Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
14.3 Ways of reading authorship
Unit 14 Authorship and intention
Section 3 Attributing meaning
We have seen that the notion of authorship is problematic, and that appeals to or attempts to discover authorial intention are equally problematic. Although our interest in authors and authorial intentions seems to persist in spite of these problems, we therefore need to be hesitant, when interpreting any text, in claiming that we have uncovered what the author meant or intended. One way of avoiding some of the more obvious pitfalls is to distinguish carefully between authors, on the one hand, and narrators and characters, on the other. The contemporary novelist Margaret Elphinstone, who is a colleague of three of the writers of this textbook, sometimes receives letters from enthusiastic readers who confuse the characters and narrators of her books with the author herself. The following ways of reading will help readers to avoid making such mistakes.
14.3.1 Narrator, implied author and poetic speaker
The author of a literary text needs to be distinguished from the imaginary person who is supposed to ’speak’ it. In novels, we differentiate between the author and the first person or third person narrator (the fictional person who narrates it). This distinction is clear enough in the case of the main narrator of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe (1992):
I can’t say I’ve had much education. Book education. Even though high school back in the twenties was really school; not what these youngsters are getting away with now . . . I went to kindergarten on the muddy streets in Brooklyn; finished up grade school when I married Nadine; took my first diploma from the Pacific; and this cafe, well now, this cafe is earning me a PhD. You might say I’m majoring in Life.
The narrator here differs from the author in several ways: the narrator is male (Naylor is female); the narrator went to school in the 1920s (Naylor was born in 1950); the narrator has not had much book education (by the time Bailey’s Cafe was published Naylor had a BA in English from Brooklyn College, an MA in Afro-American Studies from Yale, had taught in various universities, and had published four highly regarded novels).
In poems, too, we often need to distinguish between the poem’s author and its poetic speaker, narrator or persona. For one thing, while the poet may be regarded as the creator of the poem, the speaker is clearly one of its devices or techniques - a formal choice made by the poet. This distinction is often important even in first person Romantic poems, despite the emphasis in Romanticism on individual authorial expression. In the first stanza of Wordsworth’s ’Lucy Gray’ (1800), for example, which recounts the story of a young girl who drowned in a canal in a snowstorm, it might seem natural to assume that the speaker is Wordsworth himself:
Oft had I heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.
Yet scholars have revealed that this poem is not based on Wordsworth’s own experience but on Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy’s recollections of a real incident that occurred during a period of her childhood when she was separated from her brother and living in a different part of England. In other words, Wordsworth could never have seen Lucy Gray in real life. Although the poem implies that the speaker encounters Lucy’s ghost, who continues to haunt the moors where she died, it seems clear that this is a fictional encounter. This is not to say that the poem is based on a lie, but to say that the poem recounts an imaginary incident and that we therefore need to see the ’I’ of the poem not as Wordsworth himself, but as a kind of imaginary Wordsworth - a persona.
14.3.2 Authorial irony and the implied author
One reason for distinguishing between author and narrator is that some narrative texts may present us with a narrator who is subject to authorial irony or structural irony (see Unit 11) by being shown to be unreliable at some level - perhaps in terms of his or her ability to understand events or in terms of his or her moral position. For example Huck, the narrator of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (1884), is presented from the beginning as being unable fully to understand his own situation, including the fact that he himself is a fictional character:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
The novel was published in 1884, but it is set ’forty to fifty years previously’ - that is, before the American Civil War led to the emancipation of American slaves. Huck is presented as sharing a conventional view that slavery is natural, even though this conflicts with his personal friendship for an escaped slave called Jim. As the narrator of the novel, Huck explicitly expresses the moral confusion that results - worrying, for example, about Jim’s plan to emancipate his children from slavery. Ironically, Huck is shocked by hearing Jim coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children - children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.
Huck subsequently recognizes that he would feel just as bad if he betrayed Jim to the authorities, and so abandons his attempt to resolve what for him is a moral dilemma. To suggest, however, that Huck’s predicament is a moral dilemma for the novel itself, or for its real author, would be a serious misreading. Huck’s interior monologue is both comic and tragic in its limited viewpoint and in its aping of the flawed logic and morality that helped sustain slavery. Since Huck cannot see the irony that his own reasoning reveals, there seems to be a higher-level viewpoint in the novel that is not available to Huck himself. We might describe this viewpoint as a post-Civil War perspective that exposes the ironic contradictions and limitations of a pre-Civil War narrator whose love for an individual slave does not allow him to see the problem with slavery in general.
In order to capture the sense that there is another point of view hidden behind or above Huck’s, which allows us to glimpse a ’true’ moral position that differs from Huck’s ironized version, we need to employ a concept such as the implied author. The implied author needs to be distinguished from the real author because the implied author is not the original producer of the text but rather an effect of the text - an impression that it produces. The implied author, then, can only ever be a critical fiction - a rationalization of the impression we have in reading a novel (or perhaps in viewing a film) that we are being confided in by some specific human consciousness. Thus the idea of the implied author already presumes an understanding of novels as a kind of intimate speech. It might be, therefore, that the implied author is more the product of a particular way of reading than a way of reading in its own right. Furthermore, the distinction between implied author and real author is sometimes difficult to sustain in practice. It seems almost inevitable to say that the post-Civil War consciousness that is exposing the ironic dilemmas of the narrating character in Huckleberry Finn is none other than Mark Twain himself. Nonetheless, it also needs to be stressed that this is not a claim about authorial intention: a close reading of the text reveals that the text itself is working to ironize Huck’s dilemma, even though there are no voices in the text from which that irony appears to originate. Thus it is possible to say that the text ironizes its own narrator, but problematic to claim that this was Twain’s intention.
14.3.3 Ways of reading authorial games
Literary texts can be seen as elaborate games that authors and readers play together. Authors are continually reviving old games and making up new ones, and readers need to learn to identify these games and learn how to play them. In the Gothic novels that flourished in the second half of eighteenth-century Britain, for example, authors would often pretend that the novels they had written were actually ancient manuscripts that they had found and had edited for the general public to read. Most readers quickly learned that this game, presented in prefaces supposedly written by an ’editor’, was part of the fiction and one of the conventions of the Gothic novel. Twenty-first century novelists also play versions of this game, especially in historical fiction. In Voyageurs: A Novel (2003), for example, Margaret Elphinstone begins her novel about a Quaker’s voyage to North America in the eighteenth century with an ’Editor’s Preface’ in which the ’editor’, who is mischievously identified as ’MNE’, supposedly discovers a manuscript, written by the central character, which becomes the basis of the book. Yet, despite the fact that Voyageurs is subtitled ’A Novel’, many readers have assumed that Elphinstone really did find such a manuscript. In other words, it is important not to confuse such fictional ’editors’ with real authors. Again, such an ’editor’ is part of the text, part of the fiction, not the text’s creator.
14.3.4 Does the identity of the author matter?
Knowing information about an author can often hinder rather than aid interpretation. Once readers discover that the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was addicted to opium they tend to see nothing else in his poems except the effects of that addiction. In other instances, making discoveries about an author’s identity may have positive effects. For example, the realization that the nineteenth-century realist novelist George Eliot was actually a woman - Mary Ann Evans (1819-80) - may enhance or subtly change our response to her novels’ moral analysis of nineteenth-century England. On the other hand, a great deal of ink has been wasted over the question of whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poetry that have been attributed to him or whether ’Shakespeare’ was a pseudonym for another, more educated or higher-class person from the period. In this case, it does not seem to matter that we know little about Shakespeare the man: the texts themselves do the talking.
Having said this, it is inescapably the case that the name of the author is an important factor in the experience of reading. Knowing that we are reading a text by ’Shakespeare’ has an impact - whether positive or negative - on our responses to that text. This is likely to be the case with all the ’great’ or canonical writers we encounter. In a sense, the name of the author on the cover of a book is part of that book and shapes the way we read it. Different names will have different effects according to whether the author is famous or relatively unknown, whether or not we have read other books by the same author, or whether the author is male or female, from the past or the present, and so on. The name of the author - together with information on the cover - might signal his or her geographical or ethnic origins. Also, given the fact that the name of the author may carry such a range of influential connotations, we need to consider the contrary experience of reading anonymous texts, or texts that have been worked on by more than one author. And there are some cases where knowing the actual identity of an author concealed behind a nom-de- plume might have a significant impact on our response to a text. A stark example of this arises with the erotic classic Story of O (Paris, 1954), by ’Pauline Reage’. Given that the novel follows the experiences of a woman who subjects herself entirely to the whims of her ’master’, it would seem important to know whether the text was written by a man or a woman - whether, that is, the name ’Pauline Reage’ was a pseudonym for a male writer. In fact, as www.storyofo. co.uk reveals, this question has appeared urgent for many readers:
The Story of O has surrounded itself with secrecy, mystery, and conjecture for fifty years. When it was published in Paris in 1954 it provoked all sorts of scandals and for forty years the true identity of its author ’Pauline Reage’ (actually Dominique Aury) was kept secret by a handful of friends close to the writer. Speculation concerning the author’s identity produced many candidates, among them Andre Malraux, Henry de Montherlant, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, Raymond Queneau, and Jean Paulhan for whom, it turns out, the book was actually written. The fact that it was written by a woman gives the novel, it has been said, a special ’diabolical’ aura.
It is revealing that readers assumed that the real author of the novel must have been a man and that the revelation that it was actually a woman made the story seem all the more ’diabolical’. Yet the fact that it was written by a woman could be said to make it less ’diabolical’ in that this knowledge allows us to see the book as a woman’s bold exploration of aspects of female sexuality rather than as a man’s fantasy about the exploitation of women.