There has not been a finer and more stylistically nuanced study of pronouns than Sorlin's since the publication of Katie Wales’ Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English (Reference Wales1996). As Sorlin's blurb states: ‘This book takes “you”, the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun’, and, throughout, the book fulfils the reader's expectations of both an engaging exploration of this ever more important personal pronoun and a thorough and wide-ranging account of its meanings.
Since the rise of second-person fiction, the starting point of which Sorlin locates with Michel Butor's (Reference Butor1957) La Modification, the pervasive use of the second person, both in literary and spoken narrative and in advertising, has long been in need of the comprehensive and thorough analysis and appreciation of its effects that this book offers. Starting off with a theoretical chapter, Sorlin lays the ground for the forthcoming investigation of the meanings of ‘you’ across genres, periods and media (‘Theorising the “you effects”’, pp. 1–34). The first three sections of this opening theoretical chapter chart the expansion of ‘you’ in recent decades, noting its uses in fiction, advertising and politics. This provides a strong context for the timeliness of Sorlin's study, as the reader is able to appreciate the wide-ranging contexts of use of this most interactive of pronouns. Unlike the first- and the third-person pronouns, the referents of which are most of the time unambiguous and more stable, Sorlin argues that ‘the flexible, diverse and sometimes ambiguous reference of “you” renders any simple classification illusory’ (p. 9). And she is right that the second-person pronoun can have meanings that range from the immediately deictic form of address of the interlocutor in the prototypical face-to-face interactive situation to a first-person self-reference and even third-person reference. This semantic and pragmatic richness singles out the second-person pronoun as a unique case in the already versatile class of pronouns. And Sorlin manages to tease out all these different meanings of ‘you’ in the foundational theoretical chapter that opens the book.
Building on four crucial studies of the second-person pronoun – Fludernik's (Reference Fludernik1993, Reference Fludernik1994a, Reference Fludernik1994b) and Kluge's (Reference Kluge2016) – Sorlin proposes her own theoretical model of the meanings of ‘you’, which is both pragmatically and literarily informed. This is illustrated here from page 16:
You1 thus refers to the self, denoting the ‘I’; You2 refers to the ‘I’ as a representative of a larger group; You3 is the quintessential impersonal or generic ‘you’, meaning anyone; You4 is an address to ‘you’ in front of me as a representative of a larger entity; You5 is the deictic address to the person in front of me; You6, one of Sorlin's original contributions to existing theoretical categorisations, ‘denotes cases where the narrator is speaking on behalf of the protagonist’, cases where ‘the narrator speaks both about and to the protagonist, or rather on her behalf’ (p. 17). The idea of a continuum between these different meanings of ‘you’, as well as the addition of the designations of each pole of this continuum (Personalisation vs Generalisation; Self vs Other), are among Sorlin's finest theoretical insights that the book offers.
As these different functions of ‘you’ are pragmatically and communicatively informed, Sorlin takes special care to account for the reader of fictional narratives, since one of the primary concerns of her book, and of stylisticians in general, is the literary context of text production and reception. Drawing a further line under her diagram, she positions the reader as a potential addressee who might choose to self-ascribe any of the roles of ‘you’ delineated in the diagram (p. 19). The addressive power of ‘you’, which even in circumstances where the ‘you’ is clearly defined as a character and someone other than the reader, is one of the most effective stylistic tools for immersing the reader into the text, or for giving the reader ‘a stronger “palpable sense of being there”’ (Brunyé et al. Reference Brunyé, Ditman, Mahoney, Augustyn and Taylor2009: 31; cited on p. 21). With the same methodological rigour, Sorlin also theorises the author as a potential addresser in her rhetorical model of fiction informed by Phelan's (Reference Phelan2011) rhetorical narratology (section 1.3.1). The book's theoretical chapter is nicely concluded with a section on the ethics of the second person, a rich philosophically informed discussion that ranges from Levinas’ (Reference Levinas1991) existentialist views on ‘the other’ to the evolutionary psychology of Tomasello (Reference Tomasello, Dweck, Silk, Skyrns and Spelke)2009). This erudite excursus into the ethics of the second-person pronoun is more than apposite given the inherent addressivity of this pronoun and its widespread use in discourses that are meant to shape and influence human behaviour, such as the discourses of politics and advertising.
And so, with strong theoretical foundations laid in chapter 1, the exploratory journey of the various and richly layered meanings of ‘you’ begins in part I, ‘Singularising and sharing’, with a study of its functions in two autobiographical narratives. These are George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which displays frequent shifts between first- and second-person pronouns and the generic ‘one’, and Paul Auster's ‘autobiographical dyptich’ (p. 31), Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013), entirely told in the second person. Sorlin includes both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of Orwell's text, teasing out the meanings of ‘you’ with fine attention to linguistic detail in the surrounding co-text, which she brings to bear on the semantics of the second person. The overall effect of the different types of ‘you’ in Orwell's text is ultimately one of empathy, that is empathy for the people living as tramps and struggling to make ends meet. But Sorlin goes further in developing her appreciation of Orwell's use of ‘you’ by establishing a unique connection between stylistic choice and genre and ideology, which she spells out as follows: ‘The interplay of specificity and genericity in “you” is what subverts the strict separation between autobiographical/imaginary re-creation and historical/political documentary, personal and social aspects being inextricably linked in the essay’ (p. 55).
Although still autobiographical, Auster's texts are contrasted to Orwell's through an insightful comparison, which illuminates further the significance of the second person for the genre of autobiography. Thus, Auster's ‘You1 is not pointing towards a “self-referential experiential” You2 as is the case in many examples of Orwell's essay. “You” is in fact open to interpretation of the self as if it were somebody else’ (p. 59). This creates a unique opportunity for Auster to use the second-person pronoun not in order to refer to the self or to the self and others, but in order to refer and address the self as other, or in Sorlin's words, to refer to the ‘I as other’ (p. 59). Sorlin provides many fine analyses of selected passages from Auster's texts, as well as garnering further evidence for this interpretation from extratextual biographical material. Another fine theoretical move is to categorise these uses of ‘you’ as ‘doubly subjective’, as ‘fluctuat[ing] between a concealed “I” and “I” addressed as other’ (p. 60), thus appropriately revising Herman's ‘doubly deictic’ categorisation of ‘you’ (Reference Herman1994, Reference Herman2002). This ‘doubly subjective you’ opens up the space for a potential dialogue with the self as it ‘keeps the singular subjectivity of the first [person] while adopting the distance of the third (without going all the way towards a third-person perspective)’, and thus adds a ‘uniquely’ ‘intrapersonal dialogic mode’ to Auster's narratives (p. 62).
Part II focuses on the role of ‘you’ in narratives about traumatic events. Unlike Auster, Sorlin's first author of traumatic events – Jim Grimsley – uses the second person to both reference the I as experiencing subject, and more importantly to distance the I from the childhood trauma that had afflicted the protagonist in Winter Birds (1994), thus at the same time maintaining a connection to the past self and distancing the present self from it. The power of ‘you’ to induce empathy in the reader, to make them feel as another, when this other is so very different from oneself, is mobilised in such narratives to very good effect. As Sorlin argues, ‘there is no better device than the second-person pronoun to bring readers to imagine themselves as an “other”’ (p. 92). In this way, readers ‘not only experience the vulnerability of the character, but [also] a performance of vulnerability’ (p. 92). Through a Text World analysis of some passages, Sorlin shows how world-switching may be a powerful coping mechanism for the child experiencing a trauma. She also brings other stylistic frameworks, such as Speech and Thought Representation (Leech & Short Reference Leech and Short2007) and narrative viewpoint (Simpson Reference Simpson1993), to bear on the textual analysis, which also benefits from a well-researched account of critical studies of trauma literature.
Sorlin's second text in this part of the book is Nicholas Royle's Quilt (2010), a book where the effects of ‘you’ can be considered alongside the use of first- and third-person pronouns, thus displaying some nice contrasts that allow for a better appreciation of the semantic and pragmatic meanings of ‘you’. Surprisingly, the second-person parts of the narrative emerge as foregrounding the mediating voice of the narrator more explicitly than the first- or third-person sections, which according to Sorlin can immerse the reader more fully into the subjective point of view of the protagonist.
Part III of the book, titled ‘The author–reader channel across time, gender, sex and race’, is a truly historical exploration of the uses of ‘you’ in different periods. Starting with Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Sorlin develops a fine account of the richly variable, at times inviting and at times ironic, addresses to the reader in this picaresque novel. A pragmatic analysis of politeness strategies and Gricean maxims appropriately informs some of the discussion of the communicative acts between author and reader, so characteristic of the period and so important for creating the comic effects. This analysis leads to some further insights into the classifications of the meanings of ‘you’ in Sorlin's diagrammatic model. While most of Fielding's addresses to the reader align with You4 in her model, she is right to note that they show the complexity of this You4 category, which can imply more or less genericity or move very close to a specific ‘you’, which may have gender specificity, for instance. You4 thus emerges as possessing ‘a plurality of formal incarnations, enhancing readers’ liberty to occupy and not to occupy the Reader position […], depending on who she is’ (pp. 141–2).
Moving further into the history of the novel, Sorlin chooses Jane Eyre (1847), with its famous ‘Reader, I married him’, as her next example displaying substantial addresses to the reader. One of the reasons behind these frequent addresses is the heroine's own life, her early experiences of not being heard, her desire to make herself and her narrative heard. In contrast to Fielding, where Sorlin finds that the ‘various types of address accord free space to the actual reader, in between the various interpellations to them, in Jane Eyre the actual reader is strongly incentivised to self-ascribe as Jane Eyre's narratee’ (p. 146) and this is achieved through a variety of engaging strategies, one of which, as Sorlin aptly shows, is the historic present tense, the ultimate technique creating immediacy.
Part III continues the historical and genre exploration of the meanings of ‘you’ with a twenty-first-century narrative about a homosexual protagonist (Neil Bartlett's Skin Lane, 2007), where ‘the author–reader channel’ is kept open through multiple addresses to the reader and a very talkative and prominent narrator. The references to a narrating I, distinct from the third-person protagonist, and to a recipient of the narrative – presumably the reader – together with frequent references to the construction and composition of the tale, create a metafictional postmodern space. But ‘paradoxically’, as Sorlin argues in a fine theoretical manoeuvre, ‘the telling framework generates an immersive reading by calling upon the reader as participant in the conversation in a more intimate oral-like way. Thus rather than disrupting illusion, these metanarrative comments can be said to be relatively “illusion-affirming” (Nünning Reference Nünning, Herman, Jahn and Ryan2005: 39)’ (p. 159). As well as inviting the reader to participate in this communication with the author and to even take part in the construction of the tale, the use of the second person is also crucially involved in making the singular experience of someone from a sexual minority group more universal. As Sorlin shows, this is achieved through frequent shifts between a generic situation, which is then connected to the singular experience of the protagonist or vice versa. Such shifts necessarily involve shifts between third- and second-person pronominal references, which, although syntactically discontinuous, can ‘subtly connect […] the readers to [the protagonist], that is to say to somebody that they may otherwise have found hard to identify with’ (p. 166).
In the final chapter of Part III, Sorlin could hardly have chosen a more appropriate genre and period to explore the ideological significance of the second person. Focusing on two postcolonial narratives – Jamaica Kincaid's essay A Small Place (1988) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ (2009) – Sorlin's critically acute analysis of the ideological positioning of the reader uncovers the power of ‘you’ to expose multiple layers of colonial oppression. A very unsettling picture of the effects of ‘you’ emerges from the analysis of Kincaid's essay, where the reader is straightforwardly addressed through You4, but rather than being flattered or cajoled into agreeing with the author–narrator, the reader is threateningly made to feel uncomfortable by positioning them into the role of the Western tourist who along with their predecessors – the colonisers – is plundering and destroying the native land of the narrator.
Although used in a very different way in Adichie's narrative, as a pronoun that allows speaking about the character simultaneously with speaking to the character – Sorlin's You6, occupying a middle ground between You1 (‘where the protagonist would also be the narrator’) and You5 (‘where the protagonist is the identified narratee, clearly addressed by a narrator’) (p. 185) – the second person is also uniquely positioned to implicate the reader in both acts – the act of speaking to oneself and the act of addressing the character who belongs to the colonised. This overall ‘you’–narrative also displays an unusual and unique usage of the second person in Free Indirect Speech, where the speech of the protagonist's white American boyfriend, presented in the free indirect mode, is further dialogised through the second person of address. Among the many theoretical insights that the book offers, this reconceptualisation of Free Indirect Speech in the second person as a mid-way category between Free Indirect and Free Direct Speech is a much needed addition to the analysis of this important technique in the ever more pervasive mode of second-person narration.
In the concluding Part IV, ‘New ways of implicating through the digital medium?’, Sorlin offers a masterfully brilliant critique of digital fiction, with its claims to readerly freedom and empowerment. For most people, it would seem undeniable that the reader plays an important role in such texts, ‘whether it be [through] clicking on the hyperlink of her choice to get to the next screen-page […], or typing input into the narrative to instruct the system to go one way or another’ (p. 204). But while this overt ‘freedom’ and involvement would not have been possible or even conceivable before the advent of digital fiction, when the actual positioning of the reader is subjected to a more in-depth scrutiny, something that Sorlin achieves with ease thanks to her rich repertoire of cultural criticism, we find that ‘in fact, in hypertext fiction […], where the reader needs to click on links of her choice to advance the story, the freedom physically granted to them is inevitably constrained’ (p. 205). This sophisticated argument is based on the understanding that ‘the reader is “forced” into taking the “you” position the text assigns her’, because ultimately ‘clicking into it boils down to accepting self-ascription as the “you” addressee’ (p. 205). Paradoxically then, Fielding's addressees are afforded more freedom, because they can ‘refuse to occupy the position of the authorial audience’, than readers of digital fiction, where the actual physical progression of the story depends on compliance with the invitation to ‘press buttons’ (p. 205). In a sophisticated tour de force Sorlin manages to argue that this over-explicit freedom is a freedom forced upon the reader and therefore ultimately constraining. But it would have been too facile to dismiss the whole digital oeuvre without further qualification of the different manifestations of the genre. And Sorlin does just that when she nevertheless ventures into discussing certain more complex examples of digital fiction, which display sophisticated degrees of interactivity with the audience and which question the very medium they use ‘the way novelists self-consciously did at the rise of the novel’ (p. 213).
The final section of the chapter offers an illuminating and well-placed analysis of the different degrees of ‘audience implication’ in response to ‘you’ strategies (p. 218), which is both diagrammatically illustrated and also developed with reference to each and every work that the book has discussed up to that point. Pulling all the threads together, this section concludes the different arguments that have been explored so far and reminds the reader of how they cohere and relate to each other.
The final chapter, then, makes a timely and critically robust intervention into the use of ‘you’ as a coercive audience address in a controversial video released by the actor Kevin Spacey, in his own defence, following allegations of sexual abuse. While not directly enriching the argument about the different classifications of the second person in fiction and the positioning of the reader, this chapter nevertheless offers a useful illustration of how fictional techniques can be ‘illegitimately’ adopted in real-life discourses that can have ethical repercussions for real people.
The rise of the second person in narrative has long been in need of a full exploration of its various referents and effects. Sorlin's book has achieved this in a rich and nuanced study of ‘how the reader imaginatively “simulates” the narrator's thoughts and experience, trying to make sense of them through empathic enactment’ (p. 230). As we discover throughout this exploration, the roles that the reader can occupy are multiple and diverse, just as the character referents of ‘you’ are multiple and diverse. Each of these roles and referents, illustrated with a powerful textual example, brings clarity and depth to Sorlin's initial categorisations. Drawing on socio-cognitive theories of intersubjectivity, alongside some of the finest examples of critical theory, Sorlin develops a stylistic analysis that is as captivating and empowering as the subject of her book – the second-person pronoun.
