Besides the fundamental disagreement with Genette over the number and nature of instances of POV, there are differences as to the status of first- or third-person narrative utterances, a question which intersects with that of the status of utterances with a heterodiegetic narrator and those medi- ated by a character, on the plane of the expression of subjectivity and knowledge.
As the previous markers may be present with an “I- or he-POV”, it fol- lows that a POV expressed in the first person is not necessarily subjec- tifying by virtue of its expression, no more than a third-person point of view necessarily implies an objectifying utterance. This scale of sub- jectivity in the expression of POV is due to the fact that what is perceived is expressed, be it with an “I” or a “he”, through lexical or syntactic markers—much in the same way as were those mentioned in connection with examples (11) to (23); and these markers, by virtue of their presence, indicate the reactions of a subject toward an object. Thus, the “I-POV” in (24) is totally subjectifying, through the comparison of the loved one with a gazelle or a young stag. The “I-POV” in (25), describing Ezekiel’s vision of the construction of the new temple, is objectifying, whereas the same prophet’s vision of glory in (26) is a combination of various objectifying data from which there emerge, despite his desire to describe faithfully what he had seen in a dream, a certain number of subjective reactions:
(24) The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice. (KJV: Song of Solomon 2:8–9)
(25) So he measured the court, an hundred cubits long, and an hundred cubits broad, foursquare; and the altar that was before the house. And he brought me to the porch of the house, and measured each post of the porch, five cubits on this side, and five cubits on that side: and the breadth of the gate was three cubits on this side, and three cubits on that side. (KJV: Ezekiel 40:47–48)
25
(26) And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and they four had their faces and their wings. (KJV: Ezekiel 1:4–8)
The presence and the combination of lexical and syntactic markers pro- duce the same effects of subjectifying or objectifying expression with a “he-POV”: the heterodiegetic POV of Solomon, describing the temple, is objectifying in (28), the POV taking the form of a description of actions:
(27) And in the most holy house he [Solomon] made two cherubims of image work, and overlaid them with gold. And the wings of the cherubims were twenty cubits long: one wing of the one cherub was five cubits, reaching to the wall of the house: and the other wing was likewise five cubits, reaching to the wing of the other cherub. And one wing of the other cherub was five cubits, reaching to the wall of the house: and the other wing was five cubits also, joining to the wing of the other cherub. The wings of these cherubims spread themselves forth twenty cubits: and they stood on their feet, and their faces were inward. And he made the vail of blue, and purple, and crimson, and fine linen, and wrought cherubims thereon. (KJV: 2 Chronicles 3:10–14)
The heterodiegetic POV in (3), on the other hand, includes numerous sub- jectivemes, as was seen above. For its part, the following extract from Genesis occupies an intermediary position:
(28) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (KJV: Genesis 1:1–5)
The same reasoning denies the pertinence of the erroneous simplifications which portray the POV of a heterodiegetic narrator as, by definition, objective, and a character’s POV as, by definition, subjective26. This type of confusion between the origin of and the linguistic expression of sub- jectivity relies in an overly naive fashion on the mistaken idea that nar- ration is so “objectifying” that “no one is speaking here, the events seem to narrate themselves,” as Benveniste (cf. 1966: 241) claims in an as-
26
sertion which is contradicted by the presence of all sorts of subjective markers (cf. Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1981), even in written texts whose enun- ciation is historical, because anaphoric localization still does not prevent traces of the modal subject from coming to the surface (cf. Rabatel 2005c: 117–20), as can be verified if one reflects on the presence or absence of such-and-such a linguistic marker, as in examples (11) to (23), opening the way to the possibility for a narrator’s or a character’s POV to be more or less objectifying or subjectifying.
The last point of disagreement concerns the attribution of a volume of untouchable knowledge contiguous with each perspective, ranging from narratorial omniscience to the maximum retention of information in ex- ternal focalization, whereas this is only a theoretical possibility. This eventuality is accepted as far as the narrator is concerned, even if, in practice, he is confined to omniscience27, while on the other hand charac- ters are denied variability in the volume of their knowledge. Now, omnis- cience is a datum which is not always verified in texts, depending on the genre, the type of narrator, expositional strategy, etc.; nor, moreover, is it reserved exclusively to narrators, insofar as it is manifest, since there exist knowledgeable characters and since, generally speaking, the thesis according to which the point of view of characters is a limited one (re- stricted to external vision, according to Vitoux [1982]), because they are supposedly unable to have access to the thoughts of other characters, quite simply does not stand up to close linguistic inspection, as is shown by the examples analyzed in chapter 12 of my 1997 book. The fact that a character can indeed evoke the thoughts of others, particularly in reported discourse, is the surest indicator that characters, as the centers of nar- rative perspective, can have access to other characters’ interiority or, at least, represent this interiority, as the narrator does, with the same margins of certainty and error. What is certain is that the existence of this actorial knowledge about other characters is not guaranteed: in this sense, there is a clear difference between the authorial and the actorial instance28, but it
27
See Rabatel (2009) for a more detailed analysis of straightforward examples of omnis- cience or of an equally obvious absence of omniscience, and for the development of a bridge between the enunciative approach to point of view and an interactional con- ception of narration which gives all due importance to the reader/co-enunciator. See also Pier (2004) and Coste (2006).
28
It could be objected that the characters’ knowledge depends on their status as “nar- rator”-characters, who are the authors of embedded narratives. This objection, how- ever, backfires on those who voice it: the fact that a character can act as a second-level
is one that has to do with the fiduciary relationship. In short, it is possible for a character to have access to the introspection of someone else, contrary to what J. Lintvelt writes: “adopting the perspective of an actor, the narrator is limited to the extrospection of this actor-perceiver, with the result that he will only be able to give an external presentation of the other actors” (Lintvelt 1981: 44).
But beyond the differences, what remains—and this is one of Ge- nette’s unsurpassed (and unsurpassable) achievements—is the distinction between mode and voice, in other words the possibility for the narrator to tell a story with his own voice while allowing other enunciative sources to be heard, even when they do not take the form of discourse. In my own work, up to now, I have constantly endeavoured to identify the linguistic markers which allow one to hear these POVs, with their profoundly dia- logic nature, within the framework of a continuum, by paying particular attention to the least obvious forms of subjectivity, in contexts of enun- ciative effacement, in which traces of a modal subject are nevertheless perceptible29.
These different forms function conjointly (cf. Rabatel 2001; 2005b), allowing the prime speaker/enunciator to—more or less explicitly— express his own point of view or adopt that of the characters, or even to superimpose or oppose various narrative perspectives, inviting the reader, on the basis of the effects produced by the POV, to get ever closer, through empathy, to the characters’ reasons, as to those of the narrator, since the former are expressed through the voice of the latter. This is why the necessarily schematic presentation of forms and markers must be con- fronted with texts and their interpretations, which it has not been possible for me to do here, having chosen to demonstrate and substantiate the deep underlying enunciative unity which brings together such a diversity of linguistic forms. But the reader may wish to refer to the numerous pub- lications30 in which critics have been good enough to point out the thor-
narrator exposes the vacuousness of the arguments that relegate characters to a role which only allows them limited knowledge. This in no way reduces differences in function and status: the cognitive superiority of the character-narrator, which is higher than that of all other characters, remains lower than that of the first narrator.
29
For a more complete approach, see my re-reading of Genette, in Rabatel (1997 and 2008b: ch. 2).
30
See, in particular, my analyses of the Bible (cf. Rabatel 2008a, ch. 6 to 8), Maupassant (cf. Rabatel 2008a: ch. 9 and 10), Pinget (in Bouchard et al. [2002]), Ernaux, Renaud Camus or Semprun (cf. Rabatel 2008b: ch. 8 to 10).
oughness of the linguistic descriptions and the resulting interpretative ad- vances.
Translated from French by Rodney Coward (University of Tours), in- cluding the quotations from Ducrot (1984), Latour (2006) and Lintvelt (1981).
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