Ethical CompanyThe Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction by Wayne C. BoothReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksNOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 328-330Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345959 .

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Ethical Company

WAYNE C. BOOTH, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. xii + 557, $29.95.

What an honorable book! In rhetoric as in substance, it speaks of moral struggle, of ef- forts at honesty, of difficulty implicit in every authentic critical act. Wayne Booth argues not that we should perform acts of ethical criticism but that we necessarily do so, given the nature of reading and of writing. His massive, meticulous study of how such criticism works argues for self-awareness and responsibility in the reading process. Words on a

page must affect the reader's sense of moral possibility, Booth maintains. Consciousness of that fact both heightens and helps to define the deepest pleasures of

reading. The compendious notion of ethics underlying Booth's argument allows him to con-

sider diverse aspects of the literary undertaking. "Ethical" here implies not a limited moral project, but "the entire range of effects on the 'character' or 'person' or 'self"' (8). The Company We Keep concerns itself with reading and writing as processes of relation-

ship. The experience of entering into relation with another consciousness may prove helpful or harmful, enlivening or debilitating. Booth sets out to explain how and why lit- erature affects its consumers, aware that such an enterprise necessarily engages him with social and political as well as personal issues. Wishing to avoid both the kind of ab- solutism that would judge all texts by a single standard and the relativism that pre- cludes serious judgment, he scrupulously examines his own assumptions and proce- dures as he constructs a theory of evaluation that takes into account the workings of in- volvement with textual "otherness."

Characteristically exhaustive and methodical, his construction proceeds by minute

steps. Booth argues for the communality of literary evaluation, terming the act of a

judgment one of "coduction," a neologism intended to suggest the individual critic's "reliance ... on the past experiences of many judges who do not have even a roughly codified set of precedents to guide them" (72). The solitary reader may arrive at an im- mediate solitary response to an experienced work, but a process of revaluation then

begins almost instantaneously, dependent both on individual rethinking and on literal or metaphoric conversation with others "about the values we claim to have seen" (74). Evaluation and revaluation may depend on rational standards: Booth emphatically re- jects the notion of pure subjectivism. He insists that "appraisals of narratives can refer to something real in the narratives" (82; his italics), that narratives of value embody such

"diversity of powers" (83) that they properly inspire diversity of judgments, that the criti- cal community (his conception of that vague group appears larger, more inclusive, than

Stanley Fish's) shares many different kinds of judgment. These assertions of course im-

ply that much more than mere personal preference is at work in any critical appraisal, and Booth has a large stake in making just that point. The idea of diversity lies at the heart of his undertaking. In a crucial articulation of his organizing concept, he main- tains that "we must avoid at all costs the effort to reduce literary 'goods' to one kind; in- stead, we should seek to clarify and embrace a plurality of goods, exhibited in particular coductions" (115). But no notion of plurality should allow us to evade the fact that "all

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REVIEW I ETHICAL COMPANY 329

works do teach or at least try to ..., and that no reading can be considered responsible that ignores the challenge of a work's fixed norms" (152).

My summaries thus far have been based on the book's first section, "Relocating Ethical Criticism." In a second part, "The Making of Friends and Commonwealths: Criticism as Ethical Culture," Booth concentrates on how ethical reading fulfills readers'

responsibilities to themselves. He focuses on the reading experience rather than on its

long-range consequences, attending to the kind of metaphorical friendship established

by the act of reading. These literary "friendships" vary greatly, along such axes as level of reciprocity, degree of intimacy, intensity of engagement, extent of familiarity. Booth formulates the reader's active desire-the plotmaking desire that interests Peter Brooks-as "wanting more of the friendship" offered by a given text. Thus one contin- ues to read, seeking outcomes. The reader's yearning "determines who he or she is to be for the duration of the experience" (202). All stories, Booth points out, "will produce a

practical patterning of desire, so long as I stay with them" (204). Reading shapes read- ers, helping to build evolving selves. Largely from books we construct our own charac- ters and the plots of our lives. The activity of reading thus, in Booth's conception of it, assumes overwhelming importance in individual experience.

In Part III, "Doctrinal Criticism and the Redemptions of Coduction," Booth turns his attention to a series of specific texts. He has offered bits of practical criticism earlier, by way of exemplification: a brief demonstration of the ethical inadequacy of Jaws, for in- stance; a negative judgment of 1984; an investigation of possible revisions of a Yeats

poem. In his final section, he provides more detailed readings of Rabelais, Austen, Lawrence, and Twain, all ethically problematic. About Rabelais he concludes that "Rabelais has to some degree failed to do imaginative justice to one half of human real-

ity-women" (408), and that he also failed in imaginative sympathy with heretics burned for their convictions. But Booth does not rest easily in such conclusions. He fully con- fronts the claims of cultural and historical relativism, acknowledging the importance of

accepting difference, but still maintains the need to adhere to and judge by one's own moral commitments. To negotiate these contradictory imperatives presents formidable obstacles, but the critic must face them.

Austen comes off rather better than Rabelais. Emma, Booth argues, teaches conven- tional lessons by its narrative form but "contains within itself the antidotes to its own po- tential poisons" (432) in its suggestions that only fantasy creates happy endings for women. Lawrence emerges as something of an ethical hero, not from a Leavisite per- spective but because of his remarkable "distribution of human sympathy for disparate views" (451), his "vigorous penetration of the souls of those whose stories he tells" (455). The Twain of Huckleberry Finn continues to embody moral perplexities. Booth confesses the "distressing disparity" between the force of his ethical objections (mainly to the pre- sentation of slavery and its consequences) and his "continuing love for the book" (477). But this very disparity, he maintains, calls attention to the fact that such ethical criticism as he advocates does not necessarily reveal literary unities: it involves continuous dia- logical questioning which often uncovers inconsistency.

In an era of hieratic critical utterance, Wayne Booth's dogged lucidity will strike some readers as dated and dull. I must confess that, despite my sympathy with his criti- cal project, the book irritated me on occasion. The critic's drive toward inclusiveness, his apparent determination to raise every conceivably relevant question, produces annoy-

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330 NOVEL I SPRING 1990

ing disparities between questions and answers. What are the author's responsibilities to those whose lives he or she uses as "material"? Booth asks, only to answer, "it is not our business here to worry much about this question" (130). For the sake of completeness, he calls attention to a dizzying array of problems-more than he could possibly hope to deal with. The insistence of his classifications and sub-classifications interferes with the

sweep of his argument; his relentless consciousness of relationship with his own readers (registered especially in an annoying plethora of trivial footnotes) paradoxically makes this reader feel rebellious.

But these are mere cavils. Booth has written an important book, a powerful utterance in current debates initiated by J. Hillis Miller and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, among others. His individual readings compel attention less by the originality of his conclu- sions than by the scrupulosity with which he records the process of reaching those con- clusions. He recommends and embodies non-egotistical critical self-consciousness. Demonstrating the energy of morally serious criticism, engaging with the hardest and most confusing problems of critical discourse, he reproaches by his earnestness the essential frivolity of self-displaying theoretical pyrotechnics. Many critics have long practiced the kind of criticism here recommended. Booth knows that. He supplies a

contemporary program to justify such practice, offering an account of literary reality that once more reveals the personal urgency of criticism.

PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS, University of Virginia

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