Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [49]
On the one hand, I see Palmer's view as broadly corroborated by what we are learning about our metarepresentational capacity. Constantly keeping track of the difference between the implied author and the narrator means in effect retaining a source tag behind every minute instance of narration and, moreover, doing so after you have already bracketed the whole story as a metarepresentation pointing to the author. It means, for example, saying to yourself as you read Pride and Prejudice and come across Lydia Bennet's elopement with Wickham: "Austen claims that Lydia ran away with Wickham"—a kind of micro source-tracking5 that is simply too cognitively expensive and as such is not a default mode of our reading process. It seems to me that it is precisely because we do not, in our everyday reading practices, trace back to the author every single representation contained in the text (once we have bracketed off the whole fictional text as a metarepresentation) that the writers fond of unreliable narrators can play their complicated games with their readers.
On the other hand, I am not really that invested in debating either the overall usefulness of the category of the implied author or the cognitive feasibility of maintaining such a category. What I find more fascinating is the cultural history of the figure of the implied author. Susan Lanser has characterized its introduction into the narratological discourse in the early 1960s as a "problematic compromise." As she sees it, the figure of the implied author "not only adds another narrating subject to the heap but it
9: The Implied Author
fails to resolve what it sets out to bridge: the author-narrator relationship." At the same time, at a "crucial moment in literary history the word 'implied' did provide a respectable prefix with which the mention of the author became permissible."6
Lanser is referring to the time when the terms author and reader had "all but disappeared from the analysis of point of view, because they were not considered properly textual personae." By 1960, "Anglo-American New Criticism had taken as a basic tenet the autonomy of the text as a concrete linguistic object; thus it became virtually taboo to speak of the text as an act of communication among real people in the real world."71 find Lanser's account of the compensatory function of the term implied author particularly gratifying from the cognitive perspective I champion here. It appears that, prevented from speaking about the "real" author behind the fictional narrative, critics nevertheless found a way of still retaining a source tag behind this narrative—by introducing the category of the "implied" author. Compare this act of cognitive compensation to the one that I described earlier, when talking about Barthes's-Foucault's concept of the "Death of the Author." Here, the author is substituted by the "implied" author; there, the author was substituted by the reader. It seems that a culture will find a way to insinuate a source tag into its perception of a representation that is a metarepresentation. A work of fiction has to have an agent-specifying source tag affixed to it, however extravagant (e.g., "dead" or "implied") that agent may seem at certain historical junctures.
Let us give this screw yet another turn. The implied author is alive and well and entering his/her forties. As a heated discussion at a recent meeting of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature demonstrated, this figure continues to exercise a strong pull on critics' imagination,