bialostosky, don h. - booth's rhetoric, bakhtin's dialogics and the future of novel...

Booth's Rhetoric, Bakhtin's Dialogics and the Future of Novel CriticismAuthor(s): Don H. BialostoskySource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Spring, 1985), pp. 209-216Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345786 .

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DON H. BIALOSTOSKYIPOETICS PANEL

Booth's Rhetoric, Bakhtin's Dialogics and the Future of Novel Criticism*

DON H. BIALOSTOSKY, Panelist

When we ask, "Where do we go from here?" it helps to know where we are. In novel criticism today, one place from which we can take our bearings on the future is Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction. It is not the only source of rhetorical

* This essay was provoked by and is indebted to a paper by Hendrik van Gorp on "Theories of Novelistic

Polyphony: Bakhtin vs. Stanzel, Genette, and Booth" presented at an International Colloquium on Mikhail Bakhtin: His Circle, His Influence, at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, October 7-9, 1983. I have also benefited from conversation and correspondence with Wayne Booth. Homer Goldberg and Marianna Torgovnick helped with close critical readings.

209

because they force us to examine their disguises and revive and revise our own dormant views. But I do think there will have to be some accommodation on their part also of the aesthetic and moral value of literary fictions, in this case novels, some restoration of their status as works worthy of contemplation as well as texts for deconstruction. We eclectic humanists have after all been engaged for some time with the weaknesses and dangers of the works we cherish as well as with their moral and aesthetic merits; and we have been engaged also in broader and deeper approaches to fiction than mere formalism allows. The verbal icon is no longer a sacred object for us, but rather a richly meaningful object which repays repeated study through a variety of extrinsic and intrinsic approaches. Its autonomy is relative rather than absolute, and I think that the new schools will have to accept that relative value and its person-centered uses, even as we learn to accept their descriptive systems and cultural codes as tools of great sociological utility-as indeed they are when applied to those "priv- ileged texts" we all know and love, which as I understand it our American poststructuralists now treat as "works" even while professing otherwise.8 If this seems like another liberal ploy for compromise and absorption, I can only say-why not? I think authors, works, readers, and cultures alike will benefit by it in the long run; and if that is unduly optimistic, I can only say that this is an optimistic as well as a skeptical and pragmatic culture in which we bourgeois individualists also live, breathe, earn our salaries, and prepare our papers for each other's edification on socially regressive panels like this one. At least my own sense of a happy ending tells me so.

8 See, for example, Mario Valdes, ed., The Identity of the Literary Text (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press, 1985); and for the counter-tendency, see Charles Altieri, Act & Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981). For other humanist defenses, see Robert Alter's brilliant assessment of the present conflict, "Mimesis and the Motive for Fiction," in Motives for Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 3-21; H. M. Daleski's Unities: Studies in the English Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985); and Daniel Schwarz's work in progress, The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller.



210 NOVEL ISPRING 1985

approaches to fiction on which current criticism draws, but since it remains the most self-consciously rhetorical and the most widely known place in which to learn about rhetorical criticism of fiction, I will take it as the place from which I try to chart some future directions for novel criticism.

In the afterword to the 1983 second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth has had occasion to ask himself where novel criticism has gone since 1961 and to point directions it might now take. Of the more than 400 new entries in his bibliography, he singles out four critics for their special pertinence to his project; of those four, one above all not only enriches Booth's inquiry but challenges some of its fundamental premises. Booth finds Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic poetics of the novel especially impressive on the topics of language and style, historical and implied authors and readers, objectivity and technique, and ideology and form.1

Booth's acknowledgment of Bakhtin in his afterword is remarkable for its willingness to see him as a challenge on the same issues that The Rhetoric of Fiction raises rather than to quarantine him as a theorist of some other critical mode with its own distinctive but unrhetorical questions. In this he shows the effects of the responsive and open-ended pluralism he invents in Critical Under- standing.2 But in his foreword to Caryl Emerson's new translation of Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics-an essay he sees as spilling over from the afterword to his own book-Booth combines this stance with the more defensive pluralism of his 1968 essay on "The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions": he generously acknowledges Bakhtin's challenge to the rhetoric of fiction, but he also isolates that challenge in a critical mode distinct from his own.3

Booth begins his foreword to the Dostoevsky book by establishing a common ground between his Chicago Aristotelianism and Bakhtin's dialogism on the question of ideology and form. Both positions, he claims, reject the opposition between abstract form and ideological content for an idea of form charged with value or ideology. Booth distinguishes his Chicago Aristotelianism, however, for its focus on the distinction between the effects authors intend in their ideologically charged formal unities and the technical means they use to achieve them. According to the Chicago premises Booth worked under in The Rhetoric of Fiction, "Authors were..,. in charge of created unities that consisted of choices exemplified and judged." 4

In this Aristotelian framework, Booth conceived the rhetoric of fiction as

1 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 409, 410n., 415-17, 419. The other three critics Booth pays special attention to are Peter Rabinowitz, Sheldon Sacks, and G&rard Genette.

2 Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

8 Wayne C. Booth, "Introduction," in Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xiii-xxvii; Wayne C. Booth, "The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions," Novel 1 (Winter, 1968), pp. 105-117; rpt. in

Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 77-89.

' Booth, "Introduction," p. xviii.



DON H. BIALOSTOSKYIPOETICS PANEL 211

focused on technique, on "the rhetorical resources available to the writer . . . as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional world upon the reader." 5 Booth assumed the end of imposing a unified fictional world of a given kind-like the tragic, comic, or horrific-and concerned himself with advocating the unrestricted use of all rhetorical means to impose that world upon the reader. He argued, accordingly, that it is an arbitrary and unnecessary restriction on artists and readers to confine them to using or appreciating only "objective" techniques.

Booth's afterword presents Bakhtin's position as if it transcended the whole question of fictional techniques and their relation to artistic ends. Bakhtin's challenge, he writes, "has nothing at all to do with the author's effort to produce a single unified effect. Its subject is not the ordering of technical means toward certain effects so much as the quality of the author's imaginative gift-the ability or willingness to allow voices into the work that are not fundamentally under the 'monological' control of the novelist's own ideology." 6 As Booth recognizes, he has assimilated Bakhtin's position to the Longinian alternative to Aristotle that the Chicago school has long acknowledged-an alternative concerned to demonstrate the presence of genius or greatness or sublimity in the author rather than to articulate the functioning of parts in the whole in a given work.7 Booth repeatedly emphasizes Bakhtin's transcendence of mere technical concerns for more profound and important issues, making his challenge to the rhetoric of fiction seem more like a moral and spiritual challenge to its questions than a technical and artistic challenge to Booth's answers to them.8

Booth thus diminishes his direct encounter with Bakhtin by conceding him the high ground and holding onto the low, but we shall see that the dialogics and the rhetoric of fiction challenge one another more directly on the common grounds of the author's role, the author's chosen artistic task, and the technical means of realizing it than Booth's account of Bakhtin allows. In outlining what I take to be their points of confrontation, I think I am also mapping terrain on which novel criticism may discover much that needs to be said about both its theoretical resources and the body of texts with which it is concerned.

Though Booth argues in The Rhetoric of Fiction for the author's use of all available technical means in imposing a fictional world on the reader, his polem- ical emphasis is on the uses of the author's voice. He shows the usefulness of direct authorial commentary and the price of renouncing it. And he argues that when such commentary is lacking and the author resorts to the "hundreds of devices [that] remain for revealing judgment and molding responses," "the author's voice is still dominant in a dialogue that is at the heart of all experience with fiction." g Booth's idea of the novel as dialogue among the author, narrators,

a Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. xiii.

6 Booth, "Introduction," p. xx.

SIbid., pp. xx, xxvii.

8 Ibid., pp. xx, xxiv-xxv, xxvii.

SBooth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 272.



212 NOVELISPRING 1985

characters, and readers links him with Bakhtin's dialogic model of novelistic discourse,'1 but his repeated insistence on the dominance of the author over narrators, characters and readers differentiates the rhetorical novel Booth examines from the dialogic Dostoevskian novel Bakhtin describes.11

While Booth repeatedly posits a dialogue in which "the author sees more deeply and judges more profoundly than his presented characters," 12 Bakhtin explicitly examines the novel in which not the author's superior consciousness but the hero's self-consciousness is the dominant of representation.13 Booth would see such a move as a shift in technical devices that "turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator," 14 but Bakhtin's self-conscious hero is not a "center of consciousness" through whose perspective a story is told but the object of representation itself. The hero's discourse in its response to discourses of the other characters and the discourse of the author is, for Bakhtin, the novel's principal object of representation.'5

Bakhtin's dialogics of fiction thus reopens the question of what is means and what is end in the novel and suggests that in some cases at least the choices Booth advocates as technically effective would not serve the end Bakhtin imagines. If the hero's self-consciousness is to be the dominant of representation, the author's position must be shifted from the finalizing and judging role Booth defends to an actively dialogic interchange with the hero. "Only in the light of this artistic project," Bakhtin writes, "can one understand the authentic function of such compositional elements as the narrator and his tone . . . and the . . . nar- ration direct from the author." 16 This is not the critical language of someone unconcerned with "unified effect" and the "technical means toward certain effects" 17 but of someone who posits a different kind of effect that calls for a radical reconsideration of fictional means and ends.

Bakhtin's account of the genre of the Dostoevskian novel gives us an idea how the ends toward which it is organized differ from more familiar tragic or comic or rhetorical ends with which he contrasts it. Bakhtin traces Dostoevsky's generic sources along several lines of what he calls the "serio-comic" or carnivalized genres. In all these genres, he writes, "there is a strong rhetorical element, but in the atmosphere of joyful relativity characteristic of a carnival sense of the world this element is fundamentally changed: there is a weakening of its one- sided rhetorical seriousness, its rationality, its singular meaning, its dogmatism.""18

1o Ibid., p. 155.

11 This insistent subordination of hero to author or story to discourse is widely assumed in contemporary novel and narrative theory. I have contrasted Seymour Chatman's reliance upon it with Bakhtin's challenge to it in "Bakhtin versus Chatman on Narrative: The Habilitation of the Hero," University of Ottawa Quarterly 53 (January, 1983), 109-116.

12 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 74. is Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 49-50. 1, Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 164.

15 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 63-65, 266. 16 Ibid., p. 64. 17 Booth, "Introduction," p. xx. 18 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 107.



DON H. BIALOSTOSKYJPOETICS PANEL 213

The "stylistic unity . . . of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, [and] the lyric" is replaced by mixed styles in the serio-comic genres,19 as "the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate" is replaced by self-division in which the hero "ceases to mean only one thing." 20 Carnival familiarization suspends the usual hierarchies of social values and destroys "epic and tragic distance." 21 Deeply ambivalent responses to fundamental contradictions replace the clarified responses of separate tragic and comic genres; promiscuous participation replaces the conventional "division into performers and spectators." 22

Even this highly compressed summary of the serio-comic genre can show us how Bakhtin gives positive character to a literary effect that Booth reads as a lack of the "clarity about distance" provided by the "traditional forms." 23 TO the critic who argues for the reader's right to know whether to "approve or disap- prove, laugh or cry," 24 Bakhtin's "joyful relativity of all structure and order" 25 and his "ambivalent laughter" 26 are a challenge to fundamental distinctions of literary effect. The clarification of response one seeks in Aristotelian tragedy or comedy depends upon the audience's recognition of the hero's standing and the audience's distance from the hero's situation, but the participatory response Bakhtin envisions puts the hero and the audience in a carnivalized proximity to one another that replaces definitive judgment with mutual openness and responsiveness.

In such a fictional world, the author does not design characters to provoke laughter, tears, or admiration but to provoke articulate responsiveness of one person to another on common human ground. Instead of issuing in a non-verbal recognition or feeling or attitude, the unfinalized interplay of value-charged discourse in the dialogic work continues in the diverse verbal responses it provokes in its readers. Booth's rhetorical emphasis on determinate and generally non- verbal effects leads him to call "the critical disagreement" provoked by stories "a scandal." 27 For Bakhtin that unsettled controversy is a mark of success in a work designed to dialogic rather than rhetorical specifications.

In Bakhtin's serio-comic genre, then, it is not, as Booth says, that the characters defy "any temptation the author may have to fit them into his superior plans" 28 but rather that, as Bakhtin says, "the freedom of a character is an aspect of the author's design" and "is just as much a created thing as is the unfreedom of the objectivized hero." 29 Bakhtin has not forfeited an interest

e19 Ibid., p. 108. 20 Ibid., pp. 116-17. 21 Ibid., p. 124. 22 Ibid., p. 122. 28 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 331. 24 Ibid. 25 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 124.

26 Ibid., p. 166. 27 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 315. 28 Booth, "Introduction," p. xxiii. 29 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 64-65.



214 NOVELI SPRING 1985

in artistic design and the technique that serves it but has radically enlarged the field of such designs and so has not only shifted the possible functions of techniques but has shifted the very boundaries between technique and design.

One of the most important shifts in these boundaries concerns the role of language or discourse or diction in the novel. In his afterword Booth remains insistently Aristotelian in treating language not as the object of imitation but as the means for realizing the object of "characters-in-action," 30 and he regrets that he did not place more emphasis on the primacy of plot in The Rhetoric of Fiction." 31 Bakhtin just as firmly declares that the "main object of [Dostoev- sky's] representation is the word itself" understood as the discourse of the ideologist-hero in its responsiveness to the words addressed to it by other characters and by the author as well.32 Bakhtin's analysis of the various ways in which one person's word can be related to the word of another provides perhaps his richest contribution to our critical vocabulary. His chapter on "Discourse in Dostoevsky" as well as his section on reported speech in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language enrich our understanding not only of novelistic techniques like free indirect discourse but of interesting novelistic objects in the very verbal interplay among the languages of characters, authors, and narrators.33 His typology of verbal interactions is most immediately useful for analyzing local verbal events in the novel and leaves as yet unanswered the question Bakhtin himself thought remained most open at the end of his inquiries, the question "of the whole in a polyphonic novel." 34 That question remains open and important for future novel criticism."3

Introducing Bakhtin's dialogics of fiction into our discussion of the novel does not rule out the effects Booth considers or the techniques he defends, but it does tempt me to identify them and his rhetorical criticism of them as appropriate principally to the monologic novel. I shall resist the temptation, however, to set up a dialectical opposition between Booth's monologism and Bakhtin's dialogism, because the dialogic perspective finally does not allow for such an opposition in critical theory any more than in novelistic practice. Though Bakhtin himself, despite his dialogic principles, habitually makes use of this heightened opposition and tempts me to emulate him, he writes in the essay "Discourse in the Novel" that "even in those places where the author's voice seems at first glance to be

so Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 409.

31 Ibid., pp. 436-440.

32 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 266.

SS Mikhail Bakhtin, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 109-159. This volume was originally published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov.

8 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 4.

as For an effort in the Chicago Aristotelian and rhetorical tradition to come to terms with "the problem of completeness in the open-ended novel," see David Richter, Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). James Phelan, writing in the same tradition, provides its most thorough analysis of the place of language in fiction but does not take up Bakhtin's contribution to the question. See his Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).



DON H. BIALOSTOSKYIPOETICS PANEL 215

unitary and consistent, direct and unmediatedly intentional, beneath that smooth single-languaged surface we can nevertheless uncover prose's three-dimension- ality, its profound speech diversity, which enters the project of style and is its determining factor." 36 For Bakhtin, then, neither "monologic" novelists nor critical theorists would "mean only one thing" any more than does the hero of the Dostoevskian novel. While dialectical arguments reduce their participants to representing such single meanings, dialogic criticism must be alert to what remains to be said from the unfolding positions of its concrete participants.

Viewed in this dialogic perspective, Booth's linking of Bakhtin to the Longinian tradition may be seen as part of another agenda. Booth's current inquiries into the ethics of fiction make him less interested in Bakhtin's bearings on the technical issues of the rhetoric of fiction than on the evaluative issues that now concern him. In his feminist critique of Bakhtin and Rabelais in "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism," he subordinates technical issues to moral judgment of the "quality of . . . laughter" Rabelais evokes and political criticism of the exclusion of female voices from his text.37 Booth recognizes the carnival effects Bakhtin dwells upon, but he challenges Bakhtin's celebration of them as ideologically limited rather than as formally unclear. But even in The Rhetoric of Fiction itself Booth opened the question of "the moral, not merely the technical, angle of vision from which the story is to be told," and his identification of Bakhtin's argument with that "more profound" question may serve to acknowledge Bakhtin's challenge where it matters most to him now, rather than to deflect it from the issues of the rhetoric of fiction in which he is no longer engaged.38

Bakhtin, too, has more to say than my reductive opposition between his theory and Booth's allows. Especially in his essay "Discourse in the Novel," he shows himself aware of a heterogeneity of novelistic genres not reducible to the Dostoevskian model dominated by the hero's self-consciousness and organized to carnivalized effects. His definition of the novel in that essay as "a diversity of social speech types..,. and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized" preserves the emphasis on the imitation of language and on artistic organization that I have brought out, but it allows for other arrangements of diverse voices and other artistic effects than the Dostoevskian.39

His acknowledgment of this diversity also permits him to present the history of novelistic genres without making it seem to culminate in Dostoevsky's achievement-which reminds me to acknowledge that Booth in his foreword to Bakhtin finds his "own greatest challenge" in Bakhtin's historically and socially situated alternative to Booth's "ahistorical treatment of forms." 40o Though

36 Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 315.

57 Wayne C. Booth, "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism," Critical Inquiry 9 (September, 1982), 60.

38 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 265.

S* Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," p. 262. 4o Booth, "Introduction," p. xxvi.



216 NOVEL SPRING 1985

Bakhtin too, as I have argued, has his contribution to make to such an ahistorical theory of novelistic possibilities, I would not want the emerging conversation between his position and Booth's to confine itself to that formalistic purview. If we cannot rest in a dialectical opposition between a Boothian monologics and a Bakhtinian dialogics of fiction, perhaps we can have a historically specified Boothian "Rhetoric of Pre-Modern Fiction" to go along with a Bakhtinian "Prob- lems of Dostoevsky's Poetics" and an Aristotelian "Problems of Athenian Tragic Poetics."

But such a historical formulation would be as fatal to the dialogue I wish to promote as its dialectical counterpart. For it should be clear that all these arguments bear on one another as accounts of the poetics of fiction, and that each of the theories is at least as conditioned by its responses to its theoretical prede- cessors as by its choice of specific historical subjects. We can no more isolate them from one another by specifying them historically than by defining their distinctive theoretical modes; we must engage them as they have engaged others on the perpetually open ground of what needs to be said next.

Booth, following Bakhtin in his foreword, writes that "to state the future would belie its openness," 1 but I will venture a few speculations about the directions our conversations will take after Bakhtin. Formally, we will have to talk more about how an imitation of discourse rather than action finds that degree of wholeness it embodies. Historically, we will want to discuss novelistic discourses as both responses to and provocations of other social discourses. Theoretically, we may find ourselves reexamining novel criticism itself as a response to and a continuation of novelistic discourse. Other voices will surely contribute to these inquiries and remind us that we were engaged in them before Bakhtin was translated for us, but however the conversation proceeds some of it will go on from what Bakhtin, and what Booth's engagement with him, leaves to be said about the poetics of fiction.42

41 Ibid.

42 The conversation has, of course, already begun. The bibliography of essays and books on the novel influenced by Bakhtin begins in the West with Julia Kristeva's "Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman" in Critique (April 1967), 438-65, and most recently includes Caryl Emerson's "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin" in PMLA 100 (January, 1985), 68-80, and Victor Brombert's Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Readers of Novel have already entered the conversation through David Hayman's essay and review in 16 (Winter, 1983), 101-120, 173-77. The most complete and convenient bibliography of Bakhtin's reception and influence is available in The Bakhtin Newsletter from Clive Thomson, Department of French, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. Numbers one and two including bibliography through 1983 are available for $8.00 each.



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