The premise of Walter Ong’s article, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” is twofold: first, writers fictionalize their audience, which is plural and imagined, and second, the reader must, in reading, accede to their assigned role. In other words, we are the playthings of the author’s imagination when we read. To make his point, Ong looks at the very first paragraph of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The narrator begins that novel by describing a scene in nature, and a time in the past:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.” (my italics to add emphasis)

Ong does not ask about the plural use of we in the opening paragraph of Hemingway’s novel, he points to the function of the word that. The question is not about the “we” of the first paragraph, but how the reader could possibly know what “that” year was…. 

This is the trick Hemingway plays: the reader is forced to go along with the conceit that he, or she, remembers that year, that river, that mountain, and so on. Hemingway wraps his arm around his reader’s shoulder and reminds him, or her, of the experience the two had together back then, in that year, in that river valley. Don’t you remember? he asks, casting his reader, in Ong’s words, “as a boon companion.” It is from this vantage point that the reader will comprehend the story because, as Ong states, “the reader must play the roll the writer has cast for him.” This is the world “as recall, not representation.” (Ong) The story has already happened. 

Think of the way the reader’s role has changed since 1929: on Facebook, on Twitter, in blogs. I don’t know about you, but the current permitted roles in the United States seem to be “walking vector of disease,” “social justice advocate,” “guilty liberal” or, if one refuses to wear a mask and comply with the dictates of social distance, or the political Left, “insurrectionist,” “sexist & racist,” “grandma killer.” I do not like this kind of pressure. I like my space. And it is not that I don't identify as any of the previous categories, at one time or another, it is that the information overload creates in a person a kind of schizophrenia. Thus, it is that I have decided to begin to cancel myself. This is the reason I happen to be traveling south to a foreign land, which I am returning to, reading a book, the forward written by Ernest Hemingway, about a man traveling south in an attempt to recall a previous role in his life, as to set himself free of the “abstract furies” that haunt him.

That book is Conversations in Sicily, written in 1939, and it begins with this sentence: “That winter I was haunted by abstract furies” (my italics). Which winter? That winter. Ah, yes, now I remember. At the outset of the tale, the narrator shares a letter from his father which tells of his father’s decision to leave his home in Sicily with another woman and move to Venice. Next, the narrator, coincidentally, sees an advertisement in the train terminal on his way home from work to his wife and kids (he lives, I take it, in Milano, a northern Italian city) which offers a trip to Sicily at a 50% discount. He has already told us that it is his mother’s birthday in a few days and that he has not seen her in fifteen years and that she lives in Sicily. He takes the trip on a whim, and sends a telegram, on the fly, to his wife telling her he will be gone a week. 

Upon arriving in Syracuse, after several encounters with a variety of characters during his train trip, the narrator cannot at all remember the reason he came to Sicily. This is odd, but the book is a story about an awakening, or a remembering; it tells of a relationship between mother and son. The book includes snapshots on the train, of the characters the narrator meets, and then the narrator's three-day encounter with his mother at her house, and these are memories, and they arrive at a point in time in which the narrator does possess the ability to remember. In the present, telling the story, he has found some sort of closure. He has completed a task or journey and he is explaining the ways that that happened. The reader’s role is to recall with the narrator how that happened because the narrator’s story is Universal. 

Elio Vittorini, like the other important writers of his age, concerned himself with consciousness and time. A plangent but inchoate philosophy undergirds this little book. Freud worms his way in and around the story. A fine example is the way the narrator’s mother exists in two spaces: past and present. She kindles the narrator's memory of his childhood (he pictures her as a young woman), and now, the same woman abandoned and solitary, the woman to whom the narrator has run from his life, appears "a ghost, herself and the memory of her."(55) 

For three days the narrator lives with his mother again. From on vantage point, he replaces his father in her life. This is Oedipal and thus exists in the realm of tragedy (Oedipus must leave Thebes after it is revealed he has married and fathered children with his mother). The story takes place during the time of fascism, which coincided with massive technological changes, the streamlining and mechanization of society. Perhaps Vittorini plays with the idea that the narrator suffers from a disconnect from Mother Nature. 

If Vittorini focuses on dislocation, he also focuses on the way that chronological time oppresses and alienates. One wonders how intentionally he does this. After all, the narrator works as a foil, a double, for the writer. If the narrator cannot explain his actions, the writer creates for himself plausible deniability. There is no reason to be perfect, to have a philosophy figured out. Because Vittorini creates in his reader a sympathetic ear, someone willing to overlook the story’s inconstancies in the name of discovering how it is the narrator has overcome whatever it is that obstructed him ("abstract furies") to arrive at the point in which he tells his story, he gets away with what I consider a bit of sloppiness.

I have not yet reached the midpoint of Vittorini’s novel. As I said, the story centers around a trip home to Sicily, in which the narrator meets his mother after fifteen years. There, she brings up things from of his adolescence he has no memory of: his favorite foods, the times she beat him as a boy, the times his father beat her. I cannot imagine anyone incapable of remembering such formative aspects of adolescence. 

According to fashionable academics, Vittorini’s narrator has lost his memory because of fascism. This says almost everything one needs to know about what Theory can do. If Vittorini wrote with this in mind, it exposes the foundations of the way literature has been taught in 20th century Humanities. It would be an understandable tactic--attempting to reshape reality in reaction to fascism--but it kills one falsehood and replaces it with another. This kind of thought can only happen when politics binds one. I have to stop to ask myself: are the children who have lived through this last year going to remember any of it? (Of course they will).

Perhaps we should blame Hemingway. People in power get there because of damaged egos. Sure, Vittorini does not have much social sway, and most academics speak only to other academics. But isn’t it about time we stop giving people with agendas our power when their agendas do not align with truth? I do not want to accede to my assigned role in society as it stands (I might become schizophrenic!). The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I would have to finish Conversations in Sicily, to give it a fair shake and that, perhaps, is the truth (I leave it to you, if so willing, to draw your own conclusion).