"Who Thinks This Book?" Or Why the Author/God Analogy Merits Our Continued Attention

Jonathan Culler's recent article on "Omniscience" in Narrative was a welcome event, re-opening as it did the scholarly conversation on a topic too long ignored. But honored as I am by Culler's attention to Authorial Divinity, I find myself wishing he had paid more. I am indeed "the extreme instance" of taking the author/God analogy seriously in assessing the ideology—in this case the theology—of a writer, so his considering my work was probably obligatory in attempting to put the analogy safely behind us. But while Culler did address my reading of Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers," he did not engage my discussions of some of the very issues he addressed in his essay. And there remain significant reasons why I do see the author/God analogy carrying continuing import for our thinking about authorial narration.¹

Culler does grant that the force of the analogy may help us "to imagine the possibility of a creator, a god, a sentient being, as undetectable to us as the novelist would be to the characters who exist in the universe of the text this god created. Indeed, theologians can draw upon the analogy between the author and God to help explain God" (23). But he sees the analogy as useless to the literary critic: "The fundamental point is that since we do not know whether there is a God and what she might know, divine omniscience is not a model that helps us think about authors or about literary narration" (23).

I have trouble seeing the usefulness of this distinction. To make it seems to argue that to conduct literary analysis is non-ideological activity—a curious claim, to say the least, in this postmodern climate. Moreover, to argue that only if we are theologians might our readerly experience of authorial narration carry analogical import seems to defy the experience of countless readers and writers. Of course Culler is right that "we do not know whether there is a God and what she might know (23), but such uncertainty frets all human knowing to varying degrees. And certainly both authors and readers do have beliefs and assumptions about God. This analogy—widely assumed as it is—may at least help us think about what we, and what in turn our authors, may presume or wonder about God—how they may narrationally reckon with their own ontological assumptions and with ours. Moreover, point of view is not the only area of literary criticism in the past thirty years which has found useful analogies in theology. In 1967, Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending explored an eschatology of fiction. In 1975 Brian Wicker wrote The Story Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics. Also in 1975, Wesley Kort gave us Narrative Elements and Religious Meanings and in 1986, Modern Fiction and Human Time: A Study in Narrative and Belief. More recently Paul Fiddes published The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature in 2000; Emily Griesinger wrote "The Shape of Things to Come: Toward an Eschatology of Literature" for Christianity and Literature in 2004.

As illustration of readers experiencing authorial narration theologically, I offer just a few examples:

Susan Lanser: "It is not accidental that we use the term author to refer to God or that the root of the word 'authority' links it to the notion of the creator or promoter."

(84)

Christopher Ricks: "Perhaps when man proposes God disposes with as cool a disposition as Mrs. [Muriel] Spark's, though if He indeed looks upon his created world with the same eye with which she looks upon hers, then thank God I am an atheist."

(32)

Fran Schumer: "If there is some benign God watching over us, we want Him to upon us with the wisdom and compassion with which Mr. [T. R.] Pearson views his world."

(4)

Of course, it is the prevalence of this analogy Culler is trying to quash. His "narrating instance," Genette's "zero focalization," and Ermath's "nobody" are all attempts to prevent our readerly "proclivity [from] lead[ing] us astray...