Coduction

To meet his need for a term to adequately describe how we “arrive a our sense of value in narratives in precisely the way we arrive at our sense of value in persons”(70; this, and all other page citations in this entry are to The Company We Keep), Booth introduces his term “coduction” in Company: “from co (‘together’) and ducere (‘to lead, draw out, bring, bring out’)” (72), coduction is a term which implies “a communal enterprise rather than a private, ‘personal’ calculation” (72). Booth suggests that we evaluate people and narratives alike “by experiencing them in an immeasurably rich context of others that are both like and unlike them” (70). That is, when we first “meet” a narrative we cannot help but to compare it instinctly to other experiences—our “untraceably complex experiences with other stories and persons” (71).

Not only do we compare all narratives we encounter to other similar and dissimilar encounters, we sometimes (or, hopefully, often, as Booth would have it) discuss narratives with other people, adding another level to coduction. When we discussion a narrative together, other people’s experiences with narratives enter into our evaluation. Booth describes the process of coduction:

Coduction will be what we do whenever we say to the world (or prepare ourselves to say): ‘Of the works of this general kind that I have experienced, comparing my experience with other more or less qualified observers, this one seems to be among the better (or weaker) ones, the best (or worst). Here are my reasons.’ Every such statement implicitly calls for continuing conversation: ‘How does my coduction compare with yours.’ (72-73).

In the final sentence of Booth’s description, he links coduction to “continuing conversation,” connecting the coductive process to the ongoing process of Critical Understanding.