Omniscience for atheists: or, Jane Austen's infallible narrator.

The comparison of the traditional novelist to God has received many memorable formulations. While Flaubert and Joyce emphasize the author's ubiquity, invisibility, or silence, the quality usually adduced for comparison is omniscience, as in Sartre's complaint about Mauriac: like God, he "is omniscient about everything relating to his little world" (15). For Sartre, of course, this is a bad thing: "God is not an artist. Neither is M. Mauriac" (25). As Meir Sternberg has demonstrated, the god being compared in these formulations is specifically the God of the Old Testament: "Homer's gods," he notes, "like the corresponding Near Eastern pantheons, certainly have access to a wider range of information than the normal run of humanity; but their knowledge still falls well short of omniscience, concerning the past and present as well as the future" (88). Sternberg explicitly includes Jane Austen's narratives within this biblical model: "Surely ... one assumes that, like all novelists, she enjoys the privilege of omniscience denied to tellers ill everyday life. She invokes different rules, we say. But if it is convention that renders Jane Austen immune from all charges of fallacy and falsity, it is convention that likewise puts the Bible's art of narrative beyond their reach. For the biblical narrator also appeals to the privilege of omniscience--so that he no more speaks in the writer's ordinary voice than Jane Austen does in hers, but exactly as a persona raised high above ..." (34). J. Hillis Miller explains how "This immanent omniscience is ... like the knowledge traditionally ascribed to God. It is an authentic perfection of knowledge. The omniscient narrator is able to remember perfectly all the past, to foresee the future course of events, and to penetrate with irresistible insight the most secret crevice in the heart of each man. He can know the person better than the person knows himself ..." (64). (1)

But in the twenty years since Sternberg's book--and in significant measure because of the interest sparked by his book--the premise that all heterodiegetic narrators exercise Godlike omniscience has been questioned. (2) Sternberg argues that "omniscience is a qualitative and therefore indivisible privilege.... The superhuman privilege is constant and only its exercise variable" (183). While this logic would doubtless be true of "real" omniscience, it does not seem compelling with regard to "pretend" omniscience, which might readily be imagined as divisible. The "demand for a God's Eye View or Nothing" (Putnam viii) may be a limiting dichotomy that prevents us from exploring alternative models. (3) Omniscience might instead be thought of as a toolbox, with different novelists using the different tools within it in distinctive ways. My own survey of discussions of omniscience identifies four primary tools in that box: omnipotence, omnitemporality, omnipresence, and telepathy. To get ahead of myself for a moment, I'll argue that Austen's narrators are more accurately described as "infallible" than "omniscient": at least on the basis of these four features, the infallible narrator as defined here is not a type of omniscient narrator. I take no position on the larger question of whether "omniscience" is always a misnomer; Austen's narrators, however, utilize so few of these standard tools so sparingly that the label is not useful for discussing her practice. Indeed, it seems to have hampered prior analyses of Austen's method.

Austen's career, at least in her handling of point of view, has long been treated as the exemplification of Haeckel's Law that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," as her novels rehearse in perfect sequence all of the evolutionary stages of the genre. She begins with the early epistolary drafts, in which the novels have no omniscient narrators at all. Later, she revises them into third-person omniscient novels with engaging and judgmental narrators, effectively rendering extinct the earlier genre of the epistolary novel. During the course of writing these novels she gradually weans herself from what Marvin Mudrick calls her "early tendency to assert an arbitrary omniscience over the objects of her irony" (84). Finally, in Emma and Persuasion, she evolves from the daughter of Dr. Johnson into the mother of Henry James, pioneering the novel with a central consciousness or filter and a more reticent narrator. (4) In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth outlines the final stage of this progression: "In Emma there are many breaks in the point of view, because Emma's beclouded mind cannot do the whole job. In Persuasion, where the heroine's viewpoint is faulty only in her ignorance of Captain Wentworth's love, there are very few. Anne Elliott's consciousness is sufficient, as Emma's is not, for most of the needs of the novel which she dominates" (250-51).

Just as a play has a certain number of speaking parts, so an Austen novel has a certain number of what we might call "thinking parts," characters whose consciousness the narrator reveals to us. Given the critical narrative outlined above, one might expect to see that number start out very large and narrow down to a single central consciousness. If one measures omniscience quantitatively, as Booth suggests, counting how many minds the narrator has access to, then Persuasion, in which the narrator reveals the consciousnesses of ten characters, is no different from Emma, in which she also reads the minds often characters. But not only is there no progression from Emma to Persuasion in this regard, there is no pattern of progression at all in Austen's novels: Northanger Abbey has ten thinking parts, Sense and Sensibility twelve, and Mansfield Park thirteen. Only Pride and Prejudice, with nineteen thinking parts, stands out. (5)

Discussions of omniscience assign it a broad and variable range of characteristics, many of which have little to do with omniscience per se. Critics often apply the label to passages of exposition, but most of these, at least in Austen, communicate information about incomes or family ties that constitutes common knowledge in that world, known to the characters as well as the narrator. The narrator of Persuasion tells us that Anne and Captain Wentworth had fallen in love and separated seven years ago as a courtesy to us as newcomers to the neighborhood, but we learn nothing that Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Lady Russell don't know. In fact, we are assured that if Wentworth's brother and sister hadn't been out of the country and Anne's sister, Mary, away at school, they would have known all about it too, as would have anyone in the "Kellynch circle" (Persuasion 28). (6)

Other critics conflate the idea of narrative reliability with omniscience, but as far as factual or mimetic matters go, virtually all narrators are reliable--lying narrators are very rare--and as far as narrative judgments go, Jonathan Culler seems right in his argument that the narrator's wisdom is "offered for our consideration and assent, in a mode of persuasion." When the narrator asserts, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Pride and Prejudice 3), the reader is being asked to ponder the statement: to accept it literally (as does Mrs. Benner) or to dismiss it outright are both inadequate responses (the rich single men do turn out to need wives). The universal ...