"The Absence of Her Voice from that Concord": The Value of the Implied Author

Peter J. Rabinowitz Hamilton College "The Absence of Her Voice from that Concord": The Value ofthe Implied Author Hamilton College and a Utica coffee house have been co-sponsoring a series of community lectures under the rubric "Imagining America" — and two winters ago, 1 gave a talk on the critical reception of Lolita. To do so, I first had to walk briefly through my own hardly radical interpretation. Whatever Humbert's manipulations of Dolores and the narrative audience, Nabokov's fundamental purposes, I said, are profoundly ethical, as he teaches us to navigate around Humbert's postures and prose and to recognize the ugly truth he tries to hide. Nothing striking in my reading there — but during the question period, a philosopher chum. Celeste Friend (Nabokov couldn't have given her a better name), proposed another turn ofthe screw. The novel, she said, supplies pornographic pleasure for at least some readers — indeed, for more readers than will admit it. Suppose the moral veneer ofthe novel is just a front? Suppose that Nabokov not only knew that his high-art surface was offering a way for certain readers to indulge their illicit fantasies (much as the "serious" articles used to serve as a cover for intellectuals buying Playboy), but also was laughing at those of us who tried to defend the novel as artistic and high-minded? Suppose Lolita is an elaborate display of smoke and mirrors aimed at tricking intellectuals into defending smut? I'll return to this question later — but first a little light theoretical preparation on the subject of implied authors. Granted, at first this isn't going to sound even like light theory, but please bear with me. 1 recently decided that I needed to buy a new turntable. Given the cost — and I'll tell you at the end of my essay what the top-rated Clearaudio turntable goes for — I turned to a few friends for advice. The typical response was a blank look and the question, "What do you need a turntable for?" And the answer, of course, is that if you live in a world of downloads, or even of compact discs, you don't need one. I raise this bit of personal shopping history because that response ("What do you need one for?") so closely resembles what we often hear from theorists who go after the implied author: "What do you need it for?" And the answer is, if you live in a world of certain kinds of intellectual inquiry, you probably don't. But people who live in those worlds will never be able to prove Style: Volume 45, No. 1, Spring 2011 99 100 Peter Rabinowtiz their larger point that it's unnecessary for the rest of us — at least, they'll never be able to prove it theoretically. Why? There are, I think, two overlapping reasons. First, there's the literary analog to Gödel's incompleteness theorem: literature will always exceed the theories we develop to explain, evaluate, and interpret it. No theoretical schema can cover all the ground: there will always be something left out, some line of inquiry for which it will be inadequate. As a result, theoretical systems that call on Occam's razor to slice away the implied author are doomed from the start. At best, pure theorists can show that there are some coherent systems that don't require it; but they can't show that those coherent systems are sufficient to answer our questions, especially our future questions. I'm sorry to have to pick on David Herman here because I have collaborated productively with him and because I admire his work tremendously. But when, in "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance," he tries to eliminate the implied author using Occam's razor (Herman 243) — and it's odd that anyone who relishes complicated taxonomies as much as Herman does would try to wield that particular weapon — he's superficially successful. That is, he manages to provide a sensible program that doesn't include it — a coherent program that, moreover, manages to do the things he wants to do. But what does that prove? In the long run it's an inductive argument of the sort that can never clinch the case because it can't begin to represent all kinds of narrative or all the kinds of questions we might want to ask. It's not only, to use one of Herman's favorite words, defeasible; it's easily defeasible with just a single example of the sort I'll be providing later in my paper. In the same way, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck's claim that "narratology can function perfectly without using the term" (18) holds true only under a limited notion of "functioning perfectly" — and falls apart when other functions are called upon. Besides the incompleteness theorem, there's a second reason why appeals to theory won't get rid of the implied author. It's what I call the PROUST principle: Practice Rigorously Outranks Universal Schemas and Theories. Literary study is more like engineering than like theoretical physics. Thus, theoretical tools don't drop out when they're "disproven" in an abstract way; they drop out when they no longer serve a day-to-day practical purpose. As long as they're still useful — like Newtonian mechanics, or like such outmoded terms as first-person narrator, omniscient narrator, and point of view — they'll continue to hang around, even well after serious and superficially devastating theoretical attacks have been launched against them. As Kindt and Müller observe, although more ruefully than 1 would, "certain prominent concepts in cultural studies are used not because of their The Value of the Implied Author 101 suitability but rather in spite of their unsuitability — because, that is, they make it possible to articulate certain beliefs" (Kindt and Müller 151). It's in the day-to-day grappling with specific problems about specific texts that the worth of a concept is forged; whatever the intellectual force of Nünning's influential "Deconstructing and Reconceptualizing the Implied Author," it founders because it doesn't engage seriously with actual literary texts at all. To put it provocatively: analytical tools are valued for their productivity more than for their lack of fuzziness. David Herman has accused the defenders of the implied author (and, by extension, defenders of the authorial audience) of minimizing the heurism of the scheme, so let me put the record straight: the authorial audience is fundamentally and profoundly a heuristic device, and I've neverthought otherwise. I believe the same to be true of the implied author. These concepts don't in and of themselves legitimate our readings, because they're always hypothetical and subject to revision. Rather, they provide ways of talking about our readings and sharing them, ways that are convenient under some but not all circumstances.' They're valuable not because they clinch conversations but because they begin them by illuminating new angles and giving us a new purchase on the texts we read. It should come as no surprise that, in the rest of this essay, I'm going to be arguing for the pragmatic usefulness of the implied author, a far easier task than the theoretical task Herman has taken on. In doing so, of course, 1 won't be aiming to address all the problems with this difficult concept. I'll be bracketing a lot of important issues, including the key issue of how the implied author as created by the author ties in with implied author as created by the reader (cf Kindt and Müller 60). I'll also be leaving aside the issue of the implied author's agency: for the moment, I'll be talking about the implied author as something created by the real author rather than as the source of the text. Evenft-omthis restricted perspective, the implied author is a Protean concept — perhaps overly so, as Herman has argued. So let me address its multiplicity head on. Kindt and Müller rightly point out that "Booth did not create the implied author concept in The Rhetoric of Fiction, but actually introduced a cover term for several concepts or variants of a single concept" (7): and I'd like to turn to three of them today, addressing the issues of authorial intention, of biography, and of rhetorical counterpoint. First, with regard to intention: It's well known, but it bears repeating, that The • Rhetoric ofFiction was written at a dark time when author and intention were banned. To a certain extent, the terminology was a sleight of hand to smuggle the categories back into more or less formalist critical discourse. This is the context in which I 102 Peter Rabinowtiz most agree with Herman's claim that it's "a compromise formation" (242) — and, perhaps not coincidental ly, it's the context in which the term seems to be dropping out of our conversations. That's not because it's wrong or theoretically suspect, but because it's decreasingly useful, since nowadays anti-intentionalists don't wield as much power: the prohibition against talking about intention set out in Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" now seems as quaint as the prohibition against using the word "stationery" instead of "letter paper" or "writing paper" set out in Vogue's Book of Etiquette published the same year (Fenwick 109) (On the other hand. Vogue's recommendation that you not play the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde as a prelude to a wedding ceremony still seems apt [177].) Nowadays, we're once again allowed to talk about "the author" without hedging.^ But the implied author is more than a circumlocution that allows us to bring talk of intention into polite society. The implied author is also (and this became more important to Booth as time passed) a way of thinking about how authors choose to present themselves. This is where biography, in the most general sense, comes in. What exactly is involved in this act of self-presentation? As the narrator of Proust's In Search of Lost Time points out, writers may well criticize "the vices . . .of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives, or their own misdeeds . . ., without, however, thinking to alter their way of life or improve the tone of their household" (Proust 181). James Phelan has introduced the metaphor of streamlining to describe what's going on here (¿/v/>7g45), but I'm not ful ly persuaded by the term. Phelan himself, of course, uses it broadly, recognizing a wide range of possible differences between author and implied author; but the implications ofthe word "streamlining" are less supple, suggesting that in creating his or her "second self," the author merely sands off rough edges in the interests of polish and efficiency. And that matches practice only in some cases and to some extent. Think ofthe love-sick Julien Sorel implied by the love-letters he fakes — hardly an example of streamlining. Would the difference between real and implied Julien be any different if he were an actual person rather than a character in a novel? If that example doesn't work for you, think of your own implied authors as you write letters of applications, ads for dating services, thank-you notes, even academic articles. 1 can't speak for anyone else here, but I know that 1 heighten and even flí/í/characteristics that I want my readers to think I possess. Referring to books I haven't quite finished or expressing enthusiasm over "impottant texts" that bored me to death are the most minor of these self-improvement projects. Nor need the implied author always be an improvement on the real author. When Raymond The Value of the Implied Author 103 Chandler points to Hollywood writers who, under the pressure of required "personal and artistic subordination," find themselves "becoming little by little a conniver rather than a creator," he is talking about implied authors who are far less skilled than real authors (120). It's not a problem that emerges simply when writing for Hollywood or producing dumbed-down mass-market fiction. I'll admit that when 1 am forced to participate in writing a strategic plan or an accreditation document, I often find myself creating a second self who is (I hope!) distinctly inferior to my "real" self And I doubt I am alone in this. Note that from this perspective, the implied author is not a mere theoretical abstraction created by the reader, it is (assumed to be) something created (at least partly consciously) by the real author in the same way that he or she creates characters and plots. The implied author is therefore a useful — I'll go so far as to say crucial — concept in certain kinds of biographical study, for those times when we're interested in the author and his or her context rather than in the text per se. Consider, for instance, of what's involved when we're exploring the forces (political, psychological, whatever) that influence what an author can say and how he or she can say it. Since my own preferred implied author is a music critic as much as a literary theorist, let me start with a musical example. In 1949, Dmitri Shostakovich penned Song ofthe Forests, a patriotic potboiler in honor ofthe post-war Soviet reforestation projects. There's a lot you can say about it without recourse to the implied author (or, technically, the implied composer): you can talk about its formal structure, its orchestration, its thematic links to other works, its impact on listeners, its reception history, the conventions underlying its rhetorical gestures. But suppose you're interested in Song ofthe Forests as an entryway into understanding both what it was like to live under Stalin and how sincere (dangerous word there!) Shostakovich was? That kind of study would require some way to talk about the difference between the "real" composer and the image he projected through the score. To return to literature: it may be fashionable to chuckle at Tolstoy when, in What is Art?, he insists on judging art by sincerity; but it seems odder still to assume sincerity as we read — and erasing the difference between author and implied author is, among other things, to paper over the gap in which authorial insincerity can be seen. There's value in exploring the difference between the real Tolstoy — he ofthe ruinous marriage — and the more noble soul projected by his late works, including What is Art? There's value in exploring the incongruity between the real Raymond Chandler — alcoholic, depressed, occasionally suicidal — and the stronger image of himself (as distinct from the image of Philip Marlowe) that he '0^ Peter Rabinowtiz presents in his novels. Now there are lots of ways of getting at these splits: Freud offered contributions to this discussion. But the implied author seems to me one ofthe simplest and therefore one of most useful because, among other things, it allows us to talk about both conscious and unconscious self-fashionings and because it allows us to talk about freely chosen and socially or psychologically imposed self-fashionings, too. I don't have time for a full taxonomy here, but charting out the possible axes along which actual and implied authors can differ would probably give us something at least as rich as Phelan's taxonomy ofthe different kinds of narrator unreliability. Fair enough, you may say, but surely as a way of talking about the structure, meaning, and effect of literary texts, we don't need the concept, do we? Don't we have enough other tools? Even if we want to be intentionalists, shouldn't we follow Hennan's lead andapply Occam's razor at least here? Shouldn't we go along with Kindt and Müller when they point out that "actual intentionalism," which "ascribes the meaning of literary texts directly to their empirical authors," simply "does not need m additional entity such as the implied author to which meaning can be attributed" (13, italics added)? Well, as I've been saying since I began, need is relative to the task at hand: I don't need any glue other than Elmer's and storebought epoxy, but my friend Harry Richter, who's a violin maker, assuredly does. Among other things, what we need depends on what literary texts we are talking about — and that always reminds me of one of my favorite observations by Mary Louise Pratt. Having written one ofthe best books on literature and speech act theory, she went on to provide a critique ofthe model. In particular, she warned against taking particular situations and treating them as the norm: speech-act theory works, she said, for such "highly valued, and highly privileged contexts . as lovemaking, psychiatry, private tennis instruction or dental hygiene. But one needs to be skeptical about this case as representing any kind of natural norm" (Pratt 61). Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" —a story Hennan discusses eloquently in "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance" — isn't exactly the literary equivalent of dental hygiene; but for all its understated subtlety, it's still too clean and well-lighted to stand in for "all stories." Or maybe I mean "too courteous" rather than too clean — for even if we don't need the implied author as a tool for interpreting well-behaved texts, not all texts fit this privileged paradigm. Some are unruly, sotne are inappropriate, some are even incoherent. Most obviously, as other defenders ofthe implied author have pointed out, there are many fraudulent texts — of which James Frey's A Million Little Pieces has been among the most prominent in the last few years — that can The Value of the Implied Author 105 be usefully illuminated by distinguishing the author from his or her projected selfimage.' Continuations (say, the post-Fleming James Bond books)'' and "series" texts like the Nancy Drew novels also take on a multi-voicedness which is simpler to talk about when we bring the implied author into the mix. Several volumes in the Nancy Drew series were written by the male Walter Karig (Karell 42). But in some sense, he was writing "as a female" — and he was certainly received as a female by the girls who read him. Surely the notion of the implied author is a handy way of talking about that duality. Then there are multi-authored narratives from the Ellery Queen novels to the Conrad-Ford collaborations to nearly every film we see. But there are trickier and more interesting cases than that. As I've argued elsewhere, for instance, Nella Larsen's Passing is a double novel ("Betraying"). Not only does it have two authorial audiences — one aware ofits lesbian subtext, the other one not — but in my analysis, that doubleness is essential to its rhetorical workings. It's possible, of course, to talk about the whole process from the readers' (and teachers') perspectives — which is how I first approached it. But if we're at all interested in talking about how Larsen as the author fits into that exchange, we have to have some mechanism to talk about her double self-projection; and the implied author is the easiest way I know of doing so. Which brings me back to Lolita. Whether or not you agree with the particular position suggested by Celeste Friend, it's hard to deny that Nabokov's novels are particularly contrapuntal and that much of their dcliciously frustrating flavor comes from our sense — nourished by Nabokov's very public, but not necessarily trustworthy, extra-textual pronouncements — that the author is engaged in sneaky behavior: not that he's being insincere in some cheap sense but that he's playing a series of dexterous ethical games that may allow the real author, in the end, to look down on even that small community of readers that the implied author seems to accept. I'm pretty sure that the same actual author wrote both Pale Fire and the translation oí Eugene Onegin—and when I want to talk about the curious dissonance between their "authorial" voices, a dissonance that gives Pale Fire in particular much of its flavor, the concept of the implied author provides a helpful way to do that, too. There are, in other words, more voices in (and among) Nabokov's novels than we often recognize explicitly. At the end oí Lolita, Humbert Humbert, listening to "the melody of children at play," realizes that "the hopelessly poignant thing was . . . the absence of [Lolita's] voice from that concord" (310). Eliminating the voice of the implied author from our experience of works like Lolita may not be hopelessly poignant in the same way, but it certainly reduees our ability to come to grips with the interest and intricacy of his work. 106 Peter Rabinowtiz In the end, then, despite the nay-sayers, the implied author will hang around for a while — not because it's a tightly focused concept, not because it fits into some ultimate scheme, not because it's always necessary, but because when you want to ask certain kinds of questions, it turns out to be extremely valuable. Just as, when you want to play music stored in a certain kind of recording medium, a turntable is extremely valuable. Which is more valuable? I don't know — but I do know that the top of the line Clearaudio turntable will run you $150,000 — and that's without an arm or cartridge. Notes ' As I put it in Before Reading, "Indeed, authorial reading is not only a way of reading but, perhaps equally important, a way of talking about how you read — that is, the result of a community agreement that allows discussion of a certain sort to take place by treating meanings in a particular way (as found rather than made). In this sense, what Susan R. Suleiman says about the notions of the implied author and the implied reader (which are themselves only variant formulations of the notion of authorial intention) applies to the authorial audience as well: they are, she says, 'necessary fictions, guaranteeing the consistency of a specific reading without guaranteeing its validity in any absolute sense'" (Rabinowitz 22-23). ^ In fact, even Rhetoric of Fiction, once it had developed the concept and gotten intention back into the conversation, often dropped the terminology for this purpose. Booth's discussion of Emma, for instance, doesn't really hinge on the concept in any serious way — and you can read and understand that chapter without knowing what an implied author is. ^ As is well known, this is one of those areas where Genette is ready to admit a distinction between real and implied authors (146-47). " Sebastian Faulks, who penned the 2008 James Bond novel Devil May Care, describes his authorship as follows: I developed a prusc that is about 80 percent Fleming. 1 didn't go the final distance lor fear of straying into pastiche, but I strictly observed his rules of chapter and sentence construction. My novel Is meant to stand in the line of Fleming's own books, where the story is everything. In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkeling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart fi"om the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkeling. Works Cited Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Print. The Value ofthe Implied Author 107 Chandler, Raymond. Raymond Chandler Speaking. Edited by Dorothy Gardinerand Kathrine Sorley Walker. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Print. Faulks, Sebastian. "Interviews & Essays." Devil May Care. Web. <http:// search.barnesandnoble.com/Devil-May-Car e/Sebastian-Faulks/ e/9781615568949/?itm=3#ITV>. Fenwick, Millicent. Vogue's Book of Etiquette: A Complete Guide to Traditional Forms and Modern Usage. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948. Print. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans, by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1988. Print. Herman, David. "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 6.2 (2008): 233-60. Print. Herman, Luc and Bart Vervaeck. Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2005. Print. Kareil, Linda K. "Originator, Writer, Editor, Hack: Carolyn Keene and Changing Definitions of Authorship." Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths: Essays on the Fiction of Girl Detectives, edited by Michael G. Cornelius and Melanie E. Gregg, 33-46. McFariand & Company: Jefferson, N.C. 2008. Print. Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller. The implied Author: Concept and Controversy. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Print. Nünning, Ansgar. "Deconstructing and Reconceptualizing the Implied Author: The Implied Author — Still a Subject of Debate." Anglistik ; Organ des Verbandes Deutscher Anglisten 8.2 (1997): 95-116. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1955. Print. Phelan, James. ¿/V/«g/o7e///í¿ioM//r/) Rhetoric and Ethics ofCharacter Narration. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell UP, 2005. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. "Ideology and Speech-Act Theory." Poetics Today 7.1(1986): 59-72. Print. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time: Volume II: Within a Budding Grove. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1987. Rpt. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1998. Print. 108 Peter Rabinowitz . '"Betraying the Sender': The Rhetoric and Ethics of Fragile Texts." Narrative 2.3 (October 1994): 201-213. Print. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Intentional Fallacy." W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. 77?^ Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: U of Kentucky P 1954. 3-18. Print. Copyright of Style is the property of Northern Illinois University, English Department and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.