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The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction Epistola ... non erubescit. 2 -Cicero Epistolae ad familiares 5.12.1. Ubi nihil erit quae scribas, id ipsum scribes. -Cicero Epistolae ad Atticum 4.8.4. I Although there is a large and growing literature on the differences between oral and written verbalization, many aspects of the differences have not been looked into at all, and many others, although well known, have not been examined in their full implications. Among these latter is the relationship of the socalled "audience" to writing as such, to the situation that inscribed communication establishes and to the roles that readers as readers are consequently called on to play. Some studies in literary history and criticism at times touch near this subject, but none, it appears, take it up in any historical detail. The standard locus in Western intellectual tradition for study of audience responses has been rhetoric. But rhetoric originally concerned oral communication, as is indicated by its name, which comes from the Greek word for public speaking. Over two millennia, rhetoric has been gradually extended to include writing more and more, until today, in highly technological cultures, this is its principal concern. But the extension has come gradually and has advanced pari passu with the slow and largely unnoticed emergence of markedly chirographic and typographic styles out of those originating in oral performance, with the result that the 54 The Sequestration of Voice differentiation between speech and writing has never become a matter of urgent concern for the rhetoric of any given age: when orality was in the ascendancy, rhetoric was oral-focused; as orality yielded to writing, the focus of rhetoric was slowly shifted, unreflectively for the most part, and without notice. Histories of the relationship between literature and culture have something to say about the status and behavior of readers, before and after reading given materials, as do mass media studies , readership surveys, liberation programs for minorities or various other classes of persons, books on reading skills, works of literary criticism, and works on linguistics, especially those addressing differences between hearing and reading. But most of these studies, except perhaps literary criticism and linguistic studies, treat only perfunctorily, if at all, the roles imposed on the reader by a written or printed text not imposed by spoken utterance. Formalist or structuralist critics, including French theorists such as Paul Ricoeur as well as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, and Tzvetan Todorov, variously advert to the immediacy of the oral as against writing and print and occasionally study differences between speech and writing, as Louis Lavelle did much earlier in La Parole et l'ecriture (1942). In treating of masks and "shadows" in his Sociologie du theatre (1965), Jean Duvignaud brilliantly discusses the projections of a kind of collective consciousness on the part of theater audiences. But none of these appear to broach directly the question of readers' roles called for by a written text, either synchronically as such roles stand at present or diachronically as they have developed through history. Linguistic theorists such as John R. Searle and John L. Austin treat "iIlocutionary acts" (denoted by "warn," "command," "state," etc.)", but these regard the speaker's or writer's need in certain instances to secure a special hold on those he addresses/ not any special role imposed by writing. 1. See, e.g., J. R. Searle, The Philosophy of Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 24-28, where Austin is cited, and Searle's bibliography, pp. 146-48. The Writer's Audience Is a Fiction 55 Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction and Walker Gibson, whom Booth quotes, come quite close to the concerns of the present study in their treatment of the "mock reader," as does Henry James, whom Booth also cites, in his discussion of the wayan author makes "his reader very much as he makes his character."2 But this hint of James is not developed-there is no reason why it should be-and neither Booth nor Gibson discusses in any detail the history of the ways in which readers have been called on to relate to texts before them. Neither do Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in their invaluable work, T he Nature of Narrative: they skirt the subject in their chapter on "The Oral Heritage of Written Narrative,"3 but remain chiefly concerned with the oral performer, the writer, and techniques, rather than with the recipient of the message. Yet a great many...

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