The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

Paul Dawson
Narrative, Volume 17, Number 2, May 2009, pp. 143-161 (Article)
Published by The Ohio State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/nar.0.0023
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Paul Dawson is the author of Creative Writing and the New Humanities (Routledge, 2005). His rst
book of poems, Imagining Winter (Interactive Press, 2006) won the 2006 national IP Picks Best Poetry
Award in Australia. Paul is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Media and Performing
Arts at the University of New South Wales.
NARRATIVE, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May 2009)
Copyright 2009 by The Ohio State University
The Return of Omniscience
in Contemporary Fiction
I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient fea-
ture, or at least signicant trend, in contemporary British and American literary c-
tion: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient
narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a
number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all
the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know-
ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com-
mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a
range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the ctional
world.
The novelists Im thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie
Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK;
and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody,
and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contempo-
rary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice
against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in
2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: In the age of perspectivism, in which all
claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patron-
ized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in
contemporary work (1).
How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nine-
teenth century form in the twenty-rst century? Are they conservative and nostalgic
Paul Dawson
by virtue of their form, or are they experimental and contemporary in their use of this
form? This paradox is captured with ironic pithiness in the last paragraph of David
Lodges 2002 novel, Thinks: In the rst year of the new millennium Helen pub-
lished a novel which one reviewer described as so old-fashioned in form as to be al-
most experimental. It was written in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient
and sometimes intrusive narrator (340).
We are accustomed to an historical trajectory of the novel which holds that
modernist and postmodernist ction throughout the twentieth century can be charac-
terised, in part, as a rejection of the moral and epistemological certainties of omni-
scient narration. I want to suggest that the contemporary revival of omniscience in
fact represents a further development and renement of some of the technical exper-
iments of postmodern ction. I want to further argue that the reworking of omni-
science in contemporary ction can be understood as one way in which authors have
responded to a perceived decline in the cultural authority of the novel over the last
two decades.
Attending to the features of contemporary omniscience will also help us to pro-
ductively reconsider the formal category of omniscient narration itself. According to
Grard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, the paradox of poetics is that there are no
objects except particular ones and no science except of the general (23). Existing
theoretical accounts of omniscient narration derive largely from the study of classic
nineteenth century novels. While narrative theory acknowledges historical shifts in
fashion, it operates with a synchronic understanding of omniscient narration as a sta-
tic element of narrative, produced by the structural relationship between focalization
and voice. A study of contemporary ction will enable us to approach the category of
omniscient narration as a mutable and historically contingent practice of novelistic
craft sensitive to historical and cultural contexts.
THE DEBATE ABOUT OMNISCIENCE
It is a fascinating historical coincidence, I think, that a theoretical debate
about omniscience has emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, at
roughly the same time that a revival of omniscient narration has reached a critical
mass in contemporary fiction. A dramatization of this debate would see Nicholas
Royle and Jonathan Culler lined up for a concerted new millennium attack on lit-
erary omniscience, and Barbara K. Olson and Meir Sternberg carrying out a
staunch rearguard defence.
1
And yet, so far, besides terminological wranglings and
abstract theorizing, the debate has not led beyond re-examinations of nineteenth
century fiction, such as William Nelless 2006 article Omniscience for Atheists:
Jane Austens Infallible Narrator. I think more recent novels have yet to be can-
vassed because surveys of contemporary fiction continue to cast omniscience as an
outmoded narrative voice which writers have rejected in favour of more radical ex-
periments with form. This, for instance, is Brian Richardsons argument in his
2006 book, Unnatural Voices. In an exhaustive survey of twentieth century fiction,
Richardson claims that there is a general move away from what was thought to be
144 Paul Dawson
omniscient third person narration to limited third person narration to ever more
unreliable first person narrators to new explorations of you, we, and mixed
forms (13).
2
According to Nelles, Jonathan Culler, will-he-nil-he, appears to be a lightning-
rod in the current debate over omniscience (128). In his 2004 article Omni-
science, Culler asserts that omniscience is not a useful concept for the study of
narration, that it conates and confuses several different factors that should be sepa-
rated if they are to be well understoodthat it obfuscates the various phenomena
that provoke us to posit the idea (184). For Culler, there are four textual phenom-
ena which produce effects generally understood as omniscience: the performative
authority of reliable narrative declarations about the ctional world; the reporting of
characters private thoughts; overt self-reexive statements which draw attention to
the invented nature of the ctional world; and the synoptic overview of events as a
means of producing a kind of universal wisdom.
Culler carefully sifts through each phenomenon, explaining how the term om-
niscience is inadequate to describe its effects, and concludes by suggesting the
need for an alternative vocabulary. It is hard to argue with his dissection of these
phenomena, but ultimately Cullers essay seems to prove nothing except what
most narratologists accept: that omniscience is an imperfect analogy. Narrative
theory has of course long employed a range of alternative or near-alternative
terms, from extradiegetic heterodiegetic narration with non or zero focalization
(Genette) to authorial narration (Stanzel) to narrator-focaliser (Rimmon-
Kenan), to psychonarration (Cohn). The term omniscient narrator still persists in
the wider scholarly community, however, and its continued traction is presumably
the occasion for Cullers essay. Unlike Meir Sternberg, who takes umbrage to
Cullers anti-theism, I do not wish to defend the conceptual value of omniscience
as a narrative model and debate the theological and epistemological implications
which this entails. I am happy, however, to continue using the term with its atten-
dant narratological imprecisions, for it is embedded in our critical lexicon and
none of the existing alternatives quite manages to encompass the narrative freedom
(in terms of panoramic scope and narratorial judgement) which the trope of a god-
like narrator suggests.
One alternative to omniscience which Culler favourably invokes, in order to by-
pass the traditional analogy with God, and more accurately explain at least one of his
phenomena, is telepathy. This term is proposed by Nicholas Royle in his 2003
book, The Uncanny. Royle argues, in fact, that omniscience, focalization and point
of view are all critical fallacies, part of an institutionalized metadiscourse of narra-
tive theory which does not attend to the complexities of actual literary works. Royle
wants to do more than abolish an unproductive critical term, though; he wants to
reconceptualise our approach to literary history, and our understanding of modern
narrative ction. For Royle, the disappearance of God, or should we say, the author-
ity of God, in the eighteenth century, can be read in the hyperbolic appropriation of
the term omniscience to denote human knowledge. He further argues that in the late
nineteenth century, at the moment when omniscience becomes a common term in lit-
erary criticism, the concept of telepathy emerges in the discourse of psychology.
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 145
Telepathy, Royle argues, is both thematically and structurally at work in modern
ctional narratives, and calls for a quite different kind of critical storytelling than
that promoted by the religious, panoptical delusion of omniscience (261). From
brief readings of Dickens and George Eliot, Royle moves to an examination of
Salman Rushdies 1981 book, Midnights Children, where, in the character and nar-
rative voice of Saleem Sinai, the telepathic here accedes to a new level of explicit-
ness, demonstrating that the structure of fictional narration is fundamentally
telepathic rather than omniscient (269).
But what, then, I nd myself asking, are we to make of Rushdies 1988 book,
The Satanic Verses, where surely omniscience accedes to a new level of explicitness?
Where the narrator self-consciously addresses us as god, or the devil, the creator of a
magic realist world? Where the protagonist is visited by this God, who happens to
look like Rushdie himself?
3
The Satanic Verses, for me, is in fact a convenient his-
torical marker of the moment where, critical fallacy or not, omniscient narration, un-
cannily, like the return of the repressed, returns in serious literary ction, but in a
different form. In saying this, I mean that The Satanic Verses requires critics of the
novel to engage with the way Rushdie plays with the conventions of omniscient nar-
ration (I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence
and potence, Im making no claims at present [10]). The same holds true for the
number of prominent novels, published in the two decades since The Satanic Verses,
which employ omniscient narration.
Before undertaking a brief account of contemporary omniscient narration, I will
return to Cullers essay as a starting point to elaborate my approach. In asking
whether the term omniscience is useful for understanding the effects of particular
phenomena of narrative ction, Cullers essay raises the question of whether any
narrative can usefully be classied as omniscient, and thus whether the formal cate-
gory proposed by critics actually exists in literary practice. In response, I would sug-
gest that the idea of omniscience does not conate and confuse different factors for
which the term is used as a dumping ground. Rather, certain works of narrative c-
tion produce the overall effect we have labelled omniscience by combining all four
phenomena Culler identies (and others, such as temporal range). So, once they have
been separated for the purposes of analysis, the relation between these phenomena
needs to be understood.
It is certainly true that, at different times in the history of literary criticism,
each of these phenomena has received emphasis as the dening feature of omni-
scient narration, which is why omniscience has been such a theoretically unstable
term.
4
Yet the overriding effect which the various formal elements of omniscient
narration both enable, and are underpinned by, is that of a specic rhetorical perfor-
mance of narrative authority. By this I mean the heterodiegetic narrators authority
to pass judgement on the ctional world, and the authoritative resonance of these
judgements in the extradiegetic or public world of the reader.
5
Essential to this au-
thority is a coherent narrative persona who serves as a proxy for the author. Con-
temporary narrative theory has generally been reluctant to engage with this effect
because it is at odds with recurring assertions that third person narratives need not
possess a narrator.
146 Paul Dawson
Cullers rst two phenomenaauthoritative reportage of the story world and of
characters thoughtsalso hold true for internally focalized heterodiegetic narra-
tives (and the rst for external focalization). Culler himself points out the difculties
of considering these narratives in terms of limited omniscience or of narratorial ret-
icence: it effectively confers omniscience on all extradiegetic heterodiegetic narra-
tives. The last two phenomena, howevernarrators who self-consciously claim
authorship of the work, and narrators who dispense universal wisdomwhich are
more specic to a typical understanding of omniscient narration (i.e. telling rather
than showing), draw upon the epistemological surety of the rst two for the author-
ity of their claims. In classical narrative theory, these rst two phenomena can be un-
derstood in terms of focalization (the regulation or restriction of narrative
information), while the latter two can be understood in terms of narrative voice (the
relation between the narrator and the story).
In his foundational work, Narrative Discourse, Genette points out that the di-
vision between variable focalization and non focalization is sometimes very difcult
to establish . . . and yet on this point no one could confuse Fieldings manner with
Stendhals or Flauberts (192). This point should indicate that the difference be-
tween the work of these novelists is not one of focalization so much as voice, and it
is furthermore not a difference which can be accommodated by the idea of person,
since they are all heterodiegetic. Genettes work establishes the crucial theoretical
distinction between who sees and who speaks, but never provides an account of the
relation between focalization and voice. As a result the relation between these two
elements in the construction of omniscient narrative authority has long been vexed.
Genettes brief account of the ve functions of a narrator (narrative, directing, com-
municative, testimonial, ideological) provides some basis for understanding this re-
lationship, and the last seems particularly pertinent to omniscient narration: the
narrators interventions, direct or indirect, with regard to the story can also take the
more didactic form of an authorized commentary on the action (256). Genette de-
clines, however, to establish a typology of these functions which would relate back
to his other categories of voice and mood. Narrative theory since Genette has sought
to clarify the relationship between focalization and voice, and two possible ap-
proaches for omniscient narration would be to posit, along with Bal and Rimmon-
Kenan, an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who is also a focaliser, or, along with
Chatman, a narratorial slant on ltered events.
Sternberg argues that, according to Genettes own understanding of focalization
as a means of regulating narrative information, heterodiegetic narrators cannot pos-
sess restricted knowledge; they merely display a restricted performance of knowl-
edge. Thus the focalizings called internal, whether xed (The Ambassadors),
variable (Madame Bovary), or multiple (Rashomon), and external (Hammetts
The Glass Key): all typically exhibit an all-knowing (mind reading, omnitemporality,
omnipresence) that keeps the given focalized information short of what its power
makes accessible and might reveal at will to the last nonfocalized detail (Omni-
science 757). For Sternberg, the author is by denition omniscient and the narrator
is the authors superknowing delegate: the narrator is constructed in Gods image to
perform the required discourse job with authority, epistemic at least (763). This nar-
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 147
rators divulgence of omniscient knowledge ranges from omnicommunication to free
suppression, depending on the artistic strategy required. In one sense, accepting
Sternbergs claim that all heterodiegetic narrators are omniscient would neutralise
epistemological considerations and allow us to focus on the more important rhetori-
cal function of narratorial performance. Im inclined, though, to use the term omni-
scient narration as a label only for certain types of ction, rather than as a general
category of narrative: those works which actualize a panoramic intrusive narrator,
which perform omniscience, rather than those narratives which report without com-
ment, or in which commentary does not reveal a sense of the narrators personality.
In opening his discussion of the fourth phenomenon of omniscience, Culler
suggests that the examples where the best case could be made for the notion are
those nineteenth-century novels from George Eliot to Anthony Trollope with ex-
tradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrators who present themselves as histors: spokesper-
sons of authority who judiciously sift and present information, know the innermost
secrets of characters, reveal what they would keep hidden, and offer sage reections
on the foibles of humankind (31). Culler nds that omniscience also fails to ade-
quately describe these novels, and the wisdom their narrators seek to impart.
Whether or not the narrators of these novels are sufciently godlike to warrant the
description omniscient is not my concern. They obviously display a constellation of
formal qualities which produce an effect that must be named, and named as distinct
from other modes of heterodiegetic narration.
My understanding of omniscient narration, then, is that the term is a trope, a g-
ure of speech denoting a particular type of narratorial performance, and not, or not
only, a quality of narratorial knowledge. We need not take the notion of an all-
knowing narrator literally. Genettes reformulation of omniscient narration denes
it as a mode of focalization where the narrator knows more than the character, or
more exactly says more than any of the characters know (189 emphasis original).
We could enter into an epistemological debate about how and how much a narrator
knows, but I dont think this would be of much use for textual analysis. We would do
just as well to accept, along with Uri Margolin, that a basic literary convention en-
dows the claims of an impersonal omniscient narrating voice with truth by at, while
all claims from other sources are fallible (77). That is, on a scale from unreliable
homodiegetic narration (how can we know whether the narrator of American Psycho
is really a serial killer, and whether this narrator himself even knows?) to analytic
heterodiegetic narration (is it really worth pondering how much Jane Austens narra-
tors actually know?) the latter, by convention, has the highest epistemological
authority.
The debate over what sort of narrator could possess omniscient knowledge also
strikes me as unnecessary. The Anglo-American study of novelistic method may
have used the term omniscience, but it never posited a divine or superhuman narra-
tor: it simply accepted the convention of the omniscient author telling the story di-
rectly. In The Method of Henry James, Joseph Warren Beach writes: Mr. James is
seldom or never, in his later work, the omniscient author. He has a great scorn for
this slovenly way of telling a story (56). Narratology has productively complicated
this conation of author and narrator, but it has also created problems with account-
148 Paul Dawson
ing for narratorial knowledge. In his 2007 book, The Rhetoric of Fictionality,
Richard Walsh challenges several central concepts of narrative theory by presenting
a number of attempts to vindicate rather old-fashioned ideas in new terms (1). One
of Walshs challenges is to the concept of the narrator, arguing that all ctional nar-
ratives are narrated either by a character or by the author. As a result: Omni-
science, I would suggest, is not a faculty possessed by certain class of narrators but,
precisely, a quality of authorial imagination (73).
I would qualify Walshs argument only by suggesting that authors can imagine
a personalised second self to narrate their story, effectively establishing themselves
as extradiegetic characters. This effect of authorial characterisation is achieved by
the ideological perspective of narratorial commentary. Overt commentary is the chief
means of projecting a narratorial self and demonstrating the omniscient narrators
superior knowledge to the characters in terms of his or her moral sagacity, intellec-
tual breadth and psychological and social insight. The term omniscient narration,
then, is best used to describe a certain type of narrative in which a heterodiegetic nar-
rator, by virtue of being an authorial proxy, functions as an extradiegetic character,
setting up a communicative rapport with the reader in order to rhetorically highlight
the value of the narrative to a broader extraliterary public sphere.
OMNISCIENCE AND AUTHORITY
IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
What Im interested in here, is how contemporary omniscience differs from
classic omniscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not so much in terms
of formal narrative features, but in terms of the specic claims for cultural authority
which enable this narrative voice to function. Such an investigation takes us into the
terrain of contextual narratology, for it necessitates the diachronic analysis of omni-
scient narration as a formal category, and a synchronic analysis of a narratives dis-
cursive relationship to contemporaneous extraliterary discourses. Central to my
argument is the proposition that there are different genre-specic and historically
contingent modes of narrative authority which underpin the performance of omni-
science. With this in mind, we can see that the universal moral authority of the clas-
sic omniscient narrator is indeed no longer available to contemporary writers, but
that this has instead been replaced by a range of non-essentialized and more specic
relativised modes of narrative authority. That is, the authority of contemporary om-
niscient narrators is based less on traditional novelistic convention accepted by a uni-
ed reading public, than on other extraliterary claims to knowledge or expertise in
postmodern culture. For my purposes, then, a model such as Sternbergs, with its
focus on the range between omniscient narrators who are omnicommunicative or
freely suppressive, is not as important as the historically specic gure of cultural
authority which omniscient narrators invoke to assert the importance of their c-
tional narratives, and ction in general, to public discourse.
J. Hillis Miller describes the 19th century omniscient narrator as the voice of a
general consciousness, and Scholes and Kellogg suggest this narrator combines
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 149
the gures of bard, histor and maker. As I have pointed out, critical and popular
opinion has divested authors of this narrative option. Contemporary omniscient nar-
rators can no longer claim the luxury of being spokespersons of authority, asserting
accepted truths on behalf of a general consciousness. The contemporary omniscient
narrator can best be described as a form of public intellectual: a thinker and writer
who is able to speak to a general audience on a range of public issues from a base of
specic disciplinary expertise. The emergence of contemporary omniscience in the
late twentieth and early twenty-rst century, in fact, is roughly coterminous with the
rise of interest in the gure of the public intellectual, from Russell Jacobys 1987
The Last Intellectuals to Amitai Etzioni and Alyssa Bowditchs 2006 Public Intellec-
tuals: An Endangered Species?.
The formal contingency of omniscient narration results from the fact that its
narrative authority relies upon historically shifting literary-cultural conditions which
determine the status and function of the novel in the public sphere. These determin-
ing conditions over the last decade or so include: the commercial orientation of
multinational publishing houses; increased sales for literary non-fiction such as
memoirs and popular history; the competing claims of cinema, television and new
media; and the proliferation of demotic opinion in public debate via blogs, opinion
polls, and reality TV. The emergence of contemporary omniscience, I would venture,
is one response by writers to the decline of literary authority engendered by these
conditions.
6
We thus need a narratological approach sensitive to the anxieties about
social relevance peculiar to the formal narrative voices employed by contemporary
omnisciencevoices which seek to assert the cultural authority of novelists as pub-
lic intellectuals in the new millennium.
One of the difculties associated with literary omniscience is the slippage be-
tween author and narrator encouraged by the analogy with God. Rather than main-
tain a strict narratological distinction between author (or creator) and narrator (or
knower), I think it is important to understand how the combination of these two con-
cepts produces narrative authority. In The Narrative Act, a comprehensive study of
the complex textual relations through which narrative authority is generated by the
production and reception of a work of ction, Susan Lanser argues for the impor-
tance of the extractional voice of a text. According to Lanser, this voice, which
readers equate with the historical author, is manifested in the material publication of
the ctional work, from the authors name and the books title to additional ex-
tractional information in the form of a preface or foreword, a dedication, an after-
word, epigraphs, biographical information about the author or indications of his/her
previous publications, chapter titles or other textual divisions, etc. (124). To extend
Lansers claim, it can be seen that these extractional elements establish a discursive
relationship with the extraliterary publications of the historical author. The narrative
authority of contemporary omniscience, as it circulates in public discourse, needs to
be approached as an interrelation between the narrative voice of a work of ction and
this extractional voice.
Most of the authors I have mentioned have produced manifestos, essays, inter-
views or critical works in which their thoughts on the cultural function of contempo-
rary literature are clear, and which seek to establish the conditions by which their
150 Paul Dawson
work may be received. It is possible, then, to establish a discursive continuum from
narratorial commentary in a work of ction to critical pronouncements in a work of
nonction which establish mutually reinforcing claims for an authors cultural capi-
tal. This approach is particularly apposite for understanding the function of contem-
porary omniscience because critics of the novels I have identied typically condemn
their narratorial commentary as inartistic authorial intrusion. For instance, in his
2004 article, Character in Contemporary Fiction, Brian Phillips claims that the
characters in Jonathan Franzens The Corrections, often speak and think like
Franzen, whose management of indirect discourse is compromised by his enthusi-
asm for narratorial incursion, and who places too much faith in the comedic and an-
alytical properties of his crude interruptions (640). The common prejudice against
intrusive commentary which Phillips displays leads him to argue that Franzen ad-
journs to analysis and the ease of his own vocabulary because he is unable to bring
a character to life (ibid.).
If we eschew this prejudice, however, we can see the narrative voice of The Cor-
rections precisely as Franzens invocation of his extractional voice. Such an ap-
proach leads us, inevitably, to consider Franzens famous 1996 Harpers essay,
which many critics and reviewers felt obliged to refer to in their discussion of his
novel, and which was republished in the wake of the novels success as Why
Bother? in his 2002 collection, How to be Alone. This essay, of course, outlines
Franzens lament for the novels loss of authority since the nineteenth century and its
increasing obsolescence in contemporary society as a result of the banal ascendancy
of television, the electronic fragmentation of public discourse (58). The Corrections,
then, is an overt example of a novelists deployment of omniscient narration as part of
a broader project to reassert the authority of the novel in contemporary culture.
The continuum between narrative and extractional voice moves in both direc-
tions, for, in operating as public intellectuals, novelists seek to establish their cultural
authority through a range of genres, while still promoting the central signicance of
ction as their source of knowledge. So, for instance, when in the wake of the Lon-
don bombings in 2005, the Times publishes an opinion article by Salman Rushdie
entitled Muslims Unite! A New Reformation Will Bring Your Faith into the Modern
Era, surely his authority as a public intellectual rests upon the fact that he is the au-
thor of The Satanic Verses?
7
I want now to briey sketch the ways in which postmodern experimentation has
inuenced contemporary omniscience. Invoking the term postmodern is inevitably
fraught with problems of denition, and its deployment in relation to ction can only
ever be provisional. Some prominent definitions of postmodern fiction include:
metactional subversions of the relation between ction and history (Hutcheon); c-
tion in which the generic dominant is a narrative foregrounding of ontological ques-
tionsas opposed to the epistemological dominant of modernism (McHale); and, in
a critique of formalist approaches, the global expansion of English language ction
in the wake of colonialism (Berube). If we accept postmodernism, at the very least,
as a periodizing term, I will dene postmodern ction, for the purposes of this essay,
as an aesthetic move beyond the exhaustion of modernist experimentation without
returning to traditional realism, and a cultural response to a perceived crisis of
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 151
authority for the novel as a mode of public discourse, dramatised in the phrase the
death of the novel. David Lodges important 1969 essay, The Novelist at the Cross-
roads is a good starting point here, for it identies three genres which emerged from
the anxiety of writers faced with this situation. These genres are: fabulism, or what
became known as magic realism; the non-ction novel, now sometimes called fac-
tion, or grouped under the broader term of creative nonction; and the problematic
novel, now known as metaction. What I would like to suggest is that Lodges three
genres are examples of postmodern experimentation with form which opened up the
possibility for re-introducing omniscient narration in literary ction.
John Fowless 1969 metactional classic, The French Lieutenants Woman, is a
good example here. In his Notes on an Unnished Novel, published in the same
year, Fowles wrote: We suspect people who pretend to be omniscient; and that is
why so many twentieth-century novelists feel driven into rst person narration . . .
But in this new book, I shall try to resurrect this technique (153). Of course, the nar-
rator of The French Lieutenants Woman, as we are told in a direct address to the
reader, has the problem of dealing with omniscience in the age of Barthes and
Robbe-Grillet (85). In other words, an omniscient narrator in the twentieth century
cannot be the same as an omniscient narrator in previous centuries.
I propose, then, four permeable and overlapping modes of narrative authority
which contemporary omniscience relies upon, and whose postmodern lineage can be
traced back to Lodges genres. The rst mode I will call the ironic moralist. This cat-
egory grapples self-reexively with the legacy of the universalising moral authority
of classic omniscience, and it does so in the shadow of metaction. Some examples
here are David Foster Wallaces story Octet, Martin Amiss The Information, and
Adam Thirlwells Politics. The self-reexivity in this mode, in which the narrators
intrusive authority is constantly paraded, is less concerned with exposing the artice
of fiction, than with the problem of how to assert the universal in relation to
the particular.
For instance, Thirlwells novel opens with a sex scene in which the protago-
nist, Moshe, is excruciatingly self-conscious about his performance. From the sec-
ond line of the novel, the narrators presence is forcefully asserted: I think you are
going to like Moshe. His girlfriends name was Nana. I think you will like her too
(3). During this opening scene, Moshes concern about what he thinks must be the
most nervous scene in the history of sex (10) is interrupted by two pages of narra-
torial commentary which begins: I am going to expand a little on Moshes prob-
lem. It is a universal problem. It is the universal insecurity that one is not universal
(11). After offering an opinion that the genre of the novel can provide solace pre-
cisely for readers with this sort of anxiety, the narrator expresses an anxiety regard-
ing his own capacity to provide this solace: This book is meant to be reassuring.
This book is universal. It is a comparative study. The last thing I want is for this to
be just me (12). In these comments we nd both a brazen display of diegetic au-
thority and an agonistic lament for extradiegetic authority. The self-reexivity facil-
itates an appeal to the subjective personality of the individual writer, relativising
the universal authority of the narrators omniscience. Such a strategy can also be
seen in The Information where the link between narrator and author is made clear:
152 Paul Dawson
And I made the signsthe M, the Awith my strange and twisted ngers, think-
ing: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I dont know any-
thing? (63).
The second mode, which I will call the literary historian, relies upon the au-
thority of the historical record and the possibilities of imaginatively recovering pri-
vate or occluded moments in history opened up by postmodern theory and explored
in factional works such as Thomas Keneallys Schindlers Ark. Unlike historio-
graphic metactiona form which Linda Hutcheon claims the term postmodern c-
tion should be reserved for (40) this mode displays a faith in the literary
imagination to supplement the historical record, rather than undermine the narrative
truth of history. Some examples would be Gail Jones short story collections, such
as The House of Breathing and Fetish Lives, Michel Fabers The Crimson Petal and
the White, Edward P. Joness The Known World, and David Lodges Author, Author.
Here, the traditional metaphor of the novelist as historian, established by the
prototypical omniscient narrator of Henry Fieldings Tom Jones, becomes literalized
in the gure of the contemporary narrator as academic historian. The most interest-
ing aspect of contemporary historical ction is the way it employs the proleptic voice
of history to exploit the narrating instance and establish a temporal gap between
modern narrator and historical story; meaning that the narrators omniscient author-
ity is simultaneously heightened and problematized by their distance from the events
of the story. For instance, the opening paragraph of Gail Joness story, On the
Piteous Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, begins with a lyrical present-tense account
of the protagonists consciousness: She arises momentarily from the deepsea of un-
consciousness, trawls up her drowned mind through uid dimensions (105). The
next paragraph begins: She is about to die, this Mary Wollstonecraft. Born in the
year 1759, she will die at thirty-eight of post-partum complications (105). In a con-
ference paper which identies The Crimson Petal and the White as a classic of the
contemporary Neo-Victorian novel, Georges Letissier describes the narrative voice
in these terms: the double temporal perspective, with the twenty-rst century look-
ing back on the nineteenth century, with the benet of hindsight, as it were, leads to
what could be called hyperomniscience (67).
8
The third mode of narrative authority in contemporary omniscience, I will call
the pyrotechnic storyteller. For me this would include Zadie Smiths White Teeth,
Rick Moodys The Diviners, Nicola Barkers Darkmans, and much of the work of
David Foster Wallace. The pyrotechnic narrator is typically humorous or satirical,
and relies less on moral introspection or historical research than on a ourishing and
expansive narrative voice, a garrulous conversational tone, to assert control over the
events being narrated. Omniscient authority is a product of the narrative level which
determines a narrators relationship to the characters, and of the manner in which
this relationship is articulated to readers. The pyrotechnic storyteller does not aunt
his or her ontological superiority in the way that Thackerays or Trollopes narrators
do, or in the way narrators of postmodern metaction do, but nonetheless operates
much like an extradiegetic character, eschewing the impersonality of analytic omni-
science to the extent that the narrative voice often overshadows the characters being
described or analysed.
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 153
One example is the narrator of Barkers Darkmans introducing one of the char-
acters: Mrs Dina Broad had a wonderful facility for getting total strangers to do ex-
actly as she wanted (104). This introductory statement is straightforward enough,
but over the next page of character summary the narrators presence is keenly as-
serted in the hyperactive prose with its regular parenthetical qualications and ex-
tended metaphors. If Dinas life was a carousel (which it was anything but), then
there was only enough room on the rotating podium (midst the high-painted roses,
the mirror-tiles, the lovely organ) for a single pony; and Dinas was it (104). The
metaphor of the single-pony carousel is exhausted before it segues into one of the
characters life as a theatrical show: The Dina Broad show (like Celine Dion in Las
Vegas) was a show that never ended (it just went on and on and on); but this low-bud-
get extravaganza (in perfect Technicolor) by no means ran itself (104). Nuh-uh,
the narrator says, before pursuing the metaphor for another two paragraphs.
The pyrotechnic narrator is the mediating voice for much of the ction which
the prominent British critic, James Wood, denounces as hysterical realism. For
Wood, much contemporary ction is beset with an excess of storytelling (Irre-
sponsible 171), neglecting the development of characters with genuine humanity. He
describes hysterical realism in this way: The big contemporary novel is a perpetual
motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to
want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on
every page, and these novels continually ourish their glamorous congestion. Insep-
arable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all
costs (Irresponsible 167). Wood argues that this mode of ction has absorbed the
textual qualities of magic realism into the realist novel. The manic flourishes of
verisimilar improbability do not tip into the surreal, but simply exhaust the conven-
tions of realism.
Wood coined the term hysterical realism in a review of Zadie Smiths White
Teeth. This novel opens with a scene in which the protagonist, Archie Jones, is at-
tempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car. After the scene is estab-
lished we have this passage: Whilst he slipped in and out of consciousness, the
position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the ap of a tiger-moths diaphanous
wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had
decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody,
it had been decided that he would live (4). This passage seems deliberately designed
to prevent us from reading Archies escape from suicide as some sort of profound
statement about the fragility of human existence. Its satirical references to various
popular theories of universal cause and effect seem to terminate in the suggestion that
the somebody who makes shit happen is either a divine entity about which the nar-
rator can only speculate (she knows what happened, but not why), or simply the nar-
rator herself, the story-telling authors proxy, who playfully acknowledges her
analogous relation to God. Smiths narrator, in fact, regularly satirises the desire of
characters to assign events to providence: The principles of Christianity and Sods
Law (also known as Murphys Law) are the same: Everything happens to me, for me
(44). The narrative voice of White Teeth indicates that Smith herself can only imagine
a world of random uncertainty, relativising the authority of her commentary.
154 Paul Dawson
The fourth mode of contemporary omniscience contains both the immersion
journalist and the social commentator. The narrator as immersion journalist is a c-
tional counterpart of the narrators of documentary novels, such as Truman Capotes
In Cold Blood, and stems directly from the New Journalism. Here I am thinking
specically of Tom Wolfes latest novel, I am Charlotte Simmons. Central to Wolfes
construction of narrative authority, and to his operation as a public intellectual, is the
extractional voice of this novel emerging out of its prefatory material and linking it
to his 1973 account of the New Journalism, his 1989 manifesto for the social realist
novel, and his 2001 essay collection, Hooking Up. The appeal to observational eld-
work established by this voice provides a kind of ethnographic distance from the
characters as the source of omniscient knowledge, both grounding and relativizing
the narrators authority.
Throughout I am Charlotte Simmons, the detailed scenic construction is supple-
mented by explanatory commentary. For instance, after an exchange of dialogue be-
tween two college basketball players we have this line: Without even realising what
it was, Jojo spoke in this years prevailing college creole: Fuck Patois (35). This ob-
servation is followed by examples of the multiple grammatical uses the word fuck
can be put to. Another observation which seems to deliberately aunt the genera-
tional distance of the narrator from his characters occurs when Charlotte meets her
rst friend at Dupont. After introducing themselves to each other as Bettina and
Charlotte, this line follows: They were members of the first generation to go
through life with no last names (145). The mock anthropological distance of the
narrator which provides the overarching approach of the novel is highlighted to the
point of caricature in this comment during a scene where Charlotte hears shrieking in
the campus hallway: They were the cries of the female of the species feigning phys-
ical fright at the antics, probably physical, of the male (145).
In his 1989 manifesto, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast, Wolfe explains his
turn from nonction to ction: I wanted to fulll a prediction I had made in the in-
troduction to The New Journalism in 1973: namely, that the future of the ctional
novel would be in a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thor-
ough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual
in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him (50). The historical
importance of this faith in ctional realism is that, for Wolfe, postmodern ction, as
a result of its penchant for formal experimentation, has retreated from any obligation
to deal with contemporary culture. The desire to diagnose and report a social prob-
lem through the techniques of omniscience links Wolfes immersion journalist with
the social commentator, under which I would include John Updikes Terrorist,
Jonathan Franzens The Corrections, and Don DeLillos Underworld. The narrative
authority here operates by deploying the capacious knowledge of the narrator to
analyse postmodern culture. Time and again, James Wood complained in a 2001
article about the big social novel, novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure
and far-flung social knowledge. If omniscient authority must be granted by the
reading public, rather than unselfconciously assumed by the narrator, all-knowing,
in this case, has come to mean less a divine or telepathic knowledge of the human in-
terior, than a polymathic knowledge of how the world works. In other words, con-
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 155
temporary narrators know more than any other character not simply because of
their omniscient privilege, but because of their intellectual scope. In a 2003 article,
Judith Shulevitz refers to the work of DeLillo and Franzen, amongst others, when
she claims, somewhat ruefully that: Novelists, in short, have become our public in-
tellectualsour polymaths, our geographers, our scholars of the material world.
And yet, oddly, you will nd very few intellectuals in the modern novel (B31).
In Franzens novel, this omniscient knowledge is performed through the recur-
ring metaphor of corrections which links intergenerational family dynamics with
the corporate health industry and the global economy. This metaphor begins with the
individual, charting the depression of one of the characters, Gary Lambert, and re-
vealing through internal analysis that his entire life was set up as a correction of his
fathers life (181). Central to the plot is a breakthrough in neurobiological therapy
spruiked by a corporate representative as Correcktall, for disorders of the brain
such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers, and the social disease of criminality,
unchecked by traditional correctional institutions (208). The denouement of the nal
chapter opens: The correction, when it nally came, was not an overnight bursting
of a bubble, but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key
nancial markets (563). This correction to the global market occurs as the volatile
family dynamics of the Lamberts settle down in the wake of the death of the patri-
arch, Alfred.
All of these modes of narrative authority, but in particular the last two, indicate
a general shift in ction from minimalism to maximalism. In a 2004 article entitled
The War for the Soul of Literature, Laura Miller argues that what Wood denounces
as hysterical realism, and what Dale Peck calls recherche postmodernism, can be
understood in terms of this shift. For Miller, maximalism, in the form of the big am-
bitious social novel, has become the new focus of complaint about the direction of
contemporary ction, replacing Carveresque minimalism which had prevailed for
the previous two decades as a symptom of literary decline. Most people who follow
contemporary ction, Miller writes, can condently name some books that fall
into this category and can tell you what theyre like: Theyre big, theyre full of in-
formation, ideas and stylistic riffs; they have eventful plots that transpire on whats
often called a broad social canvas; they experiment with form and voice; theyre
overtly (or maybe just overly) smart. Or at least thats what theyre supposed to be
like (1). Miller lists DeLillo and Pynchon as the paterfamilias of maximalism, its
disciples including Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead, Jeffrey Eu-
genides, David Eggers, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith, and David
Foster Wallace. Maximalist ction need not necessarily be omniscient in narration,
but the scope and narrative freedom of omniscience certainly lends itself to an ex-
pansive exploration of social relations, and the garrulousness of narrative voice
which maximalism encourages is a means of competing with the dynamism of other
discourses in the marketplace of opinion and entertainment.
We could characterise contemporary omniscience as a verbose narrative voice
nostalgically invoking the friend and guide of classic omniscience, or desperately
lling the silence left by the postmodern absence of character. But we could more
productively approach this narrative voice as a kind of heuristic technique, where
156 Paul Dawson
form is generated by the architectonic function of the sentence as a line of ight. The
idiosyncrasy of Wolfes prose stems from his claim in The New Journalism that jour-
nalists who deploy the techniques of ction in the service of nonction writing are
free from the constraints of aesthetic convention governing point of view and other
narrative elements. For the gluttunous Goths, Wolfe wrote, there is still only the
outlaws rule regarding technique: take, use, improvise (48).
Narrative form here is not determined by any sense of formal unity, by the cat-
egories of narrative theory, but by the writers authority as a reporter of contempo-
rary culture. For the social commentator, the tentacular reach of omniscience is
underpinned by a creative freedom at the syntactic level. Id like to nish here with a
quote from Don DeLillo about the writing of Underworld: The prologue is written
with a sort of super-omniscience. There are sentences that may begin in one part of
the ballpark and end in another. I wanted to open up the sentence. They become sort
of travel-happy; they travel from one persons mind to another. I did it largely be-
cause it was pleasurable. It was baseball itself that provided a kind of freedom that
perhaps I hadnt quite experienced before. It was the game (DePetrio 136).
ENDNOTES
1. Royle refers to Cullers earlier work when he claims, in his 2003 book, The Uncanny, that omniscience
should be reconsidered as telepathy. Culler cites Royle approvingly in his 2004 article, Omniscience,
published in Narrative (and notes that reading Royles then unpublished chapter on telepathy
prompted his article). In the Dialogue section of a 2006 issue of Narrative, Olson, author of Authorial
Divinity in the Twentieth Century, responds to Cullers article, defending the critical merit of the anal-
ogy between author and God, and eliciting a response from Culler. And in 2007 Sternberg, author of
Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, re-asserts his status as the pre-eminent scholar
of narrative omniscience in an extended refutation of Culler and Royle in Poetics Today.
2. In the same year Brian Finney argued that what unites British novelists of the last two decades is a be-
lief that an omniscient narrator is an anachronism (12). Also in 2006, Morton P. Levitt claimed, in
The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction, that the modernist novel can be dened as a rejection of omniscient
narration, and that the occasional recurrence of this narrative voice in mainstream ction can only be
the product of a conservative New Victorian impulse: to criticize Trollope for being omniscient is lu-
dicrous; to criticize Murdoch or Drabble for being omniscient is necessary (7). An aesthetic prejudice
against omniscient narration, based on a claim for its historical redundancy, continues to be perpetrated
by Creative Writing programs. In a 2007 writing handbook, Robert Graham claims that: From the ear-
liest literature all the way through to the end of the nineteenth century, the author speaking, the author
acting as an omniscient narrator, was standard practice (47). He asserts that omniscient narration has
fallen from favour since Chekov, before providing this advice to aspiring writers: If youre going to
use an omniscient narrator in the twenty-rst century, chances are you will not want to wear your om-
niscience on your sleeve; nobody likes a show-off . . . Alternatively, you need to use a tone so arch,
so dripping in irony, that the reader is bound to realise you know fully well the omniscient narrator
went out of fashion in 1899 (56).
3. In the rst chapter Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha oat safely to the ground after falling from a
plane which has been blown up by terrorists. Towards the end of this chapter we nd this passage:
I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and potence, Im
making no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope. Chamcha willed it and Farishta
did what was willed.
The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction 157
Which was the miracle worker?
Of what typeangelic, satanicwas Farishtas song?
Who am I?
Lets put it this way: who has the best tunes? (10)
Gods visitation to Gibreel later in the novel is described in these terms: He saw, sitting on the bed, a
man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper
beard cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was balding,
seemed to suffer from dandruff, and wore glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected (318).
The link between God, the narrator and the author is made clear when the narrator admits late in the
novel that he visited Gibreel, despite a non-interventionist policy: Im saying nothing. Dont ask me
to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are
pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Wheres the
pleasure if youre always intervening to give hints, change the rules, x the ghts? (408).
4. When Henry James referred to George Eliots heights of analytic omniscience (85), he was think-
ing in terms of Cullers fourth phenomenon; and certainly analysis and omniscience were almost
interchangeable in the latter part of the ninenteenth century. When omniscience was dened as a par-
ticular point of viewthe panoramicin the Anglo-American study of novelistic method exempli-
ed by Percy Lubbock, its chief characteristic was intrusiveness and narratorial telling rather than
dramatized showing. In the old novels, Leon Edel wrote, the omniscient author was nearly al-
ways present and nearly always addressing an audience (138). By 1955, Norman Friedman was able
to dene omniscience in terms of gradations of third person narration, from editorial to neutral to se-
lective, leading inevitably to a restriction of the term to Cullers second phenomenonaccess to
character consciousnesswhich Wallace Martin, in 1986, described as omniscience in the usual
sense (146).
5. This narrative authority is the basis of Cullers atheistic disdain for authors playing God; it is at the
heart of Sartres famous attack on Mauriac; and it is gured as the source of repressive panopticism by
theorists such as Mark Seltzer and D. A. Miller who link narrative omniscience with Michel Foucaults
concept of modern disciplinary surveillance.
6. Arguments for a causal link between perceptions of literary decline and the cultural projects of post-
modern and post-postmodern novelists have been made, respectively, by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and
Robert McLaughlin.
7. In 2005, Rushdie was ranked as number ten on Prospect Magazines list of 100 global public intellec-
tuals.
8. Letissier argues that The Crimson Petal and the White illustrates the classical format of the neo-Vic-
torian novel, which has now discarded the postmodernist, deconstructionist stance of earlier post-Vic-
torian ctions, such as The French Lieutenants Woman, Possession, or Poor Things, to quote but a few,
to embrace the more traditional form of the three-decker, or large, loose, baggy monster of its Victo-
rian forerunners (1).
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