Case Study: Haunted House?

Today, my campus church group (ELCA Lutheran) received an unusual letter. We get the same unusual letter every fall as Halloween gets closer, and every year ignore it. It comes from a fundamentalist Christian group in southern Indiana that runs a “Hell House,” a sort of haunted house aimed at converting people. I have (serious) issues with this as an evangelism technique, but from a rhetorical standpoint, it makes a fascinating case study.

In “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong states, “The historian, the scholar, and the simple letter writer all fictionalize their audiences, casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play the role assigned” (17).

Ong states that the writer must construct his or her audience and cast them in a sort of role. The writer of this letter invites his reader to an “exciting drama” that depicts disturbing scenes (including abortion and drug abuse), and states that by “take[ing] this demon-guided tour, you will be challenged to take a stand for righteousness in an age when compromise seems to be the order of the day.” The writer of the letter constructs a reader who shares at least at a basic level Christian belief – he begins the letter, “Greetings in the Name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”The writer has set his relationship with me, the reader, in one line. He closes the letter with a similar statement about sharing the Gospel. The writer of the letter is, from the basis of assumed shared values, casting the reader in the role of someone who will be on board with his ideas and plans.

“A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him,” writes Ong (12). As a reader of this letter, I am asked to play an active role: I am asked to consider attending this event, I am asked to encourage other to come, both actively and by posting an enclosed advertising poster “in a prominent place in your building,” and lastly to pray for the effort. What if I, the reader, refuse to play the role the author of this letter assumes that I will play? I do not want to do any of the things the writer asked, and even while reading the letter, I did not feel particularly theologically close to the writer. (The large banner on the top of the page that had a fiery background to the words, HELL HOUSE, was a bit of a tip off.)

I think that the idea of rhetorical agency might come into play here. This letter is a clear representation of a sort of assigned rhetorical agency: the writer of the letter gives the reader (me) a set of defined, acceptable responses. In “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean”, by Karlyn Campbell (next Friday’s reading), she notes that agency is defined the competency to speak, writer, or act in ways that are heeded or recognized by others in one’s community (3). It can be “invented by authors who are points of articulation.” The author of a letter invented and gave me, the reader, a kind of agency – one that will be heeded and recognized in his community. I can enter into an ongoing cultural conversation in these ways.

However, I do not have to use only the kind of agency that the writer of this letter has constructed for me. By responding in ways that the author of the letter did not articulate, I am taking agency, and redefining it. This agency is still communal and social, constituted and constrained by material and symbolic culture elements (Campbell 3). I have taken a rather strange sort of agency in this situation – I have used this letter in a way I seriously doubt the writer intended. I am taking the material and symbolic cultural element (the letter) into a different communal/social situation: out of its original fundamentalist community and into an online rhetorical blog community. I have writing competency in this online blog community: it will be recognized by others. I do not have the same agency to act in the community of the man who sent the letter: if I do not act in the ways he prescribed, I wouldn’t be recognized as part of that community.

Understanding writers as both people who construct audiences and who construct agency for their audiences, and thinking about readers not as forced to accept writer’s audience constructs, but as people who can change and claim different roles and agencies might lead to some fascinating theoretical possibilities.