On Who the Third-Person Omniscient Narrator Might Be
Which God?
I have been picked up a couple of times, perhaps rightly, for this social media card I put out a few days ago —
This has been called lazy, sloppy thinking. But, more often, the question has been raised, Why just Christian? Why not other omniscient gods? Why not Ha-Elohim or Allah?
My initial reaction was that, as far as I am aware, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Gustav Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and the other practitioners and formalisers of the Third Person Omniscient POV were more concerned with a particularly Christian, Protestant, observing and judging but not intervening God.
This is quite possibly wrong, although I haven’t read anything arguing the case for the influence of Islam on the literary technique of these writers — meaning their approach to narrative, not their portrayal of Muslim characters. I’ll have to go looking. If you know of anything on this subject, please —
What I should have put on the card, I now see, is —
A conventional third-person omniscient novel is one in which a (Judeo-Christian) godlike narrator is able to see into the heads and hearts of all the characters…
But I have never been happy with Judeo-Christian God, because it seems to create a hybrid divinity no-one has ever actively worshipped. It does, however, point out the origins all versions of the Christian divinity (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and others) in the Jewish Yahweh.
However, though I’m ready to be proven wrong, it seems to me that the Jewish god watches humanity in order — at decisive moments — to manifest or to intervene. Omniscience is imminently accompanied by omnipotence, and that omnipotence has been used, for example, to cause a flood that drowns everyone but Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.
The Christian god, as I understand Him, though capable of small interventions in human lives (if not, why pray?), is usually seen as allowing human Free Will, and as biding His time until the annihilation of all things and the universal resurrection, after which He will judge.
This could hardly be more simplified, and probably annoying to anyone better theologically informed. Apologies. There are, I know, many versions of the Christian god ready to smite or shower blessings on whole nations. But I hope there is a structure behind the sketch.
Why I’m drawing it is this — the POV of most third-person omniscient realist novels I can think of is based on non-intervention and constantly deferred judgement.
Judgement deferred until the end of the novel, at which point we can happily and confidently condemn a character who hasn’t sufficiently redeemed themselves.
This is one of the reasons why the opening of Jane Austen’s (third-person omniscient) Persuasion, coming reasonably early in the novelistic lineage, is so strikingly done and dusted —
Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation…
We have learned, as novelists, not to create characters who have no chance of development, no ability to learn or change — and therefore to earn redemption. Or just be worth reading about for 300 pages.
Sir Walter Elliot, with his vanity (a form of Pride, one of the seven deadly sins) is finally damned even as he is first described.
(Would you ever dare do this with a character? Say they’ll go absolutely nowhere, except to hell.)
Most of Austen’s other characters aren’t so brutally introduced, and are granted the capacity to change — even if that change only brings disillusionment (Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice) or a stiffening into self-caricature (Mr Collin in the same).
It’s the undeveloping nature of many of his characters that puts me off Dickens — who I can admit is still probably the most important and influential English novelist. His people seem to be wheeled on as automata — Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, say — then perform their wound-up action, speak their scratchy catchphrase, and then you can safely cover them with a dust-sheet until their next appearance. Some comic scenes show us a group of automata doing their bits one after another, with no real change or development.
This, you’ll say, is how some people really are.
Yes, I’ll say, and isn’t that unbearable?
Most contemporary novelists — writing third-person omnisciently — will make at least some attempt to give their minor characters an inner life, rather than wheels and cogs or hardware and subroutines.
And they will not explicitly intervene to condemn or destroy their major characters, whilst stating that’s what is being done.
We may read religious texts, or Dante’s Inferno, for that satisfaction, but not novels.
Derrida used to say, instead of Judeo-Christian, “the Book” as in “People of the Book”, which has a deliberately layered meaning that intensifies the image of their relationship not just with their particular religious text but also with text generally.
This is probably a side line among wider questions of omniscient points of view, but I like knowing from the start that Sir Walter Elliott isn't going to change. In my mind it's a form of suspense: how is everyone else, and the story, going to deal with him?