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