Communication Currents

Wayne Booth (1921 - 2005) was a world-renowned scholar and teacher of English Literature and Language at the University of Chicago. In academic circles, he is perhaps most known today for rehabilitating the concept of “rhetoric” as a way to undertake literary criticism by considering how stories communicate through language designed to elicit particular effects. In over ten books, translated into seven languages, his clarity of expression and joyful style stand out in an age when academic writing has become increasingly esoteric, making a case for an ethical and inclusive engagement with the world around us. Booth identified as both a pluralist and a humanist, which in his case meant he accepted difference and diversity as productive inevitabilities while championing the commonly human (and humane) principles of truth, goodness, and beauty. He is certainly one of the twentieth century’s most important literary critics and a major figure in the disciplinary link between the study of English Literature and Communication.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, from 2001-2002, I had the honor of working with Booth first-hand. Though he had retired from the classroom, we met regularly at his home (or out for lunch, or for walks around campus) to discuss his work and mine and whatever other topics came up in what I remember as invariably deep, lively, and cheerful conversations. At the time, he was preparing to donate his papers to the University, where they would be kept in the Regenstein Library’s special collections archive among the papers of other distinguished scholars and luminaries, several of whom had won Nobel Prizes or been figures of eminent public distinction. Having come from a generation well before personal computers became so widespread, Booth generated hard copies of nearly everything he had ever written or typed. What’s more, he had kept them all: grocery lists, letters, diaries, drafts of early essays, manuscripts, birthday cards, lecture notes, random thoughts scribbled on napkins. After over four decades of service to the University and the academic community at large, he had amassed an astonishing and enormous collection of such documents. I was delighted when he asked me to assemble them into some kind of order.

A personal archive is a collection of documents and artifacts whose historical origin is attributed to a particular person. By and large, people assume of personal archives that they offer evidence about, hence insight into, the person to whom they’re attributed. In the case of a distinguished person like Booth, his personal archive accordingly provides a valuable resource for those looking to learn more about his work and life. Beyond his published scholarship and the living memories of those who knew him, Booth’s archive is the place where his legacy will be measured and made by those who encounter it. What I soon realized is that, as his archivist—one of the people charged with giving his papers the organization they have today—I played an improbably strong part in influencing what that legacy might become.

It can be tempting, when looking through the private papers someone collects throughout a lifetime, to read these papers and from their contents construct a story about who that person was and what he was all about. After all, the evidence is right there to be found in diaries and letters that offer a unique window into someone’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and motivations. But such a temptation risks reducing a person’s rich complexity into a fixed account of a single, unified self, neglecting the inevitable multiplicity and contradictions that we all experience in our bodies and minds. Considering this multiplicity might tell a more complete story about someone’s life and legacy.

For Booth, the idea that anyone might have a coherent, fully integrated, single “self” didn’t jibe with his personal feeling that all of us have many selves, often in internal conflict with one another. Instead, he believed, we all perform versions or variations of ourselves in different contexts of our social experience. These performances make the idea of selfhood—of who we are—rhetorical in nature insofar as rhetoric concerns the use of symbols to convey a certain impression or elicit a certain response in others (or even merely in ourselves). In his posthumously published autobiography, My Many Selves, which Booth began around the time I was organizing his papers, he looks for a “plausible harmony” among his different rhetorical selves. In the end, he can’t find any. At least, he’s never able to reconcile the seemingly contradictory characteristics of all his multiple personas: the vain, moral, lover, luster, honest, hypocrite, despairing, zen, and dozens of other “WBs” he self-identifies in his autobiography.

Booth kept his papers scattered across three offices, one in the English Department on campus, another in a private storage room in the University’s main library, and still one more in his office at home. If these documents contained the evidence of his various selves, such as it can be preserved in any material form, then to honor Booth my task was to organize them in a way most amenable to acknowledging such multiplicity and rhetorical variability. The problem is, when constructing an archive the decisions an archivist makes sometimes privilege a certain version of “truth” over others. For instance, an archivist needs to make tough decisions about how to classify certain papers for the sake of their organization. Should correspondence be organized chronologically, or by the person corresponded with? Should all manuscripts be compiled together, or should the various drafts and revisions of what became a particular book all be grouped in one file?

Depending on how an archivist answers these questions, researchers who consult an archive looking for insight into its subject will be channeled toward a particular performance of the “truth” about that subject. And, of course, such researchers consult an archive with particular motivations of their own, only further complicating the ability fully to recognize a person’s multiplicity of sides, meanings, and intentions. In a sense, then, personal archives, their archivist, researchers, and the namesake of the archive alike are caught in a perpetual conflict between, on one hand, fixing a static interpretation of their subject and, on the other, allowing that subject to have multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings. In short, rhetorical performances are everywhere, not just in our social experience as we live it day-to-day, but in the very documents that provide evidence of our past and, perhaps, the ongoing legacy by which we’ll be known in the future.