What Company Do You Keep?

On the "implied authors" of texts, and on how they transform us

Wayne Booth was a brilliant and wise English professor at the University of Chicago; he was also kind and gentle soul with some inner fierceness. He had two terrific ideas.

The first involves “the company we keep.” With whom or what are you spending time?

The second involves the “implied author,” that is, the apparent persona, or character, behind what we read. Booth’s work is especially relevant today, because there’s a lot of great and also not-so-great company out there, and there are some implied authors who are full of kindness, mischief, and fun, and others who are (let’s say) poisonous and full of contempt.

On the company we keep: Booth thinks that texts are a bit like friends, or company, in the sense that we visit with them and spend time in their presence. We are much affected by the company we keep. It can be uplifting, or it can instead poison our emotions and our attitudes toward other people and the world.

In law, Justice Elena Kagan is terrific company. She’s fair and she’s sharp. She’s also funny. In a different way, Justice Antonin Scalia was terrific company too. He was witty and mischievous, and while he could be mean, his meanness was almost always softened by humor.

Some novels are horrendous company, even if we are drawn to them. Booth’s own example is Peter Benchley’s “Jaws.” As the novel starts, Benchley prepares readers for a violent encounter between a woman (who has recently “thrashed” with her boyfriend in “urgent ardor on the cold sand”) and the “big fish,” the shark, moving “silently through the night water,” with eyes that are “sightless in the back” and “a small, primitive brain.”

Here is Booth’s point: By arousing the reader with the prospect of violence and by reveling in the “bloody adventure, the story at each step molds me into its shapes, giving me practice, as it were, in wanting certain outcomes and qualities and ignoring certain others. I become, for the hours of reading, that kind of desirer.”

Wow. Social media is often a lot like that. It transforms us, if only for a little while, into “that kind of desirer.” People who are full of bile make us a little like them, certainly if we agree with them, and often if we do not agree with them, because our fists clench and we want to strike back.