Good stories and implied authors

1. Meet the implied author

A story can be great because it has loveable characters, or fascinatingly complex ones. It can be great because it is a mystery whose plot takes surprising turns, or because it is a romance that keeps its lovers apart for just long enough. Form can make a story great; the writing or the cinematography may be striking in its beauty.

Sometimes, also, a story is great because of a mental quality you sense in it, which cannot be pinned onto any particular character. I love Sarah Ruhl’s plays because they feel infused with a wisdom and kindness that surpasses the wisdom or kindness of any of the characters. But there is a philosophical mystery here: what we are saying when we say that those plays are “infused with wisdom and kindness,” if we are not saying that some of its characters are wise and kind? A natural answer—and one that I think is right—is that the plays appear to have been written by someone wise and kind. More carefully, it appears that the author has manifested, or expressed, her wisdom and kindness in the way she wrote the plays.

Why the emphasis on how the story “appears” to have been written? Because it could well be that the impression one gets of what the author is like, from reading the story, is wrong. Tolstoy is a standard example: reading his stories and novels many get a sense of a deep love and compassion for humanity, which then they cannot find when they study the man himself. Since what matters when you read a story is what the mind behind the story seems to be like, some critics speak of “the implied author.” The implied author of (say) Anna Karenina is himself a fiction; there isn’t really any such person. Instead, “the implied author has a deep love for humanity” just means “the novel appears to have been written by someone with a deep love for humanity.”

2. Implied authors and story quality

I said, to start, that sometimes a story is great because of a mental quality you sense in it. In the new terminology, this becomes: sometimes a story is great because of what the implied author is like. Can we be more specific? Which features, characteristics, or “mental qualities,” are those which, if the implied author has them, contribute to the story’s being good, and which features are, instead, flaws in the story?