抄録
Recent stuides in the theory of the novel have established that the narrative method known as 'the ominiscient author' is not the primitive and clumsy mode of narration which the novel had to outgrow, but a legitimate convention with its own standards of success. This paper proposes to examine some of the more important ways in which George Eliot handles this convention in Middlemarch. Unlike the first-person narrator, the ominiscient author is not a character in the story. The impersonal and stylized language used by the omniscient author reflects his status as a being who transcends the story and has no recognizable individual traits. In novelists like Thackeray, who has a more personal and colloquial style, omniscient narration tends to become a succession of narrative postures with more or less characterization. It is not until late in her career that George Eliot mastered the impersonal stylization in her omniscient narration. Her early novels used a masculine persona, and there is an unmistakable presence of personal recollection which gives them their idyllic charm. This personal tone vanishes from Felix Holt, which opens with the objective, scientific analysis of a rural society in a tone in sharp contrast to that of loving recall of the earlier novels. Middlemarch completes this process. Its omniscient author is quite impersonal, and nowhere in the text are the author's sex, age, or circumstances revealed. (As for 'the gentle schoolmistress's tone' detected by some critics, it is impossible to estimate how much their judgment was influenced by their knowledge of the author's identity.) Different versions of the 'Finale' show that in the edition of the novel George Eliot excised sentences expressing her more personal opinions, such as feminism and progressive social views. Another characteristic of the omniscient author convention in Middlemarch is that passages of authorial commentary has a unity both conceptual and metaphorical. In this novel commentary is no longer, as in the earlier novels, a series of occasional observations hung on the string of the plot. It envisages the world of the novel as a complex totality of minute processes, and this, reinforced by the key image of the web, provides the structural principle for the entire novel. Related to it, there is another cluster of images associated with scientific technique for extending our perception, lenses, experiments, etc., which define the intensified powers of perception with which the novel pursues remote social ramifications and hidden psychological depths. Further, authorial commentary uncovers subtle distortions in the characters' view of themselves and the world, and identifies their source as egoism. Thus the omniscient author in Middlemarch is an impersonal function, both formulating and exemplifying the power of human perception at its highest state of perfection. The authorial commentary shows that the extension of our perception and the deepening of our moral sense is ultimately one and the same thing. Yet the supreme perceptive powers of the omniscient author do not finally dwarf the characters or their acts. There are limits to the authority of the commentary, and the omniscient author acknowledges this by admitting that shallow minds may sometimes arrive at correct judgment by their very shallowness. Also in one passage we find a sustained parody of authorial foresight. And in scenes like the one in Chaper LXXX, where Dorothea's vision establishes its own truth without any authorial intervention, the omniscient, author withdraws and lets the characters act out their intuitive perception. Thus in the final analysis it is the characters who attain true knowledge, but this knowledge shines out all the more clearly because the author's commentary has eliminated any possibility of a crude or easy attitude towards it.
