Fictionalizing Your Audience

In Ong's "The Writer's Audience is Always Fiction," Ong argues that the audiences of works of writing and speech vary significantly in immediacy, and that both audiences are fictionalized by the writer, as the writer is rarely directly in front of their audience when they are composing. The idea of audience becomes complicated for Ong because they are not in the presence of the author when they are writing and must therefore be imagined by the author and thrust into a certain role. Depending on how the author chooses to fictionalize their audience, the reader can be thrust into the position of an unknowing onlooker, of a friend of the narrator, or even placed directly into the shoes of the narrator. Because the audience is fictionalized and is not a part of the writing process, it is then up to the reader to choose to participate in the role that the author has created for them or to reject the role that has been assigned to them. Ong uses Hemingway's style of writing as an example, as Hemingway had a tendency to write his audience as someone that was already familiar with the setting and the characters in the stories, and therefore it was up to the reader to make sense of what is happening in the scene, rather than being spoon-fed the information by the author.

Ong's idea of a fictionalized audience complicates the idea of New Criticism, a formalist movement that shifted to emphasize the importance of close reading as a way to discern meaning from a particular text. New Criticism argued the idea that anything other than the text itself is unimportant to the study of that text, and that the text should be the only thing at the center of literary discussions. All outside factors that influenced the writer should be disregarded, including the author's life and the history of the time period in which the text was written. Ong's theory of a fictionalized audience argues that the writer plays a large role in fictionalizing their audience, which then becomes a part of the text and should be regarded with as much importance, complicating the idea of New Criticism. Ong also argues that the audience can have an active role in shaping the text, depending on how the author chooses to fictionalize their reader, and therefore plays a role in shaping the text.

Does the idea of book writing for plays and musicals challenge Ong's idea of a speaker's audience versus a writer's audience, and that the two are inherently different and should be approached as such? When playwrights write their work and later move their productions to workshops, they have an opportunity to take the words that they have written, the stage directions and dialogue that were once merely words on a page, and present them to an audience. During the workshop process before a show is released to the masses, the writer and director have the opportunity to test out the material in front of test audiences in previews and make adjustments to the material according to the reactions of the audience. This process challenges Ong's theory that a writer's audience and a speaker's audience are completely different entities, as the playwright adapts the material to fit the audience, and although the material is initially written to an fictionalized audience, the active audience become crucial to what ends up being the final result and the final version of the script.

Or could the argument be made that because a play is meant to be performed in front of an active audience, could it be considered a form of speech? While the text is written with the idea that the words are meant to be read aloud in front of an audience, actors do not generally have the freedom to change what they say and the content of the show based on the audience's reactions to the material. Although it is intended to be performed, the actors onstage have committed the script to memory and there is little room for improvisation (depending on the show). This genre seems to act as a hybrid, combing the conventions of writing and the limitations of a writer's fictionalized audience, as well as the active participation of a speaker's audience.