Theories about the audience’s role in the writer-audience relationship show up as pale shadows tacked on the heels of inquiries into the writer’s purpose and product.  I can’t help but wonder what that means. Is the audience’s role really fully subordinate to the role of the creative writer, or have we merely overlooked characteristics of audience that point us toward livelier models of the writer/audience relationship?  Is the Internet altering the role of audience? Does a writer even really need an audience? Well, let’s poke around a bit and see what we turn up …   

Presently, I’m teaching basic reading and composition classes at a local community college.  All of my students are Native Americans.  When I tell them to consider their audience as they compose their essays, I know I’m putting them on the spot.  Many of them function not only as ESL students but also as Western Tradition as a Second World View students; for them, identifying audience might be an especially arduous task.  Recently, I asked them, “Whom do you imagine your audience to be?”  “English teachers,” one student replied.

English teachers.  How dreary.  But while these kids might find the way toward audience an especially steep climb, the difficulty they experience tuning their words with … some reader or other in mind … isn’t specific to challenges of their youth or their culture.

Many writers have only a vague sense of audience.  Some don’t bother about audience at all when they write; others have ambivalent, even hostile, relationships with whomever they imagine their readers to be.  Some writers create their work aware that someone waits anxiously to read it, yet in order to engage in experimental language or unusual narrative styles they disengage their sense of audience and go it alone for the course of the experiment.  Two theorists, Flowers and Hayes, describe the writer as being ”hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and the language itself.”  And let us not forget the activist writer who produces out of a nearly biological imperative to persuade.  “The winds must change,” the activist cries in her passion.  “Let us change them before all is lost!”  The activist writer depends upon her audience being there.  How many other kinds of writers are there?  Legion, and that may explain why the lion’s share of literary criticism from Plato to the present focuses on writers and their product or upon theories about writers and their product.  After hundreds of years of consideration, questions about the craft and character of poetry or storytelling and of the poet/storyteller have settled enough to support stereotypes.

The craft and character of audience is not as closely studied, perhaps because identifying audience and understanding its role is rougher business.  Perhaps writers have merely hogged the spotlight while traditional physical circumstances have relegated audience members to the darkest parts of the theater or else placed them off-site behind closed doors and curtained windows.  Darkness or distance — each deepens an audience’s anonymity and may contribute to the dismayingly hazy spectrum of audience theory available.  One thing we might safely say is that thanks to the Internet, the traditional concept of audience as mere passive consumers of an author’s work appears to be on its way out.  Following hard on its heels may be the assumption some artists make that an audience is an unruly rough draft in need of revising in order to be brought in line with the artist’s own more finely constructed world view.  As a means of keeping an audience’s belief system intact and unspoiled, didacticism may be falling by the wayside as well.

First, what is an audience, and what are all its parts doing as they grind upon a writer’s words?  It seems that most audience theories fall into either of two categories: writer-focused audience theory, which investigates the role of audience by querying the writer’s nature and purpose, and social-constructionist theory, which allows the audience a more active role in the creative moments that writing can give rise to.

A brief (and admittedly shallow) survey of scholarship concerned with audience theory shows that when faced with the daunting task of defining and applying meaningful theories of audience, many scholars sidestep the task smoothly, turning their queries about audience back toward the writer’s role, thus following the traditional path of writer-focused audience theory already fraught with blank spots, circular reasoning, or contradictictions.  For instance, in his essay, “The Meanings of Audience,” written mainly for English composition teachers, Douglas Parks asserts that because developing a workable definition of audience is a sophisticated task — too sophisticated for beginning writers — questions about audience ought to focus on the writer’s problem of how to create writing that has meaning to a wide spectrum of readers.  He suggests that novice writers adhere to traditional conventions for form and, after learning those, move into more complex conventions associated with genre, and so forth.

While telling writing students to learn established conventions is good advice, the problem of producing writing that has meaning to a wide spectrum of readers re-introduces the question of audience.  If a writer has difficulty developing a workable definition of audience, how can that writer determine what will have meaning to a wide range of readers?  Conventions may provide enough structure to support some meaning and engage an audience’s interest.  But conventions exist as agreed-upon forms that prompt an audience to hold certain expectations for meaning.  A convention acts as a kind of contract between writer and audience.  Can a beginning writing student hold up her end of such a contract?  Perhaps some can, but most struggle to understand the convention’s basic contractual terms, let alone the fine print.

Other concepts that tread the beaten path of writer-focused theories of audience advocate the writer’s assuming the greater responsibility and/or dominant role in the writer-audience relationship.  Obviously, writers can and do make choices for their writing based on their perceptions of “target audiences.”  Some theorists go so far as to say that a large part of the writer’s task is maintianing control over the nature of that relationship.

One theorist — Robert Roth — takes audience control a step farther.  He suggests that creating a concept of audience may become a process of the writer’s creating “an ideal reader who is in essence one’s best self,” which leads us to one of the more famous and interesting author-focused concepts of audience.  In his essay “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong asserts that when a writer imagines an audience for her work, she constructs that audience based upon her impressions of who reads other written works.  Ong’s model figures audience members right into the writer’s process of fictionalization, casting them in supporting roles along with all the other figments of the writer’s imagination produced for a given work.  Ong holds that readers or audience members understand that they’re taking on fictitious roles and will accept their parts in the writer’s fantasy as long as the roles the writer casts them in are familiar to them.  If a role is not familiar, will the audience rebel against the writer?  If the writer fails to persuade them to accept an unfamiliar role, they most certainly will.  However, Ong believes that a writer’s goal is to evoke a desired response from her imaginary audience; thus concerns about style or voice become linked to a writer’s skills in persuasion.

Ong’s theory of the fictitious audience leads my poor English composition students right back down the alley of their dilemma to that familiar brick wall.  If I ask them who do they imagine the readers for their comparison/contrast or descriptive papers to be, their answer will be exactly the same: “English teachers.”  Suggesting that they might be fictionalizing their English teacher audience would result in a confusing and (to them) boring discussion.

But Ong’s theory does have strong merit in publishing practices.  Editors and agents frequently pose two questions or variations upon these questions when interviewing prospective writers.  The most frequent question is more or less the same question I put to my composition students: “Who is the audience for this work?”  The second question comes at concerns of audience through the theater’s front entrance: “Who do you read?” 

If a writer aspiring to publication answers the question “Who do you read” with “I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky,” editors or agents wave the answer aside.  “What contemporary authors do you read?” they’ll ask. If the writer answers with a list of contemporary mystery writers who set their work in the American Southwest, the editor takes stock of the aspiring writer from two directions: that of a member of a particular audience, or a “consumer” for a particular market, and that of a writer who may or may not have potential to produce work for that marketing niche.  Both angles of the question attempt to imagine an aspiring writer’s prospects based upon who the querying editor/agent believes audiences for other works (works similar to but other than the aspiring writer’s) to be.  In so doing, agents and editors’ strategies appear to support Ong’s theory.

A writer who answers the question “Who is the audience for this work?” with “Readers of mysteries set in the American Southwest” may actually be doing one or both of two things.  First, like the agent, the writer might be imagining an audience for her work based upon who she believes audiences of other works to be.  Secondly, a writer who answers the question by saying ”Readers of mysteries set in the American Southwest” might be offering to accept a role in the agent or editor’s fictionalization of audience, agreeing to play a part on the editor’s marketing stage.  Either way, Ong’s concept rings true and has many reverberating echoes.

Ong says his theories of audience-fictionalization apply to all writers and most if not all kind of writing, including letter-writing.  As far as writer-focused theories of audience go, Ong’s concept of the writer-audience relationship as being wholly fictitious has its compelling points.  But what happens to Ong’s theory if audience members create their own roles in response to a writer’s work?  When an audience or one or more of its members refuses a role the writer imagines for it/her/them, does it follow that the writer’s imaginative or persuasive powers have failed or that the audience has somehow failed?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Part Two will explore social constructionist theories about audience and how such theories may provide a step up from traditional author-focused concepts of audience. Also, we’ll try our hand at imagining whether or not the “audience is always a fiction” model has undetected facets useful for thinking about the role of audience in the creative writing process.  

Tweet

Categories: Authoring, Criticism, Literature, Publishing, Series | | Comments Feed: RSS 2.0 Comment | Trackback