Indefinite Strangers

Christine Blasey Ford, in portions of her testimony, spoke in the fourth person singular. When she said "indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter," she reported a memory of personal humiliation and at the same time articulated a general statement about the effects of abuse recognized by millions. Nuar Alsadir's Fourth Person Singular names this crux of memory and witness, theorizing the possibility of a mode of address that could encompass both intimate and collective experience:

The one who speaks "I" becomes a many who speaks "I" or "he" while meaning "I" and "he," but also "you," "we," and "they." My attempt to make sense of this voice that speaks as one but out of the many—first, second, and third person simultaneously—led nowhere, into the nowhere of the mind, which is also an elsewhere, and, like the unconscious, a space of possibility.

Alsadir opens an inquiry into this "nowhere" and finds evidence that has been denied or trivialized: "Within: a chattering of girls who talk & talk." The space of possibility she seeks makes room for the chatter and for another economy of consciousness: "To repossess my thoughts as a car gets repossessed if payment hasn't been made—but what kind of debt is owed, and to whom?" Tonally quiet yet barbed with insight, Fourth Person Singular comprises an essay on lyric subjectivity, sketches (visual and verbal), and a prismatic array of lyric fragments. Alsadir's object of study is the shame that inheres in thought itself, and her method draws not only on theoretical models including special relativity, Freud's uncanny, Barthes's punctum, and Bakhtin's super-addressee, but also on observation of mass transit, life with children, and walking the dog.

Alsadir goes looking for an alternative grammatical "person" because the first person I induces shame: "Why do you talk so much? What is it that you have to hide?" The chastening questions expose a paradoxical desire to express and conceal the self's vulnerability:

Pleasure and disgust, the border of desire, of aesthetics, where beauty and the uncanny meet—is this the brink one must always live on, bare and bear, the vulnerability necessitated in feeling alive? When I have bared myself, I feel a compulsion to send out a flurry of signals to adjust the reception of others, to scramble the image that may have been momentarily revealed of me—

She begins with shame as a fundamental condition of consciousness, recalling Slavoj Žižek's illustration of revulsion toward what comes from inside us: we would recoil from drinking saliva, a substance we continually produce and swallow, if it were offered to us in a glass. Alsadir extrapolates the poet's predicament while attempting to write the ever-elusive secrets and secretions of the self: "The lyric is that saliva in a glass, but what does it incarnate?" Her inciting question boils down to one of any writer's bread-and-butter tasks, choosing a pronoun:

what am I, that self that organizes around thinking of you? And why is it that writing a lyric poem that has an I that matches up with the person I consider myself to be in my everyday life induces shame?

Part of the answer lies not in affective experience or psychology but in literary history. As Gillian White's astute study Lyric Shame (2014) has shown: by the 1970s the "lyric I" had become persona non grata, and avant-garde anti-lyricism became common, even canonical, in the decades that followed. Disdain for a lyric speaker for excessive display of vulnerability has deeper roots. Alsadir mentions "lyric shame" in the example of Robert Browning, who took refuge in dramatic monologue after his book of confessional lyrics was panned. White observes that "lyric" applies less to a specific literary genre than to an abstract way of projecting subjectivity onto poems, and Alsadir reexamines that mode of projection:

I was grappling with the recognition that even though I'd developed an aversion to confessional poetry, the poems I found moving…were...