Hello there.

I'm a new here and an aspiring writer of literary fiction. I have a quick question to submit for your consideration.

Does anyone know of any examples of any other literary works that have been written entirely in the fourth person?

Thank you for your time,
J.

Hello, JC, and welcome to WriteWords.

I'm not sure what you mean by the fourth person - can you give an example?

Emma

Do you mean like the Queen might write a novel?
"One awakes to the barking of Corgis ... or has one been dreaming of the Corgis of Barking?"
I suppose 'one' is a 'third' of some sort though. Otherwise, I can't think what fourth person would be ... Room for an Oulippo style mystery story here though, I would have thought, bringing in the 'fourth dimension' in the quest for the'fourth person'.

Yours intrigued

Jim

Is this where an author blends third and fisrt-person perspectives together - like James Patterson does, and Richard Laymon did?

S.M.

Hi. Thanks for your replies. I'm about half way through my first humble attempt at writing a novel. I believe that it could possibly be considered (to a reader unknown to me) as having been written in the 'fourth' and even (in places) the 'fifth' person'.

Firstly, in literary terms I do not know if such a concept as writing from the perspective of the 'fourth person' actually exists. I was hoping that someone here may be able to confirm or deny its existence as a theoretical concept. If such a term does not exist, or if I have been applying it incorrectly here then I shall find defining what I mean by the concept extremely arduous without using it.

Basically, what I mean when I refer to the 'fourth person' is a work that has been composed from a perspective 'further' than the standard third.

I believe that the changing relationship and gradual role-reversal in contemporary literary fiction of the writer and the reader theoretically offers the opportunity for one to write in the 'fourth person'. If one takes the basic theories of 'the death of the author' worked upon by French theorists suchs as Barthes and Foucault in the 70's as a basis - that literature only exists in the mind of the reader - then, through gradually deconstructing the role of the writer to the point where he no longer 'exists' in his relationship to his work (at least in the traditional sense of writer-novel relations), then I think that new avenues of literary perspective become available.

In my theory, the 'fourth person' perespective may only be adopted after the writer has essentially 'writen himself out of existence' for the reader. If the 'writer' is entirely detached from the literature that the reader passes over, he has no identity or does even not exist at all, then he is essentially 'free'. The 'writer' (and the established role of the writer towards the novel) himself assumes a position as merely being another tool in the construction of narrative meaning within the mind of the reader.

I guess that the most obvious example of such an approach would be a narrative where say, a writer writes a novel about a writer who's writing a novel, the writer of which is in fact himself. This is the 'novel within a novel' approach which is, I think a postmodern concept that is now rather exhausted. However I feel that things can go far further and assume far more meaning than this.

Anyway, I have go on a bit. I'm sorry. I hope that all of this has been at least comphresible. I apologise if it hasn't. It is difficult to explain and I haven't attempted to do so before. It is really not as complicated (or pretentious) as it may sound, in fact in practice, in the fiction I'm doing it is really quite clear.

Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks!.

J.

The simple solution, JC, is to upload an example of your work for us to read. I've read your explanation twice, and I have no idea what you mean… sorry

It may just be a matter of terminology. Let’s have a look and we can take it from there.

Dee

JC, it's an interesting idea.

Forgive me if I start with what John Cleese called Statements of the Bleeding Obvious, to get my thoughts clear. 'First' 'second' and 'third person' are really grammatical terms - I, You, and He/She/They - and philosophically speaking, I don't think there's really another possibility. When fiction-writers use these terms, they start with grammar, but the discussion rapidly spreads into the broader question of who is telling the story - who is the narrator, in other words.

Obviously in First Person, the author is telling the story through the eyes of a particular character with particular attitudes and opinions, and if the story is told as fiction, while the reader settles comfortably into the illusion that the 'I' is telling the story, the real assumption is that the author is not the same as the narrator. A Second Person narrative is rare, and difficult and almost always sounds silly and pretentious, except arguably in poetry. It implies the presence of a First Person narrator in some form - otherwise who is it saying 'you' all the time, if not an implied 'I'? - even if they have no other presence in the story. Third Person as narrator has a wider range of possibilities, and many novels use more than one. There's the one almost like First Person, telling the story wholly through one set of eyes, with the illusion of the author as a neutral transmitter of this view. Then there's the narrator who tells what happened through various eyes but effacing him/her self and opinions - much 20th/21st century fiction is of this kind. Henry Green must be the exemplar. Finally there's the classical omniscient narrator of the great 19th century novelists who presents the story explicitly to the reader, and offers opinions. (At a slight tangent, there's the unreliable narrator, who may be lying, but this is a game played with the illusion of the omniscient narrator, which depends (while seeming to contradict it) on the tradition of narrator-as-authority, so I firmly park it with the other kinds of narrators.)

The only narrative that doesn't have a narrator but does have an author is one that consists of nothing but dialogue. Of that, the reader (or actor, or film director) can make of it what they will, which is probably why reading plays on the page is such a dust-dry activity. As soon as you have any... I've never known what non-dialogue is called, but you know what I mean. Anyway, as soon as you have some description between the speeches, someone is saying it. Even a very plain, neutral statement of simple action - Hemingway-style, you could say - is still narration, and still has a narrator, even if it's not written in a way that implies an opinion or an apparent viewpoint. However much you argue that the reader constructs the text, I think you can't say that the author is dead. The author is there, chosing the words and putting them on the page. They may not know exactly how a reader will read those words, but what and how much they choose to put, and leave out, is an authorial decision as powerful and controlling of the reader's reaction as any other aspect of writing. The experience of a text is a joint operation between author and reader.

So I'm not quite clear to what your Fourth Person refers, for the purposes of writing, as it seems to me to be the same thing as a narrator. Or maybe I've misunderstood!

Emma

JC, it's an interesting idea.

Forgive me if I start with what John Cleese called Statements of the Bleeding Obvious, to get my thoughts clear. 'First' 'second' and 'third person' are really grammatical terms - I, You, and He/She/They - and philosophically speaking, I don't think there's really another possibility. When fiction-writers use these terms, they start with grammar, but the discussion rapidly spreads into the broader question of who is telling the story - who is the narrator, in other words.

Obviously in First Person, the author is telling the story through the eyes of a particular character with particular attitudes and opinions, and if the story is told as fiction, while the reader settles comfortably into the illusion that the 'I' is telling the story, the real assumption is that the author is not the same as the narrator. A Second Person narrative is rare, and difficult and almost always sounds silly and pretentious, except arguably in poetry. It implies the presence of a First Person narrator in some form - otherwise who is it saying 'you' all the time, if not an implied 'I'? - even if they have no other presence in the story. Third Person as narrator has a wider range of possibilities, and many novels use more than one. There's the one almost like First Person, telling the story wholly through one set of eyes, with the illusion of the author as a neutral transmitter of this view. Then there's the narrator who tells what happened through various eyes but effacing him/her self and opinions - much 20th/21st century fiction is of this kind. Henry Green must be the exemplar. Finally there's the classical omniscient narrator of the great 19th century novelists who presents the story explicitly to the reader, and offers opinions. (At a slight tangent, there's the unreliable narrator, who may be lying, but this is a game played with the illusion of the omniscient narrator, which depends (while seeming to contradict it) on the tradition of narrator-as-authority, so I firmly park it with the other kinds of narrators.)

The only narrative that doesn't have a narrator but does have an author is one that consists of nothing but dialogue. Of that, the reader (or actor, or film director) can make of it what they will, which is probably why reading plays on the page is such a dust-dry activity. As soon as you have any... I've never known what non-dialogue is called, but you know what I mean. Anyway, as soon as you have some description between the speeches, someone is saying it. Even a very plain, neutral statement of simple action - Hemingway-style, you could say - is still narration, and still has a narrator, even if it's not written in a way that implies an opinion or an apparent viewpoint. However much you argue that the reader constructs the text, I think you can't say that the author is dead. The author is there, chosing the words and putting them on the page. They may not know exactly how a reader will read those words, but what and how much they choose to put, and leave out, is an authorial decision as powerful and controlling of the reader's reaction as any other aspect of writing. The experience of a text is a joint operation between author and reader.

So I'm not quite clear to what your Fourth Person refers, for the purposes of writing, as it seems to me to be the same thing as a narrator. Or maybe I've misunderstood!

Emma

<Added>

choosing, not chosing!

<Added>

Oops! Sorry that got in twice.

Thank you for your response.

Firstly, I use the term the 'fourth person' merely as a label for a concept that is, for ease of communicating through this forum the most appropriate that I can devise for now.

Secondly, whilst I very much appreciate your response, Emma, I remain convinced that by 'removing' the author from the reading process a reader may approach a work of literary fiction from perspectives of consciousness beyond merely the 'first', 'second' and 'third'.

I understand that a 'fourth person' is not recognised by or indeed does not even exist in terms of the grammatical rules of literature. However, I do feel that such rules are not absolute. I agree with you that all of this is a matter of narration, of identifying the narrator, whom is by definition, as you mentioned inescapably present in any word on any page. This is at least true from the perception of the writer. However, if one removes the 'writer' from a literary work, replacing instead his authoritative role with multiple narrators, some fictional and one not, to the extent where, at least in the reader's perception the division between reality and fiction are indistinguishable - and wholly irrelevant anyway - then the reader is then truly free from influence of the author. In this senario, a work of literary fiction may be read and interpreted as a completely organic work in it's own right, free of all external influence and is therefore (in the purest form) rendered existent only within the mind of the reader, is constructed only by internal perception. Now, my point is this: if such a circumstance between unknown writer and unknown reader is achieved then the reader, will inevitably be constructing the text, configuring the direction of narration himself as he reads it. In effect, the reader shall be 'writing' the work as he passes over it in parallel with the author's pre-lain text. Therefore, when the reader is effectively 'writing', constructing the text in such a manner he is, theoretically doing so in the 'fourth person'.

Thirdly, I mentioned in my previous message of the theory of 'the death of the author' not to say that I personally subscribe to this theory, rather I used it as a starting block in the discussion merely to suggest that the role of the author and his relationship to the reader is a rapidly evolving one.

Finally, as an example, I wish to offer Calvino's novel 'If On a Winter's Night a Traveller' as a pre-cursor to what I have suggested above. Remember that this work, from some 27 years ago offers us the paradox of the reader being the protagonist and is moreover, essentially performing the same role as the writer.

Anyway, I apologise again for having babbled on at such length! I hope that this has clarified what I'm stabbing at, at least a little bit. If not, then perhaps I am just communicating it poorly or am perhaps simply somewhat crazed.

Kind regards,

J.R


<Added>

mis-spelt 'scenario'

J.C.

Like Dee said, why not upload? It might save a bit of time.

Pete

However, if one removes the 'writer' from a literary work, replacing instead his authoritative role with multiple narrators, some fictional and one not, to the extent where, at least in the reader's perception the division between reality and fiction are indistinguishable - and wholly irrelevant anyway - then the reader is then truly free from influence of the author.

But I don't think you can remove the writer from a literary work, can you? Once upon a time, a particular person sat down and wrote his/her words on paper, and now someone else is reading them. That someone else may not be thinking particularly about the writer-narrator, but much more about the fictional narrator/s. But the author's there nonetheless. What the reader does with the text is conditioned partly or mainly by what the author wrote, and to that extent readers can't ever be 'truly free from influence of the author', can they?

I'm also not sure that the distinction between reality and fiction, though fluid and debatable, is ever wholly irrelevant. Fiction-readers know they're reading fiction, and the interplay of the fiction with they what know as fact, and with what they don't know directly but the novel presents as facts (an obvious example would be in historical fiction), is part of their experience of the novel. Metafictional references add another layer to the cake, but I don't think you ever abolish the distinction between reality and fiction.

Emma

Wow. This is high falutin' stuff.

JC, you seem to be proffering an interesting concept, but I imagine that I am not alone in having difficulty in envisioning what a segment of text written in the style you are suggesting would look like. You mentioned an author (Calvino) - I'm not sure whether it would be permissible to upload a segment of his novel within the confines of this thread (Maybe someone could confirm or deny this) but it would certainly help in getting a feel for the approach to writing you are espousing here.

I'm intrigued

Guy

Here's a section of 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'. The general consensus in my household is that the book is written 'in the first person, sort of', with parts in the second person.

The great pastime of these customers at the bar seems to be betting: betting on trivial events of daily life. For example, one says, "Let's bet on who comes first to the bar tonight, Dr Marne or Chief Gorin." And another says, "And when Dr Marne does get here, what will he do to avoid meeting his ex-wife? Will he play billiards or fill in the football-pool form?"

In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can't imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.

"I don't know," I say in a low voice.

"Don't know what?" she asks.

It's a thought I feel I can also say now and not keep for myself as I do with all my thoughts, say it to the woman who is here beside me at the bar, the owner of the leather-goods shop, with whom I have a slight hankering to strike up a conversation. "Is that how it is, here in your town?"

"No, it's not true," she answers me, and I knew this was how she would answer me. She insists that nothing can be foreseen, here or anywhere else: of course, very evening at this hour Dr Marne closes his office and Chief Gorin comes off duty at the police station; and they always drop by here, first one or first the other; but what does that signify?

"In any case, nobody seems to doubt the fact that the doctor will try to avoid the former Madame Marne," I say to her.

"I am the former Madame Marne," she answers. "Don't listen to them."

Your attention, as reader, is now completely concentrated on the woman, already for several pages you have been circling around her, I have – no, the author has - been circling around the feminine presence, for several pages, you have been expecting this female shadow to take shape the way femaile shadows take shape on the written page, and it is your expecation, reader, that drives the author toward her; and I, too, though I have other things to think about, there I let myself go, I speak to her, I strike up a conversation that I should break off as quickly as I can, in order to go away, disappear. You surely would want to know more about what she's like, but instead only a few elements surface on the written page, her face remains hidden by the smoke and her hair, you would need to understand beyond the bitter twist of her mouth what there is that isn't bitter and twisted.

Femaile = typing error

<Added>

In the 'you' passages, Calvino does amazing things with the second person. But it's still the second person.

Hi JC,

I believe the reader can never be

truly free from influence of the author

as it is the initial text constructed by the author that lays the fundamental foundation for any individual perception by a reader.

free of all external influence

Even with 'pre-lain text' we're talking external and empirical influence aren't we?

Interesting theory JC, but I think we're talking about a state of hypothetical existence here where we reach perception of 'a story' almost through something bordering telepathy...

Like the others before me; do you have an example to upload?

Erik