The autor ia a sign. A semiotic perspective on the author-narrator relationship

Abstract

[Abstract] After poststructuralism, literary scientists, linguists, and, of course, literary semioticians have started to consider the question ‘Who is talking?’ again. Texts are seen as a part of a communicative process working according to a sender-code-receiver model. Who is the sender of a literary text? The answer would be the author. His return to the academic world has revived a discussion that had started with Plato’s poeta vates, became more interesting with the introduction of the narrator (Kayser), had a preliminary climax in the proclaimed death of the author (Barthes, Foucault), an intriguing turn with his comeback (Booth), and has been experiencing a new high point since the turn of the millennium. Whether his function in the process of interpretation and reception, his role in other media, or his importance for questions of race, gender, and class: the author is back. He has secured a save place in the communicative model that describes narratives as well. Apart from this pragmatic perspective, however, the author-narrator relationship has not been discussed as a semiotic relation. I attempt to present two different approaches to compensate this deficit. The author could be seen as the signified of the narrator (signifier). From this perspective a subdivision would have to look at the author-signified as a sign of a real author (signified) and an implied author (signifier); the narrator-signifier would be divided analogously into fictional narrator (signified) and focalizer (signifier). This approach will serve as a preliminary aid to translate the communication model into a sign model. The Peircean triadic sign offers a more complex basis for describing the author-narrator relation. A chain of triads that depicts the «real» author, the textual/implied author, the fictional narrator, and finally the creation of the story by the focalizer serves to demonstrate the semiotic dimension of the problem and also offers a solution to the dilemma of intentional fallacy. The author can be understood as a symbolic, indexical, and iconic sign. I will argue that the iconic quality of the author is most relevant for the narratological perspective. The problems with author concepts in the past are simply a result of failed semiosis on the part of the interpreter: the hypoiconic sign is misread as a genuine icon (which would equal its object). I hope to shed a new light on the author and his narrotological implications by introducing a semiotic perspective into the debate.