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  • The Field of Selves:Wayne Booth’s Defense of Hypocrisy Upward
  • Robert D. Denham (bio)

From the beginning of his distinguished and productive career, Wayne Booth was attentive to the many selves contained in each of us—the masks we wear, the poses we assume, the concealments and projections we engage in either deliberately or unconsciously. Our various personae, of course, show up in our fictions, and one of Booth's signal contributions was his well-known distinction in The Rhetoric of Fiction ([1961] 1983) among the real author, the implied author (the projected "second self" of the creator of story as pictured by the reader), and the narrator or dramatized teller of the story.

One of the earliest second selves Booth revealed publicly was his ironic alter ego, disclosed in a series of satires he published in Furioso (and its later incarnation as the Carleton Miscellany) in the early 1950s. Some of these pieces, which he called "ironies," were collected in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970). Booth enjoyed playing the role of the eiron. When he lectured at my college some thirty years ago, he arose after the introduction to declare that Wayne Booth, alas, was ill and that he, Wayne's brother George, would be delivering the lecture instead. He continued with this ruse for several minutes, duping the undergraduates and some of my faculty colleagues. The subject of his lecture was irony, and of course irony is based on at least two voices, and sometimes more than two, as in Swift's A Modest Proposal. Booth was so captivated by the eirons we encounter in literature and life that some [End Page 21] twenty years after publishing his "ironies" he wrote a book on the topic—A Rhetoric of Irony (1974b). But Booth the eiron was just one of his many selves. He wrote freely about his other selves, the catalog of which, as we will see, is extensive.

As his student in the early 1970s, I witnessed a number of these selves firsthand, but it is only in reviewing Booth's work on the problem of the self, especially in his recent autobiography, My Many Selves (2006) and in an unpublished manuscript, "The Curse of Sincerity," that I have come to appreciate how deeply Booth himself thought about the selves he presented in the classroom over the years. Rather than engage primarily in personal recollection here, I examine Booth's explorations of what he called "hypocrisy upward" (briefly, the idea that by pretending to be better than we are, we can actually become better) and its relation to the idea of multiple selves. Toward the end of the essay, I explicitly comment on some pedagogical consequences of Booth's work on multiple selves, including some I experienced firsthand.

In The Rhetoric of Fiction ([1961] 1983), the concept of the self is largely subsumed under the categories of the narrator and the implied author. Thus we have narrators who are, for example, disguised, dramatized, omniscient, unreliable, and self-conscious. In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974a), Booth turned his attention to various philosophical, psychological, and religious conceptions of the self. In the chapter "The Self as a Field of Selves," he attacks the prevalent view of the autonomous self, especially the grand narratives of the self advanced in the modern age by scientism and irrationalism, both of which view human beings as isolated minds and bodies. In the view of scientism, men and women are "enormously complicated organisms [that] have special needs because of their complexity, but essentially they are meaningless atomic units in a universal order (or disorder), behaving according to the rules that govern the bits of nature from which they spring" (128). In one common version of the myth of scientism, the self is seen as a naturally aggressive, depersonalized, and isolated body or mind that confronts other bodies or minds only as a materialistic force. In the irrationalist myth, the self is represented as an alienated being and defined "as over against everyone and everything else: my identity is discovered analytically or negatively through discovery of differences. What I am is what everything else is not. Self...

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