Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, 1992

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.

While cautioning against the excesses of zealots, Booth encourages the very sort of examination and criticism that Moses made, and which he says is still being resisted, today. By the time he wrote Company (1987), in fact for some while before, Booth had come to believe that even the most neutral and unbiased critic has “ an ethical program in mind—a belief that a given way of reading, or a given kind of genuine literature is what will do us most good” (6). Booth calls this estimation or appraisal of the worth of a text, “ethical criticism” and spends the bulk ofCompany exploring how this might be done well.

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:

Particulars of coduction are discussed further in this section.

Responsibility

In Chapter 5 of Company, Booth builds on concepts of authorial and reader responsibility first introduced in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth adds to his previous delineation of roles by assigning specific responsibilities to the author vis-à-vis the many other personae implicated in the act of making meaning through texts: to the flesh-and-blood reader, as someone who must 'live' through the moments of the text; to the author, him- or herself, as a person, and as a career author; to those whose lives the author has used as material for his work; to others whose labour is exploited in the name of art; to “the world”, to “the future,” to the “truth”.

Booth assigns responsibilities to the reader as well, in his relationship with the flesh-and-blood author, and the career author; in his or her role as reader vis-à-vis the work of art; to his or her own self (or soul) as flesh-and blood reader; to other individual readers; to society.

In this discussion of responsibility, Booth often introduces the questions that he feels we should be asking ourselves. He does not provide clear answers for us, but he does make us wonder about these responsibilities. This section of the book prepares us for the process of discovery that Booth hopes all readers will engage in. By asking us to think critically about these ethical obligations, where we might have otherwise simply enjoyed a book without feeling obligated, Booth prepares us for the process of ethical examination he advocates throughout the book, and indeed in his life’s work.

Part 1 of Company introduces Booth’s further concepts and terminology. He defines the terms he uses frequently, such as “ ethical”, “character” “virtue”, and so on. Concepts, such as “openness” “subjectivism” as a threat, and “fixed norms” and “nonce beliefs” are all introduced, explained and examined in their connection with ethical criticism of narratives.

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.

Part 1 introduces subjects that Booth deals with at greater length in previous books as well as those he proposes to tackle later in the book. Booth draws together all the strands from his previous books. He incorporates his previous discussions of authorial voice and narrative personae from The Rhetoric of Fiction, and refers frequently to his advocacy of assent and rejection of dogma, treated in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Booth alludes to his discussion of irony from A Rhetoric of Irony but treats it in greater detail later in this book. In so doing he tells us where he has already been, and establishes a foundation of understanding for where he is going with his argument. Booth later builds on concepts introduced in this first part (for example the concept of “character”).

Booth anticipates and attempts to answer the criticisms of skeptics and adherents to other critical schools of thought. As he introduces each segment of his argument for a return of ethical criticism, he deals with the notional criticisms of modernists, structuralists, feminists, Marxists and several other “ists”.

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.

Methodology and Criticism ( What does it mean to us)

Booth approaches his subject in Part 1 through a process of questions and answers, to demonstrate his rational progression and the soundness of his approach, and to build trust with the reader. He declares up front that his topic is a difficult sell and that some questions are unanswerable.

Booth walks the fine line of self-contradiction that attends an advocacy for pluralism: he argues for an inclusive, pluralistic approach to ethical criticism, advocating that all voices should be heard if the welfare of readers is at stake, but while he tackles head-on the probable contrary arguments and beliefs of many of the other factions of rhetorical criticism, he almost completely ignores and certainly dismisses those critics whom he considers extremists, on the fringe of critical, political or religious society. Indeed, he appears to grant an audience to only mainstream, “responsible critics”, and the “more or less qualified readers”. We are tempted to ask: “What about those who advocate book banning for similar reasons to those of Paul Moses? Where do we draw the line between whom we will listen to and whom we will tune out?” And the ever-present question, “Who decides?” Booth does not address this question directly, in this first part of The Company We Keep.

Company and Booth’s earlier works

In Company, Booth continues discussions begun in his earlier works. The author of this book is clearly an older and wiser Booth, a man not afraid to change his mind and say that he was wrong about beliefs he previously asserted. In so doing,

Booth shows himself to be the embodiment of his own theory. Frederick Antczak, in the introduction to his book, Rhetoric and Pluralism, writes that Booth has “modeled in his writing about good reasons […] the capacity to change his mind in response to good reasons. To an extraordinary extent, Wayne Booth has been living in his critical discourse the kind of critical life that he has been writing about” (9).

In Part I, Booth presents a new vocabulary in support of ethical criticism and introduces us to the concept of coduction in a metaphor of textual friendship. In Part II Booth expands the discussion of this notion of narratives as potential friends.

There is a step preceding coduction. This step entails the evaluation of a work as it effects the single reader, before he or she introduces his or her evaluation into the community. To describe this step, Booth employs the metaphor of “would-be friends,” as he considers the relationship between a reader and text as comparable to the relationship between two would-be friends.

Also worth noting in this section is that Booth presents us with some of his most “philosophical” writings to date—ideas he hopes will resonate beyond the confines of the text—as he continues blurring the boundaries between literary and social critic.

Booth’s Metaphor: Texts as Would-Be Friends

Fundamental to our understanding of Booth’s theories is his notion that all texts (narratives, arguments) are essentially rhetorical acts: authors shape readers into the audience they envision while writing, and readers attempt to join those implied audiences. Essentially, texts become arenas facilitating the interaction between people—the meeting place where a conversation between the implied author and implied reader occurs. Inherent in this relationship are ethical qualities and consequences. As we see in The Rhetoric of Fiction, whenever an author makes choices as to what we read, whenever an author exhibits intention, he or she imbeds ethical qualities into the work.Booth notes

Further, he asks us to explore the values implicit in literary works by examining the way these values are transmitted to us by asking such questions as

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).

If we allow ourselves to be open to the metaphor Booth constructs in this text—the notion that our relationship to narratives is equivalent to the relationship built between would-be friends, then a key question we must ask during our encounters with these would-be friend becomes:

And furthermore, if we open ourselves to Booth’s notion that we are not individual selves, but a field of selves, and, further, that this field of selves can consist of selves adopted from narratives, we have to entertain the idea that “who we are, who we will be tomorrow depends thus on some act of criticism, whether by ourselves or by those who determine what stories will come our way—criticism wise or foolish, deliberate or spontaneous, conscious or unconscious: ‘You may enter; you must go away—and I will do my best to forget you’” (Company, 484).

Booth’s concept of openness recalls an idea of Helen Cixous’. For Cixous, the possibility for escape from, essentially, a world of dogma resides in the artist. She says, “Thinkers, artists, those who create new values, ‘philosophers’ in the mad Nietzschean manner, inventors and wreckers of concepts and forms.” What all these “poetic persons” share is an acceptance of the Other, the things in life excluded by traditional discourse (Sorties, 581). As Cixous sees it, without the Other invention, and (as Booth shows us) ethical criticism, is impossible.

The Figuring of the Mind and Metaphoric Worlds

The overriding friendship metaphor in The Company We Keep asks us to not only consider texts as potential friends, but to examine how we recognize the particular gifts they offer us. In Part II Booth also tackles the concept of metaphor and the relevance of figures to community building and making judgments.

Figurative Language

In parallel to the investigation he conducts into one of the other master tropes in A Rhetoric of Irony, Booth here gives metaphor a full “Boothian” treatment in Company.

Jost makes a very useful statement when he says “only if the reader can actively [imagine the parts to be reconstructed – (implied author’s meaning, implied reader’s reaction)]…can the reader follow Booth in what he makes of his metaphor” (Antczak, 29).

Booth devotes several chapters of Company to the discussion of metaphor, which helps us to understand how he himself uses this device, as well his fundamental idea that “all narrative is metaphorical” (302).

Booth says that “if we don’t know what it is we are talking about, we can hardly hope to decide whether or not it is good for us” (303). Since Booth claims that all narrative, and perhaps everything, is constructed of metaphor, he needs to substantiate this with talking about what metaphor really is. He does this by looking at two ends of the whole: “the figuring of the mind” and then “metaphorical worlds” and how we negotiate them.

When Booth talks about the “figuring of the mind”, he takes on the task similarly to how he takes on his discussion of Irony. He talks about the individual reader’s experience with a text (“micro-narrative” or ‘single metaphor’).

Booth and Aristotle

Aristotle, as we know, is a foundation for many of Booth’s approaches to criticism. Metaphor for Aristotle is the “most important single gift of the poet” (Irony, 177). In A Rhetoric of Irony, Booth agrees that metaphor is “supreme”, but admits that “in modern times more authors have established themselves in our consciousness through ironic voices than through metaphoric richness” (178).

However, Aristotle and Booth are very different when it comes to how they talk about the effectiveness and value of metaphor.

Aristotle tells us throughout chapter ten of book three of Rhetoric what “appeals to us” and what is more or less attractive. In short, he makes the ethical criticism for us, unlike Booth, who encourages us to work through metaphors on our own – from petty to complex and mixed – and to discover what we will in them (though he does, of course, tell us what he thinks).

Aristotle suggests that “those [metaphors] which puzzle us” are not effective, while Booth is quite adamant that the most effective metaphors are those which require us to actively engage our minds in the problem: that is, puzzle-like reconstructions, as with irony.

Booth asks “how do you judge effectiveness? Will the answer to this help judge ethical value?” (Company, 312). While Aristotle seems to stop at judging effectiveness as value, Booth wants to go further to suggest that there is much more to ethical value than effectiveness.

Metaphor and Irony

Company is primarily concerned with the ethics of fiction, and Booth often discusses both irony and metaphor as a means of developing a community in which ethical judgment can be made. This community is created when we reconstruct meaning. Booth shows this very carefully for one trope in Irony, and he shows it in Company for the other.

The relationship between metaphor and irony is complex; in Rhetoric of Irony, Booth even calls metaphor the main rival of irony (176-178). We need to be careful here to discern the two. Both are, of course, elements of figurative language, but they have different functions. Ultimately, the reconstruction of meaning through metaphor is superior to that of irony when the purpose is ethical criticism because:

• irony creates intimacy with the implied author
• but metaphor creates the world in which fixed norms exist, and this is what we are basing our ethical criticism on.

From an ethical perspective, perhaps it is also superior because it does not require a victim.

Furthermore, metaphor extends a meaning, while irony is “subtractive.” That is, irony’s main purpose is experiencing intimacy and collaboration with the author, and while metaphor is also involved with intimacy and collaboration, it is more expansive than irony because a whole world of values is created.

In both cases, we have the two platforms (what is said, what is meant):

• in Rhetoric of Irony, Booth shows us that to understand the irony is to reject the original “platform” or idea (Irony 40 – rejecting literal meaning), while metaphor simply augments our understanding of the original idea.
• in Company, he shows us how the new platform in metaphor does not reject the original literal meaning; rather, the latter sheds new light on the former.

Reconstruction and Community

The idea of reconstruction is very important to Booth because it is fundamental to creating community. It is an action which necessitates a relationship between the implied author and the implied reader.

Booth is obviously very concerned with community, especially in his overall aim of “keeping company” with books and with others as a means of making ethical judgments. We’ve seen this in Rhetoric of Fiction where he asks us to be responsible readers, in a sense ‘communing’ with the intended author/narrator. We’ve seen this idea of community in Modern Dogma, where the idea of assent is fundamental. And we’ve just seen how Rhetoric of Irony discusses reconstruction of ironies as a means for building community.

When it comes to actually evaluating the values of these reconstructions, we need to look at the whole world of values that each metaphor implies.

Our appraisal of the metaphorical worlds, also called macro-narratives, is where we can make qualified ethical judgments.

We appraise these worlds by engaging in their clusters of metaphors. Each ‘world’ is made up of fixed norms (values) and an idea of how the world/situation ought to be or ought not to be.

Experiencing alternative fixed norms (i.e., alternative to our own), allows us to evaluate the ideology of the author. Do we share these fixed norms or not? The answer to this helps us make a justified ethical criticism. Booth calls this process of experiencing worlds and making ethical judgment based on them a “two-track ‘talking’ route”. This is what Booth does with his own writing

Booth emphasizes that the experience is primary, and is more important than critical thought about it (Company, 347).

Overall, this section on metaphor highlights Booth’s pluralism: he explains that one metaphor can’t cover everything in a world/situation; however, many metaphors together can (in a metaphorical world).

Booth suggests that different kinds of metaphors, like “universe as organism, universe as mechanical function, etc.” can “profit from the criticism of the others, because each has a great difficulty accommodating some of the data that the others handle efficiently. But none can be refuted by the others” (Company, 356).

Finally, we should remember that intimacy is a key concept not only in this section, but in the whole book. The metaphor of keeping company suggests the friendship and intimacy of engaging oneself with a text and with participating in conversation with others where values/fixed norms can be evaluated. Both of these are made possible in the world of metaphor.

Booth states that “ethical criticism…is something we live, both as we engage with works and as we converse about them” (Company, 369).

So we see that we must experience both the “figuring of the mind” and whole “metaphoric worlds,” and then participate in coduction – the sharing of ethical judgements in a community.

A reader’s engagement with a metaphor, and with a whole world, is a conversation between implied author and implied reader, which is exactly the kind of relationship Booth cultivates with his own writing.

Leading By Example

Part 3 of The Company We Keep is subtitled, “Doctrinal Criticism and the Redemptions of Coduction”.

This is “redemption” in the sense that he’s defending coduction as a useful critical approach, and “redemption” in the sense that through coduction we may redeem the privileges of given texts.

An evaluation based on a deduction—as in “that poem is bad because it contains a false doctrine”—can miss out on arguments derived from alternative premises. A coduction, on the other hand, allows for open evaluations on a range of values (Company, 179; “Some measures of literary friendship”).

Coductions are localized evaluations of narratives in conversation with others and tempered by understanding. They are relative in time, in relation to our accumulated experience: a child reading Moby Dick, or a grown up reading a comic book, may have too little or too much experience to appreciate the text and match the role of the implied audience.

Here there be Dragons: an anecdote of coduction

Take the movie, Quills, which portrays the marquis de Sade in a flattering way, as a perverted yet earnest libertarian (Quills, 2000). The advertising tagline for the film was, “There are no bad words...only bad deeds.” Well, words can depict bad deeds--for instance, the horrific scene in de Sade’s Justine where characters cast a living child into a fire pit during an orgy-- now what? Booth provides an answer in Company, in which he argues that (in a more compelling and comprhensive way than one finds in, say, Speech Act Theory) that words are deeds. They lead readers though patterns of desire, and de Sade’s patterns are vicious.

Rogers Shattuck’s Forbidden Knowledge, published four years prior to the release of Quills, deals in part with the rehabilitation by various intellectuals of the Marquis de Sade (Shattuck, 275), and it casts a useful, Boothian, light on the film Quills, as it does on any efforts to celebrate the vicious:

The redemptions of coduction then, are not only the capacity to change our minds in response to good reasons (Antczak, 9), but the capacity to take our own assessments and shift them to a deeper and more comfortable seat, to make them more fully our own.

Booth’s final chapter is his appraisal of Huckleberry Finn, a text which, we are told in the introduction, initially prompted him to defend overt ethical appraisal as a legitimate form of literary criticism (Company, 4). Booth, in each of his four coductions (dealing with Rabelais, Lawrence, Austen, and Twain) follows a pattern of:

• Exploring a variety of arguments, as well as the text itself.
• Articulating an indictment of the text
• Extending friendship, or mercy toward the text, attempting to redeem the baby from the bathwater.
• Followed by a re-evaluation of his previous assessment, the final act of his coduction

Throughout his analyses there is an emphasis on re-evaluation and understanding, juggling multiple perspectives and weighing their merits. Of Huckleberry Finn, Booth notes that Twain knew “that when we put our minds on ideological conflict, a story can be destroyed” (Company, 459). He focuses our attention on a passage where Twain satirizes the “norms dictated by obedience to public morality—and especially by official Christianity” (460), to show how Huck abandons abstract norms which would have him turn in the old slave, Jim, for existential knowledge, “his memories of joyful loving life with Jim” in what he calls “one of the great literary confrontations of abstract, misguided principle with concrete, lived experience” (Company, 461).

Booth then articulates objections to Huckleberry Finn by Rhett Jones and Julius Lester, who particularly object to the pathetic portrayal of Jim, his use as a prop and plot device, and the cruel ending (where Finn and Sawyer play a trick on the slave, pretending to set him free when he has already been freed) and finally exonerating Sawyer for the prank he plays on Jim. He attempts to balance this attack with the idea that Huckleberry Finn, as a whole, is anti-racist, and that it permanently opens a conversation about racism (Company, 474).

After outlining the ethical implications of Huckleberry Finn, Booth asks, “After such sins, what forgiveness?” He considers a variety of defences for the novel, such as: “Why cannot we assume that any flaw of perception or behaviour we discern is part of Twain’s portrait of a ‘character whose moral vision, though profound, is seriously and consistently flawed?’” (Company,470). Indeed, this moral duplicity may represent the national dilemma following the collapse of Reconstruction (Company, 417); however, Booth discounts these arguments because they require too much work, and most readers would not extend themselves so far to such an interpretation.

He concludes that the novel provides a kind of moral holiday, “a mythic experience that can lead to endless but fruitful inquiry into what kind of creatures we are” (Company, 475), but ultimately offers us every invitation to mis-educate ourselves. Thus he retracts his original position:” I now find a distressing disparity between the force of my objections…and the strength of my continuing love for the book. My ethical criticism has disturbed a surface that was once serene” (Company, 477).

He observes two differing traditions for addressing our ethical models: the search for purity, spotting virtue and vice; the embrace of everything human, letting the bad slip away (Company, 485-8). He considers Christ as a model of the man who embraces all humanity without being contaminated. However, he notes: “We must both 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). We can’t love everyone, we’re not invulnerable. So, Christ is not the vir bonum dicendu partibus we’re looking for.

Resolution: The metaphor of friendship encompasses both the compassion and tolerance of the embracing tradition, while acknowledging that friendships can be re-evaluated and even dropped. But not necessarily on account of utility: Books can be good friends without strictly performing some utility service, like a dictionary or a textbook. In the final Epilogue, Booth restates the problem which prompted his inquiry: “I must leave it to each reader to practice an ethics of reading that might determine…just which of the world’s narratives should count most, and just which of the world’s narratives should now be banned or embraced in the lifetime project of building the character of the ethical reader” (Company, 489).

How do we decide which books elevates us as human beings? How do we decide in a way that does not throw out the babies with their bathwater?

If we cannot decide on what elevates us prior to evaluation, let’s revive a classic doctrine of Cicero’s vir bonum dicendi partibus--the good person speaking well. The leader-by-example. Booth leads by example, both figuratively and literally, and suggests that if we consider texts as friends that answer to his question, which books elevate us as human beings, will help us make our critical choices responsibly, with understanding and appreciation, to answer the question.

Antczak, Frederik. “Introduction.” Rhetoric and Pluralism: Legacies of Wayne Booth. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995.

Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Booth, Wayne. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Cixous, Helene. "Sorties." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1998. 578 - 585.

Clark, Gregory C. "Wayne Booth". Twentieth-century rhetorics and rhetoricians: critical studies and sources. Michael G. Moran and Michelle Ballif, editors. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000, pages 49-51.