we've touched upon some proposals about the intention writing that seriously changes the roles of readers and authors. Placing "masks" over these roles and distancing them from one another breaks down the connection of the audience and writer, making it appear as if the author has no way of directly communicating with the audience through his or her writing.
Is an author then simply writing for himself? What can an author consider to be his motivation?
The latest texts we have covered are so wrapped up in dealing with the struggle of interpretation that they seem to neglect the point of being an author or an audience. As a couple of you guys have mentioned in your posts, there is a difference between choosing to read something, or being forced to read it for whatever reason. But oftentimes an audience is absolutely required to read, digest, and provide feedback. In the same vein, many authors are cranking out material in large part for their readers. I believe it is evident that in our society we can see many instances in which readers are almost more infatuated with the author than on the material they create.
There certainly is an identity to being an author. One must have responsibility for one's actions, which includes works of writing. I just have to keep reminding myself that these texts need to be read in absolute context.
Yay for masks--only if they're fun. And hooray for those who disrobe their Dramatis Personae. When this entered the text I immediately thought of Alan Watts discussing the topic
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/xLMebuJEbYg
Also some beautiful language by ONG discussing the orator as a disrober (robber, ha!) of masks and egos and curling it down to the core, he writes,
"Masks are inevitable in all human communication, even oral. Role playing is both different from actuality and an entry into actuality: play and actuality (the wrold of "work") are all dialectically related to one another." Then, "But oral communication, which is built into existential actuality more directly than written, has within it a momentum that works for the removal of masks. Lovers try to strip off all masks. And in all communication, insofar as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love (!!!) . Those who have loved over many years may reach a point where almost all masks are gone. But never all. The lover's plight is tied to the fact that every one of us puts on a mask to address himself, too (!!!) . Such masks to relate to ourselves to ourselves we also try to put aside and with wisdom and grace we to some extent succeed in casting them off. When the last mask comes off, sainthood is achieved, and the vision of God. But this can only be with death" (20).
WOW! Now that's a delightful angle for ego dissolution by way of communication and oral performance, in actuality and love. I feel any further "unpacking" would best be left to Alan Watts above, or a reread of the above excerpt. This is beautiful in terms of what spoken poetry can do. Ties into the T.S. Eliot quote at the end of the article about the audience of a love poem vs. the one to one communication of love from the lips. Furthermore...
I would like to quote the annotation of ONG on page 21 in notes about T.S. Eliot
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T. S. Eliot suggests some of the complexities of the writer-and-audience problem in his essay on "The Three Voices of Poetry," by which he means (1) "the voice of the poet talking to himself--or to nobody," (2) "the voice of the poet addressing an audience," and (3) "the voice of the poet when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking" (citation.....) Eliot, in the same work, states these voices often mingle and indeed, for him, "are most often found together." The approach I am here taking cuts across Eliot's way of enunciating the problem and, I believe, brings out some of the built in relationships among the three voices which help account for their intermingling. the audience addressed by Eliot's second voice not only is elusively constituted but also even in its elusiveness, can determine the voice of the poet talking to himself to nobody (Eliot's first sense of "voice"), because in talking to oneself one has to objectify oneself, and one does so in ways learned from addressing others. A practiced writer talking 'to himself' in a poem has a quite different feeling for 'himself' than does a complete illiterate." (21)