3

3.9. Mode: Perspective

Perspective: definition

Perpective is the motivation of narrative selection through the use of subjectivity. It is the modalization of the action using the perception or thought of different narrative subjects (the characters, the narrator) as filters for representation. Perspective is the focalization of the action through these centers of consciousness, which therefore perform the role of focalizers. We have already mentioned the concept of point of view at the level of the action. Focalization is the use of subjective point of view (the narrator's or the characters') to give shape to the story. It is the manipulation of perception and subjective stance as a rhetorical strategy. Focalization is therefore subordinated to narration. It is closely bound up with such matters as the use of the character's discourse (direct or free indirect discourse are closer to the character's viewpoint), the generation of suspense and mysteries, the reader's emotional involvement with the characters and the representation of their mind-styles. It is related (though it does not govern them) to such matters as the temporal selection of events (such as starting in medias res), and the choice of one narrative line at the expense of another one (e.g. the hero's story instead of the villain's). These are perspectival arrangements that exist even in an "objective" genre such as drama; fiction, being more subjective, more fit to represent the characters' inner world, develops ways of focusing more closely and intensely on figural perspective. Since the problems of perspective and voice are closely related, it may be a good idea to start with some observations on their closeness and difference.

Henry James's theory of perspective

Henry James makes a distinction between narrative voice and perspective in his novelistic practice as well as in his theoretical statements. This distinction comes from his concern with the ability of the novel to depict experience and psychological life. The first-person novel will not do for this, because James is not looking for a conscious revelation of the person, or for a kind of novel based on recollection of past experience, which is what 1st person narrative implies. His novels are usually written in the 3rd person, which is less "intrusive," more "dramatic." Where James does otherwise, he makes sure that the result will be equally dramaticæfor instance, using an unreliable narrator in the main narrative of The Turn of the Screw. The action should in any case unfold in a transparent way, without the writer stepping in to make his own comments. We are shown its development through significant scenes, we are not simply told. Percy Lubbock will develop in his The Craft of Fiction (1922) some of James' insights in this particular. Lubbock analyzes the practice of James and gives it more explicit theorical formulation. He privileges scenic presentation and the use of an unified point of view. His central tenet will be highly influential:

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself. . . . The thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement. (Lubbock 1926, 62)

There is, according to James and Lubbock, an ideal way of "showing" in third person narration which is at once dramatic and psychologically immediate. This is what James usually calls narration through "centers of consciousness" (preface to The Portrait of a Lady; 1986: 294), "vessels of sensibility" or "reflectors" (preface to The Wings of the Dove; 1986: 354), and which we now usually call focalizer characters. The scenes usually act on a perceiving character, an reflector or focalizer, whose psychological reaction, the development of his understanding of the action, helps give the plot an organic unity. This is the role of Strether in The Ambassadors, of Maisie in What Maisie Knew. James does not require, as some of his followers, that there be no changes of perspective during the narrative; but he does seek to cut the story into perspectival blocks that are internally coherent . For instance, in The Wings of the Dove, the story of Milly Theale is seen mainly through the eyes of two characters, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as well as her own. Every change or apparent incoherence of point of view, James says, has its aesthetic justification, its dramatic coherence:

There was the "fun", to begin with, of establishing one's succesive centres- of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them as from happy points of view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty. . . .

Do I sometimes in fact forfeit the advantage of that distinctness? Do I ever abandon one center for another after the former has been postulated? From the moment wer proceed by "centres"æand I have never, I confess, embraced the logic of any superior processæthey must be , each as a basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the high interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is no economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and though I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a represented community of vision between several parties to the action when it makes for concentration, I understand no breaking-up of the register, no sacrifice of the recording consistency, that doesn't scatter and weaken.[1]

Just as in Aristotle we found that an action or praxis had to be treated artistically before it became the plot or mythos, we find in James a distinction between the "subject" and the "wrought material" or novel, and in Tomashevski we found a related opposition between fabula and siuzhet. A series of rules on the use of point of view define which is the relationship between the material and the finished novel. We see that James conceives of these "rules" he formulates on the use of point of view as organic, internal rules, which spring from the very nature of the psychological material of the novel. They will be transformed by some critics in the 20th century into external, a priori rules to decide on the quality of any novel, irrespective of its internal economy. The influence of James's ideas is readily apparent in most important twentieth-century writers on point of view, such as Percy Lubbock (The Craft of Fiction, 1921), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (Understanding Fiction, 1943), Jean Pouillon (Temps et roman, 1947), F. K. Stanzel (Typische Erzählsituationen, 1954), Norman Friedman ("Point of View in Fiction," 1955); Mieke Bal (Narratologie , 1977).

James also experimented with a concept of dramatic narrative which would be closer to the idea of inmediacy held by Genette. A novel like The Awkward Age consists almost entirely of dialogue, the narrator being completely unobstrusive and limiting himself to introducing the words of the characters and sparingly describing some of their actions in the way they are described in a play's stage directions. Here the distance between novel and drama—at least, closet drama—is at its minimum.

Perspective, point of view, focalization

We can conceive of the action as something which is perceived in order to be transmitted. The structure of the story will depend to a great extent on the nature of those perceptions and on who perceives.[2] This perceptual structuration of the story is what we call narrative perspective or focalization. We shall use these terms rather than the more general term "point of view" or "viewpoint", which has traditionally been used to cover questions both of perspective and of narrative voice (e. g. a statement such as "the story is told from Pip's point of view" may intend to mean that Pip is the narrator). Pip's point of view is a part of the action, as is Mr Wopsle's, for that matter. But it is Pip's and not Mr Wopsle's which is taken as a guiding thread. Any narrative involves a perspectivization of the action; a narrative, like any other semiotic representation of reality, has an inbuilt phenomenological structure; it is a view from some specific angle.

Narrative perspective is therefore the representation of a subject's mental activity: the activity of a subject (the focaliser) over an object (the focalised).[3] Quite often perspective is dealt with in visual terms (e. g. the terms perspective, point of view) though it actually includes all kinds of subjective mental activity, such as visual, auditory, tactile, etc. perception, evaluative stance, mood and emotional attitude, knowledge and interpretation, thought and association of ideas. That is, perspective includes all those mental activities which are called intentional by phenomenologists, meaning that mental activity is constantly bent on some object (an intentional object, the focalised).

We have already mentioned the issue of selection with reference to the temporal structure of the story, and selection can indeed be considered from a temporal point of view. But we can focus now on the actual specificity of that time, and consider selection as a matter of perception and knowledge, of the amount and nature of information we are offered about the story.

The perspectival structure of a text is inextricably woven with the representation of space and time. The focalizer will be the one of the main spatio-temporal reference points in the narrative (the narrator, if different from the focalizer, may be another). Perspective is used as a realistic motivation for the selection and arrangement of events in the story. For instance, a character's experience and perception (an action-level phenomenon) may be used as a compositional device to create involvement and suspense in the story; the detective's limited knowledge of the action in a murder story is a perspectival choice among many implied in the action: the writer chooses the one which suits best the kind of story he intends to write and the kind of effect he aims at.

First criterion: The subject of focalization

We may distinguish two main perspectival modes on the grounds of the subject of perception, that is, who acts as focalizer: figural perspective and narratorial perspective.

• Figural perspective, when a character is the cognitive, emotional and perceptual focus of the narrative. This is usually the case in first-person narrative. It happens too in third-person narrative when the narrator reports the words, thoughts, perceptions or feelings of a character (a reflector, focal character or focalizer). In any case, figural perspective is closely tied to the character's experience. The activity of focalization in this perspectival mode has both an objective and a subjective aspect: objectively, it lets us know about the events and existents in the action (the object of focalization); subjectively, the intentional activity displayed, the perceptual schemata used, the emotions and attitudes which colour the focalizer's experiential field, are a way of characterizing the focalizer dramatically, of "showing" him or her.[4]

The narrator may also select the character's intentional contents and report, for instance, the character's perceptions while withholding his emotions or judgments. There are, accordingly, several types of figural focalization. One mode is linked to the character's discourse (either verbalized or internal thought represented as speech). In this case, figural focalization is closely associated to such phenomena as free indirect style. But the rendering of the character's mental activity may also be dissociated from any verbalization. We can then speak of "vision by proxy" or "narrated perception", as phenomena analogous to free indirect style in the field of perception.[5]

Figural perspective may be single or multiple, and the distribution of the focal characters' viewpoints along the narrative also matters. We should note the relative knowledge and reliability of focal characters, and the degree to which their viewpoints contribute to narrative development.

• Narratorial perspective, when the judgments, emotional colouring, or perceptions cannot be ascribed to any of the characters and are provided therefore by a narrator-focalizer who is not one of the characters.[6] If this narrator-focalizer can shift perspective at will from the mind of one character to another, and from one story-line to another, we can speak of omniscient narration, although the term is admittedly problematic and vague, and is somewhat of a jumble label for a variety of narrative techniques. Authorial narration is a near-synonymous term as far as perspective is concerned: the difference is that the authorial narrator is a well-defined subject who presents himself as the author (inventor, writer, transcriber) of the story he tells. This is a question of narrative voice we shall return to later. Authorial narrators are usually as omniscient as they wish, although occasionally it may be a part of their strategy to feign ignorance. Anyway, perspective is not so much a matter of what the narrator knows as of what s/he tells: it is the knowledge about the story which actually reaches the reader, and failure to distinguish a narrator's knowledge from the part of that knowledge which is available to the reader in constructing the story vitiates many discussions of omniscience. Omniscient narrators, of course, may know more than any of their characters, both about other characters, about the ongoing development of the action and even its outcome, about secrets and mysteries. Again, all this knowledge is a matter of narrative voice, of the narrator's characterization; here we are concerned with the perspetive on the story actually offered to the reader. Narratorial perspective may provide characteristic plot constructions, jumping from one action line to another without the shift of focus being motivated by the presence, knowledge or action of a character. A narrator-focalizer will present the story from the most convenient angle with a view to the desired effect on the reader, favouring at times one character's viewpoints, and then another's. We should note, however, that in any case, all happenings are presented from a viewpoint, even if the focus is elusive or changeable.[7] If figural perspective provides an experiential approach to the characters, narratorial perspective tends to be more objective, less empathic in its workings. Here characters may be described objectively by the narrator, and this description is not dramatic in the sense that it does not describe simultaneously any focal character, as is commonly the case in figural perspective.[8] In extreme cases, the narrator may deliberately distance his viewpoint from that of the characters, rejecting any shared perspective.

The division between figural and narratorial perspective that we have presented is convenient, but it involves a simplification. Perspective is after all a narrative manipulation of subjectivity; as such, it can constitute provisional subject positions, which are strategically manipulated or assumed by the narrator, but which do not necessarily identify with any given character, and could not be said to fully represent the narrator's perspective on the action, either. It may be useful to remember at this point that the narrator is also a verbal construct. A narrator thus defined may assume a more or less defined human subjectivity, but its foremost commitment is to the tellability of the story. A narrator may then alternatively feign ignorance or omniscience, assuming subject positions which would seem to be incompatible were it not for the sake of the tale. A well-defined, personalized narrator need not present the story always from his point of view. Like any other narrator, it may play with the knowledge he has or lacks, and assume provisional fictive personalities, "subjects" which focalize the story from a viewpoint created specially for them.

Second criterion: The object of focalization

We can also distinguish perspectival modes according to the nature of the object of perception: what is focalized, no matter who does the focalizing. A distinction between perceptible and non-perceptible objects is useful.[9] Perceptible objects include characters and settings, events, actions, the focalizer's intentional processes, and also those aspects of the characters' mental activity which can be deduced from external observation. Non-perceptible objects include mental processes other than the focalizer's: perceptions, feelings, reflections... This distinction in the object is useful in order to classify different types of focalizers. For instance, an extradiegetic narrator may or may not have access to characters' thoughts. A narrator who doesn't, then, has some common traits with an authorial narrator (his extradiegetic situation) but also with an intradiegetic observer, since his perspective may be as limited as that of a character.[10] Clearly, voice and perspective go together, and a given enunciative mode may be used to motivate in a realistic way a perspectival choice. E. g. a detective's tale of his investigations easily motivates the presence of a mystery (a limited viewpoint) and its gradual solution (the gradual perspectival reconstruction of the action). This joint approach to narrative mode, combining voice and perspective, may be used to yield basic types of narration or pigeonholes to classify narratives; some theorists distinguish three modes, some four, some eight.[11] But it is clear that many more modes might be devised using different combinations of voice and perspective. In our analytical approach we shall keep them separate, because they may be used to de-motivate as well as to motivate each other, for instance in parodies. Perspective and voice are conceptually distinct and we shall adhere to this mode of exposition, which is no more arbitrary than any other. Typological approaches can list only the major or most frequent modes, and can therefore be misleading if these specific cases are mistakenly thought to cover the full range of formal varieties. Each narrative is unique (although, so it goes here as elsewhere, some are more unique than others). Detailed stylistic analysis of perspective should show it at work in specific scenes of a given novel, showing its interaction with the story's theme and values, its characters, the creation of narrative interest, etc. The classification of a narrative under one given typology may be a useful first approach, but it should not be identified with an analysis of that narrative. Moreover, it is often the case that these typologies are devised using conflicting or fuzzy criteria.[12]

The events of the action undergo a perspectivization in the story. Among the several action sequences which develop simultaneously in the narrated world, only a few sections are chosen for representation. We have already discussed the implications of this process of selection for the temporal structure of the story. It is obvious that selection also involves a perspectival structuration.

Action in fictional narrative is usually linked to character. Perspectivization involves therefore a foregrounding of certain characters while others remain in the general background, present only insomuch as they enter in contact with the main characters. The temporal and spatial focus of the novel may be restricted to one character (the hero) or to several, with varying degrees of importance. Such shifts from one action line to another increase the compositional complexity of the narrative; the Victorian multiplot novel, for instance, is a complex form derived from simpler structures in eighteenth-century narrative; a more complex narrative form enables a more complex analysis of the complexity of social relationships, such as the interaction between the social classes. The articulation of action series with each other, the selection of central series in terms of which the subordinate series will be perceived, is therefore a crucial aspect of perspectival selection in a story.[13] Figural perspective amounts to a doubling of the story, an added density of the story-world in which the reader is immersed. There is not only an objective sequence of events, but also a subjective sequence of their perception or of the emotional reaction of the figural focalizer. In this way the temporal experience of narrative becomes more complex; the possibilities of literature as a sequential art are explored to their full extent, the time of the action becomes a dramatic experience.[14] This doubling also enhances the experiential value of the plot. A traditional plot-scheme can be renewed through an adequate perspectival reworking, and it is often the case that the problem of perception becomes the real story which is told.[15] The construction of the story takes clear precedence over the events themselves. This is clearly the case in such genres as the detective novel. The development of sophisticated perspectival techniques goes hand in hand with the evolution of the novel; it is an aspect of a wider phenomenon of the evolution of modern literature, with a turning point in Romanticism and a culmination in Modernism, which involves the subjectivization of aesthetics, the development of forms which try to approximate experiential immediacy.[16]

As far as the representation of character is concerned, we can establish a general distinction between two main modes:

• Internal perspective, when the psychological processes of the character are available for narration. Internal perspective may be single (only one character is seen from the inside), which is most commonly the case in first-person or in figural narration. In this case, narrative knowledge is closely tied to the personal experience of the character; other characters are known to us primarily through the focal character's attitude to them. Fictional characters are not on equal footing: we know them not only as they act, but as they think and see other characters; we can see them through other characters.[17] If the internal focus shifts from one character to another, we speak of multiple internal perspective. Multiple internal perspective is one of the main defining characteristics of omniscient narration, althought we may sometimes find critics speaking of "restricted omniscience" or "selective omniscience"[18] for those narrator-focalizers whose preternatural powers are restricted to the minds of only some characters.

• External perspective, when only external behavioural signs are narrated. An external perspective on secondary characters is the logical consequence of the use of single internal perspective; however, we may also find narratives in which no character is seen from the inside (e. g. in some of Dos Passos' most characteristic scenes). External perspective is usually associated with third-person narrative: its use in first-person narrative produces the characteristic deadpan feel of some of Hemingway's or Dashiell Hammett's tales. In such narratives, whatever inner experience is conveyed by the tale must be deduced on the basis of external signs. Some critics have praised this approach as providing a close analogue to our perception of other people in the real world.[19]

On internal perspective

The twentieth-century novel has developed a number of conventions to represent internal psychic experience. The most characteristic are that bundle of techniques which go by the name of "interior monologue" or "stream of consciousness". As is always the case in structural analysis, we do not find a limited set of clear-cut techniques, but rather a continuum which can be mapped to some extent through the use of some relevant traits. For instance, the internal focus may be more or less comprehensive. It may attempt to give a more or less stylized version of a character's inner life. Rhetorical conventions should be studied here — actual internal speech is quite unlike articulate discourse, and generally speaking we can assume that the more articulate a character's thoughts, the more stylized the presentation. Period conventions should be taken into account: the attempt to represent thought in its raw state is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. In the past characters thought as they spoke, indeed, they often spoke their thoughts aloud for the sake of convention. The narratorial presence is usually conspicuous. In modernist narrative, the narrator will often try to efface his hand, and to let the inner life of the character unfold dramatically in front of the reader. Joyce, Faulkner, or Woolf are the best instances. Yet their "methods" are also quite different from one another; each of them uses different techniques in each of their works. In modernist narrative we find this curious and extreme development, the complete erasure of the narrator in narrative: the character "tells" the story but without telling it, that is, without a communicative intent such as is presumed in fictional memoir-writers such as Robinson Crusoe or David Copperfield. The character's thoughts simply unfold on the page, and the reader watches from a secret vantage point the spontaneous workings of a consciousness. This technique, which is not "narrative" in the sense of being a mediated presentation through a narrator, can be modulated in a number of ways, since despite its extremely mimetic quality it can't avoid stylization, convention and rhetoric. We have already remarked that a narrator may delve in a character's consciousness in the directions of verbal thought, of perception, of feeling and impression... This is also the case when the character holds the scene with no narrator other than the author. The rendering of the character's mind may be, for instance, more verbal than visual. In that case we approach a more conventionally articulated discourse, a kind of interior dramatic monologue held by the character.[20] The term "stream of consciousness narration" is more adequate when the portrayal of consciousness tries to approximate the multidimensionality of actual consciousness, with coexisting lines of thought and attention, and emotions and sense impressions, bodily and external, as well as verbalized representation. The author is of course forced to represent visual and other non-verbal impressions linguistically, usually by means of broken phrases, as in certain chapters of Ulysses. The conventional representation of consciousness, therefore, consists either in the slanting of consciousness towards its verbal element, or in the verbalization of visual and emotional experience.

Another matter which should be taken into account is the focalizer's attitude to his or her perceptions. The focal character (or, for that matter, the narrator) may be relatively transparent, that is, focusing mainly on the focalised object, or it may be self-conscious about focalization. We can broadly speak of reflexive or non-reflexive focalizers,[21] but of course there are potentially infinite degrees in between. A reflexive focalizer may reflect upon his or her perceptual or experiential activity much as a reflexive narrator reflects on the implications of his own telling. Reflexive focalizers can assume a variety of roles (commentary, construction, etc.) which are usually the narrator's province. Of course, they become increasingly frequent with the development of psychological fiction in the twentieth century.

Third criterion: Level of focalization

It is well known that a narrative may include second-level narratives among the events it tells. A character may tell a story which becomes an second-level narrative embedded in the main story. The notion of narrative level is relatively simple, and we shall return to it in a later section. We mention it here so as to introduce an analogical concept: that of level of focalization.

By analogy with enunciative embeddings, we may define a number of phenomena relative to perspectival embeddings. For instance, just as there are first and second-level narration, we can distinguish first and second-level focalization. A narrative is a text produced by an agent called the narrator. The mode of transmission of literary narratives is verbal, a specific semiotic medium which is language. Now, these narratives are very complex semiotic constructs. A verbal narrative is the verbal transmission of a non-verbal structure of perceived happenings, the story. The story can be defined as a non-verbal perceptual structure. The perceptions we speak of may be fictional, but that is not our concern now. Whether real or fictional, these perceptions belong to a variety of subjects: the narrator himself (acting as narrator-focalizer), or a variety of focal characters. Each of these perceptual structures may be thought as a text, a non-verbal text of perceptions (since perception, too, is a semiotic activity). The narrator-focalizer's text is usually the main one, the main framework of the story (e.g. in a novel such as Dickens's Dombey and Son). In this case, it may be defined as the first level of focalization of the story. Just as a narrator may introduce the voice of other characters, a first-level focalizer may introduce perceptions coming from focal characters: these will be second-level focalizers. Their second-level perceptions are like small stories presented from their perspective, which are embedded in the main story presented from the narrator-focalizer's viewpoint. In Dombey and Son, some of the images and impressions used in descriptions come from the narrator, but others are presented as a character's (e.g. Paul's) impressions and associations. As happens with narration, second-level perspectival sections may be brief or extended. In this case they may duplicate the first-level structure, and introduce further embedded perspectives, so that we can speak of third or fourth-level focalisers and focalised objects.

The "narrating I" must be distinguished from the "experiencing I" in first-person narrative, and this applies to their perspective just as it applies to their discourse or activity. A first-person narrator need not present his story from the viewpoint of his present knowledge. He may restrict his focus in order to present the story as he experienced it in the past, without any obvious retrospective stance, just as a third-person narrator might restrict the perspective of the tale to that of a figural focalizer.[22] Of course, there are many ways in which a first person narrator's knowledge may infiltrate a story supposedly presented from the viewpoint of his past self. Witness the opening of Great Expectations, which are narrated by an adult Pip and focalized by his younger self. The narrator's knowledge nevertheless secretly informs his account of the child's doings, and this produces among other things the gentle irony of the passage.

Fourth criterion: Perspectival level.

Just as in realistic painting there is a focal point of perspective which organizes objects according to the position of an implied observer, in narrative perspective we can speak of an origo or reference point for spatio-temporal orientation. We call deictics those words whose meaning depends on the context of utterance: "here" means, in principle, the place where the enunciator speaks from. "I" means the speaker who says "I", and "you" means the speaker's addressee. "Now" means the moment the speaker utters "now". That is, these words do not have a relatively context-free meaning, the way other words indicating space or time do (e.g. "America", "1993", "Christmas"). They work only through a reference point in discourse. While this reference point is usually the enunciating subject, and the time and place of enunciation, this subject can delegate its functions to other textual subjects, such as the focal character. Such transpositions are well-defined rhetorical figures. Fictional narrative often presents a whole scale of such deictic transpositions. To start with, the real enunciator, the author, often introduces a fictionalised narrator. And often we abandon the narrator's reference system as a second-degree transposition places a character's referential system at the center. This is the case, of course, every time a character speaks "in his own voice", since the character's perspective is implied in his use of discourse. But it may also be the case in instances where the voice we hear is still the narrator's; in free indirect style, for example, the character may be referred to as "he" but yet his perspective may justify the use of deictics such as "this", "today", etc. with reference to the character's system of coordinates. That is, there are shifts of perspectival level which constitute a figure recognizably distinct from enunciative shifts. In figural perspective, the focal character usually becomes the reference point for spatio-temporal deixis. But even a character who is seen mostly from the outside, as an object rather than a subject of focalisation, may serve as a focal point and exceptionally assume a more prominent subject role. As we see, two foci of orientation may govern the same section, even the same sentence; the pronouns may be governed by the narrator's focus, so that the character is a "he", while the temporal deictics may be seen from the focal character's viewpoint, so that the character's time is "now", not "then."

We find embedded focalization in a variety of forms. One important question is its articulation with the enunciative structure of the text, its relationship to narration. Embedded focalization may be linked to narration, or it may be autonomous.

• Perspectival embeddings linked to a narrative embedding. If a new narrator is introduced, there is a built-in change in the level of focalization, since the new narrator will act in principle as the focalizer of the story he tells. A change in narrative level conveys in principle a change in the level of focalization. The same happens whenever a text introduces a quotation from a previous text: such quotations are embedded enunciations and entail a shift in perspectival as well as in narrative level.[23]

Such perspectival embeddings are quite common in all kinds of literature, just like the narrative embeddings of which they are, in fact, just an aspect. Linked perspectival embeddings lend themselves very easily to multiple-level embedding. A hierarchy of multiple narrative embeddings, a common phenomenon in literature, is also a hierarchy of multiple perspectival embeddings linked to those narratives.

• Autonomous perspectival embeddings. Embedded focalization can also occur autonomously, that is, within the same speaker's discourse. This is the reason why we consider that voice and perspective are two separate categories. A narrator may adopt a character's point of view without letting that character speak in his or her own voice. That is, the narrator presents the action from that character's perspective but without any breach in the continuity of the first-level narrative discourse, with no embedded enunciations. Thus we can speak of changes in perspectival level as a well-defined and autonomous narrative phenomenon.[24] We may distinguish two cases: those in which there is a "disguised" enunciation, because of the inherently verbal nature of the perspectival embedding, and those in which the narrator presents nonverbal phenomena from the character's point of view. In the first case, there is a continuum of forms between perspectival embedding and free indirect discourse.

Autonomous perspectival embeddings are rarely recursive. That is, we rarely find more than one, or at most two, consecutive changes in the level of focalization without a change in narrative level. We may find two in those cases when a second-level focaliser thinks of another character's words or ideas,[25] but clearly the recurrence of this structure is avoided because of the confusion that would follow from a whole hierarchy of perceptions unmarked by the characters' voices.

Shift markers

Changes in perspectival level may be marked by the presence of a verb of intentional activity, such as verbs of speech or thought in the case of those perspectival shifts built in a shift of narrative level, or a verb of perception (see, hear) or mental activity (believe, reflect) in the case of autonomous shifts of perspectival level.[26] Such verbs effect the shift through a clear syntactical/semantic construction, and are therefore a clear mark of the transition. But a shift may also appear without an intervening verb.[27] In the absence of the verbs, it is the logic of character construction and situation which indicates that a shift has occurred. An ambiguity as to the perspectival level of a given proposition often occurs; in many cases such ambiguities are transitional, and can act therefore as a subtler marker of the shift.[28]

Definiteness of the perspectival shift

So far we have assumed that there is no problem in identifying that a perspectival shift occurs, that the transition is clear-cut and that any given intentional activity can be ascribed to the main focaliser or to the embedded focaliser unproblematically. This is usually the case in built-in perspectival embeddings, and also in those autonomous perspectival shifts which are introduced by a verb of intentional activity. But in unmarked cases, and not rarely in marked cases as well, there can be difficulties in ascribing a given perception, word or thought to the narrator or to a focal character. We may distinguish two cases: double or ambiguous focalization.

• Double focalization has some similarity with the "double voice" of free indirect style.[29] The narrator modulates his perception after the character's, but without going so far as to abandon his own perceptual stance.

• Ambiguity in perspectival level. Some kind of marks which mark a second-level perspective must appear regularly. Otherwise, the reader will assume that the narrative has unperceptibly shifted back to first level. That is, the first level is the unmarked one.

Both double and ambiguous focalization are common phenomena, and are often found framing a perspectival shift, in order to make it smoother.

Fifth criterion: Variability of perspectival norms

From the point of view of variability, perspective may shift between the extremes of fixed and multiple perspective.

• Fixed perspective (whether authorial or figural, internal or external) is the adherence to one single perspectival mode.

• Variable perspective favours no single mode, and shifts from one to another. Of course, there may be intermediate degrees between fixity and absolute multiplicity, which may be thought as ideal poles. Many typologies of perspectival modes can only be used with the proviso that they may be accurate descriptions of specific sections of a narrative, and not of the whole of a novel, for instance. Even in narratives which preserve a general formal uniformity, expressions such as "the point of view" of Great Expectations, or of As I Lay Dying, are only useful generalizations, and any text will have to be analyzed in the detail of scene and phrase if we want to determine the real significance of its use of perspective. A text does not sustain a uniform perspective throughout. Of course, there may be a remarkable consistency of norms, and a general characterization can usually be given, so that we can say that, for instance, the action in The Ambassadors is presented from Lambert Strether's perspective, or that Jane Eyre is both told and focalised by Jane. On closer analysis, though, we should always be able to specify further, detecting modulations of perspective in each section, scene, or even in each sentence of the narrative text. The overall perspective of a text could therefore be conceived a quilt composed of small patches each of which offers a perspectival structure of its own: and the patterns of two patches may mix so that several viewpoints are simultaneously present in the same linguistic structure.[30]

Of course, there is no such thing as "absolute" variability, and maybe absolute fixity is also an abstraction. Narratives hover between the poles of fixity and variability. We may think of a narrative as the establishment of a perspectival code, and, ocasionally, its subsequent undermining. As it develops, each narrative establishes its own perspectival formula: whether there are any figural focalisers, whether only one or more characters may act as focalizers, whether the narrator is bound to any specific narrative line or can shift from one to another, whether the mental processes of (one or several) characters are available to him, etc. The reader gradually constructs the perspectival formula, which may be more or less rigid. We can often define the general mode of a narrative while noting specific perspectival alterations of that norm in given sections.[31] Such exceptions may be conceived as devices to restrict the informative ability of the perspectival mode, so as to tell the reader less (paralipsis) or, conversely, as partial suspensions of the mode's restrictions, so that the reader is exceptionally given more information (paralepsis).[32] Exceptions are just as interesting and revealing for the analyst as the prevailing norms; they may easily contain faults or breaking points in the narrative ideological structure. We must nevertheless realize that exceptions are such only if they do not seriously question the existence of a norm.

We see there are several relevant parameters in the analysis of focalization: something may be known or ignored; knowledge may be objective or subjective; mental events may or may not be available to the focalizer; the subject and the object of focalization may be single or multiple; the dominant perspectival norms may be consistently used or may give way to exceptions and variations.[33] Fictional narrative is enormously elastic as far as perspective is concerned, both in comparison to drama or even film, and to other nonfictional narrative genres.

The implied spectator

The "implied spectator" is just a convenient label to name the perceptual role assigned to the implied reader by the structure of the story. It can be thought as the mirror image of the focaliser, the role fulfilled by the reader insofar as he constructs the variety of perspectives from which the story is focalised. In constructing the focalizer's vision, the reader installs himself in the text and imaginatively shares that focalizer's orientation. The spectator's perspective, however, does not fully coincide with the focalizer's, since the spectator's is the cognitive accumulation of all the perspectival shifts. Any text is a game of multiple viewpoints, and this plural perspective modalizes the reader's construction of an implied receiver's stance. Perspectival shifts are therefore an important device to construct textual meaning and ideology.

[1] Henry James, preface to The Wings of the Dove.

[2] It is problematic to define focalization as the activity which constitutes the story, as proposed by Bal (1977, 33). It is better to speak of several structuring principles (tense, aspect, distance) without stretching the terms focalization or perspective in order to cover the whole of those phenomena.

[3] For these concepts as well as for the general outline of this approach we are indebted to Bal. See especially the first chapter of her Narratologie (not Narratology).

[4] Bal 1977: 43. See the above section on "Distance".

[5] Fehr 1938. Cf. Bonheim 1982: 50 passim.

[6] Cf. Stanzel 1984, 49; Bal, 1977, 36 passim.

[7] Genette's term "nonfocalized narrative" (1972: 210) to describe this elasticity of the narrator-focalizer's perspective may be confusing and is best avoided.

[8] See Pouillon 1970: 60ff.

[10] For Todorov (1964) such narrators "know less" than the character.

[11] See Lee 1968; Brooks and Warren 1959: 684; Pouillon 1970: 60ff; Friedman 1955; Todorov 1964: 141; Stanzel 1984; Lintvelt 1981.

[12] E.g. Genette's (1972: 203ff). See Bal's discussion (1977: 28).

[13] Pouillon 1970, 23; Stanzel 1984, 111ff.; Lintvelt 1981, 67, 86.

[16] See Edinger 1977 for an account of the early phases of this process.

[17] See Pouillon 1970, 23-34; 60ff..

[18] Friedman 1955, Humphrey 1954.

[20] See Bowling 1950 for a differenciation between "stream of consciousness" and "interior monologue."

[21] See Banfield 1982; Berendsen 1981: 86.

[22] Cf. Pouillon 1970: 56-57; Cohn 1978: 167 ff.

[26] Bal (1977) observes the presence of verbs of perception as markers of the shift. Cf. the early analysis in Hatcher 1944.

[29] See Bal 1977: 41; 1985: 118; Chatman 1978: 204.

[31] Genette 1972: 211; Bal 1977

[32] The terms are Genette's (1972).

[33] For these parameters, see Todorov 1975: 65ff; Lanser 1981: 150ff; Lintvelt 1981.