How do you make omniscient narration fresh and modern?
I’ve been wanting to write about the way Lauren Groff uses of point of view in Matrix since I first read the book—it may even have been one of the inspirations for this Novel Study series. What Groff pulls off in Matrix is a version of omniscient narration that feels modern and self-aware, and still brings us as close to her protagonist as we might be with third-person limited point of view.
Before we get into the details of how Groff achieves this effect, let’s define omniscient narration. Point of view is the narration style of a novel and requires authors to make three key decisions:
Will you write about your protagonist (and possibly other point-of-view characters) in first person (I) or third person (he/she/they)?
Will you primarily use past tense (I said) or present tense (I say) to tell the story?
Whose inner thoughts and feelings can readers access? If we see the interior thoughts and feelings of only one or a handful of characters and only one at a time, then that’s limited narration. If we have access to the interior thoughts of any character in the novel in any scene, then that’s omniscient narration.
Some genres are identified with certain POV styles: For example, YA novels are often written in first-person present tense, which encourages readers to identify with or inhabit the point-of-view character. The heyday of omniscient narration was also one of the heydays of the novel as a form: the nineteenth century. Here’s the opening of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to give you a sense of the nineteenth-century style of omniscient narration:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.
This passage positions the reader as the observer of Dorothea Brooke, with a chatty narrator acting as a kind of museum docent, directing our attention to certain details and telling us what we should think of them. This narrator establishes its authority through the breadth of its references: broadly cultural references like “Italian painters” and “elder poets” as well as ‘in-world’ references like “to-day’s newspaper” and reported community gossip. If we have access to a character’s inner life, it isn’t direct—it’s filtered through our omniscient narrator, as in this sentence from later in the same paragraph:
Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot…
Right there in the opening paragraph is the central question of this plot strand of the novel: How is a woman like Dorothea—a woman of intense faith and feelings, who would martyr herself if she could, like the child Saint Theresa we meet in the prologue to the novel—going to find a place in this world in which marriage is one of the few options available to her?
Groff’s protagonist in Matrix, Marie, is living in medieval England, a time in which choices are similarly constrained for most women. In Marie’s case, the decision has already been made for her, and we meet her at the moment when she has been deemed unmarriageable and dispatched from the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine to become prioress of an impoverished abbey. Unlike Dorothea, Marie has no stirrings of faith—all she wants at the beginning of the novel is to remain in the orbit of Eleanor, with whom she has fallen hopelessly in love.
Groff’s novel, it seems to me, is a deliberate contrast to Middlemarch and not just in the path taken by her protagonist. Groff’s use of omniscient narration is also a considered departure from Eliot’s style. Where Eliot gives her omniscient narrator authority, Groff tends to make hers more neutral. Eliot’s narrator is an active interpreter; Groff’s narrator is a more neutral researcher.
In The Art of Perspective, Christopher Castellani argues—correctly, I think—that omniscient narration has fallen out of favor because it is “too old-fashioned for a fractured world that distrusts authority, has abandoned God, and has little faith in any absolute truth put forth by an individual. . . . Who is [the author] to speak for anyone or anything other than herself and her own experience?”
Groff solves this dilemma by creating a narrator who speaks for herself only very rarely and who, instead, gives us access to points of view that provide counterpoints—and sometimes correctives—to Marie’s point of view.
We saw in an earlier post how this starts at the very beginning of the novel, which places us with Marie traveling through a drizzly March to her new life at the abbey. We get a brief glimpse of the omniscient narrator at the end of the second paragraph of the novel: “She sees for the first time the abbey, pale and aloof on a rise in this damp valley, the clouds drawn up from the ocean and wrung against the hills in constant rainfall. Most of the year this place is emerald and sapphire, bursting under dampness, thick with sheep and chaffinches and newts, delicate mushrooms poking from the rich soil, but now in late winter, all is gray and full of shadows.” Marie doesn’t yet know what the abbey looks like “most of the year,” so this information must come from elsewhere. The effect is so subtle that reader intuits rather than acknowledges the presence of an omniscient narrator.
Other than small touches like this one, the narration remains closely focused on Marie through part one of the novel, and I think this closeness is part of what makes Groff’s use of omniscient narration feel fresh and modern. Groff uses present tense, which also lends freshness and makes her lengthy backstory excursions in this first part of the novel easier to identify.
Groff also uses a technique I’ve seen frequently in recent literary fiction, like Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay: she removes quotation marks from dialogue, which gives the reader the sense that all dialogue is filtered through the consciousness of our point-of-view character rather than being directly reported.
Consider, for example, this passage from later in the first chapter. Marie has just arrived at the abbey, numb from cold and her long ride, and the abbess is washing Marie’s feet:
Marie feels needles and the deep burn as her feet return to life. It is only now under the gentle hands of the blind abbess that the shock is fading. This colorless place may be the afterlife, yet under the abbess’s hands Marie feels she is becoming human again.
In a low voice, she thanks the abbess for washing her feet, she does not deserve such kindness.
But Goda hisses that Marie is not special, that all visitors have their feet washed here, doesn’t she know anything, it is in the Rule.
The abbess orders Goda to leave and bids her to tell the kitcheners to bring the supper up to her rooms. Goda goes, muttering.
The abbess tells Marie not to mind the subprioress, because Goda had had her ambitions, but they were dashed with Marie’s advent. Goda is of course the daughter of the most noble English families, some Berkeley, some Swinton, some Meldred, and she cannot see how a mere bastard sister of a Norman upstart throne-thieving clan should supplant her in the hierarchy. But of course, Emme says, Eleanor demanded the place for Marie and what could Emme do faced with the will of the queen? Besides, Goda would fill the role terribly. She’s more fit to lead the animals she cares for than she is to lead her sisters, with whom she quarrels and whom she torments with her tongue-lashings. The abbess pats Marie’s feet dry with a soft once-white cloth.
Groff brings us deeply inside Marie in the first paragraph of this passage, reminding us of her loneliness and heartbreak—a feeling given physical expression in her “low voice.” Goda’s hiss then feels likewise filtered through Marie’s consciousness, as do her words. Is it in fact a hiss? Are her words as abrupt and confrontational as Marie’s consciousness reports them to us? We need the abbess’s explanation of Goda’s backstory to feel sure. Likewise, Emme’s rush of words feels like stream of consciousness, and we may wonder—because it is not Marie’s consciousness but rather what she is hearing—whether she has filtered out some details.
Notice also how this technique compresses dialogue into action: Marie’s thanks; Goda’s hiss and mutter (this last not attached to any specific words); Emme’s orders; Eleanor’s demands.
Now that we’ve seen how Groff brings us closely to her main point-of-view character, let’s look in detail at a couple passages where she creates more distance. The first comes at the end of part one. Marie, after weeks of languid despair and then a failed attempt to win her way back to court by sending off a collection of lais written for Eleanor, has a vision during Lauds of the nuns’ song emerging as puffs of smoke, condensing into a spiritual elixir when it hits the chapel ceiling, and rolling back to the ground to be absorbed again into the singing nuns, further purifying and intensifying their faith and song:
Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.
As soon as Marie accepts her fate, she begins to grasp her power and take action to improve the condition of the starving nuns. She goes to the cellar, where she discovers the cellatrix has put aside food for her own use, a practice she tries to defend as ordinary in other abbeys:
Ah. Do other cellatrices keep food to themselves despite their sisters starving? Marie asks, and Ruth would later recount that Marie’s face was terrible, granite, inhuman in this moment; that the cellatrix, a stout and loud woman prone to slapping the servants and lesser nuns, cowered in fear. Marie does not shout, though she demotes the cellatrix to work in the fields, though the field nuns are mostly drawn from the English, and certainly not the French of bluest blood.
She promotes to the cellatrix position noseless Sister Mamille, who has not felt hunger since her nose was bitten off and who has a mind that slides only along lines of justice and fairness. She would prove a most excellent and thoughtful cellatrix even to the last days of Marie’s own abbacy.
Groff’s researcher narrator inserts herself here in two places, informing us of what Ruth would “later recount” and showing us the future, revealing that Marie will eventually be abbess and hinting that her tenure in that office will be a long and prosperous one. These touches remind us that Marie is not our only touchpoint through the novel and prepare us for part two, in which Groff begins to move rapidly through time, jumping to Marie’s second year at the abbey, then her third. By the end of part two, thirty years have passed: the “grief-blasted” seventeen-year-old of the opening paragraphs is now a forty-seven-year-old about to step into the full power of her role as abbess.
It is in part three of the novel where Groff’s narrative choices bear their full fruit. We are still most closely allied with Marie’s point of view as she begins to take dramatic steps, guided by visions that tell her to build a labyrinth to protect her nuns from the outside world, to create a dam from a marshland, and, most controversially, to take on the offices of the mass and confession—traditionally reserved for male priests.
The drama in this last part is located as much in the controversy as in the actions Marie takes. Groff wants us to question whether Marie has overstepped her authority, become too drunk on her own power to consider the negative consequences of her actions. To do that effectively, she needs to give readers access to viewpoints outside of Marie’s. I’m going to walk you through the second chapter of part three to show you exactly how Groff pulls it off.
In this chapter, Marie has summoned her four closest advisors to share with them her vision for creating the enormous labyrinth that will encircle the abbey, preventing all access except through hidden tunnels that will be known only to the nuns. To start, we see the four through Marie’s eyes: “The new prioress Tilde, twitchy and scrupulous, with the sweet, startled face of a dormouse. Oh how the girl loves god, hungers for god, believes in the goodness of all things with a kind of rigorous simplicity. Such knowing simplicity in this complex world takes great intelligence, Marie finds. She envies the girl, admires her.” We get similar introductions to Sister Asta, who has the mind of an engineer; Sister Ruth, who was a novice with Marie; and Wulfhild, whom Marie brought to the abbey as a young child and made bailiff of the abbey when she wanted to marry rather than take orders.
After these introductions, the narrator pulls back from Marie to show us the scene from a neutral position, seemingly hovering above all of the characters: “It is deep in the night when all are assembled in Marie’s chambers. Marie’s kitchener brings up cheese and bread and pies of fruit and good sweet wine carried over from Burgundy. With the arrival of the food, the women mind less missing their sleep.” In that last line we move a step closer in, seeing the collective state of mind of all the women in the room except Marie.
In the next paragraph, the narrator takes us into the mind of another character: “Then Marie stands, huge, by the fire. Ruth thinks with wonder that she glows with a light that is not of fire. She tells them slowly of her vision in the fields that day, and of her plan.” Next, we see the internal reaction to Marie’s plan from Tilde, who is “frightened of Marie, how swiftly her mind leaps and turns,” then Asta, who is thrilled by the challenge: “she calculates swiftly and says that it can be done in two years, perhaps, if all hands inessential to the abbey’s urgent needs are used.” We then return to Ruth for two paragraphs as she wrestles with her unease and doubts until “she at last arrives at the understanding that Marie’s will is stronger than any practical impossibilities.” The next paragraph moves us a step away from Ruth’s consciousness, externalizing her worry by making it perceptible in her voice rather than just in her mind: “She lowers her head and prays and raises it and says yes, though in a voice thick with worry when the vote is called.”
Only Wulfhild resists Marie, and at this point the narrator keeps us in that pulled-back position, watching the exchange from above but loosely allied with Ruth, Tilde, and Asta. When Wulfhild begins her intervention, we get a great deal of detail about her but it is all external: “Twelve years now the abbey’s bailiffess, in her strange leather tunic and skirt, shining with the tallow she rubs on to make them impervious to the weather. She is a dark-haired, sunbrowned woman who gives the impression of boiling turmoil held in check by willpower alone, smaller than Marie but like Marie holding a kind of natural authority in her shoulders thrown back.”
When Wulfhild votes no, “the other women in the room hold their breath.” This clearly excludes Marie, who “asks very quietly if Wulfhild does not love her.” Groff is careful to use very specific rather than generalized language in Wulfhild’s response, to make it clear that we are hearing the words unfiltered from the points of view of others in the room: “Wulfhild says she loves her so much that she dares to tell Marie when she is making a mistake and that not all even in this room can boast of such honesty when Marie puts on her murderess face, which she is wearing right now. But the abbess doesn’t scare her, Wulfhild.”
However, the narrator now tells us, “It is clear by the rapid pulse twitching in Wulfhild’s neck that the abbess does in fact scare Wulfhild.” This is an external cue, visible to all the women except Wulfhild, though she must herself feel it. The use of passive voice is savvy here because it holds the dramatic revelation until the end of the sentence and doesn’t require Groff to name who exactly notices this rapid pulse: just Marie or do the other women notice it as well? The next line—“The silence stretches on and it is horrid”—similarly sidesteps subjectivity, but we can guess that it includes all of the women in the room except for Marie, who is the one prolonging the silence. That intuition is confirmed by the next sentence: “In a voice so soft that all the women lean forward to hear, Marie says that when Wulfhild speaks, she speaks in the voice of Marie’s own authority, which she has only lent to the bailiffess. But Marie herself speaks with the authority of the Virgin Mary who has bestowed upon her a great vision that very day. Surely, she says, Wulfhild would not dare to contradict the Virgin Mary.”
It is only at this point that we make a step closer inside Wulfhild’s consciousness, but it is so small as to be barely perceptible: “And so Wulfhild’s resistance is overrun. She sighs. She adjusts. With burning eyes she bends over the table where Asta has already in excitement begun sketching her plans.” Wulfhild’s adjustment is internal, as is her sense of the tears burning in her eyes, but the scene closes with Asta’s plans, leaving the readers positioned again at that ceiling-level view, looking down at the group of women gathered around the table.
Note that Groff also uses what are often called “filter words” to establish whose point of view we are in. These are words like sees, thinks, hears, feels, which writers are generally encouraged to avoid when writing in limited point of view. In omniscient point of view, however, they are crucial anchors.
Once Groff has established this technique of shifting points of view and walked readers through it slowly, she can use it more economically at later points in the novel. Marie’s next vision tells her it is time to build a grand abbess house and shows her how she will fund it. In chapter four of part three, Groff leads us, one by one, through the internal reactions of the same group of women: Tilde weeping in her bed at night at the thought of the work she will have to undertake, Asta dreaming of buttresses, and Wulfhild swallowing her exhaustion and resistance, knowing Marie’s visions will win out.
We are still in Wulfhild’s point of view when she comes to Marie to explain her plan for bringing in stonecutters to do the work but keeping them away from the abbey, and in this remarkable passage, we get a short glimpse into three points of view, moving from Wulfhild to Marie to Asta:
She will work out a system of blindfolds to bring the strangers in, give extra pay for swifter better work. She will take it on herself to keep trouble from imposing itself on Marie’s tender nuns.
Practical Wulfie, Marie says aloud. Inside, she says: heart of my heart.
Done in a year, perhaps, Asta believes, having her own glorious visions.
Because Groff has thoroughly established the range of movements her omniscient narrator can make, and repeatedly demonstrated the presence of that narrator, we can easily follow these movements without feeling disoriented.
Before we close, I want to examine one more way Groff uses point of view to bring meaning to her novel, and this one hews more closely to the traditional use of an omniscient narrator. At a few points, the narrator reaches far into the future to build a bridge between our twenty-first-century reality and the twelfth-century world of the novel. Groff does this exclusively through place, which is almost another character in the novel.
The first example comes when Marie rides out through her newly finished labyrinth and becomes lost. She believes it is punishment for her sin of ambition, to create a work so remarkable that her name will not be lost to history. When she prays and finds her way again, she believes her sin to have been cleansed. Here, however, our omniscient narrator—one now clearly allied with a twenty-first-century attitude toward environmental intervention—speaks up:
What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.
There is a similar moment when Marie achieves another innovation: creating a dam out of a marshland to feed the seasonal stream that runs through the abbey property and make it run perpetually:
The water is calf high, now waist high, now it has already climbed against the temporary wall blocking where the gates will stand; so much has already been swallowed under the surface, the grasses, the nests where the rare marsh birds live, the snake dens, the beaver dams. The last living exemplar of strange red salamander found only in this damp place is chased away from its hibernation nest and perishes, its guts pecked open by a bird. The twisted trees, small but ancient, having seen Romans and Danes, watch the waters close up over their topmost branches.
Note how the trees become point-of-view characters to briefly witness the destruction of this dam before they too are swallowed up by the water.
It’s at the very end of the novel that Groff builds the clearest bridge between Marie’s time and ours. In the last chapter of the novel, we are first with Marie as she dies, and in this scene Groff keeps us very tightly bound to her protagonist. Marie has lost her sight and some of her words and memories by this point, and the scene is a tour de force of intensely experiential, stream of consciousness writing.
But in the second scene of the chapter we move outward again, first seeing the funeral from a distance, then from the collective perspective of the novices, who cannot imagine the abbey as Marie—and we readers—first encountered it. Then Groff takes us into Tilde’s point of view as she discovers the book in which Marie recorded her visions. After Tilde makes a momentous choice about what to do with the book, the omniscient narrator steps in, considering what might have been if Marie had seen her visions rather than her labyrinth or her abbey house or her dam as her most important legacy:
Tilde is not blessed with mystical sight, she cannot see . . . the visions that might have shown a different path for the next millennium. . . . How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life. The abbey crumbling, the earth warming, the clouds abandoning this place, and the newts and birds vanishing, and in the new dryness of the hot world, the traces of the old dead abbey’s buildings are thrown up in seared brown lines upon the grasses of the strange changed place absent of holy women, the lines of the labyrinth buried under the roads and houses of later, even more ravenous people.
As readers, we recognize that we are the ravenous people living in the hot world, and that shock of seeing ourselves named in a novel set in this faraway time closes the distance, making us want to reach back in time and grasp those visions of Marie to help us build a different kind of future.
Takeaways:
Be deliberate about your point-of-view choices. Know why you are making your overall choice, as well as the effects of choices in individual scenes.
Establish your omniscient narrator early by providing details your point-of-view character or protagonist cannot know.
To make omniscient narration feel fresh, give readers close access to the protagonist, moving away only for select moments.
To avoid confusing your readers or earning the dreaded “head-hopping” label, be sure to use techniques such as filter words to identify the point-of-view character and control the distance of the scene, stepping further back first rather than jumping directly from one character’s thoughts to another’s. Writer Emma Darwin has excellent practical tips and examples for POV handoffs.