Ong: Audience and Reader

Ong's text 'The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction' highlights a few of the most interesting and complicated themes in Barthes and Foucault's views on the Author. Ong begins this text with a couple quotes from Cicero, in which Cicero muses on the role of the author and writing within his own terms. One of the quotes states: "When there is nothing to write about, one writes himself". Considering our discussions concerning 'Death of the Author' and 'What is an Author', this view is a bit jarring. One of the many ideas within these two texts is that an author must die, not simply retreat into the work, but disappear from it entirely. So how does Ong fit into this perspective with his text on audiences?

Ong sets off into this work by right away making the distinction that our collective idea of rhetoric as the art of the orator and dealing chiefly with public speaking is incorrect; for Ong, rhetoric has morphed into writing. Any rhetorical writing, however, is reliant upon audience. Ong asks us to reconsider the idea of a physical audience and instead substitute the reader (singular) for audience (plural). Ong states "...the time is ripe for a study of the history of readers and their enforced roles, for they show that we have ample phenomenological and literary sophistication to manage many of the complications involved"(Ong, 10). For Barthes, the active reader that pulls away from the author is the same as Ong's conception of the reader: a reader, like an audience, that is able to participate with a text, but instead of this being a collective participation it changes to a singular interaction with a text, but an interaction nonetheless. So, instead of the author (or speaker, as in oral tradition) taking precedence, the reader and the readers relationship with the text is what becomes important here.

Ong states:"For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in space or time or both"(Ong, 10). Ong's idea of the reader/audience is not terribly radical, what is more interesting is the way he views the relationship between the author and the reader. For Barthes, the author's voice must be lost entirely:"...the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins"(Barthes, 875). For Barthes, the Author must die in order to write a good work, but for Ong, instead of requiring the death of an author, he requires that the author "...writes to or for them[the reader]"(Ong, 10).

Perhpas Ong's inclusion of the quote from Cicero is to highlight the difference from his own views and those of old philosophers whose views on rhetoric he now considers outdated. Or, perhaps this idea that the writer inevitably "writes himself" says something about audience and readership. Ong discusses Hemingway and how through his use of definite articles he is able to achieve familiarity with his readers, and Ong seems to laud this ability. Maybe Ong wishes to task the writer with fictionalizing their reader because the author should not retreat entirely, but instead fictionalize an audience in which he sees himself.

-Taylor Kincaid

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

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, 874-77.