Narration and focalization correspond to speaking and seeing. Narration is the basic voice, i.e.

Who
speaks? Who is the texts narrative voice?
A narrator/narrative agent/narrative agency is the speaker or voice of the narrative discourse.
He/she is the agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee (the narratee), who
manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how it is to be told (especially from what point
of view), and what is to be left out.
Narratives are focalized not only by someone (the focalizer, the vehicle of focalization) but also on
someone or something. Focalization has thus both subject and object. The subject (the focalizer) is
the agent whose perception orients the presentation; the object (the focalized) is what the focalizer
perceives.
Focalization is a means of selecting and restricting narrative information, of seeing events and states
of affairs from somebodys point of view, of foregrounding the focalizing agent, and of creating an
empathetical or ironical view on the focalizer.
A focalizer is the agent whose point of view orients the narrative text. A text is anchored on a
focalizers point of view when it presents the focalizers thoughts, reflections and knowledge, his/her
actual and imaginary perceptions, as well as his/her cultural and ideological orientation.
An external focalizer is a focalizer who is external to the story and who is thus also called narratorfocalizer because the focus of perception seems to be that of the narrator.
An internal focalizer is a focus of perception of a character in the story, and thus also called
character-focalizer.
Consider the extract:
what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of
earth, sweet smells of lowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the
road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell
sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand
instincts, releasing a million memories the smell of hare, the smell of fox.
This excerpt is from Virginia Woolfs novel Flush. The paragraph begins with someone smelling different
smells and it seems these smells are perceived of as attractive. In the last sentence it becomes clear
that this someone is in fact a young dog; he is the focus of perception, the focalizer. We hear about the
smells, the attractions of fox and hare, the flash of passion from the dogs point of view, as one might
imagine a dog to experience these things. Obviously, it is not the dog who speaks. It is a heterodiegetic
narrator who tries to reproduce the dogs impressions in an internal focalization. In the terminology
introduced by Stanzel, this combination is called figural narrative situation.
Patterns of Focalization

fixed focalization The presentation of narrative facts and events from the constant point of
view of a single focalizer.

Example: It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat;
she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment. But in her bosom there was still that bright
glowing place that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared
to breathe for the fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to
look into the cold mirror but she did look, and it gave her back a woman , radiant, with smiling,
trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something divine to happen
that she knew must happen infallibly. (K. Mansfield, Bliss)
While there is a narrator telling us about Bertha, we do not look at her from a distance or from a birds
eye view perspective; the perspective adopted here is Berthas own. She experiences

variable focalization The presentation of different episodes of the story as seen through the eyes
of several focalizers.

Example: For Heavens sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation; it
was his silly unconventionality, his weakness; his lack of a ghost of a nation what anyone else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his age, how silly!
I know all that, Peter thought; I know what Im up against, he thought, running his finger along the
blade of his knife, Clarissa and Dalloway and all the rest of them: but Ill show Clarissa (V. Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway)

multiple focalization A technique of presenting an episode repeatedly, each time seen

through the eyes of a different (internal) focalizer. Typically, what is demonstrated by this
technique is that different people tend to perceive or interpret the same event in radically
different fashion. Texts that are told by more than one narrator (such as epistolary novels) create
multiple focalization based on external focalizers (example: Fowles, The Collector).

Example: When she was ill and sat by the window in her room he sometimes went in the evening to
make her a visit. They sat by a window that looked over the roof of a small frame building into Maine
Street. By turning their heads they could see through another window, along an alleyway that ran
behind the Main Street stores and into the back door of Abner Groffs bakery. Sometimes as they sat
thus a picture of village life presented itself to them. At the back door of his shop appeared Abner Groff
with a stick or an empty milk bottle in his hand. For a long time there was a feud between the baker
and a grey cat that belonged to Sylvester West, the druggist. (Sh. Andersen, Mother)

collective focalization Focalization through either plural narrators (we narrative) or a group of
characters (collective reflectors).

Example: We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the
young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to
that which had robbed her, as people will. (W. Faulkner, A Rose for Emily)
Facets/Aspects of Focalization

the perceptual
external: birds view, panchronic
internal: limited observer, synchronic
o ordinary/primary/literal perception (vision, audition, touch, smell, taste, bodily sensation)
o imaginary perception (recollection, imagination, dream, hallucination, etc.)
the psychological
external: omniscient, objective, neutral
internal: restricted knowledge, subjective, coloured, involved (fear, pity, joy,
revulsion, etc.)
the ideological facet or conceptualization (thought, voice, ideation, style, modality, deixis,
etc.)
external: one dominant ideology/perspective
internal: plurality of ideologies
Verbal indicators of text subjectivity/focalization

Textual narrative techniques that represent figural consciousness

Psychonarration (comprises narrators discourse about a characters consciousness, rendered
through narrative Report of Thought Acts, Indirect Discourse, characters perception is uttered
through narrators diction and style)
Quoted monologue (rendered through Free Indirect Discourse)
Interior monologue (rendered through Free Direct Discourse)
Lexical idiolect, jargon, evaluative adjectives, kinship terms (familiarizing denominations),
verbs of sense perception and mental perception
Grammatical mimetric syntax (sentence structure reinforces either the style of a characters
mind or the actions he is undertaking), broken syntax (shows a momentary dominance of
impression over clarity of expression), awkward syntax; the use of tenses, deixis; questions,
exclamations.
Graphical paragraph indentation.

The perceptual facet has to do with sense perception and is determined by the coordinates of space
and time. A character-focalizer, for example, can orient the narrative only toward those objects that
he/she has smelled, seen, touched, tasted, or heard (or heard about). Moreover, his/her vision will
necessarily be affected by such material factors as her stature and physical location.
The psychological facet has to do with the focalizers emotional state and cognitive capacity. A
character-focalizer who is ill, upset, depressed, worried, or tired will perceive the world very differently
from one who is enthusiastic, joyful, happy, or well rested. Additionally, a characters age and level of
experience will influence how she perceives events or objects that are unfamiliar.
The ideological facet has to do with a characters general system of viewing the world conceptually.
How a given character interprets any event will be influenced by the social ideologies she is presented
as having grown up with. These ideologies, which are constitutive of his/her fictionalized identity, not
only determine where he/she fits into society and how he/she should relate to others, but also color
his/her perceptions of the world.
Yet even though the visual aspects of focalization are often those that are most readily accessible to
students in an introductory literature course, Rimmon-Kenan, following Uspensky, argues that the
purely visual sense of the term is too narrow. He demonstrates that at least three other facets are also
relevant in focalization analysis: (1) the perceptual facet (determined by the two coordinates of space
and time); (2) the psychological facet (determined by the cognitive and the emotive orientation of the
focalizer toward the focalized); and (3) the ideological facet (7482).
Perception of the focalizer is determined by both space and time. Spatially, the external focalizer has a
bird's-eye view, allowing either a panoramic view of the story's events or a simultaneous focalization of
things happening in different places. This kind of perception is obviously denied to the internal
character-focalizer (or indeed to an unpersonified position internal to the story). In Thrse
Desqueyroux , since the character-focalizer Thrse is herself within the story, she can of course have
only a limited vision. Although theoretically it is possible within any text to observe a change in spatial
focalization from bird's-eye view to one limited observer or a shift from one limited observer to another,
in Mauriac's novel we find neither panoramic views nor simultaneous focalization and only a few shifts
from one limited observer to another. This particular insistence on limited vision contributes to the
general reader empathy generated for the character Thrse.
The second coordinate of the perceptual facet of focalization is that of time. If we are dealing with
external focalization, it is panchronic for an unpersonified focalizer (as in Robbe-Grillet's La jalousie )
but retrospective for a character focalizing his or her own past (as in the entire episode in chapter 7 of
Thrse Desqueyroux , which is narrated in the first person and recounts Thrse's first meeting with
Jean Azvdo). Internal focalization, however, is logically synchronous with the information regulated by
the focalizer. Thus an internal focalizer is limited to the present of the characters while the external
focalizer has access to all the temporal dimensions of the story (past, present, and future).
Within the psychological facet of focalization, it is the focalizer's mind and emotions that take on
importance. The external or narrator-focalizer, within the cognitive component, has of necessity
unrestricted knowledge about the represented worldand if this focalizer does not pass on total
knowledge to the reader it is simply for rhetorical effect. The knowledge of the internal focalizer,
however, is necessarily restricted; as part of the represented world, an internal focalizer cannot know
everything about it. This particular aspect of focalization does much to explain why students who read
Thrse Desqueyroux often have trouble with the characters of Bernard and Jean. Save for two or three
occurrences of external-narrator focalization, we have only Thrse's knowledge of the two men; thus if
we read naively, they may appear to be but caricatures. Even the character-focalizer Thrse realizes
the limits of her knowledge as she thinks of her husband, then smiles at cette caricature de Bernard
qu'elle dessine en esprit this caricature of Bernard that she has conjured up in her mind (32). In its
emotive aspect, the difference between external and internal focalization gives us the difference
between objective (or neutral or uninvolved) focalization and subjective (or colored or involved)
focalization. In Thrse Desqueyroux , for example, the long passage that opens chapter 3 (the
description of Argelouse) is externally focalized:

Argelouse est rellement une extrmit de la terre; un de ces lieux au-del desquels il est impossible
d'avancer, ce qu'on appelle ici on quartier: quelques mtairies sans glise, ni mairie, ni cimetire,
dissmines autour d'un champ de seigle, dix kilomtres du bourg de Saint-Clair, auquel les relie une
seule route dfonce. Ce chemin plein d'ornires et de trous se mue, au-del d'Argelouse, en sentiers
sablonneux; et jusqu' l'Ocan il n'y a plus rien que quatrevingts kilomtres de marcages, de lagunes,
de pins grles, de landes o la fin de l'hiver les brebis ont la couleur de la cendre.
Argelouse is, literally, at the end of the earth, a place beyond which it is impossible to go, the sort of
settlement that in this part of the world is called a quartier. Just a few farms with no church, town hall,
or cemetery, scattered around a field of rye and joined by a single ill-kept road to the market town of
St. Clair six miles away. This road with its ruts and potholes fades away beyond Argelouse into a
number of sandy tracks. From there, right on to the coast, is nothing but marshlandfifty miles of it.
Brackish ponds, young pine trees, and stretches of heath where the sheep at wint's end are the color of
dead ash. (29)
But in chapter 8, internally focalized by Thrse as she recalls the months of her pregnancy, the same
place description takes on an entirely different color:
Jusqu' la fin de dcembre, il fallut vivre dans ces tnbres. Comme si ce n'et pas t assez des pins
innombrables, la pluie ininterrompue multipliait autour de la sombre maison ses millions de barreaux
mouvants. Lorsque l'unique route de Saint-Clair menaa de devenir impraticable, je fus ramene au
bourg, dans la maison peine moins tnbreuse que celle d'Argelouse. Les vieux platanes de la Place
disputaient encore leurs feuilles au vent pluvieux.
Until the end of December one had to live in this darkness. And as if there weren't enough pines
already, the never-ending rain surrounded the gloomy house with its myriad moving bars. When it
seemed likely that the only road to St. Clair would soon be impassable, I was taken into town to a house
scarcely less gloomy and dark than the one in Argelouse. The old plane-trees on the square were
fighting with the rainy wind in an effort to keep their last few leaves. (104)
Of course perception of the focalized from without also restricts observation to external manifestations,
leaving the emotions to be inferred from them. In contrast, perception of the focalized from within
allows the reader to share the inner life of the focalized, either by making the focalizer and focalized
identical (as in interior monologue, of which examples abound in Thrse Desqueyroux ) or by granting
to the external narrator-focalizer the total knowledge to penetrate into the inner life of the focalized.
When the focalized is seen from within, especially by an external focalizer, indicators such as she
thought, she felt, it seemed to her, she knew, she recognized or, most commonly, with
reference to Thrse, elle songeait she dreamedoften appear in the text: J'ai t cre, pense
Thrse, l'image de ce pays aride et o rien n'est vivant, hors les oiseaux qui passent, les sangliers
nomades I was created in the image of this arid land, Thrse thinks, where there is no living thing
save the passing birds and the wild pigs roaming through the forest (124); Thrse, ce moment de
sa vie, se sentait dtache de sa fille comme de tout le reste Thrse, at that moment in her life, felt
as detached from her daughter as she was from everything else (109); Elle ne songeait plus feindre
l'indiffrence It no longer occurred to her to feign indifference (125); Thrse le savait, elle savait
qu'Anne entrane par sa mre avait en vain cherch dans la foule un visage absent Thrse knew,
she knew that Anne, brought there by her mother, had searched the crowd in vain for an absent face
(67). But when the inner states of the focalized are left to be implied by external behavior (e.g.,
Thrse's constant smoking), modal expressions such as apparently, evidently, as if, or it
seemed often occur. These words of estrangement, to use Uspensky's term (8587) underline the
speculative status of the vision.
The third facet of focalization is that of ideology. According to Uspensky, this facet (sometimes simply
referred to as the norms of the text) consists of a general system of viewing the world conceptually,
in accordance with which the events and characters of the story are evaluated (8). These norms,
ordinarily presented through a single dominant perspective (often a narrator-focalizer), are usually
taken as authoritative, and all other ideologies in the text are evaluated from this higher position. In
more complex examples, however, the unitary authoritative external focalizer may give way to a
plurality of ideological positions, the interplay among them provoking, according to Bakhtin, a
nonunitary or polyphonic reading of the text.

The question of ideological focalization in Thrse Desqueyroux is extremely interesting. The ideology
of traditional Catholicism as focalized through Thrse certainly allows the reader to seein its stifling
hypocrisyhow difficult its norms are to live by; at the same time, Jean Azvdo's ideological
alternative, what one critic has called his potted nietzsche (Maucuer 43), also focalized through
Thrse, seems to be equally unsatisfactory as a dominant ideology within the text. Indeed, in Thrse
Desqueyroux the norms of the text as defined by the peculiarity of the novel's focalization involve a
total questioning of ideology as such.
Rimmon-Kenan also points out that although focalization is in itself nonverbal (seeing as opposed to
narration's speaking), like everything else in the text it can only be expressed by language (82). The
overall language of Thrse Desqueyroux is of course that of the narrator, not the focalizer; but
focalization certainly colors the novel in such a way as to make it appear as the transposition of the
perceptions of a separate agent, Thrse herself. Both the presence of a focalizer other than the
narrator and the shift from one focalizer to another may be signaled by language.
My discussion has centered solely on the concept of focalization and the ways it can help initiate
students into the use of theory in the foreign literature classroom. Given the particularities of Thrse
Desqueyroux as a model text, however, I hope it is easy to see how many other aspects of
narratological theory may also be of use in the teaching of this novelsuch as questions of order,
duration, and frequency. By using narratology in the foreign literature classroom, we demonstrate to
our students that theory is not merely a tool for advanced scholarly research but also an integral part of
the process of becoming competent and critical readers.