In his essay ‘Writing’ W.H. Auden wrote —
When some obvious booby tells me he has liked a poem of mine, I feel as if I had picked his pocket.
But all writing depends, one way or another, upon deceiving the reader.
Upon making a fool of them.
This isn’t about red herrings, MacGuffins, and plot twists.
This isn’t about getting the reader to forget they are looking at black words on a white page, rather than believable people acting and speaking believably.
There are many different kinds of fiction, let alone many different kinds of writing, and some of them can maintain an unfailing insistence upon their own textiness.
They can even come across as unspoken, unvoiced.
No, the fooling I’m thinking of is more like Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief, or at least the suspension of constant attempts to undermine the thing that’s being read.
I consider myself a very gullible reader. When I open a book, I do so in order to be convinced, to believe, to go along with the writer.
While I’m reading it, I tend to agree with almost anything.
I read as if I were a parent or carer watching their child in the school play. I want everything to go well. I’m alive to the tiniest mistakes. I’m aware I’m not even attempting to be objective.
Less reader, more cheerleader.
It’s afterwards that I become critical.
Later in the same essay, Auden says —
Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.
Auden is being extremely moral here, almost reaching the theological level of priests who disapprove of image-making. He is becoming puritanical. Most of all, he’s trying to discipline his own charismatic power as a poet.
But for most writers, the biggest danger is in imagining, and getting hung up on, and intimidated by, an entirely disenchanted reader.
Because that is the kind of reader of their own work that they tend to become by the time they’re going back to the fourth or fifth draft.
Their words collapse and disjoint in front of them. They see nothing but errors.
This is a bit like having painted a room in your house. If you feel you missed a bit, up in the top corner, you’ll always see it.
But when did you ever walk into someone else’s living room, look at the walls and think, They missed a bit up there?
You don’t, because you just see the colour plane of the paint. Even if there is a gap, your eye is fooled.
One of the things I say most often to students is that they need to learn to read their own work as if they haven’t written it.
This is often received as if I’m telling them to get rid of their self-love, and be hyperaware of all the flaws that an outsider is going to see.
There’s something in that, for some drafts.
But just as equally, I’m encouraging the students to sometimes be their own fools, to enchant themselves, to pick their own pockets.
Unless you can go along with your own shtick, you’re not seeing your act as an audience will.
If you fail to fall for the whole thing, but only see bits, you’re more a cynic than a critic.
That’s where I think Auden is wrong. Because, by opening a book, by reading a poem or story, we are willingly giving our consent to be fooled — fooled enough to allow the story to tell itself to us; fooled enough to see colour fields rather than individual brushstrokes.
We’re not having our pockets picked, because we know we are engaging with a deceiver. Instead, we are willingly handing over our money to play the three cup game.