control of the rhetorical resources? . . . One of the major delights of
this delightful, profound book is that of watching Humbert almost
make a case for himself. But Nabokov has insured that many, per-
haps most, of his readers will be unsuccessful, in that they will iden-
tify Humbert with the author more than Nabokov intends. (390–91)
—WAYNE C. BOOTH, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, CHAPTER 13I should have distinguished more clearly between the conclusions
that were derived from rhetorical inquiry and those that were sim-
ply my unargued personal commitments.. . . And sometimes, especially in chapter thirteen, I seem to forget
just how difficult it is to do justice to ethical complexities, in our read-
ing experience, in our study of rhetorical problems, and in our thought
about the relative values of particular art works in constituting and
criticizing selves and societies. (418–19)
— WAYNE C. BOOTH, AFTERWORD, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, SECOND
EDITION
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. (9)
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, LOLITAIn 1961, when Wayne C. Booth published The Rhetoric of Fiction, what we
now think of as classical narratology had not yet emerged, and the dominant
literary theory was the New Criticism. The New Critics famously regarded
canonical literary works as verbal icons or well-wrought urns and just as
famously ruled that interpretations based on responses of individual readers
were guilty of the Affective Fallacy. In this climate, Booth’s chapter 13 on “The
Morality of Impersonal Narration,”^1 the chapter that includes his commentary
on Lolita, was a radical statement, because it viewed fictional narratives not
as autonomous objects but as acts of communication whose aesthetic quali-
ties were intertwined with their ethical effects on individual readers. Given
the hegemony of the New Criticism, it is not surprising that Booth’s chap-
ter encountered a lot of resistance from its initial readers or that its remarks
about Lolita were a flashpoint for that resistance. Even from a twenty-first-
century perspective that values ethical criticism—in part because of Booth’s
1988 The Company We Keep—his 1961 comments invite objections. How can
Booth both acknowledge that Nabokov has marked Humbert as an unreli-
- By “impersonal,” Booth means narration that separates the person of the implied
author from the source of the narrative information; thus, for Booth, both internal focalization
and character narration are impersonal.
ESTRANgINg UNRELIABILITY, BONDINg UNRELIABILITY • 97