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demonstrable bearing on the manner in which the existents of the poem's world are focalized. A return
to Henry will serve to demonstrate the emotive component of the psychological facet of focalization.
On mornings when toast is not forthcoming,
“Henry realizes the futility of his smiles and cute antics, and meanders out of the kitchen and
onto the back deck to be alone. Between gaps in the railing he stares at a glum garden drooping
into parched, neglected dirt. It's all hollow. Roots gnawing and sucking up dust. Empty black
stems”.
However, if we visit Henry on a morning of toasted munificence, the same garden
“winks at Henry. The roundness of its flowers and richness of its soil a sign that the
universe is an expression of fullness, an indestructible principle blooming ever sated among
plump bumblebees sharing forever flowing sweetness”.
129
These excerpts from two of Henry's mornings illustrate how the subjectivity of the focalizer impacts
the presentation of the single focalized, the garden. When Henry's emotions are gloomy, the garden is
focalized through a filter of negativity, a psychological facet which forces flowers to droop and the dirt
to desiccate. However, when focalizer Henry is in good spirits, the same flowers instead bloom and the
soil is perceived as a foundation of inexhaustible nourishment.
Aside from factors such as facet and mode, aspects of focalization that are primarily concerned
with issues surrounding the focalizer, an introduction to the concept of themes and sub-themes 96 of the
focalized needs to be made before concluding this chapter and beginning an analysis of focalization in
Cen Shen's frontier landscapes. Theme here refers to the focalized object perceived by the subject
focalizer with very little, if any, qualification; a straightforward example of a theme is “house”. Subthemes
are the qualities or features of the focalized which are selected for attention by the focalizer, for
example the eerily ajar door and ghostly glowing windows of a house. Although using a different set of
terms, Manfred Jahn's “field of vision” diagram 97 graphically presents theme and sub-theme and how
96 The use here of themes and sub-themes is adapted from Bal's “rhetoric of description”. See Mieke Bal, Narratology, p.
46. An understanding of the focalized's theme and sub-themes will be indispensable for understanding the underlying
patterns in the structure of Cen Shen's thermal frontier landscape.
97 See Manfred Jahn, “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstructing a Narratological Concept” Style 30:2