Similar reader-writer relationship in Ong and Barthes

In Walter J. Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” he explains an older idea of the author-reader relationship: “If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers” (Ong 11). This notion recalls if not replicates Roland Barthes’ idea in “The Death of the Author” of the text as an imitation, a perfect mixture of writings already written so as not to “rest on any one of them” (Barthes 876). Ong understands that for a reader to understand the intent of a non-modern author, 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). Ong suggests that the reader should understand the author, meaning it would be necessary for the reader to acknowledge the Author that Barthes so vehemently wishes the reader to avoid to determine his intent. Ong expresses the problems when a reader’s understanding of the writer’s intended audience is necessary, mentioning Hemingway and Faulkner as writes who impose often problematic and misunderstood requirements upon the reader. Barthes believes the reader must have more control, or agency for the work to be meaningful. Barthes writes, “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 877). Clearly, Barthes believes that a writer should not maintain selfish intentions within his work, or require his audience to submit to a necessary audience personality. Barthes understands writing as able to transcend the meaning its writer understands it to have, if only the reader does not recognize the writer. The author must accept his death at the commencement of the writing process. In this way, “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes 877). By the conclusion of his essay, Ong asserts the necessity and inevitability for the writer and reader to wear masks to communicate most efficiently, an idea that confuses or eliminates a work’s potential meaning, already so difficult to determine. Here, Proust’s idea of “the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters” seems applicable, as a similarly altered or unnatural relationship between writer and reader seems preferred by both Ong and Barthes (Barthes 875).