View/Open - University of Victoria

y the poet-narrator through a lens of ordinary sensual perception (sight), the selfsame extraterrestrial
body in Li He's “A Dream of Heaven” is focalized through the imaginary mode of the perceptual facet.
Without once directly perceiving the “moon” (yue 月 ) as the moon, Li He's poet-narrator nonetheless
focalizes the astral existent through a means informed by fantastic preconceptions of the lunar body.
Rather than apprehend colour, luminosity, or shape, qualities which are all available to the ordinary
mode of perception, the poet-narrator focalizes the moon through a mythological lens, one which
presents the moon as a phantasmagoric sequence of unreal denizens derived from Chinese lunar
mythos, a vision perceivable only through the imaginary mode 92 of the perceptual facet of focalization.
An apposition of the moon in Li Bai and Li He's poems reveals how, depending on the mode of
the perceptual facet of focalization used by the poet-narrator, a single focalized can have wildly
divergent manifestations. But aside from perceptual modes, another influence on a focalized's
presentation is the psychological facet of the focalizer. Unlike the perceptual facet and its relation to the
means of perception of the focalized itself, the psychological facet is concerned with the focalizer's
mind and emotions 93 and their potential effects on subsequent acts of focalization. This second facet is
subdivided by Rimmon-Kenan into two components, the cognitive and emotional, though it is only the
latter of these two divisions which will be of relevance to this thesis. 94 The emotive component reveals
degrees of objectivity (neutral, uninvolved) and subjectivity (coloured, involved) informing a text's
focalization, 95 or for purposes of this thesis how the poet-narrator's mental state may or may not have a
128
92 David McCraw refers to the mode in which the unusual dominates poet-narrator's presentation of a “simple landscape”
in Li He's “Walking the Fields Around South Alp” (“Nanshan tian zhong xing” 南 山 田 中 行 ) as “Li He's peculiar mode
of perception”, a term certainly suggestive of the “imaginary” node of Jahn's “imaginary-ordinary” binary. See David
McCraw, “Hanging by a Thread: Li He's Deviant Closures” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol.
18 (Dec., 1996), pp. 23-44, especially p. 33.
93 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, p. 79. Since this thesis will have a section devoted to addressing the
emotive component of the psychological facet of focalization when examining the effects of nostalgia on Cen Shen's
poet-narrator's focalization of the “distant” frontier landscape, only the emotive component of the psychological facet ,
and not the cognitive, will be explained and exemplified in this chapter.
94 The cognitive component deals with how knowledge, conjecture, and belief affect focalization. See Shlomith Rimmon-
Kenan, Narrative Fiction, pp. 79-80.
95 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, p. 80.