A study of the history of the notion of focalization shows that the two dis- tinct structural levels upon which it is considered1 have, time and again, given rise to an endemic conflict, and that the ensuing disputes between two opposing camps of theorists have taken place not within the frame- work of either level, but across them. This is why they are constantly la- tent, and always ready to erupt. It would be possible to say that this oc- curs in this way because their subject (the subject of their investigation), in connection with the definition of focalization, is not the same. For Genette and his disciples this subject is the narrative (which itself is focal-
1 Genette speaks about focalization at the narrative level, and for him this corresponds with “selection” of information (Genette uses the term “selection” even though he is aware of the danger this brings owing to an implied concept of mimesis). Focalization thus provides the basis for some kind of complex “view” of narration. Against this, Bal situates the entire theory of focalization on the level at which the characters of a nar- rative focalize the world of narrative events most simply: the story. She states: “In a story, elements of the fabula are presented in a certain way. We are confronted with a vision of the fabula” (Bal 1985: 100). The sentence, “Elizabeth saw him lie there, pale and lost in thought,” is therefore for her an example of focalization, in which, for Bal, Elizabeth is the focalizer who does the focalizing, and she does not enquire whether there is also someone else, focalizing both “him” and “Elizabeth”. Thus the “focus on narrative” (or, as Genette says, the narrator—or, beyond the convention that takes the fiction into account, the author) is a strategy that brings about this type of focalization. Moreover, Genette speaks also of focalization of the narrator, which, according to him, is logically implied in the case of first-person narration. Genette thus regards it as in- apposite to personify focalization at the level of focalizers by whose mediation the ele- ments of the story would be focalized: according to him only the narrative itself may be focalized, and as a complex entity. And Bal also says: “Focalization is the relationship between the ‘vision’, the agent that sees, and that which is seen. This relationship is a component of the story part, of the content of the narrative text: A says that B sees what C is doing” (Bal 1985: 104; italics added). Thus she provides a foundation for her theory of a mutually conditioned relationship between subject and object, in which she characterizes the seen as that which sees.
ized); for Mieke Bal and her disciples it is the story (which is focalized by means of the focalizers). The difference between their approaches is reflected also in Genette’s reply to Bal in the book Narrative Discourse Revisited:
The rest of the Balian theory of focalizations develops according to its own logic, based on her innovation (establishment of an instance of focalization composed of focalizer, a focalized, and even, page 251, “recipients of the focalizing”), like the idea of a focalization in the second degree. (Genette 1988: 76)
Bal thus establishes the instance (agent) of focalization, whereas for Ge- nette it is rather the situation of focalization that is established. On the one hand, Gerard Genette refuses to connect focalization with any of the elements of narrative that we designate as the “narrator” or as “char- acters”, considering it a higher category than these2; on the other, Mieke Bal claims it is possible to delimit the term “focalization” on the level of those elements, and in consequence to personify it, in the form of a fo- calizer. For Genette, focalization is connected with a limitation of the a- mount of information that the reader obtains through the text about the fictional world. In Bal, focalization is not connected with this phenom- enon. It is a matter of an activity (of relationships) that produces informa- tion that has already been selected; this is why Bal does not speak of a zero-value focalization, and why she regards it as necessary to study both object and subject of the relationship, separately, in other words, what is focalized and what does the focalizing.
Therefore these two concepts can never be reconciled, despite the fact that they both use the common term focalization. Both consider the ques- tion that they answer with the term “focalization” quite legitimately— however, as mentioned above, each on its own structural level. One should be aware of these ambiguities in the term, and perceive them as a productive area to which the attention of narratology must be directed.
2 Genette defines focalization in terms of the character’s “knowing more or less” than the narrator; however, in specific examples his “narrator” comes close to the concept of the author, and often overlaps with the concept of the implied author, which Genette refuses to admit to his theory. The peculiarity of the relationship between narrator and focalization is attested also by Genette’s dictum: “For me, there is no focalizing or fo- calized character: focalized can be applied only to the narrative itself, and if focalizer applied to anyone, it could only be the person who focalizes the narrative—that is, the narrator, or, if one wanted to go outside the conventions of fiction, the author himself, who delegates (or does not delegate) to the narrator his power of focalizing or not fo- calizing” (Genette 1988: 73).
The attempt to reconcile these opposing views of focalization leads to pa- radoxical claims, also exemplified in Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002). Here, focalization is a strategy at a higher level than ei- ther narrator or characters, but “it is important to keep in mind that focal- izing is not necessarily achieved through a single consistent narrative con- sciousness. Focalization can change, sometimes frequently, during the course of narrative, and sometimes from sentence to sentence” (Abbott 2002: 190); Abbott consequently associates focalization with the narrative voice (“In this study I present focalization and voice as companion concepts”, Abbott 2002: 190). While voice, for Genette, is the conse- quence of the strategy of focalization, for Abbott voice is focalization it- self.
I would like here to adhere to the definition of Genette, for whom fo- calization is closely connected with the overall semantic construction of the narrative. It constitutes a sign of a strategy which distributes, and, from our point of view, generates, meaning in a literary text. I am interest- ed in the moment at which, says Genette, only narration itself can be focalized, and the possibility of focalization is open only to that, who fo- calize the narration (or not focalize): this is the narrator, or—ignoring the convention that evaluates the fiction—the author himself, who delegates (or does not delegate) his task of focalization to the narrator (cf. Genette 1988: 73). To recapitulate: for Genette, focalization is connected with the level at which narration itself is focalized.
Before turning to my main topic, I would like to draw attention to an- other productive area which opens up when the concept of focalization is so defined, and which connects Genette’s theories with those of the Pra- gue structuralists, and of Jan Mukařovský. For Mukařovský, too, it was the question of intention that constituted the central question in connec- tion with the generating of meaning: the text is the vehicle of the inten- tion, and the intention at the same time refers to the situations of author, text and reader. For this reason, he introduced the notion of the subject in this context: it is an “abstract subject, contained in the structure of the work itself, which is merely a point from which the whole structure can be comprehended” (Mukařovský [1937] 2000: 258). Mukařovský then focused his attention on understand-ing the production, and the textual location, of the subject, at a time (the first half of the 1940s) when he was at the peak of his powers. And the essential content of the notions of “focalization” in Genette’s writings, and “subject” in Mukařovský’s, must
prompt the question why the former did not need to use the term “implied author”, and why the latter came so close to this concept.
In his Poetics of Composition, Boris Uspenskij distinguished a number of structural levels on which a narrative point of view is formed as a function, that he delimitated at a pragmatic level of the act of narration. The function of this point of view is to lead the narration to fulfil a certain purpose, and to understand this purpose it is necessary, according to Uspenskij, to investigate the principles of its constitution. Uspenskij con- vincingly demonstrated the way in which the processes through which the narrative point of view is manifested are closely connected with the for- mation of values in the fictional world. And his concept is in its own way confirmed by Schmid’s model of the construction of perspective, which amplifies Uspenskij’s four structural levels (ideological, phraseological, temporal-spatial and psychological) with a perceptual level that is hier- archically superior to them.
So if we perceive this point of view as a basic means of constructing value in the fictional world, then it is necessary to reformulate the ques- tion of the character and intention of a textual realization that produces the situation of focalization, or, more simply—of the character and inten- tion of a textual instance of focalization. Therefore we are interested not only in the “range” and “depth”, but also in the “quality” of a focalization of the fictional world. This quality cannot be connected merely with the “density” of the information that we acquire concerning the fictitious world, but also with its value. However, in the present context our ques- tions concerning the principles through which meaning is generated in a text, and the principles through which the fictional world is constructed, come, by virtue of the strategy of focalization, very close to the questions of the intention of the narrative act, of the reading public, of the context, and of the principles through which the reader re-produces meaning in the form of a unique “sense”. Our point of departure is the area of semantics, and we set out for the area of the pragmatics of a narrative act. Therefore the procedure is fully in the tradition of the Prague school, for whom the semantic gesture—the overall construction of meaning in a work—is a question of pragmatics.