The Second Person: A Point of View?
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in Narrative Prose Fiction.
Chapter 7
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The Second Person: A Point of View? Chapter 7 |
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"It's all the fault of the pronouns" 103
1. You singular, you royally plural 104
In "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" James Kincaid proposes that texts aren't coherent, we just read them that way. In the view of the notions of narrative textuality and narrative "person" underlying this thesis, it is a beguiling premise. What if most literary texts are in fact "demonstrably incoherent, presenting us not only with multiple organising patterns but with organising patterns that are competing, logically inconsistent?" (Kincaid, 1977: 783). In this final chapter I will argue for quite a different way of explaining the deeply unsettling discourse articulated by Almost You than that offered by the previous two chapters. Unstable, ambiguous instances of "second-person" narrative as articulated by Almost You do nothing so much as tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture 105 that unifies Cartesianism's experience or sense of subjectivity. Beneath those tears, to repeat an image invoked by both Culler and Barthes, are glimpses of something insuperably monumental, something incomprehensible in the face of which we can only gaze and wonder, mute - to Cartesianism's subject, glimpses of something monstrous. Exploring "second-person" narrative, therefore, might not entail analysis of a collusion between subjects (as Hantzis describes it), but of a failure of narrative discourse to manufacture for the reader the necessary, or at least anticipated, "token of the type 'human subject'" - a token that provides the reader with stable and conventional nominal and pronominal structures, and thereby acts as the "parsimoniously granted support," as Barthes puts it, for the subjectivity or identity of the engaged reader (Barthes, 1986:181). The appeal of Kincaid's aphoristic premise that literary texts aren't coherent, we just read them that way, is that it offers an apt description of at least one aspect of narrative "person." The premise might be rewritten as: Narrative "person" within any particular text becomes coherent only in the act of reading and only within specifiable practices of reading. The number of coherent patterns available, moreover, is exhaustible. The limiting factor is the metaphor of "person" itself. The metaphor - underpinned by Cartesianism - deploys a given range of structures that operate on narrative textuality (as explored in Chapter 4). But if coherent structures of narrative "person" are exhaustible, there does remain beyond those structures any number of possible instances of incoherent narrative "person" in which the metaphor and its unities are not sustained, or if at all, sustained solely by dint of the reader's resilient wilfulness. These, I would suggest, include the texts that Hantzis has categorised as "second-person" point of view proper, their oscillations and indeterminacies being construed by her as constituting their own unique structure - whereas I would offer a more prosaic proposition, characterising these texts' vacillations as precisely that: incoherence. Kincaid's notion of "demonstrable incoherence" seeks to negotiate a ground for criticism between two diametrically opposed modes of reading, and consequently between two opposed attitudes toward the nature of language and its relation to the world. His discussion becomes a gesture towards placing more responsibility for meaning-making with the reader and towards a conception of the text as a "triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation)" (Barthes, 1974: 5). But it is also at once a refutation of the deeper implications of the "triumphant plural," a notion denounced by Rosenblatt and others as dissolving the text into a mere "vide, an abstract form, a vessel, into which meaning . . . is to be poured" (Rosenblatt, 1978: 171). Almost You itself describes this opposition - though typically with far greater equivocation - in juxtaposing the "you"-protagonist's and Himmel's respective attitudes towards acts of translation and (re)making. In the previous chapter I discussed Himmel's and the "you's" differing attitudes towards origins and originals. Whereas the "you"-protagonist is consumed by a deep anxiety toward the determining power of originals and origins - over subsequent texts, over lives, over identity - Himmel's story grants them no specific privilege (see pages 187-89 above). In this, Almost You thematises two opposing approaches to language practice - broadly speaking, a classical model of language-as-code against a post-structuralist model of language as pragmatic. The "you"-protagonist's approach is expressed in terms of intentionalist, one-to-one communicative practice and shares the assumption made by classical linguistics that behind every normal speech act stands "an authentic, self-consistent, essential subject, a 'true self,' which does or does not . . . hold the intention that the other is supposed to recognise . . . " (Pratt, 1986: 62). Obedient to Grammar/Law/Father/Godsometimes fearfully so - his practice presupposes that the aim of an utterance is the maximal, "correct" communication of information, a practice that privileges the lisible (the readerly), and closes down the intimidating potential of unlimited semiosis. Writing about the lisible, Barthes suggests that: it is the direction of meaning which determines the two major management functions of the classical text: the author is always supposed to go from signified to signifier, from content to form, from idea to text, from passion to expression; and, in contrast, the critic goes in the other direction, works back from signifiers to signified. The mastery of meaning, a veritable semiurgism, is a divine attribute, once the meaning is defined as the discharge, the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing from the signified toward the signifier: the author is a god (his place of origin is the signified); as for the critic, he is the priest whose task is to decipher the Writing of the god. (Barthes, 1974: 174) Himmel's approach to language, by contrast, speaks of a more open practice, of an entry or intervention into acts of signification at a point within a rhizomic weaving of objects/signs/interpretants to which no absolute beginning and end can be ascribed. Within his use of language, statements are authenticated not teleologically (i.e., for meanings that will make rounded sense at the end of the narrative when the tale's conclusion resolves any puzzles still outstanding) but processionally, signs sending to signs, meanings streaming forward and back. Both characters begin the novel at a point where language is on the verge of failing them, but where the "you" vigorously seeks to consolidate this aphasia, to contain and further close down meaning, Himmel is described as seeking to move out into the bewildering world of discourse, seeking the sociality of language (even with a ewe; even with the not-anthropomorphic). Delighted by words, by language - "Babel!" Himmel blurts (Gunn, 1994: 126) - he embraces contradictory and non-rational sense. At its most self-conscious, this theme is expressed in the each character's childhood background. Both are raised as the children of "development" company owners, one in construction, the other in demolition, in deconstruction. And as children, both engage in acts of making. The "you"-protagonist's acts of construction are formal, linear and uni-directional. He uses Lego, Meccano, wood and imperial-sized screws, construction materials that comprise given sets of elements (all the various blocks and accessories of Lego; all the dimensions of finished timber), each item within its respective set to be joined together most soundly according to relatively inflexible structures and conventions of assembly. Whatever he makes, that is, is limited by the equivalents of a formal lexis and grammar, that is, is delimited by a code. Books came relatively late into your life. Before them there was Lego, Meccano, bits of wood and tools. Always constructing something, transforming those inert little blocks or struts or girders into recognisable, nameable objects - bridges, cranes, especially cars and houses. Then, later, planks and screws into chests and cabinet - show you struggled with your favourite joints, the tongue-and-groove and the dovetail. Books came later, and then by way of dictionaries and grammars, the mainstays of your budding mania for translation. (97) The corollary of his acts of making, of reducing his Lego and Meccano models back to their constituent parts, on the other hand, "was always upsetting for you. As you took down a wall, a window always disappeared - most disturbing - and the foundations turned back into neutral, un-become, blocks" (98). He quickly found, however, "that the boxes and cabinets, once completed, . . . were truly finished" (97). Making objects from words, too, freed him from the direct need to take them apart again, for here was an inexhaustible resource. Moreover, they "needed constant adjustment, could always be improved, changed to the last" (97), at least until a certain point - the point of institutionalisation within publication. The practice of (re)making textual objects became ongoing, the pleasure (whatever its pleasure) sustained. The nature of publication, however, turned the process bitter. Committed to print and mass produced, publication made his translations unalterable beyond the nihilistic sins of bowdlerisation and defacement. Even worse than dismantling a Meccano toy "was the moment when you would dip into one of your published translations. For though you had lavished the maximum attention up to the very last moment, language itself, since that moment - your language or just language, language out there - had shifted and changed" (98). He embraces the non-English text as the point of departure, as the foundation of the act of translation, and sees the definitive translation as the message he wishes to impart - as his destination. He arrives, however, elsewhere: "[t]he infelicitous word, the ungainly phrase, leapt out at you and seized you by the conscience" (98). His failure to produce a final meaning, more than an error, is construed as an act of immorality, the proof of a spoiling, irremediable imperfection in the finished object, and in his self. It is confirmation of Plato's denunciation of the poets, the corruption of true forms. When Himmel, on the other hand, expresses a predilection for making and remaking things as a child, it is with disparate bits and pieces, scraps, "little objects, anything" that he picks up around his father's demolition sites (125). The aged couple who present themselves as his parents tell how Himmel "[s]tarted making models. . . . Before long the garden shed was full, he said he was constructing a new city, everyone took it as a child's fancy, but he was deadly serious. . . . Not many tools, but what he did with them! And names for all his buildings too" (125). As against the formal, codified material of the "you"-protagonist's practice of making models, the material of Himmel's objects as he collects it can constitute no clear code. Although each item must possess characteristics that make it suitable for combination, each item to that extent lending itself to incorporation within a "poetics" of construction, his material can be systematised by neither a lexicon (his scavenged material is boundless, non-institutional), or a grammar (combinable therefore according to no standardised system). Himmel's practice of making is truly pragmatic. Subject not to a formalised code but to more ephemeral procedures that can only emerge within the instance of making, and only according to the material and to the tools available, his is a practice of extemporisation rather than formal composition. As an adolescent, Himmel, like the "you"-protagonist, finds within himself a talent for classical Latin. Hoping to jog Himmel's memory, the aged man coaxes: "Do you remember it now? Mensa, mensae, mensam, all day long. Like a revelation to him. . . . He was taught the modern way, didn't have to think about putting passages into Latin, only Latin into English - it's important this" (125). That is, to translate was to reanimate a "dead" language, to re-express its utterances in one that is "living." But at the point Himmel turns to other living languages - first French, then German - he realises: That there are languages, the living ones, are used to take your native words and turn them foreign. Suddenly he saw the full implications. That everything could be put into French, or German, or Russian, or Italian - or Latin too, why not. (126). Himmel, it seems, "couldn't bear the idea, quite took him over, that people were busy translating" (129). Whereas the "you"-protagonist blames the wrongs of translation on the infelicities of language (understood as syntagmatic change in codes across time) and the insufficiencies of its users (understood as degrees of knowledge), Himmel's narrative infers that the problem of translation arises somewhere within the practice itself. For Himmel, to translate was "to steal" (126). Initially at least, Himmel also sees the practice as providing the solution. He would return the words he construed as stollen to their initial forms, in their "mother tongue," as it were. He took translations of his favourite English-language books and translated them back into English. But he did so ceding no authority to originals. The aged man explains: Never referring back to the original English! Translating a translation! And it didn't stop there. For once it was back in English you'd be content for a while, go on to something else, then you'd decide it needed more work, so you'd put it back into French or Italian or German or whatever, in order to put it back into English again. [ . . . ] (129-30) Thus, where for the protagonist the infelicitous word is a despoiling imperfection in a finished object, for Himmel it is merely a node in a game of Chinese whispers. But lacking a principal of origins to guide him, lacking an original text to authorise THE final revision, the project can have no completion. When Himmel realises he is "fighting a losing battle," working "twenty hours a day, but in the end on just one or two books which you kept moving from one language to the other, changing them minutely all the time" (130), he turns to a more radical solution: "It was what took you to the Continent, Hector, don't you remember now? [ . . . ] For you'd decided it was futile trying to translate back all the books, and to devote yourself to urging translators to give up their work" (131). He hopes to stop the theft of language, as if such theft might be a degredation, because to translate was also "to destroy!" (126). This mission failing too, he turns to a third solution which "[s]omehow - you didn't explain the logic. . . might begin to eliminate the ill-effects of translation" (132). This final solution attacks the problem more laterally. Himmel becomes a father. The logic of this, however, remains opaque. Indeed, to suppose the existence of even the most specious rationale might already be beyond the point, the theme collapsing beneath the contrary, overdetermining gravity of the "you"-protagonist's Oedipal drama in which Himmel, never verisimilar, stands as the figure of a dialectic, symbolic counterpoint. Of course, one might object that this thematic juxtaposition of attitudes toward language has long since collapsed under the weight of the contrary - has been nullified, that is, by a sort of irony. It is the "you"-protagonist's story, rather than Himmel's, as one might expect, that proceeds in terms of a postmodern aesthetic expressive of a deconstructive attitude toward language. His phenomenological experience of time within the first strand is that of suspension. Set in the protagonist's present, the first strand participates in what McHale refers to as the tense of all the possible nows. The second strand of narrative, the "you"-protagonist's biography, is entirely fractured. Time is figured in the past tense but is non-linear, leaping between incidents with little temporal or dramatic congruity - some passages, set off by whitespace, being no more than uncontextualised recollections: Remember: Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated! Obey: Repeat this line to yourself, and as you do so, think: no Titania to dote on the ass you made of yourself. (60) With no conventional, "plotted" development, his life story is articulated as a parade of reflections and scenes which, totalised within the field of "biography" (biography as a genre-construct), constitute a depiction of the protagonist's identity and life. Himmel's tale, on the other hand, as described in the previous chapter in the context of the narrator's affection of omniscience, proceeds with almost classical composure. Although distributed across the first two strands of narrative, it is otherwise linear, episodic and "plotted" story-telling. It begins, as appropriate for a tale about an amnesiac, in medias res, progresses through a succession of incidents to a climax that incorporates the necessary revelation of "the time before the story," and concludes conventionally enough with a partially suspended denouement, three generations of a family reunited but for the immanent opening of the last door. But of course, the thematised juxtaposition of language modes does not collapse, even subjected to an irony of inversion. Irony merely doubles the theme. If the labels are crossed so that the "you"-protagonist's stories are told in a manner that seems more appropriate to Himmel's experience of language, and vice versa, this can finally do nothing more than resolve into one more of the text's riddling inconsistencies. 2. Protean-"You" and the Narrative Function
The notion that Almost You lacerates the systemic structures that naturalise classical story-telling - including, most crucially, conventionally inscribed "first-" and "third-person" subjectivity (i.e., of the coherent, stable and authoritative self) - has been demonstrated in the previous chapter. Like the differences between Hantzis's and Fludernik's readings of Joyce Carol Oates's "You" (1970) as discussed in Chapter 5, reading Almost You for its articulation of "second-person" point of view proper differs from my own reading in a number of key respects. Read in terms of the notion of negative capability, Gunn's novel is not so inextricably bound into Cartesianism's fantasy of origin and authority. Nor is its reader. But again, like the readings of Oates's "You," the reading offered in the previous chapter and my own, although coming to different conclusions, respond to many of the same textual cues. To let the illustrations of the Protean nature of "you" presented in the previous chapter stand as evidence of my own propositions seems a facile albeit economical approach to the argument. 106 But the move the former reading makes, in the context of point of view criticism and dramatic analysis, is to draw from these same illustrations evidence of the articulation of an intersubjectivity. Withdrawing Cartesianism's notion of the subject from the theorisation of the Protean-"you" - in particular Cartesianism's prejudicial faith in the knowledgeable self as the originator of discourse - one is left with discourse whose origin is inexplicable and indeterminate, and thus with instances of subjectivity that find no centre, no authority, and no autonomy. They become instances of subjectivity that, like Himmel, should admit to knowing nothing, or at the very most, as purveyors of gossip, received knowledge, hearsay and conjecture, should admit to knowing nothing for certain. I suggest, therefore, that Almost You licenses all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in the previous chapter. The chapter illustrates the constant overdetermination of the "you" and the narrating voice at length, and demonstrates that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both Himmel and the "you"-protagonist utterly ambiguous. But I would now specify that the myriad instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity of Protean-"you" discourse. Moreover, this fluidity and ambiguity is to be understood in large measure as the condition of all narrative textuality, but a condition that is vitiated - vigorously mediated against - by dominant practices of reading and writing. Kincaid is right in at least one significant respect. As readers and writers, we routinely produce texts as coherent. We unify discrete elements, make connections, read (in McHale's terms) paranoically. If there is an opposite tendency to read antiparanoically, to read for what Barthes has termed the scriptible (the writerly), taking meaning and pleasure from incompatibilities and contradictions, it is nonetheless the case that the lisible (the readerly), the orderly, has remained tenaciously ascendant (Gibson, 1996: 70). In so far as the scriptible is sanctioned in literary texts, one might observe that the sanction occurs principally under the condition that, as literary, it remains institutionally disciplined. It remains "Art." Within non-literary and non-fictional discourses, including linguistics, the very notion of the writerly is largely anathema. The scriptible is disdained by dominant practice because, as Silverman writes, no "glue" holds the disparate pieces of the writerly text together. Rather, she writes: heterogeneity and contradiction are multiplied as much as possible. None of its codes is subordinated to any other - on the contrary, the writerly text strives for anarchy and incoherence. Barthes insists that even irony must be banished from the text's premises since it enacts a repressive discourse in which the voice of implied criticism dominates all others. Here numerous codes signify simultaneously, without regard to the rules of precedence or sequentiality. (Silverman, 1983: 246) Within the domain of the lisible, on the other hand, structures of coherence are typically conspicuous. Put over-simply, we have learnt (have been encouraged to learn) how to read and write conventional "first-" and "third-person" narrative texts so as to maximise stability and homogeneity of interpretation. It is a matter of habit. Protean-"you" texts, on the other hand, hinder the constitution of stable hermeneutic structures. And as with the failure to discharge any lifelong habit, in reading such texts we may feel ourselves in some measure of discomfort, feel ourselves at a loss. Invoking Kincaid's notion of "demonstrable incoherence," I would suggest that each coherent understanding of a particular narrative's "person" - whether a modality of the "first," "third" or "second person" - is always in some sense finally incoherent. Each particular instance of coherence will be drawn together as a totality in a number of ways, none of which I would privilege over the other. Firstly, of course, a narrative's "person" will draw its constituent elements from amongst the disparate utterances of the text. These will always be in excess of what is needed to produce a particular sense of "person," if for no other reason than the fact that very many of the text's utterances will not be interpreted by a reader as bearing on the category of "person." But the same utterances might be read quite differently in subsequent readings or by other readers. A case in point is Oates's "You." Read in terms of Hantzis's notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity, the text articulates a "first-person" modality from beginning to end, in spite of the conceit of its opening pages. The "second-person" textuality that dominates the first third of the story and that persists through to the end is a sign of a "first-person" narrator apostrophising her absent mother, describing the mother's thoroughly typical behaviour. Read by Fludernik, the nature of the "second person" within the first third of the text is left indeterminate, which in turn places the nature of the story's "first-person" textuality, as manifesting an apparently self-referential autodiegetic narrator, in question. Nor can the presence of both "first-" and "second-person" modalities in "You" be explained "by juxtapositional and combinational strategies on the part of an 'implied author,'" because even this promising structure, she insists, is debatable. Oates's text becomes a "naturalistically and narratologically 'impossible'" narrative (Fludernik, 1993: 242). A second factor in the emergence of a particular pattern of coherence will be the influence of literary and non-literary genre and the vraisemblable as given models or templates to which the text might be compared or matched; and a third influence will be the myriad institutional and cultural discourses about "persons," selves, texts, the text in question, and so on, brought to bear in the act of reading. Manifest evidence of the third field of influences in particular is easily found in Hantzis's and Fludernik's readings. Hantzis and Fludernik seem to have called on quite different assumptions about the relationship between the "first-person" pronoun and the narrator, and quite different levels of openness toward non-canonical points of hermeneutic and aesthetic reference. Hantzis seems to read the story within the broad frame of modernist angst and a hyper-real investigation of the "self," while Fludernik explicitly invokes the frame of postmodernism's subversion of realism. Their divergent readings, then, might also be explained by contrasting Hantzis's insistence on "the presence of a narrator in every narrative text," with Fludernik's contention that no traditionally conceivable narrator is identifiable in "You." Fludernik's position implicitly identifies the origin of the narrative discourse not in "a narrator," which for Hantzis is inevitable, but in a narrative function of the order proposed by Chambers - a notion I will return to directly - or, in Gibson's words, in "the text itself." If no particular instance of coherence is guaranteed, however, it nonetheless remains the case that narrative discourse is thoroughly circumscribed, so much so that the inscription and "recognition" of "person" within narrative fiction has become, so to speak, all but totally automatic. Witness for instance the pressure placed on criticism to devise narrator-centred categories for "anomalous" texts such as the so-called "narratorless" or "camera eye" modalities exemplified by Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, Hemingway's The Killers, and sections of Dos Passos's U.S.A. (1966). As testament to the normative power of the standard notions of narrative "person," such anomalies have frequently been regarded as the proof of the rule - or disregarded altogether. But as texts like Jealousy, "You," and Almost You demonstrate, the organisation of a coherent structure that clearly expresses an unequivocal narrative "person" is not inevitable. Rather, they articulate a threat to the organisation of "person's" coherence. The threat articulated by indeterminate "second-person" narrative textuality is specifically a threat to the particular forms of knowledge and logic, particularly the logic of Cartesianism, that provide the structure of "person's" coherence. These modes can thereby undercut the very possibility of "person" emerging from the background of the text's inscriptions as a stable or even adequately distinguishable category. To put this differently, we fail to find ourselves in the text. One might recall here Margolin's point that without the sense of centre or of origin of the text's discourse, the traditional notion of the subject is much less applicable to the narrative discourse itself (Margolin, 1986-87: 208). Similarly, as Gibson somewhat polemically writes, at such moments we may no longer be able to say that the narrative originates from some position of subjectivity, no matter how vaguely formed or adumbrated; the origin of the narration can only be the text itself. Fludernik's reading of Oates's "You" offers a first example. A second illustration is offered by Gibson. At the end of the 14th chapter of Joyce's Ulysses (1969), in "The Oxen of the Sun" section, writes Gibson, is a passage that seems comprised of very many different voices (Gibson, 1996: 176). He characterises these voices as quotes or paraphrases of earlier characters' speech, references to or imitations and parodies of their speech, vernacular utterances, clichés, and stray phrases. All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil's sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward to the ribbon counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospital! Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius. A make, mister. The Denzille Lane boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Alee samee dis bunch. En avant, mes enfants! Fire away number one gun. Burke's! Burke's! Thence they advanced five parasangs. Slattery's mounted foot. Where's that bleeding awfur? Parson Steve, apostates' creed! No, no, Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead. Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mulligan! What's on you? Ma mère m'a mariée. British beautitudes! Retamplatan digidi boumboum. Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beatiful book come out of Ireland in my time. Silentium! Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen and there annex liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are (atitudes!) parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer, beef, trample the bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampllers. Thunderation! Keep the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops boosebox. Halt! Heave to. Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You hurt? Most amazingly sorry! (Joyce, 1969: 555-56) Gibson poses the question of whether this cacophony is entirely orchestrated, as it were, by one entity - by some singular, masterly narrator (Bloom? Stephen?) - or a rabble chorus barely constrained by an implied authorial agent. Or perhaps it is something else again. Although many - certainly not all - of the phrases can be traced back to this or that character or earlier moment within Ulysses, forming around the passage the most astonishing and dense texture of intratextual and intertextual resonances, the passage's "indeterminacies obscure that very specificity of voice" (Gibson, 1996: 176). In doing so, Gibson asserts, each phrase returns us to some other given phrase not as a trace of its origin, but as writing that has "no certain origin save the text itself" (emphasis added, Gibson, 1996: 176). More than this, the texture of intratextual and intertextual resonance begins to acquire its own momentum. Any given indication of a specific speaking voice within the passage might not only tentatively propose a speaking voice, but may also "remind us of another that we do not hear," the text not so much producing voices as inciting them, throwing the problem and responsibility for their "origin" back in our faces (Gibson, 1996: 176). Within Almost You, likewise, indeterminacies obscure the specificity of voice. In the previous chapter I addressed the problem of the text's unrelenting imperative utterances, such as: Note: Now your two rooms do not appear to you in the least capacious. . . . Know: Your objections are not heard, still less registered or acknowledged. . . . Look now: There goes Mrs Simpson, how quickly she moves. . . . (Emphasis added, Gunn, 1994: 81) Each utterance involves a verb (try; look; hear; know; assert; claim) which is sometimes accompanied by an additional word or phrase. Comprised solely of the verb or kept to fewer words, as the following, the utterance tends to express little or no attitude toward the "you"-protagonist: "deduce: . . . " (32); "recognise: . . . " (41); "try again: . . . " (67); "You assert: . . . " (127). Conversely, the expanded imperative utterances - and even a few of the solitary verbs, like "whine" (50) - explicitly express an attitude towards the predicated utterance and the "you"-protagonist, and so lend much to the impression of an immanent narrator: "hear now despite your reluctance: . . . " (11); "know all the more clearly now what intuited then: . . . " (53); "Object - yes object all you wish, for Himmel can not hear you: . . . " (25). It emerges that no absolute image of the narrator can be totalised around the imperative utterances alone, in spite of the strong invitation to do so. Time and again, the origin of the utterance slides between the "external" view of an extra-heterodiegetic narrator and the "internal" view of the "you"-protagonist himself: "Ask: . . . Ask also: . . . Think: . . . Try again: . . . Hear this rather: . . . " (67). But this vacillation comes about not for any quality of its own, but rather for the growing doubt that either reading - as external or internal narration - explains these utterances' presence within the narrative discourse. Nor, it might be added, is there a formalised or systematic movement between the two identities that might suggest the presence of two independent narrators, one heterodiegetic, the other homodiegetic. Describing these as some form of authorial intrusion, moreover, provides no adequate explanation of their relation to the rest of the text. Here instead is the invitation to the reader to engage his or her capacity for negative capability, sanctioning the contradictions of voice and even the possibility that many of these unrelenting imperatives may originate from no specific voice at all. At times - the more so as the novel progresses - they become "naturalised" as a specific convention of this text. Bound into the structure of the narration, into the "grammar," they can become disengaged from any specific voice. Indeed, they begin to acquire some of the qualities of "form" rather than "content," that is, come to replace the otherwise absent quotation marks. Chambers's notion of the "narrative function," I suggest, offers a useful way of conceiving of these utterances, and offers a way of reading them that resolves the conventionally absolute need to attach the narrative utterance to a speaker. He proposes that rather than focusing on "discovering" the "distinctions between subjects that are in effect versions of one another" (Chambers, 1989a: 28) - that is, on the supposed play between actual and implied authors, narrators, narratees, and actual and implied readers - we should concentrate on distinguishing the play between three crucial contextualising functions. Thinking of narrative "as an articulation of 'functions,'" he argues, "can throw light on the question of authority" (Chambers, 1989b: 36). Narrative viewed as information passing between duly constituted full and conscious subjects, such as the "narrator" and the "narratee," is discourse controlled - without residue or error - by those subjects, and in particular by the narrator as "originator" of the discourse. [ . . . ] But if, as Mallarmé has it, the "best" the happens ("se passe," not passe") between two people escapes them, then the interpretable dimension of discourse in its "textual function" is a manifestation of something that traditional Western culture has viewed as unsettling and dangerous, that is of discursive uncontrollability. No check is possible on such discourse: I mean both that it cannot be verified (cf. French "contrôlé") at its source (for there is no origin, no accountability) and that it cannot be stopped at its point of reception (for instead of a point of reception there is the limitless process of supplementation we call interpretability). (Chambers, 1989b: 33) Chambers writes that we should distinguish between, firstly, the text as language, as a referential system, secondly, the text as discourse, as a communicating practice, and thirdly, the text as object of reading, as an interpretive relation. For instance, reading for the first context, we will understand the text in terms of its reference to fictional and actual worlds. Read in the second context, we make sense of the text in terms of what we make of "the narrator" and of the narrator-narratee relationship (involving all the assumptions that accrue around the terms, as well as the conventional questions we are invited to ask when considering the narrator). Both of these functions would lead us to construe narrative in terms of the vraisemblable, such that we might find in narrative texts images we imagine to be of ourselves and of our world/s. To read in terms of the third context, on the other hand, is to allow the text to "represent itself" (Chambers, 1989a: 28). Reading, Chambers argues, "as the production of meaning, is a phenomenon that is different in kind and has a different object from the reception of information (as 'narratee') . . . " (Chambers, 1989b: 32). He concludes that, as a consequence, we need to "distinguish between a 'narrative function' of discourse, defined in terms of the narrator-narratee relation, and a 'textual function,' defined as a relation of a reading to a writing (where 'writing' names discourse that is not assumed to originate in a subject or to be under its control . . . )" (Chambers, 1989b: 32). The narrative function, which most concerns me here, concerns the way in which information is conceived of as passing from the narrator to the narratee (Chambers, 1989b: 37): As the etymology of the word "narrator" (<*gnarus) suggests, the "narrative function" produces discourse as the vehicle of transmission of knowledge - that is, of information whose meaning is controlled by its being anchored in a "knowing" subject (the narrative "I"), produced as originary and originating, addressing another subject (the narrative "you"), produced as the appropriate (curious, desiring, needful . . . ) recipient for such information. I say "produced as" because it is vital to recognise that the narrator and the narratee are not autonomous instances capable of using discourse in an instrumental way but, to the contrary, . . . [are] best conceived as empty "slots" whose "content" is a function of the predications of discourse itself. They are thus representations (or more precisely simulacra) produced as tokens of the type "human subject," controlling the discourse which, however, itself produces them" (Chambers, 1989b: 36-37). The narrative function, as "the vehicle of transmission of knowledge" (Chambers, 1989b: 36), refers to the concept that is more conventionally described by the term "narrator." To state this differently, if narration is the process of producing narrative information, then the narrator is the figure identified as the agency through which this production and channelling of information is carried out. 107 It is the narrative function that organises the story's information, but organises the information in such a way as to make it appear as if originating from a specifiable, anthropocentric agency uttered to another like agency: THE narrator/s, THE narratee/s. Bal's incisive but terse definition of narrative implies that a third agency is constituted by the narrative function: A narrative is an account, in any semiotic system, of a subjectivised and often entirely or partly fictionalised series of events. It involves a narrator - whether explicitly or implicitly self-referential, always a "first person" - a focaliser - the implied subject who "colors" the story - and a number of actors or agents of the events. Narrative thus conceived is not confined to literary or, indeed, verbal narrative. It is a mode of semiotic behavior rather than a finite set of objects. (Bal, 1993: 308) Like the narratee, the third agency, the focaliser, might be explicit or implicit, but the paradigmatic notion of narrative epistemology being addressed here by Bal insists on their constitution by any narrative text. In so far as Hantzis, Bal and others insist that every narrative will have a narrator, it might be more perspicacious, therefore, to insist that every narrative has a narrative function that readers are in the habit of totalising as an anthropocentric agency. Chambers stresses that the work of the narrative function is precisely to produce the narrators and narratees, the text's illocutionary subjects, as if they were originating subjects. But he also insists that these categories are in fact reader-made projections of the discourse. As a type of conceit of narrative discourse, the narrator is identified within and by the processes themselves as the agent that "produces" and "channels" narrative information, while in fact being itself produced by that discourse. Consequently, the narrator, Bal's "first person," cannot finally be held to be the origin of narrative discourse. Chambers, however, focuses his notion of narrative function on the illocutionary subjects as (illocutionary) subjects. To read in terms of the narrative function is to read at a less sophisticated level of the literary text, to read for the values of narrative information, "knowledge," plot, rather than engaging at the level of the textuality. For my own purposes I would shift that focus onto the nature of the function, that is, onto the narrator's and narratee's nature as produced as if themselves originary. In this, the narrative function might be conceived of much like a ventriloquist's doll accorded the conceit of speaking (and dressing, and drinking the glass of water) for itself - though the analogy is also tellingly false. What is also true of the narrative function is that there is no Man, no authorising agency, in whose lap it would sit, for the text is something quite other than Man. 108 Thus, to specify a text's narrative function is to enumerate the means by which the text's narrative information is imparted, means that in all prevailing practices of reading are inevitably, but only conventionally, totalised and ascribed some measure of anthropocentric identity and agency as the "vehicle" of this information - even if only as the disembodied, "objective" voice of a "camera eye." Indeed, the tools the reader/critic will draw on to describe the means by which the narrative is told - Genette's categories of diegesis, Stanzel's segmented wheel, the "second-person" addressee identity model, and so on - are themselves already heavily inscribed by the anthropocentrism and assumptions of agency that will conjure the images of the text's narrator/s and narratee/s. Conventionally, then, the narrative function works proficiently and more or less seamlessly to articulate an agent that appears to be the source of the narration. Occasionally, however, the origin of the narration, or of certain utterances within the flow of narrative discourse, becomes so indeterminate as to become all but untraceable - witness passages of Gravity's Rainbow as discussed by McHale, the cited passage of Ulysses as discussed by Gibson, and Oates's "You" as discussed by Fludernik. Witness, finally, the ambiguities that arise in relation to Almost You's imperative utterances. To whom should the words "admit," "object" and "testify" be ascribed: an extradiegetic narrator, the protagonist, an intrusive, authorial voice? Admit: There are muscles still mobile in your face. Expressions of exasperation are still feasible. The occasional sick smile. Object: No numbers on the row where you live, and the street sign, if it ever existed, was removed years ago. Even Mrs Frock, a local - you have heard her - refers to it as just The Row. Testify: The odd look of blind panic too. Do not neglect that. (Gunn, 1994: 133) The imperatives slip from mouth to mouth, sounding unconvincing and awkward in each. The narrative function has failed its obligation to specify the precise channel, the precise conduit, of narrative information. Narrative information simply effervesces amidst the rhizome of the text. 109 The function uncharacteristically disrupted, we find ourselves reading narrative discourse that we can no longer confidently assume "to originate in a subject or to be under its control" - a situation that traditional Western culture, as Chambers notes, finds quite unsettling. It is my contention that this is what ensues, too, from Protean-"you" discourse: the deterioration of the narrative function as Chambers describes it, leaving us in a state "unsettling and dangerous." 3. The dissolution of Intersubjectivity
Here, then, I turn to my concern that the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity in fact presents "a false problem, because it relies on a 'wrong' self" (Michaels, 1980: 198). This "false problem" might be paraphrased as: What experience of reading transpires when textual subjects relinquish their conventional claim to the authority of traditional, anthropocentric subjectivity? Stating the problem in this way, however, assumes the status of traditional, anthropocentric subjectivity as a given of the "unmarked case" of narrativity. The crucial point here is not so much that this mode of reading is anthropocentric. The issue is that the forms of the people we find in prose narrative texts are construed in terms of particular modes of subjectivity, modes that are the textual corollary of Cartesianism's notion of the self. This, then, is what I mean by proposing that the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity relies on a "wrong" self. The problem might better be stated as: What transpires when narrative discourse fails to articulate stable, conventionally comprehensible modes of subjectivity and instead adumbrates deictic relations between textual subjects? 110 An underlying supposition informing this thesis is that, contrary to Cartesianism's notion (that textual subjectivity is predicated, mimetically, on forms of the social subject), the constitution of the social subject is substantially predicated on the textual - on the emergence of the self in semiosis. When narrative fails to articulate stable modes of subjectivity, as occurs in Protean-"you," ratified categories of textual subjectivity become unstable and are at threat of being dissolved in their entirety. This is not to say that the actual reader's subjectivity will be likewise entirely dissipated in the experience of reading Protean-"you" texts. It is to argue, rather, that within the deeply unsettling effect of reading Protean-"you" texts is also the trace of this potential dissolution, the trace of the subject's experience of being in jeopardy. I must stress immediately, however, that my object in discussing the "second-person" point of view proper at such length is not to take Hantzis's argument to task, but to further explore the underlying Cartesianism that it finally falls back to. Hantzis in fact provides a sophisticated and insightful discussion of the operation and effects of "second-person" discourse, and her arguments are valuable precisely for the ways in which they press beyond the limits set by the hegemony of Cartesianism. But they are instructive, too, of the reach of that hegemony. In this, I take her arguments as emblematic of much contermprary criticism. I would suggest that, at the level at which we experience ourselves as self-identical, continuous beings, at the experience of the everyday, Hantzis's description of "second-person" proper as constitutive of an intersubjectivity is lucid. Texts such as Almost You do seem to rearticulate, for a time, the reader's experience of self as a subject one-amongst-others, as a "mutually authorising, always fading" self whose identity is fluid and ambiguous. Hantzis is right to argue that the oscillation and instability of identity so characteristic of "second-person" textuality is cardinal to the experience of reading it. She is also right to propose that this experience radically undermines the mode of subjectivity paradigmatic of what I have been calling Cartesianism. The value of the notion of intersubjectivity, I suggest, lies in its interrogation of the traditional conception of the unitary, self-identical subject, and thus in its provision of a means of political and ethical intervention into dominant, authoritative modes of narrative discourse. 111 The experience of reading "second-person" narrative proper may very well, in some sense, offer a liberating experience of self. Yet the question I would raise is what transpires when we renounce - as Hantzis admits herself reluctant to do - the subject status of narrative entities. I have noted that Hantzis makes many of the same observations about "second-person" textuality that I make. The fundamental point on which we differ concerns the conclusions drawn from those observations. These conclusions are significantly affected by differing assumptions regarding the nature of the subject as a textual and social category. What notions of "second-person" intersubjectivity tend to elide is that while the "second-person" proper explicitly challenges the assumption of the unitary textual subject, it simultaneously underwrites the self-identical subject by producing it as a constitutive precondition. I suggest that this the case in at least two major respects. In figuring intersubjectivity as an oscillation across multiple positions or sites of subjectivity, this notion of the "second-person" proper appears to presuppose that something outside those sites comes to occupy them. Hantzis, for instance, conceives of the "second-person" point of view's new vision of the world and one's place in it as what a human subject comes to and experiences - it is a rupture of unitary subjectivity that a reader experiences as an epiphany. It is explicitly figured as a peculiarly literary mode of subjectivity that affects the reader's subjectivity by drawing him or her into participation in a particular instance of intersubjectivity. Moreover, outside texts the (social) subject implicitly retains the privilege of priority and self-sufficiency granted it by Cartesianism. Intersubjectivity is figured as a mode of subjectivity that a self-sufficient subject comes to and participates in, and is free to disengage from at any time. As Kalaga has argued, it seems that many of the recent critiques of the Cartesian self - including, he writes, those by Foucault and Derrida - may yet permit "an implicit hypostisation of a nuclear persona, creating a self-contradictory duality" (Kalaga, Nebulae 15). He argues that theories of the "non-originary and heteronomous . . . constructed subject" are frequently supported by an underlying duality of "individual"-"subject," a dichotomy between the always already existent individual and the constituting Exterior: the origin and the existence of the individual is determined by the field of discourse, and yet the individual must first enter that field. Contrary to the claims that there is no pregiven entity beyond discursive production, some kind of anteriority always seems to be implied: an ersatz of the essentialist "I," still plasmatic, unformed, unmoulded and embryonic, but already there. . . . (Kalaga, 1996: 15). Kalaga proposes that despite the many declarations made in current critical theory that the subject's production is rooted in practices of signification, the agent "which takes a subject position - or enters the symbolic order, or internalises signification - is not founded in the theory of signification and remains outside it like a 'dangerous supplement'" (Kalaga, 1996: 18). Kalaga writes that evidence for this approach to the problem of subjectivity abounds and that it is typified by the proposition that identity "is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society" (Kalaga, 1996: 16). It is a proposition that brings Kalaga to conclude that instances of the split between the subject and the individual often "reflect an obvious conceptual schizophrenia" (Kalaga, 1996: 16). He argues that since "an individual must ex definitione - through a tautology of the most fundamental kind - have an identity, the impending question of what is that individual before it enters the dialectical relation and what is its origin before the first positioning, first interpellation, places in doubt the validity of the relation's originary power" (Kalaga, 1996: 16-17). The question of what the individual is "before it enters the dialectical relation" throws us back to the problem of the "ghostly presence" espied by Eco, a presence intuited (or perhaps merely anticipated) as the concrete producer of signs wherever there is discourse (see pages 55-56 above). As much as the language and metaphors of Foucauldian and Derridean critical theory may lend themselves to the self-contradictory duality Kalaga describes, however, I am not convinced that the theories themselves fall into the trap Kalaga identifies for them. When Foucault speaks about "the individual," it is in a particular sense. As Catherine Greenfield has written: In a philosophical account, or a history of the subject, "the subject" functions as a model from which we can derive all other forms of individual existence. Insofar as someone is accorded the status of "individual," they are also a "subject." The principle of every individual is a mechanism (the synthetic activity of consciousness) of knowledge or experience, and the subject is simply the model of this mechanism in its ideal, or self-reflexive, form. (Greenfield, 1984: 48) For Foucault, then, the individual is to be taken as nothing other than the particular, nameable human, social subject. As Peirce might have described it, what the subject is "before it enters the dialectical relation" is a subject in a dialectical relation, and so on, in the infinite regression of unlimited semiosis. Moreover, I would also suggest that Chantal Mouffe's reading of the Foucauldian notion of subjectivity quoted in Chapter 2 describes at least one of the ways in which Foucault resolves the problems Kalaga raises. Foucault's notion of the plurality of the multiple and contradictory subject, as described by Mouffe, "does not . . . involve the coexistence, one by one, of a plurality of subject positions," but the constant subversion and over determination of thinkable positions by intersecting strands of discourse. It is the intersecting of diverse moments of discourse across their various open but determinate fields that makes possible "the generation of totalising effects" that we call identity, knowledge and so on (Mouffe, 1962: 28). The notion of the "field," too, should be clarified. As Dennis Lee astutely points out, the metaphor needs to be extend far beyond the merely spatial. He writes: The metaphor of the field, invoking the idea of an unseen but definable force which patterns the particles that fall within its influence, furnishes . . . a way of talking about the overall structures that govern the relationships among a collection of separable items. (In physics a field can only be perceived by inference from the relationship of the particles it contains; the existence of the field is, however, entirely separate from that of the particles: though it may be detected through them, it is not defined by them.) (Lee, cited in Browne, 1978: 176) Contrary to Kalaga's assertion, therefore, it is not at all the case that Foucault proposes that some "still plasmatic, unformed, unmoulded and embryonic" ersatz "I" moves from fixed position to fixed position. Yet this is what the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity appears to argue, the identity of the "multiple subject" often being described as oscillating between positions that house the "you"-as-narrator, the "you"-as-character, the "you"-as-reader and so on. Hantzis's postulate is that even if the participants relinquish a "false claim to individual identity," they continue to hold their constitutive place in the system "as subject guarantors for each other" (Hantzis, 1992: 75). To pluralise voice in this way, however, is still to remain unequivocally attached to voice as metaphor. Underwritten by an implicit faith in the subject that speaks, the pluralisation of voice seems to obscure rather than deconstruct the ideological function of narrative voice "as an index or unifying 'source'" of what is judged meaningful and coherent (Gibson, 1996: 170). Rather than pluralisation, a more felicitous approach to the problem of the loaded metaphor of voice, perhaps, is to disperse voice. In respect of her own arguments, however, Hantzis is very aware of the issues at hand. She is mindful that any definition (like her own) of the narrator as "the consciousness that generates the 'you'-utterance" (Hantzis, 1992: 47), or of point of view as "that which constructs the whole of the textual world through the voice that speaks it" (Hantzis, 1992: 12), must simultaneously acknowledge the powerful and conventional assumptions behind those metaphors. She writes: "The idea that a collusion between subjects occurs in second-person narrative presumes the subject status of the narrative entities just as does the term intersubjectivity" (Hantzis, 1992: 74). She is explicit, then, that her assumptions inevitably invest characters and narrators with subject status. Perhaps no assumption, she admits "is so fragile today as that one" (Hantzis, 1992: 74). 4. Conclusion: On the Borders of Nihilism
As sketched in my first chapter, my argument, like Hantzis's at its broadest, concerns assumptions about the nature of subjectivity. But unlike Hantzis, my concern with radical "second-person" textuality is not with what it produces, but with what it doesn't produce. To spell these assumptions out, one might begin with the observation made in Chapter 2 that theorists and philosophers like Barthes, Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, and C.S. Peirce and Nietzsche before them, have variously argued that the sovereign, unitary subject of knowledge is no more to be discovered outside and prior to texts - that is, out there reading texts, including this text - than within them. But as Peirce observes, the hegemony of the Cartesian self is such that we persist in identifying ourselves with our will, with our power over the animal organism, with our brute force (cited in Colapietro, 1989: 29). Jacques Derrida has made the same observation: that the prevailing notion of self is predicated on the experiential, auto-affective fact of our own subjectivity as the sole subjectivity of which we can be assured, a subjectivity whose "presence" seems assured for its "self-presence in so-called living speech and in self-consciousness" (Derrida, 1981b: 5). As I speak, as I write, I experience my own identity as stable and continuous. But this says nothing about the role played in the stable sense of identity of the brute materiality of my body (which for Peirce is the necessary material form of the self as a sign), or memory. Nor does it acknowledge that what constitutes me as a subject might not itself simultaneously provide that identity with the comforting appearance of continuity and self-sufficiency. "Readers are astonishingly eager," writes Walter Benn Michaels, "to see shattered or social selves in novels and poems, but are a good deal more reluctant to acknowledge the consequences of such a deconstruction for their own relations with texts" (Michaels, 1980: 200). By way of illustrating the notion of "person" being proposed, I would like to return briefly to Heider and Simmel's two-and-a-half minute animated film discussed in Chapter 1.112 I noted there that the viewers of the animation took the movement of the three geometric shapes across the field as being continuous, organised and motivated. The ways in which T, t and c become "persons" and the implications this "person-ality" has for making sense of the film text has a number of similarities with the ways in which literary textuality constitutes narrative "person," particularly in the way in which the pronoun, as a signifier, operates as a "token of the type 'human subject,'" to borrow from Chambers (Chambers, 1989b: 36-37). Figure 18 illustrates the individual frames of Heider and Simmel's animation.113 (Not every successive frame is illustrated. The differences from frame to frame are gross, not the fine alterations required for the purposes of animation.) To re-paly the reconstruction of Heider and Simmel's animation, click to "refresh" the browser window or open this link: PLAY ANIMATION The appearance of continuous, smooth movement is produced by small but significant - that is, necessarily perceptible changes in the position of the objects within the field from frame to frame. At the standard 24 frames per second, the two-and-a-half minute film would comprise some 3,600 individual frames, each one showing the cardboard cut-out shapes photographed on a plain flat surface, each shape moved a short distance in preparation for the next exposure. These changes from field to field, however, occur under circumstances in which the physiological limits of perception force upon us the illusion of continuous movement. In reading, just as in viewing, discrete signifying elements are made cohesive and totalised as an identity - same-sized triangles placed in much the same position in successive film frames, for instance; or pronominal signifiers repeated within a passage of text. Totalised, they are made animate. Heider and Simmel's animation deftly illustrates that "person" is constituted as an apparent unity, but is in fact ineluctably ruptured, disparate, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense (reading, viewing, listening, writing, speaking) and so never finally unified, never finally coherent. The audience's responses to the animation suggest that the coherence of the behaviour of animated geometric shapes, if never without limits and determinants as textual, is in essence ephemeral - just like the coherence of the identity of "person." Indeed, the animation illustrates this in two ways, both directly and, thanks to a particular feature of the film medium, metaphorically. The metaphorical dimension of the illustration of the workings of "person" is the material, mechanical element of the illusion of movement in film. It is a metaphor for the way in which textual discourse and semiosis in general digitalises, or segments, our continuous, analogue experience of being-in-the-world, dividing our experience into comprehensible elements (i.e., film frame by film frame) that might, in the practice of making sense of texts, reform back into a whole that seems continuous, seamlessly complete, analogue - that is, that seems to reform into a coherent totality. But the illustration is also much more direct. The shapes have become the direct equivalents of the pronouns of "person." Whether geometric shapes projected onto a screen or words on a page, both function within semiosis as the material of "person." Applying Barthes's position concerning the "semic" constitution of literary character helps amplify the point. Barthes suggests in S/Z that pronouns and proper names function as "magnetic fields" that attract meaning, character emerging when "identical semes [connotative signifieds] traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it" (Barthes, 1974: 67). 114 Likewise, each of the three mobile geometric shapes in the animation comes to function as "the sum, the point of convergence" (Barthes, 1974: 191), of an agglomeration of semes. Particular meanings, connotations, myths accrue around each as the shapes move about in space and time on the projection screen, the "semic raw material" provided by an abundant language completing "what is proper to being," filling the name/shape with adjectives (191). "[E]verything depends," Barthes writes, "on the level where we halt the nomination of the seme" (192). The viewers of the animation must rely on nothing so generous as a written text to guide them, although the practice is alike: semes are not announced, they are construed, interpreted, they are no less a matter of hermeneutics in the filmic text than in the literary. For its viewers, storied behaviour, articulating character, emerges as one seme alights time and again on the same character/shape, confirming itself in its repetition. For instance, the semes of aggressivity, belligerence, resourcefulness for T; valiance, independence, resentfulness for t; dependence, opportunism, cowardice for c. What Barthes writes about the "I" in this context is pointedly true, too, for "you" - and for "she" and "he," for that matter. In literary texts, but also in ordinary conversation between social subjects, "I is no longer a pronoun, but a name, the best of names: . . . it gives one a biographical duration, it enables one to undergo, in one's imagination, an intelligible 'evolution,'" to be signified as an object with a density, an object in time (Barthes, 1974: 68). "The proper name," he writes, enables the person to live outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless constitutes it entirely. As soon as a Name exists (even a pronoun) to flow toward and fasten onto, the semes become predicates, inductors of truth, and the Name becomes a subject: we can say that what is proper to narrative is not action but the character as Proper Name. . . . (Barthes, 1974: 191-92) Here, again, recalling arguments drawn from Fludernik in Chapter 1, is the conclusion that anthropomorphic character is more fundamental to the nature of narrative than plot. The language that carries the semes, the language that allows/facilitates/promotes interpretation of a text as narrative, moves nowhere without the pronouns and proper names and their analogues to leap towards: becomes merely "scene," "exposition," "setting." But what of texts whose pronominal structures are pushed to the fore - epistolary and journal fiction; "pure dialogue" and internal monologue texts; dissembling "I"="you" narratives? The question arises as to what happens within reading and within reader subjectivity in relation to these texts when the habits of unity fail, as they do systemically and spectacularly, I suggest, within Protean "second-person" narrative. Rather than talking about the "second person" as a point of view and so always to entrench it in old habits, I would argue that the insights the "second person" might offer criticism concern the modalities and functions of narrative "person" more broadly, not only as narrative functions, but also as textual functions fundamental in the constitution of our own identities as human subjects. The task of exploring the striking effects of "second-person" narrative would ask the critic to keep in mind always that the too-often vitrified metaphors of "person" do not provide disinterested analytical perspectives on fiction. Rather - as a point that bears repetition - the categories of narrative "person," as metaphors of naturalisation and anthropomorphism, are deeply implicated in the fiction-making process itself (Culler, 1984: 6). The consequence of this is that the categories of person can offer no analytical perspective on fiction whatsoever. It is only when we fully conceive of these metaphors as being functions within language that we will also see "person" as contributing to a hegemony whose function is to maintain particular normative ideological and discursive structures and the sovereignty of that favourite "father," the knowing subject. It is then that they become descriptive of narrative, rather than simply contributing to the maintenance of deeper fictions. To paraphrase Michaels, as literary critics whose avowed topic is fictions, we need not find this embarrassing (Michaels, 1980: 200). Underlying this proposition is the assumption that the tension produced between particular modes of "second-person" narrative discourse and those prevailing and powerful ideological and discursive structures, the discomforting gap between thinking ourselves "unprejudiced" and seeing the "prejudice" in our words, is what largely underwrites the potentially radical, unsettling force of narrative "you." It is a force to be understood as arising through a confrontational and perilous articulation of what much post-Saussurian cultural theory assumes to be the actual condition of subjectivity - subjectivity, that is, constituted as an apparent unity, but one in fact ruptured, disparate, produced. Not finally produced, never completed, but rather always "in process," or in Peirce's phrase, a subject that is always in the middle of things. This "subject-in-process," however, is not to be construed in any way whatsoever as being produced by destabilising instances of "second-person" narrative. The position I am advocating is not a variation of that adopted by notions of "second-person" intersubjectivity. Instead, what might be claimed for the "second person" is that it has the potential to reveal this actual condition of subjectivity. In terms of narrative textuality itself, although reading practices have evolved in relation to "first-" and "third-person" modalities that thoroughly mask the condition of the textual subject as an agglomeration of semes, Protean-"you" has not as yet been normalised, and its unseemly behaviour, I suggest, forces us to reflect back on how we traditionally view the behaviour of "I," "she" and "he." Recalling Richardson's comment that "third-person" narrative tends to naturalise social relations and Irigaray's that the "I" often expresses authority over other persons and the world, we see clearly that "first" and "third-person" narratives do conventionally produce particular experiences of subjectivity in the reader, sponsoring the reader's close identification with, and sense of identity as, "a self that is coherent, stable, and knowable [and that] provides a centre of fixed truth" (Siegle 7). Faced with the Protean-"you," however, we no longer find these unities so self-evident. Moreover, this sense of self-identity neither alters the condition of subjectivity that subtends this produced (and merely apparent) self-identity, nor alters the condition of the entity onto which Cartesianism maps its own particular conception of the human subject, its particular conception of being and of being-in-the-world. Indeed, I take this to be a crucial element of the thesis I am putting here. If it is true that "a certain species of life could not live" without the "metaphysical dogmatism" of Cartesianism's fantasy of self-sufficiency (Nietzsche, 1968: 272), that does not alter the underlying condition of that species' genus (if I may play with Nietzsche's metaphor). As Michaels's comment about finding "shattered or social selves in novels and poems" suggests, the condition or nature of the subject as discontinuous and contingent needs to be applied to the reader who comes to a "first-" and "third-person" narrative text no less than to the reader of a "second-person" narrative text. In the first instance, one of the first implications of the conception of narrative "person" posited above (as allegorised by Heider and Simmel's animation) is that all three narrative "persons" are equally incoherent. Our eagerness to totalise occurrences of "first-" and "third-person" pronouns in narrative texts, that is, our willingness to bear witness to the textual inscription of (particular modes of) subjectivity, is nothing so much as habit. This returns us to one of Hantzis's principal claims for the "second-person" point of view proper: that the mode of subjectivity that it produces is "ephemeral and un-author-ised outside the voicing of the text; it persists so long as the narration persists" (Hantzis, 1992: 75). As I noted in Chapter 1, this raises some questions about assumptions regarding the status of "first-" and "third-person" points of view and the nature of the subjectivity they construe. In what ways are the modes of subjectivity described by "first-" and "third-person" points of view "authoris-ed" outside the voicing of the text, that is, in what ways are these conventional modes of subjectivity independent of the text? The notion that subjectivity might be constituted independently of texts is exactly what the Peircean notion of the self contests: the self is text. It may not be the case at all that a subjective "I," a "first person," let alone the self-identity of an objective "s/he," a "third person," persists outside texts in any but the most ephemeral sense. The self is ineluctably bound into processes of semiosis: "my language is the sum total of myself" (Peirce, cited in Colapietro, 1989: 29). The experience of being a self anterior to semiosis, then, is an experience immersed in extreme prejudice, a prejudice spoken over and over by the hegemony of Cartesianism. The paradigmatic categories of the "first-" and "third-person" are those upon which our notions of self, as subjective and objective beings respectively, are in large measure founded. As Bal rightly observes, however, it is a foundation that contains a circular contradiction. Although the epistemological notion of objective truth and impersonal knowledge is bound up with narratological notions of the external and invisible narrator, neutral representation, and "third-person" narrative, what contrarily sustains the notion of objective epistemology is Cartesianism's "mininarrative in the first person" (Bal, 1993: 197). Bal writes that the "epistemological ideal" is felicitously characterised by Lejeune's description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "third-person" autobiography as "giv[ing] us a lesson in objectivity" (Bal, 1993: n.8, 219). Conversely, one wonders what the experience of being the "third-person" would be - a "person" who, in Benveniste's terms, for its exclusion from the circuit of communication, is not an agent at all. To conclude, I would like to turn finally to Colapietro, who makes the point that whatever is meant by the term "human subject," the term should always also be taken as pointing to "the radical instability of the human person" (Colapietro, 1989: 42). Citing Jose Ortega y Gasset, he argues that man "is never assuredly man," but lives, it seems, "in perpetual fear of being dehumanised" (emphasis added, Ortega y Gasset, cited in Colapietro, 1989: 42). 115 Our reluctance to lose sight of ourselves in literary texts, which might in a sense be given as one of the implicit themes of this thesis, seems to bear this out. And indeed, as Ihab Hassan avows when speaking about the/our anxious flight from the borders of nihilism: "Moralists, ideologues, Platonists of sundry kind, may have been right after all to protect themselves against the void in a world hard enough, as it is, to justify, a world - dare we say it? - ultimately unjustifiable, except by faith or grace" (Hassan 319-20). It would appear, however, that Protean-"you," in its failure to "protect [us] against the void," does something other than simply dismantle the conventional notion of the self-conscious, autonomous, stable individual to leave us in a state of alienation from textual subjects, or on the verge of nihilistic self-alienation. As uncanny, it must do something else again; merely to be unconventional is not sufficient. Protean-"you" explicitly gestures towards, invokes, the very same subject that it mocks. As shown in my discussion of the allocutionary function in Chapter 3, Protean-"you" will always involve a sense of address that is much deeper than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative. The eventuality of a strong address function would ordinarily alert us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects, would remind us of the qualities of the entities we expect to find. Yet at the very same time, Protean-"you" leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. A tension is generated between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and their failure to emerge whole, visible and indivisible. The Protean-"you" is familiar yet unfamiliar, like ourselves yet horribly other: it at once endorses and denounces Cartesianism's self. The tension it generates is so striking because it has the character of the uncanny, the unheimlich (the unhomely). For Freud, the uncanny names everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light; it is something secretly familiar - something known, felt, experienced at some level of being but that has been repressed - which in the moment of the uncanny returns from repression with vigour. This uncanniness of the Protean-"you," I suggest, is precisely what notions of "second-person" intersubjectivity also set out to address, both Hantzis and Oppenheim describing "second-person" narrative's oscillating play of identification and differentiation as fundamental to the experience of reading "second-person" proper. Where the notion of "second-person" intersubjectivity implicitly insists that something entirely new arises from the midst of this oscillation, however, my own suspicion is that no such synthesis can occur. Rather, in Protean-"you" there is a removal of the engaged reader - the unsettled, astonished reader - towards a condition that, in profile, is less formed, less Humanistic, and much less self-authorised. But time and again, from Peirce and Nietzsche through to Gibson and Margolin, critics and theorists have observed how uncomfortable we become in the face of the absence of the anticipated Humanist self. As Colapietro writes: "It takes courage to open ourselves to the possibility of becoming aware of who we are" (Colapietro, 1989: 41). These frustrated expectations can also be understood as typically involving a failure of Protean-"you's" narrative discourse to provide readers with an appropriate and anticipated locus of authority and knowledge. Not that authority and knowledge are eliminated when the centre no longer holds: rather, they become dispersed, divided, mobile, motile. Particular knowledges, particular modes of authority, particular instances of discursive power would no longer be able to produce the totalities and controlling structures through which the authoritative narrator (the story, the text-world, the sanctioned values, the truth) can emerge to validate itself. Witness the failure of Almost You to confirm who says "you," and whether to himself or to another, and if to himself, with what degree of irony. What, then, can be the truth-value of anything that the narrator says? What can we know for certain about the narrator's, the "you"-protagonist's, Himmel's world/s? And where, finally, does the Protean-"you's" epistemological and ontological havoc leave the reader? The issue addressed here is not so much that of the problem of any "second-person" text's sense, but as in Hantzis's thesis, the problem of the Protean "second person's" deepest effect. Hantzis is right to argue, I think, that whereas conventional modes of narrative - i.e., conventional "first-" and "third-person" texts - energetically sponsor the reader's sense of identity as a unified subject, Protean narrative-"you" hinders it, or at the very least, fails to facilitate it. The "second person's" power is not finally to be understood as arising within the production of an ephemeral and revisionary point of view, of an intersubjectivity predicated on mutually authorising, always fading subjects. What radical "second-person" narrative textuality achieves is the loss - the death, to use the polemical parlance of the '70s - of the privatised self that is coherent, stable and knowable and that provides a centre for truth. This failure by Protean "second-person" discourse to provide readers with an appropriate locus of knowledge can be traced in the way origins and the notion of "the original" are treated in Almost You, particularly in the unresolved divergence between the "you"-protagonist's and Himmel's attitudes towards translation. But as in Almost You, "truth" itself as a category need not be lost, any more than knowledge and authority are eliminated. What is lost in Protean-"you" as the self-identical subject melts away is the efficacy of self-evidence and certainty. What is true to a reader in any one reading need not be true to another reader or the same reader another day. Truths become ephemera; for this, they need not become any less effective in the determination of meaning. There is, however, a caveat to be set in place in respect to the "second person's" capacity to unsettle the reader. This caveat concerns the degree to which Cartesianism's hegemony of person has been inscribed into the reader's language. Readers might easily resist the strangeness of Protean-"you" narrative for any number of reasons, withholding engagement not solely for the "second person's" unconventionality, but also for reasons coincidental to the "second person," such as the deployment of discourses antithetical to the reader (racism, sexism, and so on), and perhaps simply for reasons as vague as disinterest. Recent work within the field of anthropological linguistics, however, points to a further, very telling determinant of the effect of Protean-"you" on its readers. It is the case that socio-linguistic context will play a role in how the reader experiences Protean-"you" not only at the very generalised levels of language that are the context of this thesis, but also at the local level, at the level of culturally and even geographically definable communities. Before pursuing this caveat, though, a second observation might be made. It may also be that the more generally familiar we become with "second-person" narrative textuality, certainly in respect to its less Protean modes, the less strange it appears. Fludernik succinctly expresses this suspicion towards the end of "A Test Case for Narratology." She writes that: To the extent that the second-person form is seen as a technique rather than a medium for the conveyance of specific meanings and objective correlatives, it increasingly allows itself to be used as a "mere" formal option for the sake of variety, originality, or spectacle. As second-person texts become more and more common, their markedness also decreases apace. . . . (Fludernik, 1994c: 472) Indeed, in respect to "second-person" reflectoral short stories in which "the narrative disappears entirely behind the thoughts of the protagonist" to leave no trace of an authorial voice (Fludernik, 1994c: 451), writes Fludernik, "the point of conventional inconspicuousness has now very nearly been reached" (Fludernik, 1994c: 472). Time and again, like any resiliently dominant aspect of a culture, prevailing practices of reading and writing will modify and revitalise themselves by appropriating elements of non-conventional and radical practice, in the process palliating the threat of the new. Discursive practices are adept at training the reader in how to read the strange in terms of the known, how to find within the strange what we recognise - most significantly, to find images of ourselves as we understand ourselves to be. Witness, for instance, the commonplace nature now within literary discourse of the broken sentence, unpunctuated lines, stream-of-consciousness writing, and so on, now not so much expressions of deep angst and the agony of disenfranchised Being at the end of Modernity, the desolation of the self at the end of History, but the articulations of authentic, personal reality, individual truths expressed as if spoken from closer to one's self and one's singular experience. Much like a process of inoculation, the gestures or styles of an emerging practice will be domesticated and conventionalised, while all that might question the founding assumptions of the prevailing system will be submerged, repressed. As "second-person" narrative modalities become increasingly familiar to us, for example, and as they become increasingly formalised as a "stylistic" choice available to contemporary writers - particularly postmodernist writers - the capacity of "second-person" narratives to unsettle the reader is correspondingly lessened, their more radical implications glossed over by their seeming "normality." It may be in the nature of Protean-"you" to resist this impetus towards normalisation. However, it might also be the case that, as we become more familiar with its texts, more familiar with its tendencies and oscillations within literary discourse, that we also become more complacent towards its revelations. Less startled, we might only become adept at seeing within its ambiguous language the same conventionalised figures we are accustomed to finding within "first-" and "third-person" narrative texts - texts which are not in the end, after all, as I would have it, any more or less coherent than "second-person" narrative texts. The caveat I wish to set in place in respect to the "second person's" capacity to unsettle the reader, however, concerns not familiarity, but the matter of language itself, and the interdependent relation between language and culture. The reader's local socio-linguistic context, specifically in respect to the hegemony of Cartesianism, will play a role in how the reader experiences Protean-"you." Readers within a culture - including a regional or sub-culture - that is strongly individualist are likely to be more effected by Protean-"you" discourse than readers within a culture that is strongly collectivist. In a striking study of the relations between culture and language, Emiko and Yoshihisa Kashima (1998) consider at length recent research that emphasises the socio-cultural context of culture learning and language acquisition, research that essentially grows from Benjamin Whorf's Language, Thought and Reality (1965), and Edward Sapir's "Language" (1970). Kashima and Kashima note the way in which a person's notion of and engagement in individualism and collectivism appears to tap into distinct differences in the conception of "person" across national and regional cultures (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 463). They write that: In individualist cultures, the person is conceptualised as a decontextualised agent who is solely responsible for his or her own actions. By contrast, in collectivist cultures, the person is considered to be enveloped by a collective and suspended in the network of social relationships with other persons. Consequently, Semin and Rubini (1990) hypothesised that verbal abuses in individualist cultures (e.g., Northern Italy) are likely to be directed to the individual (e.g., "stupid," "I hope you will be murdered"), whereas those in collectivist cultures (e.g., Southern Italy) may be directed to the individual and others who are significant for the individual (e.g., "I wish a cancer on you and on all your relatives"). Indeed, they found that insults in Southern Italy (Catania) were more directed toward relations of the individual than those in Central Italy (Bologna), which were in turn more relational than those in Northern Italy (Trieste). (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 463) Like William Hanks, whose reconception of deixis I discuss in Chapter 3, Kashima and Kashima propose that "a conception of the person unique to a particular culture may facilitate, and is reinforced by, the specific uses of personal indexicals prescribed in the language spoken in that culture" (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 464). Kashima and Kashima note that, "in some languages - including English - the use of subject pronouns is obligatory: "I" or "you" must be mentioned in an utterance even if the referent is unambiguous" (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 464). In other languages, however, as in Spanish, the referents of subject pronouns are recoverable from verb inflections and so their utterance may not be required, their usage left to the discretion of the speaker. In yet other languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, pronouns can be omitted despite their irrecoverability from verb forms (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 464). By Kashima and Kashima's account, although the reasons behind "pronoun drop," as they call it, are highly contested, it seems highly likely that "the linguistic practice of pronoun drop, particularly the omission of the first-person singular pronoun (e.g., "I" in English), is linked to the psychological differentiation between the speaker and the context of speech, including the conversational partner" (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 465). Drawing on a large volume of cross-cultural research dealing with human values and self-construals, 116 they conclude that cultures in which pronoun drop is rare are likely to be more highly individualist than collectivist, and vice versa (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 471). Moreover, they hypothesise that the fewer "first-person" singular pronouns current in a language, the more individualistic that culture will be (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 468). Contrasting English and Japanese pronominal use, for instance, they write that: In English, I is the sole pronoun that indexes the speaker, whereas Japanese has many 1PS [first-person singular] pronouns such as watasi, boku, and ore . . . . The use of different 1PS pronouns may index different social roles as loci of social responsibility. In Japan, the speaker may be regarded as taking a particular type of role at the time of speech when he or she uses a particular 1PS pronoun. Perhaps a man may index himself by watasi when he states his opinion as an officer of a company, whereas he may use ore when he reveals his feelings as a friend. . . . (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 468) In contrast, Kashima and Kashima write, languages with a single 1PS pronoun such as English will embed a conception that the individual, rather than social roles, is the locus of social and moral responsibility (Kashima and Kashima, 1998: 468). The implication of Kashima and Kashima's findings for the present study is that ambiguities of pronominal modality should be most deeply felt in languages in which pronoun drop is rare, such as the English language. That is, to address Kashima and Kashima's findings to the matter of "second-person" modality in particular, the deep ambiguities articulated by Protean-"you" discourse and its failure to provide readers with an appropriate and anticipated locus of authority and knowledge will be experienced as most striking and unsettling by readers whose cultural and sub-cultural contexts have a strong commitment to notions of the individual, the universal, intellectual and affective autonomy, and so on. To put this differently, Protean-"you" is most likely to offend the habits of reading of those readers who are most firmly bound into Cartesianism's hegemony of "person." To that extent - and perhaps to be overly optimisticit may be that the waning strangeness of Protean-"you" within any particular readership, if it does begin to wane, in fact reflects in some small way, not a complacency amongst those readers, but a corresponding weakening of Cartesianism's authority within their notions of self and subjectivity. If so, then the weakening of Protean-"you" might be an outcome that speaks of something positive, rather than of something lost.
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contact: Dennis Schofield
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