WAYNE C. BOOTH: "the rhetoric of fiction" is the art of communicating with readers. Critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. The efforts of modern novelists is often "dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp the work"
WAYNE C. BOOTH: "the rhetoric of fiction" is the art of communicating with readers. Critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. The efforts of modern novelists is often "dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp the work"
WAYNE C. BOOTH: "the rhetoric of fiction" is the art of communicating with readers. Critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. The efforts of modern novelists is often "dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp the work"
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, 2 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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 3 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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. 4 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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 5 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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). 6 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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 7 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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 8 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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). 9 Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3301 Notes 07 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 15 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 16 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).