Oratory; A Two Way Synchronous Street

In Ong's The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction the difference between Audience and Readers is best explained during the discussion of the 'collectivity' of either written word or oral performances, "The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity. "Audience" is a collective noun." Then, "'Readers' is a plural. Readers do not form a collectivity, acting here and now on one another and on the speaker as members of an audience do. We can devise a singularized concept for them, it is true, such as 'readership.'" (11). Reading being a personal assumption of roles inherent to a text then occurs, though in a different way than the listener of a speaker following or tuning into the words as they come from the lips of the mouth and the mind. The final passage has something beautiful to say about this; "And it is hard to write outside of a genre. T. S. Eliot has made the point that so far as he knows, great love poetry is never written solely for the ear of the beloved, although what a lover speaks with his lips is often indeed for the ear of the beloved and of no other. The point is well made, even though it was made in writing" (21). This brings into focus the key question of the article; the relationship of the speaker/listener and that of the writer/reader in terms of audience.

I found myself most enjoying this juxtaposition between rhetorical oratory and asynchronous reading. There were a few passages I found this excerpt particularly apt at describing the difference; "Students of mine from Ghana and from wester Ireland have reported to me what I have read and heard from many other sources: a given story may take a skilled or "professional" storyteller anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how he finds the audience relates to him on a given occasion...The teller reacts directly to audience response. Oral storytelling is a two way street" (15,16). This is fascinating after Ong's explanation of how the READERS of a WRITER are established as a fictionalized representation of a possible audience while the writer is writing. So by taking on the role of a reader; the person is assuming some or many of the things inherent to the piece of writing and its (pre)conceptualization of the reader.

This gets into something interesting with Barthes' 'moment of self-creation' though I did not read the article and will post on this connection later.