Literary Criticism and the Pursuit of Character

The following text was delivered by Professor Wayne Booth at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values, the national professional society devoted to the study of humanities and medicine. Although Wayne Booth's work had nothing to do with medicine or ethics, his conceptual projects have centered on the ethical duties incurred and fulfilled in reading and writing stories. He has consistently and generously challenged the academy to look beyond parochial or technical interests in literary studies toward the consequences of literary acts in the world. Every English graduate student, his or her copy of The Rhetoric of Fiction dog-eared with constant use, has been brought up to appreciate Booth's distinctions between implied authors and flesh-and-blood authors and between implied readers and real readers. By virtue of Booth's scholarship and practice, literary studies have created means of asking questions not only about genre and style but about values and human responsibility.

Kathryn Montgomery and I invited Wayne Booth to give the plenary address at the Society for Health and Human Values in the hope that our colleague philosophers, historians, and lawyers would hear--from the most authoritative source possible--that understanding how stories work is central to the work we do. Booth's lecture, reproduced exactly here, was a turning point for the field. For the first time, bioethicists without literary training could grasp with great immediacy and pleasure the point of studying literature. This lecture was a beginning of a generative interest within bioethics in such technical literary interests as point of view and reader-response criticism. By having reached our colleagues with such clarity and élan, Professor Booth opened an era in bioethics attuned to narrative theory, literary texts, and the joys of reading.

During the course of preparing this issue, Professor Booth discovered that the text of this lecture had been previously published. The Summer 1992 issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities, then under the editorship of Dr. Charles Perakis, had published an earlier version of this essay. Because of the historical and conceptual importance of the essay, we decided, in consultation with our publisher, to make a one-time-only exception to our long-standing commitment to publish only previously unpublished material. We happily reprint this essay from our cousin journal in humanities and medicine, taking the opportunity to extend collaborative good wishes to its editorial board, now under the direction of Delese Wear. So much work we all have to do together, and such wisdom in our pasts.

--Rita Charon

The worst possible rhetorical situation is that of a speaker who joins a conference a day or so after it has begun and is then expected to say something that both fits the conference and has not been said before. Whether having the cocktail hour beforehand helps or hinders remains to be seen. I just want to make clear at the beginning that I don't pretend to know how the ethical criticism of literature that interests me might prove useful to members of the Society for Health and Human Values. Of course, in my heart of hearts I think that the criticism I pursue should be useful to everybody of every age in all climes. But I'll leave it to you to discover the connections between my way of dealing with stories and your ways of dealing with medical ethics.

In talking about stories and the ethics of storytelling and listening, one must begin with a story. Here is a true one that I have written out here for the first time, preparing for tonight. And for the first time, I've allowed memory to give the story a title: "The Artful Dodger."

Many years ago my family was riding with my stepbrother's family through a remote part of rural France. My stepbrother Hank was then a doctor with the U.S. Army, assigned to the troops who were still stationed there. Hank...