The Multiplicity of Implied Authors and the Complex Case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Abstract

understand the implied author in precisely the same way.1 As Nunning points out, there is “no widespread agreement about what the term actually designates” (239). Some writers highlight the implied author as a “core of norms” (as Wayne Booth put it [rhetoric 74]). Others emphasize the relation to the real author, as when Phelan characterizes the implied author as a “subset” of the real author (45). Still others, for example, Rimmon-Kenan (77), stress the reader’s role in constructing an idea of an author. These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But some work is required to reconcile them. In the following pages, I will first try to clarify the idea of implied authorship and its relation to what might be described as the receptive or readerly intention of the real author. In the second section, I will take up the cognitive processes involved in such intention, arguing that the unity or consistency of their outputs is greatly overestimated. Rather than a single, consistent authorial or implied authorial intent, our cognitive architecture actually predicts that we will find partially contradictory ideas and attitudes. These partial contradictions affect not only theme and emotional response, but even some story elements, such as characterization. This is not to say that there is no unity. There are certainly strong tendencies toward continuity within most works. We may reserve the phrase “implied author” for the intentions that manifest or guide that continuity. For the more local, partially discontinuous intentions, however, we may refer instead to “implicated authors.”2 These implicated authors vary with the