New Scholar journal
Places without a place: new possibilities for ‘airport fiction’
Tony Davis (PhD candidate, Media Department Macquarie University)
Abstract
International flight provides a strange paradox: the modern jet passenger is plied with food and alcohol as if special, yet checked, monitored and identified as if a criminal. A long haul trip involves passing over time zones and countries (and borders and sovereignty), out of sync with day and night, and for much of the time without agency (literally belted into place, denied the usual electronic props of telephone and Internet). It is a place, or perhaps a non-place as defined by Marc Augé, ruled by the tension of being effectively guilty until you can demonstrate yourself innocent. Michel Foucault cited the boat or ship – ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’ – as the ‘heterotopia par excellence.’ This paper argues that the modern jetliner is an even more intense heterotopia, further disorienting with speed and the blurring of borders and time zones (also creating what Foucault calls a heterochrony, or slice of time that is often linked to a heterotopy). t This paper further argues the metastable space entered at an airport and beyond (Fuller and Harley 5) provides untapped possibilities in fiction – and supports this argument with extracts from an extended short story/ novella by Tony Davis set entirely within a trip from Sydney to Zurich.
THE TEXT 300 words, 15 minutes)The Flying Paradox
The airport is an ‘other space’ – a real space that is linked to numerous other types of spaces, contradicting and inverting the sites which it connects.
(Fuller and Harley p. 105)
The experience of taking a long international flight is always slightly surreal, and the quirks are all the more evident if you choose to examine them closely and take notes as you go. Business Class, particularly, heightens certain paradoxes: for much of the time the traveller is being plied with food and alcohol as if royalty, yet checked, monitored and identified as if a criminal. It is an experience of freely passing over time zones and countries (and borders and sovereignty), never quite seeing a proper day or night, of being fêted by people who are determined to demonstrate you are a premium-paying passenger and therefore ‘special’, yet who also leave you almost completely without agency and for much of the time deny you your usual electronic props (telephone, email and Internet).
The progression from Sydney to Zurich (or any other long-haul international trip) is one where for much of the time the traveller is literally belted into place, within an alternative world floating above the real one, where altitude, alcohol and sleeplessness can blur everything, where small frustrations and worries can fester without release inside a metal box speeding through the firmament. It is also a place (or perhaps a ‘non-place’ to use the Marc Augé term, q.v.)1) ruled by the tension of being effectively guilty until you can demonstrate yourself innocent; at every point you are called to prove that you are who you claim to be, and that the person that you claim to be has a right to be in that precise seat, plane, lounge or zone of the terminal. You must regularly demonstrate that you are not a threat.
Airports and planes are filled entirely with people who want to be somewhere else (ground staff and aircrew aside, perhaps). As Pico Iyer puts it ‘no one knows where anyone is coming from … and no one really knows where anyone is at.’ (51). Iyer calls the airport a place where time plays tricks, where people play out major emotional moments in plain view (shouting, sobbing, passionately kissing), where people’s lives are changed irreversibly, yet all against a backdrop which is ‘an anthology of generic spaces – the shopping mall, the food court, the hotel lobby – which bears the same relation to life, perhaps, that Muzak does to music.’ (43)
The strange place between places
The non-place is a term coined by Marc Augé in 1995 in Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (the sub-title was shortened to An Introduction to Supermodernity for the 2008 edition). ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,’ he writes, ‘then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (63). These non-places are ‘spaces which are not themselves anthropological places’ and surrendered to ‘solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’ (63). Transport routes are within this world1; through the use of tickets, passports and so on, ‘the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence’ (82).
Augé says: ‘Since non-places are there to be passed through, they are measured in units of time’ while physical things such as cities below become merely denoted by signs, pilot announcements or points on a screen in front of the passenger (83-84). Similarly, in Aviopolis – A Book about Airports, Fuller and Harley point out that flights are generally explained in hours not miles. ‘Distance is a temporal rather than a spatial issue.’ (39)
It is significant that Michel Foucault, in his 1967 lecture paper on heterotopias, or other spaces, cited the boat or ship (‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’) as the ‘heterotopia par excellence’. I have come to believe that the modern jetliner achieves all that a ship does in this regard and further disorients with speed and the blurring of borders and time zones (also creating what Foucault calls a heterochrony, or slice of time that is often linked to a heterotopy and can intensify it; Foucault argues that ‘The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.’)
A heterotopia is an in-between place. It can be sacred or forbidden or, it seems, mundane. However, it is slightly outside the norm and is a place where changes occur (other examples are the boarding school and prison). The non-place can be thought of as a type of heterotopia, aligning to the third category of Foucault’s taxonomy (Collective heterotopia; ie that juxtapose ‘in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.’) The plane/airport can be both – a separated, composite space where one loses touch with countries, time and more.
In heterotopias and non-places there is a disconnectedness and a certain disorientation that can be effectively captured by the second person narrative, or SPN, voice. This has been achieved by Australian writers such as G.M. Glaskin and Peter Kocan. Glaskin, writing as Neville Jackson, in No End to the Way (1965) had as his heterotopia the secretive, dangerous gay scene of Perth in the 1960s. Kocan’s duology The Treatment and The Cure (1980 and 1983), used the mental institution. Despite the literary strength of No End to the Way, and the critical acclaim and modest commercial success of The Treatment and The Cure, little followed in the way of sustained SPN novels by Australian writers until Deb Kandelaars’ Memoirs of a Suburban Girl: A Novel in 2011, which examined an abusive relationship, unseen by all those outside. Overseas examples of effectively harnessing SPN advantages with a heterotopia include US writer Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City (1985). This was set in the drug-fuelled New York party world of the 1980s.
I am completing a creative practice PhD, looking at sustained second person in fiction. I need to write a creative work that demonstrates effective use of this form, to sit alongside what has already grown into a 70,000 word theoretical paper.Determined to find a suitable creative outlet for this intriguing and unusual mode, I began a novel set in a denuded, dystopian environment. I thought that here I could exploit the advantages of the SPN (distance and intimacy, ontological instability, multiple subjectivity, the ability to show a mind in turmoil, an invitation to take the role of the outsider) and avoid the pitfalls (primarily claustrophobia and the risk of repelling readers who are unwilling to take the part of the ‘you’). The dystopian/heterotopian environment and the character’s position as the outsider seemed ideal to make second person efficacious.
Unfortunately, the character I had chosen to focus on was too self-assured, too much an agent of her own fate, too much in control for the mode to produce the effects achieved by the likes of Kocan and McInerneyI was studying for my PhD. She (and her proxy, the reader) was too free-spirited to be hemmed in by second person. After a few chapters it became obvious the narrative mode needed to serve the needs of the story and characterisation, not the other way around. The work – in that form at least – would have to be discarded.
What is the second person
Defining the second person narrative, or SPN (an abbreviation for which we can thank Uri Margolin), is no easy feat. Second person is undoubtedly the least employed ‘person’ among the three mode of narration (first, second and third) and exact agreement on exactly what constitutes it is hard to find. Terms such as ‘Protean shape-shifter’ (Bonheim 79) and ‘devious’ (Richardson 14) have been applied to the way the pronoun ‘you’ can change its form or meaning in an SPN from paragraph to paragraph, even within a single sentence. The ‘you’ can at times be the real or implied reader, a protagonist who is either auto-narrating or having his story told to him by an outsider, or a reader-character who is participating in the story. Similarly, the one who says ‘you’ can range from that auto-narrator to a god-like, and often accusatory, voice aimed at the various incarnations of the ‘you’.
Richardson maintains that second person is a new and exciting development in literature, perhaps the most important since the introduction of the stream of consciousness (35). As if to highlight the dramatic contrast in views, others have passed it off as merely a sly way of writing in other modes. Narratologist Mieke Bal, discussing the pioneering second person novel La Modification (by Michel Butor) contests:
The narrative nature of this novel seems to be dependent on the fact that the second person cannot be sustained; without much effort, the reader ‘translates’ it into first-person format, which enables her to read on and process the text into a story. The ‘you’ cannot be subsumed by the reader’s position, nor can it be construed as the addressee of apostrophe … The ‘you’ is simply an ‘I’ in disguise, a ‘first-person’ narrator talking to himself; the novel is a ‘first-person’ narrative with a formal twist to it that does not engage the entire narrative situation, as one would expect it should.
(Bal 181)
It has been argued with equal force that second person is often displaced third-person (McHale 224; Ryan 138; among others). The ‘you’ is read as a ‘he’ or ‘she’ depending on the gender of the protagonist. Fludernik calls second person one of the most ‘non-natural’ types of narrative (290). Even if some of these ‘concessions’ were granted, there are still nuances and as Kacandes has noted, the second-person pronoun still has the power to move readers, ‘causing them to feel themselves addressed and to experience the force of an unusual relationship created between the narrator and narratee.’ Marie-Laure Ryan argues for the complexity of the SPN. She says that, depending on the text, the second person voice can be anything from ‘a boundary crossing address from the narrator in the textual world to the reader in the real world’ and a range of other possibilities (137-138). Ryan insists these uses play on our ‘instinctive reaction to think me when we hear you, and to feel personally concerned by the textual utterance’ (138).
For this paper it sufficient to go with Brian Richardson’s simple definition that a second person narrative is: ‘any narration other than an apostrophe that designates its protagonist by a second person pronoun. This protagonist will usually be the sole focalizer, and is often (but not always) the work’s principal narratee as well’ (19). However, we must also include Richardson’s disclaimer that the SPN can’t be tied down because its ‘very essence is to eschew a fixed essence’ (19).
What everyone seems to agree on is that second person can be unsettling to read. Herman talks about the ‘oftentimes disorienting, sometimes uncanny experience of reading second-person fictions’ which try to put the reader in the text and abolish the boundary between the textual and extra textual, the fictive and the real, the virtual and the actual (345). Kimberly Nance says for some people reading a second person narrative is like ‘reading someone else’s mail’. Stephanie Girard says it has been called a ‘clever party trick’, credited with giving the narrator ‘some distance from his own nonsense’, and held as annoying: ‘all the you’s pile up into a jangled heap of grammatical contortions’ (170).
Certainly second person can be a gimmick and a particularly irritating one, and also a mode that can repel readers by its inaccessibility, its claustrophobic nature, or by the way it makes readers complicit in acts or thoughts they find repulsive. However, in a small number of situations the SPN can be precisely the right choice, and its perceived limitations can be turned into advantages. If used skilfully it can fulfil Morrissette’s description of ‘producing effects in the fictional field that are unobtainable by other modes or persons’ (2), and provide authors with what Darlene Hantzis calls a ‘distinct device [that] produces distinct effects and constructs a unique textual world’ (1).
Extensive movement of the author’s ‘camera lens’, and an unsettling ambiguity, can both be achieved in a second-person or ‘you’ narrative. Second person can enable the writer, protagonist and reader to engage in an ontological shuffle that approximates the phrase Jay McInerney’s narrator uses in Bright Lights, Big City: ‘watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world…’ (166-67). The SPN form works especially well in the English language, Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin remark, because: ‘one grammatical form homonymically references male and female, singular and plural addressees, but can also be used as a generalized pronoun replacing “one,” the textual “you” has inspired a diversity of aesthetic uses.’
Eerie jet age sensations
Having abandoned the dystopian novel, I opted for a much more restricted environment – the extreme heterotopia of an aeroplane – and introduced an anxious-bordering-on-paranoid fugitive as the protagonist. By way of research I closely observed the progression from the Sydney airport lounge to plane to airport lounge to customs at Zurich. I noted the disjointed, ‘time-free’ events and sensationsnotedefully increasingly confirmed this to be the case. T and concluded it could provide the perfect liminal space, a continuum of an ‘other space’ experience stretching across continents and locking the protagonist in its prism for a full 24 hours. It could be a situation where he could truly feel he was watching himself in the world, as McInerney put it, even as he was being in the world.
Air travel can be ruled by doubt, frustration, claustrophobia, powerlessness and the tyranny of time and distance. 2Others have written about these very eerie jet age sensations, if not their suitability for a second person narrative. Aviopolis – A Book about Airports, authors Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley argue that ‘Airports are metastable, which is to say that they are stable in their constant instability’ (152). 3, which are constantly changing, yet appear stable.This instability (while appearing constant) mimics the metastable ‘you’ pronoun in an SPN, a pronoun which appears fixed yet is always shifting its intent (certainly to a much greater extent than the he or she in a conventional third person book, or the average I in a first person text). Fuller and Harley note that airport terminals almost seamlessly mix retail (particularly generic brand stores known around the world), banking and food courts with the apparatus of state, as per a non-place or collective heterotopia. Terminals are filled with nervous energy, are in constant preparation for emergency. The authors also write of the ontological transformation that occurs in the process of jet travel:
The airport not only transforms a body on the ground into a body in the air, but it also involves the incorporeal transformation of the travelling body into a series of processing categories, like citizen, passenger, baggage allowance, threat (code red) or innocent. (Fuller and Harley 44)
During the ‘motionless motion and placeless place of jet aviation’, the authors argue, one is constantly ‘othered’ as pax, citizen, consumer, security risk, traveller or anonymous free spirit. It seemed to me that this ontological slippage was a good match for that which the reader can experience in an SPN (44)my PhD). In his essay ‘Bardo Flight’, Erik Davis says ‘the grueling [sic], mind-altering reality of twenty-first-century commercial air travel’ can at times equate to a rehearsal for what Tibetans call the bardo: ‘the insubstantial in-between state said to confront the soul after death, when the contents of mind return to seduce and terrify the ego’s disoriented after-image as it reverberates into rebirth’ (348). One almost leaves the real world when entering the commercial air travel process, he arguesp.348). This submission starts with the loss of your body (‘or at least its relative autonomy and comfort’), being lined up, patted down and processed.
The terminal is the gateway to of an interzone of nowheres, a network of liminality, of thresholds and passageways and vehicles designed by the principalities of the air to move and distribute large populations of souls to their destinies – or at least their destinations. Terminal. What other journey, you might ask, begins at the end? (Erik Davis 348)
Similarly Iyer describes experiencing the ‘peculiar state of mind – or no-mind – that belongs to the no-time, no-place of the airport, that out-of-body state in which one’s not quite there, but certainly no elsewhere’ (59).
Erik Davis notes the arbitrariness of the ‘archons who rule these transit zones’4 and implies that justice is suspended along with much else (349). Many have discovered this to be the case; in 2012 Macquarie University’s Professor Noel King, an Australian in the process of travelling home from a US research trip, was grabbed by three Federal Marshals at the check-in counter at Seattle-Tacoma airport. He was handcuffed and accused of stealing three-quarters of a million dollars in Canadian gold bullion ‘among various other acts of theft and fraud’. (King and Winestock 59)
. From the airport King was transported to a Federal Detention Centre facility and spent the next six days in the Secure Holding Unit, underground with no natural light. In the end he was released with an apology; it was a mistaken identity, a coincidence drawn from the masses of information that are routinely gathered in the very process of travel (which in the US now includes finger-printing). Erik Davis describes an unpleasant travel experience of his own (he was dragged off a plane and questioned because an Eric Davis was of interest to authorities) and says: ‘Suffice it to say that the only redemption lay in seeing it all as the bardo, whose deepest teaching seems to be that our uncontrolled fears, desires, and hatreds boomerang back tenfold.’ (350)
By his own account King – incommunicado, underground, behind locked steel doors and suspended in legal limbo – soon battled anxiety and found himself at times talking or singing to himself, and sobbing (King and Winestock 61). What was pertinent to the story I was creating was that the experience of a ‘normal’ person being nabbed and taken away for questioning at a suburban bank counter or while going about their everyday business is almost unthinkable in most Western countries. Yet it seems always possible at almost any point while moving within the air travel system, even when innocent. Any tendency towards paranoia in a traveller could so easily be exacerbated, and the SPN form can further intensify the sensation of paranoia.
So how best to turn the travel experience into a work of fiction? I realised a fugitive provided an apposite character, and not merely because it gave the title ‘The Flight’ a secondary meaning. If it were a Julian Assange-type character, and the text contains hints that it is, it gave several advantages.
Firstly, it meant that readers would likely know something about him, or feel they do (apparent memoir provides a condition under which second person appears particularly effective, as Jackson, Kocan and Kandelaars have shownI have argued elsewhere)). It allowed the presentation of a character who is an outsider (second person being so often used as the voice of the outsider) and also one perceived to be self-centred and perhaps verging on paranoid. It also afforded a highly articulate voice to work with. This is not to say there was any attempt to take on Assange’s actual voice; merely that with an intelligent, articulate proselytiser as the protagonist, it was possible to strive for a literary and even poetic voice within the text, without it becoming unconvincing if the second person segues in and out of a quasi stream of consciousness (or if indeed the reader supposes at times that the character is addressing himself). The SPN voice works best when identifiable with the character, on the evidence of the novels cited within these pagesmy PhD thesis.
The text suggests the character is involved in some sort of electronic project to ‘bring truth’, or at least truth as he perceives it. There was another potential SPN advantage in centring on a technology-focussed individual in ‘The Flight’: it could ramp up the terror. Such a person is likely to be far more out of sorts when unable to ‘log in’; likewise, a man who is running an organisation under siege, such as Wikileaks, is likely to be suffering far more turmoil and doubt if isolated and without ‘his people’ on call. As already noted, air travel provides a liminal space that can help second person exploit its strengths. To further these effects, and ideally heighten them, the egocentric fugitive of ‘The Flight’ can add a mind in flux (and blurred with alcohol), a fear of betrayal and capture, fantasy, doubt, frustration, memories (real and distorted), claustrophobia, powerlessness and the tyranny of time and distance (Fuller and Harley, p. 39, point out that flights are generally explained in hours not miles. “Distance is a temporal rather than a spatial issue.”). All of these attributes are potentially useful in an SPN.
‘The Flight’ – extract oneXTRACT(1000 words, 5 minutes)
The plane is moving backwards. Slowly. You have to stare at the ground to confirm it. Yes, the luggage vans and fuel trucks are edging right-to-left across your porthole.
Surely that’s it. They can’t re-open the doors now. Not after all those false starts, not after all those apologies from the captain. Not after all those delays. God, so many gin and tonics in the lounge, your head tingling, your spare hand resting on your knees to stop them shaking. Sculling that first glass of champagne while sitting in window seat 12A, waiting to move.
Recklessly, stupidly, asking for another. Despite the knowledge that you should stay alert. Despite the certainty you should make as little contact with others as possible. Draw as little attention.
You look to your right. Outside. Away from the cabin staff, away from the man in the seat beside you, the latecomer who is no more than a dark shape in the corner of your eye. And must remain that.
The summer-hot tarmac stretches everywhere, blurring into the distant grey traffic, and the distant fog of buildings hovering above the equally colourless horizon.
Small white vehicles – their contrast heightened – follow lines in the dusk. Your fists are pulled so tight your arms are shaking. You wonder how you held the champagne flute without crushing it.
The hostess or purser, or whoever is now talking over the cabin loudspeakers, has a thick Singaporean accent. You have to concentrate, adjust. You take in just enough to know that it’s all routine. She is not announcing your worst fears: that the take-off is being aborted, that security is on its way, that a certain passenger needs to be removed and spirited back where he belongs.
Now the safety video. Stow any luggage under the seat in front of you. Click on your seat-belt. Turn off your portable electronic devices. Do as you are told. Do it now.
Gently rolling backwards, still. Stuttering every so often. Never exceeding walking pace. The loudest sound is the ventilation. You are strapped into place, to be observed at will. Already the plane is a tubular prison. A panopticon. A coffin with portholes. And this is Sydney. There are so many hours to go, so many possibilities for grief. Someone you have crossed paths with may twig. The security man at the scanning machines, who insisted on talking to you, who drew out from you a stream of nervous, galloping babble. Maybe even a joke about what might be in your bag, dangerous words that you heard for the first time as they left your lips, words borne of nervous stupidity. Or were those words all in your head?
The man’s demeanour seemed to change. Your senses heightened but haywire. Like you’d just stepped directly into the path of a car, yet believed the car wasn’t the greatest or most immediate danger.
‘Careful, sir,’ was the man’s final, ambiguous response.
Nobody else said a word more than they needed to. Not at the airline counter, not at the customs desk, not at the entry to the Business Class lounge. It was so easy to believe they were toying with you. Contriving to delay the climax. To increase the impact. Waiting for the press to arrive, perhaps. That way their success, and your humiliation, would be raised to the maximum.
Authorities – the apparatus – could still be doing exactly that. Playing a longer game. Hell, the plane has stopped! Stopped dead. What did you expect? Zurich via Singapore, taxiing backwards the whole way? And yet the heart races.
Look down at the two yellow lines next to you. Double yellow lines. Do not cross. The message of the hour, of the day, of this very, very turbulent month. Do not cross the lines.
You are still stationary. Still. Still, still.
There are planes in the distance, people luckier than you, already in the air, already beyond this nervous moment. A patch of blue sky appears in the cloudy twilight. A renewed roar of ventilation. A white noise. The perfect soundtrack for unobtrusive, procedural intervention.
Why are we stopped? Why are we stopped? Parked in the middle of nowhere. Has the captain been ordered to hit the brakes … are people unseen, a black car full of them perhaps, rushing across the fields of bitumen? The sweat flows freely; dripping from your armpits, lining the insides of your shoes and making your toes slide around. You reuse the hot towel, enjoying its new coolness on your face. A woman comes to take it and your glass.
She is staring at you, without doubt. Lingering longer than need be. Noting your age, your build, your ethnicity, guessing your height and age, matching it all against the bulletins that must be circulating already.
More instructions. Emergency exits. The ludicrous illustration of passengers – passengers who have removed their shoes and left all baggage and personal possessions behind – sliding down inflatable chutes into the water. You fight to distract yourself. To imagine the damp relief of the sea.
Better still, the relief of Siobhan. You and Siobhan, in a small apartment in the anonymity of Zurich. Her warm soft body. Her dark hair that smells of pine forests and raison bread. Her fighting fund. Her determination to clear your name. To have the dogs called off.
There is movement. Real movement. The leaving is gentle. And the direction forward. Siobhan recedes. And with her, the fantastical, distant sensation of lying in that warm double bed as the flakes of snow flutter across the bay windows.
Forward! Thank god. Though only at walking pace. Could the plane be going back to the terminal? There’s no proof where it is headed. No order to the white and yellow lines that snake all over the tarmac, or to the captain’s decision to steer this cigar tube left, and then right, and then left.
More instructions. Pull on the red tag for the life raft. Observe the position of the light and whistle. Yeah, sure, survivors of jet crashes are pulled out of rubber dinghies every day. Saved by their penlight torches and junior soccer referee whistles.
‘The Flight’ – extract two
‘Whatever you recommend,’ you say, shielding your eyes as if the lights behind her are too bright.
A short while later the woman brings you a Tiger Beer. Again you cover your eyes. Obvious. Too obvious.
‘Excellent choice,’ says the dark shape in the seat next to you. You tense up again. You take the can and the glass. You can’t but help see his wide, dark face. It’s like he’s grinning at you through a fish bowl. ‘Tiger Beer. Ah, Tiger Beer!’ he adds.
You risk a quick smile in return, willing it sufficient to end any further interaction. The man asks the hostess for water. Plain water, no ice, no lemon. You refrain from saying ‘Shit choice.’ He is from Singapore too, you suppose. Would either of them recognise one Euro from another?
Hard, dull land extends below. Trees and fenced paddocks. The green fields below only hinted at. The red haze on the horizon is thicker, the blue above is darkening with every minute. Your Tiger Beer is finished.
“‘Another,’ you say, when the hostess brings a small tray of nuts. You hope a second serving will soften the uncomfortable edginess that refuses to leave your system. You have managed to place your order with little more than a wave of the can. It saved asking questions.
‘Tiger Beer. Ah, Tiger Beer!’ you repeat to yourself, trying to capture the nondescript inanity with which your neighbour voiced the phrase. You convince yourself the alcohol content is low, so your excellent choice won’t cost your alertness. You are kidding yourself. You are good at it. You know it.
Your neighbour is now wearing headphones and typing away. You are glad.
More nuts arrive. A blue bag with socks and eyeshades. A menu. The small print on the beer can reveals the truth: 5 per cent alcohol. That second Tiger beer sneaks into the gap left by your extinguished anger. It fills your head, backed by a chorus of earlier drinks. It is telling you – a slightly unsteady you – that they can all get rooted. That you are too smart, too strong for them, that an army of web followers from every pocket of the world can’t be beaten. If this army’s field marshal has overstepped the mark – just a little, just occasionally – then so be it. The world needs people with a burning passion. You are still The Visionary. Just like those early, entirely positive, media stories said.
‘The Flight’ – extract three
0 words):Welcome to the Garden City. You don’t feel welcome. Past a couple of people in uniform. No-one seems to notice you, or where you are headed. Again, it could be part of the theatre. Lulling you into dropping your guard. Allowing them to wind up the drama.a time banner along the bottom, counting out the hundredths of a second.Focus you fool! There it is: B4. That’s in Terminal 3. You have to catch a Skytrain. Jesus … how hard are they trying to make this?Boarding pass and passport out says the announcement.
You become a waiting machine.
At last, the pilot advises: we have begun our descent into Zurich. You twist and turn the phrase in your mind. You commenced your dissent a long time earlier. If only we would all commence our dissent. Then real changes could be made.
You pull up the side screen definitively and see alps jutting through clouds. Frozen lakes separate them. A dazzling polarisation has painted everything black or silver. Looking at this scene, you could almost believe in beauty.
More alps, more lakes, more clouds, more mountains. A thin line of red above it all, the hint of an imminent sun. Colours slowly seeping into the monochrome below.
Dawn. Switzerland. Technicolor. Hope.
You must return to your seat, secure your tray table. Make sure your laptop computer and other electronic devices are turned off. It is a safety requirement that … like you could give a shit about any of that stuff. And on a day like today. All you know is you are on the cusp of Zurich. You have made it this far. You wish you could fast forward that little bit and arrive at the credits. But it’s all on tape, and the tape is running at the wrong speed. Time itself slows and deepens. The whiteness below moves up to swallow the plane. But in no hurry. No hurry at all.
Rocky outcrops jut through the cotton wool. In the new glare everything returns to silver and black. A gelatin print. The progress glacial.
Sudden vibration. The plane leans. The clouds have cleared. You are sitting right at the leading edge of the wing, you realise for the first time.
That wing is pointing down at a village, a village dropped carelessly among what look like black hills. Vortices of cold air swirl across the wings, giving hints as to your true speed. Yet nothing is happening quickly enough.
The lower ground is white with snow. Anything vaguely flat is sectioned off into blocks. Farms, whatever. Hurry up.
More vibrations. Lift music is playing through the sound system. The bottom of the plane might have just fallen out. You realise it is the wheels clunking down. Clunking with the sound of a jail door.
The ground – and salvation – is in clear site.
fugitive’s body found in Swiss plane wreck.
Conclusion
The SPN is rare in fiction, except when used occasionally in a colloquial manner (‘you know how it feels when…), and it is an exceeding rare occurrence where it is used throughout a novel. Only slightly more than a dozen sustained second person novels printed in English could be identified by this researcher, and there was shown to be huge variety among them. Nonetheless some traits were observed: the novels (and indeed short stories that made sustained use of the mode) tended toward brevity, intense emotions and traumatic situations and often took place in heterotopias – or non-places. The SPN mode often heightens the claustrophobia and trauma.
At their best they support Hantzis’s assertion that the SPN is a ‘distinct device [that] produces distinct effects and constructs a unique textual world’. Butor’s La Modification and several works that followed have presented a narrator that seemed to be at times fully within the character’s consciousness and at times outside, without the now common technique of toggling between first and third person, and with a very different feel to free indirect discourse. Furthermore the SPN technique can add elements on narratorial and ontological instability and can present an unsettling, dreamy feel. This is why Richardson’s sees it as ideal for showing a ‘mind in flux’ (35).
The second person voice also coaxes the reader to walk in the shoes of an outsider (such as Kocan’s Len Tait, or the fugitive in ‘The Flight’). It can increase the fear factor, reduce the sense of agency and, when combined with present tense, offer immediacy and a sense that anything could happen next. The SPN voice also allows the author’s ‘camera lens’ to move in and out to give a broader picture of the situation than allowed in, say, first person.
Although the SPN seems particularly suited to trauma stories, in ‘The Flight’, I have produced something closer to La Modification – in which a man wrestles with a major decision while travelling between two cities – though there is obviously extreme stress involved. The aim was to exploit as many of the SPN advantages as possible and also hopefully avoid the pitfalls also identified.
Richardson’s claim that second person may ‘turn out to be one of the most important technical advances in fictional narration since the introduction of the stream of consciousness’ (35) could be seen as optimistic, particularly considering the slight activity since he wrote those words. However his intention was almost certainly to shed light on the unrealised potential of this powerful mode, which undoubtedly will find new expressions in fiction going forward. In that sense, the SPN future is exciting and may yet be bountiful.
Endnotes
1Edward Relph suggests a similar concept; he uses the term ‘Placelessness’ for what he describes as ‘the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardised landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place.’ (preface, unnumbered). Relph looks at a variety of forms of ‘placelessness’, which he defines as ‘a weakening of the identity of places to the point where they not only look alike but feel alike and offer the same bland possibilities for experience’. Into his sub-category of ‘Uniformity and standardisation in places’ he places airports. He contrasts this with an ‘authentic geography’, which is ‘primarily the product of the efforts of insiders, those living in and committed to places, and a geography which declares itself only to those insiders or to those willing and able to experience places empathetically.’
EndsCONTRIBUTOR BIO Anthony Llewellyn (Tony) Davis
After many years working as a journalist and author, Tony Davis completed an M.Phil with Macquarie University’s Media Department in 2010 and is now a PhD candidate there under the supervision of Dr Peter Doyle and Dr Willa McDonald. Davis has written widely for the mainstream press, and is the author of books for adults and children. These include Sydney Morning Herald, Age and Australian Financial Review). His books include the offbeat literary memoir F. Scott, Ernest and Me, the Roland Wright novels for upper primary readers, Wide Open Road (the companion volume to the ABC television series) and, most recently, The Big Dry, a dystopian children’s novel.
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by Gillian Fuller and Ross Harleyby Erik Davis (YETI books, Portland, 2010).Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Translated by John Howe (Verso, London-New York, 1995) The global soul: jet lag, shopping malls, and the search for home, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2000Place and Placelessness, Pion Limited, London, 1976.The Big Dry, HarperCollins, Sydney 2013.Keywords
Travel, fiction, second person narrative, non-places, heterotopia, heterochrony, placelessness, short story, novella
Spelling note
Australian English.
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