An Ethics of Fiction

ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 cratic (or for that matter, as relentlessly "Joycean") as Senn's. Nonetheless , each one—whether it be Bonnie Kime Scott's consideration of Joyce's "female modernism," Austen Briggs's account of Joyce's attraction to the cinema and to cinematic technique, or Sheldon Brivic's application of Jacques Lacan's split between the eye and the gaze (from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis) to specific instances in Ulysses—finds its own way to reward the serious Joyce student. There are those who suspect that everything important about Joyce has already been said, and that meetings such as the Copenhagen Symposium are simply elaborate devices to allow American academics a chance to stroll through the Tivoli. Coping with Joyce may not answer all their objections, but it should, at the very least, give them considerable pause. And for those with more open, more generous minds, the collection will give something even better— namely, considerable delight. Sanford Pinsker Franklin & Marshall College An Ethics of Fiction Wayne C. Booth. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557 pp. $29.95 FOR THE PAST THREE DECADES, a major voice in critical theory has been that of Wayne Booth, the most influential of the Chicago New-Aristotelians—a group whose leaders included both his mentor, R. S. Crane, and Richard McKeon. WhUe I have discussed his achievement in my The Humanistic Heritage: Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), it is worth reviewing the scope of his work if only for a few sentences. What he has done in a series of important books—most notably, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) and Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism (1979)—is provide a theoretical model which allows for considering how literary texts shape an audience. Booth insists that an author affects the reader as the author intends, and communicates human emotions and values to an audience; the reader in turn responds to the implied author or felt presence within the text. Booth believes that each book teaches us how to read it and that we must eschew universal standards for a pluralistic credo which enables us to respond to each text according to its aesthetic and moral assumptions. He is perceived as a defender of 126 Book Reviews the legitimacy of what we now call authorial readings, readings that try to discover what formal and representational principles are created by the author. Authorial readers believe that the text was created for a particular purpose at a particular time; the reader, by responding to the plot, genre, language, voice, and characters, can approach the realized intention of the author. As Booth puts it in The Rhetoric of Fiction: "Nothing is real for the reader until the author makes it so, and it is for the reader that the author chooses to make a scene as powerful as possible." In that book, he teaches us how authors buüd "aesthetic form . . . out of patterned emotions as well as out of others materials," and, by example, teaches us how to locate and define the implied author in individual works. By contrast, resistant readers respond in terms of their own perspectives and create their own texts. Booth has always stressed the study of what works are made to do rather than the study of what work has been made to be. In The Company We Keep, he now adds the codicil that we as readers change and we should acknowledge—while reading and in our retrospective response—who we are and why we read as we do. Booth regrets the current unwillingness to talk about the ethical effects of our reading experiences. What he proposes is not a one-dimensional ethic which condemns books as "good" or "bad" but a critical pluralism in which we can speak about what happens to each of us while we read and about why we prefer one text to another. He argues for the importance of considering the values of a reading experience: "Ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a story...