Understanding Actuality Through Fiction

Throughout Walter Ong’s “The Audience is Always a Fiction”, and less often yet still prevalent in Barthes “The Death of the Author”, the reigning theme of performance is at the center. The writer must cast readers into “roles” and the reader must take up these roles in order to fulfill their end of the performance. Performance governs every aspect of communication, and even as “love” can come close to breaking down the “masks” with which we constantly perform, they cannot be completely unveiled, even in respect to ourselves (Ong 20).

In written text, Ong argues that this is done through fictionalizing the audience, or more specifically of the “readers”, while speech given orally is clearly a much more direct performance as it exists in a very specific time and place (Ong 11). This all seems rather straightforward, as obviously the writer cannot have a hard-defining grasp on the reception of their work. However, what seems the most interesting about this concept is the implications of this distinction. Ong gives the example of an audience, amidst a speech, being told to read a passage silently, breaking up the unity of the speech as each audience member retreats within their own mind and reads the text within their own internal voice (Ong 11).

This perfectly demonstrates the disconnection created through writing that Ong attempts to articulate. Thus, a good writer must attempt to bridge this gap of disconnection, or at least create a new type of relationship between the writer and reader. A clear indication of this is seen through Ong’s Hemingway example. By his use of specific definite articles, he created the perfect medium between proximity and distance, establishing a mutual experience with the reader (12, 13). Hemingway was able to fictionalize his audience in order to communicate on a shared emotional plane.

The word performance has a very direct connotation, probably revolving around a stage or set with live actors, performing in front of you, in real-time. The notion of writing as an indirect performance and articulated by multiple authors (Barthes, Ong, and this blog-post for that matter) is perplexing. For Barthes, language is what performs, as the author is the vehicle to “nourish the book” (876). In addition to this, “words are never fully determined in their abstract signification but have meaning only with relation to man’s body and to its interaction with its surroundings” (Ong 10). The writer, the language, and the reader are all agents in this performance, depending on where and from what perspective the text is coming alive.

To the same extent, language is the vehicle through which we ourselves navigate through our own lives, and thus life itself comes to be a performance. This idea is articulated by Ong as he discusses the inescapable masks of communication: “role playing is both different from actuality and an entry into actuality: play and actuality (the world of ‘work’) are dialectically related to one another” (20). In other words, it can be said that art, or intentional performance, attempts to reveal the performance of said “actuality”. Writing, which “normally calls for some kind of withdrawal”, is “itself an indirection” by going inward to understand the outward (Ong 10, 20).