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  • Speaking Doesn't Happen without Vision
  • Mieke Bal (bio)

The question the title of your journal poses is key to all my work—on the condition it is supplement with "Qui voit?"—who sees, or better, who perceives?

In my early work I struggled to adjust the concept of focalization, introduced by Gérard Genette (1972), in turn inspired by Henry James (1934, orig. 1909).81 In fact, in narrative theory, the concept of focalization, although clearly visual in background, has been deployed to overcome visual strictures and the subsequent metaphorical floundering of concepts such as perspective and point of view. It is precisely because the concept of focalization is not identical to that of the gaze or the look that it can help clarify a vexed issue in the relationship between looking and language, between art history and literary studies, but also between mainstream and analytic narratology. The common question for all three of these concepts is what the look of a represented (narrated or depicted) figure does to the imagination of the reader or the look of the viewer. "Who speaks?" cannot be asked without the question "Who sees?" in the sense of "Whose vision do we get to know?" and also, as I have elsewhere emphasized, "Who cannot speak?" and "Who cannot focalize?"82

Retrospectively, my interest in developing a more workable concept to replace what literary scholars call perspective or point of view was rooted in a sense of the cultural importance of vision, even in the most language-based of the arts. My long-term argument with the undisputed master of modern narrative theory, Gérard Genette, turned out to be entirely based on cultural-political disagreement. Genette refused to attribute focalization to a subject, thus trying to save the possibility of neutral, objective narration—which I reject. Hence vision must not be understood exclusively in the technical-visual sense, nor are focalizers necessarily anthropomorphic. In the sense of imaginary—akin but not identical to imagination—vision tends to involve both actual looking and interpreting. And, while this is a reason to recommend the verb read for the analysis of visual images, it is also a reason not to cast the visual out of the concept of focalization. The danger of conceptual dilution here must be [End Page 355] carefully balanced against the impoverishment caused by the excess of conceptual essentialism that goes by the proud name of "rigor."

The concept of focalization also helped overcome the limitations of the linguistically inspired tools inherited from structuralism. These were based on the structure of the sentence and failed to help account for what happens between characters in narrative, figures in image, and the readers of both. The great emphasis on conveyable and generalizable content in structuralist semantics hampered attempts to understand how such contents were shaped and conveyed—to what effects and ends—through what can be termed "subjectivity networks." The hypothesis that readers and viewers envision, that is, create, images from textual or visual stimuli cuts right through semantic theory, grammar, and rhetoric to foreground the presence and crucial importance of images in reading. The importance of images lies in their rigorous present tense. At one point, when I managed to solve a long-standing problem of biblical philology "simply" by envisioning, instead of deciphering, the text, seeing, in the present, the violence done, millennia ago, to young girls, I savored the great pleasure and excitement that come with discovery, in the act of denaturalizing such violence. Let me call the provisional result of this first phase of the dynamic of the concept-in-use, the gaze-as-focalizer.

The second phase goes in the opposite direction. Take Rembrandt, for example. The name stands for a textRembrandt as the cultural ensemble of images, dis- and reattributed according to an expansive or purifying cultural mood—and for the discourses about the real and imaginary figure indicated by the name. The images called "Rembrandt" are notoriously disinterested in linear perspective and also highly narrative. Moreover, many of these images are replete with issues relevant for a gender perspective—such as the nude, scenes related to rape, and myth-based history paintings in which women are being...

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