Richard Bradford, Stylistics

62:
Genette's typology of narrators is underpinned by the general principle of focalization.
Focalization offers us a new perspective on the relation between the narrator and
every stylistic and structural feature of the text. Focalization is the literary-critical
version of the general linguistic concept of ideational meaning: the mental image
generated by the words (Jakobson uses the term 'referential' to account for the same
process). Open any novel at random, choose a paragraph and you, the narratee, will be
engaged in focalization. Our basic linguistic competence enables us to understand
what the words mean, but their grammatical, lexical and semantic functions are tied
into a requirement to focalize their meaning: who is speaking? How much are we
being told about the events, people or thoughts described? Is the speaker witnessing
these things at the time of their occurrence? Are they a memory of past events? What
is the physical location of the speaker in relation [63 to the events described? The
deictic features of language are the principal means by which statements are
focalized. In the novel the status of the narrator (autodiegetic, extradiegetic, first
person, third person) will often determine the manner and level of focalization, but, as
we have seen from Northanger Abbey, there is not always a predictable and parallel
relation between narrator and focalizing agent. At one level Catherine herself is the
focalizer, in that the spatio-temporal dimensions of the narrative correspond with her
experiences. Rimmon-Kenan (1983) refers to this as external focalizing. At another
level the unidentified narrator will disclose Catherine's thoughts and feelings in a way
that Catherine herself is either incapable of doing or unwilling to do in speech: 'My
dear Eleanor cried Catherine, suppressing her feelings as well as she could'
(Chapter 26, Penguin edn, 1994). Rimmon-Kenan refers to this as internal focalizing,
in that our attention is directed as much to the mental condition underpinning the
statement as to its functional, conversational context.
At the beginning of Dickens's Great Expectations, the primary agent of external
focalizing (the activities of Pip) is the young, inexperienced Pip, while at the same
time the internal focalizing (the thoughts and feelings of Pip) of these chapters is
controlled and orchestrated by the older Pip who narrates the events from a
retrospective distance of about three decades. A similar but more complicated case of
split focalization occurs in James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1914-15), which begins as follows:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down
along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens
little boy named baby tuckoo
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy
face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she
sold lemon platt.

[64] The focalizing agent of this passage is the central figure of the novel, Stephen
Dedalus, at this point aged about three years. The focalizer, however, is the third-

person narrator, who situates these experiences in the past tense and structures them
around sentence patterns. The narrator makes stylistic concessions to the disorganized
mental operations of his subject (the syntactic units of the second and third paragraphs
are endearingly infantile non sequiturs), but within 500 words the deictic features of
these childhood experiences become much better orchestrated.
The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects
urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every
charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew
Throughout Joyce's novel there is a constant interface between the focalizer, the
narrator, and the focalizing agent, Stephen. This also happens in Northanger Abbey
but Joyce subtly erodes the conventions that in Austen's novel maintain the distinction
between the narrator and Catherine. As the narrative of A Portrait follows Stephen's
development through sexual and emotional rites of passage and towards intellectual
maturity the style of the narrator adjusts itself to the mood and aspirations of its
subject. The following is from Chapter 4 in which Stephen observes a girl on a beach:
Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her
bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the
wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
Just as the unfocused syntax of the narrator parallels the fluctuating attention span of
the infant at the beginning of the novel, so this passage is consistent with the aroused
sexuality and the literary ambitions of the young man. The centre of attention is [65]
the girl's clothing and body and this is stylistically 'dovetailed' into an extravagant
pattern of metaphor, assonance, alliteration and parallelism that virtually satisfies
Jakobson's definition of the poetic function. Unlike Catherine's narrator, who tells us
what she does and then goes on to reflect upon its emotional effects, Stephen's
narrator creates a stylistic representation that combines internal and external
focalization. He writes in the way that, from our knowledge of Stephen, we would
expect Stephen to write.
Genette's concept of focalization is important because it provides a cohesive centre
for the potentially disorientating variety of stylistic techniques that have been applied
in the novel. Leech and Short (1981:70) are clear about the difficulties of arriving at a
consistent and comprehensive model for the analysis of style in the novel. 'There is no
complete list of the linguistic properties of a text; therefore we have to select the
features to study.' In 1977 Roger Fowler coined the term 'mind style':
Cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to
one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world view, what I shall call a
'mind style'.
Fowler's concept of mind style combines two problematic dimensions of the novel as
text. First he raises the possibility of identifying a stylistic property which runs
through all levels of the novel. Secondly he claims that the cumulative effect of this
will enable us to treat the novel as the embodiment of the opinions and affiliations of
its author: in terms of Chatman's diagram we move outward from the centre to the

margins; in terms of Leech and Shorts we distil a message from the combination of
text and discourse. In short, Fowler draws together as a single stylistic principle all of
the techniques described above.
It is not too difficult to identify a consistent stylistic signature in the narrative
passages of some novels. A classic case is Henry James's tendency to specify a topic
(person, situation or idea) by building around it a complex network of modifying and
[66] post-modifying clauses. James's sentences attempt consistently to contain and
incorporate the multifaceted condition of their subject:
Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some
more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an opening for in the
manner of the large affable lady who sat there drawing a pair of soiled gants de Sude
through a fat, jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding, repeated over and over
everything but the thing he would have liked to hear.
(The Pupil, opening passage)
James's complicated system of main and sub-clauses is an attempt to draw together
what might otherwise be separate processes of internal and external focalization. In a
single sentence he tells us what 'he' is thinking, why he is reluctant to leave the room,
and of the physical size, activities, disposition, posture and jewellery of the person
who detains him. We might thus argue that the Jamesian mind style involves the
omniscient, intradiegetic narrator not only as the controller of the overall narrative
structure, but also as someone who strives to synthesize multidimensional experience
at a localized stylistic level. We might further argue that since this is a consistent
feature of his novels it enables us to move from narrator to implied and real author
and infer that this mind style tells us something about the 'world view' of Henry
James.
Such procedures are valid in some cases, but not all. As we have seen, some novels
can divide the process of focalization between different levels of style and narrative
and consequently disrupt any comfortable movement from narrator to real author.