POINT OF VIEW. VOICE AND FOCALISATION

 

The things expressed in the text are seen from a certain perspective in terms of their relation to the events and characters. The key items are the following: who it is who tells the story, from what perspective, with what sense ofdistance or closeness, with what possibilities of knowledge, and with what interest.

The point of view in a piece of writing is the perspective from which a story is told: the first-person point of view – the narrator participates in the action and uses the pronoun “I” to refer to himself/herself; the second-person point of view – the narrator uses the imperative mood and the pronoun “you” to refer to the reader; the third-person point of view – the narrator does not participate in the action, instead, the action is described as happening to some he, she, or it.

In fiction, the first-person point of view can be very powerful. In this kind of narrative everything is presented through the narrator’s eyes. This means that the only access we have to other characters is through the narrator’s perception of them. It also means that you should be aware that the narrators’ own characters will affect their judgement. The use of a first-person narrator can create a range of effects, including tension, irony and humour. The speaker is not the writer, but rather a character created by the writer’s imagination. The gap between the narrator’s awareness and the reader’s awareness is a major factor in many novels. Some writers choose to write in the first person to let readers know that the personal experiences or ideas expressed are one’s own. Everything is seen from the perspective of the character, who is also the narrator. By inhabiting the world of one character fully, a writer creates intimate and moving portrayals of individuals and their stories. In the following passage, the narrator is Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who describes his adventures in an imaginary land.

“The Queen, giving great allowance for my defectiveness in speaking, was however surprised at so much wit and good sense in so diminutive an animal. She took me in her own hand, and carried me to the King, who was then retired to his cabinet.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1735)

The first-person narrator is involved in the world of the story. The extent and variation of the temporal and cognitive distance between the narrating I and the experiencing I determines the quality of the narrative. Robinson (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)) forms the centre of his own story (I-as-protagonist). This leads to a greater illusion of reality, as well as the sense of immediacy and credibility. The first major English woman author Aphra Behn uses the first person as a minor character and observer (I-as-witness) in her exotic narrative Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688). She comments on the natural limits of awareness without direct access to others’ feelings and thoughts: “I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down; and what I could not be witness of, I receiv’d from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself”.

In addition, adventure novels (R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)), diaries, letters, essays, memoirs and autobiographies as well as epistolary novels (S. Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1749), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)) offer models of writing in the first person, which are connected to the central position of the individual.

Using the second-person point of view, a writer often tries to elicit a personal response or action from individuals in the audience. You can find the example in the extract from Tony Parsons’ Man and Boy (1999): “By thirty you have finally realized that you are not going to live forever, of course. But surely that should only make the laughing, latte-drinking present taste even sweeter? You shouldn’t let your inevitable death put a damper on things. Don’t let the long, slow slide to the grave get in the way of good time”.

Writers use the third-person point of view when the emphasis is on the message rather than on the message-giver. When writing fiction from the third-person perspective, one must decide whether to use a limited or omniscient point of view. In writing from the third-person limited point of view, the narrator speaks from the perspective of one character. For example, the point of view in the following passage is limited to the perspective of Louise Mallard as she anticipates the news that her husband has been killed in a train accident.

‘There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it she did not know; it was too subtle and allusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colour that filled the air.”

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour (1894)

In writing from the third-person omniscient point of view, the narrator is able to reveal the unspoken thoughts of all the characters. Omniscient means “knowing everything”. Being omnipresent and omniscient, the authorial narrator can see into the future, read various characters’ thoughts and even their subconscious. An omniscient narrator will have a distinctive tone and voice, and an attitude to the characters and events described. Sometimes the narrator’s opinion will be made clear in a direct address to the reader; sometimes it will emerge through the tone of the narrative. Omniscient narrators can move backwards and forwards in time, from one setting to another, can reveal what characters are thinking and feeling. In the following passage from The Great Fire of London (1982), Peter Ackroyd describes family relationships entering the minds of both spouses:

“Laetitia Spender sometimes thought that, if she closed her eyes for long enough, she might cease to exist, she might discover her vanishing point. Her reality, she was convinced, was known only to herself; for everyone else she was Spenser Spender’s wife, very attractive, really, hadn’t she been a model once? She hated being called “Lettuce” or even Letty: it confirmed her status merely as an object. But somehow the names had stuck – perhaps she did resemble an abbreviation or a vegetable. At these moments she would shut her eyes and try to imagine herself dead; or she would argue bitterly with Spenser over small things – over the question, for example, of how many tea-bags should be placed in a tea pot. She took no satisfaction in provoking such arguments, but there was nothing else for her to win.

Spenser never thought about their relationship, which meant that he never thought about her”.

Sometimes a story is told by multiple narrators. While reading a novel told in this way, one is to look for how different narrators’ views of people and events differ from each other, and consider the effects that are created by the reader being drawn into separate yet complementary worlds. In Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, for example, a series of narrators take over the story at different points, contributing to the novel’s dense, multi-layered effect. BleakHouse (1853) by Charles Dickens has two distinct narrative voices, the character Esther Summerson, and a third-person narrator who presents the parts of the narrative in which Esther does not feature. Julian Barnes’s Talking it over (1991) and Love, etc. (2001) are a presentation of the same events from the point of view of the main characters who form a love triangle.

Dramatic point of view presents the story objectively, mostly through dialogues. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) his simple style, careful structuring and dialogues help to get the most out of the least.

The physical location from which a writer views a subject is called the vantage point. In the essay Shooting an Elephant (1936), George Orwell recalls when he was called upon to deal with a rampaging elephant. Orwell uses the vantage point of the narrator surrounded by two thousand hostile villagers. Telling the story from this vantage point helps the reader gain greater appreciation of the pressures and circumstances that led Orwell to shoot the elephant.

“But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of faces above the garish clothes – faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hand I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I would have to shoot the elephant. (…) The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two-thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.”

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant (1936)

Vantage point can also refer to a distancing in time. For example, George Orwell wrote Shooting an Elephant (1936) long after the incident took place. Looking back at the event from the vantage point of time contributes to the ironic tone and sense of shame that permeate the essay.

Distance is created when the narrator is one of the characters in the narrative, a “go-between” through whose consciousness the story is filtered. The more intrusive the narrator, the greater the distance between narration and story. Conversely, the least distance is created when we are unaware of the narrator’s presence, when a tale seems to “tell itself”. Distance is also created by the absence of descriptive detail. Thus, the least distance, or the greatest imitation of life, is produced by maximum information and minimum presence of the narrator.

Perspective refers to point of view, or the eyes through which we see any given part of narrative. Although the narrator may be speaking, the point of view may be that of one of the other characters, and the feeling of the point-of-view character may be different from those of the narrator.

Voice refers to the voice of the narrator. Voice may be said to almost synonymous with tone, it is voice that creates tone. The voice we hear (the narrator’s) may not be the same as the eyes we see through (the perspective). When we analyze the voice, we analyze the relationship of the narrator (the act of narration) to the story being told and to the narrative (the way the story is being told). Voice helps us to determine the narrator’s attitude toward the story and reliability. The voice of the story-teller may be anonymous (like in a folk tale – “Once upon a time…”), the voice of the epic bard (Virgil’s “Arms and the man I sing”), the confiding, sententious, intrusive authorial voice of classic fiction. After the turn of the XX century the intrusive authorial voice has tended to be suppressed or eliminated, the action is presented through the consciousness of the characters or by handing over to them the narrative task.

We can also distinguish voice (who speaks) and focalisation (who perceives) of the work of literature. Bal prefers the term “focalisation” to “point of view”, because she believes “point of view” is a deficient and misleading term. Mostly it refers to omniscient narrators, naïve narrators, and so on. Bal notes that it is important to make an explicit distinction between, on the one hand, the vision through which the elements are presented (who sees) and, on the other, the identity of the voice that is verbalising that vision (who speaks). The invisible, covert narrator is merely a voice that reports information. The author passes on the task of evaluating the story to the reader. The overt narrator appears as a mediator in the discourse, introduces himself/herself and the stories to the reader, gives comments that guide the readers’ understanding. As to the narrator’s position the heterodiegetic narrator does not belong to the world of the characters, the homodiegetic narrator belongs to the story world and is called autodiegetic if telling the own life story.

The narrator’s presentation can be reliable or unreliable. The reader has basically three strategies to test the reliability of the narrative, to check its consistency, coherence and correspondence. A consistent narrative does not reveal contradictions between the narrator’s words and actions, values and judgements, self-image and images the others have. A coherent narrative presents a story in which one event leads to another without significant logical gaps.

There is no direct correspondence between reality and fiction, which creates its own world, but rather one between the fictional models of reality and the dominant view of the world at the time of writing. Strange characters and unreliable narrators defamiliarise the vision of the world and challenge our views.

The story is presented in the text through the mediation of some prism, perspective, angle of vision verbalized by the narrator. Anglo-American term for this is “point of view” though “focalisation” is more preferable term as it includes not only grammatical parameter, but also cognitive and emotive one. For example in Timbuktu (1999) by Paul Auster the narrative is the third person, but everything is perceived through the dog’s eyes. So the user of the third person is the narrator and Mr. Bones is focalizer. Focalisation asks who perceives, what, in which way. Focalisation and narration are separate and distinct things.

Types of focalisation depend upon two criteria: position relative to the story and degree of persistence.

· According to the position relative to the story focalisation can be external or internal. Internal focalisation locates the perspective within a character, limiting the information to his/her perceptual and conceptual grasp of the world. This type generally takes the form of a character focalizer (as in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J.P. Salinger). External focalisation presents information of characters’ external behaviour, such as speech and action, excluding feelings and thoughts. Its vehicle is a narrator-focalizer. This type is predominant in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to mention a few works.

· According to the degree of persistence focalisation can vary between fixed focalisation, which is restricted to one and the same perspective throughout the narrative (J. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)), variable focalisation, which presents different scenes through different perspectives (Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)), or multiple focalisation, which invites comparisons between several perspectives of the same event (Julian Barnes, Talking It Over (1991)and Love, etc. (2001)).

There are different facets of focalisation:

· The perceptual facet (space and time) concerns the sensual range of the focalizer.In spatial terms the external/internal position of the focalizer takes the form of a bird’s-eye view (panoramic view or simultaneous focalisation of things happening in different places) vs. that of a limited observer. In temporal terms, external focalization is panchronic in the case of an unpersonified focalizer, and retrospective in the case of a character focalising his own past. On the other hand, internal focalisation is synchronous with the information regulated by the focalizer.

· The psychological facet deals with the focalizer’s mind and emotions. There are two components: cognitive (unrestricted/restricted knowledge) and emotive (uninvolved/involved).

· The ideological facet concerns the ideology of the focalizer that can be presented as authoritative, or there can be a juxtaposition of different views. The view can be presented in implicit or explicit way.