point o f view.” I suspect this is because the underlying motivation for the
postulation o f omniscience is our inclination to recuperate textual details
their source. If there is a consciousness somewhere about, as there is in fo
calized narratives, we feel less need to invent another person who knows
what goes on in the first character’s head. It is above all when there is no
194
C O N C E P T S
primary character through whom narration is focahzed that our procUvity
leads us astray: we invent a person to be the source o f textual details, but
since this knowledge is not that which an ordinary person could have, we
must imagine this invented person to be godlike, omniscient.^^ We posit a
narrator so as to frame the story as something known by someone rather
than imagined by an author, and then since the story contains things that
no one could know— internal states o f others— we treat this knower as su
perhuman, omniscient. But there are more accurate ways to describe these
effects— particularly the presentation o f characters’ thought.
Consider the following extract from James Joyce’s “The Boarding
House,” which gives us representations o f two consciousnesses:
Nearly the half-hour! She stood up and surveyed herself in the pier-glass.
The decisive expression of her great florid face satisfied her and she thought of
some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands.
Mr. Doran was very anxious indeed this Sunday morning. He had made
two attempts to shave but his hand had been so unsteady that he had been obliged
to desist. Three days’ reddish beard fringed his jaws and every two or three min
utes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them
with his pocket-handkerchief The recollection of his confession of the night be
fore was a cause of acute pain to him; the priest had drawn out every ridiculous de
tail of the affair and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thank
ful at being afforded a loophole of reparation. The harm was done. What could he
do now but marry her or run away? He could not brazen it out. The affair would
be sure to be talked of and his employer would be certain to hear of it. Dublin is
such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business.^'’
What is especially interesting about this story, in which a boarder has be
come involved with the landlady’s daughter and now is going to have to
marry her, is that readers are privy to the boarder’s thoughts and to the
mother’s— the first paragraph is hers— but not to the daughter’s, so we
don’t know to what extent she has been complicitously working to achieve
this end. Again, omniscience is quite specifically not the right term for what
25. This inclination may be compounded, James Phelan suggests, by the
fact that narrators characteristically know how the story turns out. Combined
with special knowledge of characters’ thoughts, this may provoke the ascription
of omniscience.
26. James Joyce, “The Boarding House,” in Dubliners (New York: Viking,
1968), 165-66.
happens here. It is pointless to wonder whether the narrator knows the
daughter’s thoughts and does not tell or does not know, for it is not a mat
ter o f knowledge.
A more perplexing situation arises in A la recherche du temps perdu,
where we encounter a homodiegetic or character narrator with unusual
knowledge. Marcel is the narrator, and many stretches o f this enormous
narrative can be read as focalized through him-—either what he might have
observed at the time or what he may later, with his insatiable curiosity,
have come to learn. But there is information, such as the thoughts o f Ber-
gotte on his deathbed, which cannot have been reported to Marcel because
no one had access to them. Or consider the scene o f Marcel watching Vin-
teuil’s daughter from outside her window at Montjouvain, in which there
is rigorous focalization through Marcel with respect to what is seen and
heard (he is hiding outside, looking through a lighted window) but which
is focalized through Mile Vinteuil for thoughts and feelings. “She felt that
she had been indiscreet, her sensitive heart took flight etc.”^^ Gérard Gen-
ette hesitates about how to describe such cases. On the one hand, he calls
them moments “we must indeed attribute to the ‘omniscient’ novelist,”^*
with quotation marks around “omniscient” that seem to indicate doubts
about this traditional way o f talking about special knowledge; but he also
speaks o f “double focalization,” involving feelings “which only an omni
scient narrator, capable like God himself o f seeing beyond actions and o f
sounding body and soul, can reveal.
The novel itself, though, offers by way o f explanation of such effects
an evocation o f a technical device: while lying in bed Marcel thinks o f his
childhood in Combray and o f
what many years after leaving this little town, I had learned about a love affair in
which Swann had been involved before I was born, with that precision of details
easier to obtain sometimes about lives of people dead for centuries than about
those of our most intimate friends; a thing which seems impossible, just as it used
to seem impossible to converse from one town to another— before we learned of
the device by which that impossibility has been overcome.^"
27. Marcel Proust,
A
la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,
1954),
i
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
