. "Ask, then (again rhetorically): Is it surprising you invested early and enormously in that other form of duplicity and duplication which is translation?" (Gunn, 1994: 82).

That there seem (at least) two distinct voices from the first lines to the last is incontrovertible. But the issue of ventriloquism - as narrative discourse uttered by an extra-heterodiegetic voice - densely complicates this fact of dual vocality. Albeit begging questions of identity, agency, subjectivity and so on, ventriloquism does present itself as dual vocality. It presents to its audience two distinct voices, the first a subject speaking for him/herself, the second that same subject speaking for another. Although two voices are present in the implied dialogue that passes between the "you" and the narrator and in the parenthetical interpolations as illustrated above, paradoxically, such moments also become readable as ventriloquism performed by a "third-person" narrator. In the following passage, both voices are easily heard (whoever they belong to). By the end of the passage, however, the differentiation of speaker/s is much less clear, so much so that although the final utterances may be shared between two discrete speaking subjects, they may as easily be uttered ironically and mockingly by a narrator alone:

Ask: What has become of your certainty that you will never again visit the Falls of Clyde. . . . Ask: What become of your conviction that never again will you tug at a woman's underclothes. . . . And ask: You who started with forgetting and being forgotten . . . do you still believe your only hope is to turn the tables - not by dying reminiscing (like a drowning man) but by dying (as you have formulated it) into reminiscence? Do you hope to forget again . . . ?

Many questions. Ask: Why so many questions? (121)

This growing ambiguity has the effect of robbing the reader of the certainty that two speakers - two voices typographically marked off by the indefatigable colon's announcement of the change of subjectivity - are present at all in the lines of the preceding paragraph. The dual voice threatens to homogenise into a single, ventriloquistic speaking subject. The same effect is achieved more economically in the several instances in which the relative pronoun "that" is inserted after the colon. "Does it not occur to you: that, with all your declared fondness for conversation . . . some address more direct, less mediated, might be envisaged, might be imminent" (109). The grammar of the text suddenly makes the ventriloquism explicit by placing responses that would ordinarily be ascribed to the protagonist's mind more firmly into the narrator's mouth as pseudo-quotation and paraphrase, the grammatical form of the utterance explicitly marked as more appropriate to the narrator than the protagonist. Compare the sense or "presence" of the narrator's and the protagonist's respective subjectivity in the following three apparently dialogic passages. The third is the original.

Do not claim as once you used to: I did not mean to or am unaware of how I managed [to murder my father].

Do not claim as once you used to: you did not mean to or are unaware of how you managed [to murder your father].

Do not claim as once you used to: that you did not mean to or are unaware of how you managed [to murder your father]. (2)

The second half of the first passage quotes the "you"-protagonist verbatim. In the second passage, it reports the "you"-protagonist's words or thoughts in free indirect speech, and it is marked as such by the use of the "second-person" pronoun. But in both these passages, the "mind" of the protagonist is clearly present: the reader conventionally understands that these are his words/thoughts, whether quoted directly or reported. The same segment of the third passage, however, does not so immediately declare itself as originating in the protagonist's mind. The reader's expectation that it should, as a prediction invited by the paraphrastic structure of the novel now codified by the use of the colon, is arrested by the insertion of the superfluous conjunction. From the first to the third passage, the shift in the centre of consciousness across the colon is less securely articulated precisely because of the addition of one and then another grammatical mark of reported speech - first "you" (rather than "I"), and then "that you." These additions move the citation further and further from what might be imagined as the original (fictional) context of its utterance - the moments when the protagonist said to himself, "I didn't mean to murder my father." Crucially, writes Maynard, "transposing the speech event from its original context . . . diminishes the quotee's authority over his or her own speech," so that quoting the "you"-protagonist's speech by speaking for him, ventriloquistically uttering what he might be expected to say, "simultaneously brings to the text the affirmation and denial of the quotee's voice" (Maynard, 1997: 379) - and so the affirmation and denial of the quotee's status as speaking subject. "In other words, the quotation describes the quoting self and the quoted other as being distinct and yet identical," but like the ventriloquism in which "the ventriloquist['s] and the dummy's voices are presented as being distinct," we in fact also understand them "as being one and the same" (Maynard, 1997: 391). It is thus this present threat of ventriloquism that provides one of the strongest elements within the novel driving the wrenching oscillation of the narrator's identity between a dissembling "first-person" narrator interrogating himself (as "I"-"other I") to a "third-person" narrator interrogating a character.

5. Ontological Havoc

To recapitulate Hantzis's argument, a text can be said to articulate "second-person" point of view proper "when the narrator, character, narratee, and, consequently, the reader and author are simultaneously constituted in the pronoun 'you'" (Hantzis, 1992: 79). Each one of these textual and social agents, she insists, must be in one way or another "subjectively present" (Hantzis, 1992: 79), the experience of intersubjectivity arising not at the behest of an authoritative, individual narrative agent declaring to an Other that "I am," but within an inter-relation between the various textual and social subjects "housed in the 'you'" (Hantzis, 1992: 133). The principal characteristics that open the "second person's" multiple space for the reader are:

• ambiguity and multiplicity of the narration's origin;
• fluidity of the "you"-referent's and narrator's respective identities;
• multiplicity of (diegetic) realities, including paradoxes and irreconcilable inconsistencies;
• dissolution of narrative authority as a consequence of the previous three tendencies;
• and minimal articulation of traditional modes of subjectivity such as through self-referential "first-person" utterances, even as occurrences within direct dialogue, as individuation of any subject within the complex may disrupt and even shatter multiple subjectivity.

Each of these features can be identified within Almost You. The "first-person" pronoun "I," for instance, appears in the novel just twice, and on both occasions in a context that thoroughly undermines its conventional function of identifying or individuating a specific speaking subject. Similarly, instances of what Hantzis calls "multiple reality" are as abundant as the "first-person" pronoun is scarce. If the "second person" resists the location and identification of a single authorised textual voice, Hantzis writes, it also resists the inscription of a single, authoritative reality. It "intensifies the challenge to concepts of authority issued by intersubjectivity," such that "reality is multiple and not equivalent with the univocal truth" (Hantzis, 1992: 119). The "truth of events" becomes less certain and singular. Readers' faith in the depth and accuracy of narrative information - of knowledge - becomes less secure. Differences and opposites "do not replace each other. Rather, difference is incorporated into multiplicity" (Hantzis, 1992: 18).

You supposed: It is mossy and verdant where the father is interred. White bunnies frolic and a burn bubbles past elders and gorse. Outmoded names and clan runes on the time-eaten tombs. A dry-stone dyke as protection against the prevailing wind off the Pentland Firth.

You supposed: It is derelict and gray where the father's ashes are inhumed. Long grasses and weeds weighted down with city smog clogging the pathways, obscuring the granite of the cenotaphs and graves. The sulphurous city lights are reflected in dismal puddles. A senile widow who can not find her husband's plot, withered pansies in her hands.

You supposed what you did not know then, and still do not know now. You painted idealised or grotesque - in either case highly literary - versions of where you had never been, but where you knew your own name - not just surname, but Christian name as well - must be inscribed. (Gunn, 1994: 22-23)

Historical/biographical fact, names, gender, all become subject in Almost You to an equivocation that coalesces at the novel's end into one terse renunciation of their epistemological value as elements of identity: "What matter names or gender, you never owned one or other. He is surely not called Himmel, and even Hector is most dubious" (135). Names multiply, the alternatives of Himmler, Himmelstein, Henderl - and, and Hector (this last name being conferred on him by his ostensible parents) being put for Himmel. Or they go unspoken, the "you"-protagonist and his parents, brother, lovers, and teachers besides remaining obdurately and perhaps disrespectfully unnamed. Or they become parodic, even arbitrary, the narrator for instance inviting the "you"-protagonist, the Himmel-tale's narratee, to choose a name for the person at the end of Himmel's journey, the narrator immediately returning to ridicule any connections the protagonist (and reader) might conventionally assume to hold between names, identities and origins.

[C]oncede that it is surely time to Christen her - if indeed she is a she. Unto her as unto him. Use what is left of your imagination. Think: Hermes. Try again: Hermea. With an e. Two es!

Hermea. You would ask where she comes from. But enough of your questions tirelessly bearing upon origins! [ . . . ]

Hear this rather: There was an old and useless ballock, and it was put out in the sun to dry, where it shrank until less than a raisin, until it almost disappeared. When it burst into seed, sent little puff-balls into the sorrel-fragrant air. And that was the origin of Himmel, of Hermea, of Argos, of yourself too for all you know. (67-68)

But being made to appear arbitrary, the novel's names are, for that, less able to call on the authority of verisimilitude. The few names that retain the imprimaturs of historicity and the commonplace are those of actual authors he and others have translated, and the names of other translators, his peers - Andrew Leak, David Bellos, Paul Celan, Charles S. Singleton, Louis Wolfsen. These come to the narration as objects of professional ridicule or as illustrations of tragic or pathological compunctions to translate, and so are lent a ring of "truth," as it were, to amplify the pathos or calumny attached to the name, but also to mark the difference of the explicitly "fictional" names - Himmel, Hermea, and so on.

It is not just this type of broad narrative information that is subject to equivocation and complication, however. There is also the fundamental matter of the blurring of conventionally absolute boundaries between levels of narrative. The novel continually invokes the notion of nested narrative in its presentation of stories within a frame story, but begins to undermine the concept by blurring story- and world-boundaries, providing no explicit rationale for this collapse. Even the notion of mise-en-abyme, which explicitly invites the reader to contemplate the way in which one story reflects upon the other, fails to explain or clarify the rise and fall of verisimilitude and fabulation in each strand, nor does it provide a logic for the ways in which the strands converge. Having invoked a narration of lucid Euclidean geometries, the novel delivers Eschian diagrams. Its layering of Himmel's story as a narration within a narration unravels as the novel progresses until, in the final pages, the distinction between (diegetic) "reality" and "fiction" is left so deeply undermined as to throw the narration into what Margolin would call ontological havoc, the reader wondering at the status of "truth" and "being" in all three strands of the novel (Margolin, 1997/1991: 5). And wondering whether or not it is the "you"-protagonist, not Himmel - or both the "you" and Himmel - who is the fiction. Indeed, like the narrator of Barth's "Life-Story" (1969) the "you"-protagonist himself becomes increasingly anxious over his status within the storied world, told that "you do not have to think of Himmel, since Himmel - he thinks of you. Without knowing you. Worse than that, he is beginning to think you, as if you were a direct object" (Gunn, 1994: 115). Likewise, for his sins against what speech-act theorists describe as the co-operative principle, we begin to withhold our conventional, unconditionally granted faith in the immanent narrator's authority and veracity as a story-teller, in his willingness and ability to "speak the truth." At the same time, we remain at a loss as to why he might so undermine himself even while shamefacedly maintaining his strident tone of authority. One might contrast this aspect of Almost You to the slow discovery by the protagonist of "Life-Story," a writer, that he himself is a character in a story, a creation of a "higher order" authorial narrator, not a sentient being at all. Almost You, though, lacks the inscription of the thematic narrative logic or explicit structure present in "Life-Story" that might lead the reader to the discovery of the hand of such a higher order, authoritative entity. Instead, we are left in uncertainty, stable narrative authority - as it must in "second-person" point of view proper - evaporating the further we move into the "experience" of the novel.

I have alluded to the incursion of Himmel's "story-world" into the protagonist's "real world" a number of times, principally in terms of the convergence of the three narrative strands into the novel's final line, "Hector knocking at your door" (136). Uncanny correspondences between Himmel and the protagonist, however, affect the reading of the novel from its opening pages, drawing the two narrative levels together time and again. It is clear early that both characters are centrally concerned with notions of origin, original texts/sources, and destinations and ends, although each articulates this concern very differently. The "you"-protagonist, for his part, is consumed by anxiety over originals and origins. Feeling his own lack of origins (albeit that this "lack" is a psychic conceit: is something repressed), his literary translations are acts of supplement and completion, acts that he himself conceives of as attempts "to add to the resources of English (Anglo-Scots) what you realised it was lacking from the moment you read a foreign book which impressed you" (33). Moreover, in his translations, he seeks the ideal, Platonic forms of his chosen texts, his works, in his mind at least, creating their own original (69). For him,

faithfulness was not a notion . . . but a creed - faithfulness to the dead, of course, to their languages and idiolects, but not to them or these alone. For you always sensed . . . that your first duty was to be faithful to that other, silent language which hovered wordlessly somewhere beyond original and copy. (26)

If the protagonist's professed objective is to "impersonate, catch and render audible in your native tongue some echoes of those most admired, now absent or departed" (26), he also professes to a search for something fundamental, for something superior even to the author's text. His is a bid to rediscover the artistic inception behind the material (and by that fact flawed) text.

Recognise: Translate meant for you, when in such you still believed: an aspiration to something beyond the text and beyond the however faithful rendition. It meant aiming for a time before the original and after the translation, for a place where words and tongues, dialects and idioms, the author's voice and yours, the author's desire to write and your desire to rewrite, would all be royally fused. All would embrace, bow down, down further on to knees and chests, flat on the ground, before the greater Word, the more resounding Text, the more eloquent Tongue, the disinterested Author. (41-42)

If one can infer from this passage the shadow of a nascent intersubjectivity, it is not the plastic multiple subject Hantzis describes as being synthesised by "second-person" point of view proper. It is clear who takes precedence in this "royal fusion" of translator and author: all (readers?) would revere the translator, whose facilitation of the "true" text has transformed him into the Creator, into God. Taking up translation is thus also a bid to gain mastery over origins, but not as an expression of creative potential. Rather, translation is expressly revealed from the very outset as a transformation of a deep-seated dread. "Know rather: You tried to avoid this date, your day of birth, sole origin, for years tried, nearly fifteen. Then you tried to transform it, assimilate it, translate it" (2). The privilege the "you"-protagonist confers on origins, however, finally debilitates him. His project of (self)translation fails, and does so retrospectively.

Know: What decided you to leave the city . . . and come to this place which is neither city nor countryside, this place you conceived of as a no-place, was not only the thwarting of your proposed translation of Un homme qui dort. For you realised that the failure was not a block or new impediment, but was rather the belated acknowledgment that failure was always prior, had invariably already occurred, that you had only ever failed to translate, therefore, during your fifteen-year career. (18-19)

Himmel, on the other hand, expresses curiosity over his (forgotten/lost) origins, but grants them no specific privilege over the present. For most of the novel he stands dumbstruck in the midst of a radical epistemological break, all knowledge foregone, the world a mystery. He listens with interest to the tale told by the old couple toward the end of the text, listening not as one might to a revelation about one's lost identity or as the reader might to the solution to a perplexing conundrum, but as a child might listen to the telling of an entertaining story - not moved but enthralled, never "question[ing] if it was plausible or not, plausibly his own or not. It was the first story he had heard, the only one" (126). When he chooses to identify himself as the couple's son, it is with a curious lack of emotion and ceremony. "Hector then it is, accepts Hector. He knows he is losing something in his acceptance, his adoption. But had he not come here also to lose?" (197). His impassiveness produces a sense of non-reality, or rather, offends the vraisemblable, offends what we might accept as natural to a prodigal return. He is interested more in destinations than origins, and more in processes than ends. Himmel's journey is lingered over, whereas the "you"-protagonist's secretive arrival at the derelict terrace in which he hopes to "unbe (whatever this might mean)" (9) is left minimally described, "reach[ing] here - nohere - by taking a series of SMT buses and a long walk through the night with a rucksack and cowl" (56). Moreover, Himmel's is not construed as a journey "home" or to a centre, nor even to an end, even though he is clearly drawn on, led by more than just the ewe. It is a journey somewhere else, albeit somewhere in some uncertain way already familiar, perhaps with somebody waiting. That is, it is a journey into the uncanny.

It is clear early that both characters are also centrally concerned with issues of self-identity and the erasure of identity. The "you"-protagonist has hidden himself away "no-here" hoping to "unbe" - but has done so as an act of will, albeit that he feels it his only alternative and that he is a victim of circumstances flowing inexorably from his father's death. Himmel, too, felt himself

caught inside a loop with no ending or beginning, no entrance or exit. He was abstract. He was falling in a hole which for an unknown lifetime he had been digging; falling towards a place-time where he and his memory would at last be permanently divorced, and all recollection, even of the everyday, even of the present, of all words therefore, would be lost for ever. (17)

The novel begins at a point in which both are in deep jeopardy of relinquishing the status of subject and all notion of "self:" where the "you"-protagonist seeks that oblivion, however, Himmel resists it. Early on, too, the "you"-protagonist is shocked by Himmel's discovery of six words cut from a French dictionary, the equivalents of "child," "future," "story," "gender," "pain," and the verb "to be." If the bowdlerised words were intuitively understood by the amnesiac as "the coordinates" of his forgotten life, the "you"-protagonist, too, recognises them to his horror as mapping his own life (16-17). We learn finally that both characters were "raised . . . by the banks of the River Clyde" (125); that their fathers were both involved in the building industry; and that both were precociously fascinated by languages, taking to Latin and then modern Western European languages as autodidacts. Such coincidences lend themselves to a reading of Himmel's narrative strand as an allegorical, didactic fable from which the "you" is to draw lessons about his own life. Within the final revelations about Himmel/Hector, however, these coincidences, now charged for the "you" with the alarming element of verisimilitude, become melodramatically and even parodically explicit. At the end of the novel, Himmel meets an aged couple who "fill in" his forgotten past, claiming themselves his parents, renaming him in the process. The textual modality of the passage itself is significant. It becomes a type of "second-person" mise-en-abyme. During the narration of Himmel's/Hector's story, the parents having taken the role of narrator, the narrative "person" shifts from the "third" to the "second" to place Himmel in the role of "second person" narratee, a role usurped from the "you"-protagonist.

You had a child, but your woman, convinced you were crazy, had left you, taking the child with her.

Hermea!

You didn't say whether a girl or a boy. Only that you were devoting your life to finding your child. Your father tried everything, contacted the police, Interpol, private detectives, made long trips to Paris himself, anything to find you, bring you home. [ . . . ]

And then, just months ago, a letter arrived for you. A mystery, since the postman didn't deliver it. (132)

With the sudden upsurge of verisimilitude and "rounding" of plot within the third strand of narrative - which is exactly the closure the "you"-protagonist himself had hoped to force on Himmel's tale much earlier in the novel - Himmel's characterisation becomes more credible and his world more closely approximate to the "you"-protagonist's world.

The relation may become closer yet. Albeit deeply paradoxical, the relation that emerges is that of father and so - nor rather, recalling the protagonist's feminisation and the feminine gender of the name Hermea, one should admit the ambiguity and say "father and child." Before Himmel begins his journey from France to Scotland he feels himself at the edge of an abyss, a vacuity that all but consumes the centre of his being. But he resists the strong urge to step into its oblivion because at the periphery of his senses he can also feel

the pinching of someone else's desire (perhaps yours!) which announced, precisely, an impatience that he should indeed end. Like an old spider, he felt at the edge of his web the twitching of a murderous rival.

He would know that murderer, would befriend him. (Emphasis added, 17-18)

The Oedipal symbolism of this image is all but inescapable - making the "you"-protagonist's presence in it startling. Read in terms of a symbolic Oedipal relation, the inference to be made is that Himmel, dramatising the role of "the good father," intuits his own child's Oedipal intentions but overcomes the anger and fear this knowledge engenders to search out and embrace his child - as if Laius has had a change of heart. At some level, he will know that his child's well-being depends upon their rapprochement. Responding to his intuition, Himmel goes to meet his child, led there by his benign spirit-guide, the ovine embodiment of the bond between father and son, the "almost-ewe." In so doing, he is also re-united with his own father, just as the lamb is returned at the end of the novel to his own waiting flock and shepherd. "Fond homecoming! Though the distance is surely too great, Himmel is almost convinced he sees the shepherd smile and cry out in contentment at the return, after so long, of the complement of his flock" (69).

The oblique father-child relation between Himmel and the protagonist can also be traced into the inversion of the two characters' relation to procreation and translation. In the midst of the increasingly explicit correspondences between Himmel and the "you"-protagonist, significant divergences emerge that force the identities apart again - as is the way of this point of view. One of the crucial divergences is their different attitudes toward the act of translation. The implications of this difference will be more usefully explored in the following chapter, but one point at least is to be made. Himmel enters into a crusade against translation, travelling to Europe in the first instance to proselytise translators to cease their work. Where the "you"-protagonist invests energy in translation to supplant becoming a father, Himmel becomes a father to supplant translation. Having been led back to Scotland where he is ostensibly reunited with his own father, he is handed the mysteriously delivered letter. Himmel reads:

Father, will you ever read this? Will you ever find your way home? This is no place to rehearse the story of your departure, the separation. Words are precious now, and precious few. All that matters is that your child has traced your own parents, has escaped from the mother, and is now waiting tenderly for you - and not far from where you are presently reading this. Do not tarry. Time is pressing. (132-33)

The address given by the child is that of the "you"-protagonist's terrace. Himmel hastens to his (or her) door - "your" door - and the novel ends.

This fantastic revision of Himmel's persona in a story "incorporating a lack of history, a late beginning, no verisimilitude, [and] a dreadful and insistent becoming" (115), has two broad aspects. In the first, Himmel is transformed from imbecilic amnesiac to messianic eccentric. In the second, he is revealed as the protagonist's father. In both, it seems, we are being shown the person he has forgotten to be. The first can be taken (in the novelistic tradition) as an entirely credible, if melodramatic, qualification of a given reality. It is not so very far removed, indeed, from the types of revision proposed by the "you"-protagonist much earlier in the novel. The second aspect of his revision constitutes an entirely new and contradictory "reality" - i.e., Himmel as the protagonist's father. This reading of Himmel is incompatible with the story given in the first and second strands of the novel and leaves in its wake a debris of unresolvable paradoxes. One might try to reincorporate these paradoxes into the narrative by taking Himmel's institution as father as entirely symbolic, and indeed he may at this point be a symbolic dramatisation of the good father. But the ways in which this symbolism might play backwards into Himmel's story is opaque indeed, nor does it explain the novel's ending. Himmel's emergence into the "you"-protagonist's world seems not symbolic but actual (whether psychic or material is another issue), and the protagonist's distress at this entity's immanence every bit real.

And listen: You can hear him now, the Hector, he is panting from his exertion, and he is counting, using his fingers, counting the houses from one end of the row then the other, trying to decide which might be number 33.

From one end or the other he will reach it. The sun is not yet beneath the hill, he has time on his side. (135)

"Listen now," announces the narrator finally: "Hector knocking at your door" (136).

In the context of "second-person" intersubjectivity, of course, such paradoxes are welcome, because they are very much part of the multiplicity of "reality" and the dissolution of centred narrative authority by which "second-person" point of view proper is constituted. I would agree with Hantzis fully that what the engaged reader may find him- or herself foregoing in reading "second-person" texts such as Gunn's is the experience of autonomous, centred subjectivity. Lost for the reader is the comfort and reassurement of a knowledgeable subject's authoritative control over the story's discourse, an authority that the reader may expect vicariously to share. The question might be put, however, whether or not paradox, deep ambiguity and the unsettling experience of "incertitude" might not themselves be the point in texts that seem so bloody-minded in their resistance to stability and unification. Might it be that it is in the state of "incertitude," rather than in the sophisticated synthesis of an anomalous and radical point of view, that one might trace the striking, unsettling force of such texts as Almost You?

6. Critical Certitude versus Negative Capability

Brian McHale, faced with the "second person's" troubling fluidity in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1975), comes to this conclusion precisely. In exploring the problems posed by "second-person" narrative, rather than reaching for simultaneity and synthesis and the possible emergence of new unities, McHale's recipe for "preserving the text's strangeness" looks towards notions of succession, anomaly, discontinuity. I want to conclude this chapter by turning to what might be construed as a much more "old fashioned," even arcane approach to the problems of fluidity and ambiguity. Ultimately, however, it might prove a more far-sighted approach to the "second person's" often startling strangeness, because, in short, one might say that, where notions of "second-person" intersubjectivity offer a model of reconstruction, McHale offers one of deconstruction. His approach looks back to John Keats's notion of negative capability.

As Hantzis argues of "second-person" point of view proper texts, McHale argues that the most productive way of reading Gravity's Rainbow is to regard its deep ambiguities and irreconcilable contradictions as themselves central to the experience of reading it, and as central to its "making sense." To read a text like Gravity's Rainbow looking for certainties and unities, on the other hand, "is very often simple misreading, not seeing what is before one's eyes" (McHale, 1985: 94). Confronted with a range of meanings within any one passage (let alone in the novel as a whole), critics who choose the interpretation most in accord with their own hypothesis, writes McHale, have sought "to maximise integration and intelligibility. In short, they have . . . undertake[n] to interpret according to the norms of literary criticism" (112). Such an approach is pessimistically described by James Kincaid as "the basic principle governing [literary] reading," that is, "precisely the fear of logical contradiction" (Kincaid, 1977: 783). In a statement reminiscent of many of Louise Rosenblatt's in respect to "selective attention" - and revealing of the implications of "selective attention" - Kincaid writes that this "fear" is

more narrowly an obedience to the law of identity, the certainty that if A is A it cannot at the same be a logically inconsistent B. The reading of literature is in large part a search for organising patterns . . . that will make coherent all the numerous details or signals we pick up along the way. Readers proceed with the assumption that there must be a single dominant structuring principle and that it is absurd to imagine more than one dominant principle. . . . One can imagine amalgamations . . . but these would be new things or creatures, single and somehow coherent. (Kincaid, 1977: 783)

Although "the fear of logical contradiction" and the "the law of identity" are certainly robust constituents of prevailing habits of reading, Kincaid's contention that readers in some way need comprehensive and unified "patterns of significance" may overstate the reader's desire for univocality. Strong as they are, Kincaid's "needs" might more appropriately be described as tendencies and habits within prevailing reading practices. The assumption that a reading proceeds in terms of "a single dominant structuring principle" is precisely what McHale's invocation of negative capability contests: there are other modes of reading. McHale is emphatic, however, that he is not poorly disposed to such critics. Indeed, he empathises with them:

If, in the process, they (as we) have ascribed a greater degree of ontological stability to the fictional world than the text actually warrants, or have interdicted certain readings of the second-person pronoun, then the fault is less theirs than it is criticism's. More than merely justifiable, the critics' misreadings are in fact both intelligible and inevitable, even necessary. Intelligible because they are the consequence of habits of reading of which we can give an account; indeed, it is these very misreadings that help us to formulate that account. Inevitable, because these habits of reading have developed in response to texts radically unlike Gravity's Rainbow, while the habits that would enable us to read texts like Gravity's Rainbow adequately are still scarcely conceivable. And necessary, because it may well be part of Pynchon's purpose to provoke just such misreadings. I have no argument with Pynchon's critics; but Pynchon has an argument with criticism. (McHale, 1985: 112)

Given the frequency and force throughout Gravity's Rainbow of passages that deploy "second-person" modalities, readers and critics are quite entitled to ask just who is the "you"? - or rather, who are these "yous," for clearly there are more than one - and to wonder, moreover, precisely what types of communicative situations they are involved in (McHale, 1985: 95).

McHale argues that "[t]hree entities must be taken into account: narrator, narratee, and character," and that although we could "construct a calculus of [nine] possibilities that would predict all the potential pairings of addresser and addressee," after various anomalous and impossible relationships (such as a narratee addressing another narratee) have been set aside, "we are left with only four pairings of address - or and addressee" (McHale, 1985: 96). These four relationships are:

To these four McHale subsequently adds a fifth form, "the one function in which you refers to none of the entities of our model, neither narrator, narratee, nor character" (McHale, 1985: 102). McHale has named all four terms of the addressee identity model. His is yet another formulation of the set of addresser-addressee relationships that I have described as so influential in very many approaches to "second-person" narrative modality (with the addition of the situation in which one character addresses a second character, which is a relationship I've placed outside the concerns of this thesis). But having identified these addresser-addressee relationships, he argues that none can be taken as primary, none (alone) offers the key to reading Gravity's Rainbow. In the following passage, argues HcHale, as in other passages that elegise Bianca and the novel's "lost girls," critics have interpreted the "you" variously as the actual reader or as a narratee, as the character Slothrop, and even as Slothrop and a narratee simultaneously.

[S]he looked at him once, of course he still remembers, from down at the end of a lunchwagon counter [ . . . ] both of you, at both ends of the counter, could feel it, feel your age delivered into a new kind of time that may have allowed you to miss the rest, the graceless expectations of old men who watched, in bifocal and mucus indifference, watched you lindy-hoop into the pit by millions, as many millions as necessary. . . . Of course Slothrop lost her, and kept losing her - it was an American requirement - out of the windows of the Greyhound, passing into bevelled stonery, green and elm-folded on into a failure of perception, or, in a more sinister sense, of will (you used to know what these words mean). [ . . . ]

Of all her putative fathers . . . Bianca is closest, this last possible moment . . . , closest to you who came in blinding colour, slouched alone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker . . . She favours you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you. (Pynchon, 1975: 471-72)

McHale concludes that "the reasons for reading this passage as being directed exclusively to Slothrop are certainly no weaker . . . than those for including the narratee" (McHale, 1985: 108). But by insisting on one or the other, the critics again ignore "countervailing evidence in the interest of some interpretive hypothesis or larger pattern of coherence" (McHale, 1985: 108). Alternatively, asks McHale, might one instead read "you" as referring to both? McHale is content that each interpretation can remain discrete, and he looks to the very fact of their difference, rather than to something that might arises as a product of their difference, as the value of this inclusive mode of reading.

Early in his discussion, speaking about Pynchon's characters - who are themselves avid readers and critics of all manner of texts and signs: raindrops, rockets, movie scenarios, molecular structure, shivers, whip scars, reefers, and more (McHale, 1985: 93) - McHale makes the observation that:

Pynchon's critic-heroes engage in two different modes of reading: on the one hand, paranoid reading, "the discovery that everything is connected . . . ;"

If McHale's inference is that "antiparanoia" might very well be the critical mode of postmodernism, he chooses not to pursue it, leaving that argument to others. Rather, he moves on to identify "antiparanoid reading" and "paranoid reading" with John Keats's notion of negative capability and the quest for certitude. Keats's description of negative capability is that it is a capacity or quality in which a person "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason;" and he describes the quest for certitude as an "irritable" incapacity to remain "content with half knowledge" (Keats, 1958: 193). Reuven Tsur calls this "irritable" mode of reading positivism and factualism:

Factualism is not confined to the exclusion of conjectures, interpretations, integrating hypotheses. It is sometimes marked by an inability to discriminate between what is known for certain and what is merely possible: when it comes to conjectures, interpretations, integrating hypotheses, it is inclined to treat them as though they were facts. (Tsur, 1975: 777)

Tsur allows that works of criticism, to be sure, usually are "meant to dispel ignorance and uncertainties in one way or another," but also contends that one can't help feeling that in many instances, "'reaching after fact and reason' is irritable indeed" (Tsur, 1975: 776). Tsur's point is not that such reading in itself is less accurate or anything less than reasonable, but rather that it becomes "irritable . . . when it claims monopoly in its attempt to dispel half-knowledge . . . [and] is asserted with undue certainty" (Tsur, 1975: 777).

McHale's reading of criticism about Gravity's Rainbow follows the same types of trajectories, surveying readings of the novel that exhibit measures of critical certitude, including readings that take the entire text to be a "movie" of which we, the readers, are the viewers (sitting in Los Angeles' Orpheus Theatre?) (McHale, 1985: 110), 100 and others that take the work from cover to cover as an addled mind's hallucination (McHale, 1985: 94). But like Tsur, in juxtaposing these readings against one another, it is not his intention to correct the critics or expose their misreadings.

From a certain perspective, there is nothing either to correct or expose. If they have misread, they have done so in the name of the best interpretive practices. They have tried to construct interpretive hypotheses of the greatest possible explanatory power and broadest possible scope, capable of accommodating the largest number of facts without contradiction. (McHale, 1985: 112)

Contradiction, however, might be exactly the point. Reading a text such as Gravity's Rainbow or Almost You cannot proceed, perhaps, without self-contradiction and the acceptance of deep, irreconcilable ambiguities. Although unifying Gravity's Rainbow might "increase the intelligibility of the text, [it] also reduces its strangeness; and it is its strangeness that we especially prize" (McHale, 1985: 111). No doubt, argues McHale,

it is difficult to live in an ontologically unstable world like that of Pynchon's novel, where things flicker between reality and unreality; but it is nearly as difficult for the certitude-seeking critic who is forced, like Slothrop, to rely upon "dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity."

On the other hand, insists McHale, there is a way of reading Gravity's Rainbow that accepts its contradictions, ambiguities, impossibilities. As Tsur puts it, where many critics persistently strive for certitude, others critics, equally persistently, are content to relinquish it (Tsur, 1975: 782-83). Resisting "the temptation to prejudge the case," writes McHale, we should read with Edward Mendleson's insight in mind that the use of "you" in Gravity's Rainbow is in some measure always a direct address to readers, that is, a direct address in which Pynchon "tries to implicate them also in the choices the book itself includes" (Mendleson, cited in McHale, 1985: 111). But it is also more. McHale proposes that if, in addition to Mendleson's insight, we also

apply the moviegoer hypothesis sparingly and tentatively, experimenting with alternative hypotheses - that you is the sign of the narrator's apostrophe of his character, or of a camouflaged conversation between characters, or of a character's "interior dialogue;" if we do these things, then we may not satisfy our drive for certitude, but we will have exercised our negative capability, and will have preserved the text's strangeness in the process. (McHale, 1985: 111)

To answer a question put earlier, therefore, it does seem more fitting to described the striking, unsettling force of a text such as Almost You in terms of "incertitude" rather than as the synthesis of a sophisticated, alternative totality, an intersubjectivity, no matter how anomalous or ephemeral such a totality might be figured to be - to find such totalities, at least in some measure, must surely be to recuperate a strangeness that is germane to the reader's experience of Protean-"you" textuality.

Keats's description of negative capability, however, in his letters to Benjamin Bailey, George and Tom Keats, and Richard Woodhouse amongst others, 102 posits a further aspect that neither Tsur or McHale draw out, but which is striking in the present context. Negative capability involves the capacity not only of suspending judgements, of being in the presence of irreconcilable ambiguities. It is also an annulment of the self. As Gavriel Ben-Ephraim writes:

Negative Capability maintains a perception together with its own incipient unravelling, sustaining rather than resolving contraries, functioning not to integrate but to include. [ . . . ] Concerned neither with distinguishing between the positive and the negative, nor with separating the inner from the outer . . . [g]ranting contraries and suspending distinctions, Negative Capability allows a freedom from moral judgment and philosophical determination that releases (in the sense of cancelling to create) self-identity. (Ben-Ephraim, 1997: n.pag.)

The capacity of negative capability, writes Ben-Ephraim, seeks a "dark knowledge in unrecognised areas of being." It is a quality that Ihab Hassan wants criticism to think of as "an emblem of certain qualities, attitudes and dispositions," a "happy phrase" that criticism must resist "turning . . . into yet another slogan" (Hassan, 1996: 305). As a capacity of the reader as much as of the poet/writer - a capacity that can be facilitated by the right text - Hassan writes that it is an "emblem or metaphor of a spiritual attitude" (Hassan, 1996: 320). "Spiritual" because:

it cultivates the patience of self-dispossession, self-recklessness, a quiet bracketing of the ego, its needs, irritations, impulses, a momentary hush or silence that attends mysticism and, somewhat differently, the experience of the sublime. [ . . . ] Interestingly enough, some theories of the sublime convey a . . . feeling of an overwhelming void. This is particularly true of the Kantian, abyssal sublime, ineffable, formless, a kind of kenosis of the Imagination, the self-emptying of the Absolute. In all these deeper negations, the risk of abolishing the world with the self must give us pause. Yet is it not also true that when we edge closest to an invisible abysm, invisible because it is all around us and within, we see life with the greatest clarity . . . ? (Hassan, 1996: 320-21)

One might usefully contrast this abyssal sublime against the more conventionally Humanist and Romantic "Wordsworthian 'egotistical sublime'" in which the poet "always puts his stamp on reality" (Ben-Ephraim, 1997: n.pag.). Keats, on the other hand, seems to intuit a sense of Being somewhere unbound - or not bound so wholly, at the very least - by Cartesianism's fantasies of originary selfhood. For him, writes Ben-Ephraim, the creative act is "[n]ot entirely dependent on the material world or another dimension of mind . . . , [but] takes place within an "empyreal reflection," within an "otherworldly outwardness" that "represents a middle term in a merging of subjective and objective states" (Ben-Ephraim, 1997: n.pag.). The nature of this "middle term," like the nature of the sublime itself, though, is elusive.

It is true, certainly, that Keats's discussions can be read as speaking of negative capability in terms of "identifying with the experience of others" (Wallace, 1991: 182), and of figuring the poet (and reader) as an empathic entity who "is continually in for - and filling some other Body" (Keats, 1958: 1, 387). The object of empathy, too, need not be another man or woman, but might even be "The Sun, the Moon, the Sea . . . " (Keats, 1958: 1, 387). Negative capability conceived thus comes to a sort of

emptying of the self . . . so as to imagine others and even the natural from the inside: "if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel" [1.186]. In a conversation, according to Woodhouse, Keats even "affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard Ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness volubility and the rapidity of its motion." (Wallace, 1991: 181)

But Keats writes, too: "When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to [so] press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated" (Keats, 1958: 1, 387). This seems to speak of something other than empathic, conventional identification, other than one self briefly adopting elements of another self's subjectivity; but it speaks of something other, too, than the oscillating dissolve into the experience of "second-person" intersubjectivity. If the strangeness of Almost You can be explained by an appeal to a notion of intersubjectivity - which is finally, as I will argue in the next chapter, an appeal to the nature of subjectivity with which we are most comfortable - it is also the case that its strangeness can be described - and more felicitously, I would argue - in terms of a much more threatening, and much less recuperable, "annulling [of] the self."

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Index

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Notes

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