This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the second-person pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the you is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particularor a combination of theseso that readers find second-person utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the second person as a special case of narrative person that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional first- and third-person narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-you neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianisms hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of first- and third-person narrative. The Protean-you form of second-person narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought.
Rather than founding a notion of second-person narrative and narrative person generally on Cartesianism's self-ish logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-you arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subjectthe subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative.
Most discussions of second-person narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the
analysis of second-person narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the second-person pronoun. Two principal functions of second-person textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much second-person fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function.
Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a you can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all second-person narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the second person's outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and natural discourse that employ the second-person pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of second-person discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of mutual knowledge produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of person is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critics recourse to person is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority.
Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about second-person narrative propose that the second persons most striking effects derive from the constitution of an intersubjective experience of reading in which the subject positions of the you-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed,
authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel Almost You, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the you and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-you in Almost You is discussed in terms of second-person intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of person. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more old fashioned if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the second persons often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
I suggest that Protean-you texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of Almost You, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-you discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of second-person narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinisms experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-you discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinisms notion of self. Protean-you involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-you leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them.
I go on to propose that Protean-you narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative person, I argue that narrative person is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is,
Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for first- and third-person modes no less than for the second. Where second-person narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional first- and third-person narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinisms hegemony of person. It may be that the most significant insights second-person narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative person, the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/217106 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Schofield, Dennis, mikewood@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Dennis Schofield |
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