The Beautiful Omniscient | Part 2 of The Missing Omniscient Narrator

I love all the narrative styles. However, I think the total omniscient narrator has a special role to play in our lives today.

Michelangelo, The Hands of God and Adam, 1510, Cistene Chapel, Vatican, Source: Artchive

Hey everyone, and happy weekend! Finally.

If you’ve listened to the R&W podcast at all, you know I don’t do favorites. Furthermore, I will rarely declare a “superior” way of doing a thing. And I will never declare a “superior” narrative style, because that’s just crazy. The narrative style an author employs to tell a story is as unique and “particular” as the author him- or herself. A person may not care for the narrative style of a novel he or she is reading, but—assuming it is a well-written novel—I would argue this dislike says more about personal tastes and lack of curiosity than it does any narrative “shortcomings” of the novel itself.

Having said this, I want to devote this essay to celebrating the beauty of the total omniscience narrative style. Especially as it contributes to the formation of one’s soul.

Total omniscience is the classic, nineteenth-century novel. It has all but gone extinct in modern literature. (I wrote about this in Part One of the omniscient topic.) The closest we get is “limited omniscience.” Christopher Castellani, in his book Art of Perspective calls the effect of limited omniscience “prismatic” where multiple characters are “handed the mic,” so to speak, each one sharing in the telling of the whole story.

Pachinko, R&W’s current deep read, is a most excellent example of this limited omniscient, “prismatic” narrative style. Throughout the story, the author, Min Jin Lee, passes the mic from character to character, sometimes after a page or two, sometimes after a paragraph. I’m not sure there is a single character introduced into the narrative—down to the most ‘insignificant’ house servant—from whom we don’t hear, even if it is a single line of inner dialogue.

Here is a scene early in the story, between Hansu and Sunja:

“You should call me Oppa. You don’t have a brother, and I don’t have a sister. You can be mine.”

Sunja said nothing.

“This is nice.” Hansu’s eyes searched the cluster of low waves in the middle of the sea and settled on the horizon. “It’s not as beautiful as Jeju, but it has a similar feeling. You and I are from islands. One day, you’ll understand that people from islands are different. We have more freedom.”

She liked his voice--it was a masculine, knowing voice with a trace of melancholy.

“You’ll probably spend your entire life here.”

“Yes,” she said. “This is my home.”

“Home, he said thoughtfully. “My father was an orange farmer in Jeju. My father and I moved to Osaka when I was twelve; I don’t’ think of Jeju as my home. My mother died when I was very young.” He didn’t tell then that she looked like someone on his mother’s side of the family. It was the eyes and the open brow.

(Pachinko, 36)

In this scene, we are inside both Sunja’s head: she liked his voice; and Hansu’s: Sunja reminds him of someone on his mother’s side of the family.

This is the way the entire novel reads, moving from one character’s perspective to another’s, always having access to their inner thoughts as long as they’re holding the mic. It truly does give a “prismatic” effect to this generational story Lee is telling us.

One thing Pachinko’s omniscient style doesn’t do, is go beyond the characters’ inner thoughts. In other words, we never get to know or understand more about them than they understand about themselves. Apart from the first chapter, which opens much like a “Once upon a time…” story (more on that in another post), the mic seems to only pass between the characters and is rarely (if ever?) handed back to the narrator outside the story’s frame.

Enter War and Peace, and the total omniscient narrator.

The Omniscient Revealer

“I contain multitudes,” writes Walt Whitman in his poem, “Song of Myself.”

This, I believe, encapsulates the beauty and formative power of the omniscient narrator.

Multitudes is exactly what the omniscient narrator brings to the storytelling table. Omniscient multitudes—under the guide of Tolstoy’s pen—is part of what makes War and Peace the tour de force it is.

Through the omniscient, we are given privileged access to the multitudes within the characters that they—though they would never admit to anyone—know about themselves.

Some examples:

• Hélène’s mother’s secret jealousy of her daughter’s happiness upon her engagement to Pierre (226¹)

• The shame Pierre felt for his happiness at being engaged to Hélène: he felt it was a happiness that should belong to someone else (226)

• Andrei’s Toulon and secret longing for wanting nothing more than fame and men’s love (282)

• Marya’s strongest most deeply-hidden longing for earthly love; and her subsequent remorse over wanting this more than God’s will in her life. (235)

But, total omniscience (unlike the limited omniscient narrator) doesn’t stop there. It gives us the multitudes within the characters that they don’t even understand about themselves:

For instance:

Pierre was one of those who are only strong when they feel themselves quite innocent, and since that day when he was overpowered by a feeling of desire while stooping over the snuff-box at Anna Pavlovna’s, an unacknowledged sense of the guilt of that desire paralysed his will. (223)

Or:

Prince Vasili was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from circumstances and persons he met. (214)

One more:

It was not the dress, but the face and whole figure of Princess Marya that was not pretty, but neither Mademoiselle Bourienne nor the little princess felt this, they still thought that if a blue ribbon were placed in the hair, the hair combed up, and the blue scarf arranged lower on the best maroon dress, and so on, all would be well. (233)

In all three examples, the characters are blind to these deep, inner workings of their sub-conscious. They may, at times, recognize they are thinking or acting in a strange way, but can’t pinpoint the source of the strangeness, and unless they are challenged in a way that forces them to interrogate themselves, these “multitudes” remain a mystery to them.

But not to us. Which is so beautiful. And an opportunity to not be missed.

We are no different than Tolstoy’s characters. We contain multitudes. Some of these multitudes we recognize (though we may wish to deny). Some are beyond the light of our knowing.

But light shines in the darkness, does it not?? And where light shines, darkness flees. Light always overcomes it. (John 1:5)

This is the special gift of the omniscient narrator. Through the omniscient narrative, light shines into those dark places of our soul, allowing us to examine what is there. What’s more, the light is gentle, it comes to us as the rising sun—slant and golden warm.

How does it do this?

By shining first into the characters’ lives and then, diffused, into our own.

Of course, this only works if we are in a posture to receive. But that’s the other beautiful thing about novel reading as a way into deeper soul formation. Our guard is down. We’re engrossed in the story. We’ve become invested in these characters’ lives. Sure, some of them we might deeply dislike (I’m looking at you, Kurágin family). But, through the gentle, continual shining of the omniscient narrator, we find ourselves admitting at some point, “Oomph. I resemble that remark.”

The Omniscient Wise Guide

Not only does the omniscient narrator reveal to us our multitudes, it also acts as a kind of wise guide, journeying beside us and helping us understand the truth of what we are “seeing.” This, in turn, helps us navigate our own, sometimes treacherous depths, toward a more beautiful, more shalom-like way.

Much like Virgil and Beatrice were to Dante, or the Christmas Ghosts were for Scrooge, the omniscient narrator knows the Greater Story unfolding beyond the story we are seeing, and as our faithful guide, offers us glimpses of this Greater Story, too.

In our last War and Peace episode, I called these Tolstoy’s “ruminating.” Upon reflection, what I should have called them are “torn veil moments”—those times when the divide between heaven and earth dissolve, and we are invited into mystery of our dust-like, eternal lives.

Two examples follow (Note: I am purposefully staying clear of one excellent example for the sake of those participating in a year-long read, lest I give spoilers):

On the war front:

“One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead, lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly-animated and healthy men.” So thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who comes in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamour and glad keenness of impression to everything that takes place at such moments. (at the River Enns Bridge, 152)

On the home front:

How strange, how extraordinary, how joyful it seemed, that her son, the scarcely perceptible motion of whose tiny limbs she had felt twenty years ago within her, that son about whom she used to have quarrels with the too-indulgent count, that son who had first learnt to say ‘pear’ and then ‘granny’, that this son should now be away in a foreign land amid strange surroundings, a virile warrior doing some kind of man’s work of his own without help or guidance. The universal experience of ages, showing that children do grow imperceptibly from the cradle to manhood, did not exist for the countess. Her son’s growth towards manhood at each of its stages had seemed as extraordinary to her as if there had never existed the millions of human beings who grew up in the same way. (Countess Rostov’s thoughts upon receiving Nikolai’s letter, 252-3)

In both scenes, it’s as if the narrator pulls a curtain back for us, tells us to peer in and see—truly see—the matters of eternity enlivening each scene.

“This,” our narrator is kindly, but firmly, saying to us, “is the heart of things. Not the battle, or the promotions. But this: a man’s courage. A mother’s delight. These are the eternal things. I am showing them to you, so that you can have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to truly perceive.”

The “destabilizing abscence”² of the omniscient narrator in today’s modern fiction is simply a mirror held up to our 21st Century, destabilized society.

But we don’t have to stay that way. We’ve been given the gift of the Beautiful Omniscient.

We would do well to open to the pages of this Narrator’s Great Story more often.

1. All page numbers given for War and Peace are from the Oxford World’s Classic Edition.

2. From Christopher Casellani’s book, The Art of Perspective.