Historical and Implied Authors and Readers

Abstract

N A SENSE all narrative is embedded, the narrative itself existing at the center of a series of real and fictional agents who present it and receive it. A narrative is narrated by a narrator to a narratee, and the study of these relations is one proper focus of a narratological essay. But framing these elements are other relations among historical and implied authors and readers, and study of these is prerequisite to an examination of narrating. As I shall show, the failure by theorists of narrative to provide consistent definitions of these terms and to maintain distinctions among them has been a recurring source of confusion for theories of narrative and their applications. My sense of the meaning of these terms can be suggested briefly by postulating that each has its distinctive function: the historical author writes, the historical reader reads; the implied author means, the implied reader interprets; the narrator speaks, the narratee hears. This last pair of terms is to be understood as metaphorical: the narrator and narratee are constructed from the discourse of the text by inference and do not literally speak or hear, and indeed may be presented as silently thinking or writing and reading rather than speaking and hearing. In practice a certain degree of overlapping may seem to occur among these categories: the historical author may intend to mean something by a work and the historical reader, especially a certain type of literary critic, will seek (and surely will find) the work's meaning; many narrators also present themselves as having intent to mean. But the categories may be clearly defined and separated at the theoretical level. It is the historical author's physical act, not the narrator's, that produces the text; the implied author's implicit intentions, not those expressed by the historical author or narrator, are the definitive source of meaning in a work; these intentions can only be entirely grasped by the implied reader, though the historical reader may speculate about them. A closer analysis will clarify this sketch.