Holding you
Dearest readers,
As the leaves are going rusty and these windows rattle with every burst of wind, I’m reflecting on the summer passed, how expansive a time it has been. I want to share the major insight I had about my very particular strand of absorptive reading. I was born to read - and forge something from writing about - second person prose: I am writing a book*. And I need a snappy strapline for it!
I first conceived of this project in the foothills of Montserrat, now over two years ago. Since starting it in earnest, it seems as though a portal to my past has opened up, one that makes me question whether those thoughts two years ago really were incipient. Many things have been back to revisit me, almost as if I can now see them more clearly, understand their significance. For example, I recently wrote about the first time I read How To Paint A Dead Man, now twelve years ago. And in going through old papers a few weeks ago, I found a dissertation that I read whilst I was at university in 2005 and that I (rudely) photocopied from start to finish – one that embroils the reader in the construction of an imaginative performance, one that draws explicit attention to the relationship between reader and writer. I recall Geoff Nicholson, talking about where something starts:
My own feeling is that, with most journeys, and especially the metaphorical sort, it’s extremely difficult to decide where and when that first step occurred. We’re already in motion before we know where we are going, before we even realise we’re on a journey.
Being steeped in another language this summer naturally inclined me to wonder about Spanish fiction, and I asked everyone I met with an interest in reading whether prose written in the second person register was common. Trying to convey my question – in basic Spanish, in English that felt too complex and imprecise – was a lesson in itself. One of my new friends started sending me Spanish songs to aid my learning and I noticed a shift in Mil Horas in the form of you. I asked why the song contained both tu and vos, whether the same person was being referred to, and if so, what the purpose of the shift was. You got me thinking, my friend said.
This, perhaps, is the simplest motive for this project: to think. Novels written in the second person seem to ask for something, some endeavour, some greater than usual effort to place the point of view. I recall reading Paul Auster for the first time, and the sensation of being stretched by reading him. That got old after a while, when I felt I was being stretched the same way each book (truly, Auster seems like the proof of the adage that novellists write the same book again and again). But the desire to be stretched in new ways persisted.
In a recent Craft Talk, Jami Attenberg talked about being ankle deep in a new project. The project is still forming, the characters becoming more rounded, the conflicts more defined – and the how of writing this book, its perspective, are under consideration:
I wrote down a set of rules related to how I wanted to use close third in this new project.
The thought – of outlining rules – felt like an allowance, a way in to starting to construct the ideas that are emerging as I read into a door that other people could open. This has been a helpful frame for me as I read more widely - what rules do I think the writer has followed in their specific use of second person? - and seems a light-hearted way to start writing about that reading.
Enter rule one
Reader: If one thing seems clear so far, it’s that you are a font of acts that many people would find morally ambiguous, if not downright wrong. But in appealing to our shared position as subject, I see what you’re trying to do - you’re making motive, or lack thereof, apparent. You’re asking whether there is really much difference between us, whether the reasons for your actions aren’t understandable and therefore, maybe, can be condoned. The world, you say, is not made up of good people and bad people. It’s made up of people, trying to live.
Reader exits, pointing between their eyes and the rule as they do.
By some great fortune, the universe offered me a new correspondent - a bibliotecologo de Buenos Aires. In exchange for a trip to the British Library, this librarian took on my search for the raro avis of second person prose and has made some solid suggestions. The reading list so far can be found in this new online index. Just as I’ve been amazed by his contribution, I also invite your suggestions and thoughts. What have you read that is written in second person? How did it make you feel?
I can’t offer this list without at least a passing thought about the fact that so many of the titles contain the word Winter. It feels like a signal (one of many) that this is my territory. It also makes me contemplate this trajectory we’re now on to the winter months, whether there is something about those months of extended dark and lots of dwelling indoors that fosters a kind of self-meeting. When the external stimulus of the world is pared back, when we withdraw a little to weather these months, are we more aware of ourselves? Allison once sent me a link to a great podcast about Wintering (I can't lay hands on the original, but the same writer is interviewed for On Being). No doubt I’ve said this before, in the great spiral of these momentary missives.
In Spanish, you are implicated with the conjugation of a verb, an implicit contract between actor and action. Pronouns do make an appearance, often for emphasis or clarity, and though there is less room for slippage here (perhaps) than in the all encompassing you of English, still, what is said and writ must be interpreted. Reading second person prose can feel like encountering another language, with those same hallmarks of trying to distinguish who is doing what, where the object and subject of a sentence rest.
This project is beginning to reveal itself as one of self discovery – something I doubt I could get away with under the more formal auspices of an institution. Yet I long for the access that I’d be granted if I were dubbed a researcher: libraries; jstor; those fiendishly expensive academic books like Amadis in English; a challenger, even – someone to spar with over the rules I’m concocting.
Another latent memory: as part of my sexual economies class, I conducted an analysis of all the love letters I’d written to my long-distance lover. I wanted to know who appeared more frequently: I/Me or You. I don’t remember the outcome, only the question, how it burned in me, how much I wanted to understand this compulsive engagement with another human. At the time of writing the letters, I was obsessed with solipsism and though I can now laugh about it, the sentiment wasn’t all that off. We can never truly know another, nor experience things as they might. No matter how many bridges we build to other people’s islands, we are unable to cross the threshold. Is it more isolating to think one is the only being that exists, or to experience oneself in the morass, trying and failing to know another? What is the difference?
In what must be another repeat, I think of Harry Mathews, addressing the urgency of the question about how to engage the reader, speaking of the singularity of our action – and whilst this suggests that we cannot sublimate into the position of the other whilst they hold it, we can enact a transfer – we are able to move between subject and object:
I suggest as a consolation that if I alone can speak, you alone can listen: as soon as I begin to listen I become, by definition, you.
But what kind of consolation is this? There are limits to what we know and can know of others, but that doesn’t make us impervious to the desire, the intent. Reading second person, for me, is like being seed-bombed from a distance: each time I’m caught in the gaze of a printed you, another wildflower springs into bloom. I experience being known, being seen – and not just the parts of me that are regularly encountered in the world - the whole flamboyant meadow of myself. You speak to the parts of me that I’m finally still and quiet enough to listen to, parts with root systems that wend their way back decades into my past. There is something comforting here: that no matter how much I slip and slide over the you I read, it draws on something intangible and persistent. I am still the Argo, whether I speak or listen, aunque cuantos palabras nuevas lluego conocer, ni cómo las palabras ya significan otras cosas.
A final word about forms of you: there is the epistolary you, the direct addressee of a letter; there is the you that is the pronoun of a character that we come to know as distinct from ourselves, who is more or less a specific imagined entity; and then there is the deliciously murky swamp between these two poles… this, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is where I want to dwell. And it gets me thinking, with these letters I write to you - where do you find yourself on the spectrum of collective addressee? Do you instinctively know the parts that are intended for you? Do they overlap with the parts that you want to claim?
Here's a steady gaze and a smile that blooms from the depths for all of you that have nourished the seed of this project in its nascent stages - with conversations, with suggestions, and with questions. I implore you: keep them coming.
B
*I say book to give a sense of the scope of this project. It may not end up being a book.