Analyzing author-reader relationship through modes of discourse

In the closing of Foucault’s What is an Author? (and stated/alluded to several times in the “Introductions to Foucault”) there is an important point on the subject of author that is central to Foucault’s studies of language: “It is a matter of depriving the subject of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.” He goes on to say that in doing this we are striving not to re-identify the theme, but to “grasp the subject’s points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies”. In this situation, he is referring to taking the author out of his/her traditional role (which fuels author-function) and looking at how the author works within the text. In the introductions to Foucault, Richter and Herrick both make it explicitly clear that even outside of the literary scope Foucault isn’t focused on who is in power, but on how power has installed itself, how it produces effects, etc. In a literal example, Foucault is not worried about who is insane, but how insane people are treated. Applying this to literary works, he is not worried about who is the author, but how the author functions in the text.  In other words, what weapons does the author use within the text to accomplish what he/she has set out to accomplish.

           Linking this to Ong’s The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction, we can gain a clearer insight to the author-reader relationship by taking Foucault’s idea of looking at the author through his/her modes of discourse and viewing how the author creates a fictionalized relationship with the audience. My favorite example is Ong’s study of Hemingway. Essentially, Ong is doing exactly what Foucault recommends to do. He is looking at Hemingway’s work and showing what he does with his usage of pronouns like “this” and “that” to draw in the reader. Although the title of Ong’s essay would imply the audience is fictitious, it is really the relationship between author and reader that he is referring to. However, looking at Hemingway through Foucault’s scope, we find an imagined relationship between reader and author being established by way of the author’s deliberate phrasing of his surroundings: “across the river”, “to the mountains”, and “the summer of that year”.  Hemingway is creating a relationship of familiarity, and it goes further than simply pronouns. Hemingway’s style of keeping tight-lipped and writing only the necessary details creates an author-reader relationship of companionship, for what good would description be between two friends already familiar with the area. Here Hemingway creates an audience, the fictionalized audience that Ong speaks of. Of course the reader hasn’t really been to the hills Hemingway is describing and in many ways could use more description and background, but by refusing to break the imagined relationship Hemingway himself sets up, he keeps the reader engaged in a relationship that is completely fictional. This is the ultimate form of viewing the author within his/her mode of discourse that Foucault suggests in his own work.  

If we as readers can identify the fictionalized relationship the author is trying to create with us, we are much more able to take on the roles we are supposed to be playing, and more apt to understand the overall theme. As Ong points out, “This knowledge is one of the things that seperates the beginning graduate student from the mature scholar. It takes time to get a feel for the roles that readers can be expected to play in the modern academic world” (Ong. 19.). By remembering Foucault’s suggestion of viewing the author within the text, we can more clearly understand Ong’s work to establish and recount the history of the fictionalized relationship of author and audience. 

Joel Bergholtz