Unnatural Voices

1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator

• Two main features stand out in the development of fictional technique since Defoe:
  • The exploration of subjectivity (beginning with Sterne's play with unexpected association of ideas and continuing with Jane Austen's development of free indirect discourse).
  • The rise of the unreliable narrator, which had been present in epistolary fiction and gained new prominence by the time Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" (1864) appeared. In addition, narrative fragmentation and unexpected reconstructions. One goes from unreliable narrators to incompetent ones to delusional and then completely insane storytellers. On starts with flawed narration, goes on to more fragmented forms, and ends with the semi-coherent and utterly opaque.
• The nature and identity of the narrator becomes itself a miniature drama as a familiar narrating situation is established thoughout the text only to be utterly transformed at the end. The heterodiegetic narrator outside the story turns out to have been in there all along, the seemingly daring narrative "you" is instead a more conventional apostrophe, the story of another is revealed to be the story of oneself. The conventional practice is deployed until it is turned inside out, revealing the artificiality of a perspective, whether designated "third person" or "heterodiegetic", that can be so easily inverted. And the move is always away from traditional objectivity and omniscience, from the third person to the first.
• There is a general move away from what was thought to be "omniscient" third person narration to limited third person narration to ever more unreliable first person narrators to new exploration so "you", "we", and mixed forms. There is a similar movement from the psychological novel to more impressionistic renderings of consciousness to the dissolution of consciousness into textuality, and a corresponding move from human-like narrators to quasi-human, non-human, and anti-human speakers, as the figure of the narrator as a recognizable human being recedes into an ever greater eclipse

2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration

• Second person narration is an artificial mode that does not normally occur in natural narrative or in most texts in the history of literature before 1919. It is an extremely protean form, and its very essence is to eschew a fixed essence
• The Standard Form - A story is told, usually in the present tense, about a single protagonist who is referred to in the second person; the "you" often designates the narrator and the narratee as well, though there is considerable slippage in this unusual triumvirate.
  • These sentences could have been written in the first person, in the third person with a single focalizer, or in free indirect speech. Instead, the second person was chosen, and a different type of narration follows, one which approximates but cannot be reduced to any of these other perspectives.
  • A continuous dialectic of identification and distancing ensues, as the reader is alternately drawn closer to and further away from the protagonist. This you is inherently unstable, constantly threatening to merge with the narratee, a character, the reader, or even with another grammatical person.
  • The second person is a playful form, original, transgressive, and illuminating, that is always conscious of its unusual own status and often disguises itself, playing on the boundaries of other narrative voices.
  • Even in her own consciousness, the narrator of Edna O'Brien's "A Pagan Place" views herself as a peripheral figure, a passive and largely inconscquential bystander. To refer to herself as an "I" would take more temerity than she possesses. Her subjectivity is muted, diffused, collapsed. Her "you" expresses her distance from her self.
  • The choice of second person radically alters the tone of the work and provides a unique speaking situation for the narrator, one that does not occur in natural narratives and consequenlty one that continuously defamiliarizes the narrative act. Its usage can engender a heightened engagement between reader and protagonist in different directions: we may oppose identification with a "you" we resist, or we may sympathize more fully with them.
• The Hypothetical Form - In Lorrie Moore's "Self Help", we see consistent use of the imperative, frequent employment of the future tense, and the unambiguous distinction between the narrator and the narratee. The protagonist is a possible future version of the narratee, though it soon takes on an independent, parallel existence.
• The Autotelic Form - The direct address to a "you" that is at times the actual reader of the text and whose story is juxtaposed to and can merge with the characters of the fiction.
  • In McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City", the reader knows that he or she is extradiegetic, outside the narrative, and only assume identity with the main character as part of the act of play in which reading consists.
  • Italo Calvino's sophisticated stategy in "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller" is to catch you, the extradiegetic reader, off guard, and make you the subject of diegesis, thereby spiriting or abducting you into the narrative.
  • When Calvino goes on to observe, "Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost", the locution may simultaneously refer to all the different readers (narratee, implied, and actual) that traditional narratology attempts to keep separate in theory as well as a character called the Reader. At the same time, it both alludes to and enacts the anti-essentialist stances concerning personal identity characteristic of poststructuralist theory and postmodern narrative. In this work, literature and theory interanimate each other, the concept of person dissolves, and presentation fuses with representation.
• The narrative "you" is admirably suited to explore:
  • Suppressed subjectivity and silenced speech
  • The mind of a conflicted individual in the process of making significant decisions that he would prefer not to have to think about
  • The act of reading even as it is taking place.
  • Commercial discourses intended to exploit their readers through the illusion of identification
  • The mental battles of an individual struggling against the internalized discourse of an oppressive authority
  • Foregrounding a subjectivity typically excluded from common, unexamined notions of "you" and "us".
  • The unstable nature and intersubjective constitution of the self.