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WAYNE C. BOOTH THE RHETORIC OF FICTION (1961)
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. 2 Ed. 1983.
nd
Preface to the First Edition (xiii-xv)
Booth stresses that his interest in writing about the rhetoric of fiction (xiii) does not
extend to an interest in didactic fiction, fiction used for propaganda or instruction (xiii).
His subject is, rather, the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of
communicating with readers the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic,
novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world
upon the reader (xiii). Referring, for example, to the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave
Flaubert, Booth is interested in finding any defence that can be offered, on aesthetical
grounds, for an art full of rhetorical appeals (xiii), such as direct authorial intrusions:
What kind of art is it that will allow Flaubert to barge into his action to
describe Emma as unaware that now she was eager to yield to the very
thing that had made her so indignant, and as totally unconscious that she
was prostituting herself? Whatever their answers, critics have often been
troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. (xiii)
The problem is, Booth contends, that the same problems are raised, though in less
obvious form, by the disguised rhetoric of modern fiction (my emphasis; xiii). The efforts
of modern novelists, Booth argues, is often dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp
the work (xiii).
Booth admits that he is arbitrarily separating technique (xiii), the authors means
of controlling his reader (xiii), from all of the social and psychological forces that affect
authors and readers (xiii). He has set to one side the different demands made by
different audiences in different times (xiii-xiv) (treated, for example, by Q. D. Leavis in
Fiction and the Reading Public), questions about the psychological qualities in readers that
account for the almost universal interest in fiction (xiv) (addressed by Simon Lesser in
Fiction and the Unconscious), and the psychology of the author and the whole question of
how it relates to the creative process (xiv). This is because his real concern is with
whether rhetoric is compatible with art (xiv). He also admits that some might criticise
him for reducing the free and inexplicable processes of the creative imagination to the
crafty calculations of commercial entertainers (xiv), that is, for failing to differentiate
between artists who consciously calculate and artists who simply express themselves with
no thought of affecting a reader (xiv). Booth is of the view that, whether deliberate or
not, it is a question of whether an authors work . . . communicates itself (xiv): the
success of an authors rhetoric does not depend on whether he thought about his readers
as he wrote (xiv). His goal is to free both readers and novelists from the constraints of
what novelists must do, by reminding them in a systematic way of what good novelists
have in fact done (xv).
Part I: Artistic Purity and the Rhetoric of Fiction
Chapter I: "Telling and Showing" (3-22):
Booth begins by pointing out that one of the most
obviously artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of going beneath the
surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of a characters mind and
heart. Whatever our ideas may be about the natural way to tell a story,
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artifice is undoubtedly present whenever the author tells us what no one in
so-called real life could possibly know. In life we never know anyone by
ourselves by thoroughly reliable internal signs, and most of us achieve an all
too partial view even of ourselves. It is in a way strange, then, that in
literature from the very beginning we have been told motives directly and
authoritatively without being forced to rely on those shaky inferences about
other men which we cannot avoid in our own lives. (3)
Through direct authorial intrusions, the author gives us the kind of information never
obtained about real people (3). But this is information that we must accept without
question if we are to grasp the story that is to follow (3).
This form of artificial authority has been present in most narrative until recent
times (4), for example, in the Book of Job in the Bible and Homers Odyssey. Though
[d]irect and authoritative rhetoric of this kind (6), to be precise, what Booth calls direct
guidance (6) has never completely disappeared from fiction (6), it is not what we are
likely to find if we turn to a typical modern novel or short story (6). The modern author,
Booth argues, has effaced himself, renounced the privilege of direct intervention,
retreated to the wings and left his characters to work out their own fates upon the stage
(7). In such writers, the story is present without comment, leaving the reader without
the guidance of explicit evaluation (7). Since Flaubert, Booth contends,
many authors and critics have been convinced that objective or impersonal
or dramatic modes of narration are naturally superior to any mode that
allows for direct appearances by the author or his reliable spokesman.
Sometimes . . . the complex issues involved in this shift have been reduced
to a convenient distinction between showing, which is artistic, and telling,
which is inartistic. I shall not tell you anything, says a fine young novelist
in defence of his art. I shall allow you to eavesdrop on my people, and
sometimes they will tell the truth and sometimes they will lie, and you must
determine for yourself when the are doing which. . . . I can show much, but
show only. (8)
Booth insists that changed attitudes toward the authors voice in fiction raise problems
that go far deeper than this simplified version of point of view would suggest (8). He
alludes to Percy Lubbock in this regard who argued that the art of fiction does not begin
until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will
tell itself (qtd. in Booth, 8). Booth, though, questions such simple distinctions between
showing and telling, contending that we need to question what happens when an author
engages a reader fully with a work of fiction (8). Such questions lead us to a view of
fictional technique which necessarily goes far beyond the reductions that we have
sometimes accepted under the concept of point of view (8-9).
To address such issues, Booth turns his attention to two short stories from the
Medieval collection called the Decameron by Boccaccio, stories written long before anyone
worried very much about cleaning out the rhetorical impurities from the house of fiction
(9). The point of Booths discussion of these two stories (pp. 9-16) is to suggest that
Boccaccios style . . . serves as a kind of rhetoric convincing the reader of the reality of his
world (note #7, p. 16). What is important here is to recognise the radical inadequacy of
the telling-showing distinction in dealing with the practice of this one author (16). His
artistry lies not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his
ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing (16).
In the chapters which follow, Booth examines some of the more important
arguments for authorial objectivity (16), that is, for eliminating certain overt signs of the
authors presence (16). Booth is keen to examine, first, the variety of forms (16) which
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the authors voice (16) can take. In other words, [w]hat is it . . . that we might
expunge if we attempted to drive the author from the house of fiction (16). First, we
must erase all direct addresses to the reader, all commentary in the authors own name
(16). The question is, however, what degree of commentary merits being expunged.
Should all, including less obtrusive (17) commentaries be expunged? Moreover, even if
we eliminate all such explicit judgments, the authors presence will be obvious on every
occasion when he moves into or out of a characters mind when he shifts his point of
view, as we have come to put it (17). Each such shift from the perspective of one
character to another is a troubling reminder of the authors presence (17). What is
more, why not go the next step and object to all inside views, not simply those that
require a shift in point of view (17). In real life, Booth argues, all such views are not to
be had (17) and the act of providing them is itself an obtrusion by the author (17). We
must object, Booth insists, to the reliable statements of any dramatised character, not
just the author in his own voice, because the act of narration as performed by even the
most highly dramatised narrator is itself the authors presentation of a prolonged inside
view of a character (18). Moreover, the author is present in every speech given by any
character who has had conferred upon him, in whatever manner, the badge of reliability
(18). We can go on and on, purging the work of every recognisably personal touch, every
distinctive literary allusion or colorful metaphor, every pattern of myth or symbol; they all
implicitly evaluate. Any discerning reader can recognise that they are imposed by the
author (18-19). We may even go so far as to object, like Jean-Paul Sartre does, to all
evidences of the authors meddling with the natural sequence, proportion, or duration of
events (19). All such things are signs of the authors manipulating presence (19). Even
with all such devices eliminated, the very choice to write one story as opposed to another
reveals the decisive role played by the author. Even with all forms of the authors voice
expunged (20), there remains a shameful artificiality (20) for the authors judgment is
always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it (20). Though the
author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear (20).
Chapter II: "General Rules, I: 'True Novels Must be Realistic'" (23-64):
From Justified Revolt to Crippling Dogma
Here, Booth begins by listing some of the important modern theorists who have written
against the old style of authoritative rhetoric (23) in prose fiction. Some like Allen Tate
contend, for example, that in the best novels, the action is not stated from the point of
view of the author; it is rendered in terms of situation and scene (qtd. in Booth, 28). He
questions, however, whether there are, in fact, two ways of conveying a story, one all
good, the other all bad; one all art and form, the other all clumsiness and irrelevancy; one
all showing and rendering and drama and objectivity, the other all telling and subjectivity
and preaching and inertness (28). Booths goal is to show that the art even in the most
impersonal fiction does not reside exclusively in the moments of vivid dramatic rendering
(29). Why, he wonders, has there been such suspicion of everything but the rendered
scene (29).
From Differentiated Kinds to Universal Qualities
One answer, Booth suggests, has to do with a modern tendency to generalise about
literature, a tendency to move from merely inductively describing to normatively
prescribing what is necessary and appropriate for each particular work.
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General Criteria of Earlier Periods
What is different about the modern period is the widespread abandonment of the notion
of peculiar literary kinds, each with its unique demands that may modify the general
standards (34). While earlier critics did deal with qualities thought to be common to all
types of worthwhile literature, some qualities were seen as peculiar to whatever special
type was under discussion to tragedy, comedy, satire, epic, elegy, and so on (34).
There has been an abandonment of distinctions of species in the face of demands for
universally desired qualities (35), resulting in the loss of distinctions between levels of
style suited to different literary kinds (35). This has been especially true of the criticism
of fiction (36): [u]nassisted by established critical traditions, faced with chaotic diversity
among the things called novels, critics of fiction have been driven to invent an order of
some kind, even at the expense of being dogmatic (36).
Three Sources of General Criteria
Certain general qualities on the basis of which critics since Flaubert have judged fiction
(37) include views on [g]eneral qualities required in the work itself (37), to be precise,
that the
novel do justice to reality, to be true to life, to be natural, or real, or
intensely alive. Others would cleanse it of impurities, of the inartistic, of the
all-too-human. On the one hand, the request is for dramatic vividness,
conviction, sincerity, genuineness, an air of reality, a full realisation of
the subject, intensity of illusion; on the other, for dispassionateness,
impersonality, poetic purity, pure form. On the one hand, reality to be
experienced, and, on the other, form to be contemplated. (37-38)
They also include a certain view of the [a]ttitudes required of the author (38), that the
author must be objective, detached, dispassionate, ironic, neutral, impartial,
impersonal, (38) as well as, in the eyes of some critics, passionate, involved, engag
(38); and certain [a]ttitudes required of the reader (38) which tend to duplicate those
describing the ideal author (38). Booth is interested in noting the ways in which, in the
service of these goals, authors have often sacrificed technique as rhetoric (39).
Intensity of Realistic Illusion
Booth points out that the majority of attacks on the authors voice have been made in the
name of making the book seem real (40), the emphasis being on realistic rendering rather
than mere telling (40). Booth quotes two critics writing in 1935: If, then, it is dramatic
vividness that the novelist wants, the best thing he can do is to find a way of eliminating the
narrator entirely and exposing the scene directly to the reader. . . . The frankly omniscient
story-teller has well nigh disappeared from modern fiction (40-41). Booth alludes in
particular to the views of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (for whom the novel begins only
when Defoe and Richardson discover how to give their characters sufficient particularity and
autonomy to make them seem like real people [41]). The assumption on the part of Watt
and others is that commentary diminishes authenticity. Everybody knows it, nobody
questions it (42). The truth is, though, that what seems natural in one period or to one
school seems artificial in another period or to another school. Each man trusts his own brand
of reality, and the seeming agreement about the importance of a natural surface breaks down
as soon as we compare doctrines in detail (42). Booth then devotes pp. 42-50 to a
discussion of the complexities of Henry James approach to the novel as an illustration of the
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claim that there is no commonly accepted conception of reality nor of the means of capturing
it artistically. In a nutshell, James views are neither on the side pure and simple of mere
rendering nor telling. His interest in realism never led him to the notion that all signs of the
authors presence are inartistic (50).
The Novel as Unmediated Reality
Booth turns his attention here to the views of Jean-Paul Sartre who, in Booths view, is of the
opinion that the author should avoid omniscient commentary altogether (50) for the simple
reason that if we suspect for a moment that he is behind the scenes, controlling the lives of
his characters, they will not seem to be free (50). Booth argues that this
elegant theory is irrefutable so long as we assume that fiction should seem to
be unwritten. But who ever really makes such an assumption? Our entire
experience in reading fiction is based . . . on a tacit contract with the novelist,
a contract granting him the right to know what he is writing about. It is this
contract which makes fiction possible. To deny it would not only destroy fiction,
but all literature, since all art presupposes the artists choice. (52-53)
On Discriminating among Realisms
Booth points out that the general consensus is that a novel should seem real (53). The
question is, however, what is the reality which is to be depicted? Virginia Woolf, for example,
saw the novelist as trying to express the elusive reality of character (53). Others like
Dorothy Richardson used so-called stream of consciousness as a route to reality (54), while
James Joyce contended that the artist has no truck with making his work religious, moral,
beautiful or ideal; he wants only to make it truthful to fundamental laws (54). Booth cites
in this regard Robert Humphrey in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel who
identifies the
purpose of all stream-of-consciousness writers as the effort to reveal the
psychic being of the characters, in an attempt to analyse human nature, to
present character more accurately and more realistically. For such writers,
Humphrey claims, the distinctive patterns of individual works are stratagems
to give form to what is really formless. The invention of a structure thus
becomes a kind of rhetoric to support the illusion, rather than the other way
around. With motive and external action replaced by psychic being and
functioning, what is to unify the fiction? What is to replace the conventional
plot? The real life of the mind contains no forms, but the work must be
formed if the author is to communicate. And so the author invents his works
as successive devices for differentiation and variation, for getting lights and
shadows (p.88). An extraordinary inversion of the traditional rhetorical
problem! (55)
How, Booth argues, are we to make our way through the mass of conflicting claims that we
see here clustering about the term reality (55)? Some theorists think that the novel should
do justice to the unpleasant side of life (55), while others the pleasant (55). Some are of
the view that literature must strive to depict metaphysical Truth (55), for which invariable
technical and formal requirements are likely to be implicated (55). Some have felt that
reality should be sought in an accurate transcription of sensations produced by surfaces
rather than in allegiance to any general view of things (56), while others have pondered the
precisely correct relation between the reality shown by characters in novels and the reality
of their models in real life (56).
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Most writers who have tried to make their subjects real have sooner or later found
themselves . . . also seeking a realistic structure or shape of events, and wrestling with the
question of how to make that shape seem a probable reflection of the shapes into which life
falls (56) either by emphasising the role of chance in life or downplaying it. There is no
inherent reason why a realistic structure should require any particular form of realistic
narrative technique (57) simply because life is like that (57). By and large, most
programmes demanding realistic structure have led to narrative rules (57) but, for the most
part, realistic narration must disguise the fact that it is narration at all, creating the illusion
that the events are taking place unmediated by the author (57).
The Ordering of Intensities
Here, Booth argues that the entire novel is rarely uniformly intense for the simple reason that
no quality, however desirable, is likely to be suitable in the same degree in all parts of the
work (60). To the novelist who sees his task as in part that of ordering intensities, each
valley and each peak in its proper place, there is no theoretical problem here; his only
problem is to learn his craft (60). Depictions of psychical and physical vividness (62)
cannot be offered indiscriminately (60).
Booth concludes that the interest in realism is not a theory or even a combination
of theories that can be proved right or wrong; it is an expression of what men of a given time
have cared for most, and as such it cannot be attacked or defended by rational argument
(63). All that can be proved is that it has sometimes had harmful consequences in the hands
of dogmatists (63). Indeed, any exclusivist doctrine we tried to substitute for it would be
fully as dangerous (63). Many modern writers, he points out, urge all and sundry to write
a story that tells itself, freed of all authorial intrusion, shown with a consistent treatment of
point of view (64) but Booth wonders whether this automatically translates into good fiction
(64). What modern writers have yet to learn . . . is the art of choosing what to dramatise
fully and what to curtail, what to summarise and what heighten. And like any art, this one
cannot be learned from abstract rules (64).
Chapter III: "General Rules II: 'All Authors Should be Objective'" (67-86):
A second criterion common to many of the founders of modern fiction (67) addresses the
authors state of mind or soul (67). While many writers continued to believe in literature
as a form of self-expression (67), the predominant demand in this century has been for
some sort of objectivity (67). Objectivity implies impersonality, detachment,
disinterestedness, neutrality, etc. (67), three separate qualities (67) of which can be
distinguished, according to Booth: neutrality, impartiality, and impassibilit (67).
Neutrality and the Authors Second Self
Objectivity, Booth points out, can mean an attitude of neutrality toward all values, an
attempt at disinterested reporting of all things, good and evil (67-68). Keats recommended
neutrality in the poet in the early eighteenth century, while three decades later, for Flaubert,
the model is the attitude of the scientist. Once we have spent enough time, he says, in
treating the human soul with the impartiality which physical scientists show in studying
matter, we will have taken an immense step forward. Art must achieve by a pitiless method,
the precision of the physical sciences (68). Booth is of the view that no author can ever
attain to this kind of objectivity (68) for the simple reason that a careful reading of any
statement in defence of the artists neutrality will reveal commitment; there is always some
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deeper value in relation to which neutrality is taken to be good (68). Each author always
already writes according to a particular scale of values (69): to repudiate one scale is
necessarily to imply another (69). There is, in other words, a difference between neutrality
toward some values and neutrality toward all (69). However, cleansed of the polemical
excesses, the attack on subjectivity can be seen to rest on several important insights (69),
not least the warning extended to the writer of the dangers of pour[ing] his untransformed
biases into his work (70).
Booth is of the view that sometimes a lack of commitment to a particular cause(s) is
useful to the writing process, sometimes a given commitment is. Everyone is against
everyone elses prejudices and in favour of his own commitment to the truth. All of us would
like the novelist somehow to operate on the level of our own passion for truth and right, a
passion which by definition is not in the least prejudiced (70). The authors individuality
(70) should not be underestimated because, as he writes, he creates not simply an ideal,
personal man in general but an implied version of himself that is different from the implied
authors we meet in other mens works (70-71). Called by others things like official scribe
(71) or the authors second self (71), the
picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the authors most important
effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably
construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner and of
course that official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. Our reaction
to his various commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our
response to the work. (71)
Booths focus here is not so much on the readers response but the intricate relationship of
the so-called real author with his various official versions of himself (71).
Booth contends that regardless of how sincere an author may be, his different works
will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms (71). In much the same
way that ones personal letters imply different versions of oneself, depending on the differing
relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets
himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works (71). These
differences are most evident when the second self is given an overt, speaking role in the
story (71), that is, when the author actively intrudes into his own work. There are certain
common elements to the implied author which reoccur in more than one work by the same
author, but there are also important differences which can be glimpsed in particular works.
Literary criticism has no terms (73) for this created second self or for our
relationship with him (73), Booth suggests. None of our terms for various aspects of the
narrator is quite accurate(73), the terms persona, mask, and narrator being inadequate
in that they all refer to the speaker in 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 (73).
Narrator is usually taken to mean the I of a work, but the I is seldom if ever identical with
the implied image of the artist (73). Terms like theme, meaning, symbolic significance,
and ontology have been used to describe the norms which the reader must apprehend in
each work if he is to grasp it adequately (73), but such terms almost inevitably come to
seem like purposes for which the works exist (73). In more recent times, the search for the
theme or moral of the work has been replaced by a quest for the meaning which the work
communicates or symbolises (73). However, both pursuits express a basic . . . need to
know where, in the world of values, he stands that is, to know where the author wants him
to stand (73). Given the difficulty involved in reducing the many possible meanings and so
on of any work to a single, unifying one, the concept of the implied author, rather,
includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional
content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters. It includes, in
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short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value
to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator
belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form. (73-74)
There are three other terms which are sometimes used to name the core of norms and
choices (74) which Booth calls the implied author: Style refers to whatever it is that gives
us a sense, from word to word and line to line, that the author sees more deeply and judges
more profoundly than his presented characters (74) and is, as such, one of our main sources
of insight into the authors norms (74), but is unsatisfactory because in carrying such strong
overtones of the merely verbal the word style excludes our sense of the authors skill in this
choice of character and episode and scene and idea (74). Tone is similarly used to refer
to the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit
presentation (74), even as it also suggests something limited to the purely verbal (74).
Though some aspects of the implied author may be inferred through tonal variations (74),
his major qualities will depend also on the hard facts of action and character in the tale that
is told (74). Technique has been used, by Mark Schorer, for example, to cover all
discernible signs of the authors artistry (74) and the entire range of choices made by the
author (74), but is usually taken for a much narrower matter (74). Booth is seeking a term
that will call our attention to the
work as the product of a choosing, evaluating person rather than as a self-
existing thing. The implied author chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what
we read; we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he
is the sum of his own choices. (74-75)
By distinguishing between the author and his implied image (75), we can avoid pointless
and unverifiable talk about such qualities as sincerity or seriousness (75) in the author.
If the implied author is in harmony with himself (75), that is, if his other choices [are] in
harmony with his explicit narrative character (75), then this is evidence of sincerity. By
contrast, a work may be insincere if a narrator who by every trustworthy sign is presented
ot us as a reliable spokesman for the author professes to believe in values which are never
realised in the structure as a whole (75). There may be a discrepancy between the life of the
real author and the implied author glimpsed in the novel in question since, for all we know,
the only sincere moments of his life may have been lived as he wrote his novel (75).
The notion of an implied author offers us a middle position between . . . talk about the
artists objectivity and the harmful error of pretending that an author can allow direct
intrusions of his own immediate problems and desires (75). The overuse of such intrusions
mar the aesthetic quality of works but it is impossible to ignore the fact that the implied
author is neutral toward all values (76). Even the most nearly neutral comment will reveal
some sort of commitment (76).
Impartiality and Unfair Emphasis
Sometimes the authors objectivity implies an attitude of impartiality towards his characters
(77), which is often made to sound like universal love or pity or toleration (77). The
assumption is often that to understand all is to forgive all (77). No work is totally impartial,
Booth asserts. Even among all characters of equal moral, intellectual, or aesthetic worth, all
authors inevitably take sides (78). The novelist who chooses to tell this story cannot at the
same time tell that story; in centering our interest, sympathy, or affection on one character,
he inevitably excludes from our interest, sympathy, or affection some other character (78-
79). However, some works are marred by the impression that the author has weighed his
characters on dishonest scales (79) and uncertainty whether the judgement he passes
seems defensible in the light of the dramatised facts (79).
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Impassibilit
The authors objectivity can also imply what Flaubert called impassibilit, an unmoved or
impassioned feeling toward the characters and events of ones story (81). This quality is
distinct from neutrality of judgment about values (81) in that an author could be committed
to one or another value and still not feel with or against any of his characters (81-82). It is
also distinct from impartiality since the artist could feel a lively hate or love or pity for all of
his characters impartially (82). Impassibilit means, in short, detachment (82), the degree
of which varies from author to author. There is no necessary link between either too much
or too little detachment and any particular level of achievement (82) in a given novel:
authors at either extreme of the scale of emotional involvement might write works which .
. . were altogether told, or works that were strictly dramatic, strictly shown (82). We can
never securely infer, without external evidence, whether an author has felt his work or
written with cold detachment (82). A great artist can create an implied author who is either
detached or involved, depending on the needs of the work at hand (83).
In short, then, none of the three major claims to objectivity in the author has any
necessary bearing on technical decisions (83).
Subjectivism Encouraged by Impersonal Techniques
Here, Booth argues that [i]mpersonal narration may, in fact, encourage the very subjectivism
that it is supposed to cure (83). The effort to avoid signs of explicit evaluation (83) can be
dangerous for an author who is fighting to keep himself out of his works (83). The art of
constructing reliable narrators is largely that of mastering all of oneself in order to project the
persona, the second self, that really belongs in the book. And, in laying his cards on the table,
an author can discover in himself, and at least find some chance of combatting, the two
extremes of subjectivism that have marred some impersonal fiction (83). By giving the
impression that judgment is withheld, an author can hide from himself that he is sentimentally
involved with his characters (83). The kind of subjectivity (84) so often deplored is not
by any means prevented by the standard devices of so-called objectivity (84-85). Even the
most rigorously impersonal techniques can betray the poor writer hand over fist (85) for
which reason it is better for the author to lay his cards on the table. By the same token, an
[i]indiscriminate irony (85), that is, the allowance of an all-pervasive, un-earned irony to
substitute for an honest discrimination (85) is just as bad as indiscriminate sympathy or
compassion (84). Many such writers people their novels with very sort heroes because the
themselves want to appear tall (85), Booth suspects. The author who maintains his
invulnerability by suggesting irony at all points (85) is irresponsible. Such an author is
using irony to protect himself rather than to reveal his subject (85).
In short, subjectivism of these two kinds can be ruinous for a novel, Booth argue.
There is
much truth to the demand for objectivity in the author: signs of the real
authors untransformed loves and hates are almost always fatal. But clear
recognition of this truth cannot lead us to doctrines about technique, and it
should not lead us to demand of the author that he eliminate love and hate,
and the judgments on which they are based, from his novels. The emotions
and judgments of the implied author are . . . the very stuff our of which great
fiction is made. (86)
Chapter IV: "General Rules III: 'True Art Ignores the Audience'" (89-118):
10
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
Here, Booth contends that rules about realistic works and about objective authors lead
naturally to the third kind of, prescriptions about readers (89). For it is not only an image
of himself that the author creates. Every stroke implying his second self will help to mould
the reader into the kind of person suited to appreciate such a character and the book he is
writing (89). This
act of communication, fundamental to the very existence of literature, has in
modern criticism often been ignored, lamented, or denied. True artists, we
have been told again and again, take no thought of their readers. They write
for themselves. The true poet writes to express himself, or to find himself, or
to get rid of the book and let the reader be damned. (89)
The fear has long been, Booth points out, that paying too much attention to the reader might
turn one into nothing better than a hack (90) writer, with the result that the predominant
fashion among serious writers has been to consider any recognisable concern for the reader
as a commercial blemish on the otherwise spotless face of art (90).
Theories of Pure Art
Booth contends here that [s]uspicion of the reader has usually been based on theories of
pure art or pure poetry which demand that this, that, or the other element be purged in order
that what remains might consist of nothing but pure elements fused in an intrinsic, internal
relationship (91). Most such attempts have excluded all obvious rhetoric, since it is clearly
not part of the pure poetic object (91). Aristotle, for example, admits that poetry always
works upon an audience, and thus always has a close relationship to rhetoric (93), but he
also deplore all obvious separable rhetoric . . . because it is extraneous (93). Booth also
alludes to an essay, Pure Poetry, by a poet and theorist of more recent vintage, Paul Valry,
which has had an important influence on Modernism and New Criticism. Booth points out, too,
that this drive for purity (95) contrasts curiously with the general demand for realism.
Though some realisms can be harmonised with some notions of poetic purity, the typical
demand for realistic effect is likely to clash with the typical demand for a pure rendering of
the ideal aesthetic realm (95). He cites the views of Henry James and Sartre in this regard.
However, Booth argues that both the quest for realism and the quest for purity . . . have
yielded the same attack on rhetorical impurities in fiction (96): if fiction is to seem real, it
must not be laden with signs of artifice (96). By extension, if fiction is to be pure, if it is to
catch up with poetry, . . . the author must somehow find a way to create a cleansed object
which can speak for itself (96). Many modern novelists and poets have agreed with Flaubert
that the fully expressed natural event will convey its own meanings far better than any
explicit evaluative commentary might do (96). A good example of this kind of thinking is
glimpsed in T. S. Eliots notion of the objective correlative.
The Impurity of Great Literature
Booth points out that, based on a Platonic notion of a perfect condition toward which all the
arts aspire, such programs can admit the radical imperfection of every particular art work
without impugning the validity of the quest for perfection (98). Booths goal, however, is to
show that all great literature has in fact made use of rhetoric (98) in order to contend that
if the most admired literature is in fact radically contaminated with rhetoric, we must surely
be led to ask whether the rhetoric itself may not have had something to do with our
admiration (98-99). If recognisable appeals to the reader are a sign of imperfection, perfect
literature is impossible to find; in the great works, not just of fiction but of all kinds, we find
such appeals wherever we look (99). What he terms a disguised rhetoric (100) is found
11
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
in ancient Greek theatre, modern lyric poetry (where Eliots objective correlative is thought
to reign supreme), in modern drama and in the novel as well. Booth is of the view that far
from it being possible to free literature of its rhetorical dimension (105), at the very
moment of initial conception, . . . a rhetorical aspect is contained within the conception: the
subject is thought of as something that can be made public, something that can be made into
a communicated work (105). A given writer may, for whatever reason, not consciously think
of the reader at all but, Booth insists, the very concept of writing a story seems to have
implicit within it the notion of finding techniques of expression that will make the work
accessible in the highest degree (105). His point, in short, is that we tend to overlook the
rhetorical dimension of literature precisely because we assume that the writer is someone
who addresses us, who wants to be read, and who does what he can to make himself
readable (105). For Booth, in short, recognisable rhetorical elements are used by the author
and accepted by us as part of the realisation of subject. He may dramatise or he may
comment directly . . . but one eye is always on the reader, even as he works to bring the
novel itself to perfection (109).
Is a Pure Fiction Theoretically Desirable?
Booth stresses here that it is possible for an author to attempt to purify his work of its
rhetorical elements. The question remains, however, whether this makes the work better.
This leads Booth to consider in this connection the limits of possibility in literary
communication (110). He considers in this regard, first, whether the author can depend on
a natural response based on universals (110) rhetoric, he argues, might be necessary to
stimulate the requisite intensity (110) of response. He turns his attention, second, to
whether the seemingly most permanent values receive altered conventional expression from
man to man, region to region, and time to time (111). Such culturally-specific values would
necessitate a rhetoric to place them for a reader (111). He contends in this regard that the
notion of firmly constituted natural objects inducing natural responses came
into literature originally in emulation of the nineteenth century scientist, dealing
dispassionately, objectively, with concrete reality. . . . Now that the scientists
have given up the claim that they are seeking one single formulation of a firmly
constituted reality, unaffected by the limitations and interests of the observer,
perhaps we should pick up our bags and follow after. Undifferentiated reality
is never given to men in a natural, unadorned form. Without surrendering to
relativism, one can recognise that our different interests and predispositions
lead ut to take different aspects of reality for different purposes. The same fact
can be different facts, depending on differences in our general orientation.
Thus, every literary fact even the most unadorned picture of some universal
aspect of human existence is highly charged by the meanings of the author,
whatever his pretensions to objectivity. (112)
What this means, for Booth, is that
any story will be unintelligible unless it includes, however subtly, the amount
of telling necessary not only to make us aware of the value system which gives
it meaning but, more important, to make us willing to accept that value system,
at least temporarily. It is true that the reader must suspend to some extent his
own disbeliefs; he must be receptive, open, ready to receive the clues. But the
work itself . . . must fill with its rhetoric the gap made by the suspension of my
own beliefs. (112)
Third, Booth points out that fiction, in its very rive for reality, is inclined to deal with a great
number of mere conventions , meaningless except in a context 9113). For example, the
12
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
significance of a woman lighting a cigarette varies in a novel written in 1960 from that written
in 1860. The reader, Booth arguesz, is always faced with the question of what a particular
gesture, a particular detail means. It is not enough to say that it need not mean anything
because it simply is. . . . Only if the details are made to tell, only if they are weighted with
significance for the lives shown, will they be tolerable (114). Fourth, Booth points out, some
of the most powerful literature is based on a successful reversal of what many readers would
naturally think of as a proper response (115). Such reversals can only be achieved if the
author is able to call to our attention relationships and meanings that the surface of the object
obscures (115).
Booth concludes by saying that all of the clichs about the natural object being self-
sufficient (116) are merely half-truths (116) at best. Though
some characters and events may speak by themselves their artistic message
to the reader, and thus carry in a weak form their own rhetoric, none will do
with proper clarity and force until the author brings all his powers to bear on
the problem of making the reader see what they really are. The author cannot
choose whether to use rhetorical heightening. His only choice is of the kind of
rhetoric he will use. (116)
Chapter V: "General Rules IV: Emotions, Beliefs, and the Reader's Objectivity'"
(119-147):
Chapter VI: "Types of Narration" (149-165):
Here, Booth reminds us that the author cannot choose to avoid rhetoric; he can choose only
the kind of rhetoric he will employ (149). Similarly, he cannot choose whether or not to
affect his readers evaluations by his choice of narrative manner; he can only choose whether
to do it well or badly (149). The open secret is that even the purest of dramas is not purely
dramatic in the sense of being entirely presented, entirely shown as taking place in the
moment (149). As Dryden points out, try as the author may to ignore the troublesome fact,
some parts of the action are more fit to be represented, some to be related (149).
The existence of the many narrative devices in the fiction we know (149) reveals the
embarrassing inadequacy of our traditional classification of point of view into three or four
kinds, variables only of the person and the degrees of omniscience (149). Terms like first-
person and omniscient do little justice to the actual complexity of points of view in prose
fiction. Hence, Booths desire to attempt a richer tabulation of the forms the authors voice
can take (150).
Person: the difference between narration in the first and narration in the third person
is the most overworked distinction (150). To say that a story is told in the first or third
person will tell us nothing of importance unless we become more precise and describe how the
particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effects (150). We can hardly expect
to find useful criteria in a distinction that throws all fiction into two, or at most three, heaps
(150). This is confirmed by the fact that all the following functional distinctions apply to both
first- and third- person narration alike (151).
Dramatised and Undramatised Narrators: the most important differences in narrative
depend on whether the narrator is dramatised in his own right on whether his beliefs and
characteristics are shared by the author (151).
The implied author (the authors second self) (151): even the novel in which no
narrator is dramatised creates and implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes,
13
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
whether as stage manner, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God (151). The implied author
is always distinct from the real man whatever we may take him to be who creates a
superior version of himself, a second self, as he creates his work (151). Where the novel
in question does not refer directly to this author, there will ne distinction between him and
the implied, undramatised narrator (151).
Undramatised Narrators: most tales are presented as passing through the
consciousness of a teller, whether an I or a he (151). Even in drama, much of what is
given is narrated by someone (151). In fiction, as soon as we encounter and I, we are
conscious of an experiencing mind whose views of the experience will come between us and
the event. Where there is no such I, . . . the inexperienced reader may make the mistake
of thinking that the story comes to him unmediated (151-152). However, no such mistake
can be made (152) once the author places a narrator in the tale, even if he is given no
personal characteristics whatever (152).
Dramatised Narrators: some narrators are barely dramatised in that the details of their
life and personality are limited, whereas many novels dramatise their narrators with great
fulness, making them into characters who are as vivid as those they tell us about (152). In
such works, the narrator is often radically different from the implied author who creates him
(152). Many dramatised narrators are never explicitly labelled as narrators at all (152) but
every speech, every gesture, narrates; most works contain disguised narrators who are used
to tell the audience what it needs to know, while seeming merely to act out their roles (152).
Most such disguised narrators speak with an authority as sure as Gods (152). The most
important unacknowledged narrators in modern fiction are the third-person centres of
consciousness through whom authors have filtered their narratives (153). Whether such
reflectors, as James sometimes called them, are highly polished mirrors reflecting complex
mental experience, or the rather turbid, send-bound camera eyes of much fiction since
James, they fill precisely the function of avowed narrators (153). There is a seeming very
real advantage (153) to the deployment of such a method and this has become a dominant
theme in modern criticism (153) as long as emphasis is on such qualities as naturalness and
vividness (153). However, once we break out of the fashionable assumption that all good
fiction tries for the same kind of vivid illusion (153), we are able to recognise real
disadvantages (153) and that the third-person reflector is only one mode among many,
suitable for some effects but cumbersome and even harmful when other effects are desired
(153).
Observers and Narrator-Agents: there are mere observers (153) as well as narrator-
agents (153) who produce some measurable affect on the course of events (153-154),
ranging from a minor involvement (154) to a central role (154). Moreover, all narrators
and observers, wether in the first- or third-person, can relay their tales to us primarily as
scene . . ., primarily as summary or what Lubbock called picture . . ., or, most commonly,
as a combination of the two (154). Like
Aristotles distinction between dramatic [mimesis] and narrative [diegesis]
manners, the somewhat different modern distinction between showing and
telling does cover the ground. But the trouble is that it pays for broad coverage
with gross imprecision. Narrators of all shapes and shades must either report
dialogue alone or support it with stage directions and description of setting.
(154)
However, the quality of being scenic suggests very little about literary effect (154). The
contrast between scene and summary, between showing and telling, is likely to be of little
use until we specify the kind of narrator who is providing the scene or summary (154-155).
Commentary: Narrators who allow themselves to tell as well as show vary greatly
depending on the amount and kind of commentary allowed in addition to a direct relating of
14
Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
events in scene and summary (155). Such commentary can range over any aspect of
human experience (155) and is related to the business at hand in many ways: it can be
merely ornamental (155), or serve a rhetorical purpose (155) that is not part of the
dramatic structure (155), or it may be integral to the dramatic structure (155).
Self-Conscious Narrators: Both observers and narrator-agents may be either self-
conscious (155), that is, aware of themselves as writers (155), and not, that is, who either
rarely if ever discuss their writing chores (155) or :seem unaware that they are writing,
thinking, speaking, or reflecting a literary work (155).
Variations of Distance: narrators differ markedly according to the degree and kind of
distance that separates them from the author, the reader, and the other characters of the
story (155). In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator,
the other characters, and the reader. Each of the four can range, in relation to each of the
others, from identification to complete opposition, on any axis of value, moral, intellectual,
aesthetic, and even physical (155). Booth draws a distinction between aesthetic distance
(156) and the variations in personal beliefs and qualities (156) separating author, narrator,
characters and reader of which he is speaking here, the former referring to distance in time
and space, differences of social class or conventions of speech or dress (156) which serve to
control our sense that we are dealing with an aesthetic object (156). These variations take
several forms: the narrator may be more or less distant (156) on moral, intellectual,
physical or temporal grounds from, first, the implied author (156); second, from the
characters in the story he tells (156), third, from the readers own norms (156) (with the
repudiation of omniscient narration, and in the face of inherent limitations in dramatised
reliable narrators [156], modern authors have experimented with unreliable narrators whose
characteristics change in the course of their works they narrate [156]; since Shakespeare,
stories of character development or degeneration have become more and more popular
[157], culminating in the full uses of the third-person reflector [157] to show a narrator
changing as he narrates [157]); similarly, the implied author (157) may be more or less
distant, fourth, from the reader (157) (from the authors viewpoint, a successful reading
of his book must eliminate all distance between the essential norms of his implied author and
the norms of the postulated reader (157) and, fifth, from other characters (158). For
practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the
fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in
judging the narrator (158). The most important quality of the narrative is not, in Booths
view, that it is recounted in the first- or third-person, but rather the narrators moral and
intellectual qualities (158) for if he is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the total effect
of the work he relays to us is transformed (158). For Booth, a narrator is reliable when he
speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied
authors norms), unreliable when he does not (158-159). Booth admits that some reliable
narrators may be ironic and, thus, potentially deceptive (159) and may sometimes be
downright liars, but normally it is often a matter of what James calls inconscience; the
narrator is is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him
(159).
Variations in Support or Correction: Both reliable and unreliable narrators can either
be unsupported or uncorrected by other narrators (159) or supported or corrected (159).
Sometimes it is difficult to infer whether or to what degree a narrator is fallible (160) while,
in other works, it is relatively easy. Sometimes support or correction is provided from within
the action (160) or provided externally, to help the reader correct or reinforce his won views
as against the narrators (160).
Privilege: observers and narrators, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not,
commenting or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not
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Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
be learned by strictly natural means (160) (though few omniscient narrators are allowed to
know or show as much as their authors know [160]) or limited to realistic vision and
inference (160). Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience (160). There are,
however, many kinds of privilege (160): some limitations are only temporary (160), while
others are more nearly permanent but subject to momentary relaxation (160). Yet others
are confined to what their literal condition would allow them to know (160). The most
important single privilege is that of obtaining an inside view of another character, because of
the rhetorical power that such a privilege conveys upon a narrator (160-161). Many works
which are classified as narrated dramatically, with everything relayed to us through the
limited views of the characters, postulate fully as much omniscience in the silent author as
Fielding claims for himself (161). To see nothing but what the minds in question contain,
Booth argues, omniscience with teeth in it (161) in that the implied author demands our
absolute faith in his powers of divination, We must never for a moment doubt that he knows
everything (161) about each mind portrayed in a seemingly impersonal manner, or that he
has chosen correctly how much to show of each (161). In short, impersonal narration is
really no escape from omniscience the true author is as unnaturally all-knowing as he ever
was (161). This is true of so-called dramatic storytelling (161) where the author can
present his characters in a dramatic situation without in the least presenting them in what we
normally think of as a dramatic manner (161). Ostensibly, the goal of dramatic narration is
to show characters dramatically engaged with each other, motive clashing with motive (162)
by giving the impression that the story is taking place by itself, with characters existing in
a dramatic relationship vis-a-vis the spectator, unmediated by a narrator (162), but this
rarely occurs purely and simply in prose fiction. This is true also of fiction that attempts to
dramatise states of consciousness directly (162) like Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man where the hero Stephen is placed on the stage before us, acting out his destiny
with only disguised helps or comments from his author (162-163). It is not his actions that
are dramatised directly, not his speech that we hear unmediated. What is dramatised is his
mental record of everything that happens. We see his consciousness at work on the world
(163). But the report we are given of what goes on in Stephens mind is a monologue
uninvolved in any modifying context. And it is an infallible report (163). For this reason, we
accept, by convention, the claim that what is reported as going on in Stephens mind really
goes on there, or in other words, that Joyce knows how Stephens mind works (163). It is,
Booth argues, the Omniscient, infallible author (163) who speaks: the report is direct, and
it is clearly unmodified by any dramatic context (163) the result is a situation much like
that of the dramatised lyric poem where it is difficult to decide whether it is the author or the
main protagonist speaking.
Inside Views: the depth and the axis (163) of the plunge (163) of the inside view
offered by narrators vary, Booth argues. Sometimes the plunge is shallow (163), at other
times it is deep (163). Any sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the
character whose mind is shown into a narrator; inside views are thus subject to variations in
all of the qualities . . . described above, and most importantly in the degree of unreliability
(163).
Booth concludes that, though narration is an art (164), it is possible to formulate
principles about it (164) because there are systematic elements in every art (164) and
critics must strive to explain technical successes and failures by reference to general
principles (164). Where, though, are these general principles to be found (164)? Booth
answers that the novelist gets little, if any, help from the critics prognostications. Rather, as
Henry James reveals, the novelist discovers his narrative technique as he tries to achieve for
his readers the potentialities of his developing idea (165). For this reason, the majority of
his choices (165) are choices of degree, not kind (165): to
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Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07
decide that your narrator shall not be omniscient decides practically nothing.
The hard question: just how inconscient shall he be? Again, to decide on first-
person narration settles only a part of ones problem, perhaps the easiest part.
What kind of first person? How fully characterised? How much aware of
himself as narrator? How reliable? How much confined to realistic inference;
how far privileged to go beyond realism? (165)
These questions can be answered with reference more to the practice of his peers (165),
that is, the potentialities and necessities of particular works (165) and not by reference to
fiction in general(165), than the abstract rules of the textbooks (165), rules about point
of view (165), and such like. The sensitive author who reads the great novels finds in them
a storehouse of precise examples, of how this effect, as distinct from all other possible effects,
was heightened by the proper narrative choice (165). In dealing with the types of narration,
the critic must always limp behind, referring constantly to the varied practice which alone can
correct his temptations to overgeneralise (165). In place of abstract rules (165), we need
more painstaking, specific accounts of how great tales are told (165).

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