Wayne Booth’s scholarly apologia on behalf of “ethical criticism” in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep (still the most well-known defense of such criticism written by a modern academic critic), is not a plea for the upholding of “morality” in literature—or so, at least, does Booth want to assure us:
The word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance. I am interest in a much broader topic, the entire range of effects on the “character” or the “person” or the “self.” “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it.
Indeed, Booth believes that ethical criticism rigorously and conscientiously carried out is the best way to ward off the censors. By taking seriously the notion that works of literature have actual, palpable effects on readers’ perception of themselves and of the real world they inhabit outside the text, critics will avoid being “trapped” inside unacknowledged critical pieties that only ensure that the battle against censorship will be lost.
However, if “moral judgment” is only a small part of ethical criticism, it is nevertheless still a part. And it does not seem altogether impudent to ask: What really is the point of ethical criticism, define it however broadly you want, if the ultimate objective is not to arrive at a moral judgment? This judgment might be restricted to the individual reader, with no attempt to persuade others to share it, but the impulse to communicate one’s disapproval of a literary work’s moral assumptions or applications is surely a strong one in many people, especially among certain kinds of censorious literary critics. Although it is not Booth’s goal to assist such critics in turning their private moral judgments into socially enforced censorship, the very notion of “ethical” criticism seems to me inherently censorious: The Company We Keep is full of moral judgments about particular works that Booth has come to esteem or disesteem (often having changed his mind from the former to the latter), and while his discussions of these works are often elaborate but never less than thoughtful, I don’t see how they can avoid having an effect that is at least a kind of unofficial condemnation, censuring rather than censoring. Booth may not have directly wanted to discourage us from reading Rabelais because of the moral imperfection of Gargantua and Pantagruel (sexism), but this is inescapably its secondary effect.
Of course, critics discourage readers from taking up a literary work whey they accuse it of aesthetic imperfections as well, but in this case it is being judged by the standard appropriate to them: works of fiction and poetry solicit judgment as literary art, and to assess them as more or less successful is the chief function of criticism (certainly of book reviews). Aesthetic judgment need not be the only or final goal of criticism, but ethical criticism is not merely the analysis of literature in its historical, political, or cultural context. It purports to render a conclusion about the quality of literary work, in effect competing with aesthetic judgment as an arbiter of literary value. However, it is difficult to understand how ethical or moral concerns are, in fact, properly regarded as “literary” values at all. To emphasize the ethical qualities of a work of literature is to be preoccupied with ethics (in the form of morality or a branch of philosophy), not with literature per se, and criticism becomes merely the vehicle for abstract thinking about “values” in general.
It could fairly be said that many of the “great works” assigned to the literary canon were given that status because they were perceived to be the source of ethical and moral wisdom, or because they dramatized compelling ethical dilemmas. Indeed, works of literature written before the modern era may have been regarded by their audiences as at least partly a prompt for ethical reflection. I would argue, however, that to the extent these works continue to resonate for modern readers they do so as a result of their continuing aesthetic power, not mainly for their moral messages (often religious), which in many cases no longer attracts our attention (I, for one, have this reaction to Paradise Lost.) But, even granting that works of the more or less distant past were presumed to convey moral lessons, fiction (the dominant object of Booth’s ethical scrutiny) steadily developed into a literary form that increasingly discounted moral content in favor of aesthetic complexity (especially in the 20th century). Booth himself implicitly acknowledges this through his various efforts (most famously in The Rhetoric of Fiction but also in The Rhetoric of Irony, as well as The Company We Keep) to demonstrate that the putative “autonomy” of the text in modern fiction and criticism—polysemous and ironic all the way down—is an illusion, critical dogma, a misreading of the way fiction actually works, Rhetoric is unavoidable and no narrative can be completely ironic. A text that can’t be interpreted can’t be read; “meaning” may vary among different readers, but that doesn’t mean it is nonexistent.
Both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Irony are impressive feats of close reading that in effect try to use the kind of close reading advocated by the New Critics against the New Critics’ intentions to seal off the literary text from intrusions of extra-literary kinds of of analysis (political, biographical, etc.) and thus pry open the text for readings that do indeed question its autonomy. In both books, Booth applies a careful analysis to the texts and practices he considers, and both of them still provide insights into how fiction, and the devices used in fiction, work on readers. The Rhetoric of Fiction remains a book with which serious students of fiction (including writers themselves) should still be familiar. I myself read the book as a neophyte graduate student, who found it an inspiring introduction to serious literary scholarship that revealed to me how sustained thinking about works of literature, done by a critic of Booth’s intelligence and keenness of perception, can enliven out reading of these works, not bury it in jargon and abstraction.
Yet these books ultimately cleared the way for Booth’s transformation in The Company We Keep of the insights he offered there into a manifesto of sorts that magnifies those insights well beyond merely questioning the aestheticism of modern criticism and produces instead a critical program unambiguously elevating “meaning” above aesthetics. Literary criticism itself is essentially reduced to inspection of a literary work for its ethical correctness, its success or failure made contingent on such inspection. In this way, The Company We Keep has in retrospect become the harbinger of the profound shift of scholarly perspective that has occurred over the past 50 years, by which the academic study of literature has all but banished the aesthetic orientation against which Booth makes his case in favor of a broadly ethical approach (although ultimately the emphasis in current academic criticism is usually specifically political). Most academic critics do not now “read” literary texts as works of art but instead for their meaning, either explicit or latent, the latter of which providing what is now seen as literary analysis.
If The Company We Keep can be identified as a herald of this change in disciplinary mission—from the attempt to construe what is in the text to moving as directly as possible to what is outside it—Booth himself as a critic is still able to maneuver adeptly inside the text. His aim is no to use the literary work to prompt ethical inquiry tangential to literary value but to judge literary value by taking the work’s ethical implications seriously. The Company We Keep includes four extended close readings (as well as other, briefer readings throughout the book) that amply illustrate Booth’s skills in explication and interpretation. His analysis of Rabelais reluctantly concludes that Rabelais’s great work (a term Booth continues to use) is inextricably tainted by its sexism. He defends Jane Austen against the charge that her novels reinforce gender stereotypes in 18th century England, showing how Austen’s portrayals of male-female interactions already contain an implicit critique of those stereotypes, while his in-depth consideration of Huckleberry Finn comes to more ambivalent conclusions about the alleged racism of Twain’s book, although Booth asserts he does still admire the novel.
The most impressive of these readings is Booth’s account of his reconsideration of the work of D.H. Lawrence (originally delivered as a keynote address to the D. H. Lawrence Society). Booth previously had a, at best, mixed reaction to Lawrence’s novels (liking Sons and Lovers, intensely disliking Lady Chatterley’s Lover), generally finding the “implied author” in them problematic. When he is persuaded to reread Lawrence, he comes to admire his fiction for its capacity to inhabit the various points of view of its characters:
Lawrence was experimenting radically with what it means to lose his own distinctive voice in the voices of his characters, especially in their inner voices. In his practice, all rules about point of view are abrogated: the borderlines between author’s voice and character’s voice are deliberately blurred, and only the criticism of whole tale will offer any sort of clarity to the reader seeking to sort out opinions.
Lawrence in effect gives over his narratives to the perspectives of his characters so that nothing any of them think or say can be attributed to Lawrence’s implied author (or Lawrence himself). Booth considers this a sort of ethical generosity on Lawrence’s part, but Booth’s analysis of how Lawrence employs point of view is also a virtuoso act of literary criticism, ethical or otherwise. His analysis does not necessarily make me more appreciative of Lawrence’s ethical stance, but it does make me better informed about how his fiction works.
The impression left by both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep is that Booth is a critic whose first commitment is to the integrity of literature and to its illumination by criticism, but who also believes that an important measure of that integrity is a literary work’s ethical effects. But not only should the effects produced by the work be acceptable (at worst, benign, at best, virtuous.), but the reader should find its authorial presence reflected in what Booth designates in The Rhetoric of Fiction the “implied author.” Booth is the originator of this term, and his entire ethical project is essentially dependent on it for the trope that lies behind the book’s title: the reader finds (or should find) the implied author to be a “friend,” worthy of our continued attention. Booth goes into great detail about how our relationship with the implied author might approximate the qualities we value in real friendships, so it is a metaphor he takes very seriously—so seriously that he almost regards this implied author (which is itself ultimately a metaphor) as if, ideally, he/she becomes the equivalent of an actual human friend.
This is asking the metaphor to carry a great deal of rhetorical weight—too much, in my opinion. Like so much of Booth’s literary analysis, his postulate of the implied author is ultimately a reaction against the more extreme manifestations in modern criticism of formalist assertions of the independence of the literary work from the author of the work, assertions that isolate the work itself, and just the work, as the object of critical attention. We can speak only about the emergent features of the text itself, not about what the author intended, or what the author believes, or the author’s biographical circumstances. The literary text doesn’t itself “say” anything, doesn’t pronounce its meaning, but leaves the reader to determine how the text might be meaningful in the experience of reading it. Booth finds this an incomplete account of how a literary narrative actually works on us, and a misunderstanding of how most people read, and thus the implied author, who does in fact invoke rhetorical strategies to accomplish a particular effect, and whose overall presence in the reader’s perception of the way those strategies coherently interact prompts Booth to think of this presence as “company.”
If by “implied author” Booth means something like “a narrative presence fashioned by the (real) author or the sum total of the effects the work seems to produce,” then I wouldn’t really have any reservations about using the term as a way of speaking about how we experience a literary text. But Booth wants it to signify something more palpable, more closely associated with the author, even though he maintains there is a distinction between them. Ultimately, however, this seems to be a distinction without a difference: when Booth claims that Rabelais is no longer as worthy of reader’s esteem as he once might have been because of his demeaning portrayals of women, he does not mean we should direct our disapproval at the “implied” Rabelais, the writer’s stand-in, but should regard Rabelais the long-canonic historical figure who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel less charitably (since, after all, the feelings of the “real” Rabelais hardly now seem the proper object of our concern). And simply to think less highly of that book surely doesn’t spare Rabelais as author his comeuppance. The same verdict would be passed down on, say, Dickens if here were in the dock for his perceived infractions. It is not the implied author who would serve the sentence of posterity’s disdain, but Charles Dickens as we who read him now know him (as he exists now only in our reading and discussing him).
Thus Booth’s attempt to keep work and writer separate in his ethical judgments seems just as much an artificial construct as any of those contrived by the modern critics whose overly refined ideas and theories about the interpretation of literature Booth has attempted to discredit. To find a particular work ethically unfit doesn’t necessarily entail an ethical indictment of the writer (the flesh-and-blood person who wrote the book), but it does inevitably taint that writer’s work as a whole: if the Mark Twain who wrote Huckleberry Finn, which literary history as come to designate his greatest work, authored a book that is inescapably racist, what chance that his other books happily avoid this offense? Our estimation of the literary work produced by “Mark Twain,” the name itself now the only living presence of the author available to us, can only be lowered. However much Booth would like his method of ethical criticism to remain a text-based practice and not an ad hominem stricture against the person who wrote the text, the latter is in fact the ultimate effect because it is, among the preponderance of actual readers, the only effect it can have.
The present contingent of academic critics in their efforts to make literary works serve as the vehicles for their own version of ethical criticism, have focused less directly on the moral effects of narratives, concerned instead to find in literary works those elements that affirm (or fail to affirm) a broadly progressive social or political perspective. Perhaps the most consequential difference between ethical criticism as presented in The Company We Keep and the current practice in academic criticism is that Booth’s approach is centered on the interaction between the text and an individual reader, on the reader’s “appreciation” of the work, while academic critics now concern themselves with the appreciation, not of the literary work itself, or even the reader’s possible responses to the work, but of the “issues” at stake in the representations offered in, mostly, fiction (academic critics have more or less lost the ability to interpret poetry, since it doesn’t lend itself as well to analysis that rejects aesthetics), although of their memoir/creative nonfiction sometimes also fills the bill. Booth wasn’t really attempting to inquire into ethical questions outside of their salience to particular works of literature. Today, academic critics focus above all on what is “outside.”
Yet, in suggesting in The Company We Keep that “pure” literary analysis is an illusion, that the literary critic must supplement any kind of formal analysis with a consideration of the work’s ethical ramifications, Booth would return academic literary criticism to the assessment of “content.” Since the usurpation of New Criticism as the paradigm method of academic criticism by, first of all, literary theory, content has increasingly become king. The critic uses the literary narrative to get a glimpse of material historical conditions. The critic seeks to understand the influence of culture by isolating its representations in the symbolic space of literature (along with other forms of symbolic expression). The critic interprets a literary narrative and its depictions of characters in such a way that it reinforces enlightened political values related to race, gender and sexual orientation, etc. Seldon do writers’ aesthetic achievements play a role in these efforts, although at times an underappreciated writer from an underrepresented group does receive critical treatment in order to bring that writer greater recognition in general (usually because of the way this writer reinforces those political values).
Whether Wayne Booth would find these approaches to criticism consistent with his intentions in The Company We Keep seems to me questionable, but these broad changes of approach were already underway when it was published and accelerated in the remaining decade and a half of his life. I can myself recall, at around the time this book was published and I had just completed a graduate education of the kind that may have consisted of the last vestige of the traditional literary curriculum that Booth still took for granted, that in talking to several other instructors in a cohort of us who had taken temporary jobs at a midwestern University (the move to contingent employment in academe was also already underway), many, if not most, of them obviously had different assumptions than me about what “professing literature” should be about. To them, New Criticism was a hopelessly outdated and misbegotten enterprise, enamored of “verbal icons” rather than being engaged with important new ideas or making criticism and scholarship socially relevant.
I thus began my prospective career as a literature professor already feeling old. I was not myself necessarily wedded to New Criticism as the critical method I intended to pursue, but as academic criticism became only more oriented away form an interest in literature to an interest in what other agendas it can be made to serve, I found myself increasingly defensive about the formalist approach exemplified by the New Critics (but not only by the New Critics), even though I could agree that the New Critical insistence on such terms as “autonomy” and “ambiguity” could readily enough slide into dogmatism and that the proscription against sundry “fallacies” threatened to make the method excessively methodical, a matter of following interpretive rules. That an approach that had as its goal to clarify how a literary text works might be applied too zealously in following its rules does not, however, mean that the fundamental principle animating the approach is invalid. Formalism is arguably the mode of criticism that most completely centers the work of literature itself as the object of critical interest, and while it is certainly true that this need not be the only purpose the literary text might serve for the scholar or critic, to essentially deny it any acceptable place in academic literary study seems a profound overreaction to its alleged limitations.
It almost certainly was part of Booth’s intentions in The Company We Keep to dislodge formalism from its putatively privileged place in postwar academic criticism (although its displacement was happening even as the book was published, but just as surely he did not question the existence of the “art” in the art of fiction—what throughout The Company We Keeps he calls the “power” of literary narrative at its most accomplished, a power for which formalism at its best tries to account. Unfortunately, current academic criticism has not only banished critical formalism from its ranks of acceptable practice, but it has come to deny that literary art has any power that doesn’t derive from its capacity to reveal the material circumstances in which it was produced and thus to raise political awareness of those conditions. It does not attempt to reckon with the aesthetic practice of those writers who are implicitly acknowledged as literary artists, but assumes that the ultimate value of their work lies in raising political awareness of particular issues. Notwithstanding the significance of The Company We Keep as the portent of a major shift in direction in academic literary study, Booth as a critic would still probably seem to most readers encountering his work for the first time to be a pretty old-fashioned, literature-centric literary critic.
My own response to The Company We Keep has changed in the time since it was published. While even then I did not agree with Booth’s insistence on the urgency of ethical criticism, the book seemed to offer a perspective worth taking seriously for a formalist-inclined critic like me, exposing for reappraisal some of the inadequately thought-through assumptions about the distinction between form and content. But when content has so thoroughly overwhelmed formal analysis, and when the only writing about literature by academic critics that has a chance to be published must address narrowly-focused political topics that properly belong to disciplines and interests other than literature, my patience for a criticism that calls for foregrounding ethics has mostly been exhausted. When criticism in what was my field, postwar American fiction (which as “contemporary literature” had to claw its way into the curriculum in the first place) has been so emptied of concern for the integrity of literary writing as a distinctive practice, and when any consideration of an individual writer’s work concentrates on its ultimate social utility as political intervention (as a glance at the latest offerings at the major university presses will demonstrate), it is only reasonable to conclude that academic literary study has all but disappeared in any form its original proponents would recognize. Accuracy in advertising would require it be renamed to better reflect its revised mission, housed in departments of cultural analysis, activist studies, or whatever other name more correctly describes what academic critics are really up to.
If Wayne Booth could not have envisioned such a development, from my own perspective it seems entirely predictable that a conception of literary study proposing we focus on what’s good for us in the books we read would inevitably lead to the sort of single-mindedly reformist criticism we are getting. Literature itself isn’t really necessary for that kind of exercise, except as a pretext for introducing the subject at hand and reinforcing the critic’s rhetorical purpose, so it is neither surprising that literature has disappeared in the academic discipline that supposedly studies it, nor will it be an irreparable loss to those of us who do value literature if the current implosion of the humanities in academe finally reaches full collapse. I have little confidence that recent efforts to return attention to literature itself (by resuscitating “judgment” or “close reading” or “pleasure”) will meet with much success, so the question will be what do we who still care do in the midst of the rubble.
I do not unequivocally reject the consideration of ethical questions in reading or interpreting works of literature. Readers value what they read in different ways, and a work that provokes ethical reflection in addition to its aesthetic appeal is no violation of the integrity of art—that integrity depends on the work possessing aesthetic appeal in the first place, not avoiding any relevance to real-world concerns. (Deliberately saying nothing would be just as preoccupied with advancing a message as the effort to “say something” in fiction). But the “ethical” critic almost unavoidably must subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical: How can we admire the art when we believe its effects to be harmful? This question has led to a pervasive mistrust of art and artists, not only in literary criticism but in cultural discourse in general. Artists must be and do good rather than make good art.