One way of dealing with the issue of agency in the creation of the text and its narrative is to posit an intermediate construct, the "implied author" suggested by Wayne Booth. The implied author, according to Booth, is a "second self" from the actual historical person who wrote the work in question, not the flesh-and-blood being but a hypothetical entity that includes "not only the extractable meanings [of the text] but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters" (73). To rely solely on extratextual sources that will verify an author’s "intention" is at least problematic, if not a "fallacy." The implied author, though, is a construct prompted by the text itself. The implied author, Booth asserts, is responsible for the "norms" and "values" that seem to be expressed in the work but cannot necessarily be attributed to a narrator and should not be attributed to the historical author.

For many critics following Booth, the notion of the implied author is of special value in recognizing and understanding the functions of "unreliable narration." According to Booth, unreliable narration depends on "distance . . . between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator. . . . If the narrator is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the total effect of the work he relays to us is transformed" (158, my emphasis). Thus, for example, the perceptive reader becomes aware that the narration of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is fraught with the misperception and miscognition of John Dowell, its narrator, even though there is no heterodiegetic ("third-person") narrator to make or provoke such judgments. If Dowell himself does not understand the import of what he sees and reports, but readers do, then how do they know that? Their evidence must be taken from the book itself, not from anything that Ford had to say outside the text. (Ford’s statements might corroborate that evidence, but no more than that.) If neither the narrator nor the historical author is the agency that creates or cues our "true" understanding of the text, who or what does? Booth might say that the "implied author" is the responsible agent in such a case.

The nature and even the existence of the implied author, however, are still problematic. For Booth, whose subject is the rhetoric of fiction, the implied author serves as a source for the text’s ethos, those norms and values that seem to be embodied in the text but that may be at direct odds with the norms and values of a given narrator. For example, Huckleberry Finn’s conviction that he will go to Hell for helping a slave to escape is at odds with the reader’s inference that his act is in fact a profoundly moral one. In Booth’s use of the term, it is the implied author who brings the reader to recognize Huck as being of sound moral judgment but too naïve and immature to recognize that higher morality in himself. Is the principle solely one of ethos, though? Can’t there be narrators whose unreliability has less to do with a set of norms and values than with the apparent logic of story-telling, as in many of Borges’ works, for example? And just what weight of agency can really be brought to bear by a hypothetical principle?

Seymour Chatman adapts Booth’s nexus of moral weight into a structural principle of narration itself. The implied author, Chatman claims, is "reconstructed by the reader from the narrative. He is not the narrator, but rather the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative. . . . Unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating" (Story and Discourse 148, my emphasis). Here, what had been primarily an ethical principle for Booth becomes a logical principle for understanding the creation and transmission of narrative, but this structural principle has a metaphysical tinge to it; the implied author becomes a kind of demiurge responsible for the actual creation of the narrative itself. Chatman’s definition also underlines an apparent contradiction in the notion of the implied author. Even though it is the principle that has "invented" the narrator, the implied author exists as a reconstruction by the reader, who thus becomes the agent that activates the agency of the text itself. Again, the question of the actuality of this agent arises. If the reader reconstructs the implied author, then does the reader also invent the narrator and thus the narrative itself? How can a text prompt the reader to reconstruct or invent its own implied author? As we will see, these questions are further complicated when applied to other narrative media, such as film.

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan endorses the notion of the implied author but seeks to depersonify it by defining it "as a construct inferred and assembled by the reader from all the components of the text" (Narrative Fiction 87). Although Chatman initially had even suggested that a text could function without a narrator but must have an implied author, Rimmon-Kenan argues the opposite: since "the implied author cannot literally be a participant in the narrative communication situation" (NF 87), there must be a narrator who is. Chatman himself comes to endorse such a view since it avoids confusion of the implied author with any narrator. "The implied author has no ‘voice,’" Chatman later writes. "The implied author only empowers others to ‘speak.’ The implied author (unlike . . . the narrator) is a silent source of information. The implied author ‘says’ nothing. Insofar as the implied author (the text itself) communicates something different from what the narrator says, that meaning must occur between the lines" (Coming to Terms 85, my emphasis).

Note that Chatman identifies the implied author with "the text itself" rather than as some antecedent form of agency. An implied author, however, still has an apparently antecedent creative power because it "empowers others to speak." Furthermore, the primary "speaker" is the text’s narrator, even when the narrator is mostly silent. Yet that same narrator then presents the elements that allow the reader to "reconstruct" the implied author. Chatman even suggests that "we might better speak of the ‘inferred’ than of the ‘implied’ author" (CTT 77, my emphasis). A logical paradox seems to be at work. How does any text "communicate" its own act of creation? How can an implied author "communicate" at all when it cannot speak and has no other, non-verbal means of communication? How can a "construct" that is inferred by a reader actively "empower" anything? Whatever the answers, we have come a rather long way from Booth’s description of the implied author as an embodiment of ethical norms.[4]

Some critics dismiss the usefulness or even the existence of the implied author. Genette himself, while claiming to be open-minded, finds few possible examples: " . . . a narrative of fiction is produced fictively by its narrator and actually by its (real) author. No one is toiling away between them, and every type of textual performance can be attributed only to one or the other, depending on the level chosen" (Narrative Discourse Revisited 139-140). Even though Genette admits that the act of reading creates "an image of the author in the text" for a reader, that image "has no features that are distinct (from those of its model) and thus deserves no special mention, unless it is unfaithful—that is, incorrect" (NDR 141). (Note that by "unfaithful" Genette is not referring here to the notion of "unreliability" but to whatever disparities may exist between the real author and the one the reader infers from the text.) In most cases, Genette claims, there is no meaningful distinction between the real author and the implied author and therefore no need for the latter. The only exceptions he can think of are in the "fraudulent" cases of an apocryphal work falsely attributed to an author other than the one who actually wrote it and a ghost-written work issued under the name of someone other than the real writer; or in the case of a collaborative work that still constructs "the image of a single author," such as "Ellery Queen," the pen-name for the mystery-writing team of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee (NDR 146-147). Even so, none of these cases bears directly on our perception of the narrative itself.

Genette does see one positive, though obvious, use for the implied author. As a function of poetics (as opposed to the narrower field of narratology), "[t]he implied author is everything the text lets us know about the author, and the literary theorist, like every other reader, must not disregard it." Thus, the implied author may be one tool among several employed in biography or literary history. However, Genette continues, " . . . if one wants to establish this idea of the author as a ‘narrative agent,’ I don’t go along, maintaining that such agents should not be multiplied unnecessarily—and this one, as such, seems to me unnecessary" (NDR 148, Genette’s emphasis). As we shall see, others have agreed with Genette in regard to film narrative.

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