intentionality in our understanding of autobiographical telling, and such a
role is incompatible with the dominant orthodoxy of contemporary theory. It’s
this reason, I believe, that underlies or at least influences Smith and Watson’s
move from the complexity of “the project of self-narration” to the rejection of
the concept. In their view, that project is too complex to be contained within
the intentionality of any one agent, regardless of its label. In order to make
my broader case, then, I need to address these two widely shared objections.
Consequently, I will turn, first, to make room for a valid and viable notion
of intentionality in interpretation, an argument that is ultimately prior to a
case for the implied author, even as it is central to the conception of narrative
as rhetoric. Once I’ve argued for this elbow room, I will turn to explain why
Ockham need not reach for his Razor whenever he hears the words implied
author.
As I noted above, contemporary theory’s general suspicion of inten-
tionality goes at least as far back as the New Criticism. It was 1946 when
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley began the process of turning suspicion
into dogma in their famous essay on “The Intentional Fallacy,” which effec-
tively ruled out of court the author’s take on the achievement and interpreta-
tion of her text. Despite counterarguments by the Chicago neo-Aristotelians
and by E. D. Hirsch Jr., the suspicion only grew after the New Criticism lost
its ascendancy. Some theorists contended that readers should be granted more
interpretive power and authority (Holland, Iser, and Fish, “Literature”), while
others, persuaded by post-structuralist arguments about language as a system
of signs with no anchoring center, contended that language and, by exten-
sion, literary texts were ultimately indeterminate. Still others focused on the
irreducible intertextuality of literature, pronounced the “death of the author”
(Barthes), or distinguished between a historical author and an author function
(Foucault). In my view, however, this anti-intentionalist orthodoxy is unper-
suasive because (a) it is rooted in claims about language, readers, or interpre-
tation that are at best only partially true, or (b) it often entails adopting an
either/or position when a both/and one is preferable. To demonstrate these
points, I turn to consider two of the main anti-intentionalist positions, Stanley
Fish’s theory of interpretive communities and Anglo-American deconstruc-
tion (for arguments along similar lines, see my “Data, Danda,” part 1 of Wo r l d s
from Words, and the introduction to Narrative as Rhetoric).
Fish’s theory of interpretive communities is the most extreme form of his
attack on that other famous pillar of New Critical faith, Wimsatt and Beard-
sley’s “The Affective Fallacy,” but that attack simultaneously reinforces “The
Intentional Fallacy.” If, as Fish argues, the interpretive strategies of interpretive
communities dictate the meaning of texts, then interpretive authority rests
IMPLIED AUTHOR, DEFICIENT NARRATION, AND NONFICTION • 199