Is omniscient genderless?

[gauchecritic]

I'm of the mind that gender can only be included in a 1st or 2nd person POV.

Third person will show your style as a writer but will it (can it) show your gender as a narrator?

If the answer is yes or no then forget this thread. If it's debatable then have at it.

Please include examples if possible.

Gauche

P.S Let's not include fourth wall stuff.

 

[Guest]

Unlike third person restricted (or limited), omniscient must be genderless, nameless, with no identity. It has to be the author, though not necessarily the person or identity of the author.

Then you may have omniscient who is also the hysterical or unreliable narrator who may or may not "appear" to be the author (e.g., Byron; Don Juan).

Perdita

p.s. Forgot examples: The Scarlet Letter, The Hobbit


Edited to add: Took me a while to find this. Excellent article on the narrator in Madame Bovary. I love this bit, the images invoked for such a thing; my emphases:

"The majority of the material narrated in the third person singular is recounted by an absence that speaks, a glacial, meticulous observer who does not allow himself to be seen. This invisibility is born, of course, of objectivity; the reader believes he does not exist; s/he has the impression that the narrative material is engendering itself before his/her eyes."

http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/chemin/bovnarr.htm

 

[ffreak]

In The Lovely Bones the narrator is the point-of-view little girl who was killed by a rapist and continues to watch her family and friends as time goes by. It's a mystery, but not the one you might think. It's not trite.

The girl was a tom-boy and still wonders about becoming a woman, and has motherly attitudes about the people she loved.

I think the author (a woman) comes across in 3rd person.

(But what do I know?)

 

[Guest]

Eff, Lovely Bones is not third person omniscient by any definition. OK book though.

Perdita

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Everyone else can just say a big, "AMEN" to Perdita's post.

As she indicated, the trick is that THIRD PERSOn OMNISCIENT is a mulit-headed sucker with a variety of sub-sets which are sometimes given different names.

Rumple (who can screw-up in any POV) Foreskin

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I don't know... I don't recall any specif example, but theoretically, the narrator, i.e. the entity telling the tale, is a character in itself.

It may be part of the action or not, but it has a personality, which usually comes across as the author's style or whatever you want to call it, a way of telling the story, vocabulary, rhythm, --it can formulate judgments-- sometimes to an extent that will, in fact, be creating a discernable, distinct character. That being the case, I don't see why one of those distinguishing characteristics can't be gender.

 

[Guest]

Further clarification on what 3PO does:

1. Objectively report what is happening;

2. Go into the mind of any character;

3. Interpret for us that character’s appearance, speech, actions, and thoughts, even if the character cannot do so;

4. Move freely in time or space to give us a panoramic, telescopic, microscopic, or historical view, tell us what else has happened elsewhere or in the past or what will happen in the future;

5. Provide general reflections, judgements and truths.



from Janet Burroughway's Writing Fiction (Pearson Longman; 6th ed., 2002)

 

[Guest]

I don't know... I don't recall any specif example, but theoretically, the narrator, i.e. the entity telling the tale, is a character in itself. ...

Lauren, that's when you get into "romantic irony" or the "unrealiable narrator" (Byron example I gave). We're talking purely "third person omniscient".

Perdita

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I just don't see why the two have necessarily to be mutually exclusive. Can't a third person omniscient narrator be a little bit witty and humorous without losing its objectivity?

The majority of the material narrated in the third person singular is recounted by an absence that speaks.

 

[ffreak]

Like in Messi@h by Andrei Codrescu, or Chimera by John Barth (?).

 

[Guest]

Lauren: a simple answer, no. Then it becomes something else is all.

Think of it this way. Early English scholars for centuries tried pinning down Shakespeare's tragedies per Aristotle. Doesn't work, everyone knows that now. Even in h.s. I was fed the now debunked rule of the 'tragic flaw'. In some other thread I told someone you couldn't call Romeo & Juliet a romance or a romantic play or story. Shakespeare would not have called them that, he was not a romantic in the sense of the term that developed at the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 19th c. His tragedies veer far and often from the Greek idea.

I think what people are confusing here is the uncommon use of the TPO. Even the greatest writers haven't been able to stick to it consistently (see the article on M. Bovary). I wouldn't want to write in it. It is partly how all the variances developed, Byron being one of the greatest innovators and on down the line.

Gauche's query was simplistic, OK?

Perdita

Eff, I don't that work of Codrescu's, nor any Barth.

 

[Angeline]

If a narration is totally objective, I find it hard to see how it could succeed as fiction. Anyway, what genre--fiction or otherwise--is so "pure" as to exclude all context clues? Critical studies in reading comprehension (I can't really quote chapter and verse, but I'm thinking of the ones conducted by Jean Chall at Harvard in--I think--the 1970s) indicated that meaning was derived largely from context. This is true in regard to sentence-level comprehension (e.g., vocabulary, etc.), but also to the narrative elements that make writing cohesive like plot, theme, or POV. A piece of writing is a lot more than the sum of its pronouns.

Furthermore, wouldn't you expect the "objective" third-person POV to generate a more detached style than the self-aware first or the familiar second? Yet, the examples given here are all pretty passionate in terms of emotional content--Codrescu can be surreal sometimes, but very moving sometimes, too. There are theoretically "purer" third-person narratives like Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" or West's Miss Lonleyhearts, both of which have pretty detached narrators, but the contexts make for richly textured writing. But what role does all that play in defining a narator's gender and its potential for literary impact?

But all this may beg the question anyway. If a writer wants the narrator's gender to play a role (think, for example of Scout Finch's moving first-person little-girl voice in To Kill a Mockingbird), why choose the third person at all? That's what I would want to know anyway.

 

[Guest]

Hey Angeline, great to 'see' you. I did not mean, nor think I stated, that TPO equals pure objectivity. That's not possible if the author/narrator is to "Interpret for us that character’s appearance, speech, actions, and thoughts, even if the character cannot do so".

Again, 'omniscient' is the key term here. It must be genderless by definition is all. If not, then it's something else.

Really, I'm not being stubborn, I'd disagree with myself if I could.

Perdita

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Again, 'omniscient' is the key term here. It must be genderless by definition is all.

Being omniscient simply means that the narrator has complete awareness and understanding of every event in the story, and insight into every character's mind. In telling a story, anyone can be omniscient, or fake it. Neutrality, regarding gender or anything else, has nothing to do with it...

I simply can't see one single reason for these things to be so bluntly black and white, mutually exclusive.

 

[Guest]

"Foils and Point of View"

Just a bit of 'history' from an English prof's site citing two examples (highlighted):

"Some authors, who find themselves unable to assert a faith in the existence of a providential deity, argue that the omniscient narrator is a hold-over from an age in which people believed that the world of Time and human history itself is a work of art of an all-knowing Creator, who rules both behind the scenes and through supernatural intervention in nature and history to manipulate affairs in accordance with his pre-conceived plan, or "plot" for mankind. Others, who might be described as deists, maintain that, while there may be a divine being who is interested in human conduct and the outcome of human affairs and who has foreseen in advance how things will turn out, this deity has evidently chosen to refrain from personally intervening in the human story. They are inclined to adopt a similar "stance" towards the situations they create.

Understandably, many people have found these explanations puzzling. After all, all authors are constantly intervening in their stories - however invisibly - since they are responsible for creating, by their writerly decisions, every single one of the details that constitute the stories they create! And besides, stories with omniscient narrators can be delightful, sophisticated, and challenging - instead of preachy, pedantic, or commonplace - all depending on whether the writer knows how to handle "authoritative" intrusions in a truly skillful way. To appreciate this, put on your reading list for the future two wonderful novels: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). Fielding was certainly a believing Anglican Christian, but Kundera is pretty obviously an atheist. Both, however, use omniscient narration to brilliant effect."

L. A. Baker: http://www.ksu.edu/english/baker/english251/cc-foil_pv.htm

 

[Jenny _S]

Being omniscient simply means that the narrator has complete awareness and understanding of every event in the story, and insight into every character's mind. In telling a story, anyone can be omniscient, or fake it. Neutrality, regarding gender or anything else, has nothing to do with it...

I simply can't see one single reason for these things to be so bluntly black and white, mutually exclusive.

I have to agree with Lauren.Hynde. The assumption is that if the narrator is omniscient then he is either neutral or beneficent. But does that have to be the case? Why can't the narrator have his own agenda with respect to the others which may or may not be to their advantage? This doesn't rule out any character assuming the role of narrator.

Omniscient means the narrator is all knowing. It doesn't mean uninvolved that I can see.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I'm not saying a third person omniscient narrator can be involved in the story. That's just a contradiction of terms. It either is third person or an active character of the narrative.

What I'm saying is that I can objectively tell a story in which I am not involved, while at the same time not abdicating of my own personality. As a 3rd person omniscient narrator, I can say:

'Always waiting for me to make the first move! Every time it's the same fucking shit!' Given the tenseness of the situation, I would have to agree...

 

[Angeline]

Hiya yourself 'dita! Actually I didn't think you were really suggesting that--I was more kind of musing. I think we are pretty much saying the same thing--though my point specifically is about the difficulty of interpreting the impact of any one element independent of others when the reality is that they influence each other. But a pronoun is a pronoun, no? "It" will never be "you" or "I."

Still there are many ways to subtly influence a reader. I suspect that one could construct a piece of writing from a third-person perspective that uses elements other than pronouns to create a sense of gender. The narrator's pronoun use, strictly speaking, is still genderless, but the overall sense of the piece is not--but why? Why knock oneself out trying when there are easier paths to the same effect if that's important?

Anyway, I think I'm playing devil's advocate (and against my own argument, too, lol). I recently read with great interest and um amusement) the thread about correctly predicting a writer's gender (a whopping 50 percent of the time, i.e., as accurate as a coin toss) by measuring the frequency of certain syntax. I think it's a) hogwash and b) almost always beside the point.

Anyway thank you for the welcome and for reading my increasingly sleepy ramble!

 

[Guest]

Lauren:

If you, Lauren, become the narrator you are not third person, and you cannot be omniscient. The point is not objectivity or uninvolvement as Jenny terms it. I don't know what else to say. I'll wait for more comments and look in tomw.

Perdita

 

[ffreak]

If my characters take over the story, then it can't be omniscient.

But as the author of their fate, I am God when I am writing, and as God I am omnipotent. If the characters don't start behaving, I'll make them impotent. Then at least they won't have kids to run screaming around in my head.

Objectivity is in the mind of the writer.

(seeing as how I have a limited mind, I must have limited objectivity - Oh, yeah, I'm male)

 

[Lauren Hynde]

That I wasn't me. As far as anyone else in the story is concerned that was God. A totally non-intervening, all-knowing God, telling a little smut tale to Satan in a night of vigil.

If I go by Janet Burroughway's rule,

1. Objectively report what is happening;
- No problem; I can do that and you're saying it's not an issue.

2. Go into the mind of any character;
- I'm God, I'll go wherever I please

3. Interpret for us that character’s appearance, speech, actions, and thoughts, even if the character cannot do so;
- I think I can manage that too.

4. Move freely in time or space to give us a panoramic, telescopic, microscopic, or historical view, tell us what else has happened elsewhere or in the past or what will happen in the future;
- Everything but tell you how it ends...

5. Provide general reflections, judgements and truths.
- Exactly my point. If as TPO narrator I can provide general reflections, judgements and truths, they will be my reflections, my judgements and my truths. Those reflections, judgements and truths can amount to: personality. From my TPO objective point of view I can clue you in to what type of entity I am, if I'm benign, cynical, narcissist, good-humoured, witty, sophisticated, or technologically challenged, and maybe, if I really want to, my --the narrator's, not the author's!-- gender.

Again, I can't recall any examples, but in theory seems perfectly possible...

 

[janus40s]

Stepping away from the orthodox view of TPO, I would like to go back to the original question:

Originally posted by gauchecritic
Is omniscient genderless?
I'm of the mind that gender can only be included in a 1st or 2nd person POV.

Third person will show your style as a writer but will it (can it) show your gender as a narrator?

Omniscience does not imply genderlessness, impartiality or any other kind of moral purity.

The third party narrator can be all-knowing, and even trustworthy but still have a perspective. In other words, just because the narrator knows everything and reports it honestly, doesn't mean that he/she has to like it.

I don't have an example but will set about writing one. It sounds like a fun thing to do.

 

[Guest]

5. Provide general reflections, judgements and truths.
- Exactly my point. If as TPO narrator I can provide general reflexions, judgements and truths, they will be my reflexions, my judgements and my truths. Those reflexions, judgements and truths can amount to: personality. From my TPO objective point of view I can clue you in to what type of entity I am, if I'm benign, cynical, narcissist, good-humoured, witty, sophisticated, or technologically challenged, and maybe, if I really want to, my --the narrator's, not the author's!-- gender.

Lauren, I already said the narrator does not have to be the author; in your example I thought you meant 'you'. Doesn't matter. The example you give above is close to what Byron does in DJ. It's 'romantic irony', or can be called the 'unreliable narrator' today. It is not/cannot be omniscient once you even imply another 'person'. I think we're not quite viewing our terms at the same level of discourse is all.

Perdita

 

[Guest]

Stepping away from the orthodox view of TPO, I would like to go back to the original question: Omniscience does not imply genderlessness, impartiality or any other kind of moral purity.

The third party narrator can be all-knowing, and even trustworthy but still have a perspective. In other words, just because the narrator knows everything and reports it honestly, doesn't mean that he/she has to like it.

Hi Janus, don't think we've met. No, omniscience by itself does not imply what you note (why you mention moral purity I don't know), and a TPO is not supposed to be impartial (an impossibility), but if it is a true TPO it cannot be gendered, it is an it. One can of course guess or presume a gender for the author or the author's narrator, but it (the presumption or guess) has no meaning; it's inherent in the definition. This is why TPO is rarely used anymore and has always been extremely difficult to do. I daresay if you come up with an example it will easily be a variant of TPO.

regards, Perdita (who is now bemused at the protests, i.e., for me it's like trying to redefine a color without knowing one is looking through a prism)

 

[Lauren Hynde]

What you're saying is that only a non-entity can be omniscient; that once the narrator, participant or not, hints at personal general reflections, judgements and truths (a mark of TPO according to Janet Burroughway), it ceases to be TPO, even if it is TPO.

You're saying that royal blue, cobalt blue and baby blue aren't blue because they're not blue...