Where Barthes Fails and Ong Prevails

The audience has played an undeniably crucial role in writing since the day the art began. The study of it and it’s nuances, however, has begun fairly recently. It is quite curious that scholars of literature have taken so long to acknowledge the role that the reader plays in the text’s inception and its reception. Perhaps this is hindsight bias on my part; now that I have begun to study the works of Roland Barthes and Walter Ong, as well as their contemporaries, the idea seems quite obvious. This apparent existence of the reader as relevant seems to be as far as Barthes takes his argument. Ong, however, unravels the mutual fictionalization between the author and the reader to paint a much more complicated yet comprehensive picture of the most essential consideration in writing of all time.

Of Barthes and Ong, I began to know the former first. His theory is fairly dramatic: the author must die in order for the reader to be born. Of course he does not intend for the author to actually die, rather the extreme metaphor is meant to reflect the extreme and complicated nature of writing. He is essentially theorizing about a component of writing that had not been explored before (the audience), and for that component to come into focus, the previous area of focus (the author) must be pushed aside. Much of the study of literature up until Barthes’s time, and even today, focuses so heavily on the author: his background, his influences, his intentions, and so on. Barthes suggest that, instead of analyzing literature solely in terms of the writer, we should focus more on the more important agents, the language and the reader. For Barthes, the language must be performative. Language reaches far beyond the act of writing. It is language that necessitates a reader. A writer can physically inscribe words on a page, but language must be interpreted, there must be someone to receive and understand it.

Here, I can agree with our dear friend Barthes. He is completely right: the reader must be brought in to focus. Language is created to be understood. The writer attributes characters with quotes and words with meanings for the reader and the reader alone. It is his task in reading to discover the characters and disentangle meanings. I do not agree, however, with Barthes extravagant plan to kill the author. I understand, of course, that this is only a metaphor, but I really don’t think any form of eradicating the author from his writing is necessary nor is it helpful to illuminating the role of the reader. Barthes is correct in saying that critics spend far too much time attempting to uncover the mysteries of what the author could have really meant by saying what he said, but this is not to say that his thoughts are entirely irrelevant. The author’s opinions, thoughts, and imagination are essential to the writing process and are fundamentally linked to the reader. In order for the “destination” of the writing to be the reader, the author must help the words get there (877).

This is where Ong comes in. He starts from the same foundational idea as Barthes does, but then takes it in the right direction.  Instead of focusing on the ways in which the author is irrelevant, Ong theorizes about the symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. He agrees wholeheartedly that the analysis of audience prior to his time is lacking. He also seems to agree that the reader is some sort of destination that the text is attempting to reach. But, unlike Bathes, he sees the author as the essential origin of that text and its means of arrival.

Ong couches his analysis of the writer’s reader in a comparison between written and oral audiences. The reader has numerous of roles to play that the listener does not and it is essential that the writer understands and caters to them. The writer’s audience is much farther away in space and time than is the orator’s. This requires the writer to find a way to captivate this disconnected reader and make him feel present. This invocation of presence is essential.  In order to accomplish this, the writer must fictionalize his audience, constructing in his “imagination an audience… cast in some sort of role” (12). This role can be anything from someone who enjoys science, to a pilgrim going on an adventure with all of his pilgrim friends. On the flip side, the audience must fictionalize himself and play the role that the writer wishes him to play. This seldom coincides with the reader’s actual role in life, so this convincing requires expertise on the part of the writer. Fictionalizing the audience has been an essential component of all writing ever, but has manifested in different ways.

The writer must treat the reader as if he were a “companion-in-arms”, a “confidant” (13). For the writer to be successfully fictionalized, he must feel like a vicarious participant to the actions of the text. Hemingway was especially talented in accomplishing this. He referred to objects and people as if the reader was also familiar with them. He used ‘the’ instead of ‘a’. The reader feels more involved if he is told about the bench, rather than a bench. The writer intends for the reader to feel as if he is already familiar with the bench. Think about when someone who describes a character as a man who posts politically charged Facebook posts, versus someone who describes that man who posts politically charged Facebook posts. The use of that instantly connects with the reader, as they relate this to things they are already familiar with. By giving the reader so much responsibility, he gives him high esteem. It is crucial for the reader to feel apart of the story to be apart of it. The successful writer considers and accomplishes this.

Ong’s argument also triumphs over Barthes in its acknowledgement of the audience as a fiction in non-narrative works as well. Barthes only theorizes about narrative works, noting others (like scientific works, historical texts, diaries, letters, and so on) as exceptions to his ideas. Ong, on the other hand, encompasses all of these fields, positing that the audience is always a fiction. In the case of history, the historian must capture events in terms of themes and make the reader feel present in a way that no other historian does. No two histories are written in the same way, with the same voice. Like a narrative, all scholarly texts place the reader in a role of someone who knows certain facts. He must assume that some knowledge is common. The reader must fill this role to fully appreciate the text, whether he actually knows or not. In the letter, the writer must fictionalize his reader’s mood, and pretend that he is present while also acknowledging that he is not as well as the circumstances that make this so. In the diary entry, both the reader and the writer (essentially the same person) wear masks, pretending to be a different versions of themselves. Speaking to oneself is not natural, so writing in a diary definitely involves consideration of the audience. Ong is not able to account for these other written texts, writing them off. For this reason, as well as those presented above, his theory is undeniably weaker.

Ong’s success is in his ability to acknowledge the mutually understood esteme that reader and writer share. The writer builds upon this to create a common ground essential for connection. Barthes fails to do this. It seems that his entire theory revolves around not doing this. However, the network of discourse shared by the reader and the writer is what allows for fictionalization, and consequently a successful text.

-----Morgan Jantzen

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 868, 874-877.

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