Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism

Abstract

Second-Person Narrative As a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism This essay will concentrate on three related issues that connect with second-person fiction.I will start by reprinting and (re)analyzing the narrative typology presented in my "Second Person Fiction," which attempts to revise and mediate between the Genettean and Stanzelian models.The diversity and indeterminacy of second-person writing will be illustrated by a number of examples from very different sectors of the typology.I shall argue that second-person fiction does not correlate with a specific "narrative situation," and that the category "person" does not constitute a theoretically meaningful concept.A second area for investigation will be the typical ways in which second-person fiction can be said to undermine realist narrative parameters and frames.As a consequence second-person fiction helps to deconstruct standard categories of narratological enquiry.Illustrations of this point will be taken from Gabriel Josipovici's novel Contre-jour (1986) and from selected short stories.The third topic that I will treat here relates to the function of second-person story telling, particularly as regards the historical situating of second-person discourse as a. typically postmodemist kind of ecriture.The transgressive and subversive as pects of second-person texts as outlined in the second section seem to identify second-person fiction as a predominantly "postmodemist" mode of writing, yet-depending on one's definition of (post)modernism-more traditionally modernist aspects of second-person fiction and perhaps more radical indications of an ideological appropriation of the second-person technique suggest a much wider frame of application.It is in this context that one will have to reconsider the all-important question of what difference it makes, a question that will, by a "vicus of recirculation," take us back to the starting point of this issue, to Brian Richardson's attempts to grapple with the incidence of grammatical person in its combinatory diversity.In "Second Person Fiction" I proposed a revision (see figure 1, below) of Franz K. Stanzer s category "person" (first versus third) and of Gerard Genette's dichotomy of hetero-versus homodiegesis.Stanzel's category, it will be remembered, is based on a binary opposition of the (non)coincidence of "realms of Style: Volume 28, No. 3, Fall 1994 445