Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 2011"

Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author

Abstract: My interest in the implied author (henceforth 1A) dates back to a discussion on the Narrative listserv a few years ago. I have forgotten what started the thread, but I remember that it concerned how the IA of a certain text should be constructed and that all the participants seemed to take the theoretical importance of this notion for granted. Narrative fiction, all seemed to agree, was the product of a six-participant transaction involving an author, an implied author, a narrator, a narratee, an implied reader, and a real reader, though the outermost two participants were considered of no concern for literary criticism. In my earlier work, I had dutifully appended the term "implied" to any mention of the author, partly because Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction had succeeded in convincing me of the necessity of the IA, and partly for fear of appearing theoretically unsophisticated. But now I could no longer see the justification for building the protective wall of the IA between the reader and the real author, so I butted into the discussion with a post stating my skepticism regarding the existence of this sacred cow of literary criticism. It was as if l had screamed, "God is dead," in the middle of a church service. The participants in the thread responded with a volley of posts explaining why flesh-and-blood authors must be left out at all costs from literary interpretation, and why they must be replaced by IAs if the text is to be regarded not only as the representation of individual events occurring in a fictional world (a representation which is the job of the narrator), but also as the expression of general ideas, values, and opinions whose domain of applicability extends to the real world. The main argument for attributing these ideas, values, and opinions to an IA rather than to the real author (henceforth RA) is that there is no way to tell whether RA sincerely endorses them or lives by these standards. Many cases were presented of authors being despicable in real life but admirable in their incarnations as IAs, though nobody could come up with an example of the opposite situation. Some contributors went as far as suggesting the purely hypothetical case of an author defending in a novel the exact opposite of what he believes in, not just through individuated characters, but as the global message of the text. (Why an author would want to do this remained, however, obscure: it seems a sure recipe for spreading the wrong ideas!) I thought at the time that I was the only IA-doubter in the narratological community and that my arguments were consequently original. But as I started doing research for this article, I made the partly annoying, partly reassuring discovery that the concept of IA has a long history of being under fire. Its critics include narratologists as prominent as Gerard Genette, Mieke Bal, Ansgar Nunning, Michael Toolan, Nilli Diengott, Tom Kindt, and Hans-Harald Muller, all of whom, it should be noted, come from beyond the Atlantic. The proponents of the IA, by contrast, are mainly Americans: Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, William Nelles, and Brian Richardson. The implied author wars, then, pit American narratology against the rest of the world. (See Phelan 2005 and Schmid 2009 for useful accounts of the IA controversy.)As l read through the pro- and anti IA literature, I soon discovered that the term "implied author" was like William Gibson's concept of cyberspace: "Slick and hollow--awaiting received meaning" (27)--and that the only thing that unites all the users of the term is just that: the use of the term. Every advocate of the IA seemed to have his own conception of what IAs stand for, and every opponent seemed to have different objections. As the readers of this essay know full well, the concept of IA was first proposed by Wayne Booth in 1961 as a reaction against the rigid "textualism" of New Criticism. In the textualist position, the words on the page are the sole legitimate source of meaning, and any appeal to the author's intention (otto external documents that may explain the text) is considered heretical. …

Narrative/Science Entanglements: On the Thousand and One Literary Lives of Schrödinger's Cat

Abstract: Science has a notorious history of using animals for its experiments. The two most famous of these unfortunate creatures are a canine and a feline, Pavlov's dog and Schrodinger's cat. Pavlov's dog shows all the features of a well-trained, obedient dog: he drools predictably when he hears the sound of a bell. Schrodinger's cat, by contrast, behaves with the whimsy that should be expected from a self-respecting feline: nobody knows whether he is dead or alive, or maybe even both at the same time, in the box where he has been locked up together with a contraption that has a fifty percent chance of killing him. Another difference between Pavlov's dog and Schrodinger's cat is that the dog really existed, while Schrodinger's cat inhabits a purely imaginary world. The whole scheme is a thought experiment designed by Erwin Schrodinger to explore what his equation actually means for the nature of reality. Fortunately, no real cat has ever lost one of its lives to what would be otherwise an extreme case of animal abuse.

Kinds of Minds: On Alan Palmer's "Social Minds"

Abstract: It is no exaggeration to say that the work of Alan Palmer has put the study of fictional minds on a new track. That it should do so may appear surprising, because he has broken the trail through common sense much more than through reliance on new theories (though Palmer is very well informed of recent developments in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind). This makes one wonder why anybody hadn't thought of his approach before. But it could be that many readers spontaneously thought of fictional minds in the same terms; it's just that being commonsensical was not the fashionable thing to do in literary criticism. It took an independent scholar unconcerned with approval by the collective mind of academia to take such an approach. The basic idea was quite simple. Traditional approaches to characters in novels look at the mind from an "internalist perspective," according to which the mind is an inner theater featuring a neverending film of private thoughts, images, associations, memories and desires emerging from the depth of the subconscious. This film is called stream of consciousness, and the task of narratologists is to describe the forms of discourse through which narrators allow readers to look through the skull of the character and to watch the show unfold. While recognizing that the internalist perspective plays an important role in many types of novels, especially in those of the modernist period (where the representation of the inner theater of the mind becomes an end in itself). Palmer argued in his first book, Fictional Minds, for an "externalist perspective" that views the mind as something that manifests itself externally through both intentional and non-intentional behavior, and that other people can access through inductive reasoning--what cognitive psychology calls "theory of mind." Whereas the traditional narratological approach regards the mind as a mechanism for imagining and representing, Palmer's concept of "mind in action" favored a much more strategic conception of the mind: not the mind that experiences the storyworld passively, but rather the proactive mind that reacts to situations, conceives goals, constructs other minds, takes actions, and makes the story advance. In this essay and in his second book, Social Minds in the Novel, Palmer takes the externalist perspective a step further, or rather, he fully develops an idea that was already sketched in his first book by arguing for a contrast between an intramental mind, whose operations take place within the skull, so to speak (though consciousness is always directed toward the external world), and an intermental, or social mind, "which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought." The idea of a social or collective mind is not in itself particularly new nor problematic. Literary critics have long been aware of the existence of collective ideas and of their potential for creating conflict between individuals and the groups they belong to. (Think of the many narratives that focus on the dilemma of people, such as immigrants, who are torn between individual aspirations and loyalty to the values of their native culture.) The various forms of collective thinking, beside cultural values, are stereotypes, rumors, public opinion, folk wisdom, common knowledge and what Roland Barthes calls doxa. Palmer however is not content to study the manifestations of this collective thinking in a particular novel (Middlemarch by George Eliot); he makes the stronger claim that minds are not just what exists within the skull, nor are they something that manifests itself "beyond the skin," to use one of his favorite expressions, they quite objectively encompass entities that exist outside themselves. The intermental mind not only contains representations of other minds, it fuses them together, so that a unitary mind emerges out of a plurality of connected minds. This is the mind of the town of Middlemarch, or the mind of two people who know each other so well that each of them can think for the other. …