Deictic Shift Theory

Fludernik’s view of narrativity in terms of experientiality
makes the centre of narrative consciousness a more essential characteristic of narrative than the presence of a plot. Significantly, this consciousness – or point of view – is generated through deixis, thus, deixis is central to both the embodiment of perception and narrative comprehension. Grounded in the deictic shift theory (presented in Duchan, Bruder and Hewitt (1995); and articulated most clearly in Stockwell (2002)), the research aims at finding marked patterns of deictic shifts pertaining to the openings of childhood memoir. The literary context of the given study is limited to the Irish subgenre, and the two memoirs for analysis are Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled
People (2003). The application of the chosen methods to the opening segments reveals some regularities in the use of deictics, namely, a high frequency of first-person pronouns, such as chained I, my, and we as a textual indicator of intermentality, as well as pop-shifts from I to we and the obligatory shift to you. Other observed patterns include the voiding of the narrator and temporal shifts from the past to the present.

If a written text is translated into a spoken medium, an additional discourse participant is necessary: the voice-over artist. This paper argues that the introduction of such an additional, material voice can have a significant impact on the mental representation the audience constructs of the narrative. Taking the example of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, I shall illustrate how in the German audiobook the audience’s construction of the narrator’s embodiment and cultural belonging is shifted and how this has an impact on the narrative’s perspective and focalization. The shifts in perspective and focalization in turn, as will be shown, can have an impact on the audience’s projection into the story-world and, hence, its empathy with the characters. Furthermore, these shifts can have an impact on the audience’s construction of the narrator’s attitude towards the characters, which in turn can also affect its own attitude towards the characters and story events. Ultimately, such shifts can have an impact on the audience’s world-view – an issue that is particularly relevant in the case of narratives of conflict such as Things Fall Apart, where the target audience is part of the other against which the narrative writes.

Literary translation studies is only slowly incorporating insights from narratology and newer developments in cognitive poetics such as deictic shift theory and text-world theory. Narratology and cognitive poetics, too, predominantly ignore the processes of translation. However, questions such as the positioning in the text of additional discourse participants such as the translator or a voice-over artist are unlikely to find a workable answer within narrowly defined disciplinary boundaries. Instead, they make a strong case for a greater symbiosis between disciplines and a re-drawing of their boundaries.