According to Foucault and Barthes to some extent, it is the judgment of others that confers the title of author on a person. Ong has a slightly different view, as he believes that the author precedes and provides motive for the text, but at the same time relies on the audience for the perpetuation of the text. If there is no external audience, then the writer is in a sense fictionalizing himself in the act of writing (according to Ong's beliefs about audience), which doesn't allow for self-driven fictionalization by readers. Ong references T.S. Eliot, stating that, "so far as he knows, great love poetry is never written solely for the ear of the beloved" (21). In other words, there is an element of performance necessary in great writing. A piece with no intended audience outside of the writer himself, therefore, does not reach its full potential as a literary text.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Texts Need Readers
The last encounter of "In Search of America, between Asch's narrator and the self-professed poet, was particularly interesting to me in relation to an idea that Ong expresses at the end of "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." In Asch's story, the narrator is talking to a man who says he writes poetry, but when the narrator asks, "'Could I read it?'" (306), the man says, "'It's for nobody to read...I do it for myself'" (306). His statement raises questions about whether one is truly a poet, an author, if one's audience is only oneself. If one has no external audience, what is the function of one's writing? If there is no readership to interpret a text and give it legitimacy, is a writer an author and is their text literature?
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You raise an interesting point which I think Ong potentially addresses when he discusses the author and writing a diary, which is also usually intended as writing for one's self. In "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," Ong says that "The audience of the diarist is even more encased in fictions," mainly because writing a diary is sort of like talking to one's self, which is something Ong implies we do not do regularly (20). Just as Ong raises questions about which "self" the author is addressing when writing diary entries, perhaps the same can be said about a poet who writes poetry for his or her self (20). I sometimes dabble with writing poetry for myself but when doing so, I do find myself imagining the type of person who would either read my poems or listen to them, even if that imagined reader will never lay eyes on my words. Thus, I think Ong could say that even when writing for one's self, there is an audience intended, even if that audience will never materialize beyond that of fictionalization.
ReplyDeleteRicky, I absolutely agree with the last statement of your post. In the subjects of writing, music, and any kind of art, we are accustomed to assuming that an audience will be at the receiving end of the finished piece. It's as if while constructing our works, be they music, novels, or art, we spend a lot of time thinking to ourselves, 'What would so and so think of this? Will other people see it in the same light as I intended?' We're naturally trained to consider the opinions of others, it's part of our conscience.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that's interesting however is the example in poet Emily Dickinson. Her writing was never published in her lifetime, and was written as a manifestation of her reclusive lifestyle. I don't know if she ever intended to publicize her work, but it is obvious that today she is considered an extremely influential part of women's poetry in the 19th century. She wrote completely to herself, and in that internal connection, void of an external audience, she was able to combat fictionalization of herself well after she passed away.