Implied Author, I

As [the author] writes, he creates not simply an ideal, impersonal "man in general" but an implied version of "himself" that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men's works. To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes "only by writing the story that the novelist can discover -- not his story -- but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative."

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When Fielding comments, he gives us explicit evidence of a modifying process from work to work; no single version of Fielding emerges from reading the satirical Jonathan Wild, the two great "comic epics in prose," Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that troublesome hybrid, Amelia. There are many similarities among them, of course; all of the implied authors value benevolence and generosity; all of them deplore self-seeking brutality. In these and many other respects they are indistinguishable from most implied authors of most significant works until our own century. But when we descend from this level of generality to look at the particular ordering of values in each novel, we find great variety.

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Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.

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A great work establishes the "sincerity" of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created that author may belie in his other forms of conduct the values embodied in his work. For all we know, the only sincere moments of his life may have been lived as he wrote his novel.

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We too easily fall into the habit of talking as if the narrator who says, "O my good readers!" were Fielding, forgetting that for all we know he may have worked as deliberately and with as much detachment in creating the wise, urbane narrator of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as he did in creating the cynical narrator of Jonathan Wild. What was said above about the relation between the author's own values and the values supported by his second self applies here in precisely the same sense. A great artists can create an implied author who is either detached or involved, depending on the needs of the work in hand.

--Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction