Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

10 Introduction
tive production and reception. More specifically, they see narrative as an act
of communication between the real author and the flesh-and-blood reader,
but also between the implied author and the authorial audience (or implied
reader), and, finally, between the narrator and the narrative audience (or narratee).
In short, the rhetorical approach attempts to ascertain the purpose of
stories and storytelling.
Thus, Wayne C. Booth, in the context of the neo-Aristotelianism of the
Chicago School, introduced the term implied author as a heuristic tool. The
“implied author” denotes the real author’s “second self,” and as such satisfies
“the reader’s need to know where, in the world of values, he stands, that
is, to know where the author wants him to stand” (1983: 73). Booth argues
that analyses along the lines of the implied author enable us “to come as
close as possible to sitting in the author’s chair and making this text, becoming
able to remake it, employing the author’s ‘reason-of-art’” (1982: 21).
Similarly, James Phelan defines the implied author as “a streamlined version
of the real author,” and this version is “responsible for the choices that create
the narrative text as ‘these words in this order’ and that imbue the text
with his or her values” (2005: 45; 216). 12 The ultimate goal of narrative criticism
is to asymptotically approximate the condition of “the authorial audience,”
i.e., the ideal audience for whom the author constructs the text and
who understands it perfectly (Rabinowitz 1977: 121–41; see also Rabinowitz
1998; Phelan 1996: 135–53). According to Phelan, “the rhetorical model
assumes that the flesh and blood reader seeks to enter the authorial audience
in order to understand the invitations for engagement that the narrative
offers” (Phelan 2007b: 210).
Furthermore, rhetorical theorists argue that narrative texts permanently
invite us to make ethical judgments—about characters, narrators, and implied
authors (Phelan 2007a: 6). Phelan thus discriminates between four ethical
positions. The first involves (1) the ethics of the told (character-character relations);
the second and third concern the ethics of the telling, namely (2) the
narrator’s relation to the characters, the task of narrating, and the audience,
and (3) the implied author’s relation to these things. The fourth ethical position
relates to (4) the flesh-and-blood audience’s responses to the first three
positions (Phelan 2005; 2007a: 11).
12. For discussions of the implied author see Kindt and Müller (2006) and the contributions
by Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen in this collection. In The Rhetoric of Fictionality,
Richard Walsh reintroduces the actual author. More specifically, he suggests eradicating
extra- and heterodiegetic narrators in narrative fiction: “Extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators
(that is, ‘impersonal’ and ‘authorial’ narrators), who cannot be represented without thereby
being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no way distinguishable from authors.”
He therefore concludes that “the narrator is always either a character who narrates, or the
author” (2007: 84; 78).