Some critics (and readers) are instinctively hostile to the notion that we should analyse narratives as if they had somehow given birth to themselves and had nothing to do with their human authors whatsoever. Even we here on LiCOR would admit that finding things out about when and where an author lived, what were the prevailing belief systems and institutions of the society in which they went about their business, what works of literature tended to look like and what they were usually about in those days, and so on, can provide useful context for our understanding of the narratives they authored. We would continue to affirm, however, that the meaning of these narratives cannot be reduced to or explained by the personalities, outlooks or even documented intentions of their authors (for the reasons given here). To explain a narrative and justify our interpretation of it, that is, we need to look elsewhere.
This does not mean, however, that we need to do away with the sense of an overarching, unified intelligence that presides over and consciously arranges the various elements of the narrative’s discourse into a coherent and meaningful whole. We ourselves would prefer to call this totality simply ‘the narrative’ – i.e. the sum of its various parts – and to convey in our analysis of every such narrative our understanding of how its individual elements fit together and enable it to signify (i.e. convey its meaning) as a whole.
Some critics, though, prefer to characterise this totality, this overarching intelligence, this composite logic, this dominant ideology – call it what you will – the ‘implied author.’ This entity may include some of the characteristics of the real-life author, but she or he will never be identical with that author. This ‘implied author’ is in many respects the ‘voice’ of the narrative, which is itself comprised of a combination of the voice of its narrator, the voices of its other characters, the voices of the dominant and submerged social, moral, cultural and other concerns to which it gives space, and so on. It is accordingly the aggregate of the norms and opinions – along with the respective valuations and/or criticisms of those norms and opinions – that make up the total worldview of the narrative. This figure is in practice something each and every one of us produces for ourselves as we read through and reflect upon a given narrative, but it is also as a result something we might then use to explain our interpretation of that narrative afterwards. For instance, once we have established the worldview or voice of this implied author, we might use the differences and similarities between it and that of the narrative’s narrator or other characters to discuss the degree to which the views of those other participants are either upheld or contested (or even celebrated or mocked) in the narrative.
Many of those who invoke this notion of an implied author give him or her the same name as the real-life historical author of that narrative. Thus we have the Charles Dickens (or in some overly-fussy formulations, the ‘Charles Dickens’) of Great Expectations, the Charles Dickens (or ‘Charles Dickens’) of A Tale of Two Cities, and so on, without the critic involved making the claim that the authorial intentions or intellectual commitments of these two Dickenses are exactly the same in both cases.
Here on LiCOR, though, we think it is both simpler and more accurate to talk about what a particular narrative is saying or doing rather than what we think its author is trying to say or do through that narrative. To put this another way, we would prefer to discuss what Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities have to say about (for instance) the consequences of social mobility than to compare what the Charles Dickens (or ‘Charles Dickens’) of Great Expectations or the Charles Dickens (or ‘Charles Dickens’) of A Tale of Two Cities has to say about those things.
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