Lit Theory 101 | Voice, Consciousness & Distance
A practical guide to help make you a better writer and reader | PART 2
Welcome back to our crash course on the lit theory we wish we had actually learned in our MFA.
Okay, first off, here’s part 1:
And yes, we sent that out a while ago and then well, things got insanely busy round here. In fact, as I type this I’m sitting amid a living room overflowing with moving boxes because we’re moving back to Canada in just a few days (!!). So you can imagine that life is still very very busy. And yet, I didn’t want y’all to feel like I totally dropped the ball on this because, ahem, I didn’t. I’ve been working on this for months.
So, below is part 2.1. Yes, you read that right. 2.1. Because things are about to get ultra-nerdy, friends, and I want to give this out in chunks. My rough draft for this second unit was over 15,000 words (!!).
This unit on VOICE, CONSCIOUSNESS & DISTANCE will have four lessons:
Narrator & Focalizer ← today
Distance: Showing vs. Telling
Modes of Consciousness
The Unreliable Narrator
We’ll send them out every couple weeks along with writing exercises for each. As with the first unit, everything will be free to read but will eventually become paywalled like some of our archive (the stories and essays we publish will always remain 100% free to read, but because these lessons take a whole lot of work from us, we’re deciding to paywall them after the initial free send).
Paid subscribers can also access the writing exercises connected with each lesson. This is Part 1’s:
Alright, let’s get started.
Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.
And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.
What You’ll Learn
This unit gives you the vocabulary to understand literature in depth. Specifically, by learning about Narrator & Focalizer (2.1), Distance: Showing vs. Telling (2.2), Modes of Consciousness (2.3), and The Unreliable Narrator (2.4), you’ll be able to observe them in your daily reading and writing on a granular level.
Practically speaking, by the end of this unit you should be able to read a sentence and tell us who is speaking, who is seeing, how close the prose is to the seer’s mind, and whether the speaker can be trusted.
The accompanying writing exercises will let you try each of these techniques in your own prose. Here’s they are for today’s unit:
Writing Exercises to Practice the 3 Types of Focalization & Learn About Narrative Voice
Below the paywall are three detailed writing exercises to deepen your understanding of our second installment of Lit Theory 101 as well as practically apply the lesson on Narrator & Focalizer. We also include, with each exercise, questions to guide and sustain your practice.
Unit II: Voice, Consciousness, & Distance
Lesson I: Narrator & Focalizer
For most of the twentieth century, critics talked about point of view as if it were one thing. Was the story told in first person or third? Limited or omniscient? Fixed or roving? But French literary critic Gérard Genette noticed that point of view was actually two questions glued together.
The two questions:
Who speaks? — the Narrator. The voice that’s telling you the story.
Who sees? — the Focalizer. The character whose point of view shapes what the narrative shows you.
Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:
When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.
A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.
Gérard Genette gave us three positions of focalization, let’s dive into them.
1.
Zero/ Free Focalization
With zero or free focalization, the narrative isn’t tethered to any single consciousness. Rather, the narrator perceives and knows more than any character. This is what we used to call omniscience — think the 19th-century novel’s expansiveness, Tolstoy moving freely between Anna’s interior and Vronsky’s to narrators who can comment on history, weather, the secret thoughts of strangers passing on the street and so on.
Gérard Genette coined this term because he wanted to move past terms that were “too specifically visual.” He felt this for a lot of the terms we use in lit theory (point of view, angle, perspective, field of experience, etc.). But characters aren’t exclusively seeing, are they? They also hear, smell, feel, think, remember, intuit… So, this term was his attempt to account for everything a consciousness does.
Genette borrows Tzvetan Todorov’s formula to describe this position2:
Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows).
Wayne Booth’s term for this is privilege.3 Here he is on what it means, how rare its complete form is, and why even the novel that seems to disappear into its characters can't actually escape it:
Observers and narrator-agents, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not, commenting or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience. But there are many kinds of privilege, and very few “omniscient” narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know. […] Our roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, seeing nothing but what those minds contain, may seem in one sense not to depend on an omniscient author. But this method is omniscience with teeth in it: the implied author demands our absolute faith in his powers of divination. We must never for a moment doubt that he knows everything about each of these sixteen minds or that he has chosen correctly how much to show of each. In short, impersonal narration is really no escape from omniscience — the true author is as “unnaturally” all-knowing as he ever was.
Watch it happen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, page 56:
A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and that…
So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in Pimlico, while Emily Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing — poor women waiting to see the Queen go past — poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War — tut-tut — actually had tears in his eyes.
A different example, from a piece we published recently:
Most of the post-1900 examples I can name use zero focalization to move between living minds. Plangdi Neple uses it to move between living minds and dead ones — between mortal characters, the spirits of unborn children, and a collective we-narrator speaking from beyond death. Take the bathroom scene where the unborn spirits watch their mother sew a stillborn baby back to life:
They were born in a tub, in a bathroom with high clay walls and a flimsy zinc door. They slid out of their mother, a soul with a tightly curled body. She didn’t scream, this mother. She rinsed the body, that silent breathless baby, then washed herself. They watched, curious.
Her lips tight, their mother dug out a spool of thread and a needle attached. Their curiosity morphed into horror and they tried to scream. But spirits cannot scream to the living, so, they could do nothing but watch, dread curling, as the mother pricked her finger, then stabbed the dead baby’s stomach. and blood began to flow along the thread, white to red as it flowed into the body.
Then the body’s eyes opened, and it began to cry. The mother cried too, and hugged the body. The body looked at where They floated, close to the yellow bulb, hatred clear in their eyes. And it smiled. Through its tears, it smiled, and curled further into the mother.
The narrator here is moving freely between several consciousnesses at once: the spirits’ interior (curiosity, horror, dread curling), the mother’s actions and her tight lips, the dead baby that becomes alive and looks back at the spirits with hatred. No single character could narrate this. The spirits couldn’t speak to the living, the mother couldn’t see them, the baby was dead and then was something else. The narrator can see all of it because the narrator is operating from above any single consciousness — and from beyond death. That’s what zero focalization actually buys a writer: the moral and metaphysical authority to say things about the storyworld that exceed any character’s capacity to know.
2.
Internal focalization
The narrative is filtered through a particular character’s consciousness. We see what they see, know what they know, and no more.
In Genette's terms, this is the position where:
Narrator = Character: the narrator says only what a given character know.
Where zero focalization gives you the long view from above, internal focalization locks the camera to one mind. Genette divides internal focalization into two subtypes:
Fixed — the lens stays with one character for the whole novel. His canonical examples are Henry James’s The Ambassadors “where everything passes through Strether,” and What Maisie Knew:
where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl, whose ‘restriction of field’ is particularly dramatic in this story of adults, a story whose significance escapes her.
Variable — the lens moves between characters but stays inside one consciousness at a time. Genette's example is Madame Bovary, “where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles.”
The variable version is doing more contemporary work than people give it credit for. Genette himself notes:
the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily steady over the whole length of a narrative […] Any single formula of focalization does not, therefore, always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section, which can be very short.
The lens can move sentence to sentence, scene to scene, even mid-paragraph. Most novels we’d casually call “third-person limited” are actually variable internal focalization.
James Phelan4 describes it thus:
Internal focalization [is the] center of consciousness narration such as we find in the fiction of Henry James, where the narrator perceives and knows only what the central consciousness perceives and knows.
In other words, the narrator’s knowledge is intrinsically bound to the character’s and that binding so to speak is the engine propelling the story forward.
Having said that, Mieke Bal — and Phelan after her — argued Genette’s strict divide doesn’t quite hold. For Genette, narrators speak and characters see and never the twain shall meet. But Phelan shows that narrators can perceive too. “Determining focalization is just a matter of answering the question who perceives?“ — and the answer can be the narrator, the character, or both at once, sometimes inside the same sentence. Phelan calls the simultaneous version dual focalization. His central example is Lolita: Humbert the narrator perceiving Humbert the character’s past perception of Dolores, two focalizations stacked in the same syntax. The slow change in what Humbert the narrator can bear to perceive across the novel is the moral arc. It’s a way to write retrospective first-person where the present-day narrator and the past self are both focalizing at once — useful any time you want a narrator reckoning with who they were.
Palmer (2004) pushes back on the whole concept from a different angle. He argues:
Focalization was envisaged primarily for, and works very well for, one aspect of mental functioning — perception.
Focalization works well when you’re tracking what a character sees and hears. It gets shaky when you’re tracking what they think, feel, remember, or half-know without realizing. Internal focalization gives you the edge of what a character can perceive. It doesn’t give you the rest of their interior — what’s happening underneath, around, and past the senses. That stuff lives in distance, psycho-narration, and free indirect style. We’ll come back to all of those.
For now, here’s internal focalization at work, from chapter one of Gatsby. Nick has just had dinner with the Buchanans and stepped outside for air when he sees a figure on the lawn:
Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (pg 32)
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
And another contemporary example is from this piece we’ve published by Aimee Wai recently, the entirety of it fixed internal focalization:
3.
External focalization
The externally focalized narrative reports only what’s observable from outside. There’s not really much interiority, or if there is, it comes through dialogue which isn’t quite the same thing. Think Hammett’s hard-boiled detectives, Hemingway when he’s at his most withholding (“Hills Like White Elephants” — we never enter either character’s mind).
The narrator perceives and knows less than the characters. The reader is locked outside their minds and has to read them entirely from the surface — what they say, what they do, how they move, what they pointedly don’t say. Think of a camera on a shelf. The recording is honest, but the interpretation is entirely yours.
In Genette’s terms, this is Narrator < Character — what Pouillon called “vision from without” and what Genette also calls “the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative”.
Mieke Bal5 argues that what Genette calls “external focalization” isn’t really focalization at all but its absence — a refusal of access rather than a technique of access. The category is contested. But it’s still the best name we have for prose that holds the reader outside so to speak.
Gerald Prince6 defines external focalization as prose
…limited to the conveyance of the characters’ behavior (words and actions but not thoughts and feelings), their appearance, and the setting against which they come to the fore… the narrator tells less than one or several characters know and abstains from direct commentary and interpretation.
The trouble is that virtually nobody pulls it off purely (inasmuch as such a thing can even happen…more on that later). Alan Palmer points out that “’pure’ behaviorist narrative is difficult if not impossible to find” — and theorists don’t even agree that Hills Like White Elephants qualifies as fully behaviorist. Norman Friedman7 divided the territory into two: the dramatic mode (selective external — what Hemingway actually does) and the camera (pure recording, no selection). The camera mode was always a theoretical limit case because, well, even a camera has to be pointed…someone, a human with independent thought and will, always chooses the angle.
Genette gives a beautiful example of why writers reach for this position in the first place — what he calls “the reason of propriety, or the roguish play with impropriety.” The carriage scene in Madame Bovary: Emma and Léon inside a moving cab, the cab going nowhere in particular for hours, the windows pulled down and Flaubert refusing to let us in. We get only the cab seen from outside — its erratic route through Rouen, the driver’s confusion, a glimpse of a bare hand tossing scraps of paper out the window. The whole adulterous encounter is external focalization as moral discretion. Or external focalization as wink. Either reading works. The refusal of access becomes the thing that makes meaning.
Seymour Chatman8 got so impatient with the whole focalization framework that he wanted to throw the term out and replace it with two new ones: filter (a character’s perceptions) and slant (a narrator’s angle of reporting). Monika Fludernik9 even argued the whole concept should be “scrap[ped]… in its traditional configurations.” External focalization is the position that has provoked the most theoretical pushback in the entire taxonomy — partly because it’s the rarest in practice, partly because every example anyone reaches for ends up debated.
If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.
Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.
I partially bring this up because I’m very interested in non-human interiority. I know that can seem like we’re into the whimsical over here but I actually am not whimsy-oriented as much I am interested in this kind of interiority as a real ontological proposition — the dog who is a perceiver, the river that sees and so on and so forth. Focalization is the technical instrument that makes that work (or doesn’t). If you write a story focalized through a horse and the horse just feels like a person in a horse costume, it is a failure of the craft as well as imagination. The focalizer’s vocabulary, sensorium, attention, sense of time and ontological stakes have to actually be, well, the horse’s.
Here, I’m reminded of how, during a recent conversation, Kelly Link recalled a mentor mentioning that every story ought be blessed by an animal. I think fiction and truly literature at large affords limitless opportunities for us to explore the consciousnesses of beings other than those embodied as humans and focalization is a good place to start when trying to learn these techniques in practice. Speaking of which, here are some writing exercises devoting to helping you with exactly that:
Alright, that’s a wrap on Lesson #1 for our second unit in Lit Theory 101.
We’ll bring you Lesson #2 (Distance — Showing vs. Telling) in a few weeks, Here, among other things, we’ll get into why “show, don’t tell” is one of the most damaging pieces of advice the workshop tradition ever produced, and what the actual inquiry is underneath it and more.
Once more, here’s the writing exercises to help you learn more about the Narrator & Focalizer in practice.
Until then, read closely, write slowly, & daydream aplenty.
With gratitude,
Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980)
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 160-161
James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).
Norman Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,” PMLA 70, no. 5 (December 1955): 1160–1184.
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996)
Liviu Lutas, “Voice, Focalization, and Disembodiment in P. C. Jersild and C. F. Ramuz,” Narrative 27, no. 3 (October 2019).