The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

TLDR: In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world.

Abstract: I want to begin this essay by pointing out what I think has become a salient fea ture, or at least significant trend, in contemporary British and American literary fic tion: namely, a prominent reappearance of the ostensibly outmoded omniscient narrator. In the last two decades, and particularly since the turn of the millennium, a number of important and popular novelists have produced books which exhibit all the formal elements we typically associate with literary omniscience: an all-know ing, heterodiegetic narrator who addresses the reader directly, offers intrusive com mentary on the events being narrated, provides access to the consciousness of a range of characters, and generally asserts a palpable presence within the fictional world. The novelists I'm thinking of include Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, David Lodge, Adam Thirlwell, Michel Faber, and Nicola Barker in the UK; and Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Rick Moody, and John Updike in the US. In this paper I want to consider why so many contempo rary writers have turned to omniscient narration, given the aesthetic prejudice against this narrative voice which has prevailed for at least a century. For instance, in 2004 Eugene Goodheart pointed out that: "In the age of perspectivism, in which all claims to authority are suspect, the omniscient narrator is an archaism to be patron ized when he is found in the works of the past and to be scorned when he appears in contemporary work" (1). How are we to evaluate novels which employ an ostensibly redundant nine teenth century form in the twenty-first century? Are they conservative and nostalgic