Fludernik Second Person Fiction
Fludernik Second Person Fiction
Fludernik Second Person Fiction
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
Monika Fludernik
Second person fiction, that is to say fiction that employs a pronoun of address
in reference to a fictional protagonist, cannot be easily accomodated within
current narratological paradigms. In particular, there are now a great number
of very different second person texts available which require a more than
cursory analysis. In a first section these problems are discussed and a tentative
typology of second person fiction is proposed. The second section traces some
real-life dikourse types which use the second person pronoun as a form of
address or self-address and illustrates how these models serve as starting-
points for the production as well as reception of second person texts, even
though second person fiction always exceeds, restructures, and subverts such
models. The third section discusses one particularly complex second person
text, Joyce Carol Oates's "You," in an attempt to introduce the reader to the
finesses of second person pronominal usage in fictional writing.
There has recently been a renewed interest in the uses of the second
person in poetry (Grabher 1989) as well as fiction (Hantzis 1988; Kacan-
des 1990, 1993; Richardson 1991; Margolin 1993; Wiest 1993). The
huge bulk of second person fiction in fact dates from the past fifteen
years, with famous models in the fifties and sixties: Butor's La Modifica-
tion (1957), Jean Muno's Le joker (1971), the second person sections
of B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo (1964), or John Ashmead's The Moun-
tain and the Feather (1961) - like the early and extremely original Beach
218 Monika Fludernik
Red (Bowman 1945), a war novel.' There have been three noted 'anti-
cipations' of narrative in the second person: Faulkner's you in Absalom,
Absalom! (1936); R.P. Warren's intermittent use of the second person
in All the King's Men 2 (1946), which alternatively signals personal invol-
vement with the protagonist and the evasion of subjectivity in generaliz-
ations by means of generalizing you; and the brief comparable section at
the beginning of Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1951). One also has to
note the more or less pervasive use of you in free indirect discourse and
interior monologue in Lillian Smith's insider novel Strange Fruit (1944).
The two earliest you-texts that have so far been discovered are surpris-
ingly old: the French Duke of Sully's (1560-1641) memoirs Les
°economies royales (1662), in which the Duke's (Maximilien de
Bêthune's) four servants at his behest write a history of the Duke's life
and tell it to him, addressing him in the act; and Nathaniel Hawthorne's
story "A Haunted Mind" (1835).
Previous research has either focussed on the use of the second person
pronoun in reference to a fictional protagonist or on the address function
of second person texts, but ignoring the central issue of the combination
of these two aspects. The address function receives particular emphasis
in Kacandes (1990) and Bonheim (1982). Kacandes bases her analysis
of second person fiction on the intensity of the address function which
she situates on a scale between pure address (in which the addressee is
potentially able to reply) and a mere rhetorical or apostrophic function (in
which the speech act of address is an exclusively rhetorical device and
the addressee cannot be envisaged as present on the same communicat-
ive level with the addressor). My intention here is to focus in particular
on the combination of address with the reference to a fictional protag-
1 My current list of second person texts (excluding the more traditional fictions with
prominent narrates functions) now runs to some seventy texts, of which some twenty-
six are novels that use the second person either exclusively or for significant portions
of the text. I would particularly like to acknowledge the help of Irene Kacandes, who
has introduced me to the topic. Thanks also go to the staff at the National Humanities
Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for their expert help with tracing the
many queer second person items I kept ordering. Additionally, I should like to express
my gratitude to my students in a non-obligatory course on feminist writing practices in
the fall term of 1991/1992, who were thrilled with Pam Houston's "How to Talk to a
Hunter" and provided me with stimulating critical appreciation. Finally, special thanks
are due to Ms. Isabella de Campo for pointing out additional second person texts and
for helping me out with the typing of the first draft.
2 Compare Vauthier (1973) for an excellent discussion of the issue.
Second Person Fiction 219
3 Bonheim (1982, 1983) frequently discusses various kinds of address without clarifying
the important issue of existence on the story level. See, for instance, his discussion of
Leacock's stories in Bonheim (1983), where he also presents a typology in which you
supposedly refers to the "narrator." Whether this is meant to suggest that the you
refers to a protagonist, or whether the you is a deictic centre 'I' of subjectivity does not
emerge from the discussion. Compare the equally puzzling definition of second person
narration by Hantzis: "The second person narrator is present when the 'you' constitutes
the narrator [my emphasis) as well as the octant and narrates(s) of a text." (1988: 47)
4 Fuentes's A Change of Skin (1967) alternates between singular and plural addressees,
with the corresponding verbal morphology.
5 Rimmon-Kenan (1983: 104) distinguishes between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic
narratees, i.e. narratees who play a part in the events narrated to them (for instance
Mme de Merteuil, Valmont or Cecile in Les Liaisons dangereuses) and those who do not
(the psychiatrist in Henry Roth's Portnoy's Complaint). Rimmon-Kenan and Chatman
(1978) also speak of "overt" and "covert" narratees, a distinction most forcefully
illustrated by Prince (1982: 17-20) in a long list of increasingly more covert linguistic
hints at a textual address function.
220 Monika Fludernik
6 The term naturalization is here employed in Culler's sense (1975: 134-160), but for
phenomena on a level beyond those which Culler adduces in the service of fictional
verisimilitude. For details cf. Fludernik (1993, section 9.2.2.).
222 Monik a Fludernik
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226 Monika Fludernik
8 Compare Stenzel's and Bars speculations about the authorialization of the first person
narrator and the external first person narrator respectively (Stenzel 1984: 207-208; Bal
1985: 120-123).
9 See Cohn (1978).
10 I am here re-arranging Stanzel's terminology for my own purposes. Stenzel of course
includes the figural narrative situation in the reflectorsl realm, but his examples are
rarely 'pure' reflector mode texts in accordance with his own definition of reflectoral
narrative. The reason for this inconsistency lies in the incompatibility between Stenzel's
original typology and its later innovative re-invention on the lines of three axes of binary
oppositions (Stenzel 1984). Reflector mode narrative and the original figural narrative
situation ideally share a central (number of) reflector character(s), but historically the
late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century figural novel typically retains
vestiges of authorial omniscience. Pure reflector mode narrative does not become a
viable textual option until the pure interior monologue novel and even more recent
experiments with radical internal focalization.
Second Person Fiction 227
mind. Besides the two novels which I have named in the diagram one
may perhaps note the short story "You Need to Go Upstairs". by Rumer
Godden, in which a blind girl's achievement of going to the toilet by
herself is presented from within her subjective experience.
In purely reflectoral texts pronominal distinctions come to be of minor
importance and lose their deictic significance. References to the protag-
onist cover up for the subjectivity of an underlying deictic centre, and -
in the absence of a narratorial standpoint - the protagonist's / can be
referred to also as a she, he or you, without such a renaming effecting
any considerable changes in the reader's apperception of the story. This
extends Stanzel's crucial insight in the unmarked / versus he (she) rela-
tion in figural narrative (1984: 227). The neutralization of pronominal
oppositions can be explained by the absence in the text of a deictically
significant inscription of a narrator position from whose deictic existential
coordinates (BOhler's Origo, which is synonymous with the / of the
deictic centre") the story subject can be defined as synonymous (I) or
heteronymous (he, she, you). However, among the various non-distinc-
tive alternatives, semantic differences can nevertheless be observed, as
e.g. in the peculiar urgency and visionary significance of the first person
(particularly if presented in the narrative present tense), or in the
voyeuristic quality of some third person texts, whose use of free indirect
discourse lends itself to a typicalizing of the subject's mental situation.
Narrative you has as its distinguishing trait the closeness to generalizing
you and the you of self-address, and for this reason its initial distancing
effect - 'Is this me, the reader? Or is this a character?' - can develop
into an increased empathy effect, with the figural you (particularly in
present tense texts) achieving maximum identification on the reader's
part.
As has variously been pointed out (e.g. Bonheim 1983: 72, Kacandes
1993: 139-145), second person fiction comes into being in the ultimate
discovery on the part of the reader that the fictional you cannot be read
as identical to oneself, the actual, empirical reader, nor can the text be
interpreted consistently as one of continual address. This discovery is
crucially related to the amassing of verisimilar detail in the text, such that
the information gleaned about the you can no longer realistically be
applied to the actual reader's circumstances even if stretched to the
willing assumption of a narratee role. The beginning of ltalo Calvino's If
on a Winter's Night a Traveller illustrates this gradual process of re-
12 The sex of the addressee is only initially undefined and specified soon enough by the
masculine form of the Italian participle: disturbato. (See Kacandes 1993: 147)
Second Person Fiction 229
I now come to a more practical aspect of this paper which will discuss
the most important naturalizations of second person narratives and the
generic models on which these rely. I have noted above the tendency of
second person fiction to evoke real-life models as well as literary para-
digms which help to motivate the use of the second person. None of
these models ultimately manage to fully comprehend or circumscribe the
full narrative signification or the significance of the second person form.
Their importance lies in the fact of their availability both for the writer
and the reader. The former can take up such paradigms and use them for
his own ulterior aims (e.g. for the sake of parody, subversion of the
generic model, linguistic play); the latter, through prior acquaintance with
the generic paradigm, is enabled to interpret a manifestation of a second
person in an unfamiliar context through and beyond the recognition of
these generic models and their (playful) extension, radicalization or
subversion.
Discourse models for possible second person narration can be divided
roughly into those that highlight a prominent address function (which, in
actual second person fiction, is then supplemented by an existential
component, i.e. involvement in the story), and those that portray a you's
experiences in combination with a latent situation of address. Such
natural or already fictional prototypes of discourse employing second
person pronouns (i.e. pronouns of address) have been noted at length by
13 There is, though, the curious combination of a 'neutral' third person novel with a very
active address function in Stephen Koch's Night Watch (1969).
Second Person Fiction 231
14 Richardson (1991: 310, fn4) quotes a wonderful passage from Tom Jones.
15 Skaz is a form of storytelling that imitates, parodies and stylizes oral storytelling. It can
be used both to narrate in a first and in a third person mode. The term was coined by
Boris Eichenbaum and is now a standard critical term in Russian and Formalist literary
criticism. Examples of skaz texts in English are, for instance, the "Cyclops episode in
Joyce's Ulysses, or Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. See Eichenbaum (1971a, 1971b),
Titunik (1977), and Vinogradov (1925).
232 Monika Fludernik
expected to delve into the community's history and resurrect, and there-
fore save from oblivion, the memory of the community's past. The
narrator is therefore the custodian of the community's historical self-
identity. The crucial position of this narrator is mirrored linguistically in
his reference to the community as "ours," and in the self-referential
inclusion of himself as a member of the narrated community. Unlike mere
face to face conversation, the skaz model therefore reflects significantly
on the homocommunicative nature of the narration: both the narrator and
the audience share a fictional past, if only existentially, in the "realm of
existence," and not agentially as 'characters' of the 'plot.' Such narra-
tive, which frequently reappears in pseudo-oral literature (besides Twain,
compare e.g. Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days) resembles but
exceeds the paradigm of Stanzel's peripheral first person narration.
Heterodiegetic skaz narrative, for example Gogol's "Overcoat," cannot
be described within Stanzel's model readily 16 - or for that matter, Ge-
nette's - because it situates the narrator and the audience in the same
world as the characters but at a remove from them. Analytically, this
situation of course coincides with that of the traditional "omniscient"
third person narrator of the authorial type - writers talking about "our"
society, sharing England's history and mores with the narratee. Fictional
third person narrative has however evolved to a point where it neatly
separates these realms of existence, to an extent that allows for the
narrator to be refined out of existence, thus giving rise to reflectoral
narration.
Skaz narration, as a fictional technique that pretends to reinstitute a
specious orality, recuperates the original communal character of oral
storytelling, with the effect of subverting the by now established separ-
ation of narration and narrated in terms of fictional worlds. Second
person fiction utilizes this subversive potential for creating an unsettling
effect - that of involving the actual reader of fiction, not only in the tale,
but additionally in the world of fiction itself, an eerie effect that can be
put to very strategic political use. The technique has been widely
applied, for instance, in recent black women's writing where it allows the
fictional narrator both to evoke the familiar setting for the community-
internal reader and to draw readers from different cultural backgrounds
sections of the novel. It is only when the reader has come to accept (in
fictional terms) the voodoo powers of Mama Day, and the existence of
supernatural forces which Mama Day cannot counter by anything but
George's sacrificial death, that she will be prepared to accept Cocoa's
and George's dialogue across the boundary of life and death.
A final fourth prototype of a pure address function in second person
fiction is that of the dramatic monologue. Like letter writing this, too, has
a decidedly homocommunicative aspect although only in relation to the
-
17 Cohn (1978: 257-261) argues that the dramatic monologue is close to first person
narrative in its presentation of a fictional speaker who can behave much like a homodie-
getic narrator. However, not only is the telling of the story as such in a dramatic
monologue not really the 'point' of the fictional enunciation; the existential fitting out
of this speaker on the communicative plane exceeds by far the customary vague hints
at the situation of writing and speaking in first person novels.
Second Person Fiction 235
18 This departs from Chatman's (1978, 1990) definition of narrative as always sharing
story and discourse.
236 Monika Fludernik
19 See also the stories in Lorrie Moore's Self-Help (1985) and Richardson's stimulating
discussion of these in terms of "subjunctive mode."
Second Person Fiction 237
The local / rode puffed and yanked and stalled and yawned across the
cotton country. [...) We would stop beside some yellow, boxlike station, with
the unpainted houses dropped down beyond, and / could see up the alley
behind the down-town [...I The houses didn't look as though they belonged
there, improvised flung down, ready to be abandoned. Some washing would
be hanging on a line, but the people would go off and leave that too. They
wouldn't have time to snatch it off the line. It wouid be getting dark soon, and
they'd better hurry.
But as the train pulls away, a woman comes to the back door of one
of the houses-just the figure of a woman, for you cannot make out the
face-and she has a pan in her hands and she flings the water out of the pan
1...] The floor of the house is thin against the bare ground and the walls and
the roof are thin against all of everything which is outside, but you cannot see
through the walls to the secret to which the woman has gone in.
The train pulls away, faster now, (...] You think that if the earth
should twitch once, as the hide of a sleeping dog twitches, the train would be
jerked over [...1
But nothing happens, and you remember that the woman had not even
looked up at the train. You forget her, and the train goes fast, and is going fast
when it crosses a little trestle. [—I You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-
light, unriffled glint of the water [...1 and see the cow standing in the water
upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying.
But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken
away from you, too.
You bloody fool, do you think that you want to milk a cow?
You do not want to milk a cow.
Then you are up at Upton.
In Upton / went to the hotel, [...I
(All the King's Men, ii; Warren 1974: 75-76)
The actual reader qua implicit narratee is therefore inevitably drawn into
the fiction, identifying with a generalized position that transforms itself
into the specificity of an experiencing I. In Warren's All the King's Men
this / merges with the first person narrator Jack Burden, but in subse-
quent second person fiction the you stands in for the reflectoral con-
sciousness of a character with whom the actual reader is led to empa-
thize.
The telephone rings. It's right beside you - you jump - reach for the receiver.
"Yes?
A tiny instant's silence. Then: "Jacqueline?" A man's voice - deep,
civilized - with a somehow caressing intonation that is yet quiet and respect-
ful.
Your heart beats. "No," you say, with a little apologetic laugh.
(Sarah 1975: 22)
238 Monika Fludemik
20 Self-address you can be found in oral narratives, too, in invented private thoughts
which narrators pretend to have addressed to themselves at moments of intense
puzzlement.
Second Person Fiction 239
The scene continues, now larded with Marion's comments and retrospec-
tive generalizations ("You used to like to set traps for waiters" — 366-
367) and then is being juxtaposed repeatedly with Marion's simultaneous
actions: while Madeline is being dined and wined, Marion is trying to get
Peter on the telephone (367) from their New York apartment. The scene
then shifts entirely to Marion and we get a full account of Marion's
phone conversation with a friend of her twin sister Miranda, who how-
ever has no idea of Miranda's whereabouts. And back to Madeline in the
restaurant.
Then there is a "change of scene" (369) to Madeline being done up for
filming and Marion, while describing the scene and commenting on it,
addresses her mother ("pity her [the manicurist1"; "no, don't think of it"
— 370) as if she were simultaneously talking to her mother. At this point
a scene between Miranda and her mother of "last night" before Made-
line's departure is rehearsed (recapitulated and not narrated) by Marion,
Second Person Fiction 241
Clearly there is no time for Marion to address to her mother the mono-
logue (if it is one) we have been overhearing. What we have read could
occur only in Marion's mind while her mother was blissfully absent; it
constitutes an interludp of independence from the well-established domi-
nation by the mother's Other which so cruelly seems to repress Marion's
Self.
Oates's story achieves a convincing and indeed startling personal
history of filial frustration at the hands of an unappeasably demanding
and dominant mother, and provides a view of the mother's psyche
through the critical eyes of the daughter that reflects precisely that
combination of inescapable immersion and (nearly carnal) knowledge
with the self-distancing required in the process of establishing an identity
of one's own. The story additionally is a superb example of what one
may consider to be the postmodernist tendency to subvert the realistic,
representational mode. Not only is the second person identified only
belatedly as a deictic category of address (in the initial section of the
242 Monika Fludernik
If I have dealt at length with this short story it was because it illus-
trates the potential intricacies of second person fiction much more clearly
than some of the book-length exercises in this genre. These, not able to
hold the reader's attention level at maximum for an entire novel, content
themselves for the most part with "pure" reflector narrative which can
easily be recuperated realistically once the figural perspective has beeen
sorted out by the reader. Oates's story documents, even more forcefully,
that second person fiction has arrived at full literary maturity, no longer
a simple experimental trick without particular narrative quality.
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246 Monika Fludemik
Monika Fludernik
Institut fiir Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Universitet Wien