[In the past], vigorous debates about what criticism is and ought to have been conducted under the rules of sporting competition: each combatant plays to win and the victors believe they deserve their laurels. What is noteworthy about the present scene is not only the unprecedented multiplicity and strangeness of criticisms but the resultant resignation: that is, the widespread conviction that somehow we must come to amicable terms with all of them and find some intelligible way of acknowledging that they are all victors, in their fashion. Hence the problem posed for [Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism]; and, admirably, it faces up to, comes to close grips with, this problem more directly, fully, comprehendingly, and judiciously than any other book so far.

Booth, of course, brings to his task uncommon qualifications. He knows the ways in which critics of all varieties go about their business of explicating, interpreting, judging, defending their judgments, and equally the ways in which metacritics (those who take this role) talk about their problems: the aims of interpretation, the nature of literature, the functions of criticism itself, and so forth. He knows about philosophical issues and positions that are reflected in disputes about criticism. He has looked into the writings of the leading figures on the current critical scene, and studied some of them very carefully…. He contains, without concealing, his concern for the matters at stake by a tone of sometimes ironic detachment and a determined impartiality. He makes a serious effort to find non-question-begging strategies for transforming altercations into rational disputes by suggesting premises that must be reasonably acceptable to all parties and inquiring what further agreement can be based on them. He strives for a generous "pluralism" (and even a "pluralism of pluralisms," embracing Crane, Burke, and Abrams as pluralists), but makes clear the extraordinary difficulty of formulating a coherent pluralism…. (pp. 257-58)

Booth's initial effort … to distinguish his chosen view, "methodological pluralism," among six "attitudes toward critical variety and conflict" is valuable for its demonstration of the difficulties of the task, but leaves things somewhat up in the air. The chapter gets off on the wrong foot, I think, by attacking monism in an ad hominem way: "it offers what look like respectable intellectual reasons for treating all rivals superficially…. If our hope is for a single answer, and if we have already seen an overwhelmingly persuasive power in some one position, we shall most certainly mistreat rival positions."… No evidence is offered to show that monists are more disposed than others to unfairness in discussion. But now we know monists are baddies. Pluralists are goodies, if we can only learn how to recognize them (perhaps by the consideration they display toward monists)…. [The pluralist] will examine each critic's questions, language, and reasoning, discovering that "more than one mode emerges intact, irrefutable, viable, and not reducible or totally translatable into some other, superior mode."… (pp. 260-61)

But are the different modes to be taken as giving different answers to the same questions or as answering different questions? If the former, how can they be adopted "intact"?—Booth does not want to embrace contradictions. If the latter, in what sense are they "contending"? Perhaps for our attention, or allegiance: each might claim to be "the proper" or "the right" way of doing literary criticism, and each might add that the others are really not literary criticism at all, but inferior substitues for it. Then methodological monism could be the doctrine that one method is special and privileged, in that using that method is essential to doing literary criticism. And methodological pluralism could be the doctrine that there is no privileged method; there are several methods (at least two), no one of which is more central to the activity of criticism than any other. But this position, too, is hard to formulate acceptably. (p. 261)

Booth begins chapter 5 with some retrospective comment. He says that in chapter 1 his "main support for pluralism … was that it provides the least temptation to indulge in careless or malicious reduction of opponents to straw men" …—a strangely feeble support indeed! He adds: "It is by no means easy to summarize the additional evidence that the next three chapters [on Crane, Burke, and Abrams] have presented for either the desirability or possibility of pluralism." Two pages later when he does try to summarize, he concludes that each of his chosen critics "seems to reveal himself as a monist … precisely in the sense of making choices that rule out other, equally plausible, choices."… And indeed each of the three does select a particular critical method, and claim, explicitly or implicitly, that it is the right or essential way of approaching literature. Their "pluralistic disguises" consist in a willingness to refrain from trying to stamp out their rivals, perhaps even in welcoming rivals to engage in disputes with. So again Booth struggles to keep his pluralism from collapsing into some form of monism (either championing one competing method or reconciling them into a single complex method). But he cannot demonstrate either that the methods are directed solely to logically distinct questions or that they give ultimately reconcilable answers to the same questions. "Surely, then, my quest for a pluralism has failed. And since few are likely to work harder at it than I have, it seems probable that there really can be no such creature as a true pluralist in my sense."… If monism, too, is unacceptable, we are left with skepticism: there is no method; all texts are "unreadable"; each person must do his own deconstructing and achieve his own misreading.

But the book does not end at this point; in fact, we are halfway through, at the climax. Booth is left with a "provisional pluralism," also described as "open-mindedness" … and as a "reasonable eclecticism," in the words of Stephen Pepper…. The rest of the book is designed to defend this position and, in the course of defending it, to clarify it.

Booth confesses "a sense of shock" … at finding that his defense must be a pragmatic one: "Become a pluralist because pluralism serves ends that are even more important than any conceivable comprehensive and coherent theory about the whole of man's discourse."… Abandon "the dogma that truth is not properly judged by its human consequences."… What are these prominently important ends, or values? Vitality …: keeping criticism alive and critics busy. This is evidently a rhetorical value—critical discussion is a conversation that must above all be kept going. Justice …: doing right by the text (and as throughout the book, Booth deliberately identifies the text and its author by frequently oscillating references). This is a rhetorical value, too—a matter of conversational ethics designed to make the "common enterprise" of criticism possible…. Understanding—and here again the emphasis is rhetorical: the ideal critical commonwealth is defined in terms of everyone's understanding everyone else's texts, which is the same as incorporating part of their minds.

At this point we see (at least, I see) rhetoric and philosophy parting company. In a moment of brilliant self-understanding, Booth avers that he has "'rhetorized' the whole pluralistic enterprise."… His original problem was a philosophic one, belonging to literary theory or aesthetics; but Booth's strategy is to draw us away from this problem and palm off a substitute—not: How do we know if we can know, which critical method or methods are cognitively acceptable? but: What attitudes toward the plurality of critical methods will best insure that the critical conversation flourishes? Understanding, not truth, becomes the aim; critical modes are treated "not as positions to be defended but as locations or openings to be explored—in the traditional rhetorical terminology, as topoi or loci."… Whatever you do, don't rule your opponent out of the community …; follow Booth in his "simple effort to be a good citizen in the republic of criticism."… I can accord this enterprise a tempered respect. And it may be that in the end philosophy can give us no firm standpoint, no pou sto, for discovering truths that are better than rhetorical ones. But Booth's position now appears to me as a cop-out; by refusing to pursue a philosophical inquiry into his problem, he abandons the serious search for critical knowledge.

Not that Booth has no more of interest and significance to say—we must trace one further line of his thought. In the second half of his book, we see Booth's own monism emerging as he struggles to convince the reader that literary texts provide some features that are neutral to contending modes and that can afford a footing for building a common body of knowledge. Simultaneously he strains to achieve the utmost fairness, openness, generosity toward what he cannot refrain from labelling "alien modes." Again, I found myself cheering him on, pulling for him to bring off this double feat. But whether because (as I fear) my own pluralistic capacities are too narrow to assimilate all of Booth, or (as I rather think) because even his intelligence and art are defeated by the way things are, I end by agreeing with his monism but thinking his pluralism is confused and confusing—at least insofar as it goes beyond simple open-mindedness. (pp. 261-63)