Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Part I: Relocating Ethical Criticism
Part I: Relocating Ethical Criticism
Part I: Relocating Ethical Criticism
Booth begins The Company We Keep with a narrative: the story of a black
professor in his department, Paul Moses, who refused to teach the novel
Huck Finn because of his perception of the harm it caused him and his
students. Booth and his colleagues were shocked, and viewed Moses as
“violating academic norms of objectivity” (3). Booth himself “lamented the
shoddy education that had left poor Paul Moses unable to recognize a great
classic when he met one […] Moses obviously could neither read properly
nor think properly about what questions might be relevant to judging a
novel’s worth” (3).
In Company, many years later, Booth writes that the book “can best be
described as an effort to discover why that still widespread response to
Paul Moses’s sort of complaint, will not do “ (4). In effect, Booth states that
he and his colleagues were wrong in their reasoning and their responses to
Moses.
Booth describes the stance taken by Moses as “an overt ethical appraisal”
and now sees it as “ a legitimate form of literary criticism” (4). Booth argues
that “if powerful stories matter” (and he certainly believes that they do) then
we cannot ignore the type of criticism Moses voiced when he claimed the
book was harmful to him and his students.
Coduction
Booth introduces the concept and term, “coduction”. He arrives at the word
by joining the Latin prefix co- (“together”) with the Latin word ducere (“to
lead, draw out, bring, bring out”) (72). He intends it to mean:
what we do whenever we say to the world (or prepare ourselves to say): 'Of
the works of this general kind that I have experienced, comparing my
experience with other more or less qualified observers, this one seems to
me among the better ( or weaker) ones, or the best ( or worst). Here are my
reasons.' Every such statement implicitly calls for continuing conversation:
'how does my coduction compare with yours?' (72-73)
Responsibility
In this section of the book, Booth disentangles the various roles and
responsibilities of authors and readers-a variation an extension of what he
does in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This enables a precise discussion of the
subtleties of ethical criticism.
Booth explains here why ethical criticism fell out of favour and
demonstrates how it was badly done in the past. He addresses the inherent
dangers of the excesses of ethical criticism, including censorship. He also
mounts his arguments as to why an ethical appraisal is still necessary and
suggests ways in which it might be done well.
Booth clearly tries to make room in his theories for at least the partial
dogma of other critical groups, such as Feminists and Marxists. In his
pursuit of pluralism, Booth is clearly trying to be as inclusive as he can
without diluting his position.
When human actions are formed to make an art work, the form that is made
can never be divorced from the human meanings, including moral
judgments, that are implicit whenever human beings act (Rhetoric of
Fiction, 395).
Should I believe this narrator? Am I willing to be the kind of person that this
storyteller is asking me to be? Will I accept the author among the small
circle of my true friends? (Company 39).
Fundamentally, Booth is asking “How do you tell the good guys from the
bad guys?” (Rhetoric of Fiction, 457).
Booth compares this live encounter to a meeting between two people. Two
people come together in conversation with the goal of establishing, not just
a relationship, but a friendship.
This metaphor of the reading experience as the development of a friendship
is central to the questions Booth asks and wants us to ask of literature. He
stresses the idea that we people our lives with the authors we read; and
calls friendship with books “a neglected critical metaphor” (Antczak, 62).
Booth contrasts this metaphor of people meeting as they share stories with
some current metaphors used in literary theory—where books are
described variously as texts, webs, mazes, codes, rule systems, speech
acts, semantic structures, myths, and fields of power. In contrast, Booth
asks us to view stories not as puzzles or games, which are in need of
deciphering, but rather as companions, friends—or as potential gifts from
would-be friends (Company, 175).
As Booth says, “All the art, then, in this kind of metaphorical criticism, will lie
in our power to discriminate among the values of moments of friendship that
we ourselves have in a sense created. We judge ourselves as we judge the
offer.” We ask, “Do you, my would-be friend, wish me well, or will you be the
only one to profit if I join you?” (Company, 178).
Booth notes that since the Enlightenment, our search for character, our
search for self-identity, has turned away from the belief that our character
exists fundamentally in relation to others and instead turned inwards. This
turning inwards was characterized by the belief that “sooner or later one
hopes to locate and remove all alien stuff and discover bedrock—but what
one discovers instead is emptiness, and the making of an identity crisis”
(Company, 237).
Booth resists this extreme opposition of self and other, and argues that as
social beings we have no alternative to this arrangement—we need other
selves in order to complete our own selves. The isolate individual self
simply does not, can not exist, says Booth. Not to be a social self is to lose
one’s humanity (Company, 238).
Bakhtin’s dialogical view of the self reinforces Booth’s notion of the social
self. Bakhtin considered each of our “own voices,” not as a single voice, but
as a choir made up of a multiplicity of voices (Company, 238). This notion of
the social self is further echoed in the Marxist philosophers who “have
always insisted, [that] any sense of radical isolation—of essential
separation or full alienation—is a disease” (Company, 240).
I think, at this point, our understanding of the self as the collection of many
selves would benefit from a return to an idea Booth proposed in Modern
Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. In this work, Booth states that any
discussion of self, and the meeting of selves—this laying of the foundation
on which assent and advancement can take place—should “begin with our
knowledge that we are essentially creatures made in symbolic exchange,
created in the process of sharing intentions, values, meanings; in fact more
like each other than different, more valuable in our commonality than in our
idiosyncrasies: not, in fact, anything at all when considered separately from
our relations” (Modern Dogma, 134).
To deny the influence of others on ourselves is to break off parts of our own
self. As Booth dramatically puts it, “each of us has a life-and-death stake in
cultivating a social order that will nourish rather than destroy” (Company,
243).
Narratives change us: “Within the textual relationship, the author influences
the reader in the same ways that physical companions engaged in
conversation shape each other’s experiences of their present shared
reality” (Clark, 54).
Authors play roles by creating characters, and readers and spectators play
roles by re-creating them. As Booth notes, a kind of play-acting with
characters, or characteristics, a kind of faking of characters, is one of the
main ways that we build what becomes our characters (Company, 252).
This influence of narrative on our selves is unavoidable. “The ideal of
purging oneself of responses to persons, the ideal of refusing to play the
human roles offered us by literature, is never realized by any actual reader
who reads a compelling fiction for the sake of reading it” (Company, 256).
And furthermore, “When we lose our capacity to succumb, when we reach a
point at which no other character can manage to enter our imaginative or
emotional or intellectual territory and take over, at least for the time being,
then we are dead on our feet” (Company, 257).
As Booth notes, we need not fear that our “individual” voices will be
drowned out by the choir as a whole:
If…I am not an individual self at all, but a character, a social self, a being-in-
process many of whose established dispositions or habits belong to others
—some of them even to all human kind—then I need have no anxiety about
finding and preserving a unique core for the various characters that in a
sense have colonized me and continue to do so. I should be able to
embrace the unquestioned ethical power of narratives, in order to try on for
size the character roles offered to me. I can hold a fitting of various ‘habits,’
to see if they enhance or diminish how I/we appear to myself/ourselves.
And I should then be able to talk with my selves…about the strengths and
weaknesses I have found—found in one sense in the narrative but in
another sense in me/us. Some of the roles opened to me as I move through
the field of selves that my cultural moment provides will be good for ‘me/us,’
some not so good, some literally fatal. It will be the chief and most difficult
business of my life to grope my way along dimly lit paths, hoping to build a
life-‘plot’ that will be in one of the better genres. (Company ,268)
Booth notes that “the most powerful effect on my own ethos, at least during
my reading, is the concentration of my desires and fears and expectations,
leading with as much concentration as possible toward some further, some
future fulfillment: I am made to want something that I do not yet have
enough of” (Company, 201). This desiring after the gifts offered by the
other, in turn, determines who we (as readers) will be for the duration of the
experience.
A blurring of boundaries occurs between the implied reader and the real
reader through the merging of desires. Booth states “[t]he implied reader I
become cannot desire fictional blood without my desiring it” (Company,
205).
To engage with the story is to accept the implied world constructed by the
implied author. We seek not words or propositions in isolation, or even
overall “themes,” but the total pattern of desires and rewards that the author
commits us to (Company, 396).
This idea of being open to the entire narrative world is an integral one, and
includes the notion that we have to be open even to that part of the world
that, at first, looks like vice or corruption. For Booth, a worse vice is to be
self-protective, to close ourselves off to experiencing the other (Company,
487).
He believes that “we must open ourselves to ‘others’ that look initially
dangerous or worthless, and yet prepare ourselves to cast them off
whenever, after keeping company with them, we conclude that they are
potentially harmful. Which of these opposing practices will serve us best at
a given moment will depend on who ‘we’ are and what the ‘moment’ is”
(Company, 488).
The value of our engagement with otherness is in the experience it offers us
in ways of dealing with the unfamiliar or the threatening. “It is not the degree
of otherness that distinguished fiction of the highest ethical kind but the
depth of education it yields in dealing with the ‘other’” (Company, 195).
Similarly, Booth says that would-be friends, “those that I care about most
offer so much ethical value so intensely, with such clear evidence that they
are themselves pursuing the goods they offer, that differences of opinion
seem trivial by comparison—the act of deciding whether to accept gifts—is
itself a gift” (Company, 222). Further, our would-be friends help us
distinguish between what we desire, and what we ought to desire—they
allow us to evaluate our own desires in relation to the creation and
fulfillment of desires within the narrative.
We try out each new pattern of desire offered in the narrative against those
that we have found surviving past reflections, and we then decide, in an
explicit or implicit act of ethical criticism, that this new pattern is or is not an
improvement over what we have previously desired to desire (Company,
272).
Booth insists that we must take responsibility for what we are to become—
for what we desire (Company, 271), and that good narratives, good friends,
help us achieve a second-order desire: a desire for better desires.
You are an idealized version of the writer who created you, the
disorganized, flawed creature who in a sense discovered you by expunging
his or her duller times and weaker moments. To dwell with you is to share
the improvements you have managed to make in your ‘self’ by perfecting
your narrative world. You lead me first to practice ways of living that are
more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more
fully generous that I am likely to meet anywhere else in the world. You
correct my faults, rebuke my insensitivities. You mold me into patterns of
longing and fulfillment that make my ordinary dreams seem petty and
absurd. You finally show what life can be, not just to a coterie, a saved and
saving remnant looking down on the fools, slobs, and knaves, but to anyone
who is willing to work to earn the title of equal and true friend. (Company,
223)
According to Booth, “learning to meet ‘the others’ where they live is the
greatest of all gifts that powerful fictions can offer us…[and] one that
nobody can afford to reject. We must “travel” or we die on our feet”
(Company, 414).
Concluding Part 2
Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might
well pursue together? Or is this the offer of a sadist to a presumed
masochist? Of a seducer or rapist to a victim? Of the exploiter to the
exploited? Is this a friend, lover, a parent, a prophet, a crony, a co-
conspirator, an agent provocateur, a bully, a quack therapist? Or perhaps a
sidekick, a lackey, a vandal, a bloodsucker, a blackmailer…? (Company,
222)