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4 Who Sees and Who Speaks Hemingway’s Art of Focalization The artist in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and allpowerful : he must be everywhere felt, but never seen. —Flaubert to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantpie (1857), The Letters of Gustave Flaubert Never think one story represents my viewpoint because it is much too complicated for that. —Hemingway to Ivan Kashkin (1939), Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters No fields of literary theory have contributed more to our understanding of the writer’s craft than narratology and reader-response criticism. But these fields have led to a proliferation of new terms that are unnecessary for the practical analysis of fictional texts and that leave the general reader bewildered. For instance, where once stood, or sat, the reader, we now have a narratee and a small army of other such “readers”—including implied, intended, inscribed, postulated, average, informed, naïve, model, ideal, actual, and empirical readers—not to mention members of interpretive and discourse communities. Without getting sidetracked in the labyrinthine world of narrative theory, I wish to extricate two particularly useful terms: focalizer and focalization. These terms replace point of view, that nineteenth-century warhorse that still lives on in high school, college, and creative writing curricula. The problem with point of view is that it fails to distinguish between the narrator and the character through whose perspective the narrative is, at any given point in the text, being related. As Gérard Genette states, studies of point of view have suffered “from a regrettable confusion between . . . the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator?—or, more simply, the question who sees? and the question who speaks?” (ND 186). For example, in third-person limited point of view, the narrator tells the entire story from the perspective of one of the characters and limits the text’s ac78 Hemingway’s Art of Focalization   79 cess of information to what that character perceives, feels, and knows. But in some third-person limited texts the narrator confines himself or herself entirely to that character’s consciousness and understanding of events; in others, the narrator accesses the character’s consciousness but understands both it and events better than the character; and in some third-person limited texts the narrator does not access the character’s consciousness and thus seems to know less than the character. Nor does the term third-­ person limited point of view address whose voice is relating the information : the character’s, the narrator’s, or some combination of the two. Because the term doesn’t take into account these important differences, it remains vague and is incapable of discerning the text’s perspective. Drawing upon the work of Genette and others, but not fully adhering to any one particular system, I divide point of view into two categories: focalization and voice. These categories give us the tools we need to understand Hemingway ’s use of perspective in his stories.1 Focalizer means two specific things to me: through whose eyes we see and to whose mind we have access. First, the focalizer is the character who situates the action at any given point in the narrative. Thinking in terms of the cinema, we might call the focalizer’s view the camera angle. Sometimes, that camera angle is through the focalizer’s eyes, and sometimes it is the focalizer who is being sighted by the camera. Sometimes, the camera pulls back into a pan shot, but with the focalizer as a part of that larger view. Second, and especially important, the focalizer is the character whose consciousness the writer allows himself or herself access to. For instance, in a story where X is the focalizer, if Y enters the room that X is in, the author will write “Y entered the room” or “Y came into the room,” but never “Y went into the room,” because the latter is not the way X would have experienced the action or sighted it. Nor will the author tell you what Y is thinking. The author will either tell you what X assumes Y is thinking or will let Y reveal thoughts through direct speech or through an action or gesture. On the other hand, if X is not the focalizer throughout the story, the author might shift the focalization from one character to another at different points in the text, but at any one point...

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