Characters and Narrators: Filter, Center, Slant, and Interest-Focus

Abstract

language at large. In our early linguistic experience (God knows when), we learn word or phrase, say, of view. As students we read Henry James or some other narratologist who uses the term to refer to concept, or more likely, tangle of concepts that we have intuitively felt demands study. As established scholars we look long and hard for more appropriate term angle of vision, post of observation, focalization. At last we find one that seems just right, and we introduce it in the fond belief that it is definitive and transparent, only to discover that our readers start using our term in sense that seems strange, even perverse. Then we either defend the term, try to insist on its real or pure (because intended) sense, or, in frustration, abandon it and float another one. What is there about the ordinary usage of of that makes its projection into narratology so problematic? My desk dictionary lists two senses: a point from which things are viewed, and a mental position or viewpoint. (In the manner typical of small dictionaries, it in turn defines as 1. place affording view of and 2. point of view; an attitude of mind: the viewpoint of an artist. The OED and Webster's Third list other senses, including the narratological one, but I'm more concerned with the phrase in its basic popular usage.) The distinction seems to be between place from which something is seen (what we might more precisely call vista), and the mental attitude of the viewer. The second sense is clearly consequence of metaphoric and metonymic transfers. We literally stand in place, say the top of skyscraper, to see something, say the rest of the city. All three components of the situation the thing seen, the place from which it is seen, and the act of seeing are literal. But each of these, alone or together, can also be meant figuratively. Hence the complexity of

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