In Defence of the Second Person
JA
October 23
Second person point of view seems to be something of an unloved mongrel when it comes to fiction – readers dislike it for anything that goes beyond the length of a short story, publishers maintain that it won’t sell and even writers struggle to pull it off without a hitch.
Justine Larbalestier (always fabulous writer and blogger) explains it like so:
Second person is all ‘you’ and ‘yours’. It’s the most maligned of the povs. And yet, when done well ’tis heavenly. Also very useful for delivering rules about writing. No wonder that it’s the first choice of advertisers and dictators.
Pros: it’s an amazing device for writing about love and obsession and psychosis and tourism.
Cons: It is like having to spend many hours in the room with a bossy, obsessive and possible pyscho telling you what you’ll think and what you’ll do. Bugger that! And when writing in second person there’s the worrying feeling that you’re starting to turn into a bossy obsessive psycho. Or possibly the voiceover of a tourism ad.
Fashionability: Never high. The least popular of all the povs. Though some argue that all epistolary novels are automatically second person.
Difficulty: Really High – bugger it up and you lose your readers instantly.
I agree that when executed badly, second person can be excruciating (rather like a badly played violin), but when done well, it’s sublime. An example would be the voices in ‘Long, Clear View’ in Tim Winton’s The Turning, or in the title story of Cate Kennedy’s collection, Dark Roots.
One complaint I hear frequently is that second person is too directive, too dictatorial – readers baulk at being told what to do and inhabiting the voice so closely, instead of being given the opportunity to stand back from the character. Perhaps this is a lingering stigma from ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ fiction and other interactive games, but to be honest I’ve usually found that the second person tends encourage a feeling of disconnection. For example, in the story ‘Flotsam’, also in Dark Roots, Cate Kennedy deftly blends the use of first and second person to describe an old woman recalling losing her virginity and falling pregnant in her teens. While reading, I never felt that ‘I’ was the ‘You’ in the story, but rather that the narrator was recalling a time so confusing and so painful that she often need to step outside herself to relive it.
Some other books that use or include second person voice are Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, ‘Forever Overhead’ in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace, Complicity by Iain Banks and, more recently, the voice of Lou in The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton. Here is what I think is a beautiful example of second person voice from that book, below:
You can feel your body returning to you, sweating and heavy, taking back its rightful shape against the star-bursting, rushing pulse of the drugs. Your feet are pushing against the point of your shoes. There’s mascara spread like Vegemite across your palms and the earth is no longer sliding towards you. It’s raining.
Your skin prickles. You feel habit-fried, stillborn. You count what you can remember with reverence. Your eyes were golden. You were fierce; you were forgotten; you were perfect. You feel over-large, swollen with milk and venom, toxic and glorious. You know the drug’s glugged out of you, poured through your body back to the earth, like some mantra that won’t stop, hissed back away, deflating you. You eye the shape your legs make in the dust when you stamp. You thought there was a crowd, a gigantic moving mass. Not assuring, this.
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Comments
23 Oct 09 at 9:02
Jess and I disagree on this. I find it an affective mode in a short story (indeed, Jess's terrific story in our December edition last year was in the second person - perhaps we should put it up on line) but over longer pieces I just feel like I'm being hectored and constantly disorientated. Not in a good way.
...23 Oct 09 at 9:03
Also, I suspect I find it effective rather than affective. Sigh
...23 Oct 09 at 10:14
Dennis Lehane's 'Until Gwen' is the best use of this in a short story that I can think of. It allows him to be very intimate and yet alienating at the same time. Still, it's a high wire act with no net and it makes a mess when you miss.
...23 Oct 09 at 11:37
Thomas Keneally's A Dutiful Daughter is another example -- 'as if told to an incredulous self', as some perceptive reviewer put it. I don't mind it so much when used in this way, as quoted above. But when it's used to address an absent person as a way of telling the story, it drives me completely bonkers, partly because it makes the reader feel like an ignored eavesdropper but mostly because it's totally illogical -- the person would already know all this stuff -- and therefore constantly sabotages the reader's attempts at suspended disbelief. But I've seen it a lot lately -- 'And then you told me to take the cat to the vet, my darling Ermintrude, and after that you went to the shop.' Madness.
...23 Oct 09 at 11:56
Yes that's a great point Kerryn - I love second person best when it's the voice of the character talking about themslves from a distance (that 'incredulous self'). But when it's the narrator talking to another person ('You did X, and you felt Z') I agree it can be irritating.
Still, I think 2nd person is an often misunderstood POV. I think there's lots of potential for great storytelling if writers and readers would give it more of a chance.
...23 Oct 09 at 12:24
I'm a huge 2nd Person fan. In terms of its effectiveness I think it works best as a self-lacerating voice - always aware of and influenced by the deepest emotions of the character but at the same time distanced enough to regard those emotions with a cold objectivity. I reckon Beckett pulled off the best Second Person balancing act in 'Company' and also in 'That Time'. Both favourites of mine.
...23 Oct 09 at 12:26
...and can someone remove that accidental apostrophe? mortified groan upon realisation
...23 Oct 09 at 12:35
Apostrophe removed, Simon - and don't be mortified. It happens to all of us.
...23 Oct 09 at 13:03
Peter Kocan's Treatment and The Cure are my favourite second person novellas, and also the 'you' of John Forbes' poetry. I think it works if the author is also invested in the voodoo of the split self, more than just a POV from a palate.
...23 Oct 09 at 14:34
It seems that there are two very different ways to feel 2nd person.*
1) that the author is talking to me and building me into the character. I am the 'you'. INCREDIBLY IMMEDIATE and intimate, possibly hectoring, definitely intense.
2) that the author is talking to someone else and I am listening in. I am not the you; I am standing behind the author, looking over their shoulder as they talk to the 'you' character. Curiously distancing, not at all immediate - the author is facing away from me towards the character, is, in fact, standing between me and the character and I am merely an eavesdropper.
So it's possible to read the SAME PIECE of 2nd person text in either of these ways - depending on mood, how much you identify with the character to begin with etc, etc. So maybe people react so strongly and so differently to it because it's an imprecise POV - it's much harder for the author to control how the reader will read it.
*Well, actually three, once you factor in the 'incredulous self' that people are talking about above. I have to confess that it has never occurred to me while reading anything written in the 2nd person that the author might be talking about, and to, themselves.
Very interesting post, Jess! We've blogged a more personal response over at Alien Onion.
...23 Oct 09 at 23:40
I love the second-person form. Gao's use of it in Soul Mountain is brilliant, but even more so I love George Perec's second person novella 'A Man Asleep'.
I think I'm particularly partial to this perspective as someone whose internal narration usually occurs in the second person. Very rarely do I think of myself as an 'I'; almost always as a 'you'. I wonder if this effects one's appreciation of, and even ability to tolerate, the style.
...26 Oct 09 at 23:38
Someone once described the second-person to me as effectively being, in one mode at least, 'a story you tell yourself about your life' - that's how I tried to us it in TDG. I suppose this links in the with the notion of an incredulous self. For me, the most interesting thing about second person and its purpose is the confinement of point of view. If 'you' is an address to the reader it can be quite knowing and seeing, but in the way I use it, as a sort of distorted, disguised eye, it's really limited to that character's field of vision. So I'm reading Nikki Gemmell's latest novel and it's, of course, in second person but the narrative is quite broad and capable of reporting on all manner of things. I found it really hard to write action in second person - it seems to fit more readily with the reflective/static/insane!
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