Deictic Field and Narration
In linguistics, Psychology, and Literary Theory, Deictic Field and Narration refers to the study of how narration, through the process outlined by deictic shift theory, redirects the attention of the reader from their reality to the perceived reality created by the work being read, witnessed, absorbed, and realized by the audience.
What is Deixis?
Deixis is the point of reference in narrative and discourse.[1] It is the grounding of the narrator and audience in the story-world. They become fixed by the dimension of the narrative universe and they perceive that universe to be their reality. To understand deixis, one must first understand that language has subjective features; when language is analyzed against these features, there is a quality of speech which emerges which differentiates the here and now from the then and there. There is a phenomenon which attracts the narrator and listener around a view. This quality is deixis. “When philosophers, linguists, and narrative theorists attempt to understand the role of subjectivity in language and conversely, the role of language in subjectivity, they invariably notice a certain aspect of language which seems to depend on extralinguistic, subjective, occasion-specific considerations”; Karl Buhler, an Austrian psychologist, has named this aspect ‘deictics’.[1] Deixis is an aspect of language and speech by which the audience is directed to understand the perspective of the narrator in relation to themselves. Essentially, deixis is the layer of a narrative which the narrator uses to direct the audience to the story world. “Deixis (adjectival form, deictic) is a psycholinguistic term for those aspects of meaning associated with self-world orientation”.[1] It is the lens by which the audience perceives the narrative. When examining other theorists’ perspectives on how narration works, one must not ignore William Labov. Labov argued that personal experience narratives could be divided into parts, where each part was a step in furthering the narrative and each part had a specific purpose. Two of these parts were Labov’s terms of abstract and orientation, which through their function in a personal experience narrative, achieve deixis in the sense that the parts adapt the storyteller and listener to the world of the story through the narrative itself. “All language use depends on some felt relevance to situation, on the attention of participants, and their ability to lift out the topic….Like zero in mathematics and the dark space in the theater, deixis orients us within a situation without calling attention to itself”.[1] Deixis is a feature of language which accomplishes what Labov theorized were two steps in the process of storytelling.
Deictic Narratology
Buhler applied the theory of deixis to narratives. He proposed that there is a Zeigfeld, deictic field, which operates in three modes.[1] The first mode is ad oculos, which “operates in the here-and-now of the speaker’s sensible environment”, the second is anaphora, which “operates in the context of the discourse itself considered as a structured environment”, and the third mode is “that of imagination and long-term memory, which Buhler called deixis at phantasma”.[1] In Buhler’s model, in which he attempted “to describe the psychological and physical process whereby the live deictic field of our own bodily orientation and experience” is “transposed into an imaginative construction”, “the body-feeling representation, or Korspertastbild (what psychologists would probably now call the body schema), becomes loosened from its involvement with the HERE//NOW/I deictic coordinates of waking life in our immediate environment, and becomes available to translation into an environment we construct both conceptually and orientationally”; this deictic coordinate system is used “in the constructive environment to orient ourselves within ‘the somewhere-realm of pure imagination and the there-and-there in memory’”.[1]
Deictic Shift Theory is the process supported by linguists, literary academics, and psychologists that proposes how deixis is achieved in the audience by a work through narration. “Within literary scholarship, it is often noted that first and second person pronouns (and less so, and differently, third) facilitate readerly identification with the textually inscribed position (the position of the character or narrator designated by that pronoun), and evoke a sense of readerly conceptual immersion in the fictional world of the story, contributing to the ways in which the scene is imaginatively ‘realized’ in the mind of the reader, particularly the perspective from which the scene is conceptually visualized. Cognitive poetics and cognitive narratology have employed deictic shift theory (DST), largely based on the work of Duchan, Bruder and Hewitt, to attempt to offer a cognitive account of how these interpretative effects are created. Deictic shift theory (DST) proposes that readers conceptually project to the contextual locus of the speaker of deictic cues in order to comprehend them, offering a model of how the deictic referents determining such contextual coordinates are processed by readers, and how this contributes to readers’ conceptualization of the world of the story” (Deictic shifting in literature: Experimental analysis[2]).
Katie Hamburger, a German narrative theorist, studied and theorized how deictic words are used in literature. In her well known work, The Logic of Literature, she argued that there are two realms of language act: reality statement and fiction (Galbraith, 24-25). Reality statements are by someone and about something.[1] “Acts of fictional narration, on the other hand, transfer their referentiality from the actuality of the historical world to the entertained reality of the fictive world, and transfer the subjectivity of the speaker to the subjectivity of the story world characters”.[1] Hamburger argued that this transfer occurs due to the use of deictic adverbs, and psychological verbs.[1]