Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

<toc>

Citation: Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Chapter 1: The Orality of Language

Ong discusses the distinctions between the written to the oral and reverses (deconstructs?) the common hierarchy of oral over written. As he suggests, writing will always be dependent on the voice, as reading is an imaginary form of speaking.

Ong then briefly summarizes the reason for the focus on text within the linguistics discourse by focusing on the fact that study cannot take place without text. He uses early rhetoric as an example: despite being a science of orality, the study itself was carried out on transcriptions of speeches.

Weird theme: Ong treats language as an extra-human force that has a will: it solicits and demands things.

He concludes by suggesting the deeply troubling implications of the term “oral literature” but cannot come up with a wholly satisfying replacement term that can capture the richly textured history of the oral tradition.

• (pg. 6): “The orality centrally treated here is primary orality, that of persons totally unfamiliar with writing”.
• (pg. 6): “It would seem inescapably obvious that language is an oral phenomenon.”
• (pg. 7): “We are not here concerned with so-called computer ‘languages,’ which resemble human languages (English, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Twi or Shoshone etc.) in some way but are forever totally unlike human languages in that they do not grow out of the unconscious but directly out of consciousness. Computer language rules (‘grammar’) are stated first and thereafter used. The ‘rules’ of grammar in natural human languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only with difficulty and never completely.”
• (pg. 7-8): “Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, restructures thought, and in the process converts a certain few dialects into ‘grapholects.’”
• (pg. 9): “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.’ / They learn by apprenticeship – hunting with experienced hunters, for example – by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, by assimilating other formulary materials, by participation in a kind of corporate retrospection – not by study in the strict sense.”
• (pg. 11): “It is ‘primary’ by contrast with the ‘secondary orality’ of present-day high-technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on print … Still, to varying degrees many cultures and subcultures, even in a high-technology ambiance, preserve much of the mind-set of primary orality.”
• (pg. 11): “Writing makes ‘words’ appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such inscribed ‘words’ in text and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”
• (pg. 12): Great bit about ‘wheelless automobiles’ (horses).
• (pg. 14-15): “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. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. ... We have to die to continue living.”
• (pg. 15): “Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedent s and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable.”

Chapter 2: The Modern Discovery of Primary Oral Cultures

Ong begins by detailing the various degrees of acknowledgment, on the part of historical linguists, of the oral tradition in the birth of the literary. Mostly, some were aware of the oral, but always viewed it as supplementary.

He then explores the tradition of whether Homer could write, tracing out the ways in which Homer was mostly understood in terms of literary authorship rather than an entirely different cognitive mode of oral composition.

In tracing Milman Parry’s work on Homer (which is fascinating), he shows how the oral poet stitches a tale together, drawing on a variety of epithets, in order to maintain hexameter: oral texts were not recited verbatim.

He draws from this the concept of the formula: “more or less exactly repeated set phrases or set expressions (such as proverbs) in verse or prose, which, as will be seen, do have function in oral culture more crucial and pervasive than any they may have in a writing or print or electronic culture” (26).

There is an excellent account of Mc Luhan? (and how to read him) on pg. 29. Additionally, Ong provides interesting insight into “the medium is the message” in the context of the oral / literate break.

• (pg. 21): “Milman|? Parry’s discovery might be put this way: virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition. These can be reconstructed by careful study of the verse itself, once one puts aside the assumptions about expression and thought processes ingrained in the psyche by generations of literate culture.”
• (pg. 22): “Careful study of the sort Milman Parry was doing showed that he repeated formula after formula. The meaning of the Greek term ‘rhapsodize’, rhapsoidein (flat line over o in soi), ‘to stich song together’ (rhaptein, to stich; oide, song), becomes ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker.”
• (pg. 24): “In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration.”
• (pg. 24): “The conflict orality and literacy? wracked Plato’s own unconscious. For 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, although, as we now know, the philosophical thinking Plato fought for depended entirely on writing.”
• (pg. 26): “The mind has initially no properly chirographic resources. You scratch out on a surface words you imagine yourself saying aloud in some realizable oral setting. Only very gradually does writing become composition in writing, a kind of discourse – poetic or otherwise – that is put together without a feeling that the one writing is actually speaking aloud (as early writers may well have done in composition).”

Chapter 3: Some Psychodynamics of Orality

Ong opens this chapter by exploring what words meant to primary oral cultures. He suggests that words referred to events and not to objects, as there was no textual understand of words as labels. He discusses the idea that names had power over things because of the violence and struggle associated with the everyday life to which words directly referred.

He then discusses the need for knowledge to be highly formulaic and mnemonic, which suggests some of the unusual character of the records we possess of primary oral cultures. From this, he elucidates the several characteristics he sees as important to understanding thought in the oral age:

Oral Thought is:

1. Additive Rather Than Subordinative – use of lots of “ands”
2. Aggregative Rather Than Analytic – ideas come in easily remembered clusters
3. Redundant or ‘copious’ – Repeats information to make it sink in
4. Conservative or traditionalist
5. Close to the Human Life World
6. Agonistically toned – because life is struggle, language should represent struggle
7. Empathic and Participatory rather than Objectively Distanced
8. Homeostatic
9. Situational Rather Than Abstract – knowledge that is no longer useful is forgotten and vanishes

These points are then supported by a lengthy summarization of A.R. Luria amongst Uzbek and Kirghiz peasants.

He then launches into a discussion of verbatim memorization in light of the above elements of oral thought. He shows that, in some cases, the precise character of a oral form (Somali epic poetry, for instance) dictated more or less verbatim memorization whereas Greek epic allowed for a more patchwork approach to performance.

Ong next discusses “verbometer” cultures that are aware of text and produce text but are ultimately focused around the oral and not the object in everyday life. Arab, Hebrew, and County Cork are discussed as three distinct cultures that are contemporary examples.

Ong than launches into an exploration of sight versus sound focused through the oral / literary split. For Ong, sound is the sense we use to determine depth, whereas vision is consistently the realm of surfaces. For him, this is an important moment that explains much of the character of the two distinct cultures: oral cultures view themselves at the center of the cosmos whereas vision and its mapping habits allow us to experience life “before our eyes”.

The chapter concludes by discussing Derrida. For Ong, the idea that the word is not a sign is paramount and proven by his own work. Words are sound events (despite what our text-mediated consciousnesses may think) and never, directly, refer to things: they are not signs.

• (pg. 32): “For anyone who has a sense of what words are in primary oral cultures, or a culture not far removed from primary orality, it is not surprising that the Hebrew word dabar means ‘word’ and ‘event.’”
• (pg. 33): “Written or printed representations of words can be labels: real, spoken words cannot be.”
• (pg. 39): “Thought requires some sort of continuity. Writing establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity outside the mind.”
• (pg. 41): “By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing, and, even more, print downgrades the figure of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past, in favor of younger discoverers of something new.”
• (pg. 44): “As literary narrative moves toward the serious novel, it eventually pulls the focus of action more and more to interior crises and away from purely exterior crises.”
• (pg. 56): “Writing has to be personally interiorized to affect thinking processes.”
• (pg. 56): “Persons who have internalized writing not only write but also speak literately, which is to say that they organize, to varying degrees, even their oral expressions in thought patterns and verbal patterns that they would not know of unless they could write.”
• (pg. 59): “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”
• (pg. 60): “The fixed materials in the bard’s memory are a float of themes and formulas out of which all stories are variously built.”
• (pg. 61): “The sense of individual words as significantly discrete items is fostered by writing, which, here as elsewhere, is diaeretic, separative. (Early manuscripts tend not to separate words clearly from each other, but to run them together).”
• (pg. 67): “The oral word, as we have noted, never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always engages the body.”
• (pg. 69): “Oral communication unites people in groups.”
• (pg. 71): “IN treating the psychodynamics of orality, we have thus far attended chiefly to one characteristic of sound itself, its evanescence, its relationship to time. Sound exists only when it is going out of existence.”
• (pg. 72): “Sigith maps ht isolate, sound incorporates”
• (pg. 73): “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 world knew few ‘explorers’, though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.”
• (pg. 77): “Our complacency in thinking of words as signs is due to the tendency, perhaps incipient in oral cultures but clearly marked in chirographic cultures and far more marked in typographic and electronic cultures, to reduce all sensation and indeed all human experience to visual analogues. Sound is an event in time, and ‘time marches on,’ relentlessly, with no stop or division. Time is seemingly tamed if we treat it spatially on a calendar or the face of a clock, where we can make it appear as divided into separate units next to each other. But this also falsifies time. Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented on a calendar. Reduced to space, time seems more under control – but only seems to be, for real, indivisible time carries us to death. ( This is not to deny that spatial reductionism is immeasurably useful and technologically necessary, but only to say that its accomplishments are intellectually limited, and can be deceiving.)”

Chapter 4: Writing Restructures Consciousness