LITERATURE: If on a winter’s night… – 2nd Person POV

Chapter 2 (!) brings us back into the reading mode of the book, that is, the narrator addressing us as ‘you’ and telling us how to go about returning Calvino’s book because it appears to be a printer’s error in how it’s put together.

The bookseller maintains his composure. "Ah, you, too?  I’ve had several complaints already.  And only this morning I received a form letter from the publisher.  You see?  ‘In the distribution of the latest works on our list a part of the edition of the volume If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino has proved defective and must be withdrawn from circulation.’ (p. 28)

Whereby the bookseller points to a young woman who has just returned the book.  This gives ‘you’ opportunity to meet her:

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision; or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. (p. 29)

And here’s the sticky wicket with second person pov: it may not suit you as reader to become the ‘you’ of Calvino’s (or anybody else’s–I wrote a second person pov short story once that involved the reader’s appraisal of ‘her’ own naked body) image of you as reader.

Obviously, this Other Reader holds a certain attraction to ‘you’ as more than a fellow literature enthusiast; ‘you’ think she’s hot.  Huh?

Well just as Roland Barthes has taught me that reader changes story, story changes reader is often a more readily accepted fact of life.  So there should be no problem for me here.  I tend to think more like a man than a woman (stereotyping, I know, but there are biological differences and proof that cognitive forces are influenced by gender–and I’m not saying "smarter"; I’m saying "different") in many ways.  It’s just that picking up a girl has never been one of them.