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Overview
For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226065595 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 574 |
| Sales rank: | 524,014 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Rhetoric of Fiction
By Wayne C. Booth
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1983 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-06559-5
CHAPTER 1
Telling and Showing
Authoritative "Telling" in Early Narration
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 character's mind and heart. Whatever our ideas may be about the natural way to tell a story, artifice is unmistakably present whenever the author tells us what no one in so-called real life could possibly know. In life we never know anyone but 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.
"There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, one that feared God, and eschewed evil." With one stroke the unknown author has given us a kind of information never obtained about real people, even about our most intimate friends. Yet it is information that we must accept without question if we are to grasp the story that is to follow. In life if a friend confided his view that his friend was "perfect and upright," we would accept the information with qualifications imposed by our knowledge of the speaker's character or of the general fallibility of mankind. We could never trust even the most reliable of witnesses as completely as we trust the author of the opening statement about Job.
We move immediately in Job to two scenes presented with no privileged information whatever: Satan's temptation of God and Job's first losses and lamentations. But we conclude the first section with another judgment which no real event could provide for any observer: "In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly." How do we know that Job sinned not? Who is to pronounce on such a question? Only God himself could know with certainty whether Job charged God foolishly. Yet the author pronounces judgment, and we accept his judgment without question.
It might at first appear that the author does not require us to rely on his unsupported word, since he gives us the testimonial of God himself, conversing with Satan, to confirm his view of Job's moral perfection. And after Job has been pestered by his three friends and has given his own opinion about his experience, God is brought on stage again to confirm the truth of Job's view. But clearly the reliability of God's statements ultimately depends on the author himself; it is he who names God and assures us that this voice is truly His.
This form of artificial authority has been present in most narrative until recent times. Though Aristotle praises Homer for speaking in his own voice less than other poets, even Homer writes scarcely a page without some kind of direct clarification of motives, of expectations, and of the relative importance of events. And though the gods themselves are often unreliable, Homer—the Homer we know—is not. What he tells us usually goes deeper and is more accurate than anything we are likely to learn about real people and events. In the opening lines of the Iliad, for example, we are told, under the half-pretense of an invocation, precisely what the tale is to be about: "the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation." We are told directly that we are to care more about the Greeks than the Trojans. We are told that they were "heroes" with "strong souls." We are told that it was the will of Zeus that they should be "the delicate feasting of dogs." And we learn that the particular conflict between Agamemnon, "the lord of men," and "brilliant" Achilles was set on by Apollo. We could never be sure of any of this information in real life, yet we are sure as we move through the Iliad with Homer constantly at our elbow, controlling rigorously our beliefs, our interests, and our sympathies. Though his commentary is generally brief and often disguised as simile, we learn from it the precise quality of every heart; we know who dies innocent and who guilty, who foolish and who wise. And we know, whenever there is any reason for us to know, what the characters are thinking: "the son of Tydeus pondered doubtfully /.... Three times in his heart and spirit he pondered turning ..." (Book VIII, ll. 167–69).
In the Odyssey Homer works in the same explicit and systematic way to keep our judgments straight. Though E. V. Rieu is no doubt correct in calling Homer an "impersonal" and "objective" author, in the sense that the life of the real Homer cannot be discovered in his work, Homer "intrudes" deliberately and obviously to insure that our judgment of the "heroic," "resourceful," "admirable," "wise" Odysseus will be sufficiently favorable. "Yet all the gods were sorry for him, except Poseidon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country."
Indeed, the major justification of the opening scene in the palace of Zeus is not as mere exposition of the facts of Odysseus' plight. What Homer requires of us is sympathetic involvement in that plight, and Athene's opening reply to Zeus provides authoritative judgment on what is to follow. "It is for Odysseus that my heart is wrung—the wise but unlucky Odysseus, who has been parted so long from all his friends and is pining on a lonely island far away in the middle of the seas." To her accusation of neglect, Zeus replies, "How could I ever forget the admirable Odysseus? He is not only the wisest man alive but has been the most generous in his offerings.... It is Poseidon ... who is so implacable towards him...."
When we come to Odysseus' enemies, the poet again does not hesitate either to speak in his own person or to give divine testimony. Penelope's suitors must look bad to us; Telemachus must be admired. Not only does Homer dwell on Athene's approval of Telemachus, he lays on his own direct judgments with bright colors. The "insolent," "swaggering," and "ruffianly" suitors are contrasted to the "wise" (though almost helplessly young) Telemachus and the "good" Mentor. "Telemachus now showed his good judgment." Mentor "showed his good will now by rising to admonish his compatriots." We seldom encounter the suitors without some explicit attack by the poet: "This was their boastful way, though it was they who little guessed how matters really stood." And whenever there might be some doubt about where a character stands, Homer sets us straight: "'My Queen,' replied Medon, who was by no means a villain...." Hundreds of pages later, when Medon is spared from Odysseus' slaughter, we can hardly be surprised.
The result of all this direct guidance, when it is joined with Athene's divine attestation that the gods "have no quarrel" with Telemachus and have settled that he "shall come home safe," is to leave us, as we enter upon Odysseus' first adventure in Book Five, perfectly clear about what we should hope for and what fear; we are unambiguously sympathetic toward the heroes and contemptuous of the suitors. It need hardly be said that another poet, working with the same episodes but treating them from the suitors' point of view, could easily have led us into the same adventures with radically different hopes and fears.
Direct and authoritative rhetoric of the kind we have seen in Job and in Homer's works has never completely disappeared from fiction. But as we all know, it is not what we are likely to find if we turn to a typical modern novel or short story.
Jim had a great trick that he used to play w'ile he was travelin'. For instance, he'd be ridin' on a train and they'd come to some little town like, well, like, we'll say, like Benton. Jim would look out of the train window and read the signs on the stores.
For instance, they'd be a sign, "Henry Smith, Dry Goods." Well, Jim would write down the name and the name of the town and when he got to wherever he was goin' he'd mail back a postal card to Henry Smith at Benton and not sign no name to it, but he'd write on the card, well, somethin' like "Ask your wife about that book agent that spent the afternoon last week," or "Ask your Missus who kept her from gettin' lonesome the last time you was in Carterville." And he'd sign the card, "A Friend."
Of course, he never knew what really come of none of these jokes, but he could picture what probably happened and that was enough.... Jim was a card.
Most readers of Lardner's "Haircut" (1926) have recognized that Lardner's opinion of Jim is radically different here from the speaker's. But no one in the story has said so. Lardner is not present to say so, not, at least, in the sense that Homer is present in his epics. Like many other modern authors, he 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.
In sleep she knew she was in her bed, but not the bed she had lain down in a few hours since, and the room was not the same but it was a room she had known somewhere. Her heart was a stone lying upon her breast outside of her; her pulses lagged and paused, and she knew that something strange was going to happen, even as the early morning winds were cool through the lattice....
Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like.... Now what horse shall I borrow for this journey I do not mean to take? ... Come now, Graylie, she said, taking the bridle, we must outrun Death and the Devil....
The relation between author and spokesman is more complex here. Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda ("Pale Horse, Pale Rider" [1936]) cannot be simply classified, like Lardner's barber, as morally and intellectually deficient; the ironies at work among character, author, and reader are considerably more difficult to describe. Yet the problem for the reader is essentially the same as in "Haircut." The story is presented without comment, leaving the reader without the guidance of explicit evaluation.
Since Flaubert, 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, as we shall see in the next three chapters, 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 defense 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 they are doing which. You do this every day. Your butcher says, 'This is the best,' and you reply, 'That's you saying it.' Shall my people be less the captive of their desires than your butcher? I can show much, but show only.... You will no more expect the novelist to tell you precisely how something is said than you will expect him to stand by your chair and hold your book."
But the changed attitudes toward the author's voice in fiction raise problems that go far deeper than this simplified version of point of view would suggest. Percy Lubbock taught us forty years ago to believe 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." He may have been in some sense right—but to say so raises more questions than it answers.
Why is it that an episode "told" by Fielding can strike us as more fully realized than many of the scenes scrupulously "shown" by imitators of James or Hemingway? Why does some authorial commentary ruin the work in which it occurs, while the prolonged commentary of Tristram Shandy can still enthral us? What, after all, does an author do when he "intrudes" to "tell" us something about his story? Such questions force us to consider closely what happens when an author engages a reader fully with a work of fiction; they 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."
Two Stories from the "Decameron"
Our task will be simpler if we begin with some stories written long before anyone worried very much about cleaning out the rhetorical impurities from the house of fiction. The stories in Boccaccio's Decameron, for example, seem extremely simple—perhaps even simple-minded and inept—if we ask of them the questions which many modern stories invite us to ask. It is bad enough that the characters are what we call two-dimensional, with no revealed depths of any kind; what is much worse, the "point of view" of the narrator shifts among them 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 indeed. There was once a young lover, Federigo, who impoverished himself courting a chaste married woman, Monna Giovanna. Rejected, he withdrew to a life of poverty, with only a beloved falcon remaining of all his former possessions. The woman's husband died. Her son, who had grown fond of Federigo's falcon, became seriously ill and asked Monna to obtain the falcon for his comfort. She reluctantly went to Federigo to request the falcon. Federigo was overwhelmed with excitement by her visit, and he was determined, in spite of his poverty, to entertain her properly. But his cupboard was bare, so he killed the falcon and served it to her. They discovered their misunderstanding, and the mother returned empty-handed to her boy, who soon died. But the childless widow, impressed by Federigo's generous gesture in offering his falcon, chose him for her second husband.
Such a story, reduced in this way to a bare outline, could have been made into any number of fully realized plots with radically different effects. It could have been a farce, stressing Federigo's foolish extravagance, his ridiculous antics in trying to think of something to serve his beloved for breakfast, and the absurdity of the surprise ending. It could have been a meditative or a comic piece on the ironical twists of fate, emphasizing the transformation in Monna from proud resistance to quick surrender—something on the order of Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent as derived from Petronius. It could have been a sardonic tale written from the point of view of the husband and son who, like the falcon, must be killed off, as it were, to make the survivors happy. And so on.
As it is, every stroke is in a direction different from these. The finished tale is designed to give the reader the greatest possible pleasure in the sympathetic comedy of Monna's and Federigo's deserved good fortune, to make the reader delight in this instance of the announced theme for all the tales told on the fifth day: "good fortune befalling lovers after divers direful or disastrous adventures." Though one never views these characters or their "direful or disastrous adventures" in anything like a tragic light, and though, in fact, one laughs at the excesses of Federigo's passion and at his willingness to pursue it even to poverty, our laughter must always be sympathetic. Much as Federigo deserves his disasters, in the finished tale he also deserves the supreme good fortune of winning Monna.
To insure our pleasure in such an outcome—a pleasure which might have been mild indeed considering that there are nine other tales attempting something like the same effect—the two main characters must be established with great precision. First the heroine, Monna Giovanna, must be felt to be thoroughly worthy of Federigo's "extravagant" love. In a longer, different kind of story, this might have been done by showing her in virtuous action; one could take whatever space were required for episodes dramatizing her as worthy of Federigo's fantastic devotion. But here economy is at least as important as precision. And the economical method of imposing her virtues on the reader is for the narrator to tell us about them, supporting his telling with some judiciously chosen, and by modern standards very brief and unrealistic, episodes. These can be of two kinds, either in the form of what James was later to call "going behind" to reveal the true workings of the heroine's mind and heart or in the form of overt action. Thus, the narrator begins by describing her as the "fairest" and "most elegant," and as "no less virtuous than fair." In a simple story of this kind, her beauty and elegance require for validation no more than Federigo's dramatized passion. Our belief in her virtue, however—certainly in Boccaccio a more unlikely gift than beauty and elegance—is supported both by her sustained chastity in the face of his courtship and, far more important, by the quality of what is revealed when ever we enter her thoughts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. Copyright © 1983 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword to the Second EditionPreface to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
Part I: Artistic Purity and the Rhetoric of Fiction
I. Telling and Showing
Authoritative "Telling" in Early Narration
Two Stories from the Decameron
The Author's Many Voices
II. General Rules, I: "True Novels Must Be Realistic"
From Justified Revolt to Crippling Dogma
From Differentiated Kinds to Universal Qualities
General Criteria in Earlier Periods
Three Sources of General Criteria: The Work, the Author, the Reader
Intensity of Realistic Fiction
The Novel as Unmediated Reality
On Discriminating among Realisms
The Ordering of Intensities
III. General Rules, II: "All Authors Should be Objective"
Neutrality and the Author's "Second Self"
Impartiality and "Unfair" Emphasis
Impassibilité
Subjectivism Encouraged by Impersonal Techniques
IV. General Rules III: "True Art Ignores the Audience"
"True Artists Write Only for Themselves
Theories of Pure Art
The "Impurity" of Great Literature
Is a Pure Fiction Theoretically Desirable?
V. General Rules, IV: Emotions, Beliefs, and the Reader's Objectivity
"Tears and Laughter Are, Aesthetically, Frauds"
Types of Literary Interest (and Distance)
Combinations and Conflicts of Interests
The Role of Belief
Belief Illustrated: The Old Wives' Tale
VI. Types of Narration
Person
Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators
Observers and Narrator-Agents
Scene and Summary
Commentary
Self-Conscious Narrators
Variations of Distance
Variations in Support or Correction
Privilege
Inside Views
Part II: The Author's Voice in Fiction
VII. The Uses of Reliable Commentary
Providing the Facts, Picture, or Summary
Molding Beliefs
Relating Particulars to the Established Norms
Heightening the Significance of Events
Generalizing the Significance of Events
Generalizing the Significance of the Whole Work
Manipulating Mood
Commenting Directly on the Work Itself
VIII. Telling as Showing: Dramatized Narrators, Reliable and Unreliable
Reliable Narrators as Dramatized Spokesmen for the Implied Author
"Fielding" in Tom Jones
Imitators of Fielding
Tristram Shandy and the Problem of Formal Coherence
Three Formal Traditions: Comic Novel, Collection, and Satire
The Unity of Tristram Shandy
Shandean Commentary, Good and Bad
IX. Control of Distance in Jane Austen's Emma
Sympathy and Judgment in Emma
Sympathy through Control of Inside Views
Control of Judgment
The Reliable Narrator and the Norms of Emma
Explicit Judgments on Emma Woodhouse
The Implied Author as Friend and Guide
Part III: Impersonal Narration
X. The Uses of Authorial Silence
"Exit Author" Once Again
Control of Sympathy
Control of Clarity and Confusion
"Secret Communion" between Author and Reader
XI. The Price of Impersonal Narration, I: Confusion of Distance
The Turn of the Screw as Puzzle
Troubles with Irony in Earlier Literature
The Problem of Distance in A Portrait of the Artist
XII. The Price of Impersonal Narration, II: Henry James and the Unreliable Narrator
The Development from Flawed Reflector into Subject
The Two Liars in "The Liar"
"The Purloining of the Aspern Papers" or "The Evocation of Venice"?
"Deep Readers of the World, Beware!"
XIII. The Morality of Impersonal Narration
Morality and Technique
The Seductive Point of View: Céliné as Example
The Author's Moral Judgment Obscured
The Morality of Elitism
Afterword to the Second Edition: The Rhetoric in Fiction and Fiction as Rhetoric: Twenty-One Years Later
Bibliography
Supplementary Bibliography, 1961-82, by James Phelan
Index to the First Edition
Index to the Bibliographies