Breaking With the Merely Great : THE COMPANY WE KEEP An Ethics of Fiction<i> by Wayne C. Booth (University of California Press: $29.95; 486 pp.) </i>

Wayne C. Booth begins his book--an examination of the relation of ethics to literary art--where he began his inquiry: In a staff room at the University of Chicago in 1963.

I am not certain whether Isaac Newton’s possibly apocryphal apple actually bopped him on the head when it instigated his discovery of gravity. As for Booth, he was indisputably bopped when his single black colleague on the humanities staff got up and committed, as the author puts it, “an overt, serious, uncompromising act of ethical criticism.”

He could no longer teach “Huckleberry Finn,” the colleague announced. Its treatment of Jim, however well meaning, was an insult to black people and a slighting of their history.

For a sophisticated, liberal, art-for-art’s saker like Booth, this was as close as you could get to burnable heresy. Surely, anyone could see that “Huck Finn” was a Great Book, a classic, and that its genius refined its material particulars to a purity beyond all offense.

History shows, though, that even if you burn your heretics, you may learn some of what they have to teach. “The Company We Keep” is Booth’s quarter-century exploration of the question raised for him that day.

On one level, it is a thoughtful and sensitive examination of how we receive literature and what it does to us.

On another level, it is an extensive account of the critical wars among assorted platoons of Nothing-But-ers: Literature is nothing but text, nothing but form, nothing but a reflection of society, nothing but points made in the service of one ideology or another.

Finally, it is a witty and disarming personal record of the author’s shifting allegiances and certainties, of his wanderings around the battlefields, and of his emergence as a firm believer in the peace of the brave; insisting, among all these bellicose purists, upon “a radical critical pluralism.”

From a war, he turns to a permanent civic argument: Aesthetic and ethical imperatives must coexist in a symbiotic irreconcilability.

Booth’s ground instinct and enthusiasm are aesthetic; and if his book is a record of an aesthetic outlook shifted by ethical questions, its beauty is that he gives ground without ever compromising it. The message in a work of literature is essential--we must come to terms with it--but it is not the only essential. No amount of virtue will make a bad poem good, and very often, the formal virtue of a work is its message.

Booth takes, for example, Yeats’ poem, “The Fiddler of Dooney”--”And when the folk there spy me/They will all come up to me/With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney’/And dance like a wave of the sea.”

He notes that the ostensible message about art as the highest calling is quite trivial. The real message is the beauty; or, as Booth puts it, the message is that to go on reading Yeats’ poems “will be one of the best things I could possibly do for myself.”

But to ignore the ethical content of a work of art is to deny part of it, he argues. For almost the entire history of literature, he points out with quotations from writers of all times, the humane effect of a work has been central to the author’s intentions, not to mention the reader’s reactions.

A novel, a poem or a play invades and takes possession of us, and it must establish a relationship of trust, even a friendship. This may sound strange in the case of modernist and post-modernist work. Yet look, for example, at how whole heartedly we commit ourselves to Kafka, once we have broken through to each other. The friendship is there; the friend is in trouble. The distances and the reversals of modern writing at its best simply extend the meaning of what trust is.

Illustrating his notion of friendship, Booth contrasts Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Son” with Anne Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” The first, he says, takes a big subject--violence in America--but treats it in such a casually arbitrary blend of fact and fiction “that I never come to the point of trusting him (Mailer) as a friend.”

By contrast, Tyler’s scope could not be smaller, yet “I feel that she is giving me everything she’s got, and she cares a great deal about what will become of me as I read.” No better thing has been said about her.

If literature invades us, then it inevitably occupies an ethical territory. Booth imagines an extreme formalist or an extreme deconstructionist--extremes meet--commenting on “King Lear”:

“It was nice pretending for a while that filial cruelty is a terrible thing, that old and helpless fathers should not be tortured. But of course that value is culturally relative. I need not take it into account in my appraisal of the play.”

“The Company We Keep,” in its report on our literary battlefields, ranges widely and sometimes densely. The density owes more to the critical thickets that have grown up over literary theory in the past decades, than to Booth’s outlook, which is lively. He is a jack rabbit even when he gets lost from sight--at least to the general reader and this particular one--in phenomenological underbrush.

At the end, though, he gives us a kind of box score of what happened to a sublime Promethean aesthete after 25 years of pondering the staff-room session. He does it by telling us how some of his former heroes have fared.

Rabelais, he concludes, is lessened by his misogyny. Jane Austen survives the charge that she makes her women, extraordinary as they are, ultimately recognize male superiority. And Mark Twain, even though he gives Jim nobility, does it in a fashion that, on balance, justifies the anger of so many black readers.

One need not agree with these particular conclusions. I disagree with the first, agree with the second and have strong qualifications about the third. But Booth has set out the arguments for ethical appraisal so completely, so fairly and with such balance, that he invites disagreement as hospitably as agreement. What he has succeeded in doing, and it is a big achievement, is to establish that ethical values must enter into our experience of literature; and to suggest spacious grounds for doing so.

Essentially, Booth has shifted from a two-way relationship--critic and work--to a three-way relationship--critic, the work and the world. Rabelais and Twain are still heroes to him, I think, though scarred with mortality. His Chicago colleague changed his perception of “Huckleberry Finn,” he writes:

”. . . once and for all, for good or ill, from untroubled admiration to restless questioning. And it is a kind of questioning that Twain and I alone together could never have managed for ourselves.”