ABSTRACT
From a narratological point of view, one of the most controversial legacies the eighteenth-century novel has bestowed onto its inheritors is the technique of authorial narration. Described by Franz K. Stanzel as one of three typical narrative situations, authorial narration as defined in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory is ‘characterized by a highly audible and visible narrator’ who ‘sees the story from the ontological position of an outsider, that is, a position of absolute authority which allows her/him to know everything about events and characters, including their thoughts and unconscious motives’ (Jahn, 2005, p. 364). This association of authorial narration with an assumption of ‘absolute authority’ has, in conjunction with the modernist preference for ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, made the mode seem suspect to many twenty- and twenty-first-century novelists and their audiences. David Lodge, to name a prominent example, sees ‘an increasing reluctance among literary novelists to assume the stance of godlike omniscience that is implied by any third-person representation of consciousness’ (Lodge, 2002, p. 86). Authorial narration, it might seem, is reactionary, both aesthetically and ideologically speaking: incompatible with contemporary scepticism towards authority and grand narratives.
