Narration and Focalization: The Quiet American, A Severed Head,
and The French Lieutenant's Woman
This paper was written as an assignment for ENGL431: MODERN BRITISH NOVEL, Dr. Craig Barrow, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 7 Dec. 1987.
As Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan points out in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, one of the contributions Gerard Genette made to our understanding of the novel was his separation of the act of narrating from perspective. In this way, the traditional definition of point of view is seen to have two aspects: narration, answering the question `who speaks?' and focalization, answering the question `who sees?' (Rimmon-Kenan 71-72). The interplay between narration and focalization can have curious effects on the novel. Both Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head take the form of first-person retrospective narration, but each works out the tensions between narration and focalization in differing ways and with different results while John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman reveals that even third person omniscient narration can suffer from ambiguities in the relationship of narration and focalization.
Much of the tension of The Quiet American lies in the reader's awareness of Pyle's death at the beginning of the novel while being kept from knowing of Fowler's responsibility. Greene sets up this tension by his use of Fowler as both an external and an internal narrator (Rimmon-Kenan 74-76). In terms of spatial perception (Rimmon-Kenan 77-78), Fowler's narration is always limited to where he is so that, for instance, he can `learn' of Pyle's death from Inspector Vigot (Greene 17), but temporally (Rimmon-Kenan 78-79) his relationship to Pyle is framed by the retrospective structure of the novel. Throughout the novel the narrator describes action in the past tense or the past perfect.
Disguising many of Fowler's own feelings by understatement, Greene allows Fowler to suggest the feelings of characters around him by qualifying phrases ["Perhaps he had noticed the irony" (Greene 24); "He seemed to be looking for words . . . " (Greene 17)] or by reading inflection or body language ["a low voice, tense with ambiguity" (Greene 31); "I could tell that his formality pleased her" (Greene 41); "Pyle cleared his throat for the conventional response" (Greene 110); "He gave a lost gesture" (Greene 154)] giving a sense of an external narration of the psychological profiles of other characters depending on the credibility of Fowler's authority (Rimmon-Kenan 79-81).
The result of this tension between internal and external narration is an external focalization where the temporal distance of the narration from the events narrated becomes the center of the novel. When describing his first meeting with Pyle, Fowler narrates
Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures; Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle . . . (Greene 25),
placing the meeting within the context of the future. Fowler's developing relationship to Pyle so that he becomes Pyle's only friend and the fact of Pyle's death allows the story to become Fowler's attempt to work out his guilt.
Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head is also a retrospective first person narrative as we are told in the following:
I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story. (Murdoch 12)
Chapter two is a "general explanation" (Murdoch 14) of background and characters up to the point at which the novel begins. The only leaps in time Murdoch allows Martin are retrospections to events prior to the moment being narrated [c.f. "I loved to give Georgie outrageous things" (Murdoch 8)]. Martin is carefully kept from revealing any important relationship or discovery before it naturally arises in the narrative even though, as narrator, he must be aware of them as in the quotation above, and as indicated at times throughout the text [c.f. "It occurred to me then" (Murdoch 30); "the reader must just believe me that it did occur" (Murdoch 111)].
Murdoch maintains this narrative stance by continual references to time in the story [now: "lying beside her now" (Murdoch 11); "Antonia came in now" (Murdoch 22); "I was now sitting" (Murdoch 53); "Now it was essential for me to see" (Murdoch 105); "I was now, all the time, unutterably tired" (Murdoch 153); "I let myself really see her now" (Murdoch 203); tonight: "But tonight . . she stayed at the door" (Murdoch 22); today: "Today, however, I could see" (Murdoch 59)]. In addition, unlike Fowler in The Quiet American, Martin is unaware of the motives and feelings of the characters around him. This limited perception fosters the sense of surprise Martin realizes in his discoveries as the novel progresses. Where Fowler is externally focalized, lending a sense of detatchment from events that finally emphasizes his sense of guilt and remorse at the end of the novel, Martin's narration is internally focalized (Rimmon-Kenan 74, 75) preserving the naivete of his understanding of what is happening and the immaturity of his responses.
Fowles' use of third person omniscient narration in The French Lieutenant's Woman allows him to shift the focalization from character to character in the story as he moves from scene to scene ["Charles felt"; "Charles thought" (Fowles 15); "As she (Mrs. Poulteney) lay in her bedroom she reflected" (Fowles 24); "She (Ernestina) became lost in a highly narcissistic self-contemplation" (Fowles 29)]. This freedom of narrative movement allows him to create irony or suspense between what the reader is aware of and the limited perceptions of the characters [as, for instance, when Charles sends Sam with the brooch for Sarah unaware that Sam is conscious of his amours and has his own reasons for twarting them (Fowles 291+)]. Fowles suspends this freedom, however, with regard to the thoughts and motives of Sarah. While the reader, unlike Charles, is aware that she is manipulating the situation [c.f. by her actions in allowing Mrs. Fairley to see her emerging from the woods (Fowles 159); her purchase of the nightgown and green shawl (Fowles 220,221)], Fowles failure to allow the reader inside Sarah's mind causes her to remain an enigma within the text, helping to support the ambiguity of the various endings for the novel.
Fowles' position as sympathetic external narrator lends him an authority in the text similiar to that of Jane Austen with the added advantage of his perspective in time allowing him to see the action of the novel within the larger framework of Victorian and post-Victorian history. Like Austen, he encourages the reader to feel that narrator and reader share in this `higher' perspective ["You will see that Charles set his sights high" (Fowles 19); "He would have made you smile" (Fowles 43)]. The epigraphs to the chapters help maintain this stance, both by their references to Victorian life and perceptions and by the way Fowles uses them to anticipate the contents of each chapter [c.f. Fowles quotation from Persuasion on the definition of `good company' introducing the visit by Aunt Tranter, Charles and Ernestina to Mrs. Poulteney's in chapter 14].
Fowles, however, is dissatisfied with this approach to narration. As he says in Chapter 13
If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and "voice" of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. (Fowles 80)
"Perhaps," he suggests, this novel is a "transposed biography" [his essay on Hardy and his novels suggesting a similiar point (Fowles 211-216)], that he lives in one of these house in Lyme (he makes reference to living in Lyme), that it's a "game" to understand modern women, like Sarah, whom he has never understood (supported by the ambiguities of the various endings) or that he's "trying to pass off a concealed book of essays" [note his digressions into essay, c.f. 39, 128-130; his use of footnotes, c.f. 87, 131-132, 239; the epigraphs; his extended quotations of Victorian documents within the text, c.f. 186-187,240-241] (Fowles 80-81).
Finally, this novel may be Fowles' attempt to show that, in the craft of fiction, "this wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is" (Fowles 81), "we are all in flight from the real reality" (Fowles 82). As a character in his own novel (Fowles 315-318, 361-362, 365), who appears both as "he really wasn't" and as "he really is" (Fowles 361), Fowles shows us that "[f]iction is woven into all" (Fowles 82), that the novelist can't "pull the right strings" or "produce on request a thorough analysis of their (the characters') motives and intentions" (Fowles 81), that this "omnipotent god" (Fowles 317) of literature is "as minimal, in fact, as a gamma-ray particle" (Fowles 361), a foolish "impresario," a "tycoon" that "cannot bear to seem at fault over even the most trivial matters" (Fowles 362).
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. New York: Signet, 1969.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell UP, 1980.
Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Murdoch, Iris. A Severed Head. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. New York: Methuen, 1983.