The Perplexing Tales of Barthes and Ong

If you haven’t done so yet, you’ll find Walter Ong’s piece, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always A Fiction”, an interesting read in comparison to something we read and discussed in our last class, “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. I am here to put these two reads into conversation with each other, discussing Ong’s obsession with “audience” and “fictionalization,” and comparing it to Barthes’ attraction to the “author,” while also addressing two of our discussion leading terms: dialectic and epistemology.

Ong discusses the concept of “audience” and shows his concerns in its regards to writing because, often times, we think solely of the writer or the oral performer when reading or listening to something, rather than the receiver. The receiver totally gets ousted in a sense, and that’s no good. Ong believes that readers/receivers/audiences are crucial to writing because the writer needs them to fictionalize them. Fictionalize? What the heck is that? Basically, Ong said, “If the writer succeeds in writing, it’s because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers…” (11). Fictionalizing was key because “the person whom the writer [is] addressing himself to is normally not present at all” (10). Thus, you must be able to imagine who is going to be reading your work – whether it be the college-aged student in the coffee shop, the middle-aged woman at home with her coffee, or the busy NYC worker catching a ride on the subway. Ong thought “the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role” (12), like I aforementioned. Thus, creating this will aid in creating a better communication pathway between writer and receiver.

While Ong like to focus more on the key component of fictionalizing your audience, Barthes concentrated more on the importance of being an active reader and viewing the author not as an original or creative master, but rather, as the primary vehicle or “scriptor”. Barthes was a post-structuralist who questioned the idea of authorship. Barthes thought that you had to, in essence, dethrone the author in favor of the reader. In class, my group had to decide what is more important to Barthes, not to have a figurehead (idea of a person so important that you can’t see behind it/without it) or to have an active reader. We chose active reader because Barthes explains that once the Author is gone, there are no distractions, and the reader is able to actively and intently decipher the words simply for what they are, not based on who wrote them, etc. Plus, if you’re being an active enough reader, than it’s not necessary to have a figurehead.

So why does this matter?

The common ground that I see Barthes and Ong meeting on is this idea that you can’t have one without the other. They both like to explain why one is more important than the other, yet both sides of reading and writing and still in context. In his iconic last lines of “The Death of the Author”, Barthes’ says, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (877). In Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience Is Always A Fiction”, he fixates on how important the reader is to become fictionalized, although, he mainly emphasizes how this is a task left up to the writer.

In class on Tuesday, we discussed two terms: dialectic and epistemology. Dialectic was originally developed by Greek philosophers and was used as a form or method of logical argumentation. Since its main use is for argumentative purposes, its reliance on the duality of the argument to reach a conclusion or end makes sense. This three-step process can also be referred to as dialectical criticism – literary criticism – in which oppositional ideas unify a given work(s). When it comes to epistemology, this can easily be summed up by “how we know what we know”. It is the universal system of judgment and the theory of knowledge – basically, what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

So why does this matter?

Well, both epistemology and dialectic helps us better understand Barthes and Ong. Dialectic allows me take two opposition works and unify them under one centralized theory of mine (whether I am right or not). As for epistemology, Barthes and Ong have sort of formed their own epistemologies and we are able to look at them in regards to episteme, or areas of knowledge, which define periods of time according to circulation, which is important when comparing two well-known theorists.

-Morgan Crawford