Ong and Burke's Relation to Chung

The film we watched this week, Up the Yangtze, was one filled with many juxtapositions, as we discussed in class yesterday. Moreover, Up the Yangtze highlights many of the key terms that we have covered and unpacked in our quiz and in class, such as identification, and even post-colonialism, which I will dive more into later in this post. But Up the Yangtze is more than just a real-life tale about the negative side effects that are a cause due to the river’s rising level; it relates to and can stimulate discussion with some of our other rhetoricians and authors of texts that we’ve read throughout the semester probably more than we, and I, initially thought.

I want to bring us back to another unit, where we discussed Walter Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”. This text analyzes the concept of “audience” in regards to writing, and states that it is difficult for readders to be an “audience” because that implies collectivity, and reading is primarily an individualistic task. But more importantly, Ong alludes to the fact that writers (authors) would be foolish if they did not fictionalize an audience – really, every audience is fictionalized to a point – even audiences of oral communication, like Yung Chang’s narration throughout the length of the documentary. A key component in writing is imagining who your audience will be when writing (or producing, that is). Ong said, “The writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role” (12). This made me wonder who Chang imagined his audience would be when he was producing the film. I feel that his reasoning behind creating the film was expose the true beast behind the river, and by doing so, to juxtapose many sectors – imagery versus imagery, imagery versus words, characters versus characters, imagery versus words versus sounds, perspectives versus perspectives, and histories versus events – but I am still grappling with who/which type of audience was constructed in his head when he was cutting certain clips from it the scenes and adding and rearranging certain scenes. In his PBS interview, he talks about how he consciously decided to remove certain characters from the film because they didn’t fit with his vision for the audience. What audience? Who was he trying to reach specifically? I believe that this “astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle”, according to PBS, sets the scene for a type of audience that wants to fully understand “Old China” just as the cruise-goers on the “farewell cruises” wanted to see “Old China” before it dipped beneath the Yangtze river and was washed away thanks to the Three Gorges Dam – yet another juxtaposition, revealing the film’s duality as a whole in contrast to the many minor dualities/juxtapositions. This sense of duality, of post-colonialism (during not after), and of identification, is something that is remains as a common theme from beginning to end.

As for one of the other key terms I mentioned in my introduction, identification, which was coined by Kenneth Burke in Terministic Screens, can be loosely defined as the adaptation of one’s ideas and behavior to conform with those of a person or group seen as a model. He states it can be used synonymously with “consubstantial”, and is the “key to persuasion”. “As we share substances, we come to identify with others. As we speak each other’s language, we become consubstantial” (174). Burke also says that people develop most of their understanding of history, societies, nationality, and even geography through reading and interpreting symbols. Thus, “terminology creates a screen through which we view the world and perceive our reality” (49). These “terministic screens” are something used by everyone, everyday, whether they know it or not. “Any such screen directs the attention to one field rather than another…those that the audience can identify with and those that the audience disassociates from. Therefore, terms [and therefore screens] either produce continuity or discontinuity” (50). There it goes again, that word, audience. Audience for Burke, and for Chung it seems in Up the Yangtze, can be looked at as a connection, or relating to one another, because it’s necessary to use the [terministic] screens to direct the audience’s attention and help them to understand the history and geography of “Old China” and also to understand or catch the creative lens/screen that Chung is employing.

It’s funny, because when I watched this documentary, I never thought it would tie in with Ong or Burke at all. But now, I see that this film, which conveys the foreboding sense of a societal change happening rapidly before everyone’s eyes and diving, literally, into an unknown future, is more than just juxtapositions – its construction was accounted for based on a targeted audience so as to best understand the “why” behind the “for whom”.