Writer as first reader

I’ve been thinking about this post from Ong’s Hat creator, Joseph Matheny, for a few days now… Particularly this part about there being confusion around the liquid hyperreality of it all:

When it became clear in 2000/2001 that people clearly did not understand what I was trying to do with the Ong’s Hat “sacred game” (or living book as I often called it back then), I broke the fourth wall momentarily. I pointed out that there was and always had been an explanation on the CD ROM, which served as the center point for the game at the time. If you want to see it, download the ISO, use something like WinRAR or any ISO extractor, and open the Secret.pdf in the /eXtras folder.

Rather than calming the waters, my admission stirred some people up even more. It ultimately resulted in me canceling the game due to unbridled hostility on the forum over their inability to grasp a simple concept, such as not all play implies winners and losers. Sometimes, it can be about playing for the simple joy of playing.

I respect and understand the desire to shape one’s creative narrative work as one releases it into the wild. It’s something I’ve done fairly intentionally in terms of what I associate or distance the work and its contents from.

My own experience has been somewhat similar to the above, in that I have seen that no matter what I as the “Authentic Official Author”(tm) say about my work, some [very large] subset of audience members will simply not read that, or find some reason to disregard it altogether. So while on the one hand, I can perform the magic tricks in plain sunlight, on the next turn I can reveal the hocus pocus for what it is, and demonstrate the sheer technique of it all. No matter what I do, people are always going to pick and choose, and construct their own thing out of it all that honestly may or may not correspond to my own web of associations I have cast over all these bits and pieces that I have been assembling over the years.

Which is not some attempt to absolve myself of responsibility over outcomes of narratives I put out there. On the contrary, I hold that as central to the work and its conversations. But it is maybe to say that the postmodernists got there well before us, with the framing of the Death of the Author and all that. What readers bring to it is ultimately as valid in terms of lived experience as whatever the author may or may not have “intended,” perhaps more.

What role would that leave then the writer/author/whateverer in this landscape? I think it leaves us as rather more of the same as what we’ve always been (even when we factor AI in as part of the creative process): the writer as the “first reader” able to forge ahead upon the blank page, merely leaving a trail for the next reader to follow with their own baggage.

The phrase ‘first among equals‘ – primus inter pares – springs to mind:

Primus inter pares is a Latin phrase meaning first among equals. It is typically used as an honorary title for someone who is formally equal to other members of their group but is accorded unofficial respect, traditionally owing to their seniority in office.

Interesting to think of the writer as a kind of “office holder” over a work, and an office that is in many ways honorary, as the peers in this group are all the other reader/writers who paint their own meaning over it all anyway regardless.