The Audience is Always Fiction and Reader Response

In “The Audience is Always Fiction,” Walter Ong theorizes on the role of the audience in oral and written verbalization. The implication of the audience was not initially studied in rhetoric. Gradually, a distinction between speech and writing in rhetoric was made by critics of the Formalist movement. Ong believed that the writer must imagine the audience for whom his text is intended for. Some of the strategies used in fictionalizing an audience work in congruent to the philosophies of reader-response criticism.

The first dimension of an audience that Ong discusses is the one where the author projects their audience by imagining their presumptive readers. There exists a tradition in fictionalizing audience that is a component part of the literary tradition. Ong states that the tradition is “correlative to the history of literary genres and literary works, and indeed the culture itself.” (p. 12) Of course, a writer does not envision every individual for whom their text is intended for, but they do cast an “ideal reader.” In the other dimension, the audience must be willingly fictionalized in the role that the writer has cast for them. Readers must conform themselves into the writer’s projections, which seldom coincides to real life. This literary game has been learned by readers over the ages.   

For a writer to successfully fictionalize its audience, they must be able to address the immediacy of the audience. The audience for the speaker is in front of him while the writer’s audience is simply further away, in time and space. Words, as pointed out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, are “never fully determined by abstract signification but have meaning only with relation to a man’s body and its interaction with its surroundings.” (p. 10) This is a significant problem for the writer’s audience. The orator curates his performance based on audience feedback while the reader’s reaction is remote from the author himself. Ong illustrates this dilemma with the narrative voice of Hemingway.

Hemingway had a familiar structure and convention in his writing that became easily recognized by literary critics. Ong’s essay characterizes Hemingway’s style of writing as “straightforward, unadorned, terse, lacking in qualifiers, and close-lipped.” (p. 13) This characterization of Hemingway’s work is accredited to his syntax which induced a you-and-me effect on the reader. The frame which Hemingway structured his writing became synonymous to him. However, this attribution of Hemingway only came after critical analyses from readers and critics alike.

Reader-response criticism is defined in Bedford Glossary of Critical Terms as “a type of literary criticism that focuses on reading as an active process and on the diversity of readers’ responses to literary works.” (p. 425) Reader-response critics question whether our response as an audience brings new meaning to piece of work. Stanley Fish’s earlier studies are said to have marked the true beginning of contemporary reader response criticism, sometimes referred to as the “School of Fish.” Fish argued that the “informed reader” was one that “internalized the properties of literary discourses, including everything from the most local of devices (figures of speech, etc.)” (p. 427) In other words, an informed reader can decipher the unwritten aspects of writing such as code, conventions, or gaps in the text.  

The two Disney clips of Enchanted and The Princess and the Frog work perfectly to explain the concept of fictionalizing an audience in the lens of reader-response criticism. In Enchanted, the musical number, “That’s How You Know,” is a slight tweak classic on Disney tropes. While the movie is intended for children, Disney knows that adults buy movie tickets and that they must also draw them into the theatre. Enchanted features traditional animation for the kids intertwined with segments of live-action for adults. The movie also pays homage to Disney animated features such as Snow White and chooses a princess, a popular archetype in Disney movies, as the main character. The princess archetype is also employed in The Princess and the Frog expect this time a black princess is used. This was done in direct response to feedback from Disney’s African American audience who for years called for a princess of color to be created. The implementing of Tiana was Disney catering to the diversity of their audience.