Book summary

The Rhetoric of Fiction

By Wayne C. Booth

Publishers: The University of Chicago Press

Year of publishing: first edition 1961, second edition 1983

Subject matter: 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 to impose his fictional
world upon the reader. The book tries to find a defense for an art full of
rhetorical appeals. Moreover, it tries to deal adequately with the narrower
question of whether rhetoric is compatible with art. The writer, while
trying to pursue the author's means of controlling his reader, he arbitrarily
isolated technique from all the social and psychological forces that affect
authors and readers.

Part I: Artistic Purity and the Rhetoric of Fiction

Chapter one: Telling and Showing

Authoritative "Telling" in Early Narration

One of the most obvious artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of
going beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of a
character's mind and heart. The author pronounces judgments and we
accept them without question. This form of artificial authority has been
present in most narrative until recent times. Direct and authoritative
rhetoric of the kind of Job and Homer's works has never completely
disappeared from fiction.

Since Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that
objective, impersonal or dramatic modes of narrative are naturally
superior to any mode that allows for direct appearances by the author or
his reliable spokesman. Sometimes, the complex issues involved are
reduced to a convenient distinction between 'showing' which is artistic
and 'telling' which is inartistic. But the changed attitudes towards the
author's voice in fiction raise problems that go far deeper than this
simplified version of point of view would suggest. Percy Lubbock stated
in the 1920s 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.' So, what happens when an author engages a reader fully with a
work of fiction? And what an author do when he intrudes to tell us
something about his story? Such questions may lead us to a view of
fictional techniques which necessarily goes far beyond the reductions that
we have sometimes accepted under the concept of point of view.

Two Stories from the Decameron

Two examples of stories, written long before anyone worried about

cleaning out the rhetorical impurities from the house of fiction are taken
for clarification. The stories in Boccaccio's Decameron seem extremely
simple. A bad feature here is that the characters are two-dimensional with
no revealed depths of any kind. The worse is that the narrator's point of
view shifts among the characters with a total disregard for the kind of
technical focus or consistency generally admired today. But if we read
these stories in their own terms, we soon discover a splendid and complex
skill underlying the simplicity of the effect.

The material of the ninth story of the fifth day is in itself conventional
and shallow. The tale is designed to give the reader the greatest possible
pleasure of the sympathetic comedy. The interest in this passage lies in
the moral choice that it presents and in the effect upon our sentiments that
is implicit in that choice. Though the choice is relatively trivial, it is far
more important than most choices faced by the characters who people
Boccaccio's world. The narrator provided completely straightforward
statements about the heroine of the story describing her as 'gallant', 'full
of courtesy', 'patient' and 'more in love than ever before', the world of his
desires is thus set off distinctly from the world of many of the other tales,
where love is reduced for comic purposes to lust. In this story there is no
important revelation of truth, no intensity of illusion, no ironic
complexity, no prophetic vision, no rich portrayal or moral ambiguities.
There is some incidental irony, it is true, but the greatness of the whole
resides in unequivocal intensity not of illusion but of comic delight
produced in extraordinarily brief compass.

In the tenth tale of the third day, great care is taken with the character in
order to lead us to laugh at conduct that in most worlds, including the
world in which Boccaccio lived, would be considered cruel rather than
comic. The extremes in this tale by no means exhaust the variety of
norms that we are led to accept by the shifting rhetoric as we move
through the Decameron. The standards of judgment change so radically,
in fact that it is difficult to discern any figure in Boccaccio's carpet. What
is important here is to recognize the radical inadequacy of the telling-
showing distinction in dealing with the practice of this one author.
Boccaccio's 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.

The Author's Many Voices

Authorial objectivity or impersonality calls for eliminating certain overt

signs of the author's presence. If we want to drive the author from the
house of fiction, we must first erase all direct addresses to the reader, all
commentary in the author's own name. when the author of the Decameron
speaks to us directly, in both the introduction and conclusion, whatever
illusion we may have had is shattered. Such direct, unmediated
commentary is not allowed by majority of authors except on certain
limited subjects. However, even if we eliminate all such explicit
judgments, the author's presence will be obvious on every occasion when
he moves into or out of a character's mind, i.e. when he shifts his point of
view. The same intrusive 'voice' is evident whenever a new mind is
introduced. The act of providing these commentaries in fiction is itself an
obtrusion by the author. So, reliable statements of any dramatized
character should be objected to.

Everything the author shows will serve to tell; the line between showing
and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one. The author's
judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to
look for it. For this, being harmful or serviceable is always a complex
question. We must never forget that though the author can to some extent
choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.

General rules:

1. True novels must be realistic

2. All authors should be objective
3. True art ignores the audience
4. Emotions, beliefs, and the reader's objectivity
Chapter II. General Rules, I:

"True Novels Must Be Realistic"

From Justified Revolt to Crippling Dogma

James Prefaces was one of the first writers who spoke against the old
style of authoritative rhetoric. He found a way to perform the traditional
rhetorical tasks in an essentially a dramatic way, by employing a centre of
consciousness through whom everything could be seen and felt. But his
general emphasis is on the fact that the house of fiction has not one
window, but a million. There are in fact five million ways to tell a story,
each of them justified if it provides a centre for the work.

It is easy to prove that an episode shown is more effective than the same
episode told, so long as we must choose between two and only two
technical extremes. According to Allen Tate it makes sense to set up two
ways of conveying a story; one all good, the other all bad; one all art and
form and the other all clumsiness and irrelevancy; one all showing and
rendering and drama and objectivity and the other all telling and
subjectivity and preaching and inertness. The action is not stated from the
point of view of the author; it is rendered in terms of situation and scene.

From Differentiated Kinds to Universal Qualities

There is a modern love for generalization about 'all novels', 'all art', 'all
literature'; true novels do this, true literature does that, etc. For Ortega y
Gasset the seven general tendencies that cover all essentially modern
works are: 1) to dehumanize art, 2) to avoid living forms, 3) to see to it
that the work of art is nothing but a work of art, 4) to consider art as play
and nothing else, 5) to essentially ironical, 6) to beware of sham and
hence to aspire to scrupulous realization, 7) to regard art as a thing of no
transcending consequences. In the Picaresque Saint, a valuable book
written by Lewis, the phrase 'representative figures in contemporary
fiction' in his subtitle refers to 'figures of speech, to the characteristic
metaphors of the generation as well as to the human figures within the
novels and to the figures of the writers themselves.
General Criteria in Earlier Periods

The modern period is distinct in its widespread abandonment of the

notion of peculiar literary kinds, each with its unique demands that may
modify the general standards. Coleridge, who shows a great interest in the
general qualities of all poetry, was highly flexible in his particular
judgments. The abandonment of distinctions of species in the face of
demands for universally desired qualities is one of the most interesting
events in modern literary history. One aspect of it is the loss of
distinctions between levels of style suited to different literary kinds.

Three Sources of General Criteria:

The Work, the Author, the Reader

General qualities required in the work itself – some critics would require
the novel to 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
realization of the subject', 'intensity of the 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.
So, a dialectical history of modern criticism could be written in terms of
the warfare between those who think of fiction as something that must
above all be real and those who ask that it be pure – even the search for
artistic purity should lead to unreality and a dehumanization of art.

Attitudes required of the author – many take it as axiomatic that the

author must be objective, detached, dispassionate, ironic, neutral,
impartial, impersonal. Others – fewer in this century – ask him to be
passionate, involved, engaged. Between the two, temperate critics have
tried to formulate standards for proper distance between author, audience
and fictional world.

Intensity of Realistic Fiction

Attitudes required of the reader

A work should provide the reader with questions rather than answers and
he should be prepared to accept inconclusiveness; he should accept the
ambiguities of life, rejecting a vision based on oversimplified blacks and
whites. He should use his mind, his critical intelligence as well as his
emotions.
Criteria for works, authors and readers are closely related that it is
impossible to deal with any of them for very long without touching on the
others. Nevertheless, they are clearly distinct. When any good novel is
read successfully, the experiences of author and reader are
indistinguishable. But critical programmes still divide according to their
emphasis on work, author or reader.

Intensity of realistic illusion

The author needs the book seem real. So, if the novelist wants dramatic
vividness, he needs to find a way to eliminate the narrator entirely and
expose the scene directly to the reader. To sacrifice realism is to sacrifice
quality as well. For Henry James, the enlightened story-teller will
sacrifice the intensity of illusion - most often the illusion of experiencing
life as seen by fine mind - subject to realistic human limitations. He seeks
intensity of illusion as the ultimate test, the mere illusion of reality in
itself is not enough. Time must be foreshortened to achieve intensity. But
in foreshortening the novelist must use dissimulation successfully to
preserve the illusion of reality. James passion for the reader's sense of
travelling in a real, thorough, intensified world dictates a general rhetoric
in the service of realism, rather than a particular rhetoric for the most
intense experience of distinctive effects.

The novel as unmediated reality

James' interest is not negative – how to get rid of the author – but
positive: how to achieve an intense illusion of reality, including the
complexities of mental and moral reality. However, he can intrude into
his works only to perform certain very limited tasks.

To claim that the novelist must not show any signs of his control, i.e. not
playing God, is to condemn almost all earlier fiction, including that
written by the most avid prophets of objectivity. Sartre rejected the
privileged subjectivity of all earlier fiction. Taking Joyce as a stepping-off
point toward the full glory of the new novel, he calls for an absolute
subjectivity, an absolute subjectivity realism which will go beyond
Joyce's raw realism of subjectivity without mediation or distance by
achieving at least an absolute conviction that characters are acting freely
in time; as we have seen, with a plea for novels that are not viewed as
products of man but as natural products like plants or events.
When a reader surrenders to an omniscient narrator he is no more inclined
– except when under the spell of modern rules – to separate the narrator's
judgment from the thing or character judged than he is inclined to
question James' conventions when he is well into one of his novels. James
signs an agreement with the reader not to know everything and that James
cannot go behind because of the conventions he has adopted. The reader
accepts this provided it serves larger ends that he can also accept.

On discriminating among realism

Virginia Woolf saw the novelist as trying to express the elusive reality of
character especially as character is reflected in sensibility. The real life of
the mind contains no forms, but the work must be formed if the author is
to communicate.

There are four kinds of realism:

1. Subject matter; whether the author does justice to reality outside

the book.

2. Structure; most writers who try to make their subjects real have
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 itself falls.

3. Realistic narrative technique – most deprecations of plot are

based on the claim that life does not provide plots, and literature
should be like life. But in practice most programmes demanding
realistic structure have led to narrative rules.
4. Attitudes towards these three variables, subject matter, structure
and technique depend finally on notions of purpose or function or
effect.

The ordering of intensities

A novelist willing to work with many different forms of intensity, can

manipulate his climaxes in recognition that every moment cannot be a
climax. Physical immediacy sought by some modern novelists as if it
were always a virtue, is a weapon that can easily destroy a work if used
indiscriminately. Writers have to learn the art of choosing what to
dramatize fully and what to curtail, what to summarize and what to
heighten, and like any art, this one cannot be learned from abstract rules.

Chapter 3 – General Rule II

ALL AUTHORS SHOULD BE OBJECTIVE

A second type of general criterion common to many of the founders of

modern fiction deals with the author's state of mind or soul. Objectivity is
many things. Underlying it and its many synonyms – impersonality,
detachment, disinterestedness, neutrality, etc. – we can distinguish at least
three separate qualities: neutrality, impartiality and impassibilite'.

Neutrality and the author's second self

Objectivity in the author can mean first, an attitude of neutrality towards

all values, an attempt at disinterested reporting of all things good and evil.

Chichov defends neutrality, but he cannot write three sentences without

committing himself. The artist should not be the judge of his characters
and their conversations, but only can be an unbiased witness. A writer
must be as objective a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he
must know that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

As the author writes, he creates not simply an ideal, impersonal, 'man in

general' but an implied version of 'himself' that is different from the
implied authors we meet in other men's work. Our reactions to his various
commitments, secret or overt, will help to determine our response to the
work.

There are some other terms used for this second self of the author such as;
persona, mask and narrator, but they more commonly refer to the speaker
in the work created by the author. 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. Three other terms are sometimes used to name the core of
norms and choices called the implied author. They are; style, tone and
technique. 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.

Impartiality and "Unfair" Emphasis

The author's objectivity has also sometimes meant an attitude of
impartiality toward his characters. When we read some works, we may
have the impression that the author has weighed his characters on
dishonest scales. Lawrence stated that 'Morality in the novel is the
trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in
the scale to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is
immorality. The modern novel tends to become more and more immoral.

Impassibilite'

The author's objectivity can mean what Flaubert called 'impassibilite', an

unmoved or unimpassioned feeling towards the characters and events of
one's story. An author could be committed to one or another value and
still not feel with or against any of his characters. Moreover, the artist
could feel a lively hate or love or pity for all of his characters impartially.
A great artist can create an implied author who is either detached or
involved, depending on the needs of the wok in hand. It is important to
stress the dangers of a misguided commitment partiality, or emotional
involvement, the tendency to connect the author's objectivity with a
required impersonality of technique is quite indefensible.

Subjectivism Encouraged by Impersonal Techniques

Impersonal narration may encourage the very subjectivism that it is

supposed to cure. There are two kinds of subjectivism that may ruin a
novel. They are indiscriminate sympathy or compassion and
indiscriminate irony. An author can hide from himself that he is
sentimentally involved with his characters and that he is asking for his
reader's sympathies without providing adequate reasons. The author
sometimes uses irony to protect himself rather than to reveal his subject.
The emotions and judgments of the implied author are the very stuff out
of which great fiction is made.

IV. General Rules III:

"True Art Ignores the Audience"

True Artists Write Only for Themselves

True artists take no thought of their readers. They write for themselves, to
express and find themselves. The predominant fashion among serious
writers has been to consider any recognizable concern for the reader as a
commercial blemish on the spotless face of art. A serious author must
surely brace himself against the demand that he takes the reader into
account.

Theories of Pure Art

Suspicion 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. Though such theories have
varied widely in what they would ban, most of them have excluded all
obvious rhetoric, since it is clearly not a part of the pure poetic object.

When Aristotle comes to discuss 'thought', he relegates it to the rhetoric,

to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs.

The "Impurity" of Great Literature

Most of the programmes of purity have conceded that complete purity is

impossible. If the most admired literature is 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. The rhetoric of titles is
important too; such as 'The Waste Land', 'The Hollow Men.

Henry James admits to inventing what he calls 'ficelles'; characters whose

main reason for existence is to give the reader in dramatic form the kind
of help he needs if he is to grasp the story. He admits that his effort to
make everything dramatic requires the invention of carefully dissimulated
rhetoric. No doubt some authors work better when they think of their
writing as self-expression and of their technique as self-discovery.

Is a Pure Fiction Theoretically Desirable?

Fiction can be partially purified of rhetoric in the narrower sense. The

author should use as little recognizable rhetoric as possible. But what are
the limits of possibility in literary communication?
1. Even if a presented object seems to the author to call for a natural
response based on universals, he can never count on those universals
being responded to with any intensity unless he gives good reasons.

2. Most dramatic events are much more ambiguous, much more evidently
based on merely conventional responses, requiring a rhetoric to place
them for the reader.

3. Even if there are permanent, universal responses embodied in the work,

then, they are unlikely to move us strongly and the may be unclear
without the author's rhetoric. What is more troublesome is that fiction, in
its very drive for reality, is inclined to deal with a great number of mere
conventions, meaningless except in a context.

4. Some of the most powerful literature is based on a successful reversal

of what many readers would naturally think of as a proper response. Such
reversals can only be achieved if the author is able to call our attention
relationships and meanings that the surface of the object obscures.

All of the clichés about the natural object being self-sufficient are at best
half-truths. 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 so 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.

PAGE 118