The role of style in reader-involvement:

Deictic shifting in contemporary poems

LESLEY JEFFRIES

Abstract

This article investigates the language of two contrasting contemporary poems

in English: “Mittens” by Peter Sansom and “Pain tells you what to wear” by
Mebdh McGuckian. The different experiences of reading them are explored
using concepts drawn from the narrative theories of Emmott (1997), deictic
shift theory (see McIntyre 2006), and blending theory (see Dancygier 2005),
with the aim of explaining some of the apparent differences of reader-involve-
ment. Questions of identity and reference are raised in relation to the use of
pronouns in such poems, the potential effects of blending of deictic centres
is explored and the different literary effects of bringing the reader into the
deictic centre or voiding the deictic centre are discussed.

1.  Introduction: The question of reader-involvement

This article addresses the question of whether reader-involvement in a poem

can be at least partly explained by reference to stylistic features. In particular it
raises the possibility that we could explain reader-involvement partly by refer-
ence to features of deixis (Lyons 1968: 275–280), which recent developments
in cognitive stylistics (e. g., Stockwell 2002; McIntyre 2006) have begun to
frame in such a way that the reader’s perspective and text processing is the fo-
cus of the analysis. The trigger prompting this question was the experience of
reading two poems which appeared to me to produce somewhat different read-
er reactions, quite independently of their content, though both are poems that I
admire. These poems are “Mittens” by Peter Sansom (1994: 27) and “Pain tells
you what to wear” by Mebdh McGuckian (1984: 40). It seemed to me that the
former was more immediately psychologically involving for the reader than
the latter, not in terms of empathy or identity, but in the sense that the reader is
‘invited into’ the story world more clearly in “Mittens” than in “Pain tells you

JLS 37 (2008), 69–85 0341-7638/08/037–69

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what to wear”. The question which arose from these reading experiences was
“What is the stylistic basis (if any) for this difference of experience?”
An enterprise of this kind (comparing two poems stylistically) is fraught
with problems. For a start, it is like comparing apples and oranges, and there
is little sense in which we can say that it is therefore a controlled experiment.1
However, I did carry out a relatively limited initial reader-response study on
42 first-year undergraduates who were in the early stages of studying stylistics,
and who had had no exposure to cognitive theories of style and had only the
typical, quite limited British arts undergraduate’s experience of reading con-
temporary poetry.
The students were given both poems, half (20) being asked to read the
McGuckian poem first and half (22) the Sansom poem first. They were asked to
choose which of the poems involved them more as a reader – and were also told
that this was not a question of which characters they most identified with or felt
empathy for, but was more a question of which poem made them feel that they
were ‘present’ within the story being told. They were also asked to explain in
their own words why they felt this was so. A supplementary sheet ascertained
the students’ educational background as well as their general tendency to read
contemporary poetry either for their studies or for pleasure. By a large margin
(36 of 42), the students chose the Sansom poem as being more involving.
This limited reader-response survey suggested to me that one aspect of this
problem in the case of these two poems is that the McGuckian poem is difficult
to read for those unaccustomed to regular reading of contemporary poems.
This was confirmed by the results of the survey which showed that literary
competence is a reasonable predictor of the choice of McGuckian’s poem in
preference to Sansom’s.2 To be certain that the particular effects of deictic
shifting, priming and blending are central to the reader’s experience, as I will
claim, will require further exploration of a range of other poems with similar
features, though controlling all variables is not an easy task when one is deal-
ing with poetry.
A forerunner to this article is Jeffries (2000a) where I argued that Duffy
found numerous ways of involving the reader in the deictic field of her poems.
As well as using the first person and proximal place deictics in some of them,
she underlines the deictic centre of the narrator on occasion by using distal
deixis to emphasize the perspective of the speaking voice:
Downstairs they will think I have lost my mind
[‘Small Female Skull’: 109]
This poem takes place in a bathroom where the speaker is trying to recover from a
hangover. The use of ‘Downstairs’ gives us the speaker’s perspective and places us
in the bathroom with the speaker, in order to see the ground floor as being ‘down-
stairs’. To this extent, despite being distal, it works to draw us into the poem. (Jef-
fries 2000a: 58–59)

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   71

This example confirms a tendency, noted by Furrow (1988), for deictic fre-
quency (whether proximal or distal) to be related to what I am calling reader
involvement:
comparatively speaking, the more deictics in a narrative passage, the stronger the
link with the reader, who is treated as a listener, as someone who can be made to
picture and respond to the same events as the narrator. (Furrow 1988: 375)
Furrow compares a number of narratives, including a story (“In Another
Country”) by Hemingway, where the deixis is less frequent than in some of
her other examples, and she attributes some of the reader’s estrangement from
Hemingway’s protagonist to the “relative paucity of deictic terms.” (Furrow
1988: 372).
The theory of deictic shifting may be useful in explaining the mechanisms
that Duffy appears to use – and Hemingway eschews – in creating the effects
noted above. This theory, developed from the linguistic phenomenon by cogni-
tive scientists, provides a way of explaining the reader’s positioning within the
text world, by identifying the deictic triggers in a text which cause the reader to
view the text world from a different angle. Thus, it is thought that the way that
deictic expressions work in narrative is that they cause the reader to take up
the deictic positioning of the character, place and time which are indicated by
the textual triggers. Unlike everyday interaction, then, where the first person
pronoun I typically references the person speaking, the use of first person in
a narrative both identifies the narrator and also provides a perspective for the
reader to enter the text world. McIntyre (2006) describes this contribution of
DST to stylistic analysis as follows:
[Deictic shift] theory is in part an attempt to explain how it is that readers often
come to feel deeply involved in narratives, to the extent that they interpret events in
a narrative as if they were experiencing them from a position within the story world.
(McIntyre 2006: 92)

In order to explain how the deictic shifting takes place, we can draw on the
concepts of binding and priming from Emmott (1997) whose work on narra-
tive understanding includes the proposal that readers have different levels of
awareness of narrative features, with those most centrally engaged at any one
time being seen as primed, whereas those which are present in the reader’s
consciousness, but not actively engaged, are seen as bound but not primed:
Binding means simply that ‘episodic’ links between entities (people and places) are
established, thereby creating a context which is monitored by the mind. (…)
Priming, by contrast, is used in this study to describe the process by which one par-
ticular contextual frame becomes the main focus of attention for the reader. Since
any one sentence of a narrative will normally only follow events in one context,
the reader processing that sentence will concentrate on the action occurring in that
particular place. (Emmott 1997: 123)

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In order to explain aspects of how deictic shifting takes effect in literary texts,
it may be helpful also to draw on the model provided by blending theory which
proposes that against a background conceptual field two mental input spaces
may be blended to form an emergent structure or blended space. This notion
of conceptual blending, proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), not only
explains our understanding of metaphor, but applies also to blends which are
not metaphorical. Dancygier, for example, uses the idea of the blend to explain
our sense of self:
The vital relation which is perhaps most saliently subject to numerous compressions
and decompressions is Identity. Every person’s sense of a unique identity is in fact a
result of various types of blends. Conceptual integration can explain how we main-
tain a coherent sense of self in spite of a number of changes in appearance, social
and family role. (Dancygier 2005: 102)

Whilst this may be the norm for human psychology, it is nevertheless exploited
in various ways by writers, including Jonathan Raban, whose work Dancygier
discusses in the following extract:
The persona represented by I is not in fact decompressed, as it includes both the
writer’s current sense of self and the memory of his childhood thoughts. In other
words, the writer’s adult, present understanding of his childhood is projected into
the past space. (Dancygier 2005: 103)
Here, Dancygier is exploring the cognitive features of a scene in which Raban
as his adult self is present in and observing a scene where his childhood self is
sitting with his father. The adult self (now) and the father (then) are, therefore,
of a similar age, though the narrator is conscious of ‘being’ both adult and
child. What Dancygier seems to be arguing is that normally we blend our dif-
ferent ‘selves’ into a single identity, but in focusing on any one of them, as we
regularly do in life, we decompress this blend, in order to allow for differences
of age, appearance, cognitive outlook and so on. In the scene described, this
normal decompression has not taken place, at least cognitively, as the narrator
is both child and adult simultaneously.
Emmott (2002) also discusses blending in relation to the phenomenon of the
‘split self’, and notes that it provides a model of how readers produce ‘coun-
terfactual’ versions of referents in many everyday communications, where one
might, for example, produce an utterance such as “my mother was a poorly
baby”, when the person concerned was clearly not a mother at the time that she
was a baby. These considerations will be of some use in analyzing “Mittens”
in Section 2 below.
In the analysis that follows, I will attempt to trace the shifting deictic centre
in the course of reading the two poems under consideration here, using aspects
of Emmott’s model and blending theory to draw some tentative conclusions
about the potential effects on the reader.

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   73

2.  Deictic shifting in “Mittens”

In order to investigate the usefulness of deictic shifting as an explanation of

how a reader might respond to “Mittens”, we can investigate its deictic struc-
ture, and consider the extent to which the reader is presented with a clear series
of deictic centers from which to view the events of this poem.
At first sight, “Mittens” has apparently consistent person deixis, since the
first person narrator continues throughout. The deictic shift of a reader’s view-
point into a first person narrated poem may not differ a great deal from that
involved in reading a novel or story, though there may be a greater expectation,
in the absence of clear clues to the contrary, that a first person narrator has the
same identity as the poet. It is also possible that reading a poem (rather than
other genres) increases the likelihood of readers reading from the same point
of view as a first person narrator.
The question of time deixis is not quite so straightforward, since in the first
stanza there is a repeatedly shifting deixis of time where the present tense verbs
(italicized here) are interleaved with references to past time (underlined here):
I am wearing mittens.
I’ve not worn mittens since Infants,
can still smell the stink of the toilets,
still feel the grey thick-painted cloakroom pegs.
I don’t know if there was string to them then
but there’s string to these,
a couple of metres threaded through the sleeves.
The coat is bright blue.
The mittens are red, hand-knitted.
I’d forgotten how hard it is to grip in mittens.
Though this may be a fairly standard way of referencing the past in a present
tense narrative, we may call upon the notion of priming to demonstrate that
there is a sense in which the past is repeatedly primed too, though with a fairly
fast return to the present in each case.
Present and past tense, which may be seen as deictically proximal and distal
respectively, may in narrative terms nevertheless each ‘prime’ their respective
time dimensions when they are used conventionally. The use of the present
tense in the first stanza of “Mittens”, however, can be seen as priming the past
as well, the present tenses in lines three and four particularly (can smell; (can)
feel) prime the past experience by making it proximal, as do the devices which
link present and past time, such as the present perfect verb form (‘ve not worn)
indicating that something is happening now that also happened in an earlier
period. Similarly, the adverb still itself iteratively presupposes the experiences
of school in the past as well as appearing to assert that the narrator can smell
the toilets and feel the grey paint in the present. The adverb since likewise

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presupposes the wearing of mittens in Infant school, but links this experience
to the present.
These alternating time references may cause the readers of this poem, then,
to psychologically place themselves repeatedly in the present and then the past
of the narrator’s deictic field. This (narrator’s) perspective is primed by the
first person and present tense at the start of the poem, though I would also
argue that the use of the first person pronoun in particular may allow read-
ers to continue to have their own personal default deictic field bound (though
not necessarily primed) during the reading process. Though adult speakers of
the language are accustomed to interpreting ‘I’ as referring to any individual
speaker they encounter, poems in particular often appeal to the reader’s own
experience as much as they present a range of other people’s experiences.
Expectations from readers of poems, then, may include a willingness to
identify with a first person narrator, made possible by the use of ‘I’ in normal
self-expression, but also a willingness to interpret the poem more broadly in a
way that is relevant for the reader her/himself. This possibility that the reader
retains some sense of self whilst also shifting into the persona of a character
requires more investigation, though I would suggest that it may even work for
characters in clearly dramatic poems such as the murderer in Duffy’s poem
“Psychopath” (Duffy 1985: 43), where the reader may be more inclined than
we might expect to inhabit the mind of someone in many ways rather different
from themselves. These are mechanisms – the stronger possibility of identi-
fication with a first person narrator and the inclusion of some element of the
reader’s own deictic field on analogy with the narratorial deictic field – which
may differ between genres and occur more readily in poems than other longer
narratives.
Note that at this stage in “Mittens” the reader is not presented with much
incongruity beyond the alternating of time references, though the wearing of
mittens on strings in the present is perhaps mildly disturbing as the narrator
appears to be an adult and the vivid presentation of memories of school through
the marginal senses of touch and smell might give us our first sense that this
narrator is really experiencing these memories. Though shifting between deic-
tic fields of time occurs in this way in the first seven lines, the next two lines
settle back into a purely present tense narrative, and the only hint of some
kind of merging of the time zones is in the unusually bright (and thus childish)
colors of this adult man’s coat and mittens followed by the final line which
reminds us that a similar experience took place in the past (I’d forgotten). The
incongruities of the text, whereby the narrator appears to be at once a small
boy and an adult man, emerge more strongly in the second – and final – stanza
and create less a sense of deictic shifting between two different ages of the first
person narrator than a blending of the two into a new, rather unusual, character
who is an adult but is being treated like a child, probably by a mother-figure

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   75

(though the exact relationship between the two is not explained). Instead of one
concrete item (the mittens) triggering a series of vivid memories, the memories
themselves have become the present tense reality for this man:
She tucks my scarf in and fastens
the last toggle, ‘Stand up straight.
Don’t pull faces, you’ll stop like it.’
She brushes my hair. ‘There.’
We are by the back door now. It is smaller,
almost so that I have to bend.
It still sticks. ‘Wait,’ she says, and
bows my face to hers, ‘you can’t go out like that.’
She licks her hankie, and rubs
at the stubble on my cheek I must have missed.

The first five lines of this stanza could be interpreted by a skilled reader as in-
dicating a flashback, since this kind of shift to the historic present tense occurs
in many narratives both in literary works and in our daily lives. Though she
is not dealing with a historic present example, Emmott nevertheless demon-
strates that there are often relatively few – or no – cues when a flashback takes
over from and returns to a main narrative:
In narrative generally it seems to be quite common for the past perfect, having oc-
curred at the opening of a flashback, to be used intermittently thereafter or for there
to be a permanent reversion to the simple past for the remainder of the flashback.
This means that the verb form of the flashback in Example 6.3 is indistinguishable
in many sentences from the verb form of the main narrative. (Emmott 1997: 185)

While deictic shift theory and Emmott’s work on priming tell us how the read-
er concludes whether a flashback is underway when there are textual triggers,
in the case of “Mittens” it is harder to pin down, since the present tense contin-
ues uninterrupted throughout. The only reason that a reader may consider the
flashback interpretation of the beginning of the second stanza is that it would
explain the incongruous treatment of the adult male narrator as a child and
the presence of a female figure who has not appeared before. In purely textual
terms, then, there is no way of knowing in these first five lines, though the first
stanza context may incline us towards the uncomfortable reading that this is
genuinely happening in the present to the adult narrator, whilst the disjunction
with what we know about the world may incline us to revise the deictic field to
one in the past (i. e. a flashback), but described in the historic present tense.
However, there are some incongruities later in the stanza which do not allow
such a wholesale shift back in time, and keep the reader from resolving the
narratorial ‘problem’ in this way. These incongruities include the use of a com-
parative, smaller, with the presupposition that the door used to be (i. e. seem)
bigger; the return to the use of still, as in the first stanza, to indicate that two

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76   Lesley Jeffries

temporal deictic fields are in play; the need to bow the narrator’s face down
to the woman’s, rather than the other way around, and the stubble (rather than
food) which is wiped from the adult narrator’s cheek. These four clues, in Em-
mott’s terms, prime the present time, and yet the sense of past time seems also
to be primed in some way by the clues’ clear link to the narrator’s childhood.
From the point of view of deictic fields, this causes the reader a problem: how
can both past and present time (and their consequent events) be primed simulta-
neously? If we consider the example from blending theory given earlier, where
Dancygier discussed the simultaneous presence of Jonathan Raban’s adult and
child personae, we may have one way of approaching the situation in the poem.
“Mittens” contains a very similar kind of blend to the Raban example, at
least in the second stanza, and to the less extraordinary cases of different selves
being blended referred to by Emmott (2002). Whereas in the first stanza there
seemed to be two different times alternately primed, with different versions of
the narrator, the second stanza seems to arrive at a point where the past and
present time and the young and adult identities of the narrator are merged into
a single entity (Figure 1).

young blended adult

narrator narrator narrator

Figure 1. Blended narrator in “Mittens”

The two deictic fields, in other words, are simultaneously primed, though this
causes the reader some difficulty in reconciling what may appear to be an
abnormal situation with the mother figure being represented in the present,
although belonging to the past. It is also possible that the reader, whose own
deictic field is still partly bound by the continued use of the first person, may
experience a similar awareness of both young and older versions of her/him-
self, thus creating a further emergent space in which the present/past of narra-
tor/reader is the outcome (Figure 2).

young/adult blended young/adult

narrator narrator/reader reader

Figure 2. Blended reader and narrator identities in “Mittens”

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   77

One of the questions that this text raises is why the reader is not alienated by
this poem which breaks the norms of deictic referencing and challenges norms
of personal deixis too. This same question might be asked of any text which
creates a text world at odds with the reader’s actual world. Before addressing
this question, I wish to compare the McGuckian poem with “Mittens”, to see
how their deictic fields and priming/binding compare.

3.  Deictic shifting in “Pain tells you what to wear”

The opening of the McGuckian poem differs in a number of respects from “Mit-
tens”. For a start, it is written not in the first but in second person (italicized):
Once you have seen a crocus in the act
Of giving way to the night, your life
No longer lives you, from now on
Your later is too late. Rain time
And sun time, that red and gold sickness
Is like two hands covering your face –
It hardly matters if a whole summer
Is ruined by a crumpled piece of paper,
Or the dry snap of a suitcase closing.
(McGuckian 1984)

This, though, is not like the second person narratives which occur in some
novels and stories where there is a clear narratee who is, as it were, being told
their own life story – either by another (older) version of them, or by another
character who is interpreting them to themselves (see, for example, Fludernik
1994). This poem begins rather with a generic sentence where the most likely
interpretation of the pronoun (you) is the generic third person (one).
Unlike “Mittens”, this poem does not drop the reader directly into a very
specific story world with characters and actions (I am wearing mittens). This
technique of opening a literary work may be more familiar to readers of novels.
Indeed, perhaps the most famous opening of all has some very similar features:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of
such as man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed
in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property
of some one or other of their daughters. (Austen 2004: 1)

If we assume that the opening of a text ‘normally’ supplies the time, person and
place coordinates for a full deictic field, the reader may only make a full deictic
shift into the story world once the parameters (WHO, WHERE, and WHEN) are
in place. Zubin and Hewitt (1995) introduce the idea that opening paragraphs of

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literary works may void some aspect(s) of the deictic field by supplying less than
the full information, and they suggest that this can hold up the time sequencing
and effectively halt any storyworld building. In relation to the famous opening
sentences of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (above) they say:
Time sequencing entails a WHO and a WHERE: that is, progression in time may be
stopped by voiding either the WHO or the WHERE. In the following example, the
WHO, WHERE, and WHEN are not yet instantiated; the opening of the novel starts
with a commentary rather than storyworld building. (Zubin and Hewitt 1995: 143)

“Pain tells you what to wear”, seems to work rather like the opening of Pride
and Prejudice in that there is an apparent lack of text world building due to
the absence of any particular place, time or person (though see below). The use
of generalized second person pronouns, superficially hints at an addressee,
whose referent could be the reader if this were so, but is more likely to refer
to some generic third person, as would be the case if McGuckian had used
one instead of you.3 Note that Furrow does not consider such a use of the
second person form to be deictic “but rather to be colloquial stand-ins for the
indefinite pronoun one. In fact, they are ways of avoiding using the pronoun I”
(Furrow 1988: 370–371).
This usage contrasts with the first person of “Mittens”, where we could theo-
retically expect the reader to see the narrative ‘I’ from an outsider’s perspective
but where in fact there appears to be a greater potential for identity between
reader and narrator than in McGuckian’s poem, where the surface second per-
son reference does not obviously connect with the reader because the iterative
nature of what is being described (Once you…) tends to induce a third person,
generic interpretation of the pronoun since there is no overt “I” narrator, with
whom the reader might be drawn to identify. “Pain tells you what to wear”, then,
neither connects the pronoun to the reader, nor introduces a specific third per-
son through whose eyes we might perceive the text world of the poem and the
choice of present tense verb forms throughout the poem, unlike in “Mittens”,
is likely to be interpreted as the habitual use of the present; in other words, de-
scribing not what is happening, but what generally happens.
The differences between first person, third person (character) and third per-
son (omniscient) narration have been discussed in many contexts by those in-
terested in literary effects of narrative choices. Whilst one of the classic treat-
ments of narration (Booth 1961) deals with author/narrators that are ‘present’
in the text, almost as characters, more recently Zubin and Hewitt (1995), sug-
gest that the choice of third person omniscient narration leads to a kind of
transparency of perspective that contrasts with first person narration where the
reader sees the story through the eyes of a character directly:
If an author wishes to present events as simply and straightforwardly as possible,
he or she will strive to make the perspectivalization as unobtrusive and objective as

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   79

possible, as if looking through a clear pane of glass. Traditional third-person, om-

niscient narration has this character. … A different effect is achieved in narratives
that are told by a fictional first-person narrator. These offer an illusion more like
viewing the story world through a movie camera controlled by the narrator; we only
see what this person sees. (Zubin and Hewitt 1995: 133)
Such approaches do not consider the psychological question of reader involve-
ment in a story but deal instead with the effects of unobtrusive narration,
which is the converse in some ways of reader-involvement, the identification
with a character being more likely the stronger the character’s point of view.
The first person narrator more than any other narration type creates a Be-
ing John Malkovich4 effect from the outset, and though there are many other
factors in a narrative that will also alter the reader’s levels of involvement
(including, for example, modality [see Simpson 1993: Ch.  3]), the choice of
a declared first person viewpoint must be one of the main ones which will
immediately involve the reader in a deictic shift into the relevant narrator’s
deictic center, whether that narrator is identified as a character in the tale or as
the authorial voice. Other deictic elements of course contribute to this process
of identification – present tense, proximal spatial and temporal adverbials and
so on. Whilst this needs more investigation, it may be hypothesized that the
initial deictic shift into a third person (omniscient) narration may produce a
less complete identification with the who, where and when of the deictic field,
particularly when using neutral modality.
Texts opening with generalized commentary then, unlike “Mittens”, do not
draw the reader into the text world using the first person and present time/
tense although it could be argued further that these text worlds are too general
to invite deictic shifting anyway, since the parameters of the deictic field are
not complete – we have no sense of who is being spoken about in particular,
nor where nor when. In Zubin and Hewitt’s terms, these parameters have been
voided. The McGuckian poem, like the opening of Austen’s novel, keeps the
reader at arm’s length. We could consider to what extent these texts are un-
framed in Emmott’s (1997) sense:
A stretch of unframed text does not require monitoring by a contextual frame, since
the narrative does not describe one specific occasion. A text often presents its read-
ers with generalizations rather than events in context, particularly in the introduc-
tory paragraphs of a story. (Emmott 1997: 238)
In relation to the opening of Pride and Prejudice and “Pain tells you what
to wear”, then, we need to ask whether they are also too general to be stored
as referential frames of the kind she suggests that readers need to negotiate a
narrative. Emmott’s description of academic text as unframed in this sense
appears at first sight to fit quite well with these texts:
[An academic text] is unframed because it consists of a series of generalizations in
which there is no covert continuity. (Emmott 1997: 262)

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80   Lesley Jeffries

The reader may, however, suspect that the details of the poem and the opening
of Pride and Prejudice relate in fact not to the generality but to a particular
case of the generality being described. In Pride and Prejudice, it is not long
before we are introduced to the Bennet family and the impending arrival of
Mr. Darcy and we realize that the opening is not only a tongue-in-cheek in-
troduction to the social mores of the community we are reading about, but
also an introduction to the precise theme and the characters of the novel. In
the case of McGuckian’s poem, we may suspect that the generalizations are
actually references to events in the (hidden) narrator’s life, though there is lit-
tle textual evidence that can be used to support this interpretation beyond the
level of detail (the dry snap of a suitcase closing) which is perhaps unusual in
a generalization.
A similar effect has been noted in Duffy’s poetry (see Jeffries 2000a: 62)
where she also manages to make the generalized narrative cross over from
general to specific through the use of the second person pronoun:
    And in your mind
you put aside your work and head for the airport
with a credit card and a warm coat you will leave
on the plane.

In this case, the second person generalized usage helps the reader see the ‘sto-
ry’ as relating both to a specific third person and also to ‘anyone’, including
her/himself, as Wales suggests is common in oral performance and popular
culture:
The you of a singer’s ‘I love you’ ballad may well be fictional, but the audience will
often (separately!) identify themselves with this personage. (Wales 1996: 72)

This raises the question of whether there are degrees of reader-involvement,

with first person identification being closer and more involving than the gen-
eralized second-person5 and both being closer than third person. Whatever
the reader-involvement, these two poems (by McGuckian and by Duffy) cer-
tainly represent iconically their (hidden) narrator’s sense of disjunction after
a traumatic experience (of moving home and being abandoned by a partner
respectively).
What Emmott terms ‘covert continuity’ does seem to feature in all of these
apparently unframed texts, since the consequences of a new arrival in a com-
munity are spelled out in the Austen, and the identity of the generalized new
arrival is consistent, if untethered to a specific context. In the McGuckian
poem, it is less textually evidenced, but there is the default assumption at least
that the person who experiences the ‘crocus event’ is the same person who
later puts their hands over their face and has a summer ruined by the closing
of a suitcase and that these events may also be causally (thought not explicitly)

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   81

linked. Likewise, in Duffy’s poem, there is a sense that this sequence of events
happens to an unspecified individual. If this is so, these texts cannot easily
be dismissed in narrative terms as unframed text, but would seem to be more
similar in nature to those academic texts which Emmott points out may have
some framed text, albeit different in nature from narratives:
Framed text which is incorporated within academic writing is often rather different
from the framed text of novels and short stories. In the above example the characters
are not actual people, which becomes clear when the text starts offering us alterna-
tives for how the character might behave. (Emmott 1997: 263)

What we have in “Pain tells you what to wear” then, is the equivalent of this
framed, but unspecific text, which, while it fails to convince as a general-
ized account of how things are in human life, nevertheless appears to be a
consistent account of how it may be for one unidentified person. In the Pride
and Prejudice opening, we have an apparently anthropological account of how
people behave in a particular situation, though it is thinly disguised and our
contextual knowledge would inform the reader that it is merely a preamble to
more conventional narrative practices. In Duffy’s poem, we have a particular
set of imaginings in the mind of a displaced person, which are presented as
generic experiences.
The layers of viewpoint and narratorial possibility in “Pain tells you what
to wear” appear to defy straightforward analysis on the basis of the text, since
the use of a superficial second person narrative, which is readily interpretable
as a generalized third person, nevertheless seems not really to be expounding a
universal truth but telling a particular story of a particular person, who is nev-
ertheless hidden from clear view. Though we might suspect this, any attempt
at conceptual blending of the generalized third person’s identity with the (hid-
den) narrator would probably fall short of full identification, just as the reader
also falls short of fully priming the deictic field that is implied by the text.

A B
A C B
narrator reader

Figure 3. Incomplete blending of narrator (A), reader (B) and generalized third person
referent (C) in “Pain tells you what to wear”

Because of the lack of opportunities for sharing the reference of the pronoun
(you), the potential for conceptual blending of the narrator and pronoun refer-
ent is less complete than in “Mittens” and the deictic shift of the reader into

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82   Lesley Jeffries

the narratorial position is also less than complete and for the same reasons. It
may be that at the initial stages of a text, there are several possible levels of
reader-involvement, depending on the different deictic (world-building) trig-
gers. Thus, the different choices of person, time, type of text world (i. e. modal,
generalized, actual) etc might influence the reader’s own deictic shift into the
text, and, depending on what happens next, could influence the whole reading
experience in significant ways.
McIntyre notes a phenomenon he calls prominence in dramatic texts, which
he relates to the relative awareness the reader will have of the primed deictic
field in question, on the basis of triggers, both textual and non-textual (e. g.
contextual such as interruptions). These two poems support such a notion since
the deictic fields of “Mittens”, though unusual and at times apparently con-
tradictory, are nevertheless strongly primed, whereas those of “Pain tells you
what to wear” are less clear and thus less fully primed. This, it could be sug-
gested, affects the reader’s initial shift into a text, and indeed experience of the
text as a whole, since unlike in Pride and Prejudice the poem never moves out
of the generalized mode of presentation of its textworld.
Thus, “Pain tells us what to wear” begins with the only primed deictic field
available (apart from the reader’s own one); a generalized world in which see-
ing a crocus “giving way to the night” results in “your life no longer living
you” and so on. In other words, the reader is invited into an oddly unfamiliar
world of images that are difficult to unravel and which cause problems in de-
ciding whether this text world corresponds to the reader’s actual world. This
alienation is strengthened by the person deixis which not only fails to invite
the reader into the privileged position of the first person narrator’s viewpoint,
it supplies no specific personal viewpoint at all, except for a possible implied
narrator who is hidden behind the generalized third person deixis.

4.  Conclusions

The question of reader-involvement does not necessarily involve a literary (or

other) value judgment, though some individual readers may consider it to do so.
Indeed, the estrangement of the narrator/reader in “Pain tells you what to wear”
seems to me, as a reader and analyst, iconic of the meaning of the poem, in
which a woman appears to be suffering the emotional pain, and thus alienation
from her surroundings and her own self, of being abandoned by a partner; and
it has a different – though potentially equal – literary effect (and thus value) to
“Mittens”, though I argue that the latter is more directly involving of the reader.
Similarly, in the Duffy poem “In Your Mind” (Duffy 1985: 89) analyzed in Jef-
fries (2000a), the topic of displacement through exile is one where the estrange-
ment of the reader from the deictic centre seems iconically appropriate.

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 The role of style in reader-involvement   83

In summary, these poems seem to present both examples of, and questions
for, some of the main cognitive theories of reading that have been explored in
recent years. However, the spirit of theoretical eclecticism (see Jeffries 2000b)
seems to help here, as there may be some value in employing a combination
of text world theory, blending theory and binding and priming to underpin the
efforts of deictic shift theory in explaining the mechanisms of reader-involve-
ment in poems. Whilst the use of clear deictic fields, with proximal markers,
will place the reader more readily inside the text world, the use of framed text
may leave the reader with only a toe in the text world, with a primed context, in
Emmott’s terms, which is nevertheless lacking in what McIntyre calls promi-
nence, because of the lack of deictic clarity and specificity.
As usual, questions remain, however, and we are left asking whether this
effect may be specific to poems as opposed to fictional narratives and other
genres. There is more to do in addressing the extent to which we can identify
textual triggers for some of the effects of reader-involvement and how the iden-
tity of the reader will contribute to any effects of this kind. A larger reader-
response study of this phenomenon in a variety of poems would perhaps shed
some light on the variety of possible reader-identifications with the narrator
and the range of prominence of primed contexts, including the question of how
lacking in prominence a context can be before it can no longer be said to be
primed. In relation to poetry in particular, the question of the relationship (if
any) between difficulty of reading, however that may be measured, and reader-
involvement may also be a productive area of study. There is also a need for
more subtle analysis of person deixis, since the most straightforward analysis
of the surface text does not seem to convey the complexities of identity of ei-
ther of these poems, particularly in relation to the surface form of a pronoun
and its potential for hidden meaning. “Mittens” uses the ‘normal’ referencing
tendencies of the first person pronouns to demonstrate that we do not have a
single identity throughout our lives. By juxtaposing the two ‘ages’ of the nar-
rator, we see how different they are meant to be and what happens when they
merge. In “Pain tells you what to wear” we find that there may be a narrator
hiding from herself and from the reader behind a generalized third person
which fails to set up a clear deictic centre. There is more work to do on the
different triggers of deictic shifting, and whether some have more impact on
the reader’s positioning than others, as well as the impact of context, including
specific choice of text, on these effects.

University of Huddersfield

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84   Lesley Jeffries

Notes

1. It is possible in principle, however, to test out some of the findings of this research,
by means of interventions in the base text and informant testing to establish reader-
reactions to different versions.
2. Note that of the six students who picked McGuckian’s poem, three were on mainly
language and three on mainly literature courses. This appears to counteract any no-
tion that the students may have been choosing what they saw as a more prestigious
literary work.
3. Note that in the full text of the poem, McGuckian does later use ‘one’ to replace
the second person pronoun, thus confirming this view of the earlier second person
forms.
4. This reference to the film where paying customers get to see the world through John
Malkovich’s eyes for a short length of time is not mine alone; McIntyre (2006),
amongst others, regards it as the clearest filmic expression of the first person narra-
tive.
5. The next stage of this project will, inevitably, require some kind of testing of read-
er-responses to the features analyzed here.

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