Means of meaning making in literary art: focalization, mode of narration, and granularity

Abstract

Instead of considering key concepts of narratology such as focalization (perspective) or mode of narration (teller vs. reflector, as Franz K. Stanzel has it) simply as criteria for a typology of texts, this paper intends to activate them as ‘symbolic forming tools’ or ‘means of meaning making’ in literary art. The fundamental claim is that an author can activate or apply them in various ways—experimenting with them—in order to obtain given meaning effect within one and the same text.

Through analysis of examples it is shown how authors' variations on the focalization, the narrative mode, and the granularity axes produce semiotic effects amenable to systematic characterization.

A recurrent concern in the paper is the representation of consciousness in literary art.

Keywords:

• meaning making tools
• narrative art
• focalization
• narrative mode
• representation of consciousness

Notes

¹ These terms have been coined by Gérard Genette, as regards the latter two, and by Franz K. Stanzel as regards the former two. They do belong to the canon of narratological concepts but should of course be explained, be it as roughly as here: authorial vs. Figural designates in Stanzel (1983) narrative situations with, respectively, an overtly narrating instance and a covert, inconspicuous transmitter instance, say: a protagonist through whose consciousness we access the story world (without him assuming any narrator-role). Genette (1980, 1988) defines heterodiegesis as a narrative with a narrator which is not part of the story world, and homodiegesis as a narrative with a narrator who is part of the story world.

² Verbally uncommitted thought designates a representation of a given character's thoughts which does not necessarily correspond to what literally went through his mind. It gives verbal shape to its contents, without pretending to reflect its concise character.

³ A third and classical example by Joyce could be mentioned: the confession scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It has been extensively commented on by Dorrit Cohn (1978: 102f.), and by Franz K. Smith (1997)]: 250) who strongly emphasizes the semiotic effects of the transposition from internal to external focalization. It reads: “The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next. He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box.

At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to the white crucifix suspended above him. God could see that he was sorry. He would tell all his sins. His confession would be long, long. Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let them know. It was true. But God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. He was sorry. He clasped his hands and raised them towards the white form, praying with his darkened eyes, praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro like a lost creature, praying with whimpering lips” (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 143).

As Stanzel observes the focalization of the passage is initially internal while at the end Stephen is clearly seen from the outside (as an almost verbatim counterpart to the description of Eveline as a “helpless animal”, who by the way also moves her “lips in silent fervent prayer” (Joyce, “Eveline”, 42). Again, the change from internal to external corresponds quite precisely to the protagonist's self-experience of dereliction: we leave Stephen's point of view at the very moment when he really feels like having being left radically on his own.

⁴ The significant, aesthetically convincing, artificiality of the first person setting in Hemingway's texts seem to radically call into question Hamburger's distinction between first and third person narration in terms of als ob and als fiction: in many of Hemingway's first person fictions, like the one above, there is no voice assuming the pretense (Fingierbarkeit), i.e. the reader is by no means listening to any transmitted experience, but is, say, sharing the perceptions online with the protagonist, within the limited horizon of his consciousness. In this sense, Hemingway's first person narrators behave like certain reflector voices in third person narrations: that's probably part of their misery.

⁵ Of course, Robert Cohn therefore becomes some sort of a symmetric counterpart figure to Jake Barnes himself: physically able, mentally pathetic, whereas the inverse seems to hold for Barnes.

⁶ The same is basically the case in other of his short story, for example “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which sets out as a scientific report and ends up with the vision of a puddle of putrescent matter.

⁷ Notice, however, the external focalization “There was no longer any perturbation visible on her face”, which in this context, of course, reveals the feigned character of her crying.

⁸ As Chafe (1994: 255) remarks that whenever focalization is internal, descriptive sentences such as “he adjusted the pack harness”, or “Nick sat down” do not simply address the action seen from the outside, but also the protagonist's own experience of performing these actions.

⁹ Whereas there are hardly any details specified in the passage, a lot of simple actions are expressed (“walk back up”, “adjust”, “pull”, “sling”, “get [one's arms] through”, “lean against,” etc). In his 2007 article, Thor Grünbaum very convincingly shows how vivid representation of spaces, locations rest on the representation of simple actions like the ones above, not on detailed accounts of objects and their exact position in that space. My claim here is cognate to his in the sense that I also found this feature on the basic characteristics of human perceptual intentionality itself. Notice that this feature is far from being self-evident: why shouldn't more precisions, more quantitative and metrical specifications, more details, etc., why shouldn't all this—according to the principle “more is better”—yield more vivid and lively representations? Well, exactly because this does not fit our average way of experiencing, perceptually intending or bodily interacting with things in prototypical or familiar situations. (Cf. examples [15], [16], and [17] below.)

¹⁰ Windowing of attention is a pervasive mode of conceptualization, whose linguistic expression consists in only mentioning one or some of the constituents moments of a full event while gapping (and tacitly implying) the others. Hence “the pen rolled off the table, through the air and down on the ground” can be rendered, for example, by either “the pen rolled off the table” or “the pen rolled down on the ground” (each sentence would thereby express what part of the event speaker assigns intentional saliency). Similarly as regards causal event frames where the sentence “He broke the window” adequately covers the much more fine-grained sequence of sub-events: he broke the window by picking up a stone, lifting it with his hand, swinging his arm, releasing the stone, thereby propelling it forward, etc., etc. (Talmy 2000: vol. 1, 271f). Weiss' protagonist is a parade example of a windowing-impaired mind. Actually both passage [16] and [17] above would do as text book examples of what full event/causal chain frames are, they make out the stuff on which we usually operate our windowing abstractions.