Ong, Barthes, and the Creation of a Fictional Audience

One thing I found really interesting in reading Ong's "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" was that the way that he describes the fictionalization of the audience is quite similar to the way that Barthes describes the recycling of text. Ong states, "If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know...from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers" (11). Similarly, Barthes states that "the inner 'thing' [a writer] thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely" (877). Both men describe a process that repeats back on itself until the dawn of language, but what they are talking about has some interesting differences. For Ong, the perceived audience is what is never new, but for Barthes, it is language itself that is repeated over and over.

If we take Ong at his word, what does this mean for the text the author is writing? It seems to me that he is talking not so much about a recycling of actual words, but a recycling of tone. If a writer remembers being fictionalized a certain way reading a particular work of literature, it is likely that he remembers the words that indicated his relationship with the narrator, and thus with the implied voice of the narrator. In this way, Ong's idea seems to go hand in hand with Barthes' conception of language as being the recycled medium of ideas. A writer remembers a particular tone, uses specific words that signify this tone in a text, has created a work which is not specific from past literature, but rather one in a long line of texts that have created and recreated each other.

However, Ong's discussion of audience seems to indicate that the author is not dead as Barthes believes, but rather a very real figure that creates text with particular motivation and meaning. In order to form a conception of his audience based on the conceptions of other authors, an author must have context, must precede his work. And for the reader to interpret his tone, he must consider this context and the importance it has for him as, essentially, a fictional character in the author's text.