“Real Authors and Real Readers: Omniscient Narration and a Discursive Approach to the Narrative Communication Model”

This paper sketches out some methodological coordinates for investigating the formal category of narrative voice in a broader discursive context. It seeks to reformulate the classic model of narrative communication in order to redress the imbalance of current narratological scholarship, which focuses on theorizing the role of real readers without due attention to real authors. I have developed this approach to investigate and explain a specific problem: how to account for the increased prominence of omniscient narration in literary fiction over the last two decades. Does contemporary omniscience differ from the classic omniscience of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, and if so, what does that difference say about the cultural status of the novel in current public discourse?¹

I’ll begin by illustrating this problem through a brief discussion of narrative voice in William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 Vanity Fair and Martin Amis’ 1995 The Information. At one point in Thackeray’s novel, the narrator pauses to address readers as follows:

If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bedroom, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should he not declare himself to be Rebecca’s confidant too, master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience?

(171).

By contrast, Amis’ narrator laments, “And I made the signs—the M, the A—with my strange and twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?” (63). Both passages exemplify intrusive omniscient narration in that the narrators reflect on their own authority as storytellers, presenting themselves not just as narrators, but as novelists and authors of the books that we are reading. Each of these examples makes specific reference to the function of literary omniscience as a form of knowledge, about which there is an ongoing debate sparked by Jonathan Culler’s 2004 article in Narrative, entitled “Omniscience.” In my own contribution to that debate, I discussed how its parameters have been largely epistemological and theological: limited to asking how and how much an omniscient narrator “knows” about the fictional world, and what sort of narratorial figure or entity can be considered omniscient (Dawson 143–61). In a sense, Thackeray’s and Amis’ narrators are grappling self-reflexively with these same questions. What interests me in this essay, though, is not the questions themselves, but why the narrators foreground them.

If we conduct a classic taxonomic study of these two novels, we will see that both narrators display all the knowledge of their respective fictional worlds characteristic of omniscient narration, including variable (or zero) focalization, access to consciousness, and spatio-temporal freedom. In terms of Gérard Genette’s category of mood, or the various means by which information about the story world is regulated, the novels differ little, although The Information is less panoramically ambitious, focalizing mainly through the protagonist Richard. In terms of Genette’s category of voice, or the narrating instance, the novels also differ little: the person, time, and level of the narrating are all the same. So if we tick off the list of their formal properties, we can classify synchronically these novels as omniscient. Yet surely there is a palpable difference between the performative stances that these two narrators adopt. In the Thackeray passage, the novelist confidently and playfully asserts the privilege of omniscient knowledge, whereas in the Amis passage, the narrator manifests anxiety about that omniscient authority. In fact, Amis’ narrator grapples not with a failure of diegetic knowledge, but with a failure of novelistic insight resulting from his own limitations as a person. He reflects scenically on his own experience in order to ask whether he can satisfy his role as an observer of human nature.

If there is a formal difference between these two examples of omniscient narration, it rests in Genette’s last and least developed element of voice: the function of the narrator.² Both...