Ong: The Audience is a Fiction or is it the Author's Voice?

In Walter Ong's “The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction”, Ong discusses the roles readers are given by the author and states that, “if the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know” (Ong, 11), meaning that the audience for a writer is always the same because the author cannot write for an individual audience because he/she does not know who they are writing for; thus the author may copy the classics such as Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or Chaucer and write for the imagined audience these individuals wrote for. This is a key statement for Ong in his theory, but I however, find loopholes in the theory; which is: what if the author writes for an individual person, let’s say his son? Would that still cause the author to imagine an audience that is not particularly known to him? And then if so, is his son fictionalized as he writes?  

There are probably many authors who wrote narratives solely for their son or daughter’s enjoyment, but let us focus on the children’s poems of A.A. Milne, which has touched the hearts of many children all around the world for his famous characters Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh. When we here the name Winnie-the-Pooh, we think of (or at least my generation two decades past think of) the Disney classic film Winnie-the-Pooh. However, what is unknown about Winnie-the-Pooh is that this character originally comes from the poetry of A.A. Milne, who was a writer for Punch (an “English illustrated periodical… famous for its satiric humour and caricatures and cartoons” (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Punch [British periodical]) and a playwright, where he achieved considerable success ((Encyclopedia Britannica Online, A.A. Milne [British author]), but what he is mostly remembered for is the poetry he wrote for his son Christopher Robin Milne.

We can assume that A.A. Milne was a loving father who spent a lot of quality time with his son Christopher Robin Milne to write poetry for him. It also can be assumed that Milne would know what his son would like, because he would have spent time with him. Thus Milne would have known the individual he is writing for, his son. Let us look back at Ong and more specifically his example of the student writing a paper about,  “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”, Ong’s main argument for this is a simple question, “who wants to know [how I spent my summer vacation]? (Ong, 11), this maybe a problem a student faces while writing this kind of essay: To whom am I writing for? However, it can be established that A.A. Milne knew to whom he was writing for, his son, whom we can assume he knew well enough to know what he would have found enjoyable; and Milne wrote his poetry according to this particular knowledge. To paraphrase Ong, he says that: the subject matter is supposed to solve the problem of invention (at least to the teacher assigning their students with this “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay), but the actual problem is not what to say, but to whom to say it to (Ong, 11), this may somewhat repeat the argument provided already by Ong on this blog, but it is needed to be reviewed that Milne knew his audience member, his reader, his own son (this is assumed) and he did not need to come up with any particular fictionalized audience to appease his son because he already knew the reader, his son and what his son may have been accustomed to read (that is, if his son could read when Milne was writing the poetry).

Now another question has arisen, which can easily show that Ong’s argument/theory is superior to mine. However, this question excludes the problem the author has with his audience because it is possible for the writer to know his audience, but the question is: Even though Milne knew his son, his audience, where did Milne get the voice to write his poetry? Meaning, in what style did Milne write is poetry? Was it an original style? Or would Milne use the style that he wrote for Punch, the periodical or did he use the Milne who wrote plays? Did he have his own voice for poetry? And did he adapt his poetic voice from authors such as Frost, Tyson, or Wordsworth?

Voice now is what we are concerned with, not the audience. Meaning, does the author use their own speaking voice to write, that is the voice they use when they speak, and write by putting their voice into textual symbols (including or excluding their usage of slang), or does the author copy a well known voice stylized for this certain text from the past?

Now to these questions I do not have an answer for, but only to repeat Ong’s key statement in his theory, “if the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the dawn of written narrative” (Ong, 11). It is however, not the audience the authors needs to fictionalize, at least not in the case of Milne, but their own voice and style of narrative (poetry, prose, etc.), does the author want to create a narrative sounding like an epic like that of Homer’s Iliad or does the author want to write short, but complex sonnets like William Shakespeare’s poetry? These subjects maybe the key items that an author may struggle with, because it is not the audience the author has trouble dealing with or conceptualizing, because it could be the case that the audience may in fact be the author themselves or their own children, whom they know well (again this is assumed), but it is in how they present their material to capture these audience members that is the main challenge for a writer.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction.”          PMLA90 (1975): 9-21. JSTOR.          http://jstor.org/stable/461344.    

Encyclopedia Britannica 2013 Online, A.A. Milne (British Author) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/383024/AA-Milne

Encyclopedia Britannica 2013 Online, Punch (British Periodical)

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/483431/Punch