Fludernik_Second-person Narrative as a Test Case of Narratology

8/21/2019 Fludernik_Second-person Narrative as a Test Case of Narratology

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Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

MONIKA FLUDERNIK

Second-person narrative as a test case for narratology

The limits of realism

Originalbeitrag erschienen in:Harold F. Mosher (Hrsg.): Second-person narrative.Dekalb, Ill. : Northern Illinois Univ., 1994. (Style; 28,3) S. 445-479


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M onika Fludernik

Univers ity of Freiburg, Germ any

Second-Person Narrative As a Test Case

for Narratology: The Limits of Realism

This essay will concentrate on three re lated issues that connect w ith sec-

ond -person fiction. I will start by reprinting and (re)analyzing the n arrative

typology presented in my "Second Person Fiction," which attempts to revise and

m ediate between the Genettean and S tanzelian m odels. The diversity and inde-

terminacy o f second-person writing will be illustrated by a n um ber of exam ples

from very different sectors of the typology. I shall argue that secon d-person

fiction do es not correlate with a specific "na rrative situation," a nd tha t the

category "person" does not con stitute a theoretically m eaningful concept. A

second area for investigation will be the typical ways in w hich second-person

fiction can be said to und erm ine realist narrative param eters and fram es. As a

consequ ence second -person fiction helps to decon struct standa rd categories of

narratological enquiry. Illustrations of this point will be taken from G abriel

Josipovici's novel

Contre - jour

(1986) and from selected short stories. The third

topic that I will treat here re lates to the function of secon d-perso n story telling,

particularly as regards the historical situating of second -person d iscourse as a.

typically postm odem ist kind of ecriture.

The tran sgressive and su bversive as

pects of second-person texts as outlined in the second section seem to identify

second-person f iction as a predom inantly " postm odem ist" m ode of w riting,

yet—depending on one's definition of (post)modernism—more traditionally

m odern ist aspects of second-person fiction and perhaps m ore radical indications

of an ideological appropriation of the second-person technique suggest a m uch

wider fram e of application. It is in this context that one w ill have to reconsider

the all-im portant qu estion of what difference it m akes, a qu estion that will, by

a "vicus of recirculation," take u s back to the starting point of this issue, to Brian

Richard son's attem pts to grapple with the incidence of gram m atical person in

its combinatory diversity.

In "Se cond P erson Fiction" I proposed a revision (see figure 1, below) of

Fran z K. Stanzer s category "person " (first versus third) and of Ger ard G enette's

dichotomy of hetero- versus hom odiegesis. Stanzel's category, it will be rem em -

bered, is based on a binary opposition of the (non)coincidence o f "realm s of

Style:

Volum e 28, No. 3, Fall 1994

45


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446

onika Fludemik

existence," wh ereas in G enette's m odel the defining criterion is whether or not

the narrator is an actant on the story level of the narrative. My revision was

designed to accom m oda te the full range of observable varieties of second-person

texts.

Genette

(Nouveau d i scours d u r ec it

92-93;

Narrat ive Discourse Revis i ted

133-34) had suggested that second -person w riting was part of heterod iegesis, a

claim which ignores the overwhelm ing num ber of second-person texts in wh ich

the narrator as w ell as the narratee participate in the actions recounted on the

histoire

level. Nor can S tanzel's m odel deal with the occurrence of second-person

texts in the teller-model half of the typological circle although he provides an

invaluable suggestion abou t the unm arked ness of the category "person" within

reflector-m ode narrative w here

s/he and I

can be observed to alternate without

serious disruption of the ontological frame.

2

In my own model I proposed that

the use of the second-person pronou n in reflector-m ode texts (in "non comm u-

nicative narrative," as I call it) likewise operates in an unmarked (adeictic)

fashion whereas in teller-mod e texts the deictic properties of person rem ain in

full force. For the teller-mode realm (which I have dubbed "communicative

narrative ) I then expanded Genette's terminology to distinguish, primarily,

between narratives in which participants on the communicative level (narrators,

narratees) also function as protagonists (the homocommunicative realm) and

those in which the w orld of the narration is disjoined from that of the fictional

world (the heterocom m unicative realm ). Like Stan zel , however, I conceptualize

these categories as scales or clines with possible intermediate both-and areas

such as peripheral second-person texts (in w hich the protagonist is the character

referred to by mea ns of the second-person pronoun, and the narrator— designated

by a first-person pronoun—functions as an uncomprehending witness of the

events) or "we" narratives ( in w hich narrator a nd n arratee coparticipate in the

story). The term "communicative" in "noncommunicative narrative" and

"hom o/heterocomm unicative narrative" respectively refers to the com m unicative

circuit between a narr ator (or tel ler f igure in Stanzel's typology) and the imm e-

diate addressee or narratee who is at the receiving or interactive end of that

comm unicational fram e. Hom ocomm unicative texts share realm s of identit ies

between the personae on the communicative level and the fictional personae:

that is to say, either the narrator o r the narra tee or both are also char acters in

the fiction. Heterocom m unicative texts, on the other hand , com pletely separate

the realms of plot agents (characters) and interactants on the communicative

level (narrators and na rratees). The term "hom oconative narrative" in figure 1

has been coined to characterize a story setup in which the narratee is also a

character, but the na rrator-" I" of that text is not. The narra tor in such fiction is

therefore heterodiegetic in Genette's terminology. As in Stanzel's model, the

communicative level (Stanzel's teller mode) is logically constituted by the

reader's construction of teller-narratee interaction on the basis of a series of data

triggering a comm unicational "fram e"

3

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A Test Case for Narratology

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onika Fludernik

the first-person pron oun refers to the narra tor; the second-person pro noun or

second-person verbal conjugation in languages such as German, Russian, or

Spanish or the im perative is used in the function of allocution. Additional indices

of a com m unicative level include eva luative or cognitive features or both; these

establish zero focalization in the story.

4

The scale of form s in figure 1, wh ich is not necessarily ordered in one an d

only one possible direction, basically allow s for easy m oves from first to third,

first to second, second to third, or third to first- or second-person narrative.

Secon d-person narra tive com es to be situated in the overlapping area betwe en

hom o- and heterocom m unicative narrative since the narrator and narratee both

can share in the sam e "realm of existence" or reside on different narrative levels.

(The extradiegetic narrator can be situated on the en unciational discourse level,

the "you " pro tagonist on the intrad iegetic level of the story.) Pu t differently, the

narratee can or cannot function as an add ressee on the comm unicational level

(besides being a protagonist on the story level), and there ar e also second-person

texts that are en tirely heterocomm unicative and extradiegetic, operating m uch

on the lines of an authorial third-person narrator "w ho" tells the story of a " you"

with whom "he" (the narrator's "I") shares neither a fictional past nor a fictional

present o f al locution.

The scale between hom o- and heterocom m unicative forms in figure 1 is in

principle two-dim ensional since it reflects both the ontological continua' (actants

becom ing interlocutors on the level of narration) and the resultant focalizations

that realistically result from these. Authorial-figural continua (Stanzel,

A T he or y

of Narr a t i ve

198-99 ; 7.1.10

6) can be observed in second- as w ell as third-person

texts and even in second-person texts where the n arratee functions as a notable

addressee on the communicative level (Calvino's

If on a Winter's Night a

Traveler) .

An exam ination of a num ber of different types of second-person texts

wil l dem onstrate the m odel's adequ acy.

Hom ocom m unicative second-person fiction has the narrator or the narratee

or both share the levels of both discourse and story. The text may be purely

hom oconative if only the narratee is an actant (and the narrator m erely a voice

on the communicative level), as is the case in Italo Calvino's

If on a Winter s

Nigh t a T rave l e r

(1979). Since this text em ploys mu ch allocution in the form of

imper atives directed at the "you " pro tagonist, there is no dou bt about the exist-

ence of a narrative voice (the text definitely has a com m unicative level), but this

narrator function does no t acquire concise shape either on the d iscourse or the

story level. Calvino re uses this setup in less spectacular fashion in the story "U n

re in ascolto [A King Listens]. At the beginning of that tale, the king is given

instructions by an unn am ed " I" on how to behave on the throne. However, later

in the story these invocations to the king becom e increasingly mo re reflectoral

to the extent that one starts to see the world from within the king's mind,

reinterpreting the add ress function as possibly one of self-exho rtation and self-

add ress. This reading is confirm ed at the very end o f the tale when the episode


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A Test Case for Narratology

49

of being a king turns out to have been but a dr eam . "Un re in ascolto" therefore

subtly m oves from a qu asi-authorial and hortatory discourse to an increasingly

focalized presentation of the " you" protagonist's experiences, and in the cou rse

of this internalization deconstructs the initially verisim ilar quasi-realistic unde r-

pinnings of the story.

An exam ple of heterocom m unicative second-person fiction is Michel Bu-

tor's

La m odi f ica t ion [A C hange of Hear t ]

(1957), which is to be situated on the

authorial-figural continuum .

7

The text has neither a narr ator's experiencing selfg

(i.e., the narrative is heterodiegetic in Genette's terms) nor a "conative self' for

the addressee (i.e., there are no distinctly allocutive or exhortatory clauses: the

"vou s" is not being "talked to"). One does, however, have am ple exposure to

the "you" protagonist's narrated experiencing self, and there are som e m uted

indications of a narratorial (omn iscient) frame in the background. A m ore typi-

cally authorial (though not particularly evaluative) text is Rex Stout's

H o w Lik e

a God

(1929 ), in which the you sections (written in the past tense) som etim es

present the pro tagonist's actions from an a fter-the-fact point of view. No first-

person pronoun o ccurs in the text, though, and it rem ains unclear whether these

after-the-fact evaluations do not correspond to the protagonist's self-critical

thoughts as his life flashes by him prior to the mu rder he com m its (in the final

third-person section of the n ovel). Stout's second-person text therefore e asily

assumes the aura of an internal m em ory m onologue in the second person and—

like dram atic monologues—appears to develop in a direction away from second-

person fiction proper.rn As in Carlos Fuentes's

11 m uer te de Ar tem io Cr uz [The

D eat h o f Ar t em io C r uz }

(1962), there are num erous such internal self-narrations

in the second-person form in Latin-Am erican w riting, whereas—to m y know l-

edge—the type is comparatively rare in French and English fiction." Rita

Gnutzmann in "La novela hispanoamericana" has presented some fifteen such

novels, and Fra ncisco Yndu rain ("La novela desde la secunda persona ") has

noted a couple of others by Spanish authors. Since these novels contain only

segm ents of second-person fiction and are there fore fram ed w ithin a first- or

third-person n arrative, these sections (given a suitable en vironm ent

12) are then

easily naturalized as interior m onologues in the second person.

An ex am ple of peripheral second-person fiction— that is, of a story whose

"you " protagon ist is described from the no ncentral perspective of an "I" (a

narrator-protagon ist)--is Oriana Fallaci's

Un uomo [A M an]

(1979). In this novel

the narrator, Or iana Fa llaci, tells the story of Alekos P anagoulis from his at-

tem pted assassination of the G reek dictator P apadopoulos to his (Panagoulis' s)

m urder a few years later. Panagoulis is consistently referred to by m eans of

"you ." This story is clearly Panagou lis's not Fallacr s, who ha s heard m ost of it

from Panagoulis's mouth or from other sources. Fallaci's reaction to Panagoulis

is typically one of admiration tinged w ith horror: adm iration for his courage and

willingness to suffer for his ideas; horror at his m onom ania and ruthlessness. In

spite of all her ra tionalizations, Fallaci-the-narra tor, even from her privileged


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450

onika Fludemik

position as confidante a nd lover of her " subject," sti ll presents Pan agoulis from

the peripheral perspective of an u ncom prehending sym pathizer. Her peripherality

does no t relate to her lack of intelligence (the prototypical peripheral narr ator

being inferior to the grand man whose life he writes, a strategy that surfaces

ironically even in "Bartleby the Scrivener") but to her common sense and

"norm ality" (representing the m oral standards of the aud ience). In fact, the novel

them atizes precisely that: Pan agoulis's excesses and superhum an resou rces of

resistance and persistence, which are a m easure both of his heroic stature (genius)

and of his satanic qualities, are contrasted with the "normal" perspective of

Oriana Fallaci and as a con sequence they acqu ire the cast of insanity, irrespon-

sibility, and fanaticism .

Pe ripherality, however, doe s not constitute a concept that is self-explana-

tory and uneq uivocally determina ble. W hereas the case is quite clear for Fallaci's

novel , or—in the third-person realm— for, say, Thoma s M ann's

Doktor Faustus ,

one m ay start to wonder already with "B artleby the Scrivener" (is this tale only

ostensibly about B artleby the incomprehen sible and really about his em ployer,

the narrator?) or

M oby -Dick

(is this prima rily a tale about Ahab and the W hite

W hale or after all about Ishma el's adventures at sea?).'

3

In the second-person

realm, G iinter G rass's

K at z und M aus [C a t and M ouse ]

(1961) and Jane R ule's

T his Is Not for Y ou

(1970 ) both i llustrate the sam e problem : in

K a t z un d M a us

the "p oint" is, possibly, the narra tor's guilt at being perhaps respon sible for the

death of his friend Joachim Malke; and in

This Is Not for Y ou,

the ostensible

reason for the epistolary discourse (which is not reciprocated) is precisely the

narrator's urge to confess her guilt at having m essed up her ow n life as well as

the addressee's, Esther's. Peripherality as a narrative concept therefore only

m akes sense as an intermed iary area on a scale, and one definitely has to allow

for its possible am biguity and ind eterm inacy.

Finally, I wan t to docum ent the existence of reflector-m ode n arration (i.e.,

noncom m unicative narrative in m y schema) in the second person. M uch writing

about passages such as the following assum e that the "you" is the "n arrator,"

presum ably employing the term in the Boothian sense of a Jam esian "center of

consciousness." Since the narra tor, by definition, occupies the deictic position

of the "I" and the ad dressee the deictic position of the "you," you

can only refer

to the na rrator in passages of self-address in which an "I" splits into two voices

that interact dialogically. Such is not the case in the Diego passages of Virgil

Suarez's

Lat in Jazz (1989) w here no first-person pronoun s occur (except in the

quoted dialogue):

Ge tting out of the car and advancing towar d the entrance, no longer do you fee l the itch in

your no se. This stuff's a killer. Check the tie kn ot on the side m irror. Didn't get cut shaving,

a miracle. In a hurry you went from Pilar's to your parents' and found the house empty. Your

grandfather m ust have gone out somew here, he usually stays at home to catch the news.

Certainly he must be excited about the break-in. 2.37)


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ATest Case for Narratology45

This is the first Diego section of the novel. From Diego's impressions of what

he sees, we m ove straight into his thoughts (rendered in free indirect discourse),

revealing to us his obsession with the fact that his wife has just deserted him.

One is therefore inclined to continue with a reading in internal focalization,

taking the flashbacks as Diego's mem ory of what he has just done before coming

to work. Because of the present tense, the you narrative loses a good deal of

its narratorial and allocutive qualities, backgrounding, that is, both the narrator's

function of nar ration (which usua lly consists in a telling after the fact) and the

effect of address or allocution inherent in the use of

you.

("You

w a l k

down the

street" has a red uced allocutive effect since the ad dressee is hard put to con struct

a factual scenario that will apply to his or her im m ediate situation. This kind of

writing indeed asks the addressee to project imaginatively a scenario that is

therefore inhe rently fictional and less depen den t on the addre ssee's self-iden ti-

fication, w hich allocution brings into play.

14

) Where the Diego passage still has

some hints of extradiegetic management (one may wonder whether Diego is

likely to recall his visit to his parents or n ot), the follow ing paragra ph from Jay

McInerney's

Bright L ights , Big Ci ty

(1984) clearly concentrates on the protago-

nist's flow of experience, but—owing to the many verbs of consciousness—it,

too, still preserves a residua l perspective of zero foca lization:

It's five-twenty and raining whe n you leave the bar. You walk dow n to the Times S quare

subway station. You pass signs for GIRLS, G IRLS, GIRL S, and one that says YOUNG

BO YS. Then, in a stationery store, DON'T FOR GET M OTHER 'S DAY. The rain starts

coming down harder. You wonder if you ow n an um brella. You've left so m any in taxis.

Usually, by the time the first raindro p hits the street, there are m en on ever y corner selling

um brellas. Where do they come from , you have often wondered, and w here do they go when

it 's not raining? You im agine these um brella peddlers huddled aroun d powerful radios

waiting for the very latest from the National We ather Service, or m aybe sleeping in dingy

hotel room s with their arm s hailging out the windo ws, ready to w ake at the first touch of

precipitation. Ma ybe they have a deal with the taxi com panies, you think, to pick up all the

left-behind umbrellas for next to nothing. The city's economy is made up of strange,

subterranean circuits that are as m ysterious to you as the grids of wire and pipe unde r the

streets. At the moment, though, you see no umbrella vendors whatsoever. (86)

In the following passage from Joyce Carol Oates's The Seduction, the

narr ative disappears entirely behind the thoughts of the protagonist "you ." Here

the reflector-m ode is fully developed:

You look over your shoulder to see who is following you.

Bu t there is no one. You continue to walk m ore quickly. At a corner you pause, as

if without calculation, and again glance behind you— still you see no one , nothing.

Yet

he

is in the air around you, alm ost visible. You m ust resist the impulse to swipe

at the air around your head; as if driving away gnats, which you cannot quite see. You ar e

terrified of som eone n oticing you, rem arking upon your agitation. It is a frightening thing

to be on a street like this without a com panion; a ma n alone, however con ventionally and

handsomely he is dressed, is vulnerable to any stranger's eyes. (70)


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452

onika Fludernik

As Stanzel (168-70 ) has illustrated so beautifully, reflector-mod e narratives

can be determ ined best at the very beginning of texts where they imm ediately

establish a deictic center (Banfield 151-67) on the part of the protagonist and.

relate all deictic expressions to that deictic center. One therefore usually encou n-

ters familiarizing articles, referential items relating to the subjectivity of the

focalizer, and ex pressions of subjectivity at the very beginning of reflector-m ode

texts. This immediate descent into the protagonist's psyche occurs with particular

freque ncy at the beginning of short stories, and this strategy applies to second-

person texts just as much as to others. Note, for instance, Frede rick Ba rthelm e's

"M oon D eluxe" (or an y of the other second-person texts in the collection of the

same t i tle), Robyn Sarah's "W rong Num ber," or R um er Godden's "You N eed

to Go U pstairs." Here is the beginning of "M oon D eluxe":

You're stuck in traffic on the way home from work, counting blue cars, and when a

blue-metallic Jetta pulls alongside, you count it—twenty-eight. You've seen the driver on

other evenings; she looks strikingly l ike a you ng m an— big, with dark, alm ost red hair

clipped tight around her head. Her clear fingernails m ove slowly, like gears, on the black

steering whee l. She watches you, expressionless, for a long second, then deliberately opens

her m outh and circles her lips with the wet tip of her tongue. You look away, then back .

Sudd enly her lane moves ahead—tw o, three, four cars go by. You roll down the window and

stick your head ou t, trying to see where she is, but she's gone. The car in front of yo u signals

to change lanes. All the cars in your lane are m oving into the other lane. There m ust be a

wreck ahead, so you punch your blinker. You straighten your arm ou t the window, hoping to

get in behind a van that has come up beside you, and you wait, trying to rem ember w hat the

wmnlookedlke 61

As has been observed, m any second-person texts start out with a passage of what

initially appears to be a genera lized or " generic" (M argolin) "you," a "you" with

which the reader in the role of " (any)one" can identify, but the text then proceeds

to conjure up a very specific "you" with a specific sex, job, husband or wife,

address, interests, and so on, so that the reader has to realize that the "you" m ust

be an other, a or the protagonist. I have discussed this process in relation to

Haw thom e's "The Hau nted M ind" in the introduction to this issue, and it has,

for instance, been noted several times with respect to

I f on a W inter 's Night a

Trave ler

(Phelan 141-56; K acand es 143-46). There are, how ever, some texts in

which the generalized reading ("you" equ als "one"), in the form of a very specific

reader role, persists despite the narrow ing of reference, and it does so because

in these texts the desired effect is precisely to make the reader feel personally

responsible, personally caught in the discourse an d expo sed to its political thrust.

Max Frisch's Burleske —the narrative prose sketch from which his famous

play

Biederm ann und d ie Brands t i fte r

developed—is written in the second per

son, and it describes the bourgeois mentality to a T. Readers will necessarily

find them selves caught in the recognition of their own fear of criminal elem ents

and their reluctance to be judged afraid, illiberal, "bourgeois." Likewise, in

Jam aica K incaid's

A Small Place

(1988) the "you ," which appears to refer to a

specific North-Am erican wom an tour ist arriving in Antigua, begins to shoulder


10/36


the guilt of We stern society towards the colonial subject and im plicitly becom es

an o bject of identification for the real read er, who— as in F risch's tale— is asked

to feel guilty, to recognize him- or herself in the negative image. Even better

than third-person (or first-person) reflector-m ode narrative, the " you" second-

person texts with a reflector character can indu ce the hypnotic quality of com -

plete iden tification by a m axim al bid for read erly em pathy on the discourse level

in terms of the generalized "you" — a "you" that initial ly keeps the comm unica-

t ional level well in view—an d it can even m ake this generic m eaning reem erge,

turn ing fiction a gain into virtual facticity or "app licability." In A

Small Place

the reader starts out with the generic

you

of the guide-book discourse and is

pulled into an identification with the woman tourist, whose background and

current experien ce are sketched in ever m ore specific terms, thereby signaling

that she is no longer just "anyon e" (and ther efore no longer the virtual reader in

his or her real-world iden tity) but has turned into a fictional character. How ever,

at the end of the second-person passage and throughou t the continuation of the

text in the m ode of didactic and hortatory discourse, the

you

reassumes its generic

function as you-equals-"anyon e," and the real read er is even explicitly addressed

qua rea der an d citizen of a form erly im perial ist nation.

One o f the ma in m anifestations of the reflector mo de— its purest form , so

to speak—is the interior mon ologue, the rend ering of a character's (or a group

of characters"9 m ind(s) as if tape-recording their thoughts. The status of inte-

rior-monologue novels has been much at issue between Stanzel and Cohn.

W hereas Stanzel contends that it can be regarded as the

non p lus u l t ra

of figural

narrative (and hence of the reflector mod e), Cohn argues that the interior m ono-.

logue cannot be placed on the typological circle (except, perhaps, in its unme-

diated center) since it lacks narrative transmission and is (even if implicitly

quoted) internal discourse: discourse of the characters that is apparently rendered

in verbatim fashion. (Compare C ohn, "Encirclem ent" 169-70, com m enting on

Stanzel 270.) The hinge on which Cohn's argument turns is the verisimilitude

of quoted discourse. To the extent that any kind of speech (and, particularly,

thought) representation creatively generates (rather than transcribes) linguistic

material meant to evoke a protagonist's speech performance or thought proc-

esses, interior monologue is the most artificial technique imaginable, as Cohn

herself would be the first to point out. The interiority of the interior m onologue

is therefore a m eaning effect: it is a representation, m im etically evoking a process

of internal thinking, med iated in and through language.

17

One can (but need not)

align the linguistic med iation of internal thought processes with the m ediation

operative in reflector-mo de n arrative even if that type of narrative evokes m ini-

m al event structures, wherea s interior m onologue does

not :

this wou ld be Stan-

zer s position. For Cohn the interior monologue, as direct discourse, even if

internal

direct discourse, approaches the nonnarrative status of the dramatic

monologue.


11/36

454

onika Fludernik

D irect interior m onologue q ua direct discourse is by definition expre ssed

"in the first person." (In its stream of consciousness forms, which evoke a

subverbal or preverbal state of consciousness, there are, however, n o pron ouns

at all, and the re are n o finite verb form s either.) To the exten t that the interior

m ono logue em ploys first-person form s, therefore, its status as quoted but appar-

ently unm ediated discourse seems assured. One now, however, has a num ber of

texts that m ake exten sive use of second-person interior m onologu e. Su ch fiction,

although it rel ies on the everyday-m ode of internal self-exhortation (observable

in one 's own talking to on eself), rad icalizes this techniqu e by exten ding it to the

entire m onologue in a m anner as artificial as the genre of the interior mon ologue

itself. Second-person interior monologue therefore foregrounds its mediacy,

fictionality, or, if you will , narrativity," and in doing so , it clinches the argum ent

for including interior monologues with reflector-mode narrative.

A wonderful example of such a second-person interior monologue is Sa-

m uel Beckett' s m inidrama

That T im e,

noted by Gn utzmann (101-0 2):

or that time alone on your back in the sand and n o vows to break the peace when was that an

earlier time a later time before she came after she went or both before she came after she was

gone and you back in the old scene wherever it might be might have been the same old scene

before as then then as after w ith the rat or the wheat the yellowing ears or that tim e in the

sand the glider passing over that time you went back soon after long after . . . (393)

One can observe immediately how this is meant to suggest rambling memory

and thought—a m ale equivalent to Molly B loom's well-known m onologue—an d

how the

you

really refers to the thinker, the mind. The fact that this text was

written as a work for the theater does not in any way alter its narrativity: on

stage a head is projected which opens its eyes and even smiles, and the voice

proceeds from elsewhere, the implication of the mise en sane being that we

overhea r the thinking of the head, not add resses to the head. (This state is mad e

clear by the subject of the discourse: one person's m em ories.)

There d o, however, exist other (first-person) interior m onologues that use

self-address extensively, splitting the monologizing self into a dialogic contest

of self-incriminatory voices. Arguing for the narrativity of the interior mono-

logue (in its first- as well as second-person forms) necessarily involves a defi-

nition of narrativity that defies the age-old criterion of agenthood or the necessary

presence of a chain of events for the constitution of narrative. For the latter

reason Chatman' s story-versus-discourse dichotomy as a necessary minimal

condition for n arrative texts becomes q uestionable since this dichotom y presup-

poses the presence of a recuperable plot (otherwise there can be no rearrangem ent

of this story's action). I will not at pre sent go into this problem , but m erely no te

that I am elsewhere propo sing a radical redefinition of n arrativity as based o n

the constitution of (human) experientiality." Experientiality can, but need not,

reside in agen cy; it is sufficiently groun ded in active consciousn ess, observation,

perception, and reflective speculation. If the portrayal of consciousness can


12/36


correlate with experientiality, then the interior-mon ologue n ovel can e asily be

part of reflector-mod e narr ative; in fact, it constitutes the m ost radical ma nifes-

tation of fictional expe rientiality.

In tracing the diversity of second-person forms as in the above, I have

already noted that im portant aspects of second-person fiction cannot be properly

dealt with even within the typology of figure 1 because they question the very

coordina tes by me ans of which the narra tological categories that I use have bee n

defined. B esides the very diversity of second-person form s, one also has to pay

attention to the instability within individual second-person texts. Second-perso n

fiction (typically) plays with the m ultifunctionality of the second-person pronoun

(you

as address, as generic "one," or

you

as self-address, etc.) and with the

read er's attempt at constru cting a situation for the discourse, at naturalizing the

disparities within the text. Such play with the ambiguity of the second person

typically occurs at the beginning of texts, where— as we ha ve noted— the reader

appears to be addressed in person or a s a generalized " you." At the end of texts

one m ay also sudd enly encoun ter a shift into a different fram e: one discovers,

for instance, that the addressee and protagonist is dead (although she or he

appeared to be the recipient of the narrator's allocution); that this addressee-pro-

tagonist does not " really" exist, that he or she has m erely been fanta sized by the

speaker; or one encounters narratives of internal focalization where the text

suddenly acquires an addressee and then destroys the previous illusion of im-

mediacy.

2

°

Since exa m ples for how secon d-person tex ts initially create a com plex field

of potential deictic significance to the re ader and then el iminate these scenarios

in favor of one fram e (usually by reducing

you

to a referential item designating

the protagonist) have been noted a t length, I will provide ex am ples here of the

interesting twists one encounters at the very end of som e second-person stories.

I have documented such a case in "Second Person Fiction" by the example of

Joyce Carol Oates's "Y ou," w here the "you" protagonist, the actress M adeline,

em erges as the addressee of her da ughter's discourse, and— in the final scene of

the tale— one m ay (or m ay not) conclude that the entire discourse took place in

the daughter's mind w hile she was waiting for her mother's arrival at the airport.

Cortazar's "Graffiti"— in this issue discussed by Irene K acandes— can serve as

another example. The (male) you protagonist appears to be addressed, if at

all, by an unnamed authorial-omniscient "I," but at the end of the story, this

unnam ed narrator suddenly emerges as the voice of the wom an whom the "you"

protagonist had so foolhardily involved in po litical criminality an d u sed to refer

to earlier as "she." This structure that is reminiscent of the uncanniness of a

M oebius strip forces one to reinterpret the enunciatory ground of the tale, and

it therefore ra dically und erm ines a stable realistic reading of the e vents (which

are qu ite explicitly metap horical in any case).

A third example of such a structure is Ron Butlin's The Tilting Room.

In this story "you" an d "I" together share a room that has crooked corners and


13/36

456

onika Fludernik

in which ever ything is askew, but they no longe r notice this until Janice arrives

and puts everything in ord er, m aking the crooked ness of the ti lting room visible

again. The "I" is a woman, and the "you" sleeps with Janice, which the "I"

condon es. The "I" then tells a bedtime story to the "yo u." In this story the "you"

enters a room at a party, and Janice tells him that he has becom e a father, a piece

of news he obviously does not enjoy. There follows a hallucinatory sequence in

which the "you" watches a youn g girl petting with a boy and growing older fast

as she looks at him (the "you") watching her. When the vision ends with the

"yo u" trying to reestablish contact with Janice, the previous scene turns ou t to

have been a n ightmare. The narrator " I" then annou nces that she will tell another

story to the "you ," startipg by quoting the first two pa ragraphs of " The T ilting

Room ." Here the story ends, repeating itself apparently in a

mise-en-abtme effect

of story within story. The story's "I," the jealous lover—n ow dead perhaps?—

interferes with the "you 's" life w ith Janice like a ghost's haun ting the "you's"

mind with guilt. Is the tilting room a metaphor for the "you's" tilting mind

im perfectly set straight by Janice?

All these exam ples il lustrate how the referent of

you

and particularly the

situation of e nun ciation in these stories lend them selves to being reinterpreted

and radically revised. The intention is not merely to provide a metanarrative

statem ent on the fictionality of fiction; in each an d every case the bre ak w ith a

realist fram e relates to serious issues portrayed in the story, particularly with the

mental strain of guilty conscience (in Graffiti ), a fraught mother-daughter

relationship (in " You" ), and a hau nting (in " The Tilt ing Ro om "). This psycho-

logical "e xplanation" does n ot entirely resolve the il logicality of the narrative

structure in these texts, but it provides an objective correlative for them that

helps to evade an exclusively m etafictional reading of the text. The un derm ining

of realist read ing conventions prim arily relates to the enu nciatory situation (the

situation in w hich the narrator add resses the nanatee-cum -protagonist), the very

existence of a narrating voice an d of the " you" (is the "you" m erely a fantasized

"yo u" ?), and to the m etaleptic transgre ssion of existential narrative levels (the

protagonist's becom ing an e xtrafictional na rratee, a protagon ist's becoming the

narrator).

This discussion. leads into the nex t section of this article, in which I w ant

to outl ine how second-person texts rad ically question the realist reading strate-

gies used to naturalize (postm odem ist) odd ities in general and, m ore specifically,

how these texts put into doubt the very categories of narrative theory since these,

too, closely relate to a realist scenario.

2.

B roadly speaking, narrative theories proposed by Ge nette, Stanzel

Sey-

m our Chatman, Mieke Bal , G erald Prince, Shlomith Rim m on-Kenan , Helmu t


14/36


B onheim, an d S usan S . Lanser rely on narrative param eters that reflect typically

realist assum ptions abo ut na rrative. This is not to say that these theories cannot

deal with departures from the realist m ode; on the con trary, fantastic and post-

modernist kinds of writing are easily categorized in terms of infractions of the

narratological rules of selection and com bination.

2

' The realist presuppositions

specifically touch on prototypical ways

22

of story telling: few and far between

are the theories that al low for narrative without a na rrator; rare the theory that

accommodates noncanonical types of story telling (in the present tense, simul-

taneous narration, second-person narrative) on a par with canonical first- or

third-person past-tense texts. As Nilli Diengott has noted ("M ime tic Lan guage

Game and Narrative Level ), both Stanzel's and Genette's basic categories

are constructed with a realist fram ework in m ind. This is not necessarily a point

of criticism: a m ajority of texts do operate on realistic grounds, and it is therefore

important to analyze these narratives within the framework of the mimetic

presuppositions that they invoke. The solution, theoretically at least, does not

lie in the complete abandoning of realist parameters and categories but in the

integration of realist parame ters within an encom passing theoretical m odel that

can treat the realist case as the special instance of prototypical story telling

without, at the sam e time, prom oting the realist mo de to a position of theoretical

centrality. I am elsewhere attempting to provide just such a new theoretical m odel

(T o w a r d s a Na t u r a l Na r r a t o log y )

and w ill therefore here con centrate on the

problems with the standard categories, particularly as they emerge from an

analysis of second-person fiction.

Chatm an's fundam ental definition of narrativity is based on the story-ver-

sus-discourse dichotom y, the fact that all narrative is a m ediation o f an u nder-

lying story that the narrative m edium (discourse) projects from its discursivity.

This discourse—w hether verbal, fi lm ic, or dram atic— pulls together the classic

elem ents of a rearrangem ent of the story chronology, the narrational m ediation

and e valuation by the text's enunciator, its addre ss features, including the entire

range of choices about focalization, voice, mood, person, and so on. (Since the

latter categories overlap between various system s, this is naturally not m eant as

a discrete an d exh austive list.)

Second -person texts frequen tly under m ine this story-discourse dichotom y

by the very n onna turalness of their design, tel ling the narra tee' s or ad dressee's

story. W hereas the typical story-telling m ode a llows the reader to sit back an d

enjoy a n arrative of anothe r's tribulations (W einrich, ch. 3), hence instituting a

basic existential and differential gap between the story and its reception, sec-

ond-person texts (even if only initially) breach this convention of distance,

seem ingly involving the real reader within the textual world. By do ing so, they

not only break the fram e of narration (consisting of discrete levels within a m odel

of communicative circuits) and violate the boundaries of narrative levels (see

below), but they additionally foreground the processual and creative nature of

story tel ling: the "you 's" experiences ar e ex plicitly projected from the discourse


15/36

458MnkaFudernk

and a re attributed to the "you," without—in m any cases—any evidence relating

to the story world. Or, to put it differently, second-person texts in which the

narrator doe s not share the "you's" story experience (purely hom oconative texts)

openly, metafictionally, invent the addressee's experience, and this condition

becom es especially obvious for narratives in the "subjunctive" m ode (Richardson

319-20), where the imperative engenders story matter by enunciational fiat.

Secon d-person w riting of this kind therefore turns out to be ra dically antihistoric

and contrafactual.

23

The collapse of the story-discourse distinction becom es m ost apparent in

second-person texts written in the present tense and in the second-person im-

perative ("subjunctive") m ode. To the extent that texts such as Lorrie M oore's

stories from

Self-Help

posit a fictional situation tha t invites the collusion of the

reader in being read a s a vignette of speculative projection—in being read , that

is, as a quite candid inven tion of an im aginative situation— these stories are both

m ore openly fictional in com parison with "norm al" fiction, and less so. On the

other han d, the invention is here ope nly signaled by recurring linguistic devices,

not merely presupposed in the frame (the fact of a text's being a novel for

instance). On the other han d, on account of the implicit involvem ent of the reader

in the situation as a generalized "you" ("you" equ als "one"), for whom this very

predicament might become virtual reality, such projected scenes appear to be

less removed from real-life experience and therefore less "fictional."

I will illustrate this characteristic dissolution of fun dam ental narra tological

categories, which relates to the qu estions raised by second-person texts, on the

exam ple of an especially interesting nove l, Josipovici' s

Contre - jour : A T r ip tych

after Pierre Bonnard (1986). Josipovici, a leading British postmodemist and

experim entalist, in

Contre - jour

presents a fantasy of Pierre Bonn ard' s marital

situation, a fan tasy that has only a restricted factual basis.

24

The two m ajor parts

of the nove l (part 3 consists of a brief letter) represent sustained a postrophes (I

am using the word advisedly) of the daughter to her mother (part 1) and the

mother to her daughter (part 2). What initially appears to be the evocation of

the daughter's fraught relationship with her mother— and therefore a second -

person narrative describing the mother's actions in the past—soon collapses as

a trustworthy account of any realistic experience on the daughter's part. It

soon em erges that the narrative discourse is directed not to the "present" m other

by letter or maybe telephone, but to a mother who is dead (29-32): in fact, the

discourse m ust postdate the m other's death by at least ten years since the father,

too, has me anw hile died (16-17). The apostrophe to the mo ther is therefore an

entirely fantasized on e, and the n arrative of the daughter's visit to the m other

"yesterday" (with which the book opens) really has to be read as a projected

memory of such a visit. As the text proceeds, however, this factual status of

m em ory is further underm ined. It appears that the daughter is herself men tally

disturbed, a recognition that somewhat impairs the credibility of her earlier

accusations of pa thological behavior directed at the ,m other. The discourse, one


16/36


now finds, is uttered by her talking to her ow n m irror image in the windo w of

her flat in town (15, 55). Towards the end of part 1 inconsistencies in the

daughter's version of the past obtrude them selves on the reader: the da ughter

accuses the mother of rem aining unresponsive on the phone, but she does this

herself in a "pre sent-day" scen e when she re fuses to talk to her cousin Alex (27,

69-70). More damning still, Alex is said to have been to her flat before but in

the final pages of part I asks to be allowed to see where the daughter lives

(63-65, 69). From these inconsistencies one m ust conclude that the daughter's

"past" is perhaps as invented as the so-called mem ories of her mo ther's failings:

that she is extrapolating her own pathological problem s by inventing a miserable

childhood an d blam ing it on the mo ther.

Perhaps it wasn't really like that though. Perhaps it was always only m y fault. Perhaps I

me rely overreacted to a com mo n com plaint, to what they call a fact of life. Perhaps none of

it happened as I so vividly rem em ber it, perhaps there was never any sense on yo ur part of

wanting to be rid of me, only m y inordinate desire for m ore love than anyone could be

expected to give, even to their child, and then m y guilt at sensing that I was asking for m ore

than you could give. Or perhaps the guilt had to do w ith my w anting to escape you both,

which I tried to assuage by inventing this story of your rejection of m e. I don't know. W e act

and then we try to interpret those acts, but the interpretations are only perhaps further acts,

which themselves call out for later interpretation. Whatever the tru th of the matter is, that

day, like all the other days I ever passed in your com pany, I felt as if I was not wan ted and

did not belong. As if you barely noticed m e when I was there and w ould forget me the

mmn I w gone 4243)

In fact, except for the biological necessity of motherhood, it remains quite

uncertain whether the daughter ever had a m other and a childhood even faintly

resembling the one that she dram atizes in her m onologue. In spite of these radical

questions, however, the pathos in these lines betrays a depth of an guish that is

difficult to simply ignore in an effort to explain the daughter's lies as merely

pathological invention.

In this setup, then , the story-d iscourse d istinction, despite the past-tense

narration for the "rem em bered" childhood scenes, is seriously underm ined: the

story, such as we get it, increasingly discloses itself as fabulation on the discourse

level. It cannot claim prior existence to, or independent validity from, the

narratorial enun ciation. Of course, if it were not for the na rration (or enu nciation)

of

David Coppelfield

or

T ess of the D 'Ur ber vil les,

we w ould not know the story

of D avid or of Te ss either. The story is always a construction from the perspective

of the discourse. Ho we ver, in the realist story-telling tradition, the act of en un-

ciation a ppears to be m ediatory, a signifying, wherea s the discourse of

Contre -

: lour ,

qua dramatic monologue, tells a story only incidentally, foregrounding

enun ciation over story.

Contre-jour

is, of course, written in the form of a dram atic

m onologue; but the same disparity between story and enu nciation appears in al l

second-person fiction that is modeled on instructional discourse:


17/36

460

onika Fludemik

Arrive in some town aro und three, having been on the road since seven, and cruise the main

street, which is also Route W hatever-It-Is, and vote on the mo tel you wan t. The wife favors

a discreet back-from-the-road look, but not bungalows; the kids go for a pool (essential),

color TV (optional), and M agic Fingers (fun). Vote w ith the majority, pull in, and walk to

the office. Your legs unbend weirdly, after all that sitting behind the wheel. A sticker on the

door says the place is run by "The Plum m ers," so this is M rs. Plum me r behind the desk.

Fifty-fiveish, tight silver curls with traces of copper, face m otherly but for the brightness of

the lipstick and the sharpness of the sizing-up glance. In half a second she nails you: fam ily

man, no trouble. Sweet tough wise old scared Mrs. Plummer. (Updike 40)

W hereas the realist text and even sim ultaneous present-tense narrative som ehow

appears to be "pure story," the impera tive m ode foreground s enunciation over

story, highlighting the constructedness and processual engen dering of a story on

the m ake, a story that is no longer " past" but pure potentiality in an indefinite

present or future (m odal

will

is very common in second-person texts

25 of inde-

term inate reach). The second -person prono un increases this effect since it oper-

ates as a signal of enunciation, in Banfield's model even as a negative index of

narration (B anfield 150 -51). Presen t-tense narra tion, in and by itself, does not

fully explain the meaning effects of second-person fiction. Whereas the locus

and situation of first-person present-tense narrative frequen tly rem ains deliber-

ately vague (Cohn, "I doze an d I wak e"), second-person fiction— on account of

the second-person pronoun and the use of the imperative—provides a m uch m ore

well-defined point of enunciation even though the precise (fictional) situation

of utterance may rem ain equally in limbo .

A second narra tological distinction that is radically affected in second-per-

son texts is that between the various levels of discourse within the com m unica-

tional structure of narrative. In particular, characters, unless they are also

first-person narrators, are usually conceived of as e xisting on a d ifferent (and

lower) ontological plane from that of the narrative discourse. W hereas the divide

is an unbridgeable one in the case of third-person fiction except by way of

rhetorical apostrophe of the narrator to his character,

26

in first-person na rrative

narrator an d characters can share a com m on past, but the narrator can still only

addre ss his dram atis personae on the level of discourse if they, too, acquire an

existence beyond the story past in the here-and-no w of the enuciational present.

(This is the case in m uch epistolary discourse.) The narratological mo del doe s

not apply with eq ual felicity to oral story telling, however. Ever yday con versa-

tional story telling already puts the customary narratological dichotomies to grief.

Not only do we frequen tly tell of the experience of our com m on acqua intances

who n ecessarily share a world w ith us, thus allowing for a very fuzzy demarcation

line between the wo rld of the teller and that of the told;

27 in narratives of personal

experience, moreover, the current addressee is especially likely to have been

involved in the story that is being told to him or her. Second-person fiction,

which appears to be a prima facie fictional, nonnatural form of story telling,

enhances the options already available to conversational narrative an d ex tends

the boundaries of the nonrealistically possible in emphatic ways. Harangues


18/36


directed at a fictional character are one such strategy that exploits an alread y

entirely fictional process and defam iliarizes it by applying it to a second -person

protagonist rather than a fam iliar addressee as in a third- (or first-) person text:

Look at you. Wa lking out of that empty post office with the gait of some one w ho had

somewhere to go. Can you see it now? D o you rem ember? It was the day you acquired the

Taste. See the way you walked ? Head up, long stride. As though you had som eplace to go.

As though these are the days and this is the place where an ybody has anyplace to go. Get

factual, Raymond. Rea d a book. Three-day beard, filthy corduroys, tape-bound tennis shoes.

And w hat on earth m ade you sm ile that wisp of a smile you wore, with those eyebrows

leaning into each other, chevron-style? You were trying to look inspired, ma ybe? Or sure o f

yourself? What was the effect you were attempting? W hy would you do that? Nobody dow n

here in the "Flatlands" cares about you sensitive types. (McKnight 175)

Second-person texts, by putting the narratee o n the agend a, therefore query

narratology's privileging of the narrator as the locus of the story-discourse

distinction, and that already from the ontology of the communicative model

itself. M oreover, second-person texts are m uch m ore radical destroyers of the

m odel of narrative levels in that they additionally reach ou t to the reader roles

projected by the text an d invite active participation a nd even iden tification by

real reade rs. Again, second-person n arrative in this context extend s or reapplies

a fam iliar technique. Som e traditional narra tives com e close to evoking the real

reader's em pathy by using a conspiratorial "we" and "us," especially in gnom ic

com m entary on "our" hum an predicame nt. First-person texts used to be more

pron e to involving a real audien ce since the fictionality of the (quasi) autobiog-

raphy (Stanzel 111-13, 209-14

28

) tended to be signaled in the frame rather than

the text or at least was not im m ediately revealed in the nove l itself. (Qu asi)auto-

biography, that is to say, already displays a d iscourse of tell ing o ne's personal

experiences to a real audience among which the reader may want to include

herself. How ever, such setups are carefully circum scribed in accordance with

realist m odels of address, as they occur in contexts where o ne has a well-defined

teller (intra- or extra fictional narra tor). Second-person fiction extend s this basi-

cally realistic scenario to the reflector m ode and thereby, parad oxically, involves

the reader in m uch m ore radical fashion. Although second-person texts clearly

have a fictional speaker, whose ad dressee on e m ay in principle mo re easily resist

to identify with, the latent generic meaning of

you

m akes com plete distancing

more difficult. Y ou

is typically ambiguous in its applications to self and other

and to a d efinite or indefinite reading.

29

You begin your journey on so high an e levation that your destination is already in sight—a

city that you have visited m any times an d that, more over, is indicated on a traveler's m ap

you have carefully folded up to take along with you. You are a lover of m aps, and you have

already comm itted this map to m emory, but you bring it with you just the same.

(Oates, "Journey" 182)


19/36

462

onika Fludernik

Here the im aginative scene cannot w ork u nless one is initially willing to ado pt

the "you 's" experience a s potentially one's own , and the constitution of the story

therefore ope rates on a level superior, rather than infer ior, to the enun ciation,

the discourse or narration.

Narrative levels, as I have argued, are quite openly aspects of a realistic

story-tel ling fram e. If the story tel ling that is being perform ed work s according

to an oral model, a number of theoretically suspect options become perfectly

viable. Once one allows for the (faintly conceivable) possibility of telling a

narratee's story—with the noted m odels of courtroom evidence, loss of m em ory,

guidebook texts, or interior monologue in the second person

3

'—once one has

found a realist pretext for second-person narrative, that is, the narratological

categories no longer interfere. W hat happens in the m ajority of second-person

texts, however, is not a clear im itation of a rea l-world story-telling situation in

the second person, but a play with the nonna tural use of

you

for the purpose of

story tel ling and a subsequ ent na turalization of this oddity by m eans of ha lf-re-

alistic fram e projection. Such na turalizations include the option of claiming that

the character is tell ing the story to him self in the second person , an e xplanation

proffered for Bu tor's novel as well as for The Death ofAr tem io Cruz

(Gnutzmann

10 0) and for Rex Stout's

How L ike a G od. Another n aturalization (which supplies

a m otivation for the narrational act) shows u p in the apostrophic mod e. Apos-

trophe may be addressed to a dead lover, as a means of venting one's grief,

com ing to term s with the relationship, or a wishful attempt to relive past happi-

ness (Edm und W hite's

Nocturnes for the King of Naples;

Oriana Fallaci's

U n

uomo) . josipovici's Contre- jour

in both parts 1 and 2 thematizes such intense

emotional involvement between mother and daughter, who apparently try to

com e to term s with their fai led attem pts at comm unication. A third variant can

be de tected in the instructional register as, for instance, in texts l ike P am Hous-

ton' s "How to Talk to a H unter" and the Lorrie M oore stories, where the specific

fictional scenarios can at least superficially pretend to a general validity or

applicability for (wom en) readers. That reading d oes not na turalize the text as

"story" but as self-help literature.

In Josipovici's

Contre- jour

narrative levels are deconstructed less on ac-

count of a deliberate (postm odern ) infringem ent of realist param eters than as a

consequence of the radical ontological ambiguities in the text. As we noted

above, in part 1 the daughter appears to be a ddressing the mother as a real person

until we find out that she is dead or maybe does not even exist except as a

figmen t of the daughter's imagination. In part 2, where the m other addresses the

dau ghter, it becom es increasingly clear that the daughter never ex isted ("O h my

daughter./ W hom I never had" [99]) and that the m other mu st be quite insane

since she knows she does not have a daughter yet continues to write letters to

her an d threaten s to visit her at her flat (of which she has no ad dress). The pleas

directed towa rds the (im agined) dau ghter are part of a first-person narr ative, in

which the m other functions as an unreliable na rrator and in the course of which


20/36

A Test Case for Narra tology

63

the father (the painter) implicitly acqu ires heroic stature for his kindne ss, long-

suffering patience, and faithfulness to his wife. The m other's discourse u nw it-

tingly reveals what he has to put up with. A typical passage of the couple's

interaction is the following:

"I don't need anyone," I said. "If I can talk to my dau ghter. If she will talk to m e

then that is all I wa nt."

"B ut if that isn't possible?"

"W hy? W hy shouldn't it be possible?"

"If she's not there," he said, "If she's left the country. If she doesn't want to speak

to you."

"It's based on a misund erstanding," I said. "Her no t wanting to speak to m e is based

solely on a m isunderstanding. If I can get to see her I will be able to sort it all out."

"B ut you don't know where she is anymore," he said.

I hate that kind of conversation.

"You're trying to humour m e," I said.

"No," he said.

"She doesn't exist," I said. "You kn ow she d oesn't."

131)

In part 2

it remains quite unclear wha t the relation between the two d is-

courses (the first-person narr ative and the m other-dau ghter discourse) really is.

On the surface of it, the first-person narrative is part of the dram atic mo nologue

directed at the daughter; yet the m other cannot be addressing this daughter (who

does not exist) except in an apostrophic mode in her own mind. Or, does this

apostrophic discourse repre sent the text of the m other's letters to her daughter

that are discussed in her dialogues w ith the husband? In so far as the dau ghter's

childhood as a past evaporates as soon as the daughter becom es a "m ere" fantasy

of the m other's present delusions, the narra tive levels becom e entirely homo ge-

nized. The example demonstrates not only a tendency to deconstruct a real

separation of na rrative levels (though seco nd-perso n fiction usu ally retains the

distinction betw een extra- an d intradiegetic person); it also il lustrates that the

entire concept of narrative levels and n arrative em bedd ing is based on a realistic

story-telling frame in the absence of which—when realistic readings break

down—the concept of narrative level ceases to be viable. If no situation of

enun ciation can be discerned in the text or if no consistent story (protagonists,

setting) transpires, the usefulne ss of the story-discourse distinction eva porates.

Since the story exists only as a construction of the signified on the basis of the

text qua narration, a text without a discernible story or without a discernible

teller ceases to be definable as m ediated story.

3

'

In the case of

Contre - jour

the issue is much complicated by the fact that

a realistic situation of enu nciation or narr ation canno t be elicited easily from the

text. The vagueness of narrational circumstance is a general feature of much

narrative, even of the entirely realistic persuasion, and affects texts written


21/36

464

onika Fludemik

exclusively in the present tense more than it does others. (Compare Cohn, "I

doze and I wa ke.") Since the "you" addre ssees in second-person fiction are all

too frequen tly dead o r ima gined, there cannot be any rea lly convincing situation

of actual address. The situation may also be left pending (as in Fallaci's

Un

u o m o

or Gloria Naylor's

M a m a D a y ,

where ex planations are provided at the end

of the novel), or it ma y rem ain vague (as in Alexand ros Papa diam antis's story

"Arou nd the Lagoon"). In

Contre- jour ,

as I have noted, the dramatic m onologues

of parts 1 and 2 are both entirely ambiguous, with the monologic reading the

m ost "rea listic" po ssible explan ation of the observable incon sistencies. There is,

however, yet another twist to this text. In addition to the complications noted

above, the relation between parts 1 and 2 of the text remains also unresolved.

Thus— without for the mom ent taking part 3 into consideration— it is possible

(it comes first in the text) to read the m other's discourse in part 2 as an inven tion

or projection by the da ughter. After all, if she is ima gining her m other's acts of

unkindness every night, she can transfer her fantasies to the m other's perspective.

Con versely, if one starts with part 2, the daughter d oes not exist, and so part 1

m ust be the m other's projection of the dau ghter's m ind inventing her childhood

and accusing the m other.

There is no way of resolving these matters between the two parts alone,

and both readings allow for a story-within-story interpretation o f a sick m ind

projecting its own pathology onto the inven ted figure of the other, vicariously

reworking her guilt and sublim ating her aggressions. The two parts are sym m et-

rical and self-reflexive, which is suggested already in the book's title

Contre-

jour.

There are two paintings by Pierre Bonnard that have the phrase

"con tre-jour" (" against the light") in their titles: the painting of a young nu de

seen against the light and the face of an older wo m an in a hat. These may w ell

represent mother and daughter. To me, the significance of the title, however,

appears to lie less in an allusion to these paintings than in the idea o f perspective:

of how story elem ents rearrange them selves in the subjective retellings by mo ther

and daughter (see also Imho f 262). Thus, in the daughter's version of the story,

the mother seems to tyrannize the father with her obsessive bathing and her

refusals to leave her bed. Yet, in the mother's version of events, the painter

initially em erges as a m onster who persecutes his wife even into the bathroom,

obsessively needing to paint (or draw ) her and allowing her no private l ife at al l

(85). M oreover, the mother's pathology seem s to be brought on as m uch by her

inability (or unw illingness

32

) to have children a s by his incessant persecution o f

her. It is only when the m other's insane behavior em erges in part 2 (tearing up

her husband's canvas, leaving cryptic notes for him, antagonizing his friends,

disappearing into the bathroo m at the slightest provocation, and especially writ-

ing letters to a nonexisting daughter) that the positive evaluation of the father

that had already been projected by the d aughter's discourse in part 1 rea sserts

itself to the d etrim ent of the m other's credibility and our sym pathies for her.


22/36


It is therefore fitting that part 3 provides us w ith howe ver brief a glim pse

of the painter's perspective. Par t 3 consists of a letter that on e " Charles" w rites

to "R obert," telling him of his wife's death and m entioning Alex, his nephew 's

wife, who wil l take care of him . This corroborates the ex istence of Alex— whose

fictional ex istence m ight have been doubted otherwise—a nd it significantly fails

to m ention a dau ghter, therefore leading one to en dorse part 2 as constitutive of

fictional " reality." P art 3 additionally affects the text's interpretation from an

intertextual direction since the text of Charles's letter to R obert echoes alm ost

verbatim the letter that the historical Pierre Bo nnard wrote to his long-tim e friend

Henri M atisse on the dea th of his wife M artha (Terrasse 10 5). B onnard, too, did

not have a ny children, a point which extratextually clinches the reading I have

presented above. One d oes well to note, howe ver, that such a reading goes against

the grain of the text, introducing arguments from extratextual material (no

problem in and by itself) and leveling al l contradictions an d parad oxes into one

consistent explanation of the textual evidence that optim izes reliable data and

m arginalizes irreconcilable evidence as pathological, delusional, or fantasized

m aterial. Such a reading therefore violates the very spirit of

Contre- jour ,

which

lies in the pre sentation of irresolvable contrad iction betw een pe rspectives. If we

as inveterate see ker s after realistic scenarios trespass by rew riting this text into

a "m ere" juxtaposition of unreliable discourses and constructing a detective's

probabilistic evaluation of "how it really was" (to pun on Ranke), then this

interpretation dem onstrates less truth about the text than it exposes the reader's

need to create sense at all costs even at the expense of irresponsibly reducing

the complexity of the text.

This observation takes me to the final point about realistic story-telling

parameters. In texts like Contre - jour

the very ex istence (on a fictional level) of

the characters of the "story" and

the very existence of a narrating or e nunciatory

discour se can be at issue. Seco nd-pe rson fiction particularly lend s itself to such,

rigorous and ra dical deconstructions and therefore helps to question the narra-

tological necessity or primariness of categories like story and discourse, the

narr ator figure, the system o f interlocking narrative and com m unicatory levels,

and the basic (realistic) presupposition that enunciators and characters exist

(physically) on some level of the fictional world. The solution to such radical

self-doubt is not, however, to scrap narratological categories per se, but to

integrate them within a mim etically m otivated reading m odel that encompa sses

the realistic standard case but equally allows for non m im etic and an timim etic

discourses. The latter, as

C ont re - jour

docum ents with great plausibility, need

not be "postmod em ist" in the customary sense of that term: nam ely, "playful"

and " infractionary." On the contrary, a text like

Contre - jour

dem onstrates force

fully that quasi-realistic interpretations can survive the m ost resolutely nonre al-

-

istic fiction. What

Co n t r e - j o u r

achieves for the reader is not a playful

disassembling of a story that ends in a general refusal to signify or in a lack of

m eaningful connectedness. On the contrary, one's im m ersion in the contradic-


23/36

466

onika Fludemik

tions that I have here outlined will more likely tend to relate to one's concern

for a filial and m arital relationship threatened by pathological tensions involving

all three parties. Even m ore im portantly, the affective qua lity of the text resides

not in an ironic distancing from whatever " story" or intimation of stories there

is, but in one's serious

Betroffenheit

34

at the anguish that emerges from the

how ever fictive con stellations o f insanity, despair (at being unloved), jealousy,

guilt, loving kindness, and obsessive desire for love. This gamut of emotions

and their range and depth w in out over an y existential or realistic skepticism . In

this m anner

Contre - jour

m anages to be a triumph of hum an psychology while ,

at the sam e time , it constitutes a cl im ax of irreality or an tirealism in the form al

realm.

This analysis of

Contre- jour ,

which contains second-person n arrative but

is not an exclusive example of it, was meant to outline some general issues in

narra tive theory, issues that affect the theoretical placing of second-perso n fiction

within current typologies and which not only touch on, but are indeed raised by,

experimental writing of the kind to which

Contre - jour

belongs. The argum ent

therefore did not attem pt to present

Contre- jour

as a typical instance of second-

person fiction, but to ou tline a num ber of theoretical propositions on the basis

of a text that is particularly complex. These propositions suggest a critical

reevaluation of standard n arratological typologies and ex plain how the limita-

tions of current models have resulted in the marginalization of second-person

texts within the traditional paradigm s.

3.

I have here reached a suitable point for the final rem arks on second -person

fiction that are designed to get beyond formal and particularly narratological

concerns to ask what second-person texts are attempting to do and how they

differ from m ore m und ane story-telling m odes. In contrast to the standard a c-

count of second-person fiction as a (stale) postmodernist device serving the

designs of a self-reflexive language gam e in experim ental texts, I am her e arguing

for the vitality, significance, and seriousness of secon d-person texts. In particu-

lar, as I will outline below, second-person narrative can, and frequently does,

corre late with great em otional dep th since the dialogic relationship it puts at its

very center allows for an in-depth treatm ent of hu m an relationships, especially

of relationships fraught with intense em otional rifts and tensions.

W hat I will be trying to do in the following is not to explain the use of the

second per son in nar rative as invariably produ cing a certain specific scenario or

a num ber of very specific m eaning effects, but to indicate the potential usefulness

of the second-person form for a variety of purposes even if these purposes can

also be served by other entirely different m eans. The usefulness of second-person

narrative, as I see it , relates in a large m easure to its deictic qualities and to its


24/36


pragmatic connotations. Second-person fiction radicalizes—as all written lan-

guage, and especially literature, tends to do— tenden cies inheren t in the language

itself, and it does so usually for a purpose, as the consequence of deliberate

choice. This latter point should not be overlooked or ignored. The decision to

employ the second person in a narrative text is (still) a highly self-conscious

one, much more self-conscious and fraught with significance than the choice

between the first- or third-person form . Although m uch ink ha s been spilled on

the choice between first and third-person fiction—in a lively debate including

contributions by B ooth, Cohn, and Stan zel—resu lts from that scholarly exchange

have very much concentrated on the "realistic" properties of homo- and het-

erod iegetic nar rative such as they relate, in particular, to focalization an d prob -

lems of knowledge. Writers' choices of pronouns demonstrably relate to their

desire, for instance, to avail themselves of the "u nreliable narrator" option; to

exploit the dram a and irony that attach to the tensions between the naive expe-

riencing "I" and the usually wiser and m ore clear-sighted narrating self of the

first-person protago nist (Stan zel 207-10 ). Or the choice of the third-person m ode

connects with a writer's need to play the historian, to move between widely

disparate locales, indulge in philosophical or moral reflections tendered from

the privileged position of the racon teur of qua si-divine attributes. These are all,

in the final analysis, criteria of narra tive realism: if one has a first-person narr ator

recounting his or her own pa st experiences, then the narrative is tied dow n w ith

a personal viewpoint, frame of knowledge, physical manifestation within a

verisim ilar societal environm ent. This fram e m ay prove shackling to what one

wants to do, but it may also reveal itself as an asset if handled with subtlety as

in K azuo Ishiguro's

The R em ains of the Day

(1989 ). From this realist perspective,

first-person writing is much more restrictive, a marked option, so to speak,

wh ereas third-person texts can .do practically anything (in the area of focaliza-

tion) except provide the typical kind of retrospective self-evaluation and self-

knowledge of first-person fiction (the dynamics between the narrating and.

experiencing selves in Stanzel's model) or reproduce the classic case of unreli-

able's narrative, where the nar rator gives himself or herself (and o thers's) awa y.

The above fairly precise differentiation between first- and third-person texts

is of course much too neat to work generally, and it pays no attention to the

peculiar status of the category "person " w ithin reflector-m ode n arrative or pre-

sent-tense narration. Cohn, w ho has asked som e searching questions about the

significance of person in the realms of history versus fiction (biography and

fictional au tobiography versus history and third-person fictIon

37

), has recently

extended her enqu iry to texts written in the present tense ("I doze and I wak e"),

arguing that first-person present-tense texts are especially nonnatural in their

structure and design, usually hedging and obliterating the issue of their own

production: that is to say, del iberately unw riting the circum stances unde r w hich

they could be en unciated or indited. Although I personally find it hard to put a

figure on the degree of nonnaturalness involved, I would tend to agree that


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468

onika Fludemik

first-person present-tense texts m ay be hard er to im agine being produced un der

realistic circumstances. (Note that such texts canno t be interpreted a s interior

m onologues.) For eq uivalent third-person texts, voyeuristic and observational

models exist in real life even if, as I would argue, these models do not at all

correspond w ith the m atter of standa rd third-person present-tense fiction.

The an alysis is really m uch com plicated by the fact that most presen t-tense

narratives, of whatever person, are reflector-mode texts—with neutral mode

coming in second place—and therefore entirely lack an enunciatory level of

clauses like I am telling you this or in describing events of this nature one

m ust of course realize. . . ." The qu estion therefore nee ds to be resuscitated here

with renewed rigor now that one has the second person for com parison as well .

W ith respect to reflectoral fiction, as we have see n, Stanzel and Co hn have taken

opposing views. Stanzel argued that the category "person" is neutralized in the

reflector realm (227-29) wherea s Cohn had pointed o ut with som e justification

that Stanzel's examples from the Calypso episode of Ulysses

did not neces-

sarily illustrate such neutralization ("E ncircleme nt" 16 6-69).

Two caveats are in order at this point. One is the fact, so convincingly

underlined in Richardson's paper in this issue of

Sty le ,

that the com bination of

different persons w ithin one text a nd the r aison d'être for such alternation have

been ignored by m uch criticism and that it is high tim e this aspect was introduced

into the debate. The second, even m ore im portant caveat concerns one's natural

tendency to see m atters in term s of dichotomies. Introducing second-person texts

into the discussion w ill, first of all, I hope, overcom e the entre nched lines of the

first- versus third-person debates. I have also insisted on the va riety and d iversity

of second-person forms, a factor that should additionally make one cautious

regard ing large theoretical claim s.

Despite these caveats I have, alas, come down on one side of the fence as

regards the position of person within the reflectoral mode, where, I maintain,

the (deictic) category of person and the deictic properties of tense lose their

oppositional quality and become largely neutralized. Like Stanzel, I would

document this neutralization on the example of texts that alternate between

different grammatical persons, but my illustrations would come from novels such

as Be ckett' s

C o m p a n y

or John McG ahem 's

T he Dark ,

where the same protago-

nist is referred to by m eans of alternating first-, second- and third

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