How do you use focalization in omniscient narration?
As I discussed in an earlier Novel Study post on Lauren Groff’s Matrix, I’m seeing signs that omniscient narration may be coming back into vogue, and Maggie O’Farrell’s recent novel The Marriage Portrait gives us another example to dig into.
Omniscient point of view is when a narrator enters the mind of any character in a scene, as opposed to limited point of view, in which we have access to the internal experience of only one character at a time.
O’Farrell’s flavor of omniscient narration is less experimental than Groff’s, but it still feels fresher than the tactics used by nineteenth-century authors, who tended to keep us outside characters, even when describing feelings—like a museum docent explaining the themes of a piece of art.
I started my last post on omniscient narration with a contrasting example from George Eliot, so let’s do the same here since Eliot also wrote a book set, like The Marriage Portrait, in Renaissance Florence—the deservedly obscure Romola. Here’s the beginning of chapter five, in which we meet the title character:
The Via de’ Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank of the river. . . . [I]ts left-hand buildings flanking the river and making on their northern side a length of quaint, irregularly-pierced façade, of which the waters give a softened loving reflection as the sun begins to decline towards the western heights. But quaint as these buildings are, some of them seem to the historical memory a too modern substitute for the famous houses of the Bardi family, destroyed by popular rage in the middle of the fourteenth century.
The implied narrator is a resident of the nineteenth century, not the fourteenth, just like the implied reader. Eliot is taking us to Via de’ Bardi, in other words, and describing what is there in the 1860s before telling us what was there much earlier, a hundred years before the characters she is about to introduce. We then get a long paragraph describing the history of the Bardi family (author footnote included!) before, finally, the narrator takes us inside one specific house on Via de’ Bardi, where we meet Bardo and his daughter Romola.
After some description of the room and the inhabitants, and a quick snippet of dialogue about a book, we get our first glimpse at thought and feeling in this passage:
As Romola said this, a fine ear would have detected in her clear voice and distinct utterance, a faint suggestion of weariness struggling with habitual patience. But as she approached her father and saw his arms stretched out a little with nervous excitement to seize the volume, her hazel eyes filled with pity; she hastened to lay the book on his lap, and kneeled down by him, looking up at him as if she believed that the love in her face must surely make its way through the dark obstruction that shut out everything else. At that moment the doubtful attractiveness of Romola’s face, in which pride and passion seemed to be quivering in the balance with native refinement and intelligence, was transfigured to the most lovable womanliness by mingled pity and affection: it was evident that the deepest fount of feeling within her had not yet wrought its way to the less changeful features, and only found its outlet through her eyes.
Let’s try not to combust with rage at the “lovable womanliness,” angel-in-the-house bullshit Eliot is engaging here and instead notice the way our narrator turns emotion into something that can be perceived by an external observer, but only one with a “fine ear” and a keen gaze. We aren’t taken directly inside Romola’s mind as she feels pity and love, pride and passion. Instead, our narrator is pointing them out to us. In a way, we are inside our narrator’s mind as they perceive this young woman.
O’Farrell, by contrast, takes us deeper inside the minds of her characters, and I think that’s one of the tricks to making omniscient narration feel fresh. Let’s take a closer look at how she does it and also how she keeps the reader grounded, so we never feel disoriented when we shift from one character’s point of view to another.
I discussed the first chapter of The Marriage Portrait in detail in a previous post. That chapter takes us quite deeply inside the point of view of Lucrezia, establishing her as the protagonist of the book. Chapter two moves backward in time, settling into the point of view of Lucrezia’s mother, Eleanora, to tell us about Lucrezia’s conception and early childhood. Lucrezia was a difficult baby and then a stubborn, disobedient child; at the end of the chapter, we see her at age fifteen, bursting into her mother’s room and shouting that she will not wear the bridal dress that was originally made for her deceased older sister—the one whose place she’s taking in the arranged marriage to the Duke of Ferrara. This outburst is summarized from Eleonora’s point of view, and the chapter closes with this remarkable passage:
Eleonora’s mind, as she sets down her stylus, raises herself from her desk and walks through the archway towards her daughter, fixes once more on Lucrezia’s conception, the way her eyes had passed over the maps of ancient lands, had been focused on strange and wild seas, filled with dragons and monsters, beset by winds that might blow a ship far off course. What a mistake for her to make! How she has been haunted by it, punished for it!
At the other end of the room, Eleonora sees her daughter’s angular, tear-streaked face open like a flower with hope and expectation. Here is my mother, Eleonora knows she is thinking. Perhaps she will save me, from the dress, from the marriage. Perhaps all will be well.
Notice how O’Farrell explicitly takes us inside Eleonora’s mind as she contemplates the moment of her daughter’s conception (which we saw dramatized earlier in the chapter). By the end of that paragraph we get a couple of sentences that sound almost like direct transcriptions of thoughts she is having as she crosses the room to her daughter.
And then in the next paragraph, Eleonora effectively takes over the narrator role: she is the one seeing and interpreting her daughter’s emotions as they are written across her face and her thoughts as she imagines them to be.
So by the end of chapter two, O’Farrell has trained her readers to expect that they will see Lucrezia from both the inside and the outside, and that she will be focalizing the narration through multiple characters. In chapter three, she establishes that she will sometimes change this narrative focalizer in the middle of a scene. Let’s see how she does it.
The chapter opens in a very traditional omniscient style—zoomed out, setting the scene before establishing the focal point for the narration:
A foreign dignitary arrived in Florence, presenting the Grand Duke with a painting of a tiger. Cosimo was very taken with the gift and it wasn’t long before he expressed a desire to own one of these vicious, singular beasts. He kept a menagerie in the basement of his palazzo, for the diversion of visitors, and he felt that a tiger would be an excellent addition to his collection.
He gave an order to his consigliere ducale, Vitelli, that a tiger must be found, captured and brought to Florence. Vitelli, who had foreseen such an outcome ever since the painting arrived at court, heaved a deep and private sigh, duly making a note in his ledger. He hoped that the Grand Duke might be persuaded against the plan or even forget it.
Not so different in technique from Eliot at the beginning, but O’Farrell moves much faster than Eliot to establish her focalizing character, Vitelli, and takes us much more deeply inside his thoughts. Cosimo, of course, does not forget about the tiger, as Vitelli had hoped. We experience Vitelli’s discomfort as Cosimo, swishing around the sword he is strapping on, expresses his disappointment that the basement pen prepared for the tiger is still empty and issues this veiled threat: “Such a pity that it lies empty. Something—or someone—will have to occupy it.” Vitelli broods for a moment, then gets to work procuring a tiger.
Next come two paragraphs that take us away from Vitelli’s point of view:
The Grand Duke’s peculiar fancy for a tiger was communicated to an emissary, and then an ambassador, a sea captain, a silk merchant, an adviser to a sultan, a viceroy, a spice trader, an under-secretary in a maharajah’s palace, the maharajah’s cousin, the maharajah himself, his wife, his son, then back to the under-secretary, and on to a band of soldiers, then the villagers in a remote part of Bengal.
Captured, netted and tied to a pole, the tiger journeyed from its place of heat and rain and foliage. It spent weeks and months at sea, below deck, in a dank and salt-crusted hold, before being delivered to the dockside in Livorno. From there, it was conveyed inland in a wooden cage lashed to a cart, pulled by six terrified mules.
Do you notice the way the passive voice—“was communicated”—moves us out of Vitelli’s mind and creates a bridge for us to be, for a paragraph, not inside the mind of the tiger but at least up close to its experience?
O’Farrell then brings us back to Vitelli, who arranges for the convoy to wait to enter Florence until the dead of night to avoid causing a scene. Vitelli imagines a worst-case scenario worthy of the chronically anxious: “What if the animal became enraged and perhaps burst its bonds? It could run amok through the streets, devouring children and citizens. Better, Vitelli decided, to wait for the dim hours after midnight: no one would hear them; no one would ever find out.”
And precisely here, O’Farrell changes the narrative focus to the young Lucrezia. No one would find out…
Except for little Lucrezia, tucked into a bed with both her sisters in a room under the eaves of the palazzo roof. Lucrezia of the solemn gaze and pale, wispy hair—incongruously so, for all her siblings had the sleek, fox-dark colouring of their Spanish mamma. Lucrezia, who was slight and small for her age . . . . Lucrezia, who always had trouble sleeping.
She, alone, heard the tigress’s cry as the cart entered the palazzo gates: a low, hollow call, like wind funnelled through a pipe. It severed the night with its mournful pitch—once, twice—before dying away in a hoarse rumble.
Lucrezia sat up in bed, as abruptly as if she had been stuck with a needle. What was that noise, the unfamiliar cry that had reached down into her dream and shaken her awake? She turned her head one way, she turned it the other.
Notice that O’Farrell starts from the outside before working inward, getting us used to this new focus for the narrative point of view. We get some physical description of Lucrezia and details about where she is in the house. We’re not inside Lucrezia’s thoughts at this point: the description of the tiger’s mournful cry is not written in the voice of a child. But note the tone shift in that last paragraph. The question has the effect of moving us inside her mind, as does the simpler, repeating language of the head turning.
O’Farrell then keeps her narration focalized through Lucrezia through the end of the scene, following her as she creeps down a hidden staircase to witness the hissing, caged tigress being pulled into the courtyard and then deeper into the palazzo.
You can use the hand-off trick O’Farrell uses here even in limited point of view—the key is to make the point-of-view transfer very clear and to limit the jump to no more than one per scene.