To me, Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” and Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” are a bit like oil and water. I have been thinking about how they might mix together, and have been rather stumped. My first thought was, “If the author is dead, and the audience is a fiction, what are we left with?”
One thing of note about both of these pieces, though, is that they deal with roles. Ong writes that the writer casts the readers in a role, and the written work then defines the role the reader is to play. Barthes notes that the Author is a conception of the reader (876) – that is, the reader can cast the author in a certain role, or see the author as shaping and creating the text is a certain way. Ong points out several times that writers generally do not have practical access to the readership as they write, but neither do readers usually have access to the writer as they read. It might be said that readers can also fictionalize the author.
It is here, in this relationship where fictionalizing can go both ways that I see the possibility for some theorizing about agency. Writing of any kind demonstrates agency: the writer is creating a text in way that they assume will be understood and recognized by the community for which they write. Thus, the writer is imagining the community in which they – and their text – will have agency. The reader, then, also has agency. The reader is not speaking or writing, when he or she reads the text, but is acting. The reader is considering trying on the role that the writer has created. The agency of the reader is to take on the role the writer has implicitly or explicitly asked, or to put down the reading, or to take the reading and do something with it, be it write about it, recommend it to a friend, or burn it. The reader may fictionalize the writer to justify the sort of agency he or she takes, or the reader may choose to disregard the writer completely and consider only the text in his or her response (thus, deciding, like Barthes, that the author is irrelevant).
So, when the audience is a fiction, and the author is dead, perhaps agency is a sort of phoenix that rises from the ashes.
Rebekah,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post. I attempted to somehow understand these two writings together or against one another, as well, but I'm not sure I did so as effectively as you. However, that this post is so effective is what I want to question here – you gave me a few ideas.
When you write, "Barthes notes that the Author is a conception of the reader," you seem to idealize this idea into a way in which the reader is afforded power/agency. Your idea that “the reader can cast the author in a certain role, or see the author as shaping and creating the text is a certain way” is very interesting, but it seems more to understand Ong than Barthes, as Ong wrote that the reader must “fictionalize himself” and “know how to play the game of being a member of an audience that ‘really’ doesn’t exist” (Ong 12). Barthes is more interested in the way an Author limits the artistic potential of the written work. If the author’s position is maintained within his writing, then is the reader considering too much the writer and less the work? Furthermore, the Author could be understood as the influence of a writer’s previous work and an idea of the writer within society, which could be disillusioning for a reader less perceptive or critical. So, Barthes argument that the author’s death is necessary seems solid – it does not contradict itself.
Your understanding of the reader in your last paragraph is really interesting to me in that it accepts Ong’s proposal of the reader role and allows me to finally understand the way in which Barthes’ reader and Ong’s reader are acting similarly to interpret a text. However, in the role Ong proposes – one in which the reader accepts his role – is the reader really given any power other than that of accepting or dismissing? The work, it seems to me, has more purpose than that. Although perhaps it is only a mixture of signifiers, as Barthes claims, the work has more potential when the reader is not limited by a role. The way in which someone interprets a text without an place to start – the author – will be undoubtedly more revealing and productive.