Introduction: second-person narrative and related issues - Second-Person Narrative

Style, Fall, 1994 by Monika Fludernik

They are coming for you, to take you to the firing squad, the gallows, the stake, the electric chair, the gas chamber. You have to stand up; but you can't. Your body, gorged with fear, is too heavy$to move. You'd like to be able to rise and walk between them out the open door of your cell with dignity; but you can't. So they have to drag you away.

Or, it is coming, it is upon you and the others; bells or sirens have gone off (air raid, hurricane, rising flood), and you've taken shelter in this cell-like space, as out of harm's way as you can be, and out of the way of those trained to cope with the emergency. But you don't feel safer; you feel trapped. There's no place to run, and even if there were, fear has made your limbs too heavy, you can barely move. It's an alien weight that you shift from the bed to the chair, the chair to the floor. And you are shivering with fear or cold; and there is absolutely nothing you can do except try not to be any more terrified than you already are. If you remain very still, you pretend that this is what you have decided to do.

(Sontag, The Volcano Lover 2.4.217; original emphasis(1))

You wondered if the man had made sense to the others since you didn't understand him. You were looking at the other faces for clues when Misra's image came right before you, placing itself between you and the men you were staring at. You would remember the same image when, years later, at school and in Mogadiscio, you were shown the pictures of Egyptian mummies by one of Salaado's relations, namely Cusmaan. The image which insisted on imposing itself on your brain was that of a Misra, already dead, but preserved; a Misra whose body, when you touched it, was cold as ice, as though it had spent a night or two in the mortuary. But there was an incredible calmness about her corpse, as if she herself had abandoned her life much with the same preparedness as Armadio, Karin's late husband, had surrendered his to the Archangel of Death. There was no struggle, no pain, death came as welcome guest - and stayed, that was all. Somehow you consoled yourself, remembering that she looked like a corpse when asleep, with her hands neatly clasped together across her mountain of a chest and barely a snort or noise issuing from her nostrils. Did she not playfully act as though she were dead a couple of times? You rationalized that your mind conjured up these ugly images because you felt guilty at parting with her, guilty at leaving without her. Then you told the image to vanish - and it did. And you were staring at the men's faces, in silence, in the kind of thank-you-God hush which comes after a Muslim has sneezed.

(Farah, Maps 123)

Most people, when you tell them that you work on second-person fiction, stare at you in amazement: "how can a narrative be in the second person?" they ask you and then immediately go on to offer, by way of helpful comment, a remark like "O you mean texts which keep addressing a narratee? Like dramatic monologues? or the epistolary novel?" Such encounters frequently end, you will see, with a recommendation of a new second-person text. You rush to the library or bookshop to get a copy and take it to bed that night with high expectations of yet another second-person text to add to your bibliography, but the moment you lay eyes on the text, your hopes evaporate and your excitement ebbs: it is another one of those with a (maybe) personalized narratee, sometimes in admittedly impossible situations of address: for instance, the (dead) narrator's (Edgar's) harangue to his colleague Addi in Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1973). This tirade is triggered by Addi's comments about Edgar to Edgar's father. (Mr. Wibeau is interviewing the friends of his son, trying to find out about his death.) Here Edgar, already dead, chides Addi for his sanctimonious "Edgar war ein wertvoller Mensch" ("Edgar was a valuable person"):

Addi, du enttauscht mich.... Ich dachte, du machst das nicht mit, uber einen, der uber den Jordan gegangen ist, diesen Mist zu reden. (87)

Addi, you disappoint me... I'd thought you wouldn't repeat such crap about somebody who has kicked the bucket. (My translation)

Edgar also begs Charlie, his would-be girl friend, not to cry about him (86) and in similar manner exhorts his best friend, Willi, to remain faithful to their ideas (17), and he tries to keep Addi from enlightening his father about his (Edgar's) recent visit to him (102-03). (Edgar had disguised himself as a plumber.) Clearly these posthumous interventions by Edgar are metaleptic crossings of the existential levels between narrators and characters but made particularly grotesque in this case by the pretense that the dialogue is unmediated - Edgar does not "narrate it" - and by the fact that Edgar's voice is that of a dead man's. In no way is Edgar therefore narrating Addi's story to him, which could be regarded as a minimal requirement for second-person narrative proper.

The two quotations at the very beginning, on the other hand, (incipiently) illustrate the second-person mode. I have deliberately chosen two little-discussed texts in order to get away from the standard illustrations: Michel Butor's La modification (1957), Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), or Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984). The first quotation from Susan Sontag's recent The Volcano Lover (1992) is one of many interesting passages employing the second-person pronoun in the generalized meaning of "you," "one." (There is also quite a lot of actual reader address and addressing of a fairly specific narratee figure [e.g., 138-39], features that in equal measure apply to Plenzdorf's novel.) The Sontag passage represents a preliminary stage of second-person fiction and indeed sounds very similar to the openings of second-person texts such as those collected in Lorrie Moore's Self Help (1985) or Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York (1986). No story develops from this initial situation, however, a story, that is, in which the "you's" experiences would be reported: the events are told specifically about the Cavaliere in the third person, instead. Sontag therefore does not move into a second-person text proper although she well might have after such an opening paragraph.