Studying Writing in Second Person: A Response to Joshua Parker

TLDR: Parker as discussed by the authors argues that authors' self-commentaries may help us understand better the possible functions of second-person narration in fictional texts and points out that authors are men and women with professional experience as writers, who are capable of speaking quite eloquently on their own reasons for writing in second person.

Abstract: In his article "In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person," Joshua Parker reflects on second-person narration and looks at the issue from the perspective of authors who use such narration in their works. In Parker's view, authors' self-commentaries may help us understand better the possible functions of second-person narration in fictional texts. Parker's main claim is that these authors are men and women "with professional experience as writers, who are capable of speaking quite eloquently on their own reasons for writing in second person" (167). One argument that seems to follow from this, although it is not expressly mentioned in the text, is that authors' viewpoints ought to be favored over narratological or other literary-theoretical approaches or ought at least to be taken more seriously than has hitherto been the case. As Parker puts it, there is "a surprising dissonance between what theorists often tend to assume about the form and what authors themselves experience in creating it" (167). He even proposes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a "writer response theory" in analogy to reader response theories (167). Parker presents authors' self-reflexive comments, quoting writers such as, among others, Chuck Palahniuk, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Pam Houston, Lolo Houbein, Peter Bibby, and John Encarnacao, who talked in interviews or wrote in non-fictional writing about their use of secondperson narration. The main result of Parker's survey of these com*Reference: merits and of a number of texts written in second person is the following: "Seeing the self as 'other' often only takes place during descriptions of certain events or over periods of text. This self, like its experiences, is unstable. What is inscribed in second person, then, is the author's relationship to this self, a relationship often in flux" (171). Before I address Parker's main claims in more detail, I will outline four aspects that, to my mind, need to inform any research on writing in second person not only because they already appear individually or in combination in most scholarly work addressing this type of narration (e.g., Fludernik, "The Category of 'Person'"; Kacandes; Richardson) but also because they allow for interdisciplinary approaches to the topic (see Mildorf): 1. the anthropological dimension; 2. generic distinctions; 3. structural typologies; 4. functions and effects. Parker mixes up these aspects or does not follow them up assiduously enough, which explains why some of his claims are essentially flawed.1. The Anthropological DimensionParker begins his article with the example of the cave paintings at Lascaux, arguing that "their author conceived of an experiencing point of view other than his own" and that he created these paintings "with the consciousness of designing images [...] for an Other" (165). This is then linked by Parker to "what any writer working today might likewise pursue" (165). One can object to this associative connection by quoting Denis Dutton, who said that "[t]he state of the arts today can no more be inferred from looking inside prehistoric caves than today's weather can be predicted from the last Ice Age" (Dutton 3). It is also not unproblematic to link painting and writing without paying due attention to their respective medial expressivity. And one may question the underlying presupposition that art is always created for an "other." Could I not simply paint or write for my own pleasure, without having any specific audience other than myself in mind?Leaving these points of criticism aside, however, one can see in Parker's argument an attempt to bring into sharper relief something more fundamental concerning the relationship of human beings to fellow human beings, which is also expressed in the very use of the personal pronouns "I" and "you": namely, that we are ultimately "relational beings," as psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen has it. Gergen argues that "there is no isolated self or fully private experience" and that instead "we exist in a world of co-constitution" (xv). …