InvisibleLink #6: Who said that?

Focalization

Literally focalization means what it sounds like: focus. It is used in a variety of fields--landscape architecture, art, film, and literature, just to name a few. In literature, at least, it is a relatively new invention, and one that most people are not aware of when they read. But focalization is also one of the most important rhetorical devices an author can use to create an "authentic" voice within a narrative.

Most readers can generally recognize the narrator in a story: that is, who is telling the story (first-person, third-person, first-person omniscient, etc.). But narratologists finally started asking a second important question about narration: who sees the story? The person who sees the story is not always the person who tells the story. So, for example, a third-person narrator might write a story (or a segment of a story) as though a character were seeing the events taking place--this is called internal focalization, or character focalization. In other words, a narrator will sometimes focalize the story through a character in order to take on another perspective.

Jane Austen, perhaps surprisingly to many of her readers, is one of the first and most famous experimenters with focalization (in British lit., anyway). The opening chapter to Emma makes this quite clear. Emma has a lively narrative voice--we, the readers, get the impression that the narrator on the whole likes Emma without being taken in by her charms. It is a narrator not unlike the character of Mr. Knightley, in fact. Early on the first chapter, the narrator informs us:

The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

Here the narrator is clearly informing the reader about Emma's character--her faults and peccadilloes. This is, obviously, not Emma herself thinking about her own vanity. Later on in the chapter, however, it becomes unclear who is telling the reader what:

How was she to bear the change?--It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.

Here, Emma despairs about Miss Taylor being married to Mr. Weston and removing to her new home. The first phrase in the excerpt seems to be Emma's own thoughts, as does (somewhat) the last sentence. This is a narrative moment where it is ambiguous as to who is "speaking"--is this Emma's view of her situation or the narrator's?

The filmic equivalent of focalization is more obvious and generally easier to understand: it occurs with the "point of view" shot. Normally a camera takes on a somewhat anonymous point of view--we the viewers watch the scene from no particular assigned role or character. The movie Being John Malkovich played with focalization quite often, where one character enters the head of another character and suddenly sees through John Malkovich's eyes. The film seems almost to be making an elaborate intellectual joke about point of view--who is seeing (the audience, through John Cusack, through John Malkovich, who plays himself in a fictional movie about voyeurism)?