Point of View and Narrative "I"(Part 2)
Welcome back fans de memoire! for the second and final segment on Narrative "I." For the past two weeks, I’ve been unpacking the four components of memoir identity.
1. Historical "I" – The person producing the memoir.
2. Narrating "I" – Person telling the narrative.
3. Narrated "I" – The version of the self the “Narrating I” is presenting to the reader.
4. Ideological "I" – The cultural, historical, and belief systems embedded in the “I” of the memoir.
Thus far, I’ve covered Historical “I” and last week we got into the Narrative “I,” which as you may have suspected, with a word like narrative being part of it, Narrative “I” is the storyteller. Narrative “I” usually uses a first-person point of view (POV) to tell the story, which is where we left it last week, but as we will discuss now, Narrative "I" can, and does, adopt other POV’s for various reasons.
Other POV's - Second Person
Sometimes, the Narrative “I” will depart from first-person for strategic reasons adopting third or second person. In his 1933 memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell gives us a potent example of 2nd person Narrative “I” as he recounts his descent into poverty in the ghettos of Paris.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought It would be quite simple. It is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
…
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes. A sniveling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. - George Orwell
Recorded Book narrated by Patrick Tull: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVj5PEBcH8
Orwell’s use of “you” is clearly strategic here as he wants to bring the reader directly into the experience and hold hands with them for a walk through the experience of poverty.
As, I mentioned last week, use of the second person can be quite intimate but there are certain requirements that must be meet for that initmacy to function.
Novelist, Chuck Wendig, defines narrative second person as “telling the story from the perspective of you, the reader. Suddenly, its your head bobbing down “Rue de la Montagne” instead of Orwell’s, gliding past “shop windows” full of “so much food.” “In theory,” continues Wendig, “this is awesome. In practice it often comes off totally fucking goofy. Sure a gifted storyteller can pull it off…sustaining that narrative mode will be tricky and tiresome.”
Guest blogger, Joshua Essoe, in a post on Grammar Girl, comments "most readers find second-person tedious and difficult if it goes on too long." This may be due, as Essoe explains, to second person often using the "imperative mood: do this, do that, now do the other thing..." and as we all know getting ordered around constantly gets old fast, in real life or in reading. It's not that it can't be done but it's hard to do and even harder to do it well. Essoe sights one "notable exception" which is Jay Mcinerney's fiction novel Bright Lights, Big City, so if all this talk makes you curious to see someone doing it the whole way through ( I know I am!) check that book out. (If you do, tell me what you think about it!)
I've yet to hear of anyone writing a memoir in second person the whole way through. Given the primary focus of memoir is someone telling their own story using second person the whole way is an unlikely choice.
Although he doesn’t go into it much, Wendig uses the vintage gaming monster, the grue as an analogy, for bad second person usage and it works well for understanding what makes bad second person bad. When players are eaten by a grue in the text-based game Zork, the screen turns to static and the phrase “You have been eaten by a grue” flashes on the screen.
In this experience, the static represents insufficient textual detail given to the reader to explain what just happened and help them visualize it. What does a grue look like? What’s it like to be eaten by a grue? Ultimately, with no detail to go off of, as readers, we don’t feel much of anything or connect ourselves with the experience that just happened.
Going into the Orwell passage and deleting adjectives and descriptive wording the passage falls flat. If, we as readers no longer feel and see we are not going to buy into the experience. (For ease of underingstanding all changes are in orange and text deletions are represented by an underscore.)
With little food in your belly, you go out and look into _ windows. Everywhere there is food _ ; _ pigs, _ bread, _ butter, meat, __ potatoes. A _ self-pity comes over you .
I tend not to prefer second-person, perhaps, because as an English instructor, I more frequently encounter the problems it creates in student writing. When second person comes in and orders me to do or feel something using an unpleasant tone while also lacking the conviction of details to back it up, it is a case of complete second person break-down. For example, that same Orwell passage diluted with auxiliary verbs mixed in with the second person:
You should try walking in Paris, with little food in your belly. Try going out and looking into _ windows. See what it is like to be hungry and everywhere there is food _ ; _ pigs, _ bread, _ butter, meat, __ potatoes. You might feel self-pity coming over you.
The lack of details combined with the auxiliary verbs results in weak, whiny, complaining tone that is very off-putting for me as a reader and does not bring me into the experience. In this scenario, I no longer emphathize with Orwell but would rather tell him to quit complaining. In this instance, the text says we should feel "down" rather than making us feel "down" as a result of reading it. Second person asks alot of the reader and when the text fails to deliver on its end, it can come off as a bit rude and presumptuous.
But, as we’ve seen, earlier, when second person is done well, as demonstrated in the unaltered Orwell passage, it is a powerful tool. Orwell’s frequent, powerful second person drew me in and gave me an experience. Similarly, a collection of memoir essays by Sue William Silverman forced memoirist Patrick Ross to “rethink” his opinion of second person in memoir which he discusses in his blog on Silverman’s work. (Thanks to Ross, I now have Silverman on my list of memoirs to check out!)
Please visit his post for the full discussion but in brief, Ross outlines three characteristics critical for the success of second person Narrative “I” which are:
Context - Providing a guide or sense of place for the reader. Ross cites Silverman’s use of “Details” and “backstory” that “help us cope.” Orwell, too, provides context throughout: “At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an inome of six francs a day.”
Moderation - not using “you” exclusively. Ross explains Silverman switches out from second-person only using for a few of the essays in her book. After 3 pages of second person, Owell takes back the reigns with “I continued in this style for about three weeks” and first person resumes control of the poverty expeience.
Playful Form - creative stylistic use of “you”. One of Silverman’s memoir essays is entirely in second person but manages to avoid the use of the pronoun “you” almost entirely by using imperatives (command). “Fall in love with a man who drives a blue Chevy convertible” is the second person example without “you” that Ross discusses. We see a playful mix of “you” and “I” in Orwell: “You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a day or two –shocking isn’t it.”
So, we see Ross’s breakdown holds up as all three of these characteristics are found in both examples.
Third Person & Channeling Voices
Orwell is a great example to discuss for Narrative “I” with, as not only does he dip into second person, he also passes the baton to third person. I have to give him props for managing to use all three POV’s in one memoir! Pretty incredible.
Quite often, rather than talking about himself in third-person, he is relocating his narrative “I” into the voice of another character from the story.
After a brief introduction in traditional third person of Charlie, a predatory upper-class youthslumming it in the same impoverished quarter of Paris Orwell finds himself in. Orwell leads in with a description of Charlie’s “fresh cheeks,” “piggy eyes,” “soft brown hair” and “lips excessively red and wet, like cherries” then transitions to Charlie with “he is talking about love, his favorite subject. And with that, Charlie assumes Orwell’s first person and speaks. “Ah, l’ amour, l’amour! … women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin, At twenty-two I am utterly worn out and finished.”
We are still seeing what Orwell’s Narrative “I” wants to show us but through a dynamic, nested third person view. Everything Charlie, and other characters channeled in this way, say and do, is governed by Orwell’s Narrative “I.” As readers, its good to keep in mind that these voices are not autonomous but are being recalled by Orwell to serve a purpose in his memoir.
Voice of the Present Calling the Past
Lastly, important to note is the Narrative “I” is the voice of the present relaying to us a story from the past. It is this temporal distance that is responsible for gaps in memory and influences the selection process of what details are included. The current self of the writer must decide what details are important and the current state of mind affects this process.
Ever caught yourself telling a story to someone and choosing which details to keep or leave out? Then you have experienced Narrative "I's" dilema first hand.
As readers, we cannot necessarily trust what the writer includes any more than the writer can place absolute trust in themselves to remember all. And furthermore, as in the example of Orwell, while the details may be factual, it quickly becomes clear he is choosing to include certain details for a specific purpose. At the conclusion of his time in the Parisian slums, Orwell proceeds to lecture the reader on the “social significance” of dishwashers and manual laborers as “slaves of the modern world.”
Orwell’s construction of his Narrative “I” persona is more concerned with revealing the lives of the poor around him, and in all actuality, reveals very little of himself. As readers we want to be aware of what the Narrative “I” is choosing to show us so we can think about why they are showing it to us.
So, the job of Narrative “I” to recall not only the details but also, as much as possible, the state of mind of the self of the past. The Narrative “I” attempts to bring a moment from the past into the present to reenact it in manner and tone consistent with how it happened. How reliably, truthfully this occurs depends on the Historical “I” outside pulling the strings.
Things get even more interesting and complex when the Narrative “I” engages and intermixes with the Narrated “I.” Come back next week to learn about Narrated “I” and how it connects with the Narrative “I!”
