Focalisation

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Agonistic politics – Mouffe; Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Dramatic conflict

Use for: Focalization

“Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative? or the actual thing represented? — Ultimately you are even just an imitation play-actor … Second question for the conscience.”

(Nietzsche, 1998: 9)

Focalisation is a valuable concept for design practices because it facilitates consideration of and reflection upon the articulation of dramatic conflicts, both intra-character, as the agony of conscience, and between characters, as agonistic struggle, and also the dramatic reversal of focalisations from one character to another to permit multi-perspectivalism, a useful capability in our plural and diverse world.

Gerard Genette’s narratological model, presented the late 1960s, in Figures, is responsible for establishing the concept of focalisation in narrative studies. Fludernik (2005: 40) suggests that this term has now largely replaced the traditional terms perspective and point of view, but the relationship between focalisation and point of view is more complicated than simple replacement.

Niederhoff (2011) proposes that focalisation “may be defined as a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld.” In general, Genette thinks of focalisation in terms of knowledge and information, defining it as a selection of narrative information with respect to what traditionally was called ‘omniscience’. Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu (2016: 20) suggest that the difference between point of view and focalisation is that the former stands for a spatial position from which a scene is observed, irrespective of whether or not this position is occupied by someone, whereas the latter suggests the scene is inscribed in someone’s consciousness.

Genette makes a distinction between focalization and the narrator. Genette refers to the narrator through the grammatical metaphor of ‘voice’. Previous theories had analyzed such categories as first-person narrator, omniscience, and camera perspective under one umbrella term, usually point of view or perspective. Genette considered that such treatments of the subject confused two question: that of who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective (‘who sees?’), the position from which events of the narrative can be viewed; and the very different question of who is the narrator (‘who speaks?’), the point from which the story is told. A single text may contain several points of view or kinds of focalization at different moments in the narrative. In presenting a narrative to readers, an author may use one or more of the three points of view: first, second, and third person.

Genette distinguishes between zero focalisation, on the one hand, and a pair of terms defining restricted points of view, internal and external focalisation, on the other hand. With zero focalisation the authorial narrator is above the world of the action, looking down on it, and is able to see into the characters’ minds as well as shifting between the various locations where the story takes place (‘omniscient narrator’). This perspective is unrestricted or unlimited in contrast to the limitations of internal and external focalization. In the case of internal perspective, the view is restricted to that of a single character; in that of external perspective to a view of the world from outside, allowing no insight into the inner workings of people’s minds.

For Genette, internal focalization refers to a narrative situation where the narrator is external to the storyworld – i.e. heterodiegetic – and talks about the characters in the third person while providing information about the protagonist’s inner, mental life (Lissa, et al, 2016, 44).

The Genettean model is, however, inconsistent, Fludernik (2009) argues, because the reflector character is presented by means of internal focalization but s/he sees other characters under the restrictions of external focalisation. Reflector characters or reflector figures are so called, originally by Henry James, because they ‘reflect’ the story to the reader rather than telling it to them as a narrator persona would.

Ranciere and Focalisation

Ranciere discusses the distribution of the sensible in terms of its operation as a political and aesthetic apparatus which determines what is visible, audible and sayable in a given community. Exploiting that definition, critical literary and media theorists use focalisation to explore precisely how, that is, the practical or technical means by which any given work disrupts or sustains the systemic political and aesthetic determinations that exist in its storyworld; and also to explore any potentially critical relations the work has to the common sense of existing everyday practices in a specific society or social historical setting.

Focalisation and Ocularcentrism

Christian Huck (2009: 205) points out that, despite efforts to make it signify a broader range of sensory perceptions and provide cognitive, emotive and ideological orientation, the term focalization nevertheless cannot wholly free itself from the specifically visual connotations of point of view.

Huck argues that because classical narratological theory was developed through a close study of the 18th and 19th century novel, centuries which marked the heyday of the primacy of visual observation, it is not surprising that classical narratological terminology evinces a visual bias.

Postclassical narratology has sought to address this implicit and explicit ocularcentrism. Seymour Chatman (1986), for example, argues that focalization has always seemed to mean more than the power of sight for Gerard Genette, and that he refers to the whole spectrum of perception, such as hearing, tasting, smelling, and so on; while Gerald Prince (2001) contends that what is perceived through focalisation may be abstract or concrete, tangible or intangible, and may include sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, feelings or dreams. Nelles (1997), taking a lead from Jost, distinguishes between ocularization, as the visual element of focalisation, and other elements of focalisation, such as auricularization, gustativisation, olfactivisation, and tactivilisation.

References

Bal, M. (1997). Narratology: introduction to the theory of narrative, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chatman, S. (1986) Characters and narrators: Filter, center, slant, and interest-focus’, Poetics Today, 7(2), pp. 189–204. doi: 10.2307/1772758.

Fludernik, Monika (2005). Histories of narrative theory (II): from structuralism to the present, In: A Companion to narrative theory, edited by J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 36-59.

Fludernik, M. (2009). Focalization, perspective, point of view. In: An Introduction to Narratology. London, UK: Routledge, 36–39.

Huck, C. (2009). Coming to our senses: Narratology and the visual, in Huhn, P., Schmid, W., and Schönert, J. (eds) Point of view, perspective, and focalization: Modeling mediation in narrative. Berlin, DE: Walter De Gruyter, pp. 201–218.

Lissa, C. J. van et al. (2016) Difficult empathy: the effect of narrative perspective on readers’ engagement with a first-person narrator, Diegesis, 5(1), pp. 43–63. Available at: https://www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/211.

Nelles, William (1997). Frameworks: Narrative levels and embedded narrative. Frankfurt, DE: Peter Lang.

Niederhoff, B. (2011). Focalization. The Living Handbook of Narratology. Available from http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Focalization [Accessed 1 June 2017].

Nietzsche, F. W. (1998) Twilight of the idols, or How to philosophize with a hammer. Translated by D. Large. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Prince, G. (2001) A Point of view on point of view or refocusing focalization, in Peer, W. van and Chatman, S. (eds) New perspectives on narrative perspective. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 43–50.

Ryan, M.-L, Foote, K. and Azaryahu, M. (2016). Narrating space/spatialzing narrative: where narrative theory and geography meet. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.