Narrative

As most readers of this journal will know by now, Wayne C. Booth passed away in October of 2005. We will do a special issue of Narrative on his legacy for the field of narrative studies that is now planned for Spring 2007. Here I offer a personal remembrance.

The title of Booth's autobiography, released this spring, is My Many Selves, and over the past thirty years I had the great good fortune of becoming acquainted with a fair number of those selves. Since his death on October 10, 2005, I have been thinking a lot about the Wayne Booths I knew, and I have recently come to think of them as forming a kind of family (it's the twenty–first century after all, an age of exceedingly heterogeneous family units). At the head are the well-matched parents, Wayne the intellectual and Wayne the rhetorician. Wayne the intellectual loved doing things with ideas—learning new ones, or better yet, developing them; then testing them, putting them in dialogue with older ideas, and seeing where all this interaction could take his own thinking. This Wayne was the man who wrote and edited so many different kinds of books and articles—work whose subject matter ranged from narrative theory to aging, from critical pluralism to the values of amateurism, from Laurence Sterne to Sylvia Plath, from pedagogy to the craft of research. Wayne the rhetorician found in the arts of reading, writing, speaking, and listening both a set of powerful lenses through which to examine the ideas he loved and a cause that gave his work greater urgency. This Wayne believed that rhetoric, if practiced well, could make the world a better place. All who knew him will testify that his own practice was the best evidence they ever encountered for this belief.

Wayne the intellectual and Wayne the rhetorician had many progeny. Among the most fun-loving was Wayne the ironist, the man who delighted in the communion [End Page 113] between speaker and listener established by successfully executed indirection. This Wayne's most frequent target was himself, and over time his irony created a self-portrait of the absent-minded professor—one who was perpetually on the verge of either showing up for speaking engagements a year early or forgetting them altogether. A very different sibling, one whose presence always made me remember that the self-portrait was ultimately ironic, was the Wayne the mentor. This Wayne was thoughtful, wise, and generous—and was so to many, many people. To take just one example from my own experience, this Wayne, though not on my committee, stepped in to chair my dissertation defense when my advisor and his good friend, Sheldon Sacks, was unable to do the job because he had just suffered a severe heart attack. Other siblings I got to know include Wayne the political observer (often in despair about the policies of George W. Bush), Wayne the writer-seeking-advice (but not always willing to take it), Wayne the instigator ("you say this and he says that and she says the other thing, so let's figure out who's right") and Wayne the gracious host ("you can use our room on the third floor anytime"). But the members of the W. C. Booth family I want to talk most about here are a set of twins who have significantly influenced my work as editor of Narrative: Wayne the teacher and Wayne the critical pluralist.

The only formal course I took from Wayne was team-taught by these twins, and it came in the spring of 1975, my last quarter of Ph.D. coursework. At that time, Wayne the intellectual was then in the early stages of writing Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, and he made the focus of this seminar in "Rhetorical Criticism" the way critics read each other. Each one of us five students was to choose a selection from the work of a critic who was important to our dissertation projects, and each of us was to take a turn presenting to the group a written critical engagement with...