Several weeks back, Jim Phelan, a prominent narratologist, gave a talk at the University of Maryland on the implied author and its troubled/-ing place in models of narrative communication, weighing models that place the construction of the implied author inside or outside of the text, and models that excise the figure of the implied author altogether.

What work on performance theory and life writing has given me, however, is a chance to think about texts (written and performed) where the author is literally present, where author, implied author, narrator and character are collapsewd into one single performing body onstage, prompting me to wonder aloud (after some logic that is written down elsewhere) whether there are really very many cases when anything we might say about an implied author is all that different (ontologically or pragmatically) from the what we might say about the kind of-real-life identities that everyone, including an author, constructs for themselves with every action and utterance.

Judith Butler argues that gendered identity is constructed through a series of codes that instantiate themselves through repeated performance, and that are read within any number of discourses that govern sex and gender. I have argued (as have many) that this model applies to all manner of identity categories, and that we can use the model of performativity (and performance) to think through any idenitity construction (my therapist, by the way, thinks this is hilarious).

Similarly, in a 1995 essay in Women, Autobiography, Theory, Sidonie Smith postulates that autobiography is a performative act, an utterance that constitutes the very identity it claims to be narrating--that the act of narrating a self effectively constructs the self into existence.

I wonder if this effect is confined to autobiography. Isn't the supposedly fallacious notion of the author behind the text based on precisely the sort of identity that is called into being by the codes in the text? Anything that Butler says about the lack of a subject preceding the identity speaks to this. So the "Ryan Claycomb" you get from this blog is not significantly unlike the "James Joyce" we get from Portrait of the Artist . . . or the "Dave Eggers" we get from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. They are all linguistic constructions, implied authors, just like the "Ryan Claycomb" you might have seen at a party of Saturday night, the one who told you about his sister or his kids.

Which brings me back to implied authors. It seems to me that discussions of implied authors being taken out of a model for narrative communication is the wrong place to be looking. I am arguing here that all authors are implied--in their writing, in their published interviews, in their introductions, in their revisions, in the morning coffee they take with the paper. If every act, written or otherwise, is a performance that helps inscribe a legible identity, then the stories we tell at parties have no more or less privilege to representing the real person that ones written and published as poetry, fiction, drama, or memoir.

What could be excised, I think, is the "real author" which is typically set in opposition to the implied author. That a real author can be said to exist as the discrete and coherent source of many implied authors produced by/ producing texts ignores how authors change over time, and how any notion of self is one that fluctuates like the weather, and is ultimately no more useful, and probably a great deal less so, than the authorial identity and even authorial intention that readers glean from the text.

Hastily composed and thoughtfully submitted for your consideration . . .