Hemingway's Companion and a Poppin(s) Ad

In his essay entitled “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong asserts that as the rhetorical tradition began to shift from its prominence in oral form to its prominence in written form, the relationship between Author and audience would inevitably change as well. Because oral communication presents a scenario where the author has a direct relationship with his audience whereas written works not only are inherently more accessible to a larger audience, but often more distant from the writer themselves. “Because of inability to communicate orally, the writer's audience is always a fiction,” Ong declares as he goes on to assert that a writer’s audience must play the fictionalized role assigned to them by said writer if an effective conveying of text is to be achieved (17). While most of these claims are backed up by well thought out theories, they are all mostly proven under rather archaic types of technology and circulation methods. What fascinates me is whether on not Ong’s claims still hold merit in a contemporary context where authors are not solely reliant on text and voice, but modern extensions of that such as film and television.

One of the links provided for this case study was an advertisement for the film Mary Poppins. As the ad begins, it displays a crawling text that claims “With pride we announce the selection of this theatre by Walt Disney for a Special Engagement of his Sparkling New Motion Picture, Mary Poppins.”  This effectively establishes Walt Disney, or at the very least his studio, as the author of this “text.” In order to more appropriately analyze how Ong’s theories of audience fictionalization hold up in this more modern text, I will discuss the parallels between the Mary Poppins trailer and Ong’s own analysis of Hemingway.

Ong states that a primary method in which Hemmingway fictionalized his audience was through his use of definite articles, such as “a” and “the,” and demonstrative pronouns such as “that.” These verbal tools were used to put the reader in media res, or in the middle of a narrative sequence, and construct a greater relationship between the reader and writer. This relationship is formed due to the fact that Hemmingway, through his word choice, gives the impression that he and his audience are playing the same role as “that-over-there [is]at a distance from you-and-me here” (13). While the Mary Poppins advertisement does not use pronouns and articles as meticulously to place a role on its audience, it does share similarities to Hemmingway in that it uses deliberate word choice to develop a relationship with the audience and ultimately fictionalize into an accessible entity.  Hemingway’s purpose for establishing the you-and-me relationship was to more effectively bring a diverse audience into the world of his prose. The Mary Poppins ad’s main purpose is to coerce a diverse audience into interest of a film. Much of this work is done in the opening crawl where not only is Walt Disney firmly established as the author of this film through the use of the pronoun “his,” but through the use of majestic sounding adjectives. The advertisement uses words like “delightful,” “magical,” and “wondrous” to describe the film being sold in order to place firmly place the audience in the role of spectator of a majestic experience in the same way that Hemingway used his word choice to place the audience in the role of “a close companion of the writer” (13).

The advertisement’s crawl goes on to directly address the audience when it states that your life will never be the same after “you’ve been touched by the magic of the great Mary Poppins.” Obviously this is a ploy to bring more people to the theatre to see the film, but I feel that it is indicative of why I believe Ong’s assertion about the necessity of fictionalizing audience holds true under contemporary scrutiny. The opening crawl of the Mary Poppins character places its audience in the role of someone who is about to see something wholly magical and fictitious. Due to the diverse and subjective nature of the “audience” as opposed to the singular reader or listener, there must be a collective understanding of what is being presented to them. This understanding is only established if the author, be it Hemmingway, Walt Disney, Stephen King, or Quinten Tarantino, cements the audiences role in the text that is about to be presented. In Mary Poppin’s case, the opening crawl and the proceeding fantastical images allow the audience to properly enjoy the spectacle due to the fact that they were fictionalized into the position of spectator. In Hemmingway’s case, his work was able to be “assimilated by relatively unskilled readers with very little fuss” due to the fact that he fictionalized his audience into the role of someone experiencing the narrative along with the writer.