In an effort to read criticism and apply it to writing, I read this essay. I haven't been able to apply it to reading, that comes later, because it took me a long time to digest it all. So this is an outline of my understanding, for me, to use in reference to the next set of reading that I do.
Booth's primary argument is that while many critics call for the absence of authorial commentary in the novel, that authorial presence is essential and that all authorial devices, as well as attitude and values are in fact authorial influence. This should be welcomed when done effectively. Objectivity is impossible because the basic framework of a novel is a communication between author and reader.
The Authors Many Voices
- Commentary
- Character statements
- Reliable narrators
- Metaphor
- Placement and sequence of telling
All Authors Should be Objective
Neutrality and the Author's Second Self
- Sartre "art must be like science" but what's objective and by whose scale?
- Everyone is against everyone else's prejudices and in favor of his own commitment to the truth
- The argument in favor of neutrality is thus useful in so far as it warns the novelist that he can seldom afford to pour his untransformed biases into his work.
- Author creates implied version of self
- Some authors seem to be discovering or creating themselves as they wrote
- Intricate relationship of real author with his various official versions of himself; different works as reflection of the different "author self"
- Three terms used to name core of norms and choices: style, tone and technique these are all examples of authorial presence
- Author must be in harmony with choices he makes for narrative character; not necessarily be in harmony with the character himself
- Shakespeare does not plague us with his undigested personal problems
Emotions, Beliefs and the Reader's Objectivity
- Art cannot be reality else it is destroyed
- Distance is key; under distanced doesn't attract and over distanced is too personal
- If emotional effect is decreased something else in the novel must increase (social judgment for example)
- Authorial presence that can be purged: unrealistic author voice; unrealistic human emotion; moral judgment
Types of Literary Interest (and Distance)
- Curiosity about the facts; what's going to happen?
- Completion of pattern or form; crime and punishment; cause and effect or genre expectations (a sonnet must begin and end as a sonnet)
- Human attachment (desire to see the protagonist succeed or fail)
- 1 without 3 = detective novel
- Technique alone will not hold interest
- We will accept destruction of character we love if destruction is necessary to satisfy other interests
- But in great work we surrender our emotions for reasons that leave us with no regrets, no inclination to retract, after the immediate spell is past. They are, in fact, reasons which we should be ashamed not to respond to.
- Joyce values truth and beauty and Stephen will do anything conventionally amoral and reader will accept
Combinations and Conflicts of Interests
- Narrow setting does not equal narrow interests (Austen)
- Dostoevsky: curious about religious and political battle between nihilism and relativism, and we want to know if Pophyry will catch his mouse
Role of Belief
- Unless reader adopts attitude or belief it will be difficult for reader to endure
- Shakespeare: evil is bad and part of life; universal experience
- Woolf: sensibility is good; insensitivity is bad if reader doesn't agree then won't have reaction
The Morality of Impersonal Narration
The Morality of Elitism
- To believe that that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality." (Woolf)
- One possible reaction (of the artist) to a fragmented society may be to retreat to a private world of values, but another might well be to build works of art that themselves help to mold a new consensus.
- Writer must transform ideals so that they don't appear in the story as the writer's ideals but shared with the reader
- Reader needs help viewing the author's world
- Book as communication between the author and reader (and all that in between)
- Cannot divorce human action from human meaning (attitude, moral judgment)
- Author is rewarded by the peers he creates in his readers
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