I decided for this blog I would try out Peter Elbow's "invisible writing" technique, described on page 64, meaning the rest of my writing will be invisible to me in an attempt to remove my self from my expected audience. Once I have written it, I'll of course revise it, rather than edit as I go, and reflect on the experiment. So, onward.
Ong: I was very skeptical at first of Walter Ong's idea that audiences are always fictionalized. I often feel that I am myself reading a book, note, article, essay, etc. and hardly have to make myself into a fictionalized version of myself in order to understand what the writer is saying. But I have to say, Ong did turn me to his side by the end of his argument; and I have to wonder if this has anything to do with his article itself, if I fictionalized myself to make sense of his work. I think this can be true in creative fiction that presents a world from a a character's perspective we aren't familiar with and don't need necessarily to connect to as ourselves. And I think sometimes this can help us to "play the game" Ong suggests all of literacy is in written form.
I thought his comparison of oral and written narrative was compelling in that oral storytellers do in fact have a greater power over their performances as they can directly respond to their "readers," whereas written works rest as they are. (Two-way vs. one-way in Ong's terms.) I liked that Ong even exposed historical writing as being "a selection and interpretation of those incidents the individual historian believes will account better than other incidents for some explanation of" historical events (17). Thus the historian only selects and interprets those events that seem "interesting" or "significant" based on his taste, and the reader has a role forced upon him based on this. I also liked his idea that even letter and diary writing fictionialize their audiences, even though they seem to be easy to write genuinely, being on a personal level. For a letter, one must assume a mood for the reader and structure the letter accordingly, and the reader, he argues, will take on that mood in order to follow it, even if he is not particulary in that mood. As for diaries, the "self" one addresses, he says, is questionable since one can be writing to one of many identities, to an imagined self, an idealized self, a false self, one he was, one he will be, or one others believe him to be... Anyhow, I enjoyed his likening of a reader to an actor in which the 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" (12).
Elbow: I hadn't realized the idea of an audience was so complicated before reading Peter Elbow's essay. Like he mentions, I was taught like most students that the audience has to always be kept in mind in order to write something worthwhile, and even though pre-writing was taught, it was not encouraged because the audience was not usually of concern at that stage. Not in a long time have I considered simply ignoring my audience, not since the days of innocently writing mermaid stories I knew were only for my eyes. It was a time when I could sit on my carpet for hours, pencil in hand, swaying my body around like Kiara swimming through the ocean. I could feel the stories in me and when I read them once over I think I did so only to know how to continue the journeys. Anyhow I liked Elbow's discussion of the necessity for both more thought about readers at more self explorative writing. I think it was important to assert that writing can be incredibly public and helps develop our social skills, but at the same time helps us develop our reflective and interpretive understanding in our inner worlds. Elbow too signifies that "the self is multiple, not single and discourse to self is communication from one entity to another" (61). So even the "self" has its social and private dimensions. Although Ong was more focused on proving that the multiple selves are fictionalized, Elbow uses this fact to show that these selves are not always as private as they seem. It seems that engaging students in both social and private writing helps one develop in both areas, but both need to be rigorous and full of trusting audiences. And we must also learn to listen our selves with more trust and more awareness of their complex multiplicity.
Brief reflection: WHEW. It was terribly hard to not be able to see what I was writing, but it felt more in my head that way. I felt I owned my thoughts better than normal, switching my gaze from packet to keys, rather than packet to screen, email to paragraph one to that word I misspelled to packet to screen, and so on. Although I made some aggravating and strange mistakes, I remembered my train of thought quite clearly and was able to correct them quite easily. I felt more than normal as though I was writing for the sake of it, and the idea of audience didn't cross my mind very much until I revised. My writing focus was totally on the reflection I was responding with. I think I would do this again.
No comments:
Post a Comment