“The Licensed Trespasser”: The Omniscient Narrator in Middlemarch

IN the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to au thority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patronized when it is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when it appears in contemporary work. Omniscience is no longer an entitlement of the novelist. Sartre made the case against omniscience in his attack on Fran?ois Mauriac. "Like most of our writers, he has tried to ignore the fact that the theory of relativity applies in full to the universe of fiction, that there is no more place for a privileged observer in a real novel than in the world of Einstein." In the Anglo American tradition Henry James's preoccupation with "point of view" both in his theory and his practice unsettled the con fidence of novelists and critics in the possibility of objective narration. For Mikhail Bakhtin, currently the most influential theorist of the novel, omniscience is the tyranny of the mono logic to which he opposes the dialogic. The novelist, in his view, refuses or should refuse authority to the voice of any single character, including the narrator. The novel is a con testation of voices, producing a polyphony that tends toward discord rather than harmony. Even the voice of the individual character is a hybrid divided against itself. Sartre's critique is motivated by an atheistic hostility to presumptions to "divine omniscience and omnipotence," James's by a psychological realism that depicts felt experience, and Bakhtin's by an antiauthoritarian desire to allow all voices, especially those of the repressed, to express themselves. From their different perspectives, each of the critics identifies the omniscient narrator with inauthenticity or authoritarianism. The last significant attempt to defend omniscient or objective