"Who Thinks This Book?

" Or Why the Author/God Analogy Merits Our Continued Attention

Olson, Barbara K.

Narrative, Volume 14, Number 3, October 2006, pp. 339-346 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nar.2006.0016

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v014/14.3olson.html

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DIALOGUE

Who Thinks This Book? Or Why the Author/God Analogy Merits Our Continued Attention
BARBARA K. OLSON

Jonathan Cullers recent article on Omniscience in Narrative was a welcome event, re-opening as it did the scholarly conversation on a topic too long ignored. But honored as I am by Cullers attention to Authorial Divinity, I nd myself wishing he had paid more. I am indeed the extreme instance of taking the author/God analogy seriously in assessing the ideologyin this case the theologyof a writer, so his considering my work was probably obligatory in attempting to put the analogy safely behind us. But while Culler did address my reading of Ernest Hemingways The Killers, he did not engage my discussions of some of the very issues he addressed in his essay. And there remain significant reasons why I do see the author/God analogy carrying continuing import for our thinking about authorial narration.1 Culler does grant that the force of the analogy may help us to imagine the possibility of a creator, a god, a sentient being, as undetectable to us as the novelist would be to the characters who exist in the universe of the text this god created. Indeed, theologians can draw upon the analogy between the author and God to help explain God (23). But he sees the analogy as useless to the literary critic: The fundamental point is that since we do not know whether there is a God and what she might know, divine omniscience is not a model that helps us think about authors or about literary narration (23). I have trouble seeing the usefulness of this distinction. To make it seems to argue that to conduct literary analysis is non-ideological activitya curious claim,

Barbara K. Olson is an Associate Professor of English at Lee University in Cleveland, TN. She is the author of Authorial Divinity in the Twentieth Century. NARRATIVE, Vol. 14, No. 3 (October 2006) Copyright 2006 by The Ohio State University

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to say the least, in this postmodern climate. Moreover, to argue that only if we are theologians might our readerly experience of authorial narration carry analogical import seems to defy the experience of countless readers and writers. Of course Culler is right that we do not know whether there is a God and what she might know (23), but such uncertainty frets all human knowing to varying degrees. And certainly both authors and readers do have beliefs and assumptions about God. This analogy widely assumed as it ismay at least help us think about what we, and what in turn our authors, may presume or wonder about Godhow they may narrationally reckon with their own ontological assumptions and with ours. Moreover, point of view is not the only area of literary criticism in the past thirty years which has found useful analogies in theology. In 1967, Frank Kermodes The Sense of an Ending explored an eschatology of fiction. In 1975 Brian Wicker wrote The Story Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics. Also in 1975, Wesley Kort gave us Narrative Elements and Religious Meanings and in 1986, Modern Fiction and Human Time: A Study in Narrative and Belief. More recently Paul Fiddes published The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature in 2000; Emily Griesinger wrote The Shape of Things to Come: Toward an Eschatology of Literature for Christianity and Literature in 2004. As illustration of readers experiencing authorial narration theologically, I offer just a few examples: Susan Lanser: It is not accidental that we use the term author to refer to God or that the root of the word authority links it to the notion of the creator or promoter. (84) Christopher Ricks: Perhaps when man proposes God disposes with as cool a disposition as Mrs. [Muriel] Sparks, though if He indeed looks upon his created world with the same eye with which she looks upon hers, then thank God I am an atheist. (32) Fran Schumer: If there is some benign God watching over us, we want Him to upon us with the wisdom and compassion with which Mr. [T. R.] Pearson views his world. (4) Of course, it is the prevalence of this analogy Culler is trying to quash. His narrating instance, Genettes zero focalization, and Ermaths nobody are all attempts to prevent our readerly proclivity [from] lead[ing] us astray (28). It is above all when there is no primary character through whom narration is focalized [that] we invent a person to be the source of textual details (30). For Culler et al, we readers simply do not want to face the facts: there is no analogical person who is the source of our reading experience. Once we can rid ourselves of this illusion we can focus on the art with which these details have been imagined (30). Curiously, however, Cullers argument drifts here from denying narrational divinity to denying narrational personhood. For Roland Barthes, to rid narration of analogical personhood has far more profoundly ideological consequences. He sees

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both author and reader as locations not as persons having free agency, not as persons having any originary power over the language that speaks through them.2 Barthes identied his discomfort with personalist terminology as a theological issue involving not only the authorial narrator but the author as well. Consequently, he favored rst person narration, authorial narration ostensibly propagating a pernicious lie. In The Death of the Author he identied his project as an anti-theological gesture, since to refuse to x meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostasesreason, science, law (147). Barthes experience as a reader was what he called a revolutionary act (147): he was resisting a conception of Godthe only conception of God he allowed: God as tyrant. Cullers own resistance also seems to me more theological than literary. For instance, while he decides not to call omniscience obscene, it is nearly so to him, smacking of arrogance and a Bush-like imperialism. He has a particular view of Godor a particular view of what others must be referring to when they use God or a godlike analogy. For him, as for Barthes, God inevitably suggests the abuse of power. But for Barthes it was impossible to focus on authorial artistry to the exclusion of ideology. Indeed, he proclaimed authorial artistry a nave notion inevitably tied to an outdated, disreputable theology. Culler seems to hope otherwise, attempting to redirect us off what he sees as a dead end road, an analogy that yields little literary insight. He retains hope in a technology somehow devoid of ideology, or at least removed from theology. Their aversion is certainly understandable given the attraction to power that led some of our most notable modernist novelists to aunt authorial narration. William Faulkner luxuriated in the role: I think that any writer worth his salt is convinced that he can create much better people than God can (118). James Joyce functioned narrationally just as Stephen Daedalus says any artist does: he like the God of creation, remain[ed] within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, rened out of existence, indifferent, paring his ngernails (Portrait 215). Sheldon Brivic has reported that in the early essay A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce included among his ambitions that divine knowledge was to be restored (1415). So it is not surprising that Joyce even had Molly praying to him at the conclusion of Ulysses: O Jamesy, let me up out of this (633). 3 Culler and Barthes are not alone in their discomfort and resistance. Henry Fieldings authorial narrator is alternately intrigued and troubled by his powerhe can after all rescue Tom Jones from jail (30). He wonders how he can maintain his audiences Enlightenment credulity, newly attuned as it is to Cullers modern standards of probability(30). As I suggest in Authorial Divinity, the attention that Fielding calls to this dilemma is surely an indication of how godlikein his case, omnipotentthe experience of authoring feels to him. Culler tells us that other contemporary scholars join him in wishing authorial narration were only a device. Betsy Ermath wants to speak of the narrator as nobody really not intelligible as an individual (31). And, he continues, Richard Walsh in the important article Who Is the Narrator? has argued for dispensing with narrators who are not characters. Either a narrator is identiable as a character, such as Marlow or Marcel, or we dont need this ction (30).

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But writers are not likely to abandon the convention just because Culler et al say so. Novelists have long been profoundly interested in what their experience of authoring suggests analogically, theologically. As Fieldings musings suggest, the convention of omniscience only spotlightsor exposesthe pose of God authors inevitably assume. Even Virginia Woolf, for example, who vociferously declared herself an atheist, wondered in her diary within the rst three months of working on The Waves: Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants a device that is not a trick (25 September 1929; vol. 3, 257). In the early stages of the manuscript we nd her musing: I am the thing in which all this exists (qtd. in Graham 108). As I argue in Authorial Divinity, each of Woolfs novels is a narrational experiment attempting to answer that question, Who thinks it? She was doing narrational cosmology. Not a few of her readers have seen the nameless spirit who observed the dining room of Pointz Hall as the authorial narrator, concluding along with James Naremore that [o]bviously, the motives for such a technique are less psychological than metaphysical (76). I have called those motives theological, honoring Woolfs own words in a typescript of Pointz Hall: But who observed the dining room? Who noted the silence, the emptiness? ...This presence certainly requires a name, for without a name what can exist? And yet we who have named other presences equally impalpableand called them God for instance or again The Holy Ghosthave no name but novelist or poet, or sculptor or musician, for this greatest of all preservers and creators. Nameless it is yet partakes of all things named (6162). Remarkably, the nameless all-knowing, all-caring mutuality to which Woolf here refers and which is best incarnated in the narration of The Waves is much like the God of process thought. Moreover, this conception of God, which belief we have since come to call panentheism, was emerging nearly simultaneously in the work of Alfred North Whitehead.4 So it is not unreasonable to conclude that in Woolfs corpus not only can we trace her own experiments in narrational cosmology but also an uncanny intuition of the zeitgeist of the age. 5 Culler claims to base his dismissal of the author/God analogy upon a Perfect Being Theology. In his view, since criticism need not presuppose either the perfection or the freedom of the characters as this theology does of God and human beings, it seems unlikely that criticism can learn much from these theological debates (21). While this theology is not the only option out therecertainly not the option Woolf and Whitehead were proposingdebates about tension or contradiction between divine knowledge and human free will have in fact shown up also in signicant discussions concerning literary authorship. Anecdotally, most of us have heard novelists confess to sensing their characters independence from or resistance to their designs for them. In just one instance, Frederick Buechner mused, Theres a sense in which these are your creations. They would not be there if you had not put them there and dreamed them up, but once youve done that you do give them their freedom, and that makes it possible to even learn from your characters, to have them do things which you wouldnt have thought of and to [sic] things you wouldnt have dreamed up (Fickett 58). Graham Greene has his writer gure Bendix in The End of the Affair complain about one character who obstinately will not come alive, who never does the unexpected thing:

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I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will. (185186) Narrative authorsparticularly novelists, makers of sizable worldsalmost universally report the same. And it is authors who differ wildly in their ontological commitments and yet agree on the signicance of the analogy who have most sustained my interest in it. John Fowles and Ronald Sukenick have both vigorously attempted to eschew their godlike role through their narrational experiments.6 Sukenick, convinced with Roland Barthes that language speaks the author and not the other way around, has identied his major difference from modernists as his move away from the idea of the writer as creator to the idea of the writer as medium (143). Sympathetic to the goal, Fowles has nonetheless concluded, The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image with freedom our rst principle, not authority (82). It would not be a stretch to say that postmodernist narratives characteristic reexivity is generally rooted in theological resistance. And I believe Fowles has it right when he notes that the problem is less disbelief in the existence of God than a disbelief in a kind of God, a particular conception of God repellent to the postmodernist consciousness, not surprisingly, the same conception which troubles Culler and Barthes: God as omnipotent tyrant. In 1941, devout Anglican Dorothy Sayers wrote an intriguing work, The Mind of the Maker, which views theology and authorship synergistically, in one case teasing out of the analogy a criteria for judging a storys aesthetic worth. After noting that omniscience carries with it intimations of omnipotence, she remarks, The free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril (67): If we by analogy call God the Creator we are thereby admitting that it is possible for Him to work miracles; but if we examine more closely the implications of our analogy, we may be driven to ask ourselves how far it is really desirable that He should do anything of the kind. For the examples of writers who indulge in miracle is not altogether encouraging. Poetic justice (the name often given to artistic miracle-mongering) may be comforting, but we regretfully recognize that it is very bad art (7879). While those relatively unacquainted with theological scholarship may find these musings on human free will and divine authority surprising, rest assured they are not at all uncommon. Both process theology and open theology in the twentieth century reckoned with these tensions in particularly creative ways, their conceptions

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having been presciently incarnated in the work of Woolf. John Sanders eschatology in The God Who Risks, for instance, gives us a relational God who sovereignly wills to have human persons become collaborators with him in achieving the divine project of mutual relations of love(12). For Sanders the omniscient God knows all that is logically possible to know, knowing the future as partly denite (closed) and partly indenite (open), and inviting us to collaborate with him to bring the as yet open part of the future into being (Hall and Sanders 1213). In sum then, authors experience writing as world making and readers in turn experience reading as immersing themselves in the worlds of these makers. Readers observe the makers designs of these worlds and the implicit relationships the makers have with their characters. And readers experience their own relationship with these makers most directly and suggestively when the makers themselves narrate the worlds they have made. Remarkably often, the testimony of authors and readers alike has identied theological ruminations as emerging analogically from their experiences. Methinks Culler et al doth protest too much.

ENDNOTES
1. Authorial narration may be a better term for the phenomenon I am trying to understand. Culler is troubled by the unsuitability of the term omniscient on several countsone of which is his insistence that authors imagine rather than know their story world. There is no real world to be known within the created construct. And, he continues, the narrators certainly do not have omniscience regarding the world beyond their construct. True, although the God of the analogy that so troubles Culler is usually thought to both create and know His/Her world, making and knowing not usually seen as mutually exclusive. But I agree with Culler that the term omniscience does not adequately describe works sometimes designated as such. Cullers examples featured some astute close readings but they also included narrations I would call neither omniscient nor authorial. For example, he himself refers to Marcel as a characterological narrator. And Middlemarch, one of the novels about which he suggests omniscient (31) might be an appropriate descriptor, is not authorial but characterological as well. As Susan Lanser explains the convention, Ordinarily the unmarked case of narration for public narrators is that the narrating voice is equated with the textual authorunless a different case is markedsignaledby the text itself (151). Indeed, Richard Walsh seems to agree by insisting that ctional representation is an authorial activity (511). Culler quotes George Eliots narrator self-identifying her analogical pose as we belated historians(31). Clearly this narrator has signaled hers to be a different caseevading the godlike moniker, distancing herself from the makers role, donning that of chronicler. Henry Fieldings narrator, on the other hand, is an unmarked case, though a highly self-conscious one, fully aware that he can at whim rescue Tom Jones from jail. 2. As Barthes so memorably put it, a texts unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination. But this destination [also] cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology: he is simply that someone who holds together in a single eld all the traces by which the written text is constituted (148). 3. See Brivics Joyce the Creator for how Joyces cultural, personal, and intellectual development produced in him a drive toward godhead(27). He reports: Joyce strove to systematically disintegrate the simple unity of the mind in order to reveal a more complex integration that pointed to a higher unity. He realized that this higher unity was beyond human

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knowledge and that the most authoritative representation of it was to be found in theology. The thought that this unity he aimed at was divine amused him, fascinated him, terried him, impelled him. To break down the old construction of the mind, Joyce required a superhuman compound intelligence, a mind beyond what existed. By understanding and enlarging the possibilities of his creatures and by seeing their discrete personalities as parts of a larger being; he expanded our recognition of what the mind could be. For humanity to recognize its own individual multiplicity is for it to assume its godhead, and this was one goal Joyce sought to promote by his enactment of the multiple role. His challenge to God, at its bravest, was an effort to give God a truer shape. (141) 4. On 29 June 1936, Woolf mused in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, our belief is hardly perceptible to us, but will be to those who write our lives in 600 years (Vol. 6, 50). See Authorial Divinity, pages 6599 for an extensive discussion of Woolfs narrational experiments in cosmology. 5. The young Virginia Stephen was trying out in her diary on December 8, 1929 a concept of God in her a God in process of change (Vol. 3, 271). 6. See Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman and Sukenicks The Death of the Novel and Other Stories.

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Schumer, Fran. Crazy Nights and Days in Neely. Review of A Short History of a Small Place by T. R. Pearson. New York Times Book Review 7 (July 1985): 4. Sukenick, Ronald. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1969. Walsh, Richard. Who is the Narrator? Poetics Today 18 (1997): 495513. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Wicker, Brian. The Story Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975 Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-84. . The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich-Harvest, 19751980. . Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. Edited by Mitchel A. Leaska. New York: University Publications, 1983. . The Waves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich-Harvest, 1959.