ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interplay of perspectives that takes place in every flashback scene and suggests how a complex set of viewpoints becomes accessible to the viewer by means of cognitive operations of compression. The blended joint attention process underpinning flashback scenes (analyzed in Chapter 3) and the attentional triangle made up by the camera, the viewer, and the diegesis (the narrative spaces at hand), as well as a character in some instances, involve a variety of viewpoints. However, those perspectives are not only perceptual ones but also other kinds of viewpoint such as the multiple ones afforded by the different narrative spaces being set up. The cognitive approach to the point of view set forth here follows Dancygier’s (2012b) proposal of narrative viewpoint as the way certain elements in a given narrative space are presented to function as filters. She defines three types of mental spaces that configure macro-level viewpoint in narratives: story-viewpoint (SV) space, main narrative (MN) space, and ego-viewpoint space (Dancygier, 2012b). Micro-level instances of viewpoint are compressed and unified at the macro level of the story-blend: the SV space houses a unifying narrative viewpoint that results from the compression at a higher level of the innumerable viewpoints from all the narrative spaces involved in the story, and it is this implicit stance that orchestrates the whole narrative. In this sense, a blended version of the “implied author” is proposed.
More specifically, the chapter addresses viewpoint in flashbacks regarding three particular phenomena: compression of two viewpoints (past and present) from the same character in some memory flashbacks; decompression of a character’s identity in a given flashback, which serves to present two different viewpoints and to make them simultaneously available through viewpoint compression; and, finally, viewpoint compression in “replay flashbacks” (i.e., reenacted scenes).
Dancygier, B. (2012b). The language of stories: A cognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
