by P.D. Brown

This article was originally published in Rûna Magazine

“Orality and Literacy — The Technologizing of the Word” by Walter J. Ong. Routledge. London & New York 1993. ISBN 0-415-02796-9.

This book will be of interest to readers of this magazine as it looks at the changes in ways of thinking, in social structures and in the management of knowledge caused by the invention of writing and then the further changes caused by the invention of printing.  In order to do this, an examination of the ways of thought in purely oral cultures is made.

It early makes the point that the thought and expression of literature, philosophy, science and even oral discussion amongst literate people are not directly native to human existence; that of mankind’s posited 50,000 years’ existence, scripts have only been in existence for the last 6,000 years.  Writing made available resources of consciousness previously unknown.  For example abstract, sequential, classificatory and explanatory thought and even the nature of study itself, have all come about as a result of the development of writing.

As literate people, it is fascinating to have this book show you the literate bias of our modern world view, which sees orality as only an inferior variant of literacy, resulting in the contradiction in terms of phrases such as “Oral Literature,” used by academics to describe the creations of purely oral poets and storytellers.  Indeed, such is the extent of this bias that we tend to conceptualise and see words as print rather than as sounds.  Yet articulated sound is still paramount.  Gesture, sign language and writing, however rich, are dependent upon, and substitutes for, speech.  Written texts still have to be related to sound, either in the mind or out loud.  Though orality can exist without literacy, literacy cannot exist without orality.  Yet words used to describe orality, such as “preliterate” are perjorative and define orality only in terms of what followed it.

In chapter 2, an attempt is made to reconstruct preliterate consciousness, partly through a review of the scholarly awakening to the orality of speech, discussing in particular “The Homeric Question”:  Apparently, even the classical Greeks saw the Iliad and the Odyssey as different from other Greek poetry.  The Roman orator Cicero (106 – 43 BCE) saw the poems as a revision by the Athenian Pisistratus (600 – 527 BCE?) of Homer’s original works, which however, he still saw as written works.  Such preconceptions continued, though as early as the C18th Robert Wood, an English diplomat and antiquarian posited that Homer was not literate and that his poems were popular, not learned.

Then came the seminal work of the American scholar Milman Parry (1902 – ’35), the fundamental axiom of which was that virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry was the result of the prosodic constraints of composition in the oral hexameter line.  These constraints tended to cause the use of particular words, word-forms and word groups to express certain ideas or themes over and over again.  Parry showed that Homer used formula after formula, that he had a kind of phrase book in his memory upon which he repeatedly drew.

This runs contrary to the modern notion of what a poet should be.  Since the early C18th poetry had to be original.  The Romantics of the late C18th, with their emphasis on, amongst other things, individuality, demanded that the better a poet the less predictable would be his poetry.  Until Parry, Homer was seen as a consummate poet, now he appeared to have been using what to modern sensibilities was a battery of clichés!  How could clichéd poetry be so good?  Precisely because oral noetic thought depended on formulas and the formulas would of course have to be effective.  Formulas had to be constantly repeated in oral cultures or they would be forgotten, only effective formulas would survive.  When writing comes to a culture, its earliest literature is still of an oral, formulaic character.

The work of Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge University Press 1977) has since shown how shifts of thought, such as from magic to science, prelogical to rational, savage to domesticated, can be reduced to the contrasts between deeply interiorised literacy and residual orality.  Julian Jaynes’ work (The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1977) is also discussed; in primitive consciousness the right hemisphere of the brain’s “voices,” attributed to the gods, began to lose effectiveness about 1,500 BCE with the rising use of alphabets.  The Iliad shows more bicamerality in its unselfconscious characters when compared to the hero of the Odyssey, who is wilier, more self-conscious, who still hears “voices” but is not under their sway.

Jaynes’ description of the mind-set of the bicameral psyche fits in well with the mind-set of oral cultures; lack of introspectivity, of analysis, of individual will, of a sense of a difference between past and present.

Chapter 3 points up these contrasts more fully:  In a primary oral culture (with no writing), words have power simply because power is exerted in uttering them.  Sound is only heard as long as some energy creates it or there is silence.  There is no sound equivalent of immobility; you can observe a sleeping bison, or a painting of one but you can only hear a sound as the wave passes; an oscillogram makes no noise.  To a chirographic (literate) culture, names are tags, labels, but to an oral culture names give understanding of, and some power over, the named.

In a chirographic culture, anything from philosophy to mindless drivel can be set down and preserved.  In an oral culture, how can a verbalisation be recalled?  The answer is, think memorable thoughts.  This means not only that the idea has to be worthy of the effort of memorisation but also that the mode of thought will be easier to remember if it has rhythm, assonance and alliteration, in short, formulaic poetry!

Another aspect of “memorable thought” is oral tradition’s heroic emphasis, partly due to oral cultures’ agonistic lifestyle but also due to the needs of oral noetic processes.  Oral memory works best with persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable and public.  Characters tend to be “larger than life,” having extreme characteristics of whatever type – extremely brave, dangerous, innocent, wise or wicked.  As writing and print erode old oral noetic structures, characters can become more ordinary until a novel’s primary character can be dull, boring and inactive.

Further expounded differences of orality are:

1. Additive not surbordinative:  A modern narrative will prefer a series of clauses to be introduced by subordinating conjunctions (for example, if; though; because; while; then), which vary the simple oral additive formula of a series of clauses introduced by “and.”

2. Aggregative rather than analytic:  A reliance on formulas to sustain memory produce clusters or aggregates of word units.  These can still be found in our culture, not just in folktales (where an oak is always “a sturdy oak,” a princess is always “a beautiful princess”) but in political discourse where a fascist is always “a fascist bastard,” a war-monger is always “a capitalist war-monger” and the 4^th July is always “the Glorious 4^th July.”

3. Redundant or “copious”:  Distraction from a written text can always be remedied by re-reading the ever available text; spoken words are not available in this way, they are gone, so constant reminders of what has just been said are used to keep what has just been said close to the listeners’ attention.  Repetition of the just-said helps speaker and listener to keep track and if a listener misses one phrase, he or she may catch the next.  A speaker also gets a moment to consider what is coming next.  This seems redundant and pointless to the linear, analytic, literate mind.

4. Conservative or traditionalist:  Knowledge not repeated out loud for others to learn soon vanishes.  This establishes a traditionalist concern to conserve what has been learnt arduously over ages.  The wise elders who know so much are valued in oral cultures whereas chiro- or typographic cultures favour the young discoverers of novelty.  Oral cultures will have innovation and variation but always of traditional material in traditional modes of expression with themes and formulas adapting to new situations.  For example, Hrothgar’s thane in Beowulf compares the hero’s action to Sigemund’s dragon-slaying and contrasts it with the ignoble crimes of Heremod.

5. Close to the human life world:  Literate cultures can have complex, analytic categorisation dependent on writing that can put thought into a purely abstract level.  Even lists of kings or presidents dehumanises them.  This can be contrasted with, for example, the genealogical lists of Saxon kings; the list of names is not neutral and abstract but personal to the king at whose court it would, in its original context, have been recited.

6. Agonistically toned:  Written abstractions further disengage knowledge from human struggle.  This goes beyond merely a pre-occupation with bloodthirsty description of battles; it can encourage struggle between speakers; one’s verbal utterance can provoke another to display an articulate response.  A riddle should be countered with a poetic answer, a proverb with another more appropriate or even contradictory proverb (“Great minds think alike.” – “Ah, but fools run in the same channels”), an insult with a wittier put-down, a boast with a better one.   Word-duels or “slanging matches” are enshrined in poems such as “Loki’s Flyting,” they are contests of knowledge and wit.

7. Empathetic and participatory:  In oral cultures, knowing means empathising with the known.  Writing is not a performance, it sets up conditions for objectivity.  Oral performance encourages both the speaker and the audience to identify with the hero and share his anger, grief and triumphs.

8. Homeostatic:  Words have only their present meaning, a meaning that may include gesture and facial expression and the human, existential setting in which the word always occurs.  Oral cultures have no dictionaries defining words by other words that give older, redundant meanings and etymologies.  Archaic forms may survive in the written texts of old   poems and children’s games but in epic oral poetry, the meaning of some words may be changed or just lost.  It seems that oral traditions reflect a society’s present values rather than curiosity about its past.  Genealogies that are no longer required disappear from memory.

9. Situational rather than abstract:  Luria, in a book called “Cognitive Development” (1976), records work done with Uzbekistanis of varying degrees of literacy in the early 1930’s.  Asked which was the odd one out in the series – hammer, saw, log, hatchet, the primarily oral interviewees would reply that they were all alike.  Told that a log was not a tool, one man replied, “Yes, but even if we have tools, we still need wood – otherwise we would not build anything.”  He would not categorise a log as separate to a situation to which a log was vital.

Oral memorisation is shown to be usually fundamentally different to what a literate person would assume it to be.  Instead of the verbatim memorisation of a set text, many oral poets will never deliver verbatim repetitions of the same story.  Such poets have huge repertories of formulised phrases for characters or themes in traditional stories (examples of themes are Feasting, Bathing, Fighting).  These phrases are metrically correct and can be strung together to form lines of (for Homeric verse) dactylic hexameter (ten syllables, six stresses).  These can be shifted around without spoiling the storyline or the tone.  From Lord’s “The Singer of Tales” 1960, we know that Yugoslavian tale singers learn their craft by listening all their lives to others who never tell a narrative the same way twice but who use over and over again standard formulas for standard themes.

Recently, some researchers have found practitioners who do use exact repetition; the Cuma, from the Panama Coast, Somalian classical poets and in Japan, where the use of musical accompaniment perhaps tends to fix the words.  Interestingly, the Yugoslavian poets maintain the belief that their renditions are “word for word,” though the tape collections show this is just not so.  This is because to them, a “word” may be what to us is a “word-cluster.”

Oral memorisation also has a high somatic component, that is, bodily action, whether using beads, gestures, dance, stringed instruments or drums, fostering personality structures that are communal and externalised.  Reading and writing are solitary activities that throw the mind back on itself.

The interiority of sound is also explained, how sight situates the observer outside what he views, whereas sound pours into a hearer.  You can be immersed in sound in a way that cannot be done with sight.  Oral cultures’ sound dominated verbal economy tends toward harmonisation rather than the analytic, dissecting tendencies of typographic cultures centred around impersonal things.

The restructuring of consciousness by writing is looked at in chapter 4:  Writing creates context-free language that cannot be directly contested.  The only oral equivalent to such autonomous discourse is fixed ritual liturgies and the utterings of prophets, who are not the cause of their prophecies, only the medium of a higher power.

Plato’s objections to writing interestingly parallel modern criticisms of the computer; that it weakens the mind and memory.  Printing also received similar criticism in the C15th; that it further eroded the wisdom of the elders in favour of pocket compendiums.  The irony of course is that “the message is the medium”; writing and print were criticised in writing and print.  At a deeper level, Plato’s very development of a critique was a consequence of the changes in thought that writing enabled.  His ideas are part of the voiceless, fixed world of intellectual thought, divorced from the fluid, “personally interactive world of oral culture.”

The author does not have an axe to grind about writing and print (a published academic hardly could have!); the at first simple technologies of writing (quills, parchment, ink) helped humanity achieve its potential and the raising of its awareness.  He points up the paradox that artificiality is natural to human beings.

A brief history of writing is given; the earliest script was Sumerian cuneiform from 3,500 BCE; Egyptian hieroglyphs, 3,000 BCE; Mayan, 50 CE; Aztec, 1400 CE  The first and only alphabet was Semitic, which developed from cuneiform but had no vowels.  The Greeks introduced vowels.  Readers of Semitic had to know the language to supply the missing vowels, but the Greeks perfected the alphabet; now it could be used to read words in different languages.

An alphabet has lost all connection with things; a pictograph of a bird does not render “bird,” or “Vogel,” or “oiseau”; it does not reduce sound to paper; a phonogram (or “rebus”), which represents the sound of one word by a pictograph of another (for example, a drawing of a rock could represent the verb “to rock”), is still a pictograph.  Alphabets represent sounds themselves as things, not what those sounds mean.

Numerous examples are given of the onset of literacy in a culture being restricted to certain sectors of society (usually priests, wizards or scribes).  Even amongst them though, oral habits of thought died hard, habits such a thinking aloud.  This encouraged dictation to scribes.  Even when writing by himself, Eadmer of St. Albans in the C11th described the act of writing as dictating to himself.  Poets would write by imagined performance to an audience.  Only later did people in northern Europe write words to consciously compose a written text.  A genealogy is clearly a written record but of an oral sensibility, not a straight forward list.  “A begat B, B begat C…” shows the oral drive to use formulas, to exploit the mnemonic effect of balanced repetition (subject, verb, object; subject, verb, object) to narrate rather than list.  The names are doing something here, begetting.  The formula of high redundancy, discussed earlier, is at work here, each name is repeated twice, as subject and as object.

In the C11th, documents, even in legal proceedings, were not trusted (with good reason, as abbots were constantly forging false grants of land by long dead kings!).  A document could not be questioned in court but a group of witnesses would recall what they remembered happening or what their forebears told them had happened regarding a grant of land.

Jack Goody in The Domestication of the Savage Mind “shows in detail how when anthropologists display on printed surfaces lists of various items found in oral myths (clans, regions of the earth, kinds of wind) they deform the mental world in which myths have their own existence.  The satisfaction that myths provide is essentially not “coherent” in a tabular way.”

The growth in left sphere dominance, it is suggested, governed the drift in early Greek writing from left to right, to “boustrophedon” movement, that is, “ox-ploughing”; right to left on one line, followed by left to right on the next, sometimes with the letters inverted, to stoichedon style, vertical lines (these last two stages are evidenced in runic inscriptions) and finally to left to right on a horizontal line.

Early philosophical writing was presented in dialogue form, then later in objection and response form.  Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, allows the reader to imagine he is being told the stories as one of the pilgrims in the “frame story.”  It was a long time before C19th novelists felt the unease of their position and those of their readers with their frequent “dear reader.”  Such self-consciousness produces an ever-expanding irony.

In any country, there would originally be many spoken dialects.  Whichever group came to use writing the most came to see, or rather hear, its dialect become the national language (upper class London English, southern highland German, Tuscan Italian).  These developed a vocabulary from non-dialectal sources, that became “grapholects” or perhaps more properly, “printed languages.”  With the arrival of dictionaries, the speaker of a grapholect gains huge resources, resources lacking in the restricted vocabulary of any other dialect in that language.

Rhetoric, public speaking, was valued by the Greeks and continued to be valued by classically influenced Europe.  A vast body of literature was produced throughout the centuries on rhetoric.  Being in essence an oral art form, it retained the oral feeling for agonistic and formulaic expression.  So from ancient Greece onwards the importance of rhetoric in academic life gave a highly agonistic pitch in literate style.

The other interaction between orality and literacy was Learned Latin.  By 700 CE, Latin could not be understood by speakers of Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish) that had grown from it.  Also, with so many languages and dialects in Europe, most never written down at all, Latin as a common language between diplomats, students and clergymen was only practical.  This would have been an international language in writing only, being pronounced very differently in say, Russia and Spain.

Much oral residue survived in western European literary styles.  For example, Tudor English and beyond made much use of epithets, balance, antithesis and formulary structures.  Still later in the C19th, elocution contests involved memorising texts verbatim and reciting them to sound like extempore oral productions.  Dickens’ on stage readings of his novels were very popular.  In America, “McGuffey’s Readers,” published between 1836 and 1920, specialised in “sound-conscious” literature of great heroes, complete with pronunciation guides and breathing drills!

Chapter 5 looks at the shift from hearing dominance to sight dominance.  The original auditing of accounts meant being checked by being read aloud.  Early title pages were visually pleasing but inconsequential words were set in huge type faces because people still were not seeing text but hearing it, either aloud or in the imagination, so the size of the text was a matter of visual aesthetics not textual sensibility.  But the greater legibility of print allows for the development of fast and silent reading.  Material becomes immediately retrievable through visual organisation.  Over time, books became less like recorded utterance and more like a thing which contained information.  Pre-print manuscripts had no titles and were known by their “incipit”  (“it begins”), as with repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer being referred to as “Our Fathers,” evincing a residual orality. Manuscripts were often introduced by an observation to the reader (“here you have a book written by…when he…”).  This is because oral cultures’ ways of referring to stories are not label-like.

With print exact, reproducible drawings could be used with complex language describing them, reaching their height in the Industrial Revolution.  Oral verbalisation tends to focus on action rather than descriptions of appearances.  This affected literature as well as science.  No pre-romantic prose contains circumstantial descriptions of landscapes.  Print created a sense of the ownership of words by authors.  The Stationers’ Company from 1557 oversaw authors’, printers’ and publishers’ rights until the advent of C18th copyright laws.  Though a person in an oral culture may have proprietary status as the originator of a poem, anyone could learn it and the status was eroded by the common formulas, themes, lore and kennings the poet used along with everyone else.

The electronic age’s “secondary orality” of “talking books,” television, film and radio, in common with primary orality, fosters a sense of communal participation in the immediate present, as opposed to the “set in print,” isolated, private, silent world of printed book readerships.  Secondary orality however still relies on print.

There is a world of difference between the agonistic, lengthy rhetoric of old and the political televised debates of today; the latter are short, without any open show of antagonism and their apparent spontaneity is rehearsed.

Chapter 6 discusses differences in narrative; the literate narrative plot has ascending action, building tension to a climax often bringing about a reversal of action, followed by a denouement.  Long oral narrative tends to plunge the hearer straight into the action and only later explain how it came to pass; events are not in chronological order.  For example, in Beowulf, we first hear of Scyld Scefing and only much later of his ignoble predecessor Heremod.  This is because oral cultures cannot construct a plot in the relentlessly climactic way expected by literate cultures, albeit only in the last 200 years.  Having heard many different poems on the Trojan War, Homer had a repertory of episodes to string together but without writing he had no way to organise them into strict chronological order.  However, up until the 1840’s (with the first detective novel, “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe), novels were also just a series of episodes.  Why?  The answer lies in the dynamics of the orality-literacy shift.  Of course there is an oral storyline.  The situation at the end of an oral poem, song or story is different to that at the beginning but oral memory has little to do with the strict linear presentation of events.  An oral poet remembers not a verbatim “text” but the themes and formulas that he has heard from other poets since childhood.  An author, however, can read others’ stories, work from notes, and outline a plot before writing a word of the story.  The very slowness of writing encourages the growth of consciousness out of unconsciousness, particularly of conscious reflection upon a matter.

Early women novelists worked outside of the residual oral tradition not having been educated in a grammar or public school where oratory and rhetoric were still studied, albeit from texts.  They helped to make the modern novel more like a conversation than a platform performance.

Chapter 7 deals with literary theories.  The interiorisation of literacy and text-bound thinking finds its later development in the 1930’s with the “New Criticism,” which insists on the autonomy from any context of a literary work and regards a text as a “verbal icon.”  This phrase is in itself revealing, as an icon is a visual, not an aural metaphor.  The Russian Formalists held a similar position with emphasis on regarding poetry as “foregounded language” by looking at words themselves in relation to each other within the poem’s closed, autonomous world.  They are not concerned with a poem’s message, history, sources or relevance to the author’s life, only with the poem’s internal aesthetics.  This is founded in the Romantic quest for “pure” poetry, above real-life concerns, that only becomes possible in the unquestionable statement of writing and the closed world of print.  The Romantics were bound to the new technology.  Contrast this with the oral poet’s work:  It exists only in relation to a real, immediate audience at a particular social event.  Aesthetics follow from the oral poet’s other aims of celebration, education and preserving lore and group identity.  New Critics and Formalists are dealing with the textual world and their concerns show a swing away from the preceding academic literary over-concern with an author’s life and psychology to the neglect of the texts themselves.

However, Marxist criticism of the New Critics shows that a text is never closed off from the world, that a reader still has to read it, that the meaning sought by the New Critics comes from something beyond the text, namely the sensibilities, sophistication and wit of a middle class aspiring to the traditional aesthetic of the upper classes.

New Criticism implies an old criticism, however, there was no old criticism.  Criticism of vernacular English literature before World War One was non-academic and amateur.  Early academic study of literature was of Latin and Greek with a rhetorical grounding.

Structuralism, Textualism, Deconstructionism, speech-act and ready-response theories are all reviewed with the common observation that these theories do not take account of primary or secondary orality.  Logic and philosophy grew out of the ways of thought made possible by writing but have never addressed orality studies.  Neither has history.  What is to be made of works of history, such as those of Livy, that were written but with the understanding they would be read aloud?  Biblical studies, although aware of the oral origins of the texts, still see orality as merely a text awaiting “setting down” in writing.

Since Hegel, awareness that consciousness evolves has been growing.  Though anyone saying “I” has an acute sense of self, reflectiveness and articulation about the self takes time.  Narrative in the West, whether in a novel or in Jungian works such as Neumann’s “The Origins and History of Consciousness” (1954), moves to an ever greater concern with inner, personal, articulate self-consciousness.  Writing intensifies the sense of self and raises consciousness.