Second Person | Chapbook | Maybe I should sit quietly in a dark room for a while by Paul Beckman

Vol XIV: Maybe I should sit quietly in a dark room for a while

Paul Beckman (4.6.10)



We haven't had a flash fiction chapbook in a while - that's because we have been saving this one. On the nose it has the aroma of great short and short-short fiction - it arrives in bursts. Savor.


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Second Person | Fiction | Choose-Your-Own-Article

You’re in the second person.  It’s quite a startling situation for you- as a reader, you’re not used to it.  It’s a little intrusive.  You’re accustomed to doing the intruding.

1)      Try to explore your surroundings. (TURN TO PAGE 17.)
2)      Assume you’re in a cheap rip-off of an Italo Calvino novel.  March outside to confront the author of this article in a fit of pique. (TURN TO PAGE 6.)
3)      Try to remember back to the days of choose-your-own-adventure books.  (TURN TO PAGE 8.)
4)      Dismiss the use of second-person narrative as a cheap affectation, without real value to fiction.  (TURN TO PAGE 243.)


PAGE 8:

Yes, they were good, weren’t they?  You think back to Give Yourself Goosebumps.

1)      Consider the matter of interactive fiction.  Wonder a little sadly at its loss of popularity due to the rise of a more straightforwardly immersive form, in the video game.  Imagine the largely untapped, terrifying possibilities of a novel told like a puzzle, in which the reader is trapped inside the head of a protagonist, forced to act out the events of the story, rather than being allowed to remain an untouchable observer.   (TURN TO PAGE 81.)
2)      Worry about the problems of ‘personas’, and the dangers of a second-person reader/protagonist becoming immersed in the fantastic world around him, to the detriment of ‘reality’.  (TURN TO PAGE 34.)


PAGE 69:

You find yourself imagining yourself as part of the threesome.  For a short time you find yourself animal, mindless, invincible- inhabiting the sleaziest, most deviant acts without the slightest concern.

Then you wake, and you feel bad about it.  But not too bad- the person who did those things already feels far away, like someone with no connection to you whatsoever.  You call your mother, and you’re a good son, a good daughter once again; a good person, you tell yourself.

END.


PAGE 81:

No wonder, you think, that the form has largely died out, when it was hiding something genuinely revolutionary beneath stock situations and standard genre worlds.   Alternating between giving the reader a potentially empowering control over their actions, and telling them what they think?  It’s a genuinely disturbing experience, you tell yourself.  Then you scratch your nose, which is feeling extremely itchy.  Next you yawn, and consider the importance of empathy- or impressionability- in the reader’s reactions to such stories.

You go on your way, a little enlightened, vowing to tell all of your friends about the literary site called Silkworms Ink.

END.


PAGE 243:

The article doesn’t trouble to inform of you of the surprisingly large number of respected, experimental authors who’ve utilised the second-person, Faulkner and Gunter Grass.  Instead, it asks you gently whether there isn’t some interesting game possible using this ‘affectation’- the creation of a multiplicity of narratives, echoing and complementing one another, as if across parallel timelines, often turning in on themselves, for instance.  Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, only not a cop-out.

But you aren’t listening.  You tear down the article from the four walls surrounding you, and storm away to read something else.  This artificial reality collapses, apologetically.

END.


PAGE 6:

You head outside.  Unfortunately, it’s pitch black, and you’re eaten by a meta-narrative.

END.


PAGE 17:

Streams of words.  Opinion masquerading as authority.  You’re inside an article, all right- and judging from the threesome outside the window, it’s an Internet article.

1)      Assume you’re in an Italo Calvino novel.  March outside to confront the author of this article in a fit of pique. (TURN TO PAGE 6.)
2)      Try to remember back to the days of choose-your-own-adventure books.  (TURN TO PAGE 8.)
3)      Dismiss the use of second-person narrative as a cheap affectation, without real value to fiction.  (TURN TO PAGE 243.)
4)      Watch the threesome.  (TURN TO PAGE 69.)


PAGE 34:

This one is a genuine worry, you think.  Readers are only the most indirect sort of participators- and it may be that level of detachment that gives us room to make up our own minds about the themes, argument, characters of a book.  It’s entirely possible that you’ll spend the length of the entire fiction playing the author’s game, rather than hunting him like the Minotaur through the maze he’s constructed.

Or is that an insult towards the reader’s intelligence and independence of mind?  Is it, in fact, perfectly possible to immerse yourself fully and utterly, then rise again, refreshed and stimulated?

You think about it, and you make your mind up, one way or another.

By the time you’ve decided, however, someone’s switched off your computer, and you’re forced to spend all eternity in a nearly-state, trapped inside the article; a single, virtual incarnation, lost beneath a billion reproducing brothers and sisters.

END.

-
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Second Person | Poetry | Are You Talking To Me?

If this looks like a poem
I might as well warn you at the beginning
that it’s not meant to be one.

So begins one of my favourite Leonard Cohen poems, The Cuckold’s Song. I wonder if, like me, you thought he was talking to you, the ethereal reader, in those lines? As it turns out, the whole thing is aimed at the chap who has cuckolded him:

I know all about her part in it
but I’m not concerned with that right now.
This is between you and me.

and like a well-orchestrated focus-pull, that word ‘you’ takes on a different shape altogether.

The gender-less second-person pronoun is one of the poet’s most abundant tools for tricks and twists in that game of readerly cat and mouse we so often play with good art. Of course we have that most famous case of Shakespeare’s ‘young man’ who is so often assumed to be female by first-time readers of the sonnets, but beyond that, poetry is a world filled with people who choose to hide their feelings behind the blurred word, ‘you’.

Let us take the poem, Dog, from Mark Waldron’s excellent collection The Brand New Dark. The poem opens:

I had thought of you as I lay fighting
off this sleep. Now I find you as you squat
my dream as a dog…

Now we can almost certainly establish that the ‘you’ of the poem is not a literal dog. What then, should we assume? Our instincts want to tell us that the ‘you’ is a lover, for lovers are what we lose sleep over and who we find ourselves writing poetry for in those restless nights. But then again, what if ‘you’ is me? What if ‘you’ is you as you read this poem. Maybe it is you, or the idea of you that has caused Waldron these sleepless nights as he anticipates your reception of his poetry. An unqualified ‘you’ can prove to be quite the potent bomb of possibility in the hands of the right poet – a cluster bomb catching all in its blast radius with the illusion of address.

For all the refractive possibilities of the anonymous ‘you’ however, some of the most masterful poets have managed to use a specific second-person to create a sort of blurred illusion of sharpness in their address. I am thinking specifically here of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. Of course, these poems are explicitly addressed to Sylvia Plath, but as Hughes’ writing process continued over 25 years we can see that he is writing to infinite versions and reinventions of his late wife. The poem, ‘Portraits’ opens:

What happened to Howard’s portrait of you?
I wanted that painting.

Whilst we take ‘you’ to be the simple address of a husband to his wife, we know that it also stands for so much more. In the context of a portrait, ‘you’ becomes the version of Plath that was held in Howard’s “molten, luminous” depiction of her. As such, the past-tense line, “I wanted that painting”, comes to suggest that Hughes preferred this vibrant, numinous version of his wife and the word ‘you’ is shattered into the thousand people that Plath became throughout her life as is the case with all of us, especially those who have had the misfortune of suffering from depression.

Whilst I shall not dwell on it here for it has been overdone elsewhere, it is this same skill that Eliot uses so well in Prufrock when he manages to make the word ‘you’ stand for the conflicting sides of his psyche:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Finally, though, the reason I find it so easy to get engrossed in the letters of my favourite writers is ‘you’. When we read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, do we not secretly blind-spot the word ‘Mr. Kappus’ and pretend that he is writing to us? I have vivid memories of reading the following section around about my twentieth year:

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like loved rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

When we read these words, do we not feel as though the world itself is speaking directly to us? The writers die and re-enter the earth but the words they addressed to other people enter the atmosphere and come to our aid wearing the time-honoured passport to our soul – the word ‘you’.


Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Second Person | Introduction | The Real Fictional You

Week 2 | Second Person | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | Are You Talking To Me?

Wednesday | Fiction | Choose-Your-Own-Article 

Thursday | Music | On You-turns: Twin Exercises in a Mature 'You'

Friday | Chapbook | Maybe I Should Sit Quietly In A Dark Room For A While, by Paul Beckman

Saturday | Mixtape | Songs for Natalie

Sunday | Mini Essay | Half-laughter, by Phil Brown

The narratologist, Helmut Bonheim coined two terms to attempt to describe the resultant ambiguity and multifunctionality  of use of the second-person pronoun in second-person texts. The first, "referential slither" explains the capacity for ‘You’ to address the actual reader and narratee as well as a fictional protagonist. The second term, "conative solicitude," directs our attention to the power of the second person narrative to engage our emotions and connect with us more deeply – the reader is closer to the story as he or she more literarily steps through it.

Between them, the terms highlight the two key characteristics of the second person – that it is ambiguous and that it asks for a connection.

It’s all about you.

It begins with the you of folktales that evokes the universal ‘You’. You – you specifically who could be anybody.

It has always been handy in guide books/self-help books/do-it-yourself manuals to tell you what to do.

It found form in the game book – choose your own adventure - with the reader as protagonist, making choices, determining action and responding to the plot. A story where you are you but with a stretch of the imagination.

Much had happened since the game book enjoyed popularity. There has been an exponential growth of virtual realities – new places where you can seem to be and who you are is variable. Video games. The industry of time in others boots is big and the spectrum it supplies is vast – wild fantasy, magic, mutation, aliens etc to simulations of the real.

As technology advances the differences between you and the virtual ‘You’s’ narrows – a tightening of the relationship between narrator, narratee and story world. It seems to be the next thing we demand of game consoles – for us to be part of the game. Combined with the ever-increasing freedom of our interactivity we edge closer to the point where we play ourselves telling our own story. The real fictional you.

Project Natal, a technology Microsoft is launching later this year, enables you to interact with a game that ‘knows you’ – face, voice and full body recognition. A story where you play you.

This week we will mostly be talking about ‘the second person’. 




James Harringman
Editor