I suppose it wrote itself: On fictional epistemology and the author

Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate

level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book. --Cynthia Heimel Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesnt actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps its the need to keep it hidden that makes it poeticmakes it poetry. The writer darent actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. Ted Hughes

As most of you are aware, there is a controversy in narrative theory about whether there must always be a fictive narrator in every literary work. The schema adopted by most narratologists looks something like this: X relates that Y sees that Z (Mieke Bal). In this formulation, X is the narrator, Y is the focalizing or SELF character, and Z is another character. Thus, the work of fiction conceived using the metaphor of everyday oral storytelling in the real world, except that the fictional storyteller X has access to the inner life of character Y. In this model, then, one speaks of an omniscient narrator and of dual voice, meaning the voice of the narrator and that of the characters is somehow blended. This model is seen as self-evident and irreducible. Narrative theorists in this line include Genette, Bal, But there is another basic model in narrative theory that rejects this way of conceiving fiction. Instead, this competing view sees fiction as paradigmatically a world created by words that are themselves not part of the fiction except where indicated. Words are the medium of construction of this world, but they are not in this world. The question Who speaks? is nonsensical in this view of fiction unless a fictional speaker is called for by the words. This second view is commonly known as the deictic shift theory. Narrative theorists in this line include Kate Hamburger, Ann Banfield, and S.Y. Kuroda. The underlying metaphor for the deictic shift theory is manifestation. Fiction manifests itself through narration. Those in the necessary narrator camp conceive of fiction using the metaphor of speech: discourse, speaker, who speaks? Fiction, by this view, is a feigned telling. Those who view the default structure of fiction as narratorless emphasize that linguistically speaking, fiction is a tale without a tellerthe storyworld manifests itself through verbal means. One camp insists that there must be narrators in every text, but that authors are dead. The other camp denies the necessary existence of narrators, but sees the author as alive and kicking. Its very easy to get lost in the hall of mirrors that is narrative structure. Id like to talk today about a view of fiction as having an author who is not speaking but doing something else.

The author may have been declared dead a half century ago, but implied authors, unreliable narrators, and other subjective constructions keep multiplying. (note: as Richard Aczel comments, the adjective implied could be added to our understanding of anyone, since we know each other only through signs.) Important questions for my view of cognitive linguistics What is the status of the level of narration in cognitive models of fiction? Is narration necessarily viewed as a separate fictional level? In my view, no. There is no reason to view the level of narration as itself fictional. Patrons paraphrase of Hamburger: The author is not a narrator: he does not recount in the usual sense; he uses the narrative function to constitute a fictive world, with fictive characters and events (his role is closer to that of a film maker than to that of an historian). Nor does he delegate the narrative to a fictive representative. Kte Hamburgers definition has the merit of clearing away the epistemological haze that surrounds the notion of the fictive narrator: [...] only in cases where the narrative poet actually does create a narrator, namely the first-person narrator of the first-person narrative, can one speak of the latter as a (fictive) narrator (ibid., 140). More from Patron: Ending on this point, I will add that Banfields theory, as a scientific theory, is undeniably superior to other narrative theories and in particular narratology, due simply to the fact that it explains more things than narratology does. It alone offers an explanation for the role of writing, as opposed to the oral, in the production and, as it happens, in the reception of narratives. In Banfields theory, it is by writing, in the sense of written composition and not of transcription of the oral, that a form such as free indirect style can be realized in the performance. This ties into the assessment already made by certain linguists (see, among others, Benveniste 1971; Simonin-Grumbach 1975) and corroborated by certain writers and critics, that writing is the extra-linguistic factor that enables the author to withdraw from being the utterer of the narrative. (130) Patrons conclusion: by renouncing the hypothesis of there being a narrator in all narratives, we are better able, I believe, to advance our understanding of the readers cognitive activity concerning the fictional narrative. (130) Accordingly, the deictic shift theory rejects voice as an apt metaphor for narration. In fact, voice is a misleading metaphor that steers critics in the wrong direction. The questions, asked ever and often in narrative theory, who speaks? who sees? are the wrong questions.

At the same time, When we read, we are aware that we are in a fictional world. We are aware also that someone created this world. Our construction of that someone as author is part of our enjoyment of the fiction. To call this someone an implied author complicates without clarifying anything, like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. I could say the same of my construction of anyone, since after all I dont have access to the actual subjectivity of anyone. So lets call this person the author. Its my idea of the person who wrote this book. Of course, with famous authors, I will have ideas that come from outside the persons writing of fiction. But over the years I have come to believe that I get to know an author far more intimately by reading their fiction than I do by reading about their lives in other ways. Still, biography and especially autobiographical statements by the author often provide interpretive clues to what I will call the primal moments in that authors work. An author of literature, by which I mean an author who writes from an artistic motivation, doesnt speak through his or her work; an author allows something to be expressed in writing that cannot, or could not, be spoken in conventional communication. As Ted Hughes suggests above, this something is beyond the artists conscious volition, and it has the character for the author of having an existence of its own. At the same time, the author is creating something brand newthe particular metaphor created to express this hidden truth also creates new truth, new experience. Some people object to this characterization of literature as insulting to the idea of creation. But it is nave and insulting only if one thinks this means that literary creation is copying off rather than creating something new. These people think that imagination must mean creating out of whole cloth, not basing ones creation on something prior to it. But what if this based on material is the most transformative, earthshaking, impossible moments of that persons life, that cannot be expressed in any other way but through creative and new literary metaphor? At the other end of the spectrum, some other people object to this characterization as romantically focusing on the individual creator rather than on the operation of signs in a cultural context. By this view, literary creation is only a process of rearranging conventional signs. But Id like to insist, in an old- fashioned way, that literature is an honorific term for those works of fiction that bring new expression into the world, and that great authors express truths that have never been articulated and give us whole new worlds to live in and experience. Fiction has meaning, finally, because it does relate to our existence, because it is NOT divorced from real life. Finally, there is the objection that this view of literary creation as based on what I like to call the geological life experiences of the author is too vague and ungrounded, and therefore it produces crass and simplistic interpretations. We dont have access to the geological experiences of the author, so we are bound to be inventing interpretations that match our own preconceptions. To this I only say that all interpretation is suspect, but it can be done in a more or less responsible way. I believe that the creation of literary narrative is based on an authors deepest experiences and traumas, and that Ted Hughess metaphors of leaking and smuggling in the epigraph are profoundly apt.

In the vertical stacking of worlds that is necessary for fiction to function, where is the line between fiction and extra-fictional worlds? This will vary from narrative to narrative, but this line can be read through cues that are picked up by readers. Story worldnarration world book world historical world Silly conceptsthe implied author-- in painting, the brush strokes of the painting are not attributed to an implied painter. Why this multiplication of levels? Reminds me of the epicycles in Ptolemaic astronomyjust keep adding complication instead of going for Occams razorwhat accounts for this cognitive bias on behalf of the communication model? Is Roland Barthes so powerful that his death of the author article has the force of papal edict? http://www.jimloy.com/cindy/ptolemy.htm quote from Donald Keefer: Margit Sutrop has lamented in the pages of this journal the resilient attitudes of those cultural critics who take as axiomatic Barthes's claims: "Even the sharpest philosophical analysis has had no influence on those speaking about the death of the author." 7 In fact, many of the critiques are so good, one must wonder if our continuing concern with Barthes isn't bordering on overkill. Sutrop sees that Barthesian proponents have too much invested in the thesis to be moved. She then acknowledges that arguments might prove fruitless against the force of a metaphor. This is a very troubling concession however. There is nothing surprising about a community's lack of self-criticism except when that community advertises itself as the party that dares to challenge all. The convenience of certain "truths," or beliefs not subject to correction ought always to make us suspicious. Actually, Barthes Death of the Author can be helpful to us in killing off the idea that for every narrative there must be a fictive narrator. The confusion between author and fictional narrator can be very fruitful in some instances. The first person pronoun in a fictional text is always subject to epistemological confusion. Is this I a character, a narrator, or the author? Demonstration texts: Chapter 1 of Huckleberry finn.

Chapter 1 of The Secret Garden. Strange narration in The Hunger Games. Can we agree on the followingI ask you to consult your own experience: When I read a book, I am aware that someone wrote it. When I read a conventionally authored piece of fiction, I am aware that the person that wrote it is responsible for its creation. The words of a piece of fiction are not conventionally addressed to me as reader. Fiction is a factitive act of languageit creates a world. The sentences of a piece of fiction instruct me as reader to construct a world as specified by the words and to live in it as I build it. When I read fiction, I never lose track of the fact that the events and experiences I am building up through reading are not happening in the actual world; nevertheless, I have profound experiences while reading fiction. When I read fiction, my attention can be on any of several planes. I may be immersed in the story world, hardly aware of the words (immersed reading), or focused on narrative style (literary reading), or speculating about the external motivation for a particular stylistic choice (critical reading). For example, here is a paragraph from Letting in the Jungle, by Rudyard Kipling: Here was some little difficulty with the catch of the door. It had been very firmly fastened, but the crowd tore it away bodily, and the light of the torches streamed into the room where, stretched at full length on the bed, his paws crossed and lightly hung down over one end, black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera. There was one half-minute of desperate silence, as the front ranks of the crowd clawed and tore their way back from the threshold, and in that minute Bagheera raised his head and yawned elaborately, carefully, and ostentatiously as he would yawn when he wished to insult an equal. The fringed lips drew back and up; the red tongue curled; the lower jaw dropped and dropped till you could see half-way down the hot gullet; and the gigantic dog-teeth stood clear to the pit of the gums till they rang together, upper and under, with the snick of steel-faced wards shooting home round the edges of a safe. Next instant the street was empty; Bagheera had leaped back through the window, and stood at Mowglis side, while a yelling, screaming torrent scrambled and tumbled one over another in their panic haste to get to their own huts. http://www.kellscraft.com/junglebook/junglebook05.html At the immersed level, I am gripped by the tale of Mowgli rescuing his human caregivers after being aroused by the smell of his mothers blood to take action against the ignorant villagers, who call him a

devils child. At the literary stylistic level, I admire the structural way the paragraph performs its own content through its constructionthe way the second sentence delays identification of the being in the hut until the last word, and the way Bagheeras yawn is showcased in visual closeup and slow motion in contrast to the villagers panicky retreat. These stylistic effects perform the point of the paragraph that Bagheera is taking over the village, and the village is being emptied. In this paragraph, the tide turns from an ignorant mob attacking an innocent woman to a black panther terrorizing a village. Finally, this climactic paragraph resonates for me with my understanding of the authors motivation for writing. For me, primal moments in the best childrens literature are always existentially connected to the authors relational traumas. Rudyard Kiplings Baa Baa Black Sheep concerns Kiplings traumatic experience of being dropped off in England for five years to live with the woman known in Baa Baa as Aunty Rosa. The scene of parental abandonment in that story is heartbreaking. The Mowgli stories have always struck meand many other people, no doubt -- as Kiplings what if fantasy of his Hindu caregivers rescuing him from this abandonment at the moment his parents deserted him and bringing him up as one of their own. What if they had burst into the room and protected him at that crucial moment when the horrible woman was about to eat him? In every case I have investigated, a persuasive case can be made that the best childrens literature is motivated by an authors obsession to restage, undo, and get revenge for early relational traumas. Often this takes the form of restaging the key catastrophe so that the child SELF has allies or other forms of empowerment not available in the original instance. In Mowglis Brothers, the child Mowgli escapes the tiger with the help of Mother and Father Wolf. In Tiger! Tiger! Mowgli plots the death of his nemesis with the help of his animal allies. Here, in Letting in the Jungle, Mowgli goes on to wipe out the entire village with the help of a herd of elephants. Ironically, since Kipling is primarily known these days as an imperialist and a racist (which he is), the Mowgli stories express Kiplings primary attachment to India over England. The hatred and contempt of Man that is palpable in the Mowgli stories is directed allegorically at the English as Kipling experienced them in the House of Desolation, as he called his Southsea residence. Reading the paragraph about Bagheeras yawn with this lens in mind, one sees Kipling expressing the fantasy moment of confrontation between his childhood self and his enemies. In his life, this is the moment when his childhood self lost. But now his childhood self will win. The mob beats down the door because they have the power to do so, but the presence of a black panther in the bed instead of two impotent human changes the whole power equation. Now it is the human mob that is running for their lives. Mowglis allies have turned the tide of power. Because I am identified with Mowgli and his predicament, I am happy to see the terror of the villagers, happy that Mowgli and the elephants will drive them away, happy to see them flee. (But Ill have to say at a certain point, I begin to feel uncomfortable. Mowglis revenge goes beyond my revenge at a certain point when Mowgli directs the elephants to flatten the village. Im starting to read World War I into the narrative. Kiplings fantasy now becomes the fantasy of destroying civilization.) When I read the Mowgli stories, then, I feel Kiplings imaginative recreation of his childhood, transformed by a simple what ifwhat if my Indian caregivers, who had intact animal instincts

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parentingclaiming, protecting, and caring tenderly for me-- had saved me from that primal moment of abandonment? What if they had raised me? Similarly, when I read Roald Dahl, I feel Dahls fantasy of what if I had had the power to retaliate and win over the favored child that caused my father to die? What if I had the power to rescue my father from death? When I read Mark Twain, I feel his intimate feelings for his black caregivers and his alienation from his white parents and his longing to overcome this alienation either by being adopted by a black parent (Huck Finn) or scaring a white parent into responding appropriately (Tom Sawyer). The geological shifts caused by early experiences of death and abandonment underlie the plots of Dahl and Twain, and smuggled analogies of these experiences and the fantasies they gave rise to are everywhere instantiated in the plot logic of their books. I dont need to know about the precise circumstances of the primal fantasy expressed in these stories in order to feel their power. These experiences and fantasies are implicit in the books of these authors, and that the depth of the experiences upon which these plots are based has everything to do with our evaluation of these authors as worthy of artistic investigation and appreciation. Yes, they are good with words. They choose their words so precisely because something other than their conscious mind is directing them. My ideas about narrative are captured well in Maurice Sendaks book Pierre, from the Nutshell Library. Most narrative theory causes me to say I dont care. Why should I care whether theres a narrator or not, or whether that narrator is extradiagetic or introdiagetic or unreliable or effaced? Theres only one reason I care, and I have to get eaten by a lion to grasp this reason that is, I have to connect theory to existence. For me, in childrens literature, this connection lies first in the child characters vulnerability, and second in the ways the work smuggles in the deepest experiences and fantasies of the artist who created this work.