Orality and Literacy | Will O'Pedia

tags: Text

Notes

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature, philosophy and science, and even in oral discourse among literates, are not directly native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.

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1 THE ORALITY OF LANGUAGE

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THE LITERATE MIND AND THE ORAL PAST

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The orality centrally treated here is primary orality, that of persons totally unfamiliar with writing.

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Not only communication, but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound.

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language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages—possibly tens of thousands—spoken in the course of human history only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all.

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might be a First Mover Advantage happening: first language in a region to develop a written form gets widely adopted, (many many) other languages wither

‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in the imagination,

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Writing can never dispense with orality.

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we can style writing a ‘secondary modeling system’, dependent on a prior primary system, spoken language. Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality.

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relationship of study itself to writing.

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Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’.

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study in the strict sense of extended sequential analysis

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not common practice for any but disgracefully incompetent orators to speak from a text

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DID YOU SAY ‘ORAL LITERATURE’?

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We have the term ‘literature’, which essentially means ‘writings’ (Latin literatura, from litera, letter of the alphabet), to cover a given body of written materials—English literature, children’s literature—but no comparably satisfactory term or concept to refer to a purely oral heritage,

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When an of ten-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.

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such monstrous concepts as ‘oral literature’.

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a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people.

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Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature’ is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels.

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to dissociate words from writing is psychologically threatening, for literates’ sense of control over language is closely tied to the visual transformations of language:

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demoralizing to remind oneself that there is no dictionary in the mind,

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Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.

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Literacy, as will be seen, is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself

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hmmm

2 THE MODERN DISCOVERY OF PRIMARY ORAL CULTURES

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EARLY AWARENESS OF ORAL TRADITION

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THE HOMERIC QUESTION

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suggests that memory played a quite different role in oral culture from that which it played in literate culture.

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MILMAN PARRY’S DISCOVERY

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Plato expresses serious reservations in the Phaedrus and his Seventh Letter about writing, as a mechanical, inhuman way of processing knowledge, unresponsive to questions and destructive of memory,

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The importance of ancient Greek civilization to all the world was beginning to show in an entirely new light: it marked the point in human history when deeply interiorized alphabetic literacy first clashed head-on with orality.

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formulaic style marks not poetry alone but, more or less, all thought and expression in primary oral culture.

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Many modern cultures that have known writing for centuries but have never fully interiorized it, such as Arabic culture and certain other Mediterranean cultures (e.g. Greek—Tannen 1980a), rely heavily on formulaic thought and expression still. Kahlil Gibran has made a career of providing oral formulary products in print to literate Americans who find novel the proverb-like utterances that, according to a Lebanese friend of mine, citizens of Beirut regard as commonplace.

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Jaynes discerns a primitive stage of consciousness in which the brain was strongly ‘bicameral’, with the right hemisphere producing uncontrollable ‘voices’ attributed to the gods which the left hemisphere processed into speech.

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The effects of oral states of consciousness are bizarre to the literate mind, and they can invite elaborate explanations which may turn out to be needless. Bicamerality may mean simply orality.

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3 SOME PSYCHODYNAMICS OF ORALITY

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SOUNDED WORD AS POWER AND ACTION

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Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a primary oral culture is like, that is, a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.

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oral peoples commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency

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names do give human beings power over what they name: without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand, for example, chemistry and to practice chemical engineering.

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YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN RECALL: MNEMONICS AND FORMULAS

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intimate linkage between rhythmic oral patterns, the breathing process, gesture, and the bilateral symmetry of the human body

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The law itself in oral cultures is enshrined in formulaic sayings, proverbs, which are not mere juris-prudential decorations, but themselves constitute the law. A judge in an oral culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he can produce equitable decisions

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In an oral culture, to think through something in nonformulaic, non-patterned, non-mnemonic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness,

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FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF ORALLY BASED THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION

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(i) Additive rather than subordinative

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(ii) Aggregative rather than analytic

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Without a writing system, breaking up thought—that is, analysis—is a high-risk procedure.

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(iii) Redundant or ‘copious’

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(iv) Conservative or traditionalist

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This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation. Knowledge is hard to come by and precious, and society regards highly those wise old men and women who specialize in conserving it, who know and can tell the stories of the days of old. By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.

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by taking conservative functions on itself, the text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of its memory work, and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation

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(v) Close to the human lifeworld

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An oral culture likewise has nothing corresponding to how-to- do-it manuals for the trades (such manuals in fact are extremely rare and always crude even in chirographic cultures,

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Primary oral culture is little concerned with preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, self-subsistent corpus.

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(vi) Agonistically toned

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Standard in oral societies across the world, reciprocal name-calling has been fitted with a specific name in linguistics: flyting (or fliting).

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The agonistic dynamics of oral thought processes and expression have been central to the development of western culture, where they were institutionalized by the ‘art’ of rhetoric,

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(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced

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(viii) Homeostatic

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oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance.

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The meaning of each word is controlled by what Goody and Watt (1968, p. 29) call ‘direct semantic ratification’, that is, by the real-life situations in which the word is used here and now. The oral mind is uninterested in definitions

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Rhymes and games transmitted orally from one generation of small children to the next even in high-technology culture have similar words which have lost their original referential meanings and are in effect nonsense syllables.

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ring around the rosy

(ix) Situational rather than abstract

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They were convinced that thinking other than operational thinking, that is, categorical thinking, was not important, uninteresting, trivializing

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When the syllogism is given to him a second time, a barely literate 45-year-old chairman of a collective farm manages ‘To go by your words, they should all be white’ (1976, p. 114) . ‘To go by your words’ appears to indicate awareness of the formal intellectual structures. A little literacy goes a long way. On the other hand, the chairman’s limited literacy leaves him more comfortable in the person-to-person human lifeworld than in a world of pure abstractions: ‘To go by your words….’ It is your responsibility, not mine, if the answer comes out in such a fashion.

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‘Try to explain to me what a tree is.’ ‘Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is, they don’t need me telling them’, replied one illiterate peasant,

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There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can do is walk away from it into literacy.

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the Pulawat Islanders in the South Pacific respect their navigators, who have to be highly intelligent for their complex and demanding skill, not because they consider them ‘intelligent’ but quite simply because they are good navigators.

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A highly intelligent person from an oral or residually oral culture might be expected normally to react to Luria’s type of question, as many of his respondents clearly did, not by answering the seemingly mindless question itself but by trying to assess the total puzzling context

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Because it does not follow these patterns, literates have considered oral organization of thought naive. Oral thinking, however, can be quite sophisticated and in its own way reflective.

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perfectly aware of such things as physical inconsistencies (for example, coyotes with amber balls for eyes) and the need to interpret elements in the stories symbolically

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ORAL MEMORIZATION

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Most of these living South Slavic narrative poets—and indeed all of the better ones—are illiterate. Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are ‘the remembrance of songs sung’

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Comparison of the recorded songs, however, reveals that, though metrically regular, they were never sung the same way twice.

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An oral poet is not working with texts or in a textual framework. He needs time to let the story sink into his own store of themes and formulas, time to ‘get with’ the story. In recalling and retelling the story, he has not in any literate sense ‘memorized’ its metrical rendition from the version of the other singer—a version long gone forever when the new singer is mulling over the story for his own rendition

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treating specifically the Seneca language, suggests that ritual language as compared to colloquial language is like writing in that it ‘has a permanence which colloquial language does not.

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VERBOMOTOR LIFESTYLE

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Nature states no ‘facts’: these come only within statements devised by human beings to refer to the seamless web of actuality around them.

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In oral cultures a request for information is commonly interpreted interactively (Malinowski 1923, pp. 451, 470–81), as agonistic, and, instead of being really answered, is frequently parried.

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asked, ‘Is this the post office?’ The Corkman was not taken in. He looked at his questioner quietly and with great concern: ‘’Twouldn’t be a postage stamp you were lookin’ for, would it?’ He treated the enquiry not as a request for information but as something the enquirer was doing to him. So he did something in turn to the enquirer to see what would happen. All natives of Cork, according to the mythology, treat all questions this way.

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oral peoples commonly externalize schizoid behavior where literates interiorize it. Literates often manifest tendencies (loss of contact with environment) by psychic withdrawal into a dreamworld of their own (schizophrenic delusional systematization), oral folk commonly manifest their schizoid tendencies by extreme external confusion, leading often to violent action, including mutilation of the self and of others. This behavior is frequent enough to have given rise to special terms to designate it: the old-time Scandinavian warrior going ‘berserk’, the Southeast Asian person running ‘amok’.

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THE NOETIC ROLE OF HEROIC ‘HEAVY’ FIGURES AND OF THE BIZARRE

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With the control of information and memory brought about by writing and, more intensely, by print, you do not need a hero in the old sense to mobilize knowledge in story form. The situation has nothing to do with a putative ‘loss of ideals’.

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THE INTERIORITY OF SOUND

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unique relationship of sound to interiority when sound is compared to the rest of the senses.

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Hearing can register interiority without violating it.

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Sight isolates, sound incorporates.

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Vision dissects, as Merleau-Ponty has observed (1961). Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time: to look at a room or a landscape, I must move my eyes around from one part to another. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelopes me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence.

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By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart (Descartes’ campaigning for clarity and distinctness registered an intensification of vision in the human sensorium— Ong 1967b, pp. 63, 221). The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.

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Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world’, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be ‘explored’. The ancient oral world knew few ‘explorers’, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.

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ORALITY, COMMUNITY AND THE SACRAL

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WORDS ARE NOT SIGNS

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4 WRITING RESTRUCTURES CONSCIOUSNESS

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THE NEW WORLD OF AUTONOMOUS DISCOURSE

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Writing establishes what has been called ‘context-free’ language (Hirsch 1977, pp. 21–3, 26) or ‘autonomous’ discourse (Olson 1980a), discourse which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can be because written discourse has been detached from its author.

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There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before.

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PLATO, WRITING AND COMPUTERS

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Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers.

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print is vulnerable to these same charges.

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destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work

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others saw print as a welcome leveler: everyone becomes a wise man or woman

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Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word.

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Plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture

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intelligence is relentlessly reflexive,

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One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death.

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the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected

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WRITING IS A TECHNOLOGY

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Plato was thinking of writing as an external, alien technology, as many people today think of the computer.

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Writing is in a way the most drastic of the three technologies. It initiated what print and computers only continue,

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writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write ‘naturally’.

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Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious. The process of putting spoken language into writing is governed by consciously contrived, articulable rules:

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To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it.

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Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings.

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by using a mechanical contrivance, a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance.

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WHAT IS ‘WRITING’ OR ‘SCRIPT’?

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When does a footprint or a deposit of feces or urine (used by many species of animals for communication—Wilson 1975, pp. 228–9) become ‘writing’?

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coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text.

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Writing, in this ordinary sense, was and is the most momentous of all human technological inventions.

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MANY SCRIPTS BUT ONLY ONE ALPHABET

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using writing to produce literature in the more specific sense of this term, comes quite late in the history of script.

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Chinese character writing is still today basically made up of pictures, but pictures stylized and codified in intricate ways which make it certainly the most complex writing system the world has ever known.

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There can be no doubt that the characters will be replaced by the roman alphabet as soon as all the people in the People’s Republic of China master the same Chinese language

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no doubt at all…

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really?

Greeks did something of major psychological importance when they developed the first alphabet complete with vowels. Havelock (1976) believes that this crucial, more nearly total transformation of the word from sound to sight gave ancient Greek culture its intellectual ascendancy over other ancient cultures.

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Semitic writing was still very much immersed in the non-textual human lifeworld. The vocalic Greek alphabet was more remote from that world (as Plato’s ideas were to be).

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This Greek achievement in abstractly analyzing the elusive world of sound into visual equivalents (not perfectly, of course, but in effect fully) both presaged and implemented their further analytic exploits.

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Sound, as has earlier been explained, exists only when it is going out of existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: when I say ‘existence’, by the time I get to the ‘-tence’, the ‘exis-’ is gone.

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script represents words as in some way things,

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The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all connection with things as things.

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The phonetic alphabet invented by ancient Semites and perfected by ancient Greeks, is by far the most adaptable of all writing systems in reducing sound to visible form. It is perhaps also the least aesthetic of all major writing systems:

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The alphabet was used only for unscholarly, practical, vulgarian purposes. ‘Serious’ writers continued to use the Chinese character writing in which they had so laboriously trained themselves. Serious literature was élitist and wanted to be known as élitist. Only in the twentieth century, with the greater democratization of Korea, did the alphabet achieve its present (still less than total) ascendancy.

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THE ONSET OF LITERACY

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Writing is often regarded at first as an instrument of secret and magic power

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through one Scottish dialectical form has emerged in our present English vocabulary as ‘glamor’ (spell-casting power). ‘Glamor girls’ are really grammar girls.

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regarded writing as dangerous to the unwary reader, demanding a guru-like figure to mediate between reader and text

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At such a craft-literacy stage, there is no need for an individual to know reading and writing any more than any other trade. Only around Plato’s time in ancient Greece, more than three centuries after the introduction of the Greek alphabet, was this stage transcended when writing was finally diffused through the Greek population

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In the physical act of writing, the medieval Englishman Orderic Vitalis says, ‘the whole body labors’

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FROM MEMORY TO WRITTEN RECORDS

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A present-day literate usually assumes that written records have more force than spoken words as evidence of a long-past state of affairs, especially in court. Earlier cultures that knew literacy but had not so fully interiorized it, have often assumed quite the opposite.

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Witnesses were prima facie more credible than texts because they could be challenged

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Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort.

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‘Forgers’, Clanchy points out, were not ‘occasional deviants on the peripheries of legal practice’ but ‘experts entrenched at the centre of literary and intellectual culture in the twelfth century.’ Of the 164 now extant charters of Edward the Confessor, 44 are certainly forged, only 64 certainly authentic, and the rest uncertainly one or the other.

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matters from the past without any sort of present relevance commonly dropped into oblivion.

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in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with verifiable and disputed ‘facts’ or bits of information. It is the domain of the ancestors, a resonant source for renewing awareness of present existence, which itself is not an itemized terrain either. Orality knows no lists or charts or figures.

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poetic significance of tables and lists,

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writing was in a sense invented largely to make something like lists: by far most of the earliest writing we know, that in the cuneiform script of the Sumerians beginning around 3500 BC, is account-keeping.

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the oral drive to narrate rather than simply to juxtapose

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when anthropologists display on a written or printed surface lists of various items found in oral myths (clans, regions of the earth, kinds of winds, and so on), they actually deform the mental world in which the myths have their own existence. The satisfaction that myths provide is essentially not ‘coherent’ in a tabular way.

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Visual presentation of verbalized material in space has its own particular economy, its own laws of motion and structure.

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quite a different world of order from anything in the oral sensibility, which has no way of operating with ‘headings’

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The extensive use of lists and particularly of charts so commonplace in our high-technology cultures is a result not simply of writing, but of the deep interiorization of print

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SOME DYNAMICS OF TEXTUALITY

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written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present.

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words are alone in a text. Moreover, in composing a text, in ‘writing’ something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation.

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It is impossible to speak a word orally without any intonation.

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Extratextual context is missing not only for readers but also for the writer. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience.

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Even in writing to a close friend I have to fictionalize a mood for him, to which he is expected to conform. The reader must also fictionalize the writer.

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The ways in which readers are fictionalized is the underside of literary history,

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But who is talking to whom in Pride and Prejudice or in Le Rouge et le noir, or in Adam Bede? Nineteenth- century novelists self-consciously intone, ‘dear reader’, over and over again to remind themselves that they are not telling a story but writing one in which both author and reader are having difficulty

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Writing is indeed the seedbed of irony, and the longer the writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironic growth becomes

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cf “irony poisoning”

DISTANCE, PRECISION, GRAPHOLECTS AND MAGNAVOCABULARIES situating themselves. The psychodynamics of writing matured very slowly in narrative.

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Orally managed language and thought are not noted for analytic precision.

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one of my most fundamental disagreements here

‘backward scanning’ makes it possible in writing to eliminate inconsistencies

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There is no equivalent for this in an oral performance, no way to erase a spoken word: corrections do not remove an infelicity or an error, they merely supplement it with denial and patchwork.

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Corrections in oral performance tend to be counterproductive, to render the speaker unconvincing. So you keep them to a minimum or avoid them altogether. In writing, corrections can be tremendously productive, for how can the reader know they have even been made?

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By separating the knower from the known (Havelock 1963), writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is set.

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orality relegates meaning largely to context whereas writing concentrates meaning in language itself.

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a national written language has had to be isolated from its original dialect base, has discarded certain dialectal forms, has developed various layers of vocabulary from sources not dialectal at all, and has developed also certain syntactical peculiarities. This kind of established written language Haugen (1966, pp. 50–71) has aptly styled a ‘grapholect’.

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Where grapholects exist, ‘correct’ grammar and usage are popularly interpreted as the grammar and usage of the grapholect itself to the exclusion of the grammar and usage of other dialects. The sensory bases of the very concept of order are largely visual

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linguists today commonly make the point that all dialects are equal in the sense that none has a grammar intrinsically more ‘correct’ than that of others. But Hirsch (1977, pp. 43–50) makes the further point that in a profound sense no other dialect, for example, in English or German or Italian, has anything remotely like the resources of the grapholect.

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INTERACTIONS: RHETORIC AND THE PLACES

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‘rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors’

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study of ‘philosophy’, represented by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, for all its subsequent fecundity, was a relatively minor element in the total Greek culture, never competitive with rhetoric

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the rhetorical tradition represented the old oral world and the philosophical tradition the new chirographic structures of thought.

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the orator speaks in the face of at least implied adversaries. Oratory has deep agonistic roots

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INTERACTIONS: LEARNED LANGUAGES

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It has been suggested (Ong 1977, pp. 24–9) that Learned Latin effects even greater objectivity by establishing knowledge in a medium insulated from the emotion-charged depths of one’s mother tongue, thus reducing interference from the human lifeworld and making possible the exquisitely abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical modern science which followed on the scholastic experience. Without Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got under way with greater difficulty, if it had got under way at all.

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They were never first languages for any individual, were controlled exclusively by writing, were spoken by males only (with negligible exceptions, though perhaps with more exceptions for Classical Chinese than for the others), and were spoken only by those who could write them and who, indeed, had learned them initially by the use of writing. Such languages are no more,

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writing is losing its earlier power monopoly (though not its importance) in today’s world.

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TENACIOUSNESS OF ORALITY

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The Middle Ages used texts far more than ancient Greece and Rome, teachers lectured on texts in the universities, and yet never tested knowledge or intellectual prowess by writing, but always by oral dispute—a practice continued in diminishing ways into the nineteenth century and today still surviving vestigially in the defense of the doctoral dissertation

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In western classical antiquity, it was taken for granted that a written text of any worth was meant to be and deserved to be read aloud,

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The three Rs—reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic —representing an essentially nonrhetorical, bookish, commercial and domestic education, gradually took over from the traditional orally grounded, heroic, agonistic education that had generally prepared young men in the past for teaching and professional, ecclesiastical, or political public service. In the process, as rhetoric and Latin went out, women entered more and more into academia, which also became more and more commercially oriented

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5 PRINT, SPACE AND CLOSURE

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HEARING-DOMINANCE YIELDS TO SIGHT-DOMINANCE

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the shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space,

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letters used in writing do not exist before the text in which they occur. With alphabetic letterpress print it is otherwise. Words are made out of units (types) which pre-exist as units before the words which they will constitute. Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.

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Despite the assumptions of many semiotic structuralists, it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word, and, with it, poetic activity

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Hearing rather than sight had dominated the older poetic world in significant ways, even long after writing was deeply interiorized.

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In the West through the Renaissance, the oration was the most taught of all verbal productions and remained implicitly the basic paradigm for all discourse,

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Writing served largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world,

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even today, we speak of ‘auditing’, that is, ‘hearing’ account books,

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Auditory dominance can be seen strikingly in such things as early printed title pages, which often seem to us crazily erratic in the their inattention to visual word units.

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on the title page shown here the initial ‘THE’ is by far the most prominent word of all. The result is often aesthetically pleasing as a visual design, but it plays havoc with our pre- sent sense of textuality.

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whereas we feel reading as a visual activity cueing in sounds for us, the early age of print still felt it as primarily a listening process, simply set in motion by sight.

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Control of position is everything in print.

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This is an insistent world of cold, non-human, facts.

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greater legibility ultimately makes for rapid, silent reading. Such reading in turn makes for a different relationship between the reader and the authorial voice in the text and calls for different styles of writing.

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painstaking revisions by the author of an order of magnitude virtually unknown in a manuscript culture.

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SPACE AND MEANING

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(i) Indexes

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rarely do we hear an oral recitation of simply a string of nouns—unless they are being read off a written or printed list). In this sense, lists as such have ‘no oral equivalent’

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Indexes are a prime development here.

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Indexes seem to have been valued at times for their beauty and mystery rather than for their utility. In 1286, a Genoese compiler could marvel at the alphabetical catalogue he had devised as due not to his own prowess but ‘the grace of God working in me’

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Digital Sublime

The loci had originally been thought of as, vaguely, ‘places’ in the mind where ideas were stored. In the printed book, these vague psychic ‘places’ became quite physically and visibly localized. A new noetic world was shaping up, spatially organized.

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(referring to the Lord’s Prayer as the ‘Our Father’ is referring to it by its incipit and evinces a certain residual orality).

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instead of a title page the text proper might be introduced by an observation to the reader, just as a conversation might start with a remark of one person to another: ‘Hic habes, carissime lector, librum quem scripset quidam de….’ (Here you have, dear reader, a book which so-and-so wrote about….) The oral heritage is at work here, for, although oral cultures of course have ways of referring to stories or other traditional recitations (the stories of the Wars of Troy, the Mwindo stories, and so on), label-like titles as such are not very operational in oral cultures: Homer would hardly have begun a recitation of episodes from the Iliad by announcing ‘The Iliad’.

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(ii) Books, contents and labels

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Once print has been fairly well interiorized, a book was sensed as a kind of object which ‘contained’ information, scientific, fictional or other, rather than, as earlier, a recorded utterance

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Now, with print, two copies of a given work did not merely say the same thing, they

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(iii) Meaningful surface were duplicates of one another as objects.

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Hand-done technical drawings, as Ivins has shown (1953, pp. 14–16, 40–5) soon deteriorated in manuscripts

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Print was congenial. The verbal text was reproduced from pre-existing parts, and so could prints be. A press could print an ‘exactly repeatable visual statement’ as easily as a forme set up from type.

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One consequence of the new exactly repeatable visual statement was modern science.

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What is distinctive of modern science is the conjuncture of exact observation and exact verbalization:

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Technical prints and technical verbalization reinforced and improved each other. The resulting hypervisualized noetic world was brand new.

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how difficult it is today to imagine earlier cultures where relatively few persons had ever seen a physically accurate picture of anything.

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(iv) Typographic space

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the space itself on a printed sheet—‘white space’ as it is called—took on high significance that leads directly into the modern and post-modern world.

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Space here is the equivalent of silence.

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Mallarmé’s declared objective is to ‘avoid narrative’ and ‘space out’ the reading of the poem so that the page, with its typographic spaces, not the line, is the unit of verse.

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White space is so integral to Cummings’s poem that it is utterly impossible to read the poem aloud.

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MORE DIFFUSE EFFECTS

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Print eventually removed the ancient art of (orally based) rhetoric from the center of academic education.

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Print eventually reduced the appeal of iconography in the management of knowledge,

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Print produced exhaustive dictionaries and fostered the desire to legislate for ‘correctness’ in language.

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Print was also a major factor in the development of the sense of personal privacy that marks modern society.

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Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words.

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With writing, resentment at plagiarism begins to develop.

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Typography had made the word into a commodity. The old communal oral world had split up into privately claimed freeholdings. The drift in human consciousness toward greater individualism had been served well by print.

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print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

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PRINT AND CLOSURE: INTERTEXTUALITY

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Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.

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print is comfortable only with finality.

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By contrast, manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies) were in dialogue with the world outside their own borders.

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Print is curiously intolerant of physical incompleteness.

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Print ultimately gives rise to the modern issue of intertextuality,

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Print culture of itself has a different mindset. It tends to feel a work as ‘closed’, set off from other works, a unit in itself. Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’,

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With print came the catechism and the ‘textbook’,

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Peter Ramus (1515–72) produced the paradigms of the textbook genre: textbooks for virtually all arts subjects (dialectic or logic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, etc.) that proceeded by cold- blooded definitions and divisions leading to still further definitions and more divisions, until every last particle of the subject had been dissected and disposed of. A Ramist textbook on a given subject had no acknowledged interchange with anything outside itself. Not even any difficulties or ‘adversaries’ appeared. A curriculum subject or ‘art’, if presented properly according to Ramist method, involved no difficulties at all

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Ramism

A correlative of the sense of closure fostered by print was the fixed point of view,

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At this point, the ‘reading public’ came into existence—a sizable clientele of readers unknown personally to the author but able to deal with certain more or less established points of view.

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POST-TYPOGRAPHY: ELECTRONICS

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electronic devices are not eliminating printed books but are actually producing more of them.

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The new medium here reinforces the old, but of course transforms it because it fosters a new, self-consciously informal style, since typographic folk believe that oral exchange should normally be informal (oral folk believe it should normally be formal—Ong 1971, pp. 82–91).

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electronic technology has brought us into the age of ‘secondary orality’. This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas

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before writing, oral folk were group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself In our age of secondary orality, we are groupminded self-consciously and programmatically.

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Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism. Despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, these media are totally dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print: a show of hostility might break open the closure, the tight control. Candidates accommodate themselves to the psychology of the media. Genteel, literate domesticity is rampant.

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6 ORAL MEMORY, THE STORY LINE AND CHARACTERIZATION

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THE PRIMACY OF THE STORY LINE

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the elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it really comes into being and exists, embedded in the flow of time. Developing a story line is a way of dealing with this flow.

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NARRATIVE AND ORAL CULTURES

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In a writing or print culture, the text physically bonds whatever it contains and makes it possible to retrieve any kind of organization of thought as a whole. In primary oral cultures, where there is no text, the narrative serves to bond thought more massively and permanently than other genres.

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ORAL MEMORY AND THE STORY LINE

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Exegesis of oral epic by literates in the past has commonly seen oral epic poets as doing this same thing, imputing to them conscious deviation from an organization which was in fact unavailable without writing. Such exegesis smacks of the same chirographic bias evident in the term ‘oral literature’.

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an oral culture has no experience of a lengthy, epic-size or novel-size climactic linear plot.

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The ‘things’ that the action is supposed to start in the middle of have never, except for brief passages, been ranged in a chronological order to establish a ‘plot’. Horace’s res is a construct of literacy. You do not find climactic linear plots ready-formed in people’s lives,

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Having heard perhaps scores of singers singing hundreds of songs of variable lengths about the Trojan War, Homer had a huge repertoire of episodes to string together but, without writing, absolutely no way to organize them in strict chronological order. There was no list of the episodes nor, in the absence of writing, was there any possibility even of conceiving of such a list.

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the material in an epic is not the sort of thing that would of itself readily yield a climactic linear plot. If the episodes in the Iliad or the Odyssey are rearranged in strict chronological order, the whole has a progression, but it does not have the tight climactic structure of the typical drama. Whitman’s chart of the organization of the Iliad (1965) suggests boxes within boxes created by thematic recurrences, not Freytag’s pyramid.

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episodic structure was the only way and the totally natural way of imagining and handling lengthy narrative,

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If we take the climactic linear plot as the paradigm of plot, the epic has no plot.

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Why had no one written a tidy detective story before 1841?

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The bard is always caught in a situation not entirely under his control: these people on this occasion want him to sing

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Candi Rureke, when asked to narrate all the stories of the Nyanga hero Mwindo, was astonished

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In our typographic and electronic culture, we find ourselves today delighted by exact correspondence between the linear order of elements in discourse and the referential order, the chronological order in the world to which the discourse refers.

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CLOSURE OF PLOT: TRAVELOGUE TO DETECTIVE STORY

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CLOSURE OF PLOT: TRAVELOGUE TO DETECTIVE STORY

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episodic structure was the natural way to talk out a lengthy story line if only because the experience of real life is more like a string of episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid. Careful selectivity produces the tight pyramidal plot, and this selectivity is implemented as never before by the distance that writing establishes between expression and real life.

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In recent decades, as typographic culture has been transmuted into electronic culture, the tightly plotted story has fallen out of favor as too ‘easy’ (that is, too fully controlled by consciousness) for author and reader. Avantgarde literature is now obliged to deplot its narratives or to obscure their plots. But deplotted stories of the electronic age are not episodic narratives. They are impressionistic and imagistic variations on the plotted stories that preceded them. Narrative plot now permanently bears the mark of writing and typography. When it structures itself in memories and echoes, suggestive of early primary oral narrative with its heavy reliance on the unconscious (Peabody 1975), it does so inevitably in a self- conscious, characteristically literate way, as in Alain Robbe- Grillet’s La Jalousie or James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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THE ‘ROUND’ CHARACTER, WRITING AND PRINT

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As discourse moves from primary orality to greater and greater chirographic and typographic control, the flat, ‘heavy’ or type character yields to characters that grow more and more ‘round’,

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type characters and the complex ways they relate written fiction to oral tradition

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The present-day phenomenological sense of existence is richer in its conscious and articulate reflection than anything that preceded it. But it is salutary to recognize that this sense depends on the technologies of writing and print, deeply interiorized, made a part of our own psychic resources.

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7 SOMETHEOREMS

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LITERARY HISTORY

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Present-day deplotted narrative forms are part of the electronic age, deviously structured in abstruse codes (like computers).

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non-rhetorical styles congenial to women writers helped make the novel what it is: more like a conversation than a platform performance.

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NEW CRITICISM AND FORMALISM

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The New Critics have assimilated the verbal art work to the visual object-world of texts rather than to the oral—aural event-world. They have insisted that the poem or other literary work be regarded as an object,

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In his performance of The Mwindo Epic, Candi Rureke not only himself addresses the audience but even has the hero, Mwindo, address the scribes who are recording Rureke’s performance in writing, telling them to hurry on with their work

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The romantic quest for ‘pure poetry’, sealed off from real-life concerns, derives from the feel for autonomous utterance created by writing and, even more, the feel for closure created by print.

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STRUCTURALISM

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Structuralist analysis, which is often accused of being overly abstract and tendentious—all structures discerned turn out to be binary (we live in the age of the computer), and binarism is achieved by passing over elements, often crucial elements, that do not fit binary patterning.

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The ability to correct mistakes gracefully and make them appear as not mistakes at all is one of the things that separates the expert singers from the bunglers

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TEXTUALISTS AND DECONSTRUCTIONISTS

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Derrida insists that writing is ‘not a supplement to the spoken word’ but a quite different performance.

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as textualists see it, this bias can take this form: one assumes that there simply is a one-to-one correspondence between items in an extramental world and spoken words, and a similar one-to-one correspondence between spoken words and written words

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The end result for Derrida is that literature— and indeed language itself—is not at all ‘representational’ or ‘expressive’ of something outside itself.

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In his dialectic or logic Ramus provided a virtually unsurpassable example of logocentrism. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958b, pp. 203–4), I called it not logocentrism but ‘corpuscular epistemology’, a one-to-one gross correspondence between concept, word and referent which never really got to the spoken word at all but took the printed text, not oral utterance, as the point of departure and the model for thought.

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