When "I" speak(s) to "you" : the literary subject as an effect of pronominal play in two works by contemporary women writers

The deictic property of pronouns, words that stand for proper names and only take on referential status in the context of a specific utterance, is a fascinating area of study inasmuch as pronouns are pivotal to the construction of a sense of subject. The process of constructing the literary self is especially problematic as it also involves the equivocal placement in time and space of the written subject. This thesis examines that process In relation to the way two contemporary women writers make use of first- and second-person pronouns in two texts, and in so doing proposes a theory of women's first-person fiction as a subversive strategy to write outside the dominant patriarchal ideology. Part I: When "I" speak(s) to "you", not only does the text mark empty spaces to be filled, offering up literary béances as signposts to ravishment, but reader, text, and writer also participate in a triadic exchange of personal positions that turns the fixed origo of the deictic "I, here, and now" into another twist of the kaleidoscope, a temporary tableau of subjectivity. When "I" speak(s) to "you", language converts into speech by making the personae the dramatic necessity of the linguistic act; but literary speech localizes itself within a context that is endlessly locatable: with every reader and every reading, a different instantiation. By writing letters to their children, diaries to themselves, or literary products that exclude themselves from main-stream genres, women find in the false dialogism of "you"-addressed monologues a way of sustaining the illusion that one can write outside of patriarchal ideologies by denying the arbitrariness of the sign. "S/he" is patently a fictional construct, and the third person the venerable mode of epic and novelistic narration. When I speak to you, we seemingly short-circuit that channel and make of our communication both a detour around the symbolic order and a transparently direct line to the Other. Part II: In Oriana Fallaci's Lettera a un bambino mai nato this direct line is an umbilical cord, and her speech a series of lessons told as fables. The unnamed "you" makes possible the transmission of personal experience in a form that seems harmless and childish. Fallaci makes her work innocuous by stripping it of references to time, place, or person, so that the journalist, a chronicler of public History, is able to don the mask of private writer communicating personal history. This act is made possible by the equivocal functioning of the pronouns. Part III: Marguerite Duras, a self-avowed exile from writing at the time she wrote the three Aurélia Steiner texts, and, above all, from writing as a coherent story with well-crafted characters that develop along the linear exigencies of beginning, middle and end, finds in the peripatetic nomination of "you" and "I", an opening to a "post-Holocaust" solution to narrative. The shifting lines of Aurélia's tri-partite story are paralleled in the proliferation of "shifters" which fracture and disperse the unity of the text, preventing total mastery by the reader, while also frustrating the reader's efforts to construct a monolithic sense of self and Other.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat