CHAPTER 10
The Implied Author, Deficient
Narration, and Nonfiction Narrative
JOAN DIDION’S THE YEAR OF MAgICAL THINKINg
AND JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY’S THE DIVINg BELL
AND THE BUTTERFLY195T
O THIS POINT, when I have focused on the “somebody else” of rhetori-
cal poetics, I have primarily focused on rhetorical exchanges in which
actual audiences become members of the authorial audience—and thus
play the role of what I have called rhetorical readers. Playing that role is what
I regard the first step of successful rhetorical reading. In the discussion of
Lolita in chapter 5, I also noted that there are rhetorical exchanges in which
the relationship between actual and authorial audiences itself becomes an
important object of analysis, something crucial to an account of the effects
of the narrative communication. In this chapter, I turn to consider situations
in which the actual audience finds good reason, after it recognizes the posi-
tion of the authorial audience, not to occupy it. In this way, I foreground the
second step of rhetorical reading: evaluating the experience of reading in the
authorial audience. More specifically, I shall focus on what I call deficient
narration, a phenomenon that can be usefully understood in relation to unre-
liable narration. In both unreliable and deficient narration, actual audiences
who perceive the authorial audience position find something off-kilter in the
narration. The difference is that unreliable narration is deliberately off-kilter
and deficient narration is inadvertently so. In unreliable narration, author,
authorial audience, and actual audience align as they recognize what is off-
kilter about the narrator. In deficient narration, author, narrator, and authorial
audience align, but the actual audience views all three of them as off-kilter.