Book 006 Author Who
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In one of the classrooms in the university where I studied someone was very keen on deep wisdoms, as they wrote, in meticulous felt pen letters, "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment" on a piece of paper, and wrote "Shakespeare" under it as the author, to convey further authenticity and importance to the words. However, someone with a ball-point pen crossed the playwright out and wrote "Polonius" there instead.
Who is right? Are these wise words by Shakespeare spoken by a random mouthpiece-like character on his stage, or is it the worst possible advice coming from that "tedious old fool" according to Hamlet, who is also "officious, garrulous and impertinent" according to William Hazlitt?
When reading or listening to a character's words, we understand that it is a combination of the two. It is very rare that we can fully pretend that we are listening to the words of the character only. Most characters are fictional; there was no one in their world to jot down what they said; they may speak in rhyme or in languages alien to them. In Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, to take in example, Italian characters share the most beautiful English pentameters with the narrator, often with just a single quote separating the two in the flow of iambs.
Still, sometimes, we have a feeling that it is the author who is speaking, more or less directly, through a character, especially where we think that the author had an agenda to push. Indeed, exploring the source of this feeling in the text and what it does to our reception of the artwork is one of the central questions we will be dealing with. But before we go there, is there a way we can describe or approach the relationship between the (extra-textual) author of the work, and the character, the apparent (intra-textual) author of his or her own words? Or, to complicate matters further, between them and the character/author the first character is quoting, and the next character that one is quoting, and so on, like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, told by Captain Robert Walton to Margaret Walton Saville, quoting Victor Frankenstein, who quotes the creature verbatim for pages on end?
To try to map this relationship, we will use the model of communication presented in Roman Jakobson's essay titled "Linguistics and Poetics." This model contains six elements or factors: the (textual) message is coded and sent by the addresser; it is received and decoded by the addressee. The message is provided with a context it may refer to; a contact (a channel) is established between the addresser and addressee which makes the transmission of the message possible, and finally, a common code (language) is shared by the two parties which renders the message intelligible for the decoder.
Six functions of language are paired to these six elements, depending on which element in the model appears to be the most salient in the message. A referential message is primarily denotative and focuses on the context. An emotive one reflects (expresses) the addresser’s attitude; if the message is oriented toward the addressee, it is conative. To these three functions are added the phatic function, which focuses on maintaining and enhancing the contact, and the metalingual, which focuses on the code, when clearing up, for example, misunderstandings based on an unknown word or phrase. The final function, when the message is oriented on itself, is the poetic one. However, Jakobson is quick to point out that "[a]ny attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function" (37). As it will be apparent from the proposed model, self-focus, although in a slightly different sense, can indeed be connected to the artistic nature of some text.
Now, in order to use this model to describe an author and a main character or narrator (let's limit ourselves to two levels of quoting only), suppose that the message the extratextual or "out"-author is writing describes or contains a full communication complete with its own addresser (the intratextual or "in"-author), addressee, message, and so on.
In this model, the out-addressee is us, the extratextual reader, while the out-message is the text itself. The in-author lives in and is generated by the work itself, so it is the intratextual author, the main character or narrator. (There can, of course, be multiple communications inside the message, side by side, in case of a dramatic play or if there are multiple main characters.) Scholarly works often distinguish between the text by the author and the narration by the narrator, and we can find this distinction between the out-message and the in-message. For example, the title of a work is part of the out-message (as it is written by the author), but it is not part of the narration, the in-message. It can, for example, form the in-context against which the narration is interpreted. This model is also neatly aligned with the so-called frames and framing described by Jacques Derrida in his "The Purveyor of Truth."
Generally, we need to suppose that the out-code is the same as the in-code, as otherwise the out-addressee, the reader, would not be able to understand the in-message, the story. But who is the in-addressee? It looks easy to say that is the intratextual reader, the reader constructed by or represented in the text, but two observations complicate this simplistic answer. First of all, quite obviously all communications described or simulated in a text are intended for the audience, the out-addressee, so it seems superfluous to maintain that the in-addressee is separate from the out one. (Of course, in the case of communications originating from characters, it is very easy to determine who their addressee is if, in the world of the text, they are talking to another character.)
For the second argument let us try to determine where we are when reading a text. Although the story may, according to this model, be related for the in-addressee, it is told by the narrator, the in-addresser, and it is their point of view from where we experience the world. We therefore cannot do anything else but accept this point of view and find ourselves identified with the in-addresser, while our place would clearly be on the other side of the table, where the in-addressee is. The internal communication in other words seems to bite into its own tail with its addresser and addressee practically being the same thing. This circle may be related to the message becoming quite self-reflexive, which Jacobson suggested is a characteristic of artistic texts.
It is also quite interesting to see that this model conveniently connects a number of theories about artistic or literary texts. Jakobson regards narration and relating character's words as quasi-quotation: quoting a communication, but not really, as the addressee of the quoted message is quite conspicuously missing. Michel Foucault uses the term quasi-discourse, and Brett Bourbon, in his Finding a Replacement for the Soul, says that fiction is not meant to be true, but they are not lies, either; instead, he sees a way out by suggesting that they are quoted, but they lack an original speaker.
As a quick aside let me explain why I think such connections are important. All theories and investigations try to explain or at least approach an interesting phenomenon; in this case, literature. If we believe that there is something to investigate, that is, there is something common in what happens to me or you or Derrida when reading a Shakespeare-sonnet, then our observations cannot contradict each other completely. If there was nothing in common in our experiences, then what I am talking about would have no bearing at all for you or anyone else. Now this might very well be the case, but in my experience, we can talk about art and literature. And if that is so, it may show that we are on the right track if our train of thoughts does not collide, but rather runs more or less alongside those of great thinkers. After all, this is also how science works: new laws and observations do not invalidate but extend the scope of or refine existing laws -- after all, the theory of relativity does not mean that suddenly apples fall upwards. And progress is by working our way to more and more fundamental laws that merge more and more separate laws and observations: now we discover that magnetic and electric forces are really the same, then that particles are waves are not distinct, and so on. In other words, understanding is not answering the ultimate why's; it is connecting dots of our knowledge to get, hopefully, the bigger picture. When we understand more of gravity we mean that we realise the connection between the falling apple and the Earth revolving around the Sun, not understanding why gravity is there in the first place. Connections, connections -- they are important, and not only on Facebook.
Apart from these, what this model immediately gives us is places in the text we could look at if we're interesting in the extratextual author, as we have seen that anything outside the story or narration like titles, mottos, forewords, etc. are, while in the out-message, are excluded from the in-message. It also gives us the idea that the extratextual author or writer has a counterpart, a representation inside the artwork, the intratextual narrator, inscriber, or main character.
See also:
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