The Company We Keep
Green, Martin
RECANTATIONS & EQUIVOCATIONS THE COMPANY WE KEEP An Ethics of Fiction Wayne C. Booth California, $23.95, 480 pp. Martin Green The subtitle of this book, An Ethics of Fiction, refers us to the...
...I don't somehow imagine F.R.Leavis or Lionel Trilling so transported with masculine laughter...
...Many pages are confessional...
...Booth as a young man could not abide Lawrence, and one of his recantations here is of that distaste...
...we must set the individual work in the class it belongs in, and compare our experience of it with that of other qualified people as we rank it...
...This instrument differs by including both a personal confession of the white racism and the male chauvinism which hid within that rigorous discipline...
...The scholar's study was opening a door into the locker room...
...as of course they practiced ethical criticism all their lives, without calling it that...
...having been taught in the 1960s to see the offensiveness of Twain's treatment of Jim...
...The first he mentions a few times, as being of a type he and his friends regarded as "dogmatic mavericks:..the last remnants of a moralistic, pre-aesthetic past...
...Apparently it needed the protest of black readers to make some white scholars see that point...
...The most interesting aspect of The Company We Keep I found to be the fragments of intellectual autobiography Booth gives us...
...We meet the author's wife...
...His first work was on Tristram Shandy, and he still loves that book, but now he sees the masculinism of Sterne's humor...
...although some aspects of this book's argument are very like the ethical conservatism of the later Trilling...
...This is the genial and relaxed aspect of an argument which intends to be the instrument of truth, but a different kind of truth from that served by the rigorous demonstrations of The Rhetoric of Fiction...
...His questions are good ones, but the interrogative mode is terribly tentative...
...He can only raise questions...
...The section is called "Confessions of a Lukewarm Lawrentian," and his conversion is far from wholehearted...
...perhaps because he cafi't be strikingly affirmative or negative...
...and there is generally a wide gap between them and Booth...
...Those two spent most of their time with D.H.Lawrence, and in some sense learned to be like Rupert Birkin, in Women in Love, rather than like Dedalus...
...That is of course how Joyce wants us to respond (and we must thank Booth for writing it down and putting his signature to it) but that always seemed to me why one cannot respond to .the passage as intended...
...He alludes io a book and tells us he can't remember the title...
...Leavis and Trilling, of course, remained loyal to Arnold...
...We are better off knowing, not ignoring, a limiting truth, but we cannot simply remind each other of it day after day...
...and was...
...some as formal as Booth's old style, others strikingly informal...
...might it not be bad for a graduate student to choose de Sade as a thesis topic...
...If only my own stream of consciousness could flow at that high philosophical level...
...We must combine that with investigating something new...
...We see that in the fiction of Faulkner and Hemingway, and in the criticism of Henry Nash Smith and Booth on Mark Twain...
...then tells ushe didn't) and the whole ends with the tune of an Ajax commercial...
...Ethical criticism, if it reduces to worry over other people's responses, is surely only half of what criticism can be...
...and he tells how at his first reading of the humiliation of the Lady of Paris, he was "transported with laughter and rushed to tell my (male) friends about it...
...But when he traces the decay of ethical criticism from Johnson and Arnold to its death under "high modernism," that last is a phrase he has used for Joyce...
...or rather the explanation is that unholy male bonding of the literary critic to the frontier humorist...
...And if it needed a theory of ethical criticism to cut the knot, we must be glad we got one as genial and clever as this...
...and we must feel free to endorse traditional values in response to a moral problem...
...but the point is that it has been the work of a lifetime...
...in which he extended to fiction the formalist criticism which hdd had its early successes in the field of poetry: This new book is a recantation and reversal of the: old one, as is signaled by substituting a tentative "An" for the categorical "The," as well as the humanist "Ethics" for the programmatic "Rhetoric...
...There is much excellent argument here, but the positive prescriptions of The Company We Keep are necessarily quite familiar...
...But frankly I don't know why such intervention was necessary...
...Booth is dismantling the enterprise more than he need...
...Martin Green The subtitle of this book, An Ethics of Fiction, refers us to the author's famous The Rhetoric of Fiction, of 1961...
...In this book he discusses two comparable cases in some detail: Rabelais and Donne, writers he loved, and expected women friends and students to love, equally...
...This book begins and ends with the case of Huckleberry Finn, where again Booth has to recant...
...I would guess that Trilling and Leavis would have agreed with me about that...
...and were much less hearty in their masculinism...
...The difference between the two types of critic is seen in the company they kept, as young men...
...The second he barely alludes to...
...Ethical criticism can only remind us of the limits of the liberal consensus, the liberal imagination, in the sense Trilling gave that phrase...
...and a strategy for avoiding such self-deceit in the future...
...It is such a blatant piece of self-advertising, for such a blatantly "intellectual " self, that one turns away from Joyce in embarrassment...
...The intoxications of theory, the masterfulness of linear argument, enabled us to forget that consensus and its limits...
...He is including more of life in the discussion of literature, and is thinking laterally and discontinuously, rather than lineally and progressively...
...Now he sees them as offensive to women...
...or more than we need...
...But I think the actual practice of ethical criticism in the past is a better guide to how to avoid the mistakes of "rhetoric" in the future...
...Turning back now, he begins to see some point to Arnold's long-mocked ideas about poetry...
...High modernism of Booth's kind was, paradoxically, a natural heir or eager bride to American frontier masculinism...
...We must think of the characters in stories as like real people...
...By the same token, they remained much more equivocal than Booth in the face of "high modernism...
...There'are"jokes', colloquialisms, tricks (he discusses a poem, then tells us he made itup...
...He quotes a passage from Ulysses , and describes his own feelings as he read it first, at nineteen...
...He felt "completely outclassed....I can also remember clearly a sense of envy and awe-not of Joyce but of Dedalus...
...Booth took Dedalus as his model in justifying his own revolt against an "oppressive" upbringing...
...not having felt before the way the book truckles to the prejudices of its first readers...
...This is a big book, of nearly five hundred pages, and presents many kinds of writing...
...For Booth, it was Joyce, and Joyce as Stephen Dedalus, with whom he chose to spend his time...
...as apparently it needed the protest of women readers to make them see the objection to Rabelais...
...It is easy to agree to all this, but I have a feeling of let-down when I read Booth's moral commentaries...
...That marriage is now declared dissolved, it seems...
...His section on Rabelais is titled "Rabelais's Masculine Laughter...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 3
