Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [48]
A given narrator, Phelan observes, "can be unreliable in different ways at different points in his or her narration."5 For example, Frankie, the child-narrator of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, both misreads and misregards what is going on around him, whereas Nabokov's Humbert misregards, misreports, and underreports his actions and Lolita's responses to them. Likewise, Mr. Stevens, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, misreports and misregards certain events of his story as well as underreports and underreads his own motives.6 When "Stevens says that 'any objective observer' will find the English landscape 'the most deeply
9: The Implied Author
satisfying in the world,' he demonstrates a misperception analogous to his saying that 'any objective observer' would find the English cuisine the most satisfying in the world."7 He thus exhibits unreliability both "on the axis of knowledge/perception" (misreading) and "on the axis of ethics and evaluation" (misregarding).8
Note that Stevens is perfectly sincere in his belief about the "objective" superiority of the English landscape. This belief (Phelan suggests) might be rooted in his "mistaken value system,"9 which takes as a given certain subjective assumptions about the world. From the point of view of cognitive theory, by considering his take of the English landscape universal, Stevens loses track of himself as a source of this representation. To "reject the narrator's words and reconstruct an alternative,"10 the reader thus has to become aware of the missing source tag—"Stevens thinks that . . ."— and to reapply it.
Every step in this process engages and titillates our metarepresentational capacity: We come into the awareness of the missing source tag. We reapply the tag. We contemplate various ramifications of the difference between the two representations ("the English landscape is the most deeply satisfying in the world" vs. "Stevens thinks that the English landscape is the most deeply satisfying in the world") that jostle against each other in our readerly consciousness. We begin to wonder what other representations within the story may also be missing their source tags. As Phelan points out, "[OJnce any unreliability is detected all the narration is suspect"11—in some narratives, the game of the missing source tags is never really over. We close such books with a strange feeling that the state of cognitive uncertainty that they induced in us may never be fully resolved. We continue guessing which representations within the story deserve to be treated as "true" and which have to remain metarepresentations with a source tag pointing to the first-person narrator.
9
SOURCE-MONITORING AND THE IMPLIED AUTHOR
similar kind of guessing game (whom to trust and how much?) takes
place when literary critics contrast such figures as the "real" author of the text, its narrator (especially when unreliable), and its "implied author." If you are unfamiliar with the latter term, Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology defines it as "the implicit image of an author in the text, taken to be standing behind the scenes and to be responsible for its design and for the values and cultural norms it adheres to."1 Students of narrative have been debating the added value of this concept at least since the publication of Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which Booth suggested that the category of implied author captures our "intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole" of a given text.2 (For a good summary of critical grapplings with "this anthropomorphized phantom," see Nunning.3) Among cognitive narratologists, Palmer remains