Making Readers
Everyone knows the final sentences of The Rhetoric of Fiction, but I'll quote them anyway. "The author makes his readers. If he makes them badly—that is, if he simply waits, in all purity, for the occasional reader whose perceptions and norms happen to match his own, then his conception must be lofty indeed if we are to forgive him for his bad craftsmanship. But if he makes them well—that is, makes them see what they have never seen before, moves them into a new order of perception and experience altogether—he finds his reward in the peers he has created" (397–98). My essay will explore what it means, and what it might mean, for an author to make a reader and what authors and readers might make between them. I suppose that it is as much an exploration of some issues that seem to me to have mattered to Booth (or perhaps even troubled him) as it is a critique of Booth or an attempt to chart his influence (though writing such an essay may be said to enact that influence). My point of departure lies in the potential coerciveness attached to the notion that the author makes the reader. Booth seems to give the author deific powers. The author "makes" readers; the author "creates" peers who then serve as his reward.
A key reason why Booth believes that authors should make readers is that he is alive to the intensity of imaginative experience great writers evoke. This essay meditates on the promise of imaginative intensity, asking whether the power that allegedly helps make readers might be turned to other ends. It suggests that in his later thinking on this subject, Booth sought to contain that intensity in less coercive channels, as he thought further about audiences (inspired by one of his former students) and developed an enriched interest in the possibilities of dialogue (inspired by Bakhtin). My argument will be that, though both of these developments [End Page 207] have promise, neither quite does the trick, because containment isn't what is actually needed here. Instead, we need to use the intensity to break through the coercion.
I am personally in favor of being made a better reader—and for that matter, of being made just plain better. Still, the idea that authors make their readers evokes in me a mixed reaction. My ambivalence arises in part from work by others since Booth wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction. To be sure, in some of this work the possibility that authors could make readers in a strict sense fails to arise, for authors as Booth imagines them don't effectively exist. Instead, textuality or general ideology or dispersed relays of power make readers, calling them forth (shall we say, interpellating them?) with a top-to-bottom power hardly dreamt of by Booth. Our critical discourse has shifted to a place where talk of making readers is likely to evoke notions of "disciplining" readers, making them subject to the workings of an oppressive ideological nexus. In such a critical context, Booth's notion that readers could be made "well" may seem naïve at best (unless by "well" you mean, as Booth does not, "with unobtrusive but total efficiency"). I, and not I alone, have spent a lot of time trying to parry such lines of thought, and I won't go over that ground again here. But their emergence has deepened our sensitivity to the strategies of power, lending piquancy to Booth's declaration that "the author makes his readers."
Booth makes this claim because he believes that the ethical import of fiction matters, and he wants to remind us of the stakes involved in deciding whether or not to employ a mode of narration of fiction in which an ethical import can live. Beneath this concern lies, I'd argue, an exceptionally lively sense of the power of the experience of fiction itself. Novels for Booth are things you can lose yourself in. They can take...
