Ethos and Narrative Interpretation by Korthals Altes Liesbeth

Author:Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. [Korthals Altes, Liesbeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
ISBN: 9780803255609
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

But why neglect Ockham’s wise rule, since readers and narratologists alike often don’t bother to make such distinctions? The proposed distinctions, moreover, are far from being clear cut. Where, for instance, should we locate the Dave Eggers who organizes writing groups for the underprivileged: under authorial posturing or under the civic or biographic person’s activities? From a metahermeneutic point of view, though, there are good reasons to maintain such distinctions, however precarious: They draw attention, heuristically, to the different grounds and argumentation patterns, and the different value regimes, used to establish meaning and relevance for literature. Each of the authorial facets, moreover, is produced in a different discourse genre and by different agents, besides the author: editors, translators, critics, publisher, and so on, agents who may have different strategic aims. Each of these discourse genres and media moreover projects a different kind of authority: Patricola’s rabiate monograph weighs differently in my own interpretation of Houellebecq’s work than would a thorough academic analysis.

In addition, different reading strategies are likely to attribute different weight to the various author facets: a personalizing/mimetic reading strategy probably attaches greater importance to information about James Frey’s actual life than an autonomous/aesthetic one. So, even though somewhat counterintuitive, these distinctions at least make us aware of the mediated and often contradictory nature of “the” authorial ethos—an ethos that must be reconstructed hermeneutically if the narratologist is to avoid taking his or her readerly intuitions at face value.

When Is Conjecturing About the Author’s Ethos Relevant?

While I have defended the idea that in all communication situations ethos attributions occur, these become salient for assigning meaning to literary narratives only under particular conditions.

Exploring how literary texts, and certain genres in particular, “rely for their meaning on complex and ambiguous relationships between the ‘I’ of the author and any textual voice,” Lanser (2005) proposed five criteria for what she called an “attached” reading, that is, a reading that seeks to connect the worldview conveyed by a textual voice to its author. These criteria are: singularity, or the presence of only one character; anonymity, which makes it easier to see the author in the narrator; similarities between the narrator’s character and biographic details and those of the author; reliability, that is, compatibility between the values and perceptions of the author and those of the narrator; and non-narrativity, by which Lanser refers to a narrating “I” that is not reporting on or enacting events but rather giving voice to certain views (perhaps a term like opinionating would have been more helpful).34

While similarities between a character’s and an author’s life experiences or concerns constitute plausible grounds for an attached reading, Lanser´s other criteria seem somewhat less convincing. Counterexamples for the anonymity criterion quickly come to mind: Robert Pinget’s Quelqu’un, Beckett’s Not I, and Wiesław Myśliwski’s Stone upon Stone all have anonymous narrators, but I don’t see why I would feel prompted to equate them with the author. The reliability criterion also seems problematic; we cannot refer to the author’s norms as a given, since these are our interpretive construct.

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