"Austen's approach to omnipresence, our third aspect of omniscience, is
perhaps the most idiosyncratic aspect of her handling of point of view.
Oddly enough, an Austen narrator can only read minds within a radius of
three miles of her protagonist; this is specified as being precisely the
distance from Longbourn to Netherfield (Pride and Prejudice 32) and also
from Kellynch Hall to Uppercross Cottage (Persuasion 31). And even this
level of privilege occurs rarely. Normally the narrator can only read
the minds of characters within sight or hearing of the protagonist.
Austen's narrator is under house arrest, and the protagonist of the
novel is her ankle bracelet. Take Pride and Prejudice, for example: in
Chapter IV the narrator first presents a scene between Jane and
Elizabeth at Longbourn, then summarizes a parallel scene with Darcy and
his party at Netherfield, three miles away; this is the absolute limit
of an Austen narrator's range in shifting point of view (16-17). The
three mile radius appears to always have Elizabeth as its fixed center.
On three other occasions the narrator can read a character's mind when
Elizabeth is in another part of the house, and once when she is walking
in another part of the grounds. And even in some of these cases, the
point of view is not shifted across space in the mode of "meanwhile back
at the ranch," but "handed off" as it were, from Elizabeth to another
character: "... Elizabeth soon afterwards left the room. 'Eliza Bennet,'
said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her ..." (40). The
narrator does not occupy all of space simultaneously like God, nor
teleport herself through space like Captain Kirk--she simply stays
behind to hear two speeches, after which Elizabeth returns to the room.
In every other case of telepathy in Pride and Prejudice--and these are
numerous--the character whose mind is being read is within Elizabeth's
audiovisual field. This degree of spatial restriction hardly seems
consonant with handbook definitions of omniscience. " --- Nelles,
William. "Omniscience for atheists: or, Jane Austen's infallible
narrator." Narrative Vol. 14 Issue 2 (May 2006): p. 118 et seq.
I don't recall now who was the first Austen scholar to point out the
curious fact that William Nelles pointed out in the above quotation in
his 2006 article, does anyone else? What I do vaguely recall is that it
is an old interpretation, going back many decades.
In any event, I also can't recall whether I have ever pointed out
publicly what I recognized about a decade ago, which is that there is
one simple (and, in my opinion, compelling) explanation for the
Three-Mile Rule in about 95+% of the relevant passages, which does not
involve any sort of supernatural narratorial insight.
I.e., it all works like a charm if we infer that Jane Austen intentionally
wrote these narrative passages that way because they are a reflection of
the heroine's (in this case, Elizabeth's) subjective projections and
imaginings, i.e., what she believes the other characters are thinking,
and not necessarily what they are actually thinking!
And the same is true in all of the novels.
Which makes that less than 5% of narrative passages when Elizabeth is not physically present, but where we are in the head of another
character (mostly Charlotte Lucas and Darcy, I can't recall if this
applies to any other characters) extraordinarily important and
interesting, because they are not amenable to interpretation as
Elizabeth's projections and imaginings. These rare passages are the
closest thing we get from Jane Austen to some sort of objective triangulation of
social reality, in terms of our understanding of the true motivations of
those other characters. I.e., those are very rare occasions where we get
to know the thoughts of characters other than the heroine without their
being filtered, to some degree or another, through the mind of the heroine.
Cheers,
Arnie
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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