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C O N C E P T S
when Isabella resists her father’s urging to stay at Highbury with him but
proposes to return with her husband to London, we hear that Mr. Wood-
house “was obliged to see the whole party set o ff and return to his lamen
tations over the destiny o f poor Isabella— ^which poor Isabella, passing her
life with those she doted on, full o f their merits, blind to their faults, and
always innocently busy, might have been a model o f right feminine hap
piness.
Although we must accept as true the claim that Isabella departed and
Mr. Woodhouse lamented this as an unhappy destiny, we are not obliged to
accept that she is the model o f right feminine happiness. If we were dealing
with something modeled on divine omniscience, both claims would have
to be true, as would all the other value judgments in the n ovel.C on sid er
the opening o f Anna Karenina-. “All happy families are alike, but each un
happy family is unhappy after its own fashion.” This may be wise; it may
be insightful; but it is not true by definition, as it would be if the narra
tor were really omniscient. We certainly do not take it as a necessary truth
about families in the world o f this novel. In fact, it is only because we do
not take it as by definition true o f the world o f the novel that we are able to
consider it as a possible insight into the human condition.
Critics who use the term omniscience presume that the narrator is
omniscient only about the world o f the novel, but fiction o f the realist tra
dition, where the term is most used, is full o f general claims that we assess
as generalizations about a larger world that extends into our own. Omni
science is precisely the wrong term for such statements, which are different
from those that describe the characters specific to the novel.
21. Austen, Emma, 95.
22. It might be argued that in the world of Austen’s novel it is true that Isa
bella is the model of right feminine happiness, and our dissent amounts to saying
we do not believe this is the case in our world. If this were a science fiction novel,
then the narrator would be free to stipulate what counts as happiness in this spe
cial world, just as the narrator can stipulate that Isabella is Emma’s sister, but in
the realist novel judgments do not carry the same stipulative authority of descrip
tive statements. We can say that the narrator “believes” this is the right model of
happiness but can be wrong, whereas it makes no sense to say that the narrator
“believes” that Isabella is Emma’s sister but can be wrong (unless, of course, the
narrator is a character). The two sorts of statements have a different status. And
the effect of wisdom projected by the narrator depends on the fact that the judg
ments and assessments are not true by definition but are open to appraisal.
Omniscience
193
The conventionally authoritative statements o f narrators vary wide
ly, from swift summaries o f antecedent history to claims about feelings o f
which characters are not conscious. At one extreme we have traditional
folk narration: “The king was exceedingly pleased but his greed for gold
was still not satisfied, so he called in his daughter, the most beauteous
young woman in the land, and said . . . ” At the other we have the au
thoritative statements o f the psychological novel. Once we recognize that
their authority comes not, as it would in historical narrative, from the fact
that someone knows these things but from a conventional performativity
o f narrative stipulation, we lose much o f the impetus to postulate omni
science.
(2)
A second set o f cases involves inside knowledge o f others that em
pirical individuals cannot attain. Dorrit Cohn has argued that this is one
o f the major features that distinguish fiction from nonfictional narrative: if
a story starts reporting a character’s thoughts, expect it to be fiction.^^ By
Sternberg’s logic, as we have seen, access to the thought o f any character
entails an omniscient narrator, but critics have seldom in fact followed this
logic. Wayne Booth notes “a curious ambiguity in the term ‘omniscience.’
Many modern works that we usually classify as narrated dramatically, with
everything relayed to us through the limited views o f the characters, pos
tulate fully as much omniscience in the silent author as Fielding claims for
himself. The roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters” in As
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