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The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Walter J. Ong SJ
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Abstract

Whereas the spoken word is part of present actuality, the written word normally is not. The writer, in isolation, constructs a role for his “audience” to play, and readers fictionalize themselves to correspond to the author's projection. The way readers fictionalize themselves shifts throughout literary history: Chaucer, Lyly, Nashe, Hemingway, and others furnish cases in point. All writing, from scientific monograph to history, epistolary correspondence, and diary writing, fictionalizes its readers. In oral performance, too, some fictionalizing of audience occurs, but in the live interaction between narrator and audience there is an existential relationship as well: the oral narrator modifies his story in accord with the real—not imagined—fatigue, enthusiasm, or other reactions of his listeners. Fictionalizing of audiences correlates with the use of masks or personae marking human communication generally, even with oneself. Lovers try to strip off all masks, and oral communication in a context of love can reduce masks to a minimum. In written communication and, a fortiori, print the masks are less removable.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 1 , January 1975, pp. 9 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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Footnotes

*

In a briefer adaptation, this paper was read at Cambridge Univ., 24 Aug. 1972, at the Twelfth International Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures. At the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, I have profited from conversations with Albert Cook of the State Univ. of New York, Buffalo, and Robert Darnton of Princeton Univ., concerning matters in this final version.

References

1 See, e.g., J. R. Searle, The Philosophy of Language (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 24–28, where Austin is cited, and Searle's bibliography, pp. 146–48.

2 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 49–52, 138, 363–64.

3 The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 17–56. Among recent short studies exhibiting concerns tangent to but not the same as those of the present article might be mentioned three from New Literary History: Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” 1 (1969–70), 53–68; Geoffrey H. Hartman, “History-Writing as Answerable Style,” 2 (1970–71), 7384; and J. Hillis Miller, “The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth,” 2 (1970–71), 297–310, esp. p. 310; as well as Gerald Prince, “Introduction à l'étude du narrataire,” Poétique, No. 14 (1973), pp. 178–96, which is concerned with the “narrataire” only in novels (“narratee” in a related English-language study by the same author as noted by him here) and with literary taxonomy more than history. See also Paul Ricoeur, “What Is a Text? Explanation and Interpretation,” Appendix, pp. 135–50, in David Rasmussen, Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology: A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

4 Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 181–84.

5 See my The Presence of the Word (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 116–17.

6 T. S. Eliot suggests some of the complexities of the writer-and-audience problem in his essay on “The Three Voices of Poetry,” by which he means (1) “the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody,” (2) “the voice of the poet addressing an audience,” and (3) “the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking” (On Poetry and Poets, New York: Noonday Press, 1961, p. 96). Eliot, in the same work, states that these voices often mingle and indeed, for him, “are most often found together” (p. 108). The approach I am here taking cuts across Eliot's way of enunciating the problem and, I believe, brings out some of the built-in relationships among the three voices which help account for their intermingling. The “audience” addressed by Eliot's second voice not only is elusively constituted but also, even in its elusiveness, can determine the voice of the poet talking to himself or to nobody (Eliot's first sense of “voice”), because in talking to oneself one has to objectify oneself, and one does so in ways learned from addressing others. A practiced writer talking “to himself” in a poem has a quite different feeling for “himself” than does a complete illiterate.

7 See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, No. 24 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 124–38.

8 Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy (Bloomington and London: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 28–54. In these pages, Gibson gets very close to the concern of the present article with readers' roles.

9 The present inclination to begin a story without the initial indefinite article, which tacitly acknowledges a range of existence beyond that of the immediate reference, and to substitute for the indefinite article a demonstrative pronoun of proximity, “this,” is one of many indications of the tendency of present-day man to feel his lifeworld—which is now more than ever the whole world—as in-close to him, and to mute any references to distance. It is not uncommon to hear a conversation begin, “Yesterday on the street this man came up to me, and. …” A few decades ago, the equivalent would very likely have been, “Yesterday on the street a man came up to me, and. . . .” This widespread preference, which Hemingway probably influenced little if at all, does show that Hemingway's imposition of fellowship on the reader was an indication, perhaps moderately precocious, of a sweeping trend.

10 “Possible,” because there is probably a trace of fictionalizing even when notes are being exchanged by persons in one another's presence. It appears unlikely that what is written in such script “conversations” is exactly the same as what it would be were voices used. The interlocutors are, after all, to some extent pretending to be talking, when in fact they are not talking but writing.