戴维·洛奇《失聪宣判》中的叙事聚焦

论文总字数：48447字

摘 要

戴维·洛奇（1935— ）是当代英国著名小说家，以“校园三部曲”为人熟知，被誉为校园小说的代表人物。《失聪宣判》是洛奇2008年的作品。虽然学界对这部小说关注度不高，但洛奇本人却很喜欢。作为“退休学院派”之作，该书主要围绕着因患有“高频性耳聋”而提前退休的语言学教授的日常生活展开，不仅聚焦 “失聪”二字，而且进一步探讨了对死亡的看法。

目前，关于该小说的研究主要以主题分析为主。考虑到洛奇在文学批评方面颇有研究，本文在参考洛奇专著《小说的艺术》(1992)的基础上，结合热奈特的叙事聚焦理论，分析《失聪宣判》中的视点变化，探讨聚焦对突出小说主题所发挥的作用。

论文分三章论述，分别讨论零聚焦、内聚焦和外聚焦在小说中发挥的作用。首先，通过零聚焦，小说搭建了清晰的故事框架，凸显了失聪生活和健康生活的差异。同时这种非限定式叙事使作者能更方便地切换故事发生地点，引领读者体会不同场景下的失聪生活，突出了小说的戏剧冲突。其次，作者利用内聚焦突出了主人公形象。第一人称内聚焦主观色彩鲜明，让一个抑郁、幽默、自省的失聪主人公跃然纸上；第三人称内聚焦展现了主人公从抑郁到释然的态度转变。最后，借助外聚焦，作者可以深化对失聪主题的探讨，以及对其他边缘化群体的关注。从阅读体验上来看，外聚焦很好地保留了故事神秘性，并引导读者加入失聪及生死话题的探讨之中。

综上，在小说《失聪宣判》中，从记录失聪日常生活，到展现失聪人物的个性，再到探讨失聪引发的思考，零聚焦、内聚焦和外聚焦共同发挥了作用，深化了《失聪宣判》这部作品的主题。

关键词：戴维·洛奇；《失聪宣判》；叙事聚焦；失聪

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1

English Abstract 2

摘要 4

Introduction 1

David Lodge and Deaf Sentence 1

Literature Review on Deaf Sentence 2

Theoretical Framework 4

Thesis Statement and Thesis Structure 5

Chapter One Portrayal of an Embarrassing Life through Zero Focalization 7

1.1 Contrast between the Two Worlds  7

1.2 Prominence of Desmond's Hearing Impairment 9

Chapter Two Deaf Character Highlighted by Internal Focalization 11

2.1 Vivid Characterization of the Protagonist 11

2.2 Desmond's Reflection on Deafness 14

Chapter Three Cogitation on Dysfunction through External Focalization 16

3.1 Attention to the Marginalized Groups 16

3.2 Desmond's Exposure to Different Views about Death 18

Conclusion 20

Works Cited 21

Introduction

David Lodge and Deaf Sentence

David Lodge (1935—) is an eminent contemporary English writer, who has won several awards as a leading exponent for campus novel. He is an emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham and a member of Royal Society of Literature at the same time. As a writer who is both proficient in literature and familiar with academia, he always endeavors to reflect some phenomena of the academic world in his novels. Almost all of his masterpieces choose intellectuals as the main characters and select academic circles as background, for example his trilogy of campus novel——Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work. Apart from writing, David Lodge also shows high attainments and talents for literacy criticism. His writing style is traditionally regarded as a combination and balance of both realism and postmodernism. The Art of Fiction (1992) is his famous literary-critical work. Interest in literacy criticism motivates him to pay great attention to writing skills in his creation. Park Hohan argues that Lodge’s works are “fictions of film type”. From his perspective, Lodge emphasizes the change of “view point”.(Ou 71) Frequent change of “the first person” and “the third person” in Deaf Sentence hints that such inclination to switch “view point” is also displayed in this novel. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the narrative methods in Deaf Sentence is worth researching.

Desmond, the protagonist of Deaf Sentence, can be viewed as a reflection of David Lodge. As a college professor, Desmond unluckily suffers from heavy hearing impairment, which makes it almost impossible for him to give lessons to students as before. In order to seek dignity and propriety, he decides to retire in advance. Meanwhile, his wife Winifred, who is 8 years younger than him, has succeed in her late entrepreneurial career in curtain fabrics cooperating with Jakki. Winifred keeps a strict figure management by sports and exercises, which makes her revive in her mature years and she constructs a sharp contrast with the aging and infirm husband Desmond. As an idle househusband with few things to do, Desmond recognizes that the gap between Winifred and him is larger and he feels deeply depressed. Fortunately, such emotion doesn’t linger too long and Desmond soon finds ways to comfort himself. In his opinion “deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic”.（14）Persuading himself in this way, Desmond shows more positive attitude to his retirement life. Besides, Lodge deliberately uses vivid and humorous words to relieve the solemn and heavy theme of deafness. Such combination of sadness and happiness endows readers with more colorful reading experience.

Scholars have delved into his trilogy and have made many achievements in their research. Therefore, when it comes to his late work Deaf Sentence, some scholars are used to regarding it only as campus novel and judge that Lodge’s inspiration of writing has dried up. However, when talking about this work in an interview, Lodge claims that “most critics speak highly of it and it has become the most praised work of mine in a fairly long period.”（Wang 70）Therefore, Deaf Sentence deserves deeply and careful research.

Literature Review on Deaf Sentence

The most popular research focuses on his “campus novel” especially Small World. By the end of 2016, 50 essays have analyzed it from various aspects.（Zhong 74） Scholars applaud Lodge for showing the negative part of the academia and by lively description of the intellectuals, Lodge illustrates that the intelligentsia would rather crave for personal fame and gain than authentic academic achievements.

When it comes to domestic and foreign researches on Deaf Sentence, the number of researches and essays declines sharply. Foreign scholars show more interest in reading Deaf Sentence from its writing skills and literary theories. For example, Robert Cantwell (2010) gives emphasis to the humanism reflected in this novel. He also argues that humanism is the elixir of personal dilemma, with which Desmond can be more bravely and positively face his life. In the next year, by comparing the writing forms of Lodge’s two works——Therapy (1995) and Deaf Sentence (2008), Lidia Mihaela Necula(2011) comes to a conclusion that “the exorcising writing act, manifest at the level of the text under the form of diary pages, letters or emails, seems to work as the best therapeutic treatment for depression (personal or textual)”. (Necula 70)The prominent feature of this article is that it focuses on how the writing forms affect the manifestation of characters’ feelings and novel themes. Lately, Pauline Eyre(2012) applies Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory for Lodge has written critically on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the novel constructs many parts of carnivalesque to show how it might feel to be hearing-impaired. He claims that “Lodge succeeds in representing the lived materiality of hearing-impairment by setting his protagonist in motion as a Bakhtinian comic hero, a first-person narrator whose Rabelaisian body bursts from the text to invoke a carnivalesque overturning of power hierarchies.”（Eyre 17）In the book David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel, Russell Perkin(2014) analyzes Lodge’s works from the view of liberalism. Lodge has written very little criticism about poetry but references to poems occur frequently in Deaf Sentence. By scanning the poets quoted in the novel, Russell comes to a conclusion that “Lodge’s taste reflects liberalism that is catholic as well as Roman Catholic.”（Perkin 16）

Domestic scholars care more about the content and themes of the novel. “Deaf” and “death” are the core themes of this novel and have been discussed all through the novel studies. Wang Xianpei(2013) claims that “By describing the protagonist’s experiences of aging and diseases and his meditations on the threat of death, the novel exposes the universal problems brought about by old age. The author’s focus is on the quest of the meaning of life.（Wang 69）Wang intends to emphasize that the real purpose of the novel is not confined to death but to enlighten readers on the significance of life and spirit. Liu Hongyu (2016) divides the death theme into three dimensions: the youth, the middle-aged and the elderly to discuss separately the role of death in different life period. Apart from deaf and death, identity is also a new trend of researching direction. Li Zhe (2015) inspects the protagonist as an old intellectual and relates it to the theme of redemption, which is a key word in Lodge’s Catholic novels. Tao Tao (2017) attempts to define Desmond as a marginalized character. “Deafness enables the protagonist to observe the world and human life from a new perspective, and then provokes thoughts about deafness, aging and death.” (Tao 87) Because compared with common and healthy people, deaf people are few and uneasy to be discovered by central groups.

As the theme of the novel, “deafness” is inevitably mentioned and analyzed in studies of Deaf Sentence. Foreign scholars have already combined Deaf Sentence with writing skills and literacy theories to prove how Lodge practices theories in his novels. It hints that Lodge’s criticism and taste of literature will affect his own creation. Besides, Lodge summarizes the current status of English novels in an interview and says that “I think that there is still a marked preference for first person narrative over the third person narrative. It is still a very common device to use a first person narrator, and I think this is partly because of writers’ lack of confidence.”(Luo 9) Having discovered this phenomenon, Lodge has reason to pay more attention to “narrators” in his own creation. And that is what this thesis tries to do——analyzing Deaf Sentence from the perspective of narration.

Theoretical Framework

Lodge has admitted the significance of “point of view” in The Art of Fiction and he claims that “the choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.”(Lodge 26) However, he has not officially formed his own narration theories. Consequently, narrative focalizations theory of Genere Genette (1930—2018), the most outstanding representative of French narratologists, is used here to help analyze Deaf Sentence.

Before Genette’s focalizations, the academia had long suffered from a tricky confusion between mood and voice, in another word, a confusion between the question of who is the character and whose point of view directs the narrative perspective. To settle this question, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren introduced a four-term typology in 1943, which divides a narrator into two situations——a character and not a character and then discusses separately from both internal analysis and outside observation. One year later, F. K. Stanzel distinguished three types of novelistic “narrative situations”: the “omniscient” author , the character as narrator and the third-person character narration. And at the same year, Norman Friedman even created a more complicated classification with eight terms. However, all of these classifications are incomplete or confused. Based on the experience of predecessors, Genette presented his own classification in Narrative Discourse (1983), an invaluable book which fills the need of comprehensive survey for a systematic theory of narrative. According to Genette, “it is convenient to consider only the purely modal determinations, those that concern what we ordinarily call ‘point of view’ or, with Jean Pouillon and Tzvetan Todorov, ‘vision" or "aspect’.”(Genette 186, 188)

Furthermore, he advocated replacing visual terms like “vision”“field” and “point of view” with a more abstract one “focalization”, which properly corresponds to Brooks and Warren's expression, ‘focus of narration”.(Genette 189) Founding on his own classification basis, Genette cut focalization into three categories. In the first term, zero focalization, the narrator knows more than the character, or more precisely, the narrator knows more than anyone in the stories. The narration is “nonfocalized” and the narrator can know and say anything he wants. In general, it is represented by the classical narrative.(Genette 189) In the second term, internal focalization, the narrator can only say what the given character knows. In another word, internal focalization means that “a character serves as a focalizer, restricting the narration to ‘what a character knows, thinks, and feels’”.(Cohan 96) In the third term, external focalization, the narrator says less than the character knows and expresses all the information in an objective tune, which is equivalent to restricting the scope of narration “only to what can be outwardly observed”.(Lanser 38) The focalizer of external focalization is “an anonymous agent, situated outside the fabula”.(Bal 137) Genette’s three-term typology simplifies the complicated focalization judgments and provides scholars with effective researching methods, which makes it spread wide even among nowadays.

Thesis Statement and Thesis Structure

In the light of what is stated above, this research intends to analyze Deaf Sentence from the aspect of narrative focalization. And by researching the novel from zero, internal and external focalization, the thesis argues that the combination of three types of focalizations helps David Lodge enrich the theme of deaf successfully. Zero focalization constructs the daily deaf life. Internal focalization portrays the image of the protagonist with hearing impairment. And external focalization enlightens readers to think more deeply from the theme of deafness.

Three main chapters respectively explore the novel from three kinds of “view point”. In the first chapter, the function of zero focalization is delved into. Unfocalization and omniscience are two main characteristics of it. The unfocalized narration portrays an embarrassing life of the deaf protagonist. The smooth change of the timeline and space contributes to the contrast of Desmond’s deaf life and common people’s healthy life. Besides, the omniscience of zero focalization helps highlight the characters’ conflicts caused by deafness. The second chapter views from internal focalization and discusses “the first-person narration” and “the third-person narration” separately. With the subjective colors of the first-person narration, the author creates a depressed, humorous and introspective deaf character. Desmond is more individualized and has more obvious characteristics under internal focalization. Also, his attitudes toward deafness change from depression to relief. This process is displayed clearly with the third-person narration. The third chapter focuses on the external focalization and explores how it deepen the deaf theme by paying more attention to marginalized groups. Besides, this chapter analyzes how death, the concealed word behind deaf, can be pushed into the central place and discussed without limitation with the help of such objective focalization.

Chapter One Portrayal of an Embarrassing Life through Zero Focalization

Zero focalization endows the narrator with a nonfocalized and omniscient standpoint. Without the limitation of vision, the narrator is like God (Shen 71) and is able to provide more information than anyone else. Roland Barthes appraises it as occupying the summit and telling stories from the view of God. In this way, authors can guarantee the narrator to shuttle back and forth between the inner and outer part of the character. (Tan 109) Standing outside the story gives the narrator various advantages, such as grasping the information of past and present, understanding all the details of the story and thoroughly knowing the thoughts and feelings of the characters. To some degree, zero focalization helps create the authority of narration, which contributes to the integrity of the story.

1.1 Contrast between the Two Worlds 

Using zero focalization, Lodge manages to change time and space without constraint. In this way, Lodge is able to make comparison of the two worlds——deaf life and healthy life. In chapter 16(Deaf in the Afternoon), Desmond and his wife Fred go to “gladeworld”, an up-market holiday camp in a forest, to gain some relaxation and exercise. For Desmond, this holiday is everything but refreshing. The narrator describes “gladeworld” in this way. “A large sports hall where , for an additional charge, not negligible you can play under artificial light and in artificial air various sports ( tennis, badminton, squash, racquet ball, billiards, snooker, table tennis, etc.), watched critically by a ring of fellow internees waiting for your allotted time to end and their own to begin”(224) Various activities and holiday experiences are described here in order to show the colorful life of healthy people. And this special holiday camp is deliberately set to form a contrast between the frail protagonist and healthy people. However, Lodge is aware clearly that it is impossible for Desmond, the protagonist, to do so. Because he is not only impaired and old but also goes to “gladeworld” for the first time. Besides, he has never shown any interest in exercising, let alone know so many kinds of ball games. Also, he is unlikely to analyze the mental states of the critical and anxious visitors so definitely and vividly. All these objective facts and psychological details needs another narrator to tell besides Desmond. Therefore, Lodge uses zero focalization, the perspective of God, to change the story background from Desmond’s house to “gladeworld”. Without extra effort, readers’ attention is attracted by Lodge and readers can follow the author to understand the different life of deaf Desmond and healthy people.

However, the sharper contrast lies in the life of retired Desmond and his successful wife. In chapter 3, the recess bell in college mixing with the bustle of students evokes Desmond’s memory of the life before retirement. In order to remind readers of the switch of time, the author artfully uses “he” instead of “I” to show a complete story of Desmond and Winifred. “His career was over while Winifred’s was steaming ahead, and she now brought considerably more money into the household than he did. Her days were brimming with activity while he struggled to fill his own with routine tasks like shopping, or other errands undertaken more for exercise than need.”(36) These words show that the narrator is aware of the daily life of both Desmond and Winifred. The narrator records not only big things like Winifred’s career, but also trifles like shopping and other errands, with which Desmond kills time of boring retirement life. Neither can Desmond nor Winifred grasp all the daily arrangements and schedules of both characters, let alone describe Desmond’s inner feeling so definitely. Furthermore, the narrator masters the psychological states of the characters. It is the him who tells readers the tedious and anxious mental states of Desmond. Therefore, this episode is observed by zero focalization which comprehends both unlimited facts and detailed emotion. The efficient application of unfocalized narration provides Lodge with information from all sides to make the contrast between Lodge and Winifred comprehensive. By the contrast narrated with the help of zero focalization, readers can learn that life to deaf Desmond is bored but to Winifred is busy and colorful. In short, though they are couple, they live in totally different worlds.

1.2 Prominence of Desmond’s Hearing Impairment

Besides, zero focalization can help magnify character contradictions caused by deafness, because zero focalization describes inner feelings freely and portrays details exhaustively.

In chapter 14, in order to show the tremendous influence of deafness on Desmond’s daily life, the author deliberately sets a coincidence that Desmond’s hearing aid batteries die out when he is in the middle of a talk. Desmond chooses to ignore the normal rules of conversational turn-taking and talks non-stop on a subject. This episode happens, when he has a conversation with a left-wing playwright. “The playwright, who had beamed with pleasure at the first mention of his play, grew more and more restive as he listened to this lecture, opening his mouth several times in a vain attempt to speak and interrupt its flow, but when he himself could think of nothing more to add he said what a pleasure it had been discussing the man’s play and excused himself on the grounds of having to see to the wine.” (198) Lodge smartly chooses zero focalization here to avoid the protagonist’s subjective judgment and excuses in such an awkward situation. To Desmond, zero focalization clearly depicts his embarrassed conversation situation led by hearing impairment. To the playwright, zero focalization, with the advantage of grasping characters’ psychological states, vividly describes changes of his feelings and the reasons for his action. Meanwhile, the changing psychological states of the playwright serves as a foil to the protagonist’s absurd talking experience resulting from deafness. By zero focalization, readers have clear acknowledgment that the mention of the playwright’s work makes him pleased and it is the disagreement combined with impolite feelings on Desmond’s talk that makes him restive. Readers can understand the difficulty of daily talk for deaf people by the obvious contrast on the mental states of the two characters. In this way, zero focalization contributes to the formation of an encyclopedic and deaf scholar suffering from communication disorders.

With the omniscient and omnipotent zero focalization, the author can display sharp contrast between Lodge’s frail life and healthy people’s. Also the contrast between Lodge and Winifred is shown comprehensively by zero focalization. Besides, taking advantage of zero focalization’s unlimited analysis on mental activities, the author can give more prominence to the character conflicts and magnify the dilemma of deafness. However, the unlimited comprehension of zero focalization inevitably cuts the imagination space for readers. Therefore, Lodge adds internal and external focalization to the novel to achieve balance and cover the shortage of zero focalization. Also, internal and external focalization helps express the theme of deafness from other perspectives.

Chapter Two Deaf Character Highlighted by Internal Focalization

The core of focalization lies in the point of view, which also means the “restriction of field”. (Genette 189) In internal focalization, the narrator is the character in the story. From the view of the given character, readers can learn the things related to this character. At the same time, internal focalization asks the narrator to act according to the identity of the given character and to build relationship with other characters in the story. (Tan 111) There are three types of internal focalizations: fixed narration, variable narration and multiple narration. (Tan 112) All of the episodes of internal focalization in Deaf Sentence are narrated by the protagonist. Therefore, the author only chooses the fixed internal focalization. All of the following discussion of internal focalization means the fixed one.

What’s more, fixed internal focalization can be divided into “the first-person narration” and “the third-person narration”(Genette 194), which both exist in this novel. Under the discussion of focalization structure, the division of person is of paramount significance. Because different “person” provides different “vision”, which is meaningful not only to focalizers but also to focalized objects. (Tan 112) Fixed focalization is the most widely-used method in internal focalization. It endows the narration with strong individualized and subjective color, which makes the focalized objects full and three-dimensional. In addition, this limited narration enhances the reality and expressiveness of the novel. By limiting the authority of narration, internal focalization increases the suspense of the novel and makes it more dramatic.

2.1 Vivid Characterization of the Protagonist

The author portrays an individualized and colorful protagonist with the tool of the first-person internal focalization. All the three main characteristics of Desmond——depressed, humorous and introspective, are described completely and graphically. In chapter 1, Desmond records such a dialog.

“Fred: Murr murr murr.

Me: What?

Fred: Murr murr murr.

Me: (playing for time) Uh huh.

Fred: Murr murr murr.

Me: (making a guess at the content of the message) All right.”(8-9)

In this dialog, the author limits his own rights in writing. Every character in the novel is created and instructed by the author and he is able to reveal any information he wants. Therefore, Lodge is certainly aware of Fred’s words for it is his creation. However, Lodge puts restriction on his rights deliberately in this episode. And the dialog is obviously observed and narrated by the protagonist with the first-person internal narration. In this way, readers can only hear the limited information by Desmond’s impaired ears and can only grasp the thoughts of him rather than know the mental states of the two talkers. To Winifred, readers know almost nothing. Her words cannot be heard by deaf ears and nobody can hear her emotion. Standing on Desmond’s view point, readers can have a real and profound experience of being deaf, which in return provokes empathy from readers about how deafness influence daily life.

However, if the whole story complains about hearing impairment, the novel will be monotonous and lack vitality, which hinders it from becoming a masterpiece with significance and reality. Lodge is aware that the wholly tragic character is unattractive to readers. Therefore, he gives the protagonist humorous language to make him comfort himself. In chapter 2, by the first-person internal narration, the author adds a series of internal monologue. “Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic……One of the strongest curses in the English language is ‘Damn your eyes!’ (much stronger than ‘Fuck you!’ and infinitely more satisfying - try it next time some lout in a white van nearly runs you over). ‘Damn your ears!’ doesn’t cut it. ”(14) The episode is the monologue of Desmond’s thoughts of deaf and blind. Genette claims that “internal focalization is fully realized only in the narrative of interior monologue”.(Genette 193) Therefore, it is reliable to judge that the first-person internal focalization is applied here. In Desmond’s view, deafness is luckier than blindness. From the comparison, he finds reasons to relieve the depression of being deaf. Meanwhile, the discussion of “damn your eyes!” and “damn your ears!” is common and interesting, which constructs a sharp distinction with his identity of linguistics professor. Such words make him easily accepted by common readers and increase the humor sense of him. With such internal focalization, the deaf professor gains more personality and individuality besides deafness.

In addition, to guarantee the reality of the role, Lodge uses internal focalization to make the protagonist adept at self-examination and endeavors to enhance the reality of this role. In chapter 3, Desmond goes the theater with his wife. No matter where he sits, he cannot hear the consonant, which makes English heard like Hungarian in his ear. When other audience break into a loud laugh, he is still confused. On the way home, the author uses internal focalization to analyze Desmond’s inner feelings. “Fred had to explain all this to me in the car on the way home. She often has to explain such things to me on the way home from the theater or cinema. It’s got to a point where I am reluctant to offer any opinion at all on what we have just seen in case I reveal some ludicrous and humiliating misunderstanding of a basic element of the plot.”(38) Much evidence proves that the first-person internal focalization is used here. Firstly, “me” is an obvious signal of the first person. Besides, the narrator Desmond learns everything with the restriction of deafness. It is impossible for him to go beyond the boundary of hearing impairment and become omniscient. What’s more, the narrator can only analyze his own emotion. When it comes to Winifred’s feeling about explaining dramas or films to Desmond, readers learn nothing definite from the narrator.

By internal focalization, Desmond looks honest and tells readers directly that some ludicrous and humiliating misunderstanding will make him feel embarrassed. He is so sincere for he admits that he cares much about his face instead of finding excuse to conceal it. Internal focalization makes readers tend to believe the narrator’s opinion, which also means if Desmond finds excuse for himself, readers will probably be puzzled by him and be inclined to accept his explanation. However, the author doesn’t allow Desmond to do so, instead Lodge chooses internal focalization to show readers a sincere image. In this way, readers are impressed by the introspective protagonist polished by internal focalization.

2.2 Desmond’s Reflection on Deafness

Through the subtle use of the third-person internal focalization, Lodge records the changing process of Desmond’s attitude towards deafness. At first, he only feels the painful experience of hearing impairment. Later, he comes to realize the relation between deafness and death.

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