Reading Unnatural Minds in ‘Dead Fish’

Herman (1994, 2002) proposes five modalities of textual you, each of which accommodate a different type of narrative address and pivot on a specific use of the second person. His model consists of five types of textual you: (1) generalised you which refers to a text’s narrator and/ or protagonist through a process of ‘deictic transfer’ (see Margolin, 1984, 1986); (2) fictional reference; (3) fictionalised (= horizontal) you, which denotes the address of fictional enactors within the text-world; (4) apostrophic (= vertical) you, which extends beyond the fictional ontological frame of a narrative to address the reader; and (5) doubly deictic you, which denotes an interactive form of address that transcends both the virtuality and the actuality of the reading experience, reaching both fictional enactors and the reader (see Herman, 1994: 380-381). Herman is using ‘virtuality’ and ‘actuality’ here to draw a distinction between the text-world (vituality) and the discourse-world (actuality), suggesting that the use of double deixis, by triggering what is technically a fleeting word-switch, appears to blur the boundary between these ontological levels. I would argue then, that the use of ‘you’ within the text shifts between generalised you, referring to the text’s narrator, fictionalised (horizontal) you in the address of the narratee and doubly deictic you ‘in which we get a superimposition of virtuality (the fictional protagonist) and actuality (the reader), versus the wholesale actualization of you achieved by way of apostrophe’ (Herman, 1994: 387) (emphasis in original).

According to Phelan (1994: 351), ‘when the second-person address to a narratee-protagonist both overlaps with and differentiates itself from an address to actual readers, those readers will simultaneously occupy the positions of addressee and observer’. When experiencing ‘doubly deictic you’ the reader is both positioned within the text-world, aligned with the perspective of the ‘you’, and simultaneously occupies the role of observer from their ontologically distinct discourse-world position. This positioning is realised as a result of psychological projection and processes of identification (Whiteley, 2014: 400; 2011). Projection (as outlined in Chapter 3) describes the ability of readers to shift their deictic centre, or zero reference point (that is their sense of the here and now, see Bühler, 1982, Green, 1995a), onto someone or something within the text-world, so as to understand the deictic parameters of the discourse itself (see Gavins, 2007: 40). In the case of ‘Dead Fish’ this ‘someone’ is likely to be the narratee as a result of the doubly deictic second-person address experienced throughout the narrative. Such address encourages the reader to position himself or herself alongside the narrator (the ‘I’ of the narrative whose perspective encodes the deictic parameters of the text-world itself (see Green, 1995a; Benveniste, 1971)) and imagine himself or herself as the co-participant of this particular interaction.

However, the experience of enacting the role of narratee and taking on the supposed ‘relevant schemata’ of that fictional entity (Lahey 2005: 286; Whiteley, 2014: 404) should prove particularly estranging for, as argued by Kacandes (1993: 141), ‘to read the address is to perform what one reads’ and the narratee in ‘Dead Fish’ is the actor of several material action processes (e.g. ‘slide with me down the seam of Alice’s long jacket’ (Appendix F: 69)) that are logically impossible within the reader’s discourse-world. Such actions, alongside the unnatural mind-styles of the ‘we’, could therefore reduce immersion in the text-world, and readers may feel alternatively ‘shifted’ at such unnatural moments, ‘from a position of direct address to one of observation at a greater emotional or ethical distance’ (Whiteley, 2014: 404). At these moments, the use of ‘you’ will be felt to align more with the perspective of an alternate fictional entity (i.e. fictionalised (= horizontal) address), creating an alienating rather than immersive effect (see Whiteley, 2014: 404).

The positioning of the reader therefore fluctuates throughout ‘Dead Fish’ and may be experienced differently by readers depending on whether they feel able to imaginatively enact the role of narratee. Such interpretative disparity was highlighted in the discourse of my reading group participants, who reported varying accounts of their own text-world projection. For example, Participant 6 drew specific attention to her initial feelings of immersion in the narrative, having aligned with the deictic centre of the ‘you’ addressed in the opening paragraph:
P6. in those first few lines erm I was like oh oh I’m in this I’m so in this book in this story erm and it did feel like I felt a bit weightless as I was reading it as if I was being sped around carried through the story
Participant 6 reports a feeling of being ‘inside’ the book, exemplified by the repeated prepositional statement ‘I’m in this’. The preposition highlights Participant 6’s feelings of transportation (see Gerrig, 1993) during reading, indicating her sense of deictic projection to a remote spatio-temporal position that was distinct from her own. As a result of such projection, she reports feeling ‘weightless’ during reading as if she was being ‘sped around’ or ‘carried through the story’. In addition to projecting her sense of space onto the text-world, Participant 6 also undertakes a level of perspective-taking projection (Whiteley, 2011; 2014) to reconstruct aspects of the narratee’s world-view. Like the narratee, she feels ‘sped around’ by the narrator and reports a similar sense of movement and lightness that is ascribed to the unnatural entities within the text-world.

In contrast, Participants 7 and 8 report feelings of alienation or distance from the unnatural entities in the text, highlighting that they did not feel included in the second-person address or a part of the first-person plural ‘us’ of which the narratee is seemingly part. This interpretative disparity is evidenced in the following extract in which participants retrospectively compare their online immersion in the text.

Within this extract, Participant 7 expresses her inability to align herself with the perspective of the narratee and/or the unnatural entities within the text-world, noting that she ‘did not feel part of whatever the narrator is’. She reflects upon the interpretations of her co-participants, who were able to position themselves in relation to the ‘we’, and seemed to identify with the unnatural perspectives of the ‘spores’ – an experience Participant 7 did not share. She argues that linguistic cues in the text, particularly those that define the collective ‘us’ of which the narrator is part, created a distancing effect and as a result she did not feel ‘the same as what’s narrating the story’. In this instance, Participant 7 reports that she was unable to recognise similarities between herself and the narrator, resulting in feelings of disassociation rather than self-implication or identification (see Whitely, 2014). Participant 8, who agrees, supports Participant 7’s responses confirming: ‘yeah we’re not part of the us’.

Interestingly, however, Participant 7 does acknowledge a level of deictic projection into the text-world when she explains that the narrator had simply ‘taken’ her with him – ‘he’s sort of taken me with him because he can’, ‘I’m just taken wherever this thing or this person wants to go when he wants to go’. In assigning the narrator such ‘power and control’ over her material actions, Participant 7 implies here that she did feel deictically positioned within the text-world during reading and aligned with the spatio-temporal perspective of the narrator; such material action processes can only be logically ascribed to an enactor of herself within the text-world. The ability of Participant 7 to project spatially into the text, yet resist perspective-taking projection, suggests that there are moments within the narrative, where it is easier to subscribe to the role of narratee. For example, it is perhaps easier to imagine oneself in an estranging setting, projecting one’s sense of time and place into a futuristic world, than to map one’s sense of self onto an unnatural mind.

Even Participant 6, who reported the highest level of immersion in the narrative, acknowledges an inconsistency in her ability to project into the role of narratee throughout the narrative, particularly in terms of her processes of perspective-taking projection. For example, Participant 6 draws attention to a moment towards the end of the narrative in which the reader is directly cued by the text to share a particular emotional response with the narrator and the unnatural entities. On Rupi’s arrival at the mouth of the underpass, the narrator states, ‘this is the moment I wanted you to see. I hope that you too have a taste for the unusual. For the brutal’. The boulomaic modal-worlds cued by the lexical boulomaic verbs ‘wanted’ and ‘hope’ highlight the narrator’s desire for the narratee to share in his emotions at this point by responding excitedly to the scenes of violence that are about to occur. Participant 6’s reaction to this particular scene is reported as follows:

I would therefore argue that ‘Dead Fish’ encourages projection into the role of narratee at fluctuating points within the narrative, allowing the reader to experience the physical decay of the text-worlds Marek presents from a close, and intimate deictic perspective. Although such projection is not necessary for a successful reading of the text, projection into the role of narratee allows the reader to feel as if they are part of the decaying city and richly conceptualise the intricate, often backgrounded world-building elements that shape such a textured image of Marek’s future world.

The fleeting world-building element of a ‘bicycle’ on line two provides the first indication of the environmental schema which runs throughout the narrative due to the intensive relational processes that modify the object in that it is ‘neglected’, and material intention processes in that it is ‘strangled’ by the anthropomorphised ‘algae’. This is the first mention of the algae-like fungus that is destroying Marek’s text-world and the first indication of the text’s ecodystopian undertones. Markers of such decay are subtly interwoven as background to the action of the narrative, most frequently as relational processes ascribed to familiar, everyday objects (e.g. ‘algae-slicked rail’ (Appendix F: 84)) or material action processes prescribed to the inanimate yet personified fungal substance (‘moss silences chimneys’ (Appendix F: 15-16)). In part, it is the ascription of such unusual attributes to familiar objects or the violent actions of the environment itself which triggers the estranging quality of the narrative and indicates a world spatially and temporally distinct to that of the my own discourse-world.

The passage also provides the first world-building information that enriches my conceptualisation of Rupi, in that he appears ‘skinny as wicker’, exemplifying his light weight and slim physique. The first use of doubly deictic you is embedded within a conditional clause – ‘if you could slow this moment down you’d see in his shoes all the places where the leather has broken away from the sole’– and cues a conditional epistemic modal-world in which we are given additional character-advancing details for Rupi. The details, which describe Rupi’s damaged shoes, are suggestive of his impoverished life-style, which in turn offers a potential justification for his theft of the fish. The attribution of a shared visual perception between the narrator and the ‘you’ in this passage is further developed with the use of the first-person plural pronoun ‘us’ – ‘showing us his pale toes’ – which aligns the reader’s perspective with that of the narrator.

The shared perspective between the reader and the narrator is further accentuated through the imperative statement ‘come with me quickly to the place where this chase began’ (Appendix F: 24-25), which directs the reader to the second narrative strand, illustrated as Text-World 2 in Figure 8.1. The statement, which infers material action, shifts both the reader’s attention in the discourse-world and the deictic centre of the narratee in the text-world with the introduction of a small marketplace:

[PASSAGE REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT. FOR FULL REFERENCE SEE, MAREK [2009] 2012: p. 10, ll. 26-37]

The description of the marketplace added further to my conceptualisation of environmental decay within the text-world, with the increasing images of ‘rot’ and the abundance of ‘tangled Grinch hair’. Drawing upon my own discourse-world knowledge, I conceptualised the plant as being a form of ‘Hair algae’ or ‘Byropsis’ (a fast-growing water plant), which suggested to me that Marek’s world was subject to widespread water pollution. This interpretation was then cemented with the presentation of the fish at the close of the passage, which are confirmed to be ‘special’.

The inhabitants of the inner city are also described during this passage as being smartly dressed and elegant, distinguishing them from Rupi, whose clothes were notably worn. In a similar way to his opening description of Rupi, the narrator guides the narratee’s attention to such details with the imperative ‘notice’, which goes on to cue a fleeting epistemic modal-world. The modal-world, which is arguably negatively shaded, further characterises the city dwellers in that they keep up pretence of elegance and class despite the evident degeneration of their surroundings. The metaphorical representation of the inhabitant’s coat pockets as ‘nurseries where the lint grows roots’ further enhances this interpretation, implying that behind such facades lies a hidden decay – which I read both in terms of literal fungal growth and more abstract societal corruption.

The reader is then moved ‘under the canopies where the soup steam gathers’ (Appendix F: 32-33) to focus upon a fishmonger’s stall – the same stall from which Rupi stole the fish. It is explained that the pursuit was so forceful due to the rarity and importance of the fish, which cannot be caught anywhere close to the city. This is outlined between lines 38 and 42 in which it is explained that ‘in all of the rivers and out at sea, fishermen’s lines have hung dead for decades […] These fish had to be brought from far away, and distances are so much further than they used to be’. The deixis in this latter sentence implies the relative spread of decay and environmental pollution. There is an implicit distance between Rupi’s city and the nearest healthy civilisation, identified by the use of distal deictic markers such ‘out at sea’, ‘brought from far away’ and the comparative declarative ‘distances are so much further than they use to be’, all of which suggest that the devastation of the text-world is further reaching than the parameters of this particular city.

The narratee is then introduced to Alice, a mother who is trying to secure a fish to cook for her child’s future headmaster. Alice is positioned as being directly next to the narrator, yet is seemingly unaware of his presence. The narrator, however, possesses an unnatural awareness of Alice, having access to her inner thoughts and memories, as exemplified in the following extract:

[PASSAGE REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT. FOR FULL REFERENCE SEE, MAREK [2009] 2012: pp. 10-11, ll. 50-68]

Sotirova (2010) states a preference for the term ‘free indirect style’ (drawn from Banfield, 1982) over alternate terms for the form, such as ‘narrated monologue’ (Cohn, 1966), ‘free indirect discourse’ (Fludernik, 1993) or ‘free indirect speech and thought’ (Leech and Short, [1981] 2007), arguing that ‘style’ allows for the inclusion of a ‘broader range of phenomenon than speech and thought’ (Sotirova, 2010: 132), which are not always articulated by a given character. In this instance, specific lexical choices, such as ‘desperately hoping’ (Appendix F: 51), ‘unthinkable’ (Appendix F: 53), ‘source of worry’ (Appendix F: 55), ‘so ruined’ (Appendix F: 66) and ‘so much depends on it’ (Appendix F: 55), align, for me, with Alice’s perspective. The narrator, up until this point, has been notably indifferent to the suffering of the other text-world enactors, and such emotional phrases are distinctly out of character. Each indication of Alice’s thoughts triggers an epistemic modal-world, as with other expressions of consciousness, that further immerses the reader in the text-world (see Gavins, 2007: 128).

Alice’s narrative provides the first indication of moral decay as she recounts the indirect speech of her peers – ‘when people talk about John Hopworth’s they talk about the history teacher who was burned alive in a toilet cubicle’ (Appendix F: 59-61) – and her niece’s experiences at the school. Although Alice presents the thought of her son attending such a school as being ‘unthinkable’ (Appendix F: 53), the violence of the children is referenced in a relatively naturalised manner as something which is both expected and commonplace within the text-world. As one critic noted in the The Short Review, it is such indications of indifferent violence that further estrange the narrative, as assumedly distressing situations have been ‘normalized’ by the author (Lee-Houghton, 2013: n.p.). Lee-Houghton argues that across The Stone Thrower (Marek, 2012g):
there’s an ordinariness to each extraordinary story or observation. These characters are desensitised to violence, the deaths of animals, the loss of parents, the admirations of individuals known to be corrupt, the handling of dead bodies, the lies told to children to protect them from the awful truth. (Lee-Houghton, 2013: n.p.)
Alice’s response to the experiences of her niece supports this assertion, as she expresses concern not for her niece’s health or mental state following her time at John Hopworth’s, but only for her sister’s ‘ruin’ and the change in her appearance – ‘Alice’s sister was so ruined by her daughter’s experiences at John Hopworth’s that they no longer share a family resemblance’ (Appendix F: 66-68). This response was particularly unexpected in terms of my own reading of the narrative, particularly given the scenes of violence and murder attributed to the school, and added further to the estranging nature of the text-world.

The ‘ordinariness’ (Lee-Houghton, 2013: n.p.) of the text-worlds is arguably most evident in the following two narrative strands, both of which zone-in on relatively familiar domestic events. The first, which is shown in Text-World 3, details a sex scene between Morris and Danya, who are introduced as ‘their sweaty limbs slap together’ (Appendix F: 90) and Morris attempts to delay his orgasm. Although the action in this scene is restricted to this one particular interaction of which Morris and Danya are clearly the figures, the surrounding ground of the narrative (i.e. the apartment itself) further enriches the schema of environmental decay that defines Marek’s world. For example, the apartment window is ‘greened up’ (Appendix F: 89), the couple’s movements ‘[antagonize] the dust mites’ (Appendix F: 90-91) that cover the floor, and Morris is described as having ‘mildew in his lungs’ (Appendix F: 92). The scene also highlights the couple’s reluctance to conceive a child in such an environment, which is understandable given the familial concerns expressed in the Alice and Rupi strands of the narrative. According to Participant 5, ‘in the context of everything else that was happening the like (.) the sense of atmosphere […] was really strong’ in the Morris and Danya strand, an interpretation I would attribute to these world-building elements that emphasise the rot and degeneration of Marek’s world.

The second domestic scene, illustrated in the fourth narrative strand, concerns Rupi’s family who are struggling to survive, occupying a small house on the ‘revolting circumference of the city’ (Appendix F: 128-129). Text-World 4 is populated in the following extract in which the reader’s attention is shifted, by a spatial world-switch, to Rupi’s home:

[PASSAGE REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT. FOR FULL REFERENCE SEE, MAREK [2009] 2012: p. 12, ll. 109-118]

The spatial world-switch in the opening sentence is triggered by the material action process ‘zip ahead’, which shifts the narratee’s deictic centre to ‘Rupi’s home’. Additional prepositional spatial markers such as ‘over the canal’, ‘past the guards at the gate’, ‘past the tall tenements’ and ‘further on, to the last of the city’ further define this spatial location, both situating the house within the suburbs – ‘the last of the city’ – and enriching the broader worlds of the text, with the addition of contextual world-building information. For example, it is indicated that the city is gated, its borders are clearly marked by an inner wall and controlled by guards who mark the gate. The image of the bordered city once again triggered discourse knowledge of other gated dystopian communities (as discussed in Section 7.4). Given the intense environmental decay and the possible illness that plagues Morris and Danya, I inferred that the wall may have been guarded to prevent freedom of movement, either to halt the spread of possible contagion or to protect the city against further infection from outsiders (as in texts such as The Dark Hollow Places (Ryan, 2011), Allegiant (Roth, 2013) or The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey, 2014)). As the city marketplace was also well stocked with soup, samphire and the eponymous fish, I also thought it possible that the wall was a safeguard against looting, an equally common trope across the genre (The People of Sparks (DuPrau, 2004), The Road (McCarthy, [2006] 2009)). Each of these inferences is based upon my knowledge of characteristic dystopian schema and narrative interrelation (Mason, 2016), both of which served to further flesh-out my conceptualisation of Marek’s world.

The final narrative strand depicts the final spatial location within ‘Dead Fish’, returning the narratee to the side of the canal, this time at the mouth of the underpass, with the deontic proposition ‘Let’s go to Rupi’s brothers now’ (Appendix F: 133). The proposition cues an embedded temporal world-switch, triggered by the proximal deictic marker ‘now’, which shifts the reader’s zero-reference point to the spatio-temporal position of Rupi’s brothers as detailed in Text-World 5 of Figure 8.1. The following passage introduces the boys and primes the reader for the narrative’s coda:

[PASSAGE REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT. FOR FULL REFERENCE SEE, MAREK [2009] 2012: p. 13, ll. 134-140]

The relational use of the third-person plural pronoun ‘they’ shifts attention onto Rupi’s brothers as a distinct group of entities that are separate from the ‘we’ of the narrator’s companions. The pronoun is followed by a brief switch into free indirect style, which in itself triggers an epistemic modal-world. Markers such as the use of intensifiers (for example, ‘so long’, ‘so well’), evaluative expressions (‘so well’) and the sensory description of the ‘cool’ ferns are clearly attributable to the minds of the boys. The sentence ‘they are almost as invisible as we are’ quickly reverts back to the voice of the narrator, adding an additional character-advancing detail – invisibility – to my schema for the collective ‘we’. The following sentence – ‘now, this is what they’ve waited for’ – arguably merges the perspective of the boys with that of the narrator, for the spatial-temporal deictic elements ‘now’ and ‘this’ align with both of their deictic positions in relation to Rupi and the officers – their arrival being what the boys and the entities have been awaiting. The switch back to the first-person confirms the narrator’s shared apprehension for Rupi’s arrival, an experience he wishes to share with the ‘you’ evidenced by the creation of two embedded boulomaic modal-worlds, cued by the boulomaic lexical verbs ‘wanted’ and ‘hope’. These worlds detail the narrator’s hopes that the narratee is equally bloodthirsty and primes the reader for the violent ending about to befall Rupi’s pursuers.