Hemingway, Ong and The Girl

Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” provides a well thought-out theory on the role an audience plays in a writer’s work. Ong challenges the idea that there is a deep connection between a reader and writer, and claims that writers often have to create or “fictionalize” an audience when writing, that way writers have the ability to write about various situations and topics without being restrained by the certain needs of an audience. Ong’s theory is an interesting approach to the reader/writer dichotomy, but the point he brings up in his essay that fascinated me the most was Hemingway’s “you-and-me” style of writing.

Ong states that Hemingway’s style is often seen as “straightforward, unadorned, terse, lacking in qualifiers, close-lipped” (Pg. 13) because Hemingway has fictionalized an audience that knows him at the very least, as an acquaintance or friend. There is no need for a formal introduction in many of Hemingway’s novels, instead a reader is quickly submerged into the story. This because the reader has a presumed role of being a friend of Hemingway’s when he is writing. My question is, is this style of writing more affective or appealing to a reader? Or do books with some sort of formal introduction have a better appeal to a reader?

Personally, I find Hemingway’s writing detached and impersonal, but never thought about the fact that he could be writing his novels with a friend in mind as an audience. Ong’s theory would then make it a fact that Hemmingway’s style of writing is actually the most personal style of writing, instead of the opposite. Intimacy between a reader and writer doesn’t have to be established because it’s already there. “The writer needs only to point, for what he wants to tell you about is not the scene at all but his feelings. These, too, he treats as something you really had somehow shared, though you might not have been quite aware of it at the time. He can tell you what was going on inside him and count on sympathy, for you were there. You know.” (Pg.13) Ong calls this kind of reader/writer dichotomy the “you-and-me” relationship. The idea of it sounds appealing, an interpersonal and intimate relationship between reader and writer should lead to a better understanding and greater takeaway from the author’s work. However, I disagree with this. I believe that the assumed previous knowledge, can be misleading to a reader. Technically, we aren’t Hemingway’s friends and we wouldn’t have the kind of background on his life that he expects to have when we open up one of his books. Therefore, the idea of a “you-and-me relationship” between reader and writer is actually detrimental when it comes to unpacking the background and settings of Hemingway’s novels. This is probably why I and other readers have difficulty stay fully engaged with Hemingway’s writing.

However, the “you-and-me” relationship may not work effectively in writing, but it most definitely can in a visual medium. When juxtaposing Ong’s theory on Hemingway’s writing with the commercial “The Girl Effect: I Dare you” it is clear to see how a personal viewer/creator relationship is more effective to get a point across than a personal reader/writer relationship. Specifically, the moment in the video where the child says “I dare you to look at me, as more than a poster for your cause” immediately resonated with me, and my mind quickly drew up images of the well-known posters of suffering children in less developed countries. The creator assumed I had seen these posters without asking me and knew it would appeal to me emotionally, so it was used as a tactic to engage with the video. The visuals of the actual children in the video also give appeal to an audience emotionally. In the commercial “The Girl Effect: The clock is ticking” the flashing words of “poverty, aids, hunger and war” are shown to the audience without explanation because we should have a presumed notion of how terrible these things are. This allows for the commercial to be straight to the point and jarring, an effective approach for its main argument: to create change. In the “Nike Foundation: The girl effect” uses visuals to aid the audience’s assumed notions of pregnancy, womanhood, and child prostitution.

The commercials lead me to believe that Ong’s theory on the “you-and-me relationship” is most effective when used visually. After watching the commercials, I realized that much of this theory relies on using emotions attached to memories to bring context to a subject or background knowledge. For me at least, and many other people, visual aids make the emotional recall a lot easier for your mind to process it compared to reading a book like Hemingway’s novels. This is probably why I don’t particularly like Hemingway’s style of writing, and enjoyed the commercials much more. Hemingway’s cold, disillusioned writing style is harder to engage with because it sometimes makes it harder to emotionally recall memories for context, while the commercials use of visual aids made it easier to recall emotions. When thinking in terms of rhetorical strategies, using pathos to appeal to audience through “you-and-me relationships” is an effective approach, but is not necessarily the best one when it comes to certain reader/writer dichotomies.