Revisiting the "Visitable Past": Reflections on Wayne Booth's Teaching after Twenty-Nine Years

Wayne Booth taught by example. This was more than appropriate in a man who dedicated much of his life's work to exploring the ethos of the narrator and the ethics of narration, for what is teaching but telling stories of one kind or another and enforcing their significance by telling them with both conviction and integrity? When I first heard Wayne Booth speak, at the 1975 memorial service for University of Chicago professor Arthur Heiserman (to whose memory Booth's Critical Understanding [1979] is dedicated), I knew that I wanted to be in his classroom and listen to him for an entire quarter. In the end, I did more than that: as a first-year PhD student at Chicago I took Booth's MA course in the novella and the following year his PhD seminar on metaphor. After that, I was brave enough to ask him to be the director of my dissertation (on George Eliot's use of metaphor as rhetoric), and he was brave enough to agree. In writing this essay on Wayne Booth's pedagogy—a pedagogy unlikely to be taught through rules or guidelines, although he had some good ones—I have also to some extent followed Booth's example as a writer. However, although I may seem to have replicated the conversational style Booth often adopted in prose, his seemingly casual, plain-spoken writing conveyed ideas profound and complex beyond my invention, and I can only dream of recreating the ethos that makes me, even now, want to engage with Wayne in genuine conversation after reading his work.

The analytical part of this essay takes as its starting point a paper I wrote in the novella course and more recently transformed into a conference paper for a panel in Wayne's memory.¹ The original subtitle of the conference paper was to have been "The Aspern Papers and The Rhetoric of Fiction after Thirty Years." Thirty certainly sounds more euphonious than twenty-nine, and when I came up with the title I was sure it was correct: I remembered writing my original paper for the MA course on the novella in the winter quarter of 1976, the year when, in February, Mr. Booth (never Professor or Dr. at Chicago)² remarked to the class that he had just celebrated a birthday and could not believe how old he had become. I had no idea how old he was then and was amazed recently to realize that in 1976 Wayne would have turned fifty-five—my current age, although not an age that I feel is particularly old. Since winter quarter ended in March, I thought further, it was quite possible that when I located the course paper I would find it had been handed in exactly thirty years before the day of my panel presentation, or close to it. I was struck and gratified by the symmetry.

The only problem was that, when I found my copy of the paper, the date on the title page was "Winter, 1977." How could that be? I was a PhD student by that time and it was a master's-level course, and is turning fifty-six really a personal milestone? Well, apparently even though I was a PhD student, I wanted to take this course with a professor I admired, and for some reason Wayne Booth found age fifty-six worthy of mention. So much for auspicious coincidences. I recount all this, first, because it relates to the subject of my literary paper, which was Henry James's idea of the "visitable past"—the past that is before our time and yet so tantalizingly close to it that we feel we must be able to recover it, through contact with those few from that era who still survive. Yet, as my own little story demonstrates, we are often not even able accurately to recover the pasts we ourselves have lived through; how, then, can we expect to recover and illuminate the past that came before us? In recollecting my experiences of Wayne Booth as a...