POV
The great and continuing nuisance perpetuated by the term “point of view” is that it does nothing to discourage the conflation and confusion of two distinct aspects of narrative practice. Those two separate aspects are:
1. The orientation we infer to be that from which what gets told is told2. The individual we judge to be the immediate source and authority for whatever words are used in the telling.
Those two aspects have been summarized in the two distinct questions “Who sees?” and “Who speaks?”
Now of course in many narratives, orientation and discourse-authorship are sourced in a single individual. But speaking / thinking and seeing need not come from the same agent. We need to allow for cases where another person sees or has seen.
Michael J. Toolan Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction
Toolan uses orientation, rather than Genette's focalization to describe the same distinction in narrative practice. His reasoning is close to I.A. Richards de-visualizing of metaphor. Focalization is a nearly photographic term, just like “point of view,” and carries with it visual metaphors. Toolan violates his own disclaimer that orientation need not be visual, when he summarizes the aspects. “Who sees?” could also be paraphrased as “Who hears?” or “Who feels?”
I think the core confusion rests in the repetitive who? Is orientation a function of identity? If it is, then the collapse of these distinctions by those dreadful Anglo-Americans is entirely justified. However, it occurs to me that the conflation rests on a perception of unary identity. The collapse of these terms might be more of a quasi-romantic world view, rather than an Anglo-American one. Explosion of the quasi-romantic self into a multicultural social-self, motivated by a land of whats as much as a land of whos, better supports the distinction. The question of what, rather than who forces a particular orientation might be more fruitful. We need not infer an identity for a potential agent, as much as an expected response to the whatness of the orientation based on cultural more than individual proclivities.
When I quote people, or images, I do so not with the expectation that they reveal much about who sees or hears the kernal of truth I do, but rather that they reveal a certain position, or orientation if the meaning of the citation is coincident with something, not in an individual, but in a life-experience or cultural background. Is this the same as identity or personality? I don't think so.
There is, in most of what I write, a sort of expectation of limited overlap in orientation with those who would choose to read me. However, there is no expectation of overlaps in identity. Separating orientation from identity seems crucial, and the locus of activity need not be visually metaphoric. In a certain sense, orientation is often conveyed by repetitive tropes of citation and response, where the currency is a shifting cultural mythology, based on stories told and retold— each time with a subtle shift in orientation. What motivates the shift in orientation seems to be more deeply of concern than the who, which separately gives the narrative its authority, that is, if Genette's distinction is to be worthwhile.
Rather than just a simple distinction in character function, I think this separation might also be made in supposedly monologic discourse. The schizophrenic nature of deep monologues, betrays a separate universe of programmed cultural responses— orientations — which should be considered as covalent, and yet not equivalent, to identity. Zooming in on them presents a certain seductive beauty, which exists within each identity, and yet is not identity.
Repetition changes things. Not so much because the repetition is filtered through identity, but because it is filtered through context and orientation. These aspects of narrative behavior seem very important. Social deixis seems to be more easily determined by focalization, rather than identity. I think conflating them is a mistake.
