Narrative

There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Since the landmark publication of The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961, Wayne Booth's theoretical legacy can be found at the heart of at least two major schools of literary criticism. On the one hand, narratologists turn to Booth's theory for its insights into the anatomy of narrative form. Seymour Chatman and, more recently, Brian Richardson both defend, for example, Booth's notion of the implied author on "pragmatic" grounds (Chatman 75): Chatman believes that the implied author helps "to account for features [of narrative texts] that would otherwise remain unexplained, or unsatisfactorily explained" (74); Richardson similarly argues that the notion of the implied author is "a coherent and useful one for a wide range of critical practices" (165). But for a second school of American theorists, the narratological value of Booth's work cannot be detached from what for Booth makes narratology itself worth pursuing: the ethical effects of rhetorical practices. The ethical dimension of Booth's work has notably been furthered by a younger generation of neo-Aristotelians who advanced Booth's project within Booth's life time through their "coduction" with Booth into the ethical power literary texts have upon their readers.¹

In part because James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and David Richter are contributing to this special issue and can speak for themselves about Booth's centrality for narratology and for Chicago-School ethical theory, I would like instead to [End Page 187] consider Wayne Booth's legacy from a different perspective.² Since the turn of the new century, there has been an increasing return to ethical inquiry staged by literary critics whose theoretical training and political investments are far removed from Booth's. I am especially interested in new ethicists who are working in and through post-structuralist approaches to literature, a body of theory with which Booth spars but does not seriously engage: de Manian deconstruction, Foucauldian sociology, Jamesonian marxism, and identity politics. For the past twenty-five years, literary critics from these theoretical schools have sought to unveil the ideological operations taking place under the sign of "literature." Jane Tompkins, for example, calls our attention to the gender interests served through literary canon formation. D.A. Miller warns us against the novel as an instrument of normativity, its construction of its reader as a "liberal subject" (x). Nancy Armstrong credits the novel's projection of a universalized "individual subject" as a key cause for the rise to power of the "modern middle class" (How Novels Think 10).³ As far back as 1981, Fredric Jameson could take for granted that the ideological critique of literature as a privileged aesthetic category was enabled by the Nietzschean realization that "it is ethics itself which is the ideological vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination" (114). But with the unfolding of the new century a body of scholarship has burgeoned forth, fueling a debate not over whether ethical questions should be pursued but how this new ethical inquiry might best be conducted.⁴ For many post-structuralist literary critics, the return to ethics is not just the attempt to recuperate the agency of the individual reader or author for positive political action but also an attempt to theorize for our contemporary moment the positive social value of literature and literary study. My project is thus not meant to be a charting of Booth's direct influence or implied presence in this new ethical movement, but rather an argument for the surprising relevance of Booth's work to the claims new ethicists make about the value of literature. I want to make the case for Booth's legacy by showing how a generation of critics, starting from different philosophical principles and sensibilities from Booth, end up sounding a lot like Booth when they turn to the project of theorizing literature as...