Booth

Works

Two books carry the distinctions in use here.

• The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) argues that all fiction is rhetorical — an author cannot choose whether to influence a reader, only how — and introduces the implied author and the unreliable narrator.
• The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) develops ethical criticism and coduction, the comparative judgment reached through conversation with other readers rather than by deduction from a principle.
• A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) works out how a reader reconstructs a meaning the surface of a text denies.

Central ideas

The implied author is the idea the rest depends on.

• The implied author is the version of a writer that a text constructs — the sensibility a reader infers from its choices. It is not the narrator and it is not the living person, and Booth introduced it because criticism kept confusing all three.
• A narrator is unreliable when the implied author's arrangement undermines what the narrator says. Unreliability is therefore a relation inside the text, not a judgment that a speaker is dishonest.
• All fiction is rhetorical: distance, sympathy and judgment are always being managed, and the appearance of neutrality is itself a rhetorical arrangement.
• Coduction: ethical judgment of a work is reached comparatively and in conversation — this book against others I have known — rather than derived from a rule.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose looseness in ordinary use destroys their point.

• Implied author: the authorial figure a text constructs. Reading it as the real writer is exactly the error the term was coined to prevent.
• Unreliable narrator: a narrator undercut by the text's own arrangement, not any first-person or subjective narrator.
• Coduction: comparative ethical judgment formed with other readers, not deduction from a moral principle.

Debates and disagreements

He argued against the reigning orthodoxies in both directions.

• Against New Critical purism, he restored the author to criticism — but as implied rather than biographical, which is why the move is not a return to intentionalism.
• Gérard Genette and other narratologists have argued the implied author is unnecessary machinery, reducible to the text's norms without a personified figure.
• The Company We Keep's ethical criticism was contentious in a theory-dominated moment and was charged with moralism; the counter-argument is that a refusal to evaluate is itself an evaluation.

Intellectual relationships

He is the central figure of the Chicago School's second generation.

• R. S. Crane and the Chicago neo-Aristotelians supply the pluralist method and the attention to form as a means to effect.
• The New Critics are the opponents whose intentional fallacy he works around rather than through.
• Gérard Genette is the narratological critic of the implied author.
• Martha Nussbaum's ethical criticism is the adjacent contemporary programme.

How it changes this reading

Booth is named in the lineage of the Narrative-literary lens, and one of his terms does structural work for this project rather than decorative work.

• The lens asks how an account is shaped by the forms available for telling it; Booth supplies the implied author as the name for what a text projects as its source.
• That distinction is the one this work most needs: what a reading can describe is the figure the writing constructs, while the living person remains outside it. It is the same limit as the refusal to treat creative work as confession, arrived at from literary criticism instead of from ethics.
• It is not evidence that the subject read Booth or held his positions.

Useful comparisons

The lens names three theorists of narrative at different levels.

• Booth works on the rhetoric of fiction — the implied author, unreliability, and the reader's ethical relation to a text.
• Arthur Frank works on narratives lived and told under bodily duress, sociologically.
• Matti Hyvärinen works conceptually on what narrative is across disciplines.

Where the ideas meet

All three refuse to treat narrative form as neutral packaging.

• None treats a story as a report that could have been conveyed some other way without change.
• All three hold that the available forms condition what can be said.
• Each treats the reader or listener as constitutive rather than as a recipient.

Where they part

Their materials and stakes differ enough to matter.

• Booth's material is literary fiction and its rhetoric; Frank's is testimony under crisis, and a claim demonstrated in one does not transfer to the other.
• Booth's apparatus supports close analytic reading, which sits in some tension with Frank's ethic of thinking WITH a story rather than about it.
• Hyvärinen's question is what narrative is, which is prior to and different from both.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and pointed.

• The implied author is a property of a text and supplies no access to the writer; using it to reach the person inverts it.
• Unreliability is a relation within a work and cannot be attributed to a person's account of themselves.

Criticisms

The objections are real and one is structural.

• Genette's charge that the implied author is superfluous machinery has never been fully answered, and the concept remains contested in narratology.
• Ethical criticism is charged with moralism and with assuming a shared moral vocabulary that pluralist societies lack.
• Chicago School pluralism has been criticised as conservative in effect, accommodating positions rather than adjudicating between them.
• The implied author is slippery in practice: readers reconstruct different implied authors from the same text.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Treating the implied author as the real writer, which is precisely the conflation the term exists to prevent.
• Calling any first-person or subjective narrator unreliable, when the term requires the text itself to undercut them.
• Reading ethical criticism as approving or disapproving of a book's content rather than asking what relation it invites.
• Using coduction as a synonym for consensus, when it names a comparative judgment that remains arguable.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about a writer from the figure their writing projects.
• It cannot convert a property of a text into a fact about a person.