So long as verbal communication is reduced to a simplistic mechanistic model which supposedly moves corpuscular units of something labeled “information” back and forth along tracks between two termini, there is of course no special problem with those who assimilate the written or printed word. For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both. A surface inscribed with information can neutralize time by preserving the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse. If, however, we put aside this alluring but deceptively neat and mechanistic mock-up and look at verbal communication in its human actuality, noting that words consist not of corpuscular units but of evanescent sound and that, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has pointed out, words are never fully determined in their abstract signification but have meaning only with relation to man’s body and to its interaction with its surroundings, problems with the writer’s audience begin to show themselves. Writing calls for difficult, and often quite mysterious, skills. Except for a small corps of highly trained writers, most persons could get into written form few if any of the complicated and nuanced meanings they regularly convey orally. One reason is evident: the spoken word is part of present actuality and has its meaning established by the total situation in which it comes into being. Context for the spoken word is simply present, centered in the person speaking and the one or ones to whom he addresses himself and to whom he is related existentially in terms of the circumambient actuality. 

I am writing a book which will be read by thousands, or, I modestly hope, by tens of thousands. So, please, get out of the room. I want to be alone. 

How does the writer give body to the audience for whom he writes? It would be fatuous to think that the writer addressing a so-called general audience tries to imagine his reader individually. 

“Audience” is a collective noun. There is no such collective noun for readers, nor, so far as I am able to puzzle out, can there be. “Readers” is a plural. Reader do not form a collectivity, acting here and now on one another and on the speaker as members of an audience do. We can devise a singularized concept for them, it is true, such as “readership.” We can say that the Reader’s Digest has a readership of I don’t know how many millions—more than it is comfortable to think about, at any rate. But “readership” is not a collective noun. It is an abstraction in a way that “audience” is not.

The contrast between hearing and reading (running the eye over signals that encode sound) can be caught if we imagine a speaker addressing au audience equipped with texts. At one point, the speaker asks the members of the audience all to read silently a paragraph out of the tex.t The audience immediately fragments. It is no longer a unit. Each individual retires into his own microcosm. When the readers look up again, the speaker has to gather them into a collectivity once more. This is true even if he is the author of the text they are reading. 

To sense more fully the writer’s problem with his so-called audience let us envision a class of students asked to write on the subject to which schoolteachers, jaded by summer, return compulsively every autumn: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” The teacher makes the easy assumption, inviting and plausible but false, that the chief problem of a boy and a girl in writing is finding a subject actually part of his or her real life. In-close subject matter is supposed to solve the problem of invention. Of course it does not. The problem is not simply what to say but also whom to say it so. Say? The student is not talking. He is writing. No one is listening. There is no feedback. Where does he find his “audience”? He has to make his readers up, fictionalize them.

If the student knew what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, “Who wants to know” The answer is not easy. Grandmother? He never tells grandmother. His father or mother? There’s a lot he would not want to tell them, that’s sure. His classmates? Imagine the reception if he suggested they sit down and listen quietly while he told them how he spent his summer vacation. The teacher? There is no conceivable setting in which he could imagine telling his teacher how he spent his summer vacation other than in writing this paper, so that writing for the teacher does not solve his problems but only restates them. In fact, most young people do not tell anybody how they spent their summer vacation, much less write down how they spent it. 

A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life. An office worker on a bus reading a novel of Thomas Hardy is listening to a voice which is not that of any real person in the real setting around him. He is playing the role demanded of him by this person speaking in a quite special way from the book, which is not the subway and is not quite “Wessex” either, though it speaks of Wessex. Readers over the ages have had to learn this game of literacy, how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read, or at least how to operate in terms of these projections. They have to know how to play the game of being a member of an audience that “really” does not exist. And they have to adjust when the rules change, even though no rules thus far have ever been published and even though the changes in the unpublished rules are themselves for the most part only implied. 

Written narrative at first was merely a transcription of oral narrative, or what was imagined as oral narrative, and it assumed some kind of oral singer’s audience, even when being read. The transcribers of the Illiad and the Odyssey presumably imagined an audience of real listeners in attendance on an oral singer, and readers of those works to this day do well if they can imagine themselves hearing a singer of tales. How these texts and other oral performances were in fact originally set down in writing remains puzzling, but the transcribers certainly were not composing in writing, but rather recording with minimal alteration what a singer was singing or was imagined to be singing. 

The invocation to the Muse is a signal to the audience to put on the epic-listener’s cap. No Greek, after all, ever talked the kind of language that Homer sang, although Homer’s contemporaries could understand it well enough. Even today we do not talk in other contexts quite the kind of language in which we tell fairy stories to children. “Once upon a time,” we begin. The phrase lifts you out of the real world. Homer’s language is “once upon a time” language. It establishes a fictional world. But the fictionalizing in oral epic is directly limited by live interaction, as real conversation is. A real audience controls the narrator’s behavior immediately. Students of mine from Ghana and from western Ireland have reported to me what I have read and heard from many other sources: a given story may take a skilled or “professional” storyteller anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how he finds the audience relates to him on a given occasion. “You always knew ahead of time what he was going to say, but you never knew how long it would take him to say it,” my Irish informant reported. The teller reacts directly to audience response. Oral storytelling is a two-way street.

(the drama is the first genre controlled by writing, and by the same token, paradoxically, the first to make deliberate use of colloquial speech)

Because history is always a selection and interpretation of those incidents the individual historian believes will account better than other incidents for some explanation of a totality, history partakes quite evidently of the nature of poetry. It is a making. The historian does not make the elements out of which he constructs history, in the sense that he must build with events that have come about independently of him, but his selection of events and his way of verbalizing them so that they can be dealt with as “facts,” and consequently the overall pattern he reports, are all his own creation, a making. No two historians say exactly the same thing about the same given events, even though they are both telling the truth. There is no one  thing to say about anything; there are many things that can be said.

Without themes, there would be no way to deal with events. It is impossible to tell everything that went on in the Pentagon even in one day: how many stenographers dropped how many sheets of paper into how many wastebaskets when and where, what they all said to each other, and so on ad infinitum. These are not the themes historians normally use to write what really “happened.” They write about material by exploiting it in terms of themes that are “significant” or “interesting.” But what is “significant” depends on what kind of history you are writing—national political history, military history, social history, economic history, personal biography, global history. What is significant and, perhaps even more, what is “interesting” also depends on the readers and their interaction with the historian. This interaction in turn depends on the role in which the historian casts his readers. Although so far as I know we have no history of readers of history, we do know enough about historiography to be aware that one could well be worked out. 

The academic world today preserves much of the nomenclature, such as “thesis” and “defense” of theses, but less of the programed fighting spirit, which its members let loose on the social order more than on their subject matter or colleagues.) From Augustine through St. Thomas Aquinas and Christian Wolff, writers of treatises generally proceeded in adversary fashion, their readers being cast as participants in rhetorical contests or in dialectical scholastic disputations.

Today the academic reader’s role is harder to describe. Some of its complexities can be hinted at by attending to certain fictions which writers of learned articles and books generally observe and which have to do with reader status. There are something things the writer must assume that every reader knows because virtually every reader does. It would be intolerable to write, “Shakespeare, a well-known Elizabethan playwright,” not only in a study on Renaissance drama but even in one on marine ecology. Otherwise the reader’s role would be confused. There are other things that established fiction holds all readers must know, even though everyone is sure all readers to not know them: these are handled by writing, “as everyone knows,” and then inserting what it is that not quite everyone really knows. Other things the reader can safely be assumed not to know without threatening the role he is playing. These gradations of admissible ignorance vary from one level of scholarly writing to another, and since individual readers vary in knowledge and competence, the degree to which they must fictionalize themselves to match the level of this or that reading will vary. 

The dimensions of fiction in a letter are many. First, you have no way of adjusting to the friend’s real mood as you would be able to adjust in oral conversation. You have to conjecture or confect a mood that he is likely to be in or can assume when the letter comes. And, when it does come, he has to put on the mood that you have fictionalized for him. Sone of this sort of adjustment goes on in oral communication, too, but it develops in a series of exchanges: a tentative guess at another’s mood, a reaction from him, another from yourself, another from him, and you know about where you are. Letters do not have this normal give-and-take: they are one-way movements. 

The audience of the diarist is even more encased in fictions. What is easier, one might argue, than addressing oneself? As those who first begin a diary often find out, a great many things are easier. The reasons why are not hard to unearth. First of all, we do not normally talk to ourselves—certainly not in long, involved sentences and paragraphs. Second, the diarist pretending to be talking to himself has also, since he is writing, to pretend he is somehow not there. And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines he is? Or would like to be? Or really things he is? Or thinks other people think he is? TO himself as he is now? Or as he will probably or ideally be twenty years hence? If he addresses not himself but “Dear Diary,” who in the world is “Dear Diary”? What roles does this imply? And why do more women than men keep diaries? Or if they don’t (they really do—or did), why do people think they do? When did the diary start? The history of diaries, I believe, has yet to be written. Possibly more than the history of any other genre, it will have to be a history of the fictionalizing of readers.

The case of the diary, which at first blush would seem to fictionalize the reader least but in many ways probably fictionalizes him or her most, brings into full view the fundamental deep paradox of the activity we call writing, at least when writing moves from its initial account-keeping purposes to other more elaborate concerns more directly and complexly involving human persons in their manifold dealings with one another. 

No matter what pitch of frankness, directness, or authenticity he may strive for, the writer’s mask and the reader’s are less removable than those of the oral communicator and his hearer. For writing is itself an indirection. Direct communication by script is impossible. This makes writing not less but more interesting, although perhaps less noble than speech. For man lives largely by indirection, and only beneath the indirections that sustain him is his true nature to be found. Writing, alone, however, will never bring us truly beneath to the actuality. Present-day confessional writing—and it is characteristic of our present age that virtually all serious writing tends to be confessional, even drama—likes to make an issue of stripping off all masks. Observant literary critics and psychiatrists, however, do not need to be told that confessional literature is likely to wear the most masks of all. It is hard to bare your soul in any literary genre. And it is hard to write outside a genre. T. S. Eliot has made the point that so far as he knows, great love poetry is never written solely for the ear of the beloved (p. 97), although what a lover speaks with his lips is often indeed for the ear of the beloved and of no other. The point is well made, even though it was made in writing.

Impossible to get Mius to admit that, in order to assure selection, it is not enough to prefer the delicate and rare variety, that its difficult victory over the commoner varieties must be assured by suppressing the latter in its vicinity.

To avoid argument, he pretends to clear my garden of them; but I find them a little later, transplanted in some corner, just as rugged as the rare variety is fragile, and infinitely prolific. In less than two years they have won back their place; the exquisite has disappeared, stifled by the commonplace. Because, for flowers too, “the exquisite is as difficult as it is rare”; and however beautiful the most modest flower of the fields may be, one’s heart weeps to think of the most beautiful always has the least change of survival. It is at one and the same time the least gifted for the struggle and the one that most arouses appetites and jealousies. Oh, if only man, instead of so often contributing to the spreading of the vulgar, instead of systematically pursuing with his hared or his cupidity the natural ornament of the earth, the most colorful butterfly, the most charming bird, the largest flower; if he brought his ingenuity to bear on protecting, not on destroying but on favoring—as I like to think that people do in Japan, for instance, because it is so very far from France! . . .

Were a miracle to produce in our woods some astounding orchid, a thousand hands would stretch out to tear it up, to destroy it. If the bluebird happens to fly past, every gun is sighted; and then people are amazed that it is rare!

The young men I have known who were most crazy about automobile-driving were, to begin with, the least interested in traveling. The pleasure is no longer that of seeing the country or even of quickly reaching a certain place, where nothing really attracts them; but simple that of going fast. And though one enjoys thereby sensations just as deeply inartistic or anti-artistic as those of mountain-climbing, it must be admitted that they are intense and indomitable. The period that has known them will not escape the consequences; it is the period of impressionism, of the rapid and superficial vision; one can guess what gods and altars it will choose; through lack of respect, consideration, and consistency, it will sacrifice even more on those altars, but in an unconscious or unavowed manner.