How do you make omniscient narration fresh and modern?

I’ve been wanting to write about the way Lauren Groff uses point of view in Matrix since I first read the book—it may even have been one of the inspirations for the original Novel Study blog 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. (See my post on The City We Became for an explanation of the different kinds of point of view.)

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 (1872) to give you a sense of the nineteenth-century style of omniscient narration:

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. If we have access to a character’s inner life, it isn’t direct—it’s filtered through our omniscient narrator, as in this passage from later in the same paragraph:

Right there in the opening paragraph is the central question of the novel: How is a woman like Dorothea—a woman of intense faith and feelings—going to find a place in a 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 detached 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.

The narration remains closely focused on Marie through part one of the novel as she moves from grief to acceptance. 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 (what a word!) has put aside food for her own use, a practice she tries to defend as ordinary in other abbeys. Marie’s response is decisive:

Groff’s researcher-biographer 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 revelations 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.

In part three of the novel, 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.

Part of the drama in this last part of the novel comes from the reader’s shifting relationship to Marie. It’s easy to cheer the demotion of the greedy cellatrix in part one; Marie’s choices in part three are more complicated. 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:

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 employed as bailiff 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:

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, looking at Marie: “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 learn a wealth of details about her, but they are all external:

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:

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 herself must feel it. The passive voice construction (“It is clear . . .”) means that Groff doesn’t have 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:

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.

In order to establish whose point of view we are in, Groff uses filter words like “sees,” “thinks,” “hears,” “feels.” In limited point-of-view narration, we don’t need these words because we already know which character’s mind we’re inhabiting; eliminating filter words closes the gap between character and readers. In omniscient point of view, however, they are crucial anchors. (See my posts on The Searcher and The Last Thing He Told Me for more about filter words.) 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: As we saw in my post on its opening, she removes quotation marks from dialogue, which removes the reader’s direct access to it. Instead, it feels as if all dialogue is filtered through the consciousness of our point-of-view character or presented to us by the omniscient narrator.

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 how she will bring in stonecutters to do the work but keep 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:

Because Groff has thoroughly established her omniscient narrator’s range of movement and repeatedly demonstrated the presence of that narrator, we can easily follow these shifts without feeling disoriented. Omniscient narration is an advanced technique and offers greater flexibility along with higher risks than limited narration. If writing in limited point of view is like driving on a controlled-access highway, then writing in omniscient point of view is like taking an all-terrain vehicle off-road. You will be able to find less-traveled spots—and you also run a good chance of losing your readers along the way unless you proceed carefully.

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