The Second Person: A Point of View?
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in
Narrative Prose Fiction.
General Editor's Notes and apologies
Throughout the thesis readers might note a regrettable loss of spaces between some words. In most cases, these collapses occur where a dash or hyphen should be found. For instance, in the Introduction, readers will find (or might have found - see following note) this statement:
- Jonathan Holden privileges the written over the spoken"literature" over "oration"asserting that the "second person" can only work well when it constitutes a direct, unambiguous address to an audience.
Returning the dashes to their proper places, the statement should read
- Jonathan Holden privileges the written over the spoken - "literature" over "oration" - asserting that the "second person" can only work well when it constitutes a direct, unambiguous address to an audience.
My apologies for this annoying error, which occurred during the conversion of the original WORD files into HTML files.
(NB - The text has had a quick going-over since the above note was added, though some instances of this error may remain)
Notes to Introduction
1 See Monica Fludernik's "Second Person Fiction: Narrative You as Addressee and/or Protagonist" (1993); and Uri Margolin's "Dispersing/Voiding the Subject: A Narratological Perspective" (1986-87).
2 Due to this novel's somewhat iconic status in the canon of "second-person" narrative texts, and to avoid confusion in respect to its titles under American and English publications (A Change of Heart [Simon and Schuster] and Second Thoughts [Faber & Faber] respectively), I will refer to this novel for the most part by its French title, La Modification (1957).
3 The notion that narrators might be classified and discussed in terms of their relation to the text-world and to the narration rather than more simply for their use of particular pronouns is implicit both in Henry James's The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (1934); and Norman Friedman's "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept" (1955).
4 On the masculinisation of grammar, see Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1979).
5 This assumption, I will argue below, is founded upon Cartesianism's prejudicial notion of the self and its faith in the stability and continuity of the social-subject.
6 Cf. the discussion of deixis in Chapter 3, page 93, in relation to the implicit Cartesianism of Benveniste's conception of the emergence of subjectivity, which institutes the "I"/ego as the centre of communicative practice and as the "subjective" ground or "origo" of deixis.
7 Moreover, the reader expects, and is expected, to find his or her choice ratified across successive readings of the same passage.
8 Louise Rosenblatt speaks revealingly about this will towards unity thus: "When we see a set of marks on a page that we believe can be made into verbal signs (i.e., can be seen as a text), we assume that it should give rise to some kind of more or less coherent meaning. We bring our funded experience to bear. . . . If the marks on the page evoke elements that cannot be assimilated into the emerging synthesis, the guiding principle or framework is revised: if necessary, it is discarded and a complete rereading occurs. New tentative guidelines, new bases for a hypothetical structure, present themselves . . . . Finally, a synthesis or organisation, more or less coherent and complete, emerges, the result of a to-and-fro interplay between reader and text." (Rosenblatt, 1988: 11).
9 Such assumptions, again, are succinctly articulated by Louise Rosenblatt. See Chapter 1, pages 26-27.
10 See in particular in this respect: Lorraine Code's What Can She Know (1991); and Rosi Braidotti's Nomadic Subjects (1994).
11 See, for instance, Gerald Prince's "Notes Toward a Categorisation of Fictional 'Narratees'" (1971) and "Narratee Revisited" (1985); and Mary Ann Piwowarczyk's "The Narratee and the Situation of Enunciation: A Reconsideration of Prince's Theory" (1976).
12 See, for instance: Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse (1980); Mieke Bal's Narratology (1985); and Manfed Jahn's "Windows of Focalisation" (1996).
13 See, for instance, Seymour Chatman's "Characters and Narrators" (1986).
14 Pratt makes this comment in respect to the implicit return of much reader response criticism to "a notational variant of that very formalism [it] so roundly rejected" (Pratt, 1982: 201). Given Louise Rosenblatt's comments as quoted above and elsewhere, Pratt's observation thus seems particularly apt in the present context.
15 In so far as Oppenheim's arguments arise in the context of a phenomenological critique of the "I"-"other" division, it is also, by inference, a critique of the Benvenistian "I" and "you" dyad.
16 Such an approach, of course, risks neglecting instances in which "first-" and "third-person" modalities also participate in fluid and ambiguous play with narrative agents and pronouns. For a response to this, see Brian Richardson's "I etcetera" (1994), and Monika Fludernik's "Pronouns of Address and 'Odd' Third Person Forms" (1995), for discussions of non conventional use of "first-" and "third-person" narrative pronoun modalities.
Notes to Chapter 1
17 See also Hopkins and Perkins's discussion of dual time in respect to "second-person" narrative in "Second-Person Point of View" (1981).
18 These four figures situate the narrator within the realm of the story-world, and so, of course, describe the case for intradiegetic narrators, but I do not intend to exclude extradiegetic narrators. The figures represent, if not explicitly then certainly by inference, both intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators. To figure both intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators in single diagrams would result in the loss of illustrative clarity; conversely, to present each form of the model would unnecessarily multiply the illustrations, the various blends of intra, extra, hetero, and homodiegecity calling for a minimum of eight further diagrams.
19 From early in the "Setting and Tripping" section of Federman's Take It or Leave It (1976).
20 See Franz Stanzel's A Theory of Narrative (1984) and "A Low-Structuralist at Bay? Further Thoughts on A Theory of Narrative" (1990). Cf. Dorrit Cohn's "The Encirclement of Narrative: On Franz Stanzel's Theorie des Erzählens" (1981).
21 J. Lyons. "Deixis and Subjectivity: Loquor, Ergo Sum?" (1982), 121.
22 J. Lyons. Semantics (1977), 638.
23 J. Lyons. Semantics (1977), 638.
24 For a fuller discussion of the implications of Cartesianism, particularly in relation to the privilege the hegemony of Cartesianism accords the privatised, masculinised subject of knowledge, see Lorraine Code's What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991). See also Susan Bordo's "The Cartesian Masculinisation of Thought" (1986).
25 See, for instance, Nicholas Karolides's book Reader Response in the Classroom: Evoking and Interpreting Meaning in Literature (1992), which focuses explicitly on Louise Rosenblatt's transactional criticism. The book offers a particularly useful window onto the way readers, writers, narrators and characters are spoken about in contemporary classrooms--and thus, I would argue, a window onto the landscape of prevailing critical practice.
26 See also Prince's "Narratee Revisited" (1985).
27 For a discussion of the Jakobsonian communication model, see Chapter 3, pages 94-95.
28 Cf. E.M. Forster's definition of narrative in Aspects of the Novel (976), 85-100.
29 Fludernik develops this theoretical model more fully in Towards a "Natural" Narratology (1996).
30 The resultant breadth of interpretation, Heider and Simmel observe, makes the results unsuitable to the quantitative analysis they employ in respect to groups I and II, in which they analyse what proportion of the sample interpret the large triangle as the aggressor as opposed to the proportion that see it as oppressed, and why (Heider and Simmel, 1944: 252). This breadth may be a result of the non-canonical form the sequence of movements take when screened in reverse. Lacking the clear model of nouement, development, climax and denouement of the forward-running animation, the backward-running animation is necessarily open to a wider range of interpretations.
31 See, for instance, David Bordwell's discussion of mimetic and non-mimetic concepts of film process in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), which comes down stridently on the side of Aristotelian mimesis as the only commonsensical approach to this problem.
32 Trans. for author by Elizabeth Stevens.
33 Cf. Passias's discussion of exclusive illocutionary versus collective "second-person" utterances in "Deep and Surface Structure of the Narrative Person Vous" (1976).
Notes to Chapter 2
34 Gibson's citations here are from Nietzsche's Will to Power (1968), pp. 266, 282, 277, 272 respectively.
35 Nietzsche. Will to Power (1968), 278.
36 Cornis-Pope, Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting (1992), 164.
37 See Derrida's Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (1973), 43.
38 See Derrida's Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (1973), 75.
39 Gibson's citation here is from le Doeuff's The Philosophical Imaginary (1989), 137.
40 Gibson's citation here is from Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (1982), 253.
41 Kofman's citation here is from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1974a), §17, 24.
42 Kofman's citation here is from Nietzsche's Gay Science (1974b), §339, 272.
43 See Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics (1976), 314.
44 As Kerby says at another point, the self-referentiality of "I" utterances lie "not in a prelinguistic or transcendental subject but in the auto-affection of speaking-hearing" (Kerby, 1991: 100), that is, in the "presence" of the subject to itself in the "presence" of the voice.
45 Kerby notes his indebtedness to Silverman (1983) for this model.
46 The omission of Lacan from the foregoing overview of theorists who have deconstructed the Cartesian model arises for a particular reservation in respect to his reliance on an essentially Benvenistian "I-you" dyad within the theory of the institution of the subject, as metaphorised in the "mirror stage." Jacqueline Rose summarises Lacan's position thus:
Lacan . . . takes the mirror image as the model of the ego function itself, the category which enables the subject to operate as "I." He supports his argument from linguistics, which designates the pronoun as a "shifter" (Benveniste [217-22]). The "I" with which we speak stands for our identity as subjects in language, but it is the least stable entity in language, since its meaning is purely a function of the moment of utterance. The "I" can shift, and change places, because it only ever refers to whoever happens to be using it at the time. (Rose, 1982: 30-31)
As I argue in Chapter 3, Benveniste's discussion of the "I"-"you" dyad and address relations adopts the standard account of deixis, in which deixis is always egocentric. Cf. Hanks's "The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference" (1992). In this, Benveniste's arguments - and thereby Lacan's, his thoroughgoing and convincing critique of the Cartesian self notwithstanding - are implicated to a degree in Cartesianism's imaginary.
47 In quoting Peirce from secondary sources, I will endeavour whenever possible to provide the source reference in square brackets.
48 Such a proposition might be taken as providing a basis for the re-institution of the Cartesian ego by its apologists on the grounds of the specificity of context and culture prevailing since the Enlightenment. That is, it might be argued that the form of the subject that emerges from the context of the Enlightenment is the subject as described by Cartesianism. As I argue in Chapter 7, however, the unitary self cannot act as a logical presupposition independent of the kind of discourse in which it occurs (see page 215).
49 Colapietro's citation here is from George Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith (1955), 1.
50 Freadman makes this observation in a paper on Peirce's notion of metaphor, titled "The Skins of an Onion," given to the conference of the Australian and South Pacific Association of Comparative Literary Studies, Auckland, 1996.
Notes to Chapter 3
51 The prefix "meso-" is used in the sense of "within" or "in the middle," or, for my purposes, "in the thick of."
52 One referent is a reader, another a narratee, the last a protagonist. Each is marked by the degree to which the "you" referent takes on particular, anthropomorphic qualities.
53 Cf. Fludernik's discussion of the personal/non-personal distinction in "Pronouns of Address and 'Odd' Third Person Forms" (1995), in which she describes Benveniste's distinction as flawed (101).
54 Metafictional-"you" will therefore raise for the reader all of the issues discussed by Waugh (1988), Siegle (1986) and others concerning the functions of language in the constitution of reality and the fictional nature of our experience of the world, the nature of the world-as-text, and so on.
55 See also William F. Hanks's "The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference" (1992) in this context.
56 That is, the reader has decided that it does not more simply name just another fictionalised, credulous recipient of the narrative.
57 However, there is nothing to hinder the referent from becoming a protagonist at some other point.
58 Barth uses the term in a sense similar to the term "protagonist." In his seventh "Additional Author's Notes" prefacing Lost in the Funhouse (1969), seemingly in direct address to his readers, he writes: "The deuteragonist of 'Life-Story,' antecedent of the second-person pronoun, is you" (xi).
59 Herman points out that "the possibilities and limits of this impersonal usage of you are to some extent language specific. For example, the grammar of a language like modern Hebrew, in which second-person pronouns in both the singular and plural numbers encode information about the gender of the addressee (Anderson and Keenan 269), does not underdetermine the deictic functions of the pronouns to the degree that the grammar of English underdetermines their English counterparts" (Herman, 1994: 397).
60 Such that the "you" borrows some of the effect of a disguised narrative-"I."
61 Cf. Fludernik's discussions of "second-person" narrative address in Towards a "Natural" Narratology (1996), pp. 226-32, and "Second Person Fiction" (1993), in which she argues that "second-person" textuality can readily give up its affect of address, most notably when the "you" is patently a protagonist rather than a narratee or reader.
62 Susan Sniader Lanser defines the "unmarked" or "degree zero" case (the terms being interchangeable for Lanser) as the case that "represents a conventional agreement about what constitutes normative literary behaviour for a given time and place" (Lanser, 1981: n32, 36). She notes that linguists use the term "unmarked" to refer to a conventional, expected or basic form, the singular form of a noun, for example, being the unmarked case, whereas the plural form is marked.
63 Both Hantzis's model and the addressee identity model conceive of utterances as unidirectional, the "you" designating the destination of the utterance.
64 Herman's usage of the term apostrophe is quite different from Kacandes's. What Herman means by apostrophe is what Kacandes speaks of as reader or narratee address. Herman takes his usage from the classical Greek dramatic device of an actor turning aside from the on-stage addressee to address the audience or hypothetical listener.
65 See also William F. Hanks's "The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference" (1992) in this context.
66 Herman describes the question marks beside the arrows as representing the fifth term's anomalous and indeterminate boundaries.
67 Melissa Furrow confirms this in "Listening Reader and Impotent Speaker: The Role of Deixis in Literature" (1988) when she argues that the higher the frequency of personal, spatial and temporal deictics in a passage, the stronger the link with the reader. The reader is treated as a listener, as someone who could stand in the narrator's position and follow the directions to see all that the narrator sees. Conversely, the lower the frequency of deictics, the greater the narrator's distance from the reader. As the sense of origo diminishes, the speaker becomes effaced, the reader no longer having any spatial figure/relation to emulate (Furrow, 1988: 375).
68 This dialogism, however, is rarely realised, certainly not as full conversation.
69 Herman writes: "Virtual" address would prompt us "to assume that the entity evoked by the you exists in the world of the narrative. . . . We thus construe the entity more or less virtual with respect to our world(s), the world(s) in which we design and interpret stories" (380). Conversely, "actual" address postulates that the "textual you evokes an entity - that is, a reader - actual or at least actualisable in our world" (380). Conventional analysis would hold that an entity must be either virtual or actual. As Herman's category of double deixis shows, however, the cases are not always so easily accounted.
70 Herman's quotation here is from A Pagan Place (1984), 110.
71 Levinson's expanded catalogue of categories suggests the way in which these basic narratological terms might be further divided.
Notes to Chapter 4
72 This readership is marked not only by pedagogical practice but by the practices of literary publication and circulation. The story in question is Langston Hughes's "On the Road," published in an anthology titled Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968), edited by James Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross. New York: Free Press.
73 The vraisemblable may be translated as "likely," "probable," or "plausible." Culler refers to the vraisemblable as "the sources of meaning and coherence" within literary texts (Culler, 1975: 138).
74 Vraisemblance is to be taken as referring not only to literary texts. Culler writes: "a work's relation to other texts of a genre or to a certain expectations about fictional worlds is a phenomenon of the same type - a problem of the same order - as its relation to the interpersonal world of ordinary discourse. From the point of view of literary theory, the latter is also a text" (Culler, 1975: 139).
75 Culler cites the quotation here as being from Genette's discussion of the vraisemblable in Figures II, pp. 73-75.
76 For a discussion of "framing," see Ian Reid's Narrative Exchanges (1992).
77 Likewise, it might be noted that, as a discipline, narratology has not involved itself with the challenges of post-structuralist critique to the same degree that some other fields of literary analysis have. It may be that the very nature of its object hinders an entry into such a critique, that to some extent the dispersal and even voiding of subjectivity posited by post-structuralism is one mark of the limit of narratology (see Margolin, 1986-87: 208). This is not to argue that narratologists such as Gerald Prince, Gerard Genette, Franz Stanzel, Seymour Chatman and so on steadfastly maintain traditional conceptions of the subject and subjectivity (whether experiential or textual), and even less that they argue for the truth of a fully mimetic relation between texts and world/s. Indeed, narratologists are often at pains to circumvent such criticisms by making clear that their object is textually produced. Narratology's hesitancy in engaging with post-structuralist critiques of subjectivity, however, does mark its general reliance, as a discipline, on essentially traditional notions of the self and subjectivity, a reliance that has thoroughly inscribed the discipline with the hegemony of Cartesianism.
Notes to Chapter 5
78 Cf. Lorraine Code's What Can She Know?, in which Code argues for "a conception of cognitive agency for which intersubjectivity is primary" (Code 72).
79 It should be noted that Oppenheim's phenomenological reading of Butor's novel differs slightly from the approach typical of the Geneva School of phenomenological criticism as developed by Georges Poulet, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset and others in the 1940s and 1950s. Oppenheim's concern is not to reduce the text to "an a priori conceptualisation of textual meaning based on phenomenological theory" (Oppenheim, 1980: 7), nor, as Eagleton describes the Geneva School's project, to read the text as "a pure embodiment of the author's consciousness" (Eagleton, 1983: 59). Rather, it is specifically an investigation of the novel "according to the constitution of meaning which occurs simultaneously with the unfolding of the 'modification' experience" (Oppenheim, 1980: 7). Cf. Robert R. Ellis's "Phenomenological Ontology and Second Person Narrative: the Case of Butor and Fuentes" (1991).
80 Oppenheim's habit of collapsing the writer into the narrator needs to be noted as being typical of phenomenological literary analysis, the phenomenological method itself inviting this collapse by requiring the literary critic to refer to the intentionalising consciousness of the writer. It is necessary, however, to avoid that unhelpful collapse of figures: the categories must remain clearly delineated.
81 See Hopkins and Perkins's "Second-Person Point of View" (1981), 120.
82 A narrative function (see Chapter 7, page 210) sometimes produces the utterance "I," sometimes "she" and "he," but if it is to be identified as a "persona" and as a speaking subject for having produced this utterance, the Cartesianism at stake in this identification always needs to be recognised, and the persona must also always be understood as acquiring this identity as an assemblage of potentially disparate parts, as it were.
83 Hantzis is quoting here from Marian Hirsch's Michel Butor: The Decentralised Vision (1981), 348.
84 Cf. Hopkins and Perkins's "Second-Person Point of View" (1981). Hopkins and Perkins propose that an "I" narrator does not necessarily disqualify a text from being categorised as possessing a "second-person" point of view.
85 Correspondence with Peter Bibby. 21 January, 1992.
86 Correspondence with Peter Bibby. 21 January, 1992.
87 Ginsburg identifies her source here as: Die Dimension des Autors, 814-15.
88 I use Ginsburg's translation here, which differs from that of the cited edition of Patterns of Childhood, but brings out the point I make more clearly. The passage as given in the cited edition is: "Nelly has to go inside, more slowly than usual, because a child who has felt the first thrill of her life at the thought of I . . . me . . . can no longer be pulled in by her mother's voice" (Wolf, 1990: 6).
Notes to Chapter 6
89 Significantly enough, Genette insists that simultaneous narration, in bringing together the two narrating instances of the narrating-moment and the story-moment - effectively collapsing the story-discourse division - can unbalance the seeming objectivity of the narrator (Genette, 1980: 219). On this same point regarding the collapse of the story-discourse distinction, see Fludernik's "Test Case for Narratology" (1994c), p. 458.
90 Monika Fludernik's reading of Almost You describes the structure of the novel quite differently. Almost You, she writes, is a "[s]econd-person narrative interspersed with third-person sections, which are extracts of writing of the addressee who is being exhorted throughout the text. The second-person protagonist-qua-writer has a past that is alluded to at times, but the narrative level of the story is situated in the present and has a narrative present tense to represent it" ("Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography," 1994a: 532).
91 Cf. Freud's "Female Sexuality" (1977) and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1979), both written towards the end of his career.
92 Stern is quoting here from an entry in J. Laplanche and J-B Pontalis's The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973), 481.
93 I use "phantasy" here as opposed to "fantasy" merely to use the spelling conventional to psychoanalysis. I imply no difference, at this point, between what is referred to by "phantasy" and "fantasy."
94 This synopsis is largely drawn from Freud's An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1979).
95 The other two primal fantasies Freud speaks about are the Castration fantasy, as explanatory of sexual difference, and the Seduction fantasy, as explanatory of the origin of sexuality and sexual desire. For a discussion of these fantasies, see Laplanche and Pontalis's "Fantasy and the Origin of Sexuality" (1986).
96 Reading Almost You as a fictionalised Freudian case history, the protagonist's colitis might be construed (intertextually) in the same light as Dora's psychosomatic, cunnilingus-fantasy induced cough. See Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria ('Dora')" (1977). For a valuable gloss on the Freudian and Lacanian readings of Dora's case, see Parveen Adams's (1989).
97 For a discussion of the function of teleology and its collapse in modern fiction, see Miriam Marty Clark's "After Epiphany" (1993).
98 Gravity's Rainbow 703.
99 Gravity's Rainbow 434.
100 See Lawrence Wolfley's "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel" (1977), 873; and Scott Simmon's "Gravity's Rainbow Described" (1974), 57.
101 Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon, 1975), 582.
102 See Keats's The Letters of John Keats 1814-21 (1958), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins.
Notes to Chapter 7
103 Becket, "The Unnamable" (1965)
104 Gunn (1994), 97.
105 For a full account of this argument, see Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics, which remains one of the best treatments on the subject.
106 Even the psychological reading of Almost You is to be granted, in so far as it speaks about the ineluctable "splitness" of the psyche, though I stress that we must remain mindful that this itself does not conclusively or convincingly establish the narration to be the expression of a madman. Alternatively, to propose that the narration is about a madman answers none of the necessary questions.
107 Of course, not all texts raise the question of the narrator so explicitly. Unlike literary texts, film, figurative art, and so on, rarely require the reader/viewer to identify a narrator as such. See Bordwell's discussion of this matter in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985). I would contend, however, that in so far as any text is conceived of as expressing a narrative dimension, then it necessarily constitutes a narrative function of the type described by Chambers.
108 Conversely, however, as I have argued in Chapter 2, any particular "self" might be precisely text.
109 A more acute metaphor, I suggest, might be that of mycelium: the all but imperceptible, subaltern traceries of mushroom fungus that reticulate through a soil without so much substance or volume as a plant's system of rhyzomic roots and whose fruit/sense breaks like abrupt magic above the surface to appear in the most astonishing forms - not all of them palatable - soon to release into the air and then back into the earth spores of yet more fungus.
110 See in this context Uri Margolin's discussion of the dissolution of subjectivity in relation to "first-person" textuality in "Dispersing/Voiding the Subject: A Narratological Perspective" (1986-87).
111 One might usefully recall in this context that Hider and Simmel's stated intention in producing the animation is to present and explore a method of "investigating the way the behaviour of other persons is perceived - "behaviour, that is, ultimately not of shapes on a film screen, but of social beings abroad in the world (Heider and Simmel, 1944: 259).
112 See Lorraine Code's What Can She Know? for a discussion of intersubjectivity that implicitly positions the notion precisely in these terms.
113 Like figures 5 and 6, the individual frames of figure 18 are hypothetical illustrations based on Heider and Simmel's description in "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behaviour" (1944).
114 Barthes's notion of the seme as a signified of connotation is that the seme is a signified that a text will "cite," but he insists that "to cite" is to be taken in "its tauromachian meaning."
[T]he citar is the stamp of the heel, the torero's arched stance which summons the bull to the banderilleros. Similarly, one cites the signified . . . to make it come forth, while avoiding it in discourse. This fleeting citation, this surreptitious and discontinuous way of stating themes, this alternating of flux and outburst, create together the allure of the connotation; the semes appear to float freely, to form a galaxy of trifling data in which we read no order of importance: the narrative technique is impressionistic: it breaks up the signifier into particles of verbal matter which make sense only by coalescing: it plays with distribution of a discontinuity (thus creating a character's "personality"). . . : the touch must be light, as though it weren't worth remembering, and yet, appearing again later in another guise, it must already be a memory. . . . (Barthes, 1974: 22-23)
115 Colapietro is citing from Jose Ortega y Gasset' s Man and People (1963), 27.
116 See Kashima and Kashima pp. 462-64 for a summary of this research, which quantifies and allocates a "score" to the degree of a culture's investment in notions of the individual, the universal, intellectual and affective autonomy, and so on.
