Abstract: Although it was very largely my piece-!The 'Second Self' in Novel Criticism, British Journal of Aesthetics, June 1966-that Wayne Booth took occasion to deplore in the last issue of NOVEL, I owe it to him to say that his essay-The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions-left me admiring his candor and sharing his wish for conversation rather than armed camps in criticism. I am sure, in the circumstances, that many readers besides myself will have warmed to the liberality of spirit with which Mr. Booth answered my criticisms. It is not everyone who would have taken such pains to see the point of view of one who had hammered some part of his subject, especially if the criticisms should strike him as inappropriate to his purpose. In a short essay in a journal concerned with aesthetics it was not really possible, of course, to meet him on his own ground. Everyone who is familiar with The Rhetoric of Fiction knows that it contains an extraordinary amount of criticism of great interest in its own right, together with demonstrations of various sorts of narrative techniques which are of permanent value. None of this was I able to applaud as I should have liked. Nor was I able to indicate how much I share his concern with what he terms the troubled or treacherous waters we all find ourselves in today. At the same time I suppose Mr. Booth is right when he says that my problems were not his problems. All that part of his book on the modern preference for the rendered scene over an author's mere certification is, I have to admit, a little wasted on me, because it seems less a matter of principle than taste, to be explained in terms of moral developments in our time and reaction from past practice. That a novel does not write itself also seems true enough, and I accept the argument that a novelist enters into a sort of contract over how much he pretends to know or not to know of the facts of his case. The claims that Mr. Booth dismisses as part of his literal-minded task (p. 98), those for artistic purity, have never amounted for me to anything more than relative claims; and this goes for Sartre's in What Is Literature? That novels are, from a reader's point of view at any rate, intended for readers, and contain all sorts of helps to their understanding, and that in novels we meet selective heightening of detail to give significance to action, are to me unexceptionable assertions. Clearly, too, a reader's beliefs affect his appreciation of works which strike him as doctrinaire; and I wholeheartedly agree that critics must always limp behind authors in describing the manifold ways in which fiction is imparted to readers.
Publication Year: 1968
Publication Date: 1968-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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