Game of Literacy

In Walter Ong's essay "The Writers Audience is always Fiction" begins with an introduction into rhetoric, reminding us that rhetoric began with a focus on orality before making the shift into writing (Ong, 9). With this, there is an evolving audience that forms in situations of the spoken word and the written word. "For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both." (Ong, 10) Perhaps what I did not consider before is Ong's distinction between "Audience", a collective noun and "Readers", a plural (Ong, 11). A group of readers do not act collectively to a written work in the same way an audience would react to a speech. It is in the "game of literacy" the reader must conform to the writer; does this still give birth to the reader at the cost of "killing" the author?

Ong describes this idea of fictionalizing himself/herself that occurs when a reader processes the information of a written work individually and internally with their own voice, beliefs and context. In relating this idea to Barthes "The Death of the Author", this process would birth the reader because they are (sub)consciously disregarding the writer and their intentions to create meaning in their own individual ways. However, as Ong points out, in order for all of this to happen the author must undergo the task of having to fictionalize an audience in the first place. He plays this out in an example of Chaucer, "Chaucer simply tells his readers how they are to fictionalize themselves. He starts by telling them that there is a group of pilgrims doing what read people do, going to a real place, Canterbury." (Ong, 16) Ong also touches on Hemingway and his usage of "...the definite article as a special kind of qualifier or of the demonstrative pronoun "that"." (Ong, 13) This "you-and-me" effect results in a fictionalized audience and commands the reader. When Hemingway uses words such as "the" and "that" the reader is fictionalized and shares the author's familiarity with the subject matter (Ong, 13). 

Connecting this to the idea of Barthes, the author has to die in order for the reader to come alive. As Ong goes on in his essay there are some clear differences. How can the reader be born if the ideas/words in which they are reading would not exist without the presence of the author. If a reader is able to interact with a written work without any notion of the author, that is, they would have to disregard the author's voice and put emphasis on the writing/language. After reading Ong, this concept becomes jarring to me. If the Author creates this fictional audience where he/she is able to adapt to the reading in creative ways but still have the ability to remain individual, then is it even possible to count the author as "dead"? There would be no reader without the writer and no writer without the reader; in a reader/writer relationship, each role relies on the other. 

In dealing with written and/or spoken communication both the reader and writer wears a "mask". The writer wears a "mask" to create this fictionalized arena for the reader, and with that "the masks of the narrator are matched...in equally complex fashion by the masks that readers must learn to wear." (Ong, 20) In written communication, the game of literacy controls the reader/writer dynamic, the reader must learn to accept the role that the writer has created.

-Alexandra Weinstock

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.