Readercon Panel Writeup: Other Points Of View

[rushthatspeaks]

Other Points of View
David Louis Edelman, Laurie J. Marks (L), Maureen McHugh, Wen Spencer, Peter Watts.
In several places, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club adopts a first-person plural viewpoint: "we" are thinking about the conversation described, and the reader gets to think about who, exactly, "we" may be-- not everyone in the room! While third person and first person singular are the standard viewpoints in fiction, here we talk about the alternatives, and when we (you?) can best employ them.

This was my first panel (in fact, first anything) of the con, and I went to it rather than the one on humor, which seems to have been a wise choice. All participants are writers. Laurie Marks is the author of the ongoing Elemental Logic series, which is awesome, and the fact that she was on the panel is one of the reasons I picked it; I've read some of Wen Spencer's vaguely-werewolf series and liked them okay. Maureen McHugh is the author of China Mountain Zhang, which I keep meaning to read, and of some poetry I like. Peter Watts is the author of Blindsight, which I keep meaning to read, and of the funniest program bio ever, which I devoutly hope he either reuses or puts up on the internet or both. (I was in the middle of reading said bio when Laurie Marks pointed out to the room at large that they should all go read it right away. I particularly appreciate his claim of being too depressing to be published in Russia.) I had never heard of David Louis Edelman, but the internet tells me that he is the author of Infoquake, which has been getting very good reviews.

I do not take notes during panels on the grounds that I will inevitably fall behind; I am therefore indebted to the notes of kate_nepveu, who was sitting next to me, for helping me remember which order things were said and that sort of thing, and also giving several of the citations. I do not quote verbatim. All attributions should be taken with a grain of human error unless specifically checked with the person to whom they are attributed, unless of course said person is me.



The Readercon program book uses 'leader' instead of 'moderator' to designate 'the person who is meant to prompt and facilitate and help things stay on track and generally herd cats'. I am not sure what prompted this vocabulary change, but it was generally disregarded by all and sundry over the course of the convention. I believe Laurie Marks introduced herself as the moderator.

She tends towards the more directive type of moderator, and the panel was therefore on the more structured end of things as panel discussions run. After the panelists introduced themselves, the panel went through the various kinds of not-as-commonly-used literary viewpoint in a set order, starting with second person, continuing through first person plural, and ending with brief mentions of second person plural and other non-common and unclassifiable points of view. Audience interpolation basically came at the end of each topic, before the switch. My comments will be in brackets. I comment a lot.

The discussion of second-person began with Marks reading an excerpt from Ted Chiang's (really awesome) 'Story of Your Life', and then asking the other panelists what they thought of it and for other examples of second person narrative.

Wen Spencer wanted to know whether 'Story of Your Life' is actually a second person narrative, since the narrator is so thoroughly defined and is speaking to a defined person [and if I recall correctly does use 'I' with some frequency].

Discussion as to whether you can have a second-person point of view without having it actually be first person.

[Me: I hate to say it, but what we really needed on this panel was a post-modernist, or at least someone who could use that vocabulary, because what I think was being got at here were the distinctions between POV, narrator, narrative voice as authorial construct, and author, all of which in post-modernist terms are quite different things.]

[Also, Ted Chiang was sitting in the back row, but did not comment.]

Wen Spencer brought up Karin Lowachee's Warchild as an example of something that is second person. The trauma experienced by a child kidnapped by pirates is so intense that the narrative uses 'you' to describe it: 'You are tied up and thrown into a ship's hold', and so on.

[Now I want to read this, in part to see whether the child is narrating as a narrator detached from herself or whether the narrator is someone else who is in fact telling the child what happened/is happening to her or whether there is in fact no implied narrator. I couldn't tell from the way the book was described, but it would be interesting to read any of those.]

Edelman agreed that 'Story of Your Life' is first-person [as do I], and brought up Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller as the most famous and effective use of second-person narrator.

Marks proposed a restatement of the question of viewpoint in the Chiang as asking who the protagonist of 'Story of Your Life' is? [And the reason I think it's first-person is that the protagonist, as in the person who acts, is definitely the narrator, the person telling the story.]

Spencer brought up the metaphor of POV as a camera, where first-person is the camera looking through a person's eyes, and the distance of the camera from the protagonist increases as the camera pulls out into third person limited and then into omniscient. In which case 'Story of Your Life' is first-person because it is looking through the mother's [narrator's] eyes, and just where is the camera in second person anyhow?

[Personally, I feel that with this metaphor, in first and third person your camera is defining the distance of the reader from the protagonist/characters. In second person your camera is defining an audience, and the distance the reader has from it, whether the general 'you' of everybody or the very specific 'you' of the daughter in 'Story of Your Life'. So the epistolary story, which is the category I think the Chiang falls into, is using the audience and narrator to define each other.]

McHugh [finally] brought up the question of narrator versus POV as two separate things. She teaches writing, and says that she will put up on a blackboard the sentences "It was a dark and stormy night. She heard a shot ring out." Upon asking what the POV is, the students always say third, which leads to the question of who is saying the first sentence? It certainly isn't 'she'. [I don't think 'she' is saying the second sentence either. Narrator as authorial construct is.] McHugh mentioned first-person as a distancing technique, because the I-narrator is [quite often] telling the story after it happened, and one doesn't know to whom, or when-- sometimes the I-narrator is dead/incapacitated afterward, or wouldn't tell the story, but there it is anyway, so one knows it's artificial. [True of the after-the-fact first-person. There are other kinds.] Then pointed out that in conversation second person is also a distancing technique, which differentiates the speaker from the described (she had a grad student who said something like "you go to grad school, and you think it's going to be great"; the 'you' here is clearly 'I' [and a differently tensed 'I' at that, 'you go' vs. 'I went']). So just because we can see an 'I' behind the second person POV doesn't mean that it's actually a first-person POV, because the narrator is saying 'you' for a reason, the distance you can get with second-person.

[I found this fascinating. As I've said earlier, I think I'd categorize a story as first or second person based on whether it's the 'I' or the 'you' who's taking the action; this compounded with McHugh would make 'Story of Your Life' first-person, but Lowachee's Warchild second person pretty much no matter who is telling it.]

Edelman commented that there's a shot that occurs frequently in Hitchcock, where just at the edge of the frame there is a character who is standing and watching the action, the same way the audience is, and that this is how second person works, with the audience watching the person watching the action.

The audience of the panel seemed to agree. [I... do if the 'you' is very strongly defined as a specific 'you'. Most of the time. Certainly in the later bits of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, but not in the first half of the book, for example. Warchild doesn't sound like it fits into this. I really need to read that book.]

Marks was glad that someone had distinguished between point of view and narrator. [Me too.] Said that if the point of view character, whom we are following, and the narrator never interact, as in Warchild, it underlines the trauma of the POV character. [What I make of this is that the narrator in Warchild has no power to do anything as an 'I', but only to tell the child what she is doing; whereas the child has no power to do anything other than what the narrator says she, 'you', is doing, so that agency is split and fractured in a way that does seem pretty traumatic to me, and probably damn effective.]

Watts then said that he'd used second much the same way in Blindsight but intending the opposite effect, as the character had very little inner life or awareness of an inner life and could only gain immediacy and a vibrant voice when not actually using first. The character is better at discussing/projecting other people's motivations than his own, and best and most vibrant when talking about machinery. [Cool. I wonder if it works that way to the reader? Need to read the book.]

Someone in the audience brought up Molly Zero, by Keith Roberts, in which the narrator is telling the story to the protagonist; the questioner couldn't figure out why this particular story was told this way and couldn't see an advantage. [I haven't read this one either.] Also was the first person to bring up the word 'epistolary' in relation to 'Story of Your Life'.

Marks then suggested that therefore there are two types of stories that tend to use the second person: the narrator actually telling someone else what that person did or is in the process of doing, which can be bizarre, or the epistolary story.[And I think the latter is probably usually first person at its root.]

Audience member brought up the narrative slip from third person omniscient into authorial 'I' that is so common in nineteenth-century fiction. [Me: ...and the narrator is not the narrative voice is not the author, dammit. That sort of fiction is third person, using an authorially constructed narrative voice which cannot be said to be the narrator in any proactive sense.]

A different audience member mentioned that in English you can convey any subject with any pronoun, without really giving grammar the run-around. The example given was of a secretary warning someone about the boss: "We're feeling a little grumpy today," a 'we' that excludes the speaker. [Cool.]

Someone else recced How To Be An Artist, a first-person future-tense graphic novel about what will face the author when he decides to become an artist.

Another audience member pointed out the narrowing of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller from a very general you to a very specific you who in fact takes narrative action; general consensus from the panelists that the general you does have to narrow at least somewhat eventually because it isn't possible to write a good story directly to every single reader.

Watts mentions that there's a convention that readers won't really stand for second because of the distancing effect, and he isn't sure whether he agrees with that.

Spencer: what POV you use can partly be genre-dependent; mysteries can use first person when other books can't.

Watts: why don't we see more second person?

Various panelists: It distracts the reader, it's seen as experimental and non-commercial, it's harder to read, and it has to succeed despite all of the conventions against it. Of course this is a chicken-egg problem-- it might not be so hard to use if it were used more commonly.

Marks then moved us on to first person plural by reading an excerpt from Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club and inviting discussion from the panelists.

[Note: Karen Joy Fowler was one of Readercon's Guests of Honor this year. She was also sitting in the front row at this panel, but genially declined to comment when queried. The Jane Austen Book Club is also one of those books that I have been meaning to read.]

Marks discussed the Fowler as containing multiple types of POV but generally using a 'we' to refer to its narrator/title group, in which not all of the people of the 'we' speaking know everything that is going on in the group; a sort of unreliable 'we' in which the reader may not be certain who knows what at what point, since 'us' knowing something does not delineate what each individual knows. [That is SO COOL.]

Maureen McHugh wasn't sure that the title group actually is the narrator-- the group is the protagonist, and the narrative voice moves through different points of view rapidly and often, including 'we', 'you', and 'I'. 'We' is also shifting fairly continuously. All of these shifts are under the control of the narrator (whoever that may be) and in a narrative voice created between the author and the page. So the book isn't in third, or in first. It shifts.

Marks agreed with this but stipulated that the question of whether the narrative voice is the narrator is less important than the question of what the unique and peculiar shifts of POV gain or lose for the book. [I need to read the Fowler, and wish I had read it before the panel, given that it was referenced in the panel description. Also, as I have said before, my kingdom for a post-modernist.]

McHugh: proposes the narrator of the Fowler as a trickster.

Discussion over the difference between an unreliable narrator and a deliberately deceptive narrator; the panel seems to have been using 'unreliable' to mean 'does not have information that the reader can nevertheless perceive in the account' or 'unintentionally elides information', but not 'intentionally elides or falsifies information'.

Wen Spencer said that very tight third can be exhausting for both writer and reader, so a shifting POV can give both writer and reader a break.

Edelman discussed a story he recently wrote in first-person plural, using a kind of Greek chorus POV. The story didn't work when he focused it on the leader of the group (of space miners), but worked when he realized that he cared about the group as a whole and not its individual members. The story is forthcoming in an upcoming anthology.

At which point McHugh remarked that this was very Marxist, to general laughter.

An audience member noted that in the Interfictions anthology there's a first-person plural story from the point of view of the adults of a small town.

Also noted that the panelists had been saying third person plural all along when they actually meant first person plural [which they had, and I've been changing that in the write-up because it would be very confusing]. Is there something difficult about talking about first plural?

The panelists said no, put that down to confusion.

McHugh said that Ayn Rand's Anthem starts out using a first person plural pronoun, even though the narrator is singular, and then shifts blatantly to first person as a Political Epiphany Of Triumph thing.

Edelman: 'Ah, Ayn Rand, the master of subtlety.'

Laurie Marks: 'And now I'm writing down, read, but don't buy.' (General laughter.) [Having read it... yeah, read, but definitely don't buy. Ack.]

An audience member brought up Choose Your Own Adventure books as an example of second person narrative that doesn't imply an I behind it. [Also text games; same deal, really. Except some text games do imply an I, or a you. Yay greater levels of interactivity/flexibility.]

Someone else mentioned a short story that's basically a Choose Your Own Adventure except that you don't get to choose; it's just a list of instructions. [Fun, but probably only ever worked as a story once.]

A different audience member: The Dress Lodger, by Sheri Holman, is from the point of view of all the people who died in a specific cholera epidemic. [Creepy, yet made of awesome. I need to read that too.]

Karen Jay Fowler noted that there's a distinction in second person over whether the story specifies that a specific 'I' is telling it or not. The Chiang is specified, is about storytelling and is intended to be a story being told; it's one specific I telling another specific you. The first-person POV telling the second person POV.

McHugh: A story within a story, one POV embedded in the other. She thought this was neat. [It is. I wonder how many POVs you could nest? Third describing and excerpting first telling second about third...]

Laurie Marks: The POV is different depending on which way you're looking at the story.

Edelman compared this to the shifting of tenses in campfire story telling, where you can use present and past to emphasize or de-emphasize elements depending on where you want your audience to look.

Marks pointed out that in second person the you is actually always the reader, except that it isn't, because the 'you' being addressed is the protagonist and does this and does that, so that at some level unless the story is totally about a generalized 'you' there's always an implied 'you'-character who isn't the reader. But isn't it interesting that the story is implicitly the reader's story?

McHugh referred this back to Choose Your Own Adventure books, but no one else really took it up.

An audience member mentioned the technical manual as another form of second-person narrative. [One which is explicitly trying to be the reader's story, I'd say.]

Marks said that in prep for the panel she'd tried to write something in second person plural but couldn't keep first person plural out of it. She read it; it was short and funny, a 'we' talking to a 'you all'.

I was hoping to bring up the glossary/dictionary/phrasebook story, a narrative assembled entirely out of the entries of one of those, as an example of unusual and unclassifiable viewpoint, but the panel ran out of time at this point.

Overall this was entertaining, stayed on topic, was fairly clear and provided a lot of food for thought and a good reading list. I think some confusion could have been avoided by a common and established vocabulary, but I also think the post-modernist I'd have wanted would have had to be a sensible and pragmatic sort of post-modernist, or all would have descended into chaos; this was more about pragmatics than literary theory and highly useful as such. It's just, well, literary theory can be useful for pragmatics. Good panel, especially for early o'clock in the morning. (Well, at least for me. On a Saturday.)

Works Cited During The Panel:
Ted Chiang, 'Story of Your Life', Story of Your Life and Others
Karin Lowachee, Warchild
Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveller
Peter Watts, Blindsight
Keith Roberts, Molly Zero
Robertson Davies, Cunning Man (epistle to non-appearing character)
Eddie Campbell, How To Be An Artist
Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
David Louis Edelman, forthcoming story in Solaris anthology
Christopher Barzak, 'What We Know About The Lost Families Of -- House', Interfictions
Ayn Rand, Anthem
Sheri Holman, The Dress Lodger
Bob Leman, 'Instructions'
the Choose Your Own Adventure books

Prominent glossary/dictionary/phrasebook stories have been written by Joanna Russ and Suzette Haden Elgin, among others.

Links: kate_nepveu's report on this panel.
Readercon Link Roundup.

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Ack. Starting off a panel of POV, of all things, by declaring "Story of Your Life..." to be second-person...strikes me as an inauspicious beginning. Regardless of the conversation to follow. Heh.

(::cough::firstpersoninapostrophe::cough::)

>Now I want to read this, in part to see whether the child is narrating as a narrator detached from herself or whether the narrator is someone else who is in fact telling the child what happened/is happening to her or whether there is in fact no implied narrator.

The first, IMO. You could make an argument for the third, I think, but not for the second.

[rydra_wong]

The first, IMO. You could make an argument for the third, I think, but not for the second.

Agreed. It's classically dissociative - these terrible things are happening to someone who is not-me.

And when the protagonist escapes from the traumatic situation, at the end of Part I, he shifts into first person with the last paragraph - "That was all I remembered about Falcone. It was enough." - and stays in first for the rest of the novel.

I haven't reread Molly Zero for ages, but I have a sense of something similar going on there: a very young protagonist, with something of the same sense of lack of agency. It's not I do this, it's This is happening to you, if that makes any sense.

(Here via friendsfriendslist, btw - hope that's okay.)

[nedlum.livejournal.com]

At risk of having/because I have nothing useful to add to the conversation, I just wanted to point out that the original Magic School Bus books were told from the first-person plural.

Ok, back into the corner.

[kate_nepveu]

That's actually a good one, I think. Are stories told to children more likely to use first-person plural, either out loud or on the page?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

The Lowachee begins in second person, sort of, "So you wake up, and discover the bad guys in your house. You try to run, but they catch you..."

[zdenka]

My mother lent me The Dress Lodger and I rather disliked it. That may be a not-my-style sort of thing, though. I don't know whether you would like it or not.

[kate_nepveu]

A post-modernist would really have been good, you're right. For those of us who are rusty or never really learned it in the first place, can you point to a useful primer?

This is the obligatory bit where I point out that Will Shetterly's new novel (online; see comments for better links, she said immodestly) appears to be in second where the protagonist is the "you." I haven't read it yet.