Focalizer

In a weblog post that could easily have more impact than many conference papers, Jill Walker raises the question of focalisers in weblogs, games, email sagas, and other digital narratives. The focaliser of a story is the person from whose point of view the story is told. The focaliser and the narrator (the person supposedly telling the story) might be two different people entirely.

It's a really useful distinction, obvious once you think about it, buried in Genette's Narratology.

Jill gives up too soon when she encounters tricky cases like OnlineCaroline, where Caroline is obviously a focalizer but the reader herself is recruited to become a focalizer as well. Borders are interesting places; the utility of theory is that it takes case that seem "weird" or "experimental" and shows us why they're complex. Improv theater, role playing games, theater in the round, hyperdrama, Thespian hypertext: they're all playing with the place of the focalizer in drama. That doesn't mean the theory failed, it means theory succeeded in explaining why these cases are unusual and unsettling.

An interesting followup question: what happens when the focalizer isn't the protagonist? I believe the identification of the reader with the hero-protagonist is the main cause of the artistic failure of computer games to date, leading inevitably to "My Friend Hamlet" and the adolescent trivialization of fate that afflicts even the most artistically ambitious games.

Jill says, "Maybe this is chapter three." I suspect it's going to be a widely read dissertation.