ABSTRACT
At the end of his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), from which the following extract is taken, Wayne Booth (b. 1921) sums up his position thus:
Booth ['Objectivity' in fiction]
CROSS REFERENCES: 4. Henry James 11. E. M. Forster 29. Mark Scharer 34. Alain Robbe-Grillet
COMMENTARY: David Lodge, 'The rhetoric of Wayne Booth', Critical Survey, iii (1966), 4-6 Wayne Booth, 'The Rhetoric of Fiction and the Poetics of Fictions', Novel, i (1968), 105-17
['Objectivity' in fiction] 'A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.' TROLLOPE
'An ecstatically happy prose writer .•• can't be moderate or temperate or brief . . • . He can't be detached ..•• In the wake of anything as large and consuming as happiness, he necessarily forfeits the much smaller but, for a writer, always rather exquisite pleasure of appearing on the page serenely sitting on a fence.' The narrator of J. D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction
'M. de Maupassant is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books. They speak of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell us how easy ..• he has found this impersonality.' HENRY JAMES
'Now you are, through Maury, expressing your views, of course; but you would do so differently if you were deliberately stating them as your views.' MAXWELL PERKINS, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
A surprising number of writers, even those who have thought of their writing as 'self-expression', have sought a freedom from the tyranny of subjectivity, echoing Goethe's claim that 'Every healthy effort ... is directed from the inward to the outward world'.1 From time to time others have risen to defend commitment, engagement, involvement. But, at least until recently, the predominant demand in this century has been for some sort of objectivity.
