multiple implied authors

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Isabell Klaiber University of Tübingen Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Single Text Have? No matter how contested the concept ofthe implied author as such has been over the past half-century, scholars only rarely discuss the number of implied authors a literary text may evoke. While the single implied author is surely the default position, this essay will give its potential multiplicity, particularly the question of what determines their number, a more thorough examination than it has received in the past. The most common occasion for multiple implied authors probably is censorship or other social pressures. This may be seen in closeted gay texts, or 19"'-century domestic novels by women written in a 'double-voiced' manner to "disguise subversive discourse" (Harris 20), so that the conventional values on the surface level ofthe text cover up the subversive values on its deeper level; they thus evoke two contradictory implied authors. Another important occasion for such multiplicity surely is collaboratively written fiction, where "different parts of multiple authors [do not always] get synthesized into a coherent implied author . . . [but rather] remain unsynthesized [so that] the implied author is an incoherent figure" (Phelan, Living to Tell 46), "an irrevocably split personality" (Richardson, Unnatural Voices 118). This is particularly likely to happen in the so-called round-robin format, in which each author continues where the previous one left off and where authorial traces' demarcate the individual contributions. Thus, in contrast to Genette's claim that jointly authored texts never "betray the dualness of their authorial agents" (Narrative Discourse 147), readers are often confronted with incompatible narrative styles, inconsistent characters, or elements of different literary genres. A reader of, for instance. Naked Came the Manatee (\996), a crime novel by thirteen authors, complains that this novel "is a hobo stew of styles, with each writer leading us through si 1 ly plot moves and adding their own characters" (Seidman). Wh i le such a lack of unity and aesthetic fluidity may be analyzed as indicative of an 'incoherent' implied author, 1 would like to argue for the case of multiple implied authors where each one of them stands for a distinguishable set of values. 138 Style: Volume 45, No. 1, Spring 2011

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Page 1: Multiple Implied Authors

Isabell KlaiberUniversity of Tübingen

Multiple Implied Authors:How Many Can a Single Text Have?

No matter how contested the concept ofthe implied author as such has been overthe past half-century, scholars only rarely discuss the number of implied authorsa literary text may evoke. While the single implied author is surely the defaultposition, this essay will give its potential multiplicity, particularly the question ofwhat determines their number, a more thorough examination than it has receivedin the past.

The most common occasion for multiple implied authors probably is censorshipor other social pressures. This may be seen in closeted gay texts, or 19"'-centurydomestic novels by women written in a 'double-voiced' manner to "disguisesubversive discourse" (Harris 20), so that the conventional values on the surfacelevel ofthe text cover up the subversive values on its deeper level; they thus evoketwo contradictory implied authors. Another important occasion for such multiplicitysurely is collaboratively written fiction, where "different parts of multiple authors[do not always] get synthesized into a coherent implied author . . . [but rather]remain unsynthesized [so that] the implied author is an incoherent figure" (Phelan,Living to Tell 46), "an irrevocably split personality" (Richardson, Unnatural Voices

118). This is particularly likely to happen in the so-called round-robin format, inwhich each author continues where the previous one left off and where authorialtraces' demarcate the individual contributions. Thus, in contrast to Genette's claimthat jointly authored texts never "betray the dualness of their authorial agents"(Narrative Discourse 147), readers are often confronted with incompatible narrativestyles, inconsistent characters, or elements of different literary genres. A reader of,for instance. Naked Came the Manatee (\996), a crime novel by thirteen authors,complains that this novel "is a hobo stew of styles, with each writer leading usthrough si 1 ly plot moves and adding their own characters" (Seidman). Wh i le such alack of unity and aesthetic fluidity may be analyzed as indicative of an 'incoherent'implied author, 1 would like to argue for the case of multiple implied authors whereeach one of them stands for a distinguishable set of values.

138 Style: Volume 45, No. 1, Spring 2011

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Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? , 139

With the term's notorious vagueness (cf Kindt/Müller 8; Nünning 370;Herman/Vervaeck 17), it is particularly important to clarify what is meant here bythe 'implied author.' Wayne C. Booth first introduces the category in The Rhetoric

of Fiction (\96\) as "an ideal, literary, created version ofthe real man" (75), "oneofthe author's most important effects [...,] which will never be neutral toward allvalues" (71 ); in other words, the implied author is the sum ofthe values and normsexpressed in the text. While Booth sees the implied author primarily as an effectofthe real author's intentional value judgments and aesthetic choices which shapethe text (cf Phelan, Living 39), I consider the implied author primarily "a criticalconstruct, inferred from the text" (Nelles 26; cf Diengott 73; Shaw 301); thus it̂is the effect ofthe interaction between text and reader and "exists . . . as inferredand imagined . . .. This effect cannot be guaranteed, for the implied author is amatter of belief, existing only when and where readers construct it" (Lanser 155;cf. Herman/Vervaeck 18). Thus the only objectively verifiable factors here are thetext's properties and the individual reader's historical situatedness. Although thetenn 'inferred author' would therefore be more suitable, I will continue to use theterm 'implied author' — not only because it is well established, but also becauseit reflects the way most readers like to think of what they infer from the text, i.e.

the implicit image of an author in the text, taken to be standing behind the scenes and tobe responsible for its design and for the values and cultural norms it adheres to.

(Prince 42; ct". Schmid 39)

My analysis slightly deviates from common practice of discussing the implied authorwhen it largely ignores the narrator and takes the real reader into consideration.Usually, the implied author seems mosttangible in atext ifthe narrator is unreliable,based on the discordance between the narrator and "the norms ofthe work (whichis to say, the implied author's norms)" (Booth, The Rhetoric 158). It is important tonote, however, that the evocation and tangibility of several implied authors is not somuch based on the narrator(s) but rather on multiple, incompatible sets of norms ina single text. Furthermore, where a single implied author's values are supposedlyaddressed to one authorial audience, i.e. the audience assumed by the author whenshe makes her rhetorical choices (cf. Rabinowitz, Before Reading 22-26; Phelan,"Narrative Progression" 212), several implied sets of values will address severalauthorial audiences. This text-internal rhetorical situation challenges the real readers,who have to reposition themselves in order to join the authorial audience everytime it changes, e.g. by suspending or stretching their flesh-and-blood identities.Therefore, my analysis will focus on the sets of values 'implied' in the text and thereal readers as the decisive factors in the evocation of multiple implied authors.

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140 Isabell Klaiber

Since its introduction, the concept of the implied author has been governedby notions of wholeness and coherence (cf. Lanser 158), which is also whatdominates its (re)construction by the reader (cf. Schmid 26). As the implied authoris considered "the sum of his own choices" (Booth, The Rhetoric 75), "[o]ur senseof [it] includes . . . the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole" (73;cf. Rimmon-Kenan 86). Booth implicitly founds his authorial category on the(romantic) concept of the artistic work as an organic whole (cf. Herbert 186).Thus coherence and consistency in terms of the text's values and norms are forthe reader the decisive factors that shape the implied author as a single entity. 1therefore assume that the number of implied authors a narrative evokes primarilydepends on the degree of coherence and consistency the text displays in terms ofits norms and values, its style, and its narrative progression. The readers' standardsof what is or is not considered coherent are, however, historically and culturallyvariable. Furthermore, the readers' paratextual knowledge about the real author(s)may influence their inference of implied authors, too. Thus, the number of impliedauthors is not related to the number of real authors, but it is subject to the propertiesof the text on the one hand, and readers' variable values or aesthetics and theirknowledge of paratextual information on the other.

Due to its notorious fuzziness, a narrative's coherence is "ultimately apragmatically-determined quality" (Toolan): it is the overall impression left by thecomplex dynamics that interrelate textual features with values and norms as well aswith context and only becomes fully manifest when it is progressively realized bythe reader. Therefore, we may "consider narratives as developing wholes" (Phelan,"Narrative Progression" 211). Phelan's conceptualization of narrative progressionproves useful here, as it refers to "the synthesis of both the textual dynamics thatgovern the movement of narrative from beginning through middle to end and thereaderly dynamics that both follow from and influence those textual dynamics"(Experiencing Fiction 3). He conceives of narrative progression as an effect of thereader's interrelation of the instabilities (occurring within the story) and tensions(created by the discourse) as well as their eventual resolution (cf. Phelan, "NarrativeProgression" 212). It is particularly important not to reduce narrative progressionto a formalist correlation of plot elements, but to include, as Phelan does, into theconcept of narrative coherence a text's unitary values and implied aims: 'tensions'are at work in terms of "value, belief, opinion, knowledge, expectation, etc. . . .between authors and/or narrators, on the one hand, and the. . . audience on the other"(211). The correlation and eventual resolution of the instabilities and tensions of atext are determining factors for its coherence, or according to Booth the "implied

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Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? 141

promise" of what will come later in a narrative (1981, 128), not only in tertns of

plot (i.e. instabilities), but also in terms of values, genre, style, ambiguity, etc. (i.e.

tensions).

In col laborative round-robin novels, it is the coherence and the 'impi ied prom ise'

that is often broken at the transition from one author's contribution to the next, thus

evoking multiple implied authors.' This is because consecutive writing formats

complicate the dynamics of narrative progression: every author after the initial one

is always a reader first, who participates in the inference ofthe 'implied promise' of

the previous chapters and the coherence ofthe novel at large. The author-readers'

individual inferences ofthe implied author ofthe previous chapters inform their

own continuation ofthe story.A rather famous example where all authors do not fully work with the already

introduced instabilities and tensions is The Whole Family, a novel by twelve authorsfirst published in Harper's Bazaar (1907/08). Although the impending problemof individual authorial styles and tones is nicely solved in The Whole Family byassigning each author one fictional character as the homodiegetic narrator of his orher chapter, we end up with several unsynthesized sets of values." The novel's firstchapter, written by William Dean Howells, presents the middle-class, well-to-doTalbert fatnily, who is about to meet Harry Goward, the fiancé of their daughterPeggy. As the young couple met in a co-educational college, Howells sets the groundfor co-education and the American family as the main themes of a realist novel (cfBrady 151). The second author, Mary Wilkins Freeman, however, unexpectedlyturns the maiden Aunt Elizabeth, who is in chapter one described as demure,unexciting, even "pathetic" (Family 19). into a femme fatale whom the fiancé isdesperately in love with. In contrast to Howells' introductory chapter. Freemanthus does not only recast the marginal character ofthe spinster aunt as central tothe plot, but she also turns the novel into a feminist satire: she departs from thethemes of co-education and the meaning of marriage for a young woman and herfamily and resets the thematic focus to the sensational escapades of a strong-mindedmodern woman. This shift of genre in itself would not be disruptive to the novel'scoherence — if the later chapters followed its conventions and Freeman's thematictrajectory, which they do not. Freeman's irreverent feminist chapter, however, seemsincompatible with the sentimental tone of Edith Wyatt's 'mother,' while in turnWyatt's sentimentalism heavily collides with Henry James's subtle chapter ofthe'married-son' (cf Richardson, "Singular" 266). It is not that coherence requires anovel to maintain the same stance, themes, tone, etc. throughout, but only that theirtrajectory forms a consistent whole. In The Whole Family it is exactly this trajectory

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that tums out to be inconsistent. That readers consciously react to the incompatibledeviation of various chapters from and disruption ofthe unity ofthe whole maybe seen in the following complaint: "[t]hc story flows together pretty well, except

for the piece written by Henry James it bogged down there, and the tone was

much too somber compared with the rest ofthe book" (Cheryl).^ Editor ElizabethJordan deliberately used the distinctiveness ofthe implied authors for marketing

- purposes: when the novel was first published, the authors who participated werelisted, though it was not disclosed which author wrote which chapter. Instead,readers were invited to infer their identities from the texts: "The intelligent readerwill experience no difficulty in determining which author wrote each chapter . .."(Jordan, qtd. in Bendixen xxxv).

The incompatibility ofthe novel's authorial values also becomes evident inthe successive re-evaluations of Aunt Elizabeth's role. Elizabeth's chapter depictsHarry Goward as raving in "mad infatuation" for her {Family 38), while chaptersix ofthe 'son-in-law' declares Goward's engagement with Elizabeth to have beena mere "farce" or joke at a house-party (130); accordingly, Goward would notbe in love with Elizabeth. These two accounts of their relation are incompatible,even incoherent, which would by default be ascribed to the unreliability of one oreven both ofthe homodiegetic narrators; this way one may arrive at one impliedauthor with a single set of values. The nature ofthe relation between Goward andElizabeth is crucial to decide whether or not this is an accurate analysis and howthe novel at large (i.e. its implied author) evaluates Elizabeth's ideal of femaleautonomy: if the narrator of chapter six is unreliable and Goward was and is inlove with Elizabeth, her unconventional behavior is consistent with the ideal ofan independent, strong-minded modem woman who is in full control of her life;this is the value Elizabeth's chapter propagates. If, however, Elizabeth is herselfan unreliable narrator and Goward is not in love with her, her role is that of an"idle and unhappy" fop {Family 195), which is how the sixth chapter makes theideal of female autonomy seem ridiculous and morally wrong (cf 136). As these"incompatible versions of Aunt Elizabeth" (Howard 21) and of Goward remainunrelated and unevaluated by the novel at large, the question of which narrator isreally unreliable is never answered and the competing values are never synthesizedinto a single set of values or one implied author. Due to the unsolved question ofunreliability, the heterogeneity ofthe genres involved and the multiple, incompatiblethematic trajectories, readers of The Whole Family are thus likely to infer at leasttwo implied authors, where the implied author ofthe second chapter is opposed tothe one of the first and most of the other chapters.

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Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? 143

While it has been demonstrated how coherence contributes to a single implied

author and incoherence tends to evoke multiple implied authors, it is not that we

can only have one or the other in a text. The standards for what is considered (in)

coherent are variable. This may again be illustrated with The Whole Family, which

is often denounced as an inconsistent and therefore unsuccessful collaboration

(cf. Brady 151). However, with a different conceptualization of coherence the

novel may just as well evoke only one single implied author. Susanna Ashton, for

instance, considers the novel's heterogeneous qualities mimetic ofthe diversity and

competition in a family and declares incoherence to be the novel's synthesizing

principle: "The success of the project was dependent upon acknowledgment of

cacophony as harmonic. Coherence was achieved because of competing visions,

not despite them" (55). Depending on different readers and their conceptualizations

of coherence (here on the basis of cultural norms related to family), a single text

may have the potential for both: one single and several implied authors.

The degree to which incoherence is acceptable is also subject to historically

changeable aesthetics. Many postmodern narratives are considerably incoherent

in terms of unstable identities and self-reflexive metafiction; their endings often

lack closure and different genres are appropriated and mixed with intertextual

playfulness. In spite of these features, narrative coherence in the sense of a text's

unitary aim is often reintroduced by declaring incoherence to be its overall aesthetics

or casting it as mimetic of an incoherent world. Therefore, as postmodern narratives

usually display a unitary set of values consisting ofthe acceptance of heterogeneity,

playfulness, and instability as well as a tolerance for incoherence, they still tend

to evoke one implied author.Yet, even in postmodern fiction, multiple implied authors may be evoked by

incompatible sets of values. "Murder at the Beau Rivage," a round-robin crimestory, shows all the above-mentioned postmodern features and is a case in point.The character ofthe serial killer G. Smith is radically unstable and inconsistent,as the "middle-aged male amateur microbiologist" of the first chapter ("Murder"219) unexpectedly turns out to be a cross-dressing woman (cf. 232). While thetypically postmodern gender instability itself does not disrupt the story's coherence,the sudden shift of norms and unrelated tensions does; it makes the reader infermultiple implied authors: the early chapters do not address sexual identity at alland thus cast it as stable by default; in the penultimate seventh chapter by NaniPower, however, the topic suddenly pops up as the central motive ofthe murdererand just as suddenly disappears again; in fact, the last author, Dave Eggers, ignoresthe gender issue entirely and introduces with G. Smith's cancer-like mental disease

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^^^ Isabell Klaiber

a different motive for the murders, which ties in with earlier clues in the story. The

theme of an unstable gender identity is thus neither fully developed nor integrated

into the story. Similarly, the mctafictional moment in Power's chapter, in which the

character G. Smith directly addresses his^er multiple authors, remains isolated andthe tension thus created is neither continued nor resolved by the succeeding andlast author. Thus the postmodern concepts of random social and sexual identitiesand the postmodern interest in metafiction are neither cast as themes ofthe story atlarge nor is there an intelligible trajectoty traceable between these shifts of focus.Rather than being a matter of unreliability, the cultural norms held in the seventhchapter, i.e. the appreciation of a flexible gender identity as well as that of theconstructedness of cultural artefacts such as stories and their characters, evoke animplied author of their own which remains unconnected with the one ofthe other,aesthetically rather unitary chapters; we therefore end up with at least two impliedauthors. Thus, while postmodernist aesthetics may have decreased the probability ofmultiple implied authors by rendering incoherence acceptable to a certain degree,a disrupted overall trajectory ofa story's shifting values and norms still evokesseveral implied authors.

So far single or multiple implied authors have been discussed as the readingeffects of text-internal factors. Sometimes, however, text-external, i.e. paratextualinformation may interfere with the strict correlation of values with the number ofimplied authors: ". . . people who do know [the facts given in the paratext] read[a] work diff̂ erently from people who do not" (Genette, Paratexts 8). Particularlyin collaborative fiction, readers' knowledge of multiple real authors, e.g. from theparatext, informs their processing of breaks, discrepancies and inconsistencies in thetext, when they tend to ascribe any disruption of narrative coherence in the above-mentioned sense to the collective authorship and inferseveral implied authors. Iftheydo not know about the collaboration, they tend to overlook minor inconsistenciesand synthesize them into a single implied author. A case in point is the infamoushoax of Naked Came the Stranger (\969) by twenty-four news reporters. As longas the scandalous novel was published under the single pseudonym of'PenelopeAshe,' "scarcely anyone commented on the . . . styles of writing," which were onlynoticed once the multiple authors were disclosed (McGrady 166). Therefore, whilethe text it.self is the first basis ofthe readers' inference ofthe image ofthe author(s),the paratext may play a role when assessing the number of implied authors ofaliterary work.'

While many of my examples belong to collaborative fiction, it is important tounderstand that the evocation of more than one implied author is not restricted to this

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Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? 145

format, but may just as well occur in narratives written by a single author. Typically,these works are considered artistic failures and/or they are deliberately 'double-voiced.' Nella Larsen's Passing, for instance, may be read as "a novel about lesbianspassing as heterosexuals that passes as a novel about racial passing" (Rabinowitz,"'Betraying the Sender'" 201): the plot explicitly revolves around issues of racialidentity, such as Clare Kendry's passing in her marriage to a white racist who doesnot know she is black; on the hidden lesbian plot level, however, her friend IreneRedfield feels attracted to Clare through a "fascination, strange and compelling,""tempting" and "mesmeric" (Passing 161), without fully understanding her owndesire (cf. 176). Rabinowitz convincingly shows how the novel thus addresses twoasymmetrical authorial audiences where "one audience [is] ignorant and another. . . knows the truth" ('"Betraying the Sender'" 205). These two audiences infertwo different implied authors: one who focuses on racial issues exclusively, andone who subtly intertwines the racial issues with the closeted lesbian strand of thenovel on which the readers are let in through implication and silent hints.

\f Passing is itself, as Rabinowitz claims, passing rhetorically' as a novel aboutheterosexual racial issues, its "performative success requires the complicit silenceof precisely those who know the most" (205), i.e. the audience who recognizes theencoded lesbian issues. Their complicity in the secrecy of the lesbian plot thereforekeeps the two implied authors distinct throughout the novel, as the second impliedauthor cannot subsume or incorporate the first if the secrecy is to remain intact.Furthermore, without the assumption of two implied authors, the novel seemsincoherent, which becomes evident in the reaction of those readers who miss thelesbian implications of the relationship between Irene and Clare: Sato, for instance,laments that Larsen "fail[s] to keep the thematic unity. In the middle of the novel,some curious change has happened. The question of passing has gone . . . as in themiddle of the book, this novel tum[s] into a case study of [Irene]'s sexual jealousy"(88), with which she "guard[s] the security of her marriage" against Claire's desirefor Irene's husband (89). Sato's reading of the novel within a solely heterosexualframe makes it seem incoherent and aesthetically flawed, while the thematic hybridityand different sets values in Passing may be accounted for by the assumption oftwo different implied authors.

Having discussed how the number of implied authors in offline narratives maybe determined, let me now turn to online hyperfiction. Here, the concept of theimplied author is even further complicated, as the reader plays an active role whenwith each hyperlink she co-dccidcs on the final version of the text: "hypertextschallenge coherence . . . by . . . transforming themselves in the course of— and

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146 Isabell Klaiber

because of— each reading" (Tyrkkö 3). Nevertheless, if users can only follow

already scripted links (cf. Hayles 31), they feel their choices are clearly limited by

an 'authority standing behind the text,' i.e. by one implied author.'

Collaborative hyperfiction opens even another dimension of authorship, both

real and implied: here anybody may at will alter, rewrite and add to the respective

instance ofthe text, such as in the literary projects on One Million Monkeys Typing,

an interactive, all-text, multi-linear writing platform. This website allows users to

read narratives in text snippets which every time branch out into "three . . . paths

that continue the story." The reader's choice of path leads to the next snippet and

so on. If readers reach an end or "simply don't like the story's trajectory, [they]

graft a new snippet and take the story's direction into [their] own hands." Snippets

may also be ranked by users to make them stay or "wither and die" (One Million).

With its multi-linear versions simultaneously present in different branches and

continuing to branch out, such a story is likely to evoke as many implied authors

as there are alternative versions of it at a given time.

While within each branch multiple implied authors may be evoked as in any

other narrative through incompatible sets of values, in col laborative on I ine writing the

formation ofthe implied author(s) is further complicated by the active involvement

of all users — authors, readers, and rating members — in the production and

emergence ofthe open-ended narrative: real authors quickly lose control over their

own version ofthe text and expose it to the creative appropriations by the readers'

individual hypertextual reading processes as well as the subsequent co-authors.

Coherence thus becomes unstable, progressional and collective.

In addition, readers' feedback on new snippets, visible in the peritext ofthe

nan-ative, often negotiate the text's emerging (in)coherence. As the unfinished text

casts the resolution of instabilities and tensions as always potentially in reach but

not fully resolved yet, the emerging implied author remains incomplete in each

snippet. When, for instance, in the story "The Stranger Within," a reader/co-author

comments on one snippet that "[i]t really beautifully sets up the next bit ofthe

plotline to come,'" he refers to how instabilities in the plot are established, but not

yet resolved. The feedback on another snippet ofthe same story advises how certain

values and norms about family, and thus a single implied author, may be worked in:

. . . the story . . . [i]s already building up a certain tension. I'm getting the image of a fam-ily that appears superficiatly very steady and normal, but that has some stress points thatmight not be apparent to the casual observer. Combine that with the general theme ofthe[story], and you've built an excellent scenario for drama.'"

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Multiple Impüed Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? 147

This user both infers and anticipates a way of rendering the narrative coherent by

explicitly formulating one possible 'implied promise' ofthe text in choosing certain

values and working them into the narrative progression ofthe story. In doing so,

he infers the potential implied author of this version ofthe story.

Considering these dynamics, the implied author of collaborative online fiction

is no longer a "mere" reading effect, but a matter for negotiation among users, i.e.

readers, commentators, and authors. Unaffected by such negotiations, however,

the «M/wèer of implied authors remains determined by the sets of values 'implied'

in snippets (as in any narrative) as well as the numoer of alternative versions of

a single story simultaneously present in different branches. We thus end up with

at least as many multiple implied authors of a story as there are different sets of

values in and versions of it at a given time.

***

In conclusion it can be said that while the default position surely is one implied

author per text, a single text may well evoke multiple implied authors. Their number

in any narrative depends most of all on the text's coherence in terms of narrative

progression, theme, and its 'implied' values and norms. The aesthetic standards of

what degree and type of incoherence is still acceptable are historically and culturally

variable. Furthermore, a single text may well have the potential for producing

both, single and multiple implied authors, depending on the conceptualization of

coherence by different interpretative communities. In addition, paratextual knowledge

about the real author(s) may determine the number of implied authors inferred.

While many of my examples are taken from collaborative fiction, the phenomenon

of multiple implied authors may occur in any text as long as different contradictory

sets of values may be identified.

The question of how the numbers of implied authors may be assessed in co-

authored multi-linear hyperfiction is particularly complex: coherence is subject to

the shared creative effort of co-authors, their explicit discussion of coherence, and

the readers' inferences; therefore, the implied author is unstable, progressional,

collective an'd negotiable in this kind of text. What is more, as there are several

versions of a story available with at least one implied author in each, the entire 'tree'

of a collaborative multi-linear hypertext narrative is bound to evoke a multitude

of implied authors.

Notes' While collaborative fiction is usually conceptualized in terms of its real

authors, such as their biographical situations (cf. Laird 347), their interaction (cf.Brady 150) or their constellations (Davis 129), the analysis ofthe /wp/iW author

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'"^^ Isabell Klaiber

in collaborative fiction should be based on the authorial traces in the text. Thus, acollection of stories by different authors loosely held together by a frame situation(e.g. A House Party, 1901) evokes an implied author for each story, while theseamless, unitary narrative without any traces of different authors (e.g. the novelsby Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris) is likely to evoke one single implied author.

^ Being an abstract projection ofthe text, the implied author should not beanthropomorphized (cf. Nünning 370; Nelles 25).

' The most common collaborative format is where the authors successfully writetogether and evoke one implied author as in the "Ellery Queen" novels, which werewritten by the cousins Frederick Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. Works inwhich a writer tries to imitate an established author image as in the early NancyDrew novels between 1930 and 1959, which are all faithful to the same set of values,or in fan fiction are likely to evoke a single implied author, too.

" It is important to note that th is format itself does not necessarily lead to differentauthorial voices. This becomes evident in other novels with multiple homodiegeticnarrators ofthe same plot level: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, for instance,includes multiple narrative voices evaluating the events quite differently and evokingsubstantially diverse moods that range from dark comedy to deep pathos. Here, thenumerous narrator-characters who witness late Addie Bundren's lastjoumey do not,however, evoke different authorial voices; instead, their heterogeneous values andpartial unreliability form the full picture ofthe Bundren family, which is arguablyone ofthe novel's overall and unifying goals.

'That this observation about readers'reactions to multiple implied authors maybe generalized is supported by different amazon.com customer reviews of NakedCame the Manatee (\996): one reader, J. Muse, is irritated by a sudden change offocus and values and presumably infers at least two implied authors for the novel:"The first half flowed pretty nicely, the authors all had very close styles of writingthat made it really enjoyable. About halfway through, one ofthe big charactersjust disappeared and became a minor one, the styles of writing changed, sex andviolence suddenly were added in what seemed like a PG-rated book, and the flowof events suddenly changed and left you confused" (Muse). Even though these maybe individual statements, "the public textual responses of readers [are] concreteevidence to be situated alongside the narrative discourse" (Dawson).

' Paul Dawson, too, who proposed a revised communication model at the 2010Narrative conference in Cleveland, OH, approaches "the narrative discourse offictional texts alongside other nonfiction and nonliterary discourses in the publicsphere" in order to assess the author's assumed persona.

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Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Text Have? 149

' Novels that pass rhetorically usually evoke multiple implied authors as theyare "created with one eye on the censor and another on an initiated audience thatgets much of its pleasure not only from reading the message, but also from realizingthat the censor has been tricked" (Rabinowitz 1994, 208).

* The 'authority' is, however, often divided depending upon "which portionsof a work [are] created by authors . . ., contributed by the audience, generatedthrough processes, or selected from pre-existing sources by the author, audience, orprocesses" (Wardrip-Fruin 177); all these may determine the final text's coherenceand thus the number of implied authors.

" Harrison Bradlow comments on a snippet entitled "A Vivid Fantasy," 20 Dec.2008,09:48 EST; http://www.lOOOOOOmonkeys.com/snippet.html?branch= 12575(accessed: 6 Apr. 2010).

'" Bradlow's comment on the snippet "Male Bonding??," 22 Dec. 2008, 14:44EST; http://www. 1000000monkeys.com/snippet.html?branch=12618 (accessed: 6Apr. 2010).

Works CitedAshton, Susanna. "Veribly a Purple Cow: The Whole Family ana the Collaborative

Search for Coherence." 5íwí//eí m//îeA'ove/33.1 (Spring 2001): 51-79. Print.

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