196
C O N C E P T S
The analogy o f the telephone suggests an unnamed device permitting
imaginative recuperation o f details o f inner and outer lives o f the charac
ters. As long as the narrator is imaginative and resourceful, he need not be
hindered by physical limitations.^’ Is “telepathy” a way o f describing what
happens here and elsewhere? Nicholas Royle writes, ‘“ Telepathy opens
possibilities o f a humbler, more precise, less religiously freighted concep
tuality than does omniscience for thinking about the uncanniness o f what
is going on in narrative f i c t i o n . I n particular, the notion o f telepathy
helps capture the fact that in cases o f reports o f characters' thoughts, we
are not dealing with narrators who know everything all at once but rather
with narrative instances reporting now on this consciousness, now on that,
often relaying, transposing, or translating thought into the intermediate
discourse o f free indirect speech, for example. Telepathy seems especially
apposite— much more so than omniscience— for cases where an extradi-
egetic homodiegetic narrator displays special knowledge. Supplementing
Marcel with an omniscient narrator would miss the point that these senti
ments are supposed to have become known to Marcel the narrator, impos
sible as this seems. Genette finds himself hesitating between two options
he rightly regards as unsatisfactory: positing an extra narrator (omniscient)
who produces some o f the clauses o f apparently seamless paragraphs while
Marcel produces the others, or else ascribing knowledge to the author, who
of course does not know anything but invents, ascribes, declares the feel
ings o f Mile Vinteuil or Bergotte or Swann to be such and such. The mas
sive tale o f Swanns love, which includes both details that the hypercurious
Marcel, obsessed with Swann, might well have learned, and Swann’s most
intimate thoughts, which it is impossible to imagine making their way to
Marcel without telepathic transmission, beautifully instantiates the prob
lem. The narrative effect here, as Marcel laboriously teases out this story
like a spider spinning the web that supports it, depends on Marcel’s imagi
native, telepathic retailing o f information that the novelist invented (just
as he invented Marcel and Marcel’s account o f himself). Recourse to om
niscience would obscure the specificity o f this effect.
Richard Walsh, in an important article, has argued for dispensing
31. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature o f Narrative (New York;
Oxford University Press, 1966), 260.
32. Royle, The Uncanny, 261.
with narrators who are not characters: either a narrator is identifiable as a
character, such as Marlow or Marcel, or we do not need this fiction.^^ This
is, o f course, an ongoing argument, which has previously been carried out
on linguistic grounds, by Ann Banfield, for instance, and which I lack the
space or expertise to explore.^^ Walsh claims that we do not need to pos
tulate a narrator to account for instances o f omniscience, since what is in
question is not something that a person can know anyway. Rather than
translate novels into stories that are reported by someone, we should, I sug
gest, try to work with other alternatives— ^whether telepathic transmission,
a reporting instance, or some similar device— that allow us to focus on the
art with which these details have been imagined.
Seymour Chatman once explored the possibility that heterodieget-
ic, extradiegetic narration with what Genette calls zero focalization should
not lead to the imagination o f a narrator, but in Coming to Terms he pro
posed a compromise: by definition every narrative has a narrator, in the
sense o f an agent o f narration, but this agent can be nonhuman, a presenter
o f the signs, just as film can present a narrative without a human narra-
tor.^^ So As I Lay Dying would not have an omniscient narrator but only
a recorder, a presenter o f signs, a transmission device. Such an approach is
more satisfactory than the positing o f a knower for any information pre
sented.
(3)
The third case o f effects that provoke ascription of omniscience
is what is called “authorial narration”: a narrator who identifies him- or
herself as the author, the shaper if not outright inventor o f the tale. There
are those who, like the narrator o f Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, flaunt their
power to determine the course o f the story:
You see, reader, that I am well on my way, and that it is completely up to
me whether I shall make you wait one year, two years, or three years for the story
of Jacques’ loves by separating him from his master and having each of them go
through the vicissitudes that I please. What’s to prevent my marrying off the mas-
33. Richard Walsh, “Who Is the Narrator?” Poetics Today 18, no. 4 (1997):
495
-
513
-
34. See Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation
in the Language o f Fiction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).
35. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric o f Narrative in Fic
tion and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 116.
Omniscience
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