This chapter also continues the discussion of chapter 3 about the differ-
ences for readerly response that follow from a narrative’s status as fictional or
nonfictional. I argue that the judgments of deficiency in my two case-study
memoirs, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Jean-Dominique
Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, are dependent on the actual audi-
ence’s assumptions that they are reading nonfiction. In addition, my treatment
of Didion complements the discussion of her memoir in chapter 3.
Finally, since I am grounding the difference between unreliable and defi-
cient narration in the actual audience’s reading of the implied author’s intended
communication, and since the issue of intentionality has been implicitly pres-
ent in every chapter of this book, I take it up explicitly here. More specifically,
even as I develop a case for the practical value of the concept of the implied
author, I subordinate that case to a more fundamental argument for the valid-
ity and viability of a rhetorical understanding of intentionality.
As I explained in the introduction and chapter 1, rhetorical poetics is more
invested in the phenomenon of authorial agency than it is in the concept of
the implied author, but it still finds that concept useful. Furthermore, rhe-
torical theory’s investment in authorial agency runs counter to the dominant
anti-intentionalism of contemporary critical theory, a stance that dates back at
least to the mid-twentieth century, when W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beard-
sley declaimed against “The Intentional Fallacy.” In narrative theory, Wayne
C. Booth pushed back against that anti-intentionalism with the concept of the
implied author, by which he meant a “second self ” that the author constructed
through all the choices (conscious or intuitive) she made in the writing of a
work. Since then, for the most part, the participants in the debate about the
concept of the implied author have focused on fiction (see Booth, Genette,
Chatman, Rimmon-Kenan, Lanser, Hansen, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning,
Kindt and Müller, Richardson, and Shen, as well as the 2011 special issue of
Style), while some participants in the closely related debate about unreliable
narration have turned to nonfiction (see especially Shen and Xu and Phelan,
Living to Tell). But to my knowledge, no one has yet done what I shall attempt
to do here: use nonfiction narrative as the central focus of a discussion that
brings together the debates about the implied author and about unreliable
narration.
ELBOW ROOM FOR INTENTIONALITY
I start with a small debate I have been having with two leading theorists of
lifewriting, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. In Living to Tell about It, I argue
that the first edition of Smith and Watson’s valuable book Reading Autobiog-
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