i 8 6
C O N C E P T S
bution, in which the modifier is logically redundant.”'’ This sounds plausi
ble, and the expression is common, but in fact it is hard to work out what
this means. Does the author know only the facts stipulated in the novel, or
does he or she by definition know the color o f the eyes o f each character
in the novel, even if this is never mentioned? That seems the sort o f thing
that omniscience ought to involve: a vast store o f knowledge, in excess of
what might be expressed. Does the author know the complete histories
o f minor characters? Some authors, notoriously, can tell you much more
about their characters than is recorded in the novel, but is this an aspect
of authorial omniscience? Jane Austen apparently confided to her nephew
that “Mr. Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept Emma
and Mr. Knightley from settling at Donwell about two y e a r s ,b u t would
we count this as knowledge o f Emma?. It seems more like ancillary anec
dote than the sort o f certain knowledge to which omniscience points. Do
we want to say that the novelist necessarily knows about the lives o f the
children that the heroine may or may not have had, as she lived happily
ever after, after the wedding that concludes the novel? An omniscient God
would presumably know whether an Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knight
ley had children and what became o f them, and their children, but novel
ists are not omniscient in this sense, about aspects o f the lives o f characters
not touched on in the book.
In fact, what the omniscience o f the novelist probably means is that
no one else can know more about the world o f the novel than the novel
ist (a debatable proposition, if you think about fanatical Janeites), and it
means especially that what the novelist chooses to have be true o f the nov
el’s world w ill be true. But “omniscience” is scarcely a good gloss for “no
one else knows more about this,” and the power to decide what will be
the case in this world is a product o f a conventional performative power
o f language, or, at best, omnipotence, not omniscience. When the novel
ist writes that Mr. Knightley came to dinner, she cannot be wrong, but
that is a power o f invention, o f incontrovertible stipulation, not a matter
o f knowledge. The novelist can simply declare what will be the case in this
world. To call this “omniscience” is extraordinarily misleading.
Sternberg maintains that the necessarily omniscient author may or
may not invest the narrator with omniscience.® Omniscient narrators dif-
6.
ExpositionalModes,
-]. Jane Austen,
Emma, ed. Stephen Parrish (New York; Norton, 1972),
335П.
fer greatly from one another, not in knowledge but in their readiness to
share their unlimited knowledge with the reader.^ Sternberg distinguishes,
for instance, the “omnicommunicative narrators” o f Trollope, who do not
withhold any important information, from the “deliberately suppressive
narrator” o f Fielding, who withholds information he indicates that he pos
sesses in order to create suspense and produce surprise. Sternberg goes a
step further to argue— a highly original claim fully consonant with the pre
sumption o f originary omniscience with which he begins— that accounts
o f narrators with limited knowledge confuse what the narrator chooses to
tell with what the narrator knows. He rejects what he calls the presump
tion that when the narrator “fails to communicate something, it necessar
ily follows that he doesn’t know it.” *** Claims o f partial omniscience
fail to take into account that omniscience, being a superhuman privilege, is logi
cally not a quantitative but a qualitative and indivisible attribute; if a narrator au
thoritatively shows himself to be able to penetrate the mind of one of his char
acters and report all his secret activities— something none of us can do in daily
life— then he has thus decisively established his ability to do so as regards the oth
ers as well."
This is a radical claim; an author or narrator who reports the thoughts of
one character must by definition be treated as knowing those o f the others.
You can’t have selective omniscience, only selective communicativeness.
But why not say, then, that a ll narrators are omniscient and that
some o f them just choose to tell the story from various limited perspec
tives? Sternberg does not himself seem to take this line, but his model of
omniscience and its separation o f what is known from the evidence o f
what is told opens the door for it. For instance, one partisan o f omni
science, Barbara Olsen, argues that Fîemingway’s “The Killers,” which is
often cited as the very model o f a limited, camera-eye narrative, has an om
niscient narrator; it “actually features Hemingway’s omniscient narrator at
his most reticent.” '^ This narrator could tell all but prefers not to. She cites
Sternberg to refute the “all too common error” o f assuming that “what the
narrator does not say is what he does not and cannot know.” So one critic
8. Sternberg, ExpositionalModes, 255.
9. Ibid., 258.
10. Ibid., 282.
11. Ibid.
12. Barbara K. Olsen, Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century (Lewis-
burg, PA: Associated University Press, 1997), 42.
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