grgr (21): "you used to know what these words mean" (supplemental)/1904 redux

[jbor]

In his study Wayne Booth identifies a corresponding category as well, 

> that of the "implied author", which is not simply an ideal, impersonal
> "man[sic] in general" but an implied version of "himself" that is different
> from the implied authors we meet in other men's works. To some novelists it
> has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as
> they wrote ....
>
> It is a curious fact that there are no terms either for this created
> "second self" or for our relationship with him. None of our terms for the
> various aspects of the narrator is quite accurate. "Persona", "mask", and
> "narrator" are sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker
> of the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the
> implied author and who may be separated from him by large ironies.
> "Narrator" is usually taken to mean the "I" of the work, but the "I" is
> seldom if ever identical with the implied-image of the artist. (*The Rhetoric
> of Fiction*, pp. 70-73 ff)

See also Walter J. Ong, S.J., 'The Writer¹s Audience is Always a Fiction'
(1972), in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (eds), *Contemporary
Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies* (Longman, New York, 1989,
pp. 83-99) for a lucid discussion of the process of "fictionalizing" one
another which author and reader undertake in the construction of a text, and
of the relationship of the devices of narrative agency in literature to oral
rhetorical modes.

Elsewhere, this slippery rhetorical structure, or phenomenon, of the
"implied author" is addressed as the "voice", "point of view", or
"narrative agency" of the text. I think it is something like what Jody
Porter is getting at when he complains of the long sequence describing
Achtfaden's Toiletship dilemma that

> P. is a slick writer, but he can be an arrogant s.o.b., and when he's bad,
> he can stink up even the Rucksichtslos.

and asserts

> if
> this passage doesn't make today's P. wince, I'm ducking for him.

The use of the second person throughout the sequence could certainly be
interpreted as an instance where this implied author (i.e. TRP's conception
of who/what TRP is/stands for) is addressing his character, and the looting
of the yearbook for 1904 seems to corroborate such a reading. I have no idea
what tensor analysis is and why it might or might not apply to history (and
I'd love to hear an elaboration on this topic), however, I'm not so sure
that there is any overt or actual endorsement of cocaine in the passage even
so, merely a negative comparison of what came after it was removed from
"It". And crack is an altogether different development, surely, and can't
really be factored in, either from the vantage of 1904, 1914, 1945, or 1973
-- or can it? Is to demand such prescience of Our Author expecting too much?

best