A Fundamental Audience Entices Literature

Walter Ong's, "The Writer's Audience is Always Fiction" discusses how a piece of literature affects an audience. Ong states that, "a writer addresses readers only, he does not quite 'address' them either: he writes to or for them" (Ong 11). Ong correlates an audience as 'fiction' in order to prove that a piece of literature cannot hold substantial value if an audience is not present. Ong defines an audience by two separate definitions: "First, that the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role-entertainment seekers, reflective sharers of experience, inhabitants of a lost and remembered world of perpubertal latency and so on" (Ong 12). The second part of the definition states that the "audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself" (Ong 12).

In order for a story to connect to an audience, the reader has to place himself/herself into the role that the author has put him/her in. But while reading this section of the reading, I couldn't help but question Ongs' theory. What if the audience has not had life experiences or memories in general of such situations? How is that audience member able to place themselves in the characters shoes? But then on page 12, Ong states: "a reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life." Then Ong uses the writing of Ernest Hemingway to establish this theory. Ong uses a tree as an example: the tree? what tree? Oh, you know the tree. After reading this example and putting some thought into it, I slowly started figuring out what Ong meant by all of this.

           
In Barthes, "Death of the Author" his explanation of the reader and author connection explains the perception of a piece of literature quite effectively. Barthes states: "the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author, confiding in us" (Barthes 875).  One of the main points that Barthes states is that "everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered." A text or piece of literature can only be deciphered by the audience. On page 877, Barthes re-iterates this concept by stating: "it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." So, the "ends" are classified by the Author and the true meaning of the text can be justified once the Author dies.

When analytically speaking about the two different theories presented by Ong and Barthes, I believe it is fair to say that they do not differentiate in the importance of the audience. Both argue that without an audience or reader, a work would not be read or scrutinized. Barthes and Ong both state how important the audience is and in a way contain many similar thought processes of what an audience justifies. In plain language, without an audience there is no literature. 

-Anjelica MacGregor