The Audience and The Author: Ong vs. Barthes

What is the purpose of art if there is not an audience to observe it? What makes an audience? How many people does it take? How long must the art be observed by a the audience in order for them to be considered with such a title? Walter Ong attempts to answer these complicated questions while explaining the ideas he has on the topic of an “audience.”

            Starting out with the term itself, Ong does not find the use of the word “audience suitable for the subject because this term implies a collective unit rather than an individual observer. When considering the audience of writing, Ong believes that the term audience rules out the idea that an individual reader taking in the text on their own is excluded from the idea of audience.  Ong is taking simple terms­­—audience and reader—and delving into their true definitions, far past whatever we have thought them to mean before.

            Ong also explores the connection that he feels is crucial between author and audience in order for the audience to truly interpret the author’s words. Ong describes a “give-and-take” scenario in which “the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role-entertainment seekers…” in order to write text that can be interpreted and understood by an audience (12).

            Barthes and his essay “The Death of an Author” contradict Ong’s ideas. Barthes believed that the reader should have to power to use their own knowledge and experiences to interpret text however they like. He wanted to “kill” the author in order to give “birth” to the reader. Barthes believes that when we “give an author a text” and are “imposing a limit on that text” (877). Barthes would not agree with Ong’s “give-and-take” concept, and would rather all power be given to the reader for interpretation.”

            My own complications arise when I am not sure which idea I agree with more. On one hand, I feel that Ong has the right idea in saying an author should know whom they are writing for. The author of romance novels is writing for a different audience than that of the author of murder mystery novels. I also think that the point Barthes make is accurate in a way that supports the idea that a reader or an audience can interpret text however they wish, based on their own experiences. If a reader is enjoying a novel about traveling to Paris, should they not be able to interpret it based on their own experience studying abroad to France rather than the author’s possible intention of using Paris as a metaphor? Another question this poses is if the audience reads a text and interprets with their own idea, and then later learns of the author’s true intention for the audience, can that change the reader’s thoughts on the text?

            While both essayists have a strong idea in what they are trying to convey, I think they are both forgetting how personal of an experience both reading and writing can be for the reader and author respectively. Unless you sit down with both the author and the reader simultaneously, you may not have any way of knowing what they each are feeling and thinking.

-Chelsea

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.

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