The Joys of 2nd person diegesis

[AoiEndo]

I get the feeling that writing in the 2nd person is not very much liked.

I see the 2nd person voice as being a mark of your writing mettle. As well as your readerly mettle. A good writer, as Hemingway was fond of saying, is first and foremost, a good reader. So, if you can't, or do not wish to read a @nd person narrative form, then, it makes perfect sense that you won't be able to, or can't, or dislike writing in 2nd person.

So I thought I'd begin a thread and try to show the beauty of the Second Voice. It's possibilities, it's magic.

So, allow me to begin with Paul Auster's short story You remember the planes. The excerpt here is rather a long one. Forgive me. I know it is painful for most of you. But do no t resist. Let the waters take you:

You can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew. It seems to you that it came some time after you were old enough to identify yourself as an American, but you could be wrong, it could be that it was a part of you from the very beginning. Neither one of your parents came from a religious family. There were no rituals practised in the household, no Sabbath meals on Friday night, no lighting of candles, no trips to the synagogue on the High Holy Days, let alone on any Friday night or Saturday morning of the year, and not a single word of Hebrew was uttered in your presence. A couple of desultory Passover Seders in the company of relatives, Chanukkah gifts every December to offset the absence of Christmas, and just one serious rite that you took part in, which occurred when you were eight days old, far too early for you to remember anything about it, the standard circumcision ceremony, or bris, when the foreskin of your penis was lopped off by a fastidiously sharpened knife in order to seal the covenant between your newborn self and the God of your ancestors. For all their indifference to the particulars of their faith, your parents nevertheless considered themselves Jews, called themselves Jews, were comfortable with that fact and never sought to hide it, unlike countless other Jews over the centuries who did everything in their power to disappear into the Christian world that surrounded them, changing their names, converting to Catholicism or one of the Protestant sects, turning away from themselves and quietly obliterating their pasts. No, your parents stood firm and never questioned who they were, but in the early years of your childhood they had nothing to offer you on the subject of your religion or background. They were simply Americans who happened to be Jews, thoroughly assimilated after the struggles of their own immigrant parents, and therefore in your mind the notion of Judaism was above all associated with foreignness, as embodied in your grandmother, for example, your father’s mother, an alien presence who still spoke and read mostly in Yiddish, whose English was nearly incomprehensible to you because of her heavy accent, and then there was the man who turned up occasionally at your mother’s parents’ apartment in New York, a relative of some kind by the name of Joseph Stavsky, an elegant figure who dressed in finely tailored three-piece suits and smoked with a long black cigarette holder, a sophisticated cosmopolitan whose Polish-accented English was perfectly understandable to you, and when you were old enough to understand such things (at seven? at eight? at nine?), your mother told you that cousin Joseph had come to America after the war with help from her parents, that back in Poland he had been married and the father of twin girls, but his wife and daughters had all been murdered in Auschwitz, and he alone had survived, once a prosperous lawyer in Warsaw, now scraping by as a button salesman in New York. The war had been over for some years by then, but the war was still present, still hovering around you and everyone you knew, manifested not only in the war games you played with your friends but in the words spoken in the households of your family, and if your first encounters with the Nazis took place as an imaginary GI in various backyards of your small New Jersey town, it wasn’t long before you understood what the Nazis had done to the Jews, to Joseph Stavsky’s wife and daughters, for instance, to members of your own family for the sole reason that they were Jews, and now that you had fully grasped the fact that you yourself were a Jew, the Nazis were no longer just the enemy of the American Army, they were the incarnation of a monstrous evil, an anti-human force of global destruction, and even though the Nazis had been defeated, wiped off the face of the earth, they lived on in your imagination, lurking inside you as an all-powerful legion of death, demonic and insidious, forever on the attack, and from that moment on, that is, from the moment you understood that you were not only an American but a Jew, your dreams were populated by gangs of Nazi infantrymen, night after night you found yourself running from them, desperately running for your life, chased through open fields and dim, maze-like forests by packs of armed Nazis, faceless German soldiers who were bent on shooting you, on tearing off your arms and legs, on burning you at the stake and turning you into a pile of ashes.

Phew! You survived! But look! There you still stand! Alive, reading these words I write. You might say that you've wasted a few minutes of your life reading this post. But then, who's to say you haven't been wasting a few mninutes here, a few minutes there, a few minutes everywhere, all of your life. And where has that brought you? here, to this moment, where you have stepped into the mind of a young eight-year old jewish boy in Post-war America, who has suddenly realised he is not who he thought he was.

It must be challenging for him, to be in a world where the narrative he had been telling himself and believing, turn out to be the very antithesis to what the narrative actually is. Caught between two stories, he is. And that is exactly what a Second Voice does - we are mere actors in a pageant of our own making, like poor sods in Plato's cave, and the second Voice takes us out of that cave into another.

 

[StillStunned]

I see the 2nd person voice as being a mark of your writing mettle. As well as your readerly mettle. A good writer, as Hemingway was fond of saying, is first and foremost, a good reader. So, if you can't, or do not wish to read a @nd person narrative form, then, it makes perfect sense that you won't be able to, or can't, or dislike writing in 2nd person.

I used to hate the mere idea of 2P. But during a discussion about it here in the AH - it's a topic that returns with surprising regularity - I began to see it as a challenge.

You Know You Shouldn’t is my lowest-rated story, and always has been. It has one of my lowest view-to-vote ratios. But I enjoyed writing it, and I think it works.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Outside of CYOA, the common theme I find in successful examples of 2nd-person writing is that they work with the same characteristics that usually make that format a negative (feelings of discomfort, unwelcome loss of control), and make them work with the writing.

For instance, the Auster example above is trying to evoke the anxiety felt by a child who's learning that many people in the world will be hostile to him for something he had no choice about.

 

[filthytrancendence]

Outside of CYOA, the common theme I find in successful examples of 2nd-person writing is that they work with the same characteristics that usually make that format a negative (feelings of discomfort, unwelcome loss of control), and make them work with the writing.

For instance, the Auster example above is trying to evoke the anxiety felt by a child who's learning that many people in the world will be hostile to him for something he had no choice about.

That's been my only 'success' using it. I have something that's pretty rough even for me to read at this point, too long to post in the forums, and not really a Lit thing anyway. But I wrote it because I wanted to make people feel a sliver of what I was feeling. I did then, anyway. And I think that's part of why 2P feels a bit like a weapon to me now. But, again, I'm not trying to say this is all it's good for. I'm sure there's other things, it's just where my mind goes.

As I said in the other thread, I think 1P is more or less an invitation for the reader to inhabit the mind of the character. 2P is a lot more forceful.

Anyway here's an excerpt that gives you an idea. It's not light reading.

It hits you in one horrific, merciless moment of clarity. You’ve been in denial for years. You didn’t want to admit it. You didn’t have the language to admit it. They’ve been abusing you the whole time. That punch was a scream echoing backwards in time, sending reflections back to you of all the ways they controlled you through coercion.

It feels true in the most unbearable, awful way. It feels like a death. Worse than death, because death would be the end. There is no end to how utterly violated and stupid and weak you feel. You’re angry, but with yourself. For being so stupid, for being so weak, for letting yourself be treated like that, for maintaining denial, for letting this person you loved destroy you in the most violating way you can imagine. Most of all, you feel alone. Completely alone. Alone like you’ve never ever felt even in a lifetime of loneliness. Cut off from humanity like a branch deemed worthless by an unfeeling gardener. You feel like a non-person. Like everything that makes you who you are was used against you and used to control you and used to destroy you.

 

[iwatchus]

Reading this clip, I find it very accusatory. If I simply turned everything into 1P, everything becomes much more empathetic feeling, at least to me. 3P is somewhere in between.

 

[Britva415]

I think it's totally asinine to insinuate that you "just aren't good enough" as a reader or writer if you don't like 2pPOV.

 

[WCSGarland]

I see the value of it, just as I see the value of 1st POV present, 1st POV past, and all the variations of 3rd POV. I haven't had the practice at it as I have the others, and perhaps that is obvious. I haven't found the proper vehicle to explore it with yet. But I think I shall be looking for something to write in 2nd POV, the proper vehicle to ride to understanding.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

As someone who likes 2P POV, maybe this should be added to the list of things that shouldn't be shoehorned onto other people, right along proselitism, politics, and MLMs.

 

[AG31]

Just trying for a little clarity here. I'm thinking POV isn't really the term to use when a narrator uses "you" to tell the story. They're not telling the story from "your" point of view. They're telling it to you, about you, from their POV. Usually we can tell a lot about the narrator's personality, they are a character in the story. In a different thread I asked for examples of where a 2nd person story's narrator had no personality.

So we're talking about the pronoun the narrator uses, not the narrator's POV.

 

[PapaRomantic]

I didn't take the time to read it.

Paragraphs are your friend.

 

[Britva415]

Just trying for a little clarity here. I'm thinking POV isn't really the term to use when a narrator uses "you" to tell the story. They're not telling the story from "your" point of view. They're telling it to you, about you, from their POV. Usually we can tell a lot about the narrator's personality, they are a character in the story. In a different thread I asked for examples of where a 2nd person story's narrator had no personality.

So we're talking about the pronoun the narrator uses, not the narrator's POV.

I don't think it makes any difference whether we talk about it with the grammatically-correct term, "voice," or the literary expression "point of view." We know what we're all talking about, and I doubt that what we call it is confusing anyone or would change anyone's attitude about it.

 

[Britva415]

I didn't take the time to read it.

Paragraphs are your friend.

Not sure whether that was in the original excerpt or an artifact of copy-pasting, but yeah.

It would be ironic for one of the ever-rare examples of a "good" 2pPOV story to be irreparably marred by something as trivial as this, but hey, I don't know.

*looks it up*

Yeah, this is how it was written in the original. 5000 words broken into 8 paragraphs. This particular one is almost 800 words.


The original post is not a bad defense of the 2pPOV. It isn't persuasive to me personally, but it's a good argument. The paragraph thing on the other hand is indefensible.

 

[filthytrancendence]

The paragraph thing on the other hand is indefensible.

Agreed. I did read it, but had to force myself to do so. My brain really, really does not like confronting unbroken walls of text like that.

 

[Britva415]

https://i.imgflip.com/9yma3z.jpg

 

[StillStunned]

To be fair, it probably wasn't intended to be read in a quote box on a forum. It was apparently published in Granta 125: After the War in autumn 2013. As far I can tell, Granta is an online literary magazine.

I think the publication and theme, perhaps even the year, indicate a readership more accustomed to reading long paragraphs and sentences - or at least more prepared to give it a go in the name of literature.

Nowadays, us online readers tend to shy away from long blocks of text, and writing online has reinforced that tendency for me at least. Add in the smaller font of the quote box, and it's offputting.

That said, I read the first handful of lines, continued with the rest of the post and then went back and reread the paragraph. It was easier at the second attempt, and quite rewarding.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Not sure whether that was in the original excerpt or an artifact of copy-pasting, but yeah.

It would be ironic for one of the ever-rare examples of a "good" 2pPOV story to be irreparably marred by something as trivial as this, but hey, I don't know.

*looks it up*

Yeah, this is how it was written in the original. 5000 words broken into 8 paragraphs. This particular one is almost 800 words.


The original post is not a bad defense of the 2pPOV. It isn't persuasive to me personally, but it's a good argument. The paragraph thing on the other hand is indefensible.

Ugh, this was my hope spot. As if having white as the forum theme wasn't enough, now you're telling me this paragraph is three pages long? My eyes can't handle this amount of strain, let alone writing text that makes my eyes jump all over the place, so I end up losing myself anywhere.

 

[Britva415]

To be fair, it probably wasn't intended to be read in a quote box on a forum. It was apparently published in Granta 125: After the War in autumn 2013. As far I can tell, Granta is an online literary magazine.

I think the publication and theme, perhaps even the year, indicate a readership more accustomed to reading long paragraphs and sentences - or at least more prepared to give it a go in the name of literature.

Nowadays, us online readers tend to shy away from long blocks of text, and writing online has reinforced that tendency for me at least. Add in the smaller font of the quote box, and it's offputting.

That said, I read the first handful of lines, continued with the rest of the post and then went back and reread the paragraph. It was easier at the second attempt, and quite rewarding.

2013 wasn't that long ago and wasn't that different in terms of reading on a screen: Habits, formats, etc. were very very comparable to today.

And I wasn't reacting to the quote box in this forum, I was reacting to the original I found. "Some online website" versus "some other online website" could conceivably have made a difference in this specific instance, since the quote-box style is smaller print than the average online print style, but as it turns out, the original was also pretty small AND in a serif typeface - definitely not optimal for reading on a screen. So, to be fair, it's all a wash - the particular digital decade and the particular online channel aren't making any difference.

That's for addressing your specific points. Beyond that, 800-word paragraphs are painful on paper too. To me, this doesn't have anything at all to do with what generation it is or what medium it is.

 

[filthytrancendence]

To me, this doesn't have anything at all to do with what generation it is or what medium it is.

I dunno. My most vivid memory of having to force myself through unwieldy paragraphs was when I read Brothers Karamazov. The bits of Dickens I've read are also allergic to both periods and line breaks. I'm no 19th century lit scholar, but I definitely have the impression that unwieldy paragraphs were more in vogue then.

Not to say that has much to do with 2013. Just that paragraph length does seem to ebb and flow over time.

 

[Britva415]

I dunno. My most vivid memory of having to force myself through unwieldy paragraphs was when I read Brothers Karamazov. The bits of Dickens I've read are also allergic to both periods and line breaks. I'm no 19th century lit scholar, but I definitely have the impression that unwieldy paragraphs were more in vogue then.

Not to say that has much to do with 2013. Just that paragraph length does seem to ebb and flow over time.

It can ebb and flow over time, but it's still unnecessarily hard to read. Which is exactly what you just said.