Booth - The Rhetoric of Fiction

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
1961, 1983 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. First edition 1961
Second edition 1983
Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 10 11 12

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Booth, Wayne C.
The rhetoric of fiction.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. FictionTechnique. I. Title.
PN3355.B597 1982 808.3 82-13592
ISBN 0-226-06558-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-226-06559-5 (e-book)

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

The Rhetoric of Fiction

Second Edition

BY WAYNE C. BOOTH

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO & LONDON

To Ronald Crane

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition

When my editor at the Press suggested that it was time for a second edition, I at first resisted. Deeply immersed in other projects, why should I neglect them to tinker withand perhaps even maima book that still seemed to be making its way in the world pretty well? I felt no need to retract much of what I had said, yet I knew from experience that, once embarked on a revision, I would never stop short of creating a radically different book. And that would have taken years, because the two decades since 1961 have been without question the richest in the history of studies of narrative.

What changed my mind was thinking about the rapidly aging bibliography. The many students who each year begin their serious study of fiction by using this book as a text are served badly by its silence about those two decades. And so I agreed that, if James Phelan would do the bibliography, I would add a few pages about two or three of the main developments since 1961.

Those pages soon expanded, irresistibly, to become the that now begins on page 401. It will not make sense, Im afraid, to any reader who has not read the book first. But since its parts are to some degree independent of each other, I have provided a new index, covering the Afterword, Phelans bibliography, and the original bibliography. I have also made a few minor changes in the original text, mostly in matters of style.

I include the new index with some misgivings about providing an invitation to those who would rather raid a book than read it. In its relatively fortunate career, The Rhetoric of Fiction has suffered its share of raiders, and I now enter once again that forlorn plea made by all authors who struggle to fit things together: Do try to view the whole vehicle before condemning the hood ornament or the choice of wheel covers.

Some readers who have liked the book have nevertheless complained that it depends on more acquaintance with the worlds fiction than anyone but a professional scholar is likely to possess. One friend, a surgeon-who-reads, said, Its not just the huge number of novels you refer toits the way you do it: you seem to expect us to go read all those stories.

I chose to receive that as a compliment; for in a time when too much criticism, pursuing autonomy, floats off into the Great Inane, with never a reference to anything but its own concept-spinning, there is surely room for a criticism that is openly embedded in and respectful of the stuff that it criticizes. There may be no real problem here, even for the beginning student. After all, every reader of this book knows scores of stories, ranging from fairytales enjoyed in childhood to jokes and gossip shared yesterday with friends. You can simply slot yours in, with your own analyses.

I cant dictate just how many of the stories I discuss must be added to this shared narrative base to make the book work for you. But it obviously wont work well unless you take a detour from time to time to read or re-read one or another of the stories I discuss. The fun will come in testing what I say, not against any given theory you have learned, but rather against your own experience of Boccaccios The Falcon, of Porters Pale Horse, Pale Rider, of Joyces Portrait, of Austens Emmaof whatever story you have recently enjoyed and would like to recommend to me.

Preface to the First Edition

In writing about the rhetoric of fiction, I am not primarily interested in didactic fiction, fiction used for propaganda or instruction. My subject is the technique of non-didactic fiction, viewed as the art of communicating with readersthe rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader. Though the problems raised by rhetoric in this sense are found in didactic works like Gullivers Travels, Pilgrims Progress, and 1984, they are seen more clearly in non-didactic works like Tom Jones, Middlemarch, and Light in August. Is there any defense that can be offered, on aesthetic grounds, for an art full of rhetorical appeals? What kind of art is it that will allow Flaubert to barge into his action to describe Emma as unaware that now she was eager to yield to the very thing that had made her so indignant, and as totally unconscious that she was prostituting herself? Whatever their answers, critics have often been troubled by this kind of overt, distinguishable rhetoric. But it takes no very deep analysis to show that the same problems are raised, though in less obvious form, by the disguised rhetoric of modern fiction; when Henry James says that he has invented a ficelle because the reader, not the hero, needs a friend, the ostensibly dramatic move is still rhetorical; it is dictated by the effort to help the reader grasp the work.

I am aware that in pursuing the authors means of controlling his reader I have arbitrarily isolated technique from all of the social and psychological forces that affect authors and readers. For the most part I have had to rule out different demands made by different audiences in different timesthe aspect of the rhetorical relationship treated with great acumen by Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public, Richard Altick in The English Common Reader, and Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel. I have even more rigorously excluded questions about the psychological qualities in readers that account for the almost universal interest in fictionthe kind of question dealt with by Simon Lesser in Fiction and the Unconscious. Finally, I have had to ignore the psychology of the author and the whole question of how it relates to the creative process. I have, in short, ruled out many of the most interesting questions about fiction. My excuse is that only in doing so could I hope to deal adequately with the narrower question of whether rhetoric is compatible with art.

In treating technique as rhetoric, I may seem to have reduced the free and inexplicable processes of the creative imagination to the crafty calculations of commercial entertainers. The whole question of the difference between artists who consciously calculate and artists who simply express themselves with no thought of affecting a reader is an important one, but it must be kept separate from the question of whether an authors work, regardless of its source, communicates itself. The success of an authors rhetoric does not depend on whether he thought about his readers as he wrote; if mere calculation cannot insure success, it is equally true that even the most unconscious and Dionysian of writers succeeds only if he makes us join in the dance. By the very nature of my task I cannot do justice to those sources of artistic success which could never be calculatedly tapped, but one can accept this limitation without denying the importance of the incalculable or confining the study to works whose authors thought consciously of their readers.