10017054177 sittefene Deet S The Company We Keep N % i= oars 66 Wayne C. Booth lagg The Company We Keep An Ethics of Fiction UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1988 by ; The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Booth, Wayne C. The company we keep: an ethics of fiction /W ayne C. Booth. : cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-520-06203-5 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-520-06210-8 (pbk.) 1. Criticism—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Literary ethics. ealities PN98.M67B66 1988 174'.98—dc19 87-24610 cIP Printed in the United States of America ease Sire Siar WatYh ee er ete Thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to quote from copyrighted works: selections from “After Long Silence,” “The Choice,” and “The Tower” reprinted from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd.; a selection from “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” © 1947 by Wallace Stevens, reprinted from The Col- lected Poems of Wallace Stevens by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; “Subject for ‘After Long Silence,’” from Richard Ellman’s The Identity of Yeats, reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats and Anne Yeats; and a revised version of ““The Way I Loved George Eliot’: Friendship with Books as a Neglected Critical Metaphor,” by Wayne C. Booth, originally published in The Kenyon Review 2, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 4—27, used by permission of The Kenyon Review. For Paul Moses 1929-1966 Teacher and Critic The University of Chicago 1962-1966 THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there. Wallace Stevens God made man because he loves stories. Elie Wiesel How shall we know all the friends whom we meet on strange roadways. Ezra Pound, “Cathay” Contents Preface PART | RELOCATING ETHICAL CRITICISM I Introduction: Ethical Criticism, a Banned Discipline? a Why Ethical Criticism Fell on Hard Times 25 3 The Peculiar “Logic” of Evaluative Criticism 49 4 The Threat of Subjectivism and the Ethics of Craft 81 5 Who Is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What? 125 PART II THE MAKING OF FRIENDS AND COMMONWEALTHS: CRITICISM AS ETHICAL CULTURE 157 Introduction: The Turn to Self-Culture 159 6 Implied Authors as Friends and Pretenders 169 7 Appraising Some Friends 201 Vill Contents 8 Consequences for Character: The Faking and Making of the “Self” 227, 9 Appraising Character: Desire against Desire 265 10 : Figures That “Figure” the Mind: Images and Metaphors as Constitutive Stories 293 Il Metaphoric Worlds: Myths, Their Creators and Critics 325 PART III DOCTRINAL CRITICISM AND THE REDEMPTIONS OF CODUCTION B75 Introduction Fa IZ Rabelais and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism 383 13 Doctrinal Questions in Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain 421 Epilogue: The Ethics of Reading 483 Appendix: An Anthology of Ethical Gifts, Thank-you Notes, and Warnings 491 Bibliography of Ethical Criticism 505 Index of Subjects 2) Index of Names and Titles 549