Beyond 'The Brain of Katherine Mansfield': the radical potentials and recuperations of second-person narrative - book by author Bill Manhire

Style, Spring, 1997 by Dennis Schofield

In the concluding paragraph of a recent special issue in Style on the topic of second-person narrative fiction, Monika Fludernik takes a moment to insist that we acknowledge the complexity and diversity of second-person narration and suggests that its analysis may enable "us to stand in a crossroads of narratological pathways leading to vistas we are barely glimpsing at the moment" ("Test Case" 472). Fludernik draws together in that special issue many of the major strands of argument about the second person. Two questions in particular have remained central to discussions about it since the earliest by Leiris, Morrissette, and others in the fifties and sixties.(2) These two questions ask why readers experience some of the second person's instances as (1) both forcefully compelling and alienating, and, addressing a problem that is closely linked, (2) why it should be described as a discreet point of view. After all, as the critic Helmut Bonheim asks, why would one tell a story to a person who was clearly on the scene at the time and who must already know perfectly well, forgetfulness notwithstanding, what transpired (Bonheim 76)? But the appeal to a notion of unconventionality doesn't sufficiently explain responses to second-person narrative, nor does the uncanniness of feeling oneself being directly addressed from within a text, coerced into reading about one's own fictional, inexplicable self. Tellingly, what such an answer does achieve is the naturalization of an anthropomorphism that has remained more or less implicit within notions of narrative person and the tradition of analysis of point of view since its development by Percy Lubbock and others early this century. What follows is in part my response to that anthropomorphism, but, following the recent summation in Style of "the story so far," it is also intended as a foreshadowing of where literary theory might go next in its exploration of the second person. I assume that such a discussion will have important implications for the ways in which contemporary criticism and theory conceive narrative person as functioning. To be useful, such discussion will require a clarification not only of the concept of the category of person, but also of the very way in which literary criticism approaches it.

1. RECUPERATIONS

But some preliminaries first. Before I argue that the second person has a potential to radicalize narrative discourse (and more), I should look at how that potential is contained, for, certainly, not all texts that employ a second-person narrative modality realize any such promise. Stories that continually refer to a "you" can seem quite baffling, even unnatural. So, in order to make these outlandish narratives understandable - knowable and stable - we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand. I could invoke here any number of notions about naturalization or framing or intertextuality or the vraisemblable, among which I include Bakhtin's speech-genre. Moreover, I might include a large number of unexceptional forms of discourse that employ the second-person pronoun, and so help us interpret any particular passage of second-person narrative. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to oneself), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and the like. And, of course, there are the interpretive keys provided by the literary notion of genre. For instance, the first two chapters of Bill Manhire's book The Brain of Katherine Mansfield immediately suggest a particular generic interpretive approach. It draws on a genre that has found its niche in fiction for young adults: the "choose-your-own-adventure" story. You, Gentle Reader, are to find your own pathway through the text from the alternatives offered at the end of each chapter. But one typical feature of this genre is the way the hero or heroine will be designated by the second-person pronoun.

Chapter 1.

You are just an ordinary New Zealander. You have strength, intelligence and luck, though you are not particularly good at languages. Your family and friends like you, and there is one special friend who really thinks you're swell. Yours is a well-rounded personality; your horoscope is usually good; your school report says "satisfactory." But somehow you are restless. Your life is missing challenge and excitement. You want to make things happen. Go to 2.

Chapter 2.

On your way home from school one day, you find an old man waiting outside your house. He is holding a leather-bound book. He looks as if he has been expecting you.

"I have been reading your story," he says. "But it seems to have stopped. Something seems to happen when you enter the house."

He goes on to explain that he is eager to know how your life will continue. In fact, he says, your life is essentially an unwritten story. You yourself are the hero of the story.

"Many are the choices you must face, but the outcome of the tale will depend on you alone."