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range of the poet-narrator's physical senses.
Like its ordinary sibling, the imaginary-mode of the perceptual facet of focalization can also be
divided between how focalization occurs and what is focalized. With regards to the former of the two
halves, the focalizing lens of the imaginary mode possesses modifications to the curvatures of its
normal physical senses, meaning that recollection, hallucination or dreams have cut a new angle into
the focalizer's lens to alter the normal focalization of an object existing in the ordinary world. An
example of this phenomenon is found with a return to Henry and his toast. Having had nothing to eat
for the entire early morning, Henry has become somewhat silly headed. When a soapy red dish rag
plops down from the edge of the sink and onto the kitchen floor, the following observation is made by
our exemplary focalizer:
“After detecting a slight tremor radiating through the tiny patch of linoleum pressed against his
empty, whimpering stomach, Henry musters together the last dregs of last night's crunchy
calories and turns his head towards the source of the disturbance. And there, drenched in
gurgling butter and oozing puddles of strawberry jam, he spots a piece of toast, a magnificent
slice quite beatific in its triangular pose”
Focalizer Henry is focalizing the dish rag with an ocular lens, but it is an ocular lens reflecting the
world through the imaginary mode of the perceptual facet of focalization. Influenced by memories of
previous pieces of toast which found their way from plates and tabletops to the kitchen floor, and a
visualization further enhanced by the delirium of mid-morning morsel deprivation, Henry's ordinary
senses have contorted the inedible into a vision of unexpected breakfast bliss through a perceptual lens
that has amalgamated aspects of sight, memory and hunger to create an ocular-mnemonic-gastronomic
lens. In this case, focalization for Henry is not mere “seeing” but an act of “seeing through memory”
and “seeing through an empty stomach”. The existent, a dish rag, is thus imaginatively transformed into
a piece of toast whose colour and texture bears a resemblance to the object prior to being focalized by
Henry – a red dish rag covered in soap suds – but in the end is focalized by a hungry Henry, the
focalizer, as something far more palatable.