{1} I am pleased to see that Tobias Klauk and Tilman Köppe have responded to my article on focalization in the Handbook of Narratology, thus making a contribution towards transforming this reference work into the web-based Living Handbook of Narratology envisaged by its editors. Klauk and Köppe do not provide a detailed review of my article; instead they expand on the "Topics for Further Consideration", raising a number of additional questions. In my response to their response, I will not attempt to answer all or even most of these questions, but I hope to shed a little light on some of them. I will address four points: Klauk and Köppe's rejection of my distinction between the terms focalization and point of view (1); their suggestion that focalization might be a gradual phenomenon (2); their deductive, (meta-)theoretical approach (3); and their claim that there is a link between direct speech and internal focalization (4).
1. Focalization and Point of View
{2} In my article and elsewhere, I have argued that it is possible to make a distinction between focalization and point of view. I do not see them as opposed or separate but as partially overlapping and competing terms. Thus "[t]here is room for both because each highlights different aspects of a complex and elusive phenomenon" (Niederhoff 2011 [21]; see Niederhoff 2001 for the full statement of this argument). Klauk and Köppe reject this view, claiming that my attempt to distinguish the terms amounts to no more than "two different ways of saying more or less exactly the same thing" (Klauk 2011: [note 1]). Almost immediately after this claim, however, they make a distinction of their own which supports my view that the two terms are not equivalent. Klauk and Köppe's distinction is between different ways of theorizing focalization. According to the first of these ways, focalization consists in a restriction of information or knowledge, while, according to the second, it is based on different "modes of representation", i.e. different ways of referring to the same object or referent. "The President", "Obama", or "dad" may identify the same individual, but they indicate different points of view from which this individual is presented. Now these two ways of theorizing the concept (there is a third that is not relevant to my present argument) correspond very roughly to my distinction between focalization and point of view. If a critic is primarily interested in the regulation or restriction of information, focalization would appear to be the more helpful term. If another critic is more interested in different ways of designating the same referent, then point of view will be the better concept.
2. Focalization as a Gradual Phenomenon
{3} Klauk and Köppe suggest that "focalization could be a gradual phenomenon. Compare any two internally focalized texts. It indeed makes sense to say that one conveys the perspective [...] of its focal character much more than the other text does" (Klauk 2011: {21}). I could not agree more, but I am afraid that this is not a new idea. Genette himself makes remarks to this effect in his introduction of the term ([1972] 1986: 192 f.). If one takes the terminological predecessors of focalization, e.g. point of view or narrative situation, into consideration, the gradualism proposed by Klauk and Köppe seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Stanzel, for instance, provides an extensive discussion of the intermediate forms between the authorial and the figural narrative situation in his Theory of Narrative ([1979] 1988: 186-200).
{4} While I am writing this response, I am reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, a novel that alternates between contracting its focus on and expanding it beyond the mind of its protagonist, thus providing ample evidence for the gradual nature of the phenomenon. Here are two passages, in both of which the protagonist Lily Bart, a beautiful but almost penniless socialite, is reviewing her precarious position in the high society of New York. The first passage shows her when she is beset by regrets and worries because she has been observed leaving a male friend's flat by herself, thus laying herself open to the suspicion of having an affair; the second passage presents her in a more complacent mood.
{5} In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh.
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden's rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford. ([1905] 2008: 16 f.)
{6} Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.
In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendancy. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived. ([1905] 2008: 50 f.)
{7} Both of these passages are internally focalized; they present Lily Bart in the process of reviewing her situation. But in the first passage there is a much more exclusive concentration on how the situation is experienced by Lily herself; the rhetorical questions in free indirect thought, for instance, render her agitation. In the second passage, by contrast, her view is qualified in several ways, for instance by the introductory comment, "Society is a revolving body ...", which hints that Lily's reflections are a delusion based on the favourable constellation of the present moment. The narrator further qualifies Lily's appreciative thoughts about her upper-class companions with the word "seemed", and the vocabulary with which these companions are described, "obtuseness" and "limitations", does not reflect the "rosy glow" experienced by Lily but a less flattering light. It seems that the standard in this novel is a critical view of high society, its materialism, its shallowness, and its double standard. Whenever Lily shares this critical view, Wharton opts for a fully developed internal focalization. When Lily takes a more favourable view, the internal focalization is less fully developed, as in the second of the two quotations.
3. Meta-Theory
{8} Klauk and Köppe's discussion strikes me as highly deductive and theoretical or even meta-theoretical. In section 6 of their article, for instance, they discuss "the linguistic basis to focalization", but instead of analyzing examples, they worry about the precise nature of the connection between linguistic features, a lower-order property of the narrative text, and focalization, a higher-order property. Are linguistic features causes that trigger a certain focalization in the reader's mind? Are they reasons for interpreting a passage as focalized in a particular way? Or do we have to see the connection in logical terms – and if the latter, do we have to characterize the linguistic features as types or tokens? The relevance of these questions escapes me, my own interests being of a more pedestrian nature. I see focalization, point of view and related concepts as means of describing, analyzing and interpreting narrative texts, as in the comparison of the two passages from Wharton's novel given above. No doubt the house of narratology, like the house of fiction, has many windows. But the primary purpose of these windows is to provide a good look at the novels, short stories, ballads and biographies that are, after all, the objects of narratological study. With some of the questions and considerations raised by Klauk and Köppe, I find myself looking not through a window but into a mirror that primarily reflects the house of narratology itself.
4. Direct Speech and Focalization
{9} A further example of the somewhat deductive approach taken by Klauk and Köppe is their suggestion that the best way to bring about internal focalization is direct speech: "[I]nternal focalization has something to do with revealing the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world, and the like. And direct speech seems to be the most immediate way to do just that (2011: {34}). This claim is probably valid for direct thought alias interior monologue, as Genette points out in Narrative Discourse ([1972] 1986: 193). But it would be rash to make analogous claims for direct speech as it differs from direct thought in two ways which counteract an internal focalization on the mind of the speaker.
{10} First of all, direct speech frequently fails to express "the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world". Consider the following example, again from The House of Mirth. It describes the encounter between Lily and Sim Rosedale, the man who, to her embarrassment, has found out that she has visited Lawrence Selden by herself.
{11} "Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?" he said, in a tone which had the familiarity of a touch.
Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into precipitate explanations.
"Yes – I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors'."
"Ah – your dress-maker; just so," he said blandly. "I didn't know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick." ([1905] 2008: 16)
{12} The characters' words are rendered in direct speech, but this does not result in a direct expression of how the characters feel about the encounter. Lily is lying, while Rosedale is trying to strike the proper balance between insinuating what he suspects and keeping up the façade of polite conversation.
{13} The dialogue between Lily and Rosedale shows a second difference between direct speech and direct thought, a difference that also counteracts internal focalization. While direct thought is almost invariably limited to the mind of one character, direct speech tends to come in the form of dialogue between different characters. Theoretically speaking, there is no reason why a narrative should not present a rapid sequence of reflections by different characters, all rendered in direct thought, but I am not aware of a single example of this, whereas in direct speech the rapid alternation of utterances by different characters is the norm. This alternation does not entail a concomitant alternation of focalization. Would it be justified to say that, with each change of speaker in the dialogue quoted above, there is a parallel shift from internal focalization on Lily to internal focalization on Rosedale?
{14} Direct speech has a special status in that is is, to quote Stanzel, a "foreign body" ([1979] 1988: 65), an instance of mimesis within diegesis or drama within narrative. I suggest that the focalization or point of view in a passage of direct speech crucially depends on the narrative text surrounding it. In the exchange just quoted, for instance, the point of view is indeed Lily's. However, this is not the case because her words are rendered in direct speech but because of the way in which this direct speech is contextualized. The exchange is preceded by a lengthy passage rendering Lily's anxiety about the risk she has taken in spending time with Selden, followed by a brief paragraph that describes Rosedale's appearance. Thus Lily's anxious and embarrassed experience of the encounter is privileged over the smug triumph that Rosedale is presumably enjoying (I have to say "presumably" because we can only guess at the precise nature of his feelings). Lily's experience is also privileged in that the tone of Rosedale's voice is described precisely as she perceives it. The narrator says that it has "the familiarity of a touch", a metaphor that is continued in the description of Lily's physical and emotional response to it: "Miss Bart shrank from it slightly". Note that, assuming my account is correct, the passage is firmly focalized on Lily, not on Rosedale, although he has an equal share in the dialogue.
{15} That direct speech may also be integrated into an authorial or zero-focalized passage is shown by the following quotation from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, in which the narrator deplores the lack of discipline in the protagonist's education:
{16} Edward would throw himself with spirit upon any classical author of which his preceptor proposed the perusal, make himself master of the style so far as to understand the story, and if that pleased or interested him, he finished the volume. But it was in vain to attempt fixing his attention on critical distinctions of philology, upon the difference of idiom, the beauty of felicitous expression, or the artificial combinations of syntax. "I can read and understand a Latin author," said young Edward, with the self-confidence and rash reasoning of fifteen, "and Scaliger or Bentley could not do much more." Alas! while he was thus permitted to read only for the gratification of his own amusement, he foresaw not that he was losing for ever the opportunity of acquiring habits of firm and incumbent application, of gaining the art of controuling, directing, and concentrating the powers of his own mind for earnest investigation, – an art far more essential than even that learning which is the primary object of study. ([1814] 1981: 12)
{17} Unlike the lies and insinuations uttered by Lily Bart and Sim Rosedale, the statement given in direct speech does render "the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world", but it would be erroneous to infer that this brief statement brings about a shift to internal focalization or the point of view of the character. We do not suddenly share Edward's view of his education when we come upon this remark; we rather take it as an illustration of what we read in the rest of the paragraph. Edward's remark proves the narrator's point. Thus there is no change from the zero focalization or authorial point of view that characterizes the passage as a whole.
{18} Finally, it should be added that direct speech can also be made to fit the observer or camera point of view described as external focalization by Genette, the canonical example being Hemingway's short story "The Killers". The recipe for this type of narrative is to combine extensive dialogue, preferably of an opaque kind, with brief passages of report and description, to stick to scene rather than summary, and to avoid inside views and explanatory comments about the characters' identities or their past experiences.
{19} Klauk and Köppe's claim that direct speech entails internal focalization reminds me of the reconceptualization of perspective suggested by Pfister and Nünning (also discussed in my article on "Perspective / Point of View" in The Handbook of Narratology). Pfister argues that, in a play, each character has their perspective, a subjective disposition based on their knowledge, their values and their interests; the way in which these perspectives coincide or clash with each other determines the perspectival structure of the play. Nünning transfers this model to narrative, with the obvious addition that, in narrative, we also have a narrator with his or her perspective. The underlying assumption in this account is the principle "one man, one vote", which here appears in the form "one person, one perspective", or, to be more precise, "one person, his or her own perspective". Klauk and Köppe also argue along these lines when they assume that a character who speaks will articulate his or her point of view.
{20} In a certain sense, this assumption is incontrovertible. Each human being has a unique subjective disposition, based on their temperament, upbringing, experiences etc., and this disposition will manifest itself when they speak (also, one might add, when they think or act). This is the case in life and, presumably, also in plays and novels. But this general sense of perspective, in which it means no more than the subjectivity that none of us can escape, is different from the sense in which the term and its synonyms or competitors have been used in narrative theory. When novelists and critics began to talk about perspective or point of view in the second half of the 19th century, they responded to the fact that literary narrators did not communicate their own view of the story but rather that of a character. This is a different and, I should like to add, a more interesting and sophisticated phenomenon than the general fact that each human being has a subjective disposition; the latter is inescapable, the former is an option or a choice. Nünning, to be sure, is aware of this difference. He uses the term perspective for the more general concept of subjective disposition and focalization for the more specific narratological concept. But I am not sure that everyone else is aware of this distinction; Klauk and Köppe don't seem to be.
{21} In a way, the attempts to give perspective or focalization a broader sense by tying it up with characters and narrators amounts to a relapse into pre-Genettean times. When Genette made his distinction between the questions "who speaks?" and "who sees?", he made a salutary plea for keeping an open mind. He insisted that we disconnect narrators and perspectives or, more generally, that we do not make any rash inferences about particular human subjects having or taking a particular point of view. Klauk and Köppe are making precisely an inference of this kind when they assume that direct speech entails internal focalization on the character who is speaking. As I have tried to show, the distinction between "who speaks?" and "who sees?" is just as relevant at the level of characters as it is at the level of narrators.
Works Cited
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1986). Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Klauk, Tobias & Tilmann Köppe (2011). "Puzzles and Problems for the Theory of Focalization." In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. URL = http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Talk:Focalization [view date: 19 Oct 2012].
Niederhoff, Burkhard (2001). "Fokalisation und Perspektive: Ein Plädoyer für friedliche Koexistenz." Poetica 33, 1–21.
Niederhoff, Burkhard (2011). "Focalization." In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. URL = http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php?title=Focalization&oldid=1561 [view date: 17 Oct 2012].
Nünning, Ansgar (2001). "On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts." W. van Peer & S. Chatman (eds.). New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Albany: SUNY, 207–23.
Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 2000). The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Scott, Walter ([1814] 1981). Waverley; or, ´Tis Sixty Years Since. Claire Lamont (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stanzel, F.K. ([1979] 1988). A Theory of Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Wharton, Edith ([1905] 2008). The House of Mirth. Martha Banta (ed.). Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Reply to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe
Submitted by Burkhard Niederhoff on Wed, 24. October 2012{1} I am pleased to see that Tobias Klauk and Tilman Köppe have responded to my article on focalization in the Handbook of Narratology, thus making a contribution towards transforming this reference work into the web-based Living Handbook of Narratology envisaged by its editors. Klauk and Köppe do not provide a detailed review of my article; instead they expand on the "Topics for Further Consideration", raising a number of additional questions. In my response to their response, I will not attempt to answer all or even most of these questions, but I hope to shed a little light on some of them. I will address four points: Klauk and Köppe's rejection of my distinction between the terms focalization and point of view (1); their suggestion that focalization might be a gradual phenomenon (2); their deductive, (meta-)theoretical approach (3); and their claim that there is a link between direct speech and internal focalization (4).
1. Focalization and Point of View
{2} In my article and elsewhere, I have argued that it is possible to make a distinction between focalization and point of view. I do not see them as opposed or separate but as partially overlapping and competing terms. Thus "[t]here is room for both because each highlights different aspects of a complex and elusive phenomenon" (Niederhoff 2011 [21]; see Niederhoff 2001 for the full statement of this argument). Klauk and Köppe reject this view, claiming that my attempt to distinguish the terms amounts to no more than "two different ways of saying more or less exactly the same thing" (Klauk 2011: [note 1]). Almost immediately after this claim, however, they make a distinction of their own which supports my view that the two terms are not equivalent. Klauk and Köppe's distinction is between different ways of theorizing focalization. According to the first of these ways, focalization consists in a restriction of information or knowledge, while, according to the second, it is based on different "modes of representation", i.e. different ways of referring to the same object or referent. "The President", "Obama", or "dad" may identify the same individual, but they indicate different points of view from which this individual is presented. Now these two ways of theorizing the concept (there is a third that is not relevant to my present argument) correspond very roughly to my distinction between focalization and point of view. If a critic is primarily interested in the regulation or restriction of information, focalization would appear to be the more helpful term. If another critic is more interested in different ways of designating the same referent, then point of view will be the better concept.
2. Focalization as a Gradual Phenomenon
{3} Klauk and Köppe suggest that "focalization could be a gradual phenomenon. Compare any two internally focalized texts. It indeed makes sense to say that one conveys the perspective [...] of its focal character much more than the other text does" (Klauk 2011: {21}). I could not agree more, but I am afraid that this is not a new idea. Genette himself makes remarks to this effect in his introduction of the term ([1972] 1986: 192 f.). If one takes the terminological predecessors of focalization, e.g. point of view or narrative situation, into consideration, the gradualism proposed by Klauk and Köppe seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Stanzel, for instance, provides an extensive discussion of the intermediate forms between the authorial and the figural narrative situation in his Theory of Narrative ([1979] 1988: 186-200).
{4} While I am writing this response, I am reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, a novel that alternates between contracting its focus on and expanding it beyond the mind of its protagonist, thus providing ample evidence for the gradual nature of the phenomenon. Here are two passages, in both of which the protagonist Lily Bart, a beautiful but almost penniless socialite, is reviewing her precarious position in the high society of New York. The first passage shows her when she is beset by regrets and worries because she has been observed leaving a male friend's flat by herself, thus laying herself open to the suspicion of having an affair; the second passage presents her in a more complacent mood.
{5} In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh.
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden's rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford. ([1905] 2008: 16 f.)
{6} Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.
In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendancy. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived. ([1905] 2008: 50 f.)
{7} Both of these passages are internally focalized; they present Lily Bart in the process of reviewing her situation. But in the first passage there is a much more exclusive concentration on how the situation is experienced by Lily herself; the rhetorical questions in free indirect thought, for instance, render her agitation. In the second passage, by contrast, her view is qualified in several ways, for instance by the introductory comment, "Society is a revolving body ...", which hints that Lily's reflections are a delusion based on the favourable constellation of the present moment. The narrator further qualifies Lily's appreciative thoughts about her upper-class companions with the word "seemed", and the vocabulary with which these companions are described, "obtuseness" and "limitations", does not reflect the "rosy glow" experienced by Lily but a less flattering light. It seems that the standard in this novel is a critical view of high society, its materialism, its shallowness, and its double standard. Whenever Lily shares this critical view, Wharton opts for a fully developed internal focalization. When Lily takes a more favourable view, the internal focalization is less fully developed, as in the second of the two quotations.
3. Meta-Theory
{8} Klauk and Köppe's discussion strikes me as highly deductive and theoretical or even meta-theoretical. In section 6 of their article, for instance, they discuss "the linguistic basis to focalization", but instead of analyzing examples, they worry about the precise nature of the connection between linguistic features, a lower-order property of the narrative text, and focalization, a higher-order property. Are linguistic features causes that trigger a certain focalization in the reader's mind? Are they reasons for interpreting a passage as focalized in a particular way? Or do we have to see the connection in logical terms – and if the latter, do we have to characterize the linguistic features as types or tokens? The relevance of these questions escapes me, my own interests being of a more pedestrian nature. I see focalization, point of view and related concepts as means of describing, analyzing and interpreting narrative texts, as in the comparison of the two passages from Wharton's novel given above. No doubt the house of narratology, like the house of fiction, has many windows. But the primary purpose of these windows is to provide a good look at the novels, short stories, ballads and biographies that are, after all, the objects of narratological study. With some of the questions and considerations raised by Klauk and Köppe, I find myself looking not through a window but into a mirror that primarily reflects the house of narratology itself.
4. Direct Speech and Focalization
{9} A further example of the somewhat deductive approach taken by Klauk and Köppe is their suggestion that the best way to bring about internal focalization is direct speech: "[I]nternal focalization has something to do with revealing the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world, and the like. And direct speech seems to be the most immediate way to do just that (2011: {34}). This claim is probably valid for direct thought alias interior monologue, as Genette points out in Narrative Discourse ([1972] 1986: 193). But it would be rash to make analogous claims for direct speech as it differs from direct thought in two ways which counteract an internal focalization on the mind of the speaker.
{10} First of all, direct speech frequently fails to express "the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world". Consider the following example, again from The House of Mirth. It describes the encounter between Lily and Sim Rosedale, the man who, to her embarrassment, has found out that she has visited Lawrence Selden by herself.
{11} "Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?" he said, in a tone which had the familiarity of a touch.
Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into precipitate explanations.
"Yes – I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors'."
"Ah – your dress-maker; just so," he said blandly. "I didn't know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick." ([1905] 2008: 16)
{12} The characters' words are rendered in direct speech, but this does not result in a direct expression of how the characters feel about the encounter. Lily is lying, while Rosedale is trying to strike the proper balance between insinuating what he suspects and keeping up the façade of polite conversation.
{13} The dialogue between Lily and Rosedale shows a second difference between direct speech and direct thought, a difference that also counteracts internal focalization. While direct thought is almost invariably limited to the mind of one character, direct speech tends to come in the form of dialogue between different characters. Theoretically speaking, there is no reason why a narrative should not present a rapid sequence of reflections by different characters, all rendered in direct thought, but I am not aware of a single example of this, whereas in direct speech the rapid alternation of utterances by different characters is the norm. This alternation does not entail a concomitant alternation of focalization. Would it be justified to say that, with each change of speaker in the dialogue quoted above, there is a parallel shift from internal focalization on Lily to internal focalization on Rosedale?
{14} Direct speech has a special status in that is is, to quote Stanzel, a "foreign body" ([1979] 1988: 65), an instance of mimesis within diegesis or drama within narrative. I suggest that the focalization or point of view in a passage of direct speech crucially depends on the narrative text surrounding it. In the exchange just quoted, for instance, the point of view is indeed Lily's. However, this is not the case because her words are rendered in direct speech but because of the way in which this direct speech is contextualized. The exchange is preceded by a lengthy passage rendering Lily's anxiety about the risk she has taken in spending time with Selden, followed by a brief paragraph that describes Rosedale's appearance. Thus Lily's anxious and embarrassed experience of the encounter is privileged over the smug triumph that Rosedale is presumably enjoying (I have to say "presumably" because we can only guess at the precise nature of his feelings). Lily's experience is also privileged in that the tone of Rosedale's voice is described precisely as she perceives it. The narrator says that it has "the familiarity of a touch", a metaphor that is continued in the description of Lily's physical and emotional response to it: "Miss Bart shrank from it slightly". Note that, assuming my account is correct, the passage is firmly focalized on Lily, not on Rosedale, although he has an equal share in the dialogue.
{15} That direct speech may also be integrated into an authorial or zero-focalized passage is shown by the following quotation from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, in which the narrator deplores the lack of discipline in the protagonist's education:
{16} Edward would throw himself with spirit upon any classical author of which his preceptor proposed the perusal, make himself master of the style so far as to understand the story, and if that pleased or interested him, he finished the volume. But it was in vain to attempt fixing his attention on critical distinctions of philology, upon the difference of idiom, the beauty of felicitous expression, or the artificial combinations of syntax. "I can read and understand a Latin author," said young Edward, with the self-confidence and rash reasoning of fifteen, "and Scaliger or Bentley could not do much more." Alas! while he was thus permitted to read only for the gratification of his own amusement, he foresaw not that he was losing for ever the opportunity of acquiring habits of firm and incumbent application, of gaining the art of controuling, directing, and concentrating the powers of his own mind for earnest investigation, – an art far more essential than even that learning which is the primary object of study. ([1814] 1981: 12)
{17} Unlike the lies and insinuations uttered by Lily Bart and Sim Rosedale, the statement given in direct speech does render "the focal character's beliefs, attitudes, ways of understanding and describing the world", but it would be erroneous to infer that this brief statement brings about a shift to internal focalization or the point of view of the character. We do not suddenly share Edward's view of his education when we come upon this remark; we rather take it as an illustration of what we read in the rest of the paragraph. Edward's remark proves the narrator's point. Thus there is no change from the zero focalization or authorial point of view that characterizes the passage as a whole.
{18} Finally, it should be added that direct speech can also be made to fit the observer or camera point of view described as external focalization by Genette, the canonical example being Hemingway's short story "The Killers". The recipe for this type of narrative is to combine extensive dialogue, preferably of an opaque kind, with brief passages of report and description, to stick to scene rather than summary, and to avoid inside views and explanatory comments about the characters' identities or their past experiences.
{19} Klauk and Köppe's claim that direct speech entails internal focalization reminds me of the reconceptualization of perspective suggested by Pfister and Nünning (also discussed in my article on "Perspective / Point of View" in The Handbook of Narratology). Pfister argues that, in a play, each character has their perspective, a subjective disposition based on their knowledge, their values and their interests; the way in which these perspectives coincide or clash with each other determines the perspectival structure of the play. Nünning transfers this model to narrative, with the obvious addition that, in narrative, we also have a narrator with his or her perspective. The underlying assumption in this account is the principle "one man, one vote", which here appears in the form "one person, one perspective", or, to be more precise, "one person, his or her own perspective". Klauk and Köppe also argue along these lines when they assume that a character who speaks will articulate his or her point of view.
{20} In a certain sense, this assumption is incontrovertible. Each human being has a unique subjective disposition, based on their temperament, upbringing, experiences etc., and this disposition will manifest itself when they speak (also, one might add, when they think or act). This is the case in life and, presumably, also in plays and novels. But this general sense of perspective, in which it means no more than the subjectivity that none of us can escape, is different from the sense in which the term and its synonyms or competitors have been used in narrative theory. When novelists and critics began to talk about perspective or point of view in the second half of the 19th century, they responded to the fact that literary narrators did not communicate their own view of the story but rather that of a character. This is a different and, I should like to add, a more interesting and sophisticated phenomenon than the general fact that each human being has a subjective disposition; the latter is inescapable, the former is an option or a choice. Nünning, to be sure, is aware of this difference. He uses the term perspective for the more general concept of subjective disposition and focalization for the more specific narratological concept. But I am not sure that everyone else is aware of this distinction; Klauk and Köppe don't seem to be.
{21} In a way, the attempts to give perspective or focalization a broader sense by tying it up with characters and narrators amounts to a relapse into pre-Genettean times. When Genette made his distinction between the questions "who speaks?" and "who sees?", he made a salutary plea for keeping an open mind. He insisted that we disconnect narrators and perspectives or, more generally, that we do not make any rash inferences about particular human subjects having or taking a particular point of view. Klauk and Köppe are making precisely an inference of this kind when they assume that direct speech entails internal focalization on the character who is speaking. As I have tried to show, the distinction between "who speaks?" and "who sees?" is just as relevant at the level of characters as it is at the level of narrators.
Works Cited
Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1986). Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell.
Klauk, Tobias & Tilmann Köppe (2011). "Puzzles and Problems for the Theory of Focalization." In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. URL = http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Talk:Focalization [view date: 19 Oct 2012].
Niederhoff, Burkhard (2001). "Fokalisation und Perspektive: Ein Plädoyer für friedliche Koexistenz." Poetica 33, 1–21.
Niederhoff, Burkhard (2011). "Focalization." In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. URL = http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php?title=Focalization&oldid=1561 [view date: 17 Oct 2012].
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