The problem of focalization in the diachronic dimension

The article considers focalization as a regulatory mechanism of narration, which determines the peculiarities of the presentation of the diegetic world to the reader’s inner view. As a rule, narratologists identify the role of the addressee in the realization of the focal possibilities of the narrative with the role of the narrator: the addressee sees the world of the story in the same way as the narrator, being his absolute copy. According to our hypothesis, the reader has his own “spectatorial” competence. The latter is revealed only in the diachronic dimension, serving as the basis for three types of focalization, replacing each other from epoch to epoch. In Old Russian literature and eighteenth-century literature, the reader “recognizes” known (ready-made) combinations of details (the archaic type of focalization). The addressee of nineteenth-century works (A. S. Pushkin, L. N. Tolstoy, F. M. Dostoevsky) deals with an unpredictable set of details, from which he assembles a logically complete picture (classical type). The focalization of the non-classical type provides for such a reader’s competence as fixation (“contemplation”) of the narrative: details attract the addressee’s attention, but do not require “deciphering”, because they only testify to the presence of a conventional universe (A. P. Chekhov, twentieth century ornamental prose), producing the so-called “reality effect” (R. Barthes). The types of focalization do not replace one another irrevocably. Once emerged, they are reproduced again at subsequent stages of the evolution of narrative discourse. The classical type coexists with the archaic type, the non-classical type is formed against the background of the classical type (A. P. Chekhov), the archaic type is reactualized in socialist realism (A. S. Serafimovich, D. A. Furmanov, A. A. Fadeev, F. Gladkov), the classical type is presented in modernist literature (M. A. Bulgakov, B. L. Pasternak) and contemporary prose (E. G. Vodolazkin, Z. Prilepin, S. A. Shargunov, L. E. Ulitskaya), the non-classical type is found in postmodernist texts (M. P. Shishkin).