[The following is a primary concern in The Rhetoric of Fiction]: How does the writer of fiction (and Professor Booth does not ignore types of fiction other than the novel, though most of his book is about novels) ensure that the reader takes the intended view of his story? But there are, of course, other questions to be got out of the way before this central question can be asked: for example, we must consider the case of the writer who denies that he intends the reader to take a particular view of his story, who says that he aims to present life as it is and leave the reader to draw what conclusions he wishes. Unless Professor Booth is willing to restrict himself only to that fiction in which the author avowedly attempts to make the reader share his view of the story, he must argue—as he in fact does—that the notion that fiction can be a pure 'representation' of reality unprejudiced by a particular attitude on the part of the author is nothing but an illusion. Admittedly, this position is not difficult to establish beyond reasonable question: even if the author's consciousness could be regarded as a perfect mirror of reality, it would still be true that the direction in which the mirror is turned is the result of an act of choice, and that that act of choice results from the belief that the segment of reality chosen merits the writer's, and subsequently the reader's, attention. This belief, which amounts to a valuation, the reader must be enabled to share if the work is to be properly available to him.
Of course the 'pure representation' idea is a creation not of stupidity but of philosophical naiveté: it is scarcely possible to believe in it if one has either read, say, one's Collingwood, or thought connectedly about the implications of the idea. There is a tendency among writers today to embrace principles of general application upon instinct, to deny them their proper place in the world of thought to which they belong. Professor Booth has to demolish many such notions, as, for example, the notion that the artist creates his art-work for himself alone, ignoring any possible audience. It is one of the great merits of the book to recall the reader to the fact that such notions involve consequences, and to show that those consequences are such as almost certainly to be unacceptable to those who propound these notions. Professor Booth, though he never overtly philosophises, has a proper (and, in these days, immensely salutary) sense of the interconnections of ideas.
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