Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter

Abstract

Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter Jan Alber (bio) I want to thank James Phelan and John V. Knapp for giving me the opportunity to respond to the former's target essay. A couple of years ago, I had the honor of spending some time at Ohio State University under the auspices of Project Narrative. During my stay there, I had various discussions with [End Page 34] Phelan, and was extremely impressed by his interactions with others. It took me a while to figure out that the way in which he engages with other people's opinions or projects closely correlates with his rhetorical theory of narrative: he is always interested in finding out what exactly it is that others are trying to do, and he then takes things from there. I also sat in on one of his classes on rhetorical narratology, and I really liked the way in which he encouraged his students to ask critical questions concerning his approach, to which he then responded. Despite this positive impression, I have some problems with his written work. In my response, I will zoom in on the confidence with which he talks about the intentions of the implied author (i.e., "the stream-lined version of the actual author responsible for the construction of the narrative" that Phelan recently transformed into "the author" [10–11]) as well as the reactions of both the authorial audience (i.e., "the author's hypothesized audience" that shares his or her values [10]) and the actual (flesh-and-blood) audience. I do not take issue with Phelan's highly interesting readings of, say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), or David Small's Stitches (2009) but rather with his politics of speaking for others. He does not only think that he is for some reason entitled to speak for the author and several different readers; his permanent references to alleged authorial intentions and reactions of audiences also create the impression that his interpretations are quasi-objective investigations. Finally, I will say a few words about his definition of the term "narrative," which, at least to my mind, produces counterintuitive results. On pages 29–31 of his target essay, Phelan discusses an "implausible" passage from Huckleberry Finn that "communicates the outlandish outcomes of Jim's imagination" (34). In addition, he explains to his readers why Twain is doing what he is doing, and he also tells them how Twain's audiences react. The main problem is how does he know these things? For me, such passages are highly problematic because they presuppose that Phelan has (for some unspecified reason) direct access to authors and their audiences. However, since there is no way of ever knowing whether Phelan "gets it right," formulations such as "Twain wants to do A, and he effectively draws on B, C, and D, to accomplish A" and "audiences are willing to overlook the implausibility because doing so enables entertainment" (31) serve to cover up the fact that we are here only confronted with Phelan's opinions, intuitions, speculations, or hypotheses. His analyses do not at [End Page 35] all lack in terms of quality or clarity; rather, Phelan's terminology elevates his subjective impressions to seemingly objective statements about what is "really" going on between authors and their audiences. However, we simply do not know whether his intuitions have anything to do with what Twain had in mind or with how ideal or real audiences react. Since readers can never be sure that they have formed correct hypotheses about the implied author's intentions, I want to follow instead David Herman's slightly more modest proposal to move beyond the "compartmentalized intentionality" of the implied author—that is, beyond an approach that is grounded in a view of intentions as inner, mental objects—and toward "an approach of narrative understanding that more fully and more openly grounds stories in intentional systems, that acknowledges the extent to which the process of interpretation hinges on making defeasible (= possibly wrong) inferences about communicative intentions" (244). This proposal closely correlates with the idea that intentions are distributed...