Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Preface: Before Ongism

John Hartley situates Ong’s work within the intellectual and political context of post-war American scholarship and the rise of communication and media studies.

• Intellectual origins of Americanism: Ong’s scholarship emerged during the era when the USA achieved world hegemonic status through ideas rather than imperial conquest
  • Perry Miller at Harvard supervised Ong’s doctorate and traced “the New England Mind” back to 16th-century dialectician Peter Ramus
  • Harvard served as a megaphone for Americanism, promoting the idea that “formation of the modern mind” occurs in the crucible of language
  • Literary scholars like Alfred Harbage saw Shakespeare’s audience as precursor to American democracy
• Connection between literary criticism and Cold War politics: Several key figures moved between academic textual analysis and intelligence work
  • Perry Miller and Norman Holmes Pearson were secret agents for OSS (precursor to CIA) during WWII
  • James Jesus Angleton applied New Criticism techniques as CIA counter-intelligence chief
  • The close reading of ambiguous texts served both literary interpretation and spy craft
• Harvard tradition linking orality studies to universal claims: Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s work on oral poetry was quickly universalized
  • Parry’s discovery of oral composition in Homer was extended to claims about human consciousness in general
  • The “American mind” became equated with the human mind through this scholarly tradition

Introduction

Ong outlines his thesis that the shift from orality to literacy fundamentally transforms human consciousness and establishes the scope of his investigation.

• Central thesis: Recent discoveries show basic differences between oral cultures and writing cultures in managing knowledge and verbalization
  • Many features taken for granted in thought, literature, philosophy and science are not native to human existence but products of writing technology
  • This forces a revision of understanding human identity itself
• Methodological approach: Must examine orality-literacy contrasts both synchronically (comparing coexisting cultures) and diachronically (historically)
  • Human society existed with oral speech for 30,000-50,000 years
  • Earliest script dates from only 6,000 years ago
  • This historical framework allows understanding of oral culture, writing culture, print culture, and electronic culture
• Bias problem: Literate readers find it difficult to conceive of oral communication except as a variant of literate communication
  • The book attempts to overcome these biases and open new ways of understanding
  • Electronic age paradoxically made us aware of orality-literacy contrasts through comparison with print

The Orality of Language

The Literate Mind and the Oral Past

Ong traces recent scholarly awakening to oral-literate contrasts while showing how textual bias has historically dominated language study.

• Recent scholarly developments: Multiple fields have discovered orality-literacy contrasts but with limitations
  • Saussure noted primacy of oral speech but saw writing as complement rather than transformer
  • Linguistics developed sophisticated phonemics but rarely contrasted primary orality with literacy
  • Applied linguistics and sociolinguistics increasingly compare oral and written verbalization dynamics
• Milman Parry’s revolutionary work: Literary studies produced the greatest awakening to oral-literate contrasts
  • Parry’s work on Iliad and Odyssey demonstrated these were oral creations
  • Albert Lord continued Parry’s work with field studies of Yugoslav oral poets
  • Eric Havelock connected these findings to Greek culture and philosophy’s emergence
• Fundamental nature of oral language: All human communication uses multiple senses, but sound has special relationship to time
  • Every human group has language that exists basically as spoken and heard
  • Of thousands of languages spoken in human history, only 106 have produced literature
  • Most languages have never been written; hundreds in active use have no effective writing system
• Writing as secondary modeling system: Written words must relate to sound to yield meaning
  • Oral expression can exist without writing; writing never exists without orality
  • All texts require conversion to sound (aloud or imagined) to be meaningful
  • This makes writing dependent on the primary oral system

Did You Say ‘Oral Literature’?

Ong critiques the concept of “oral literature” as a contradiction that reveals literate bias in understanding oral cultures.

• Textual bias in scholarship: Focus on texts led scholars to assume oral art forms were simply unwritten texts
  • Oral performances were considered unskillful variants of written works
  • No concepts exist for understanding oral art without reference to writing
  • The term “literature” (from Latin for “writings”) cannot adequately describe oral traditions
• Problems with “oral literature”: The concept creates fundamental distortions
  • Like thinking of horses as “wheelless automobiles” - defines by what they lack rather than what they are
  • Oral performances exist as events in time, not objects in space
  • They emerge from and respond to immediate social contexts in ways texts cannot
• Alternative terminology needed: Current terms reflect literate bias
  • “Preliterate” treats orality as deviant from literacy
  • “Text of oral utterance” applies written concepts to oral performance
  • Ong suggests “epos” (related to “voice”) but acknowledges limitations
• Fundamental differences: Oral cultures produce powerful verbal art unreachable by literates
  • These cannot be converted to writing without essential transformation
  • Orality needs to produce writing for consciousness to reach fuller potentials
  • But literacy can also restore memory of oral consciousness it initially destroys

The Modern Discovery of Primary Oral Cultures

Early Awareness of Oral Tradition

Ong traces historical awareness of oral tradition from ancient times through the Romantic Movement while noting persistent literate assumptions.

• Ancient recognition: Even early writers acknowledged drawing on oral tradition
  • Ecclesiastes describes collecting and arranging oral proverbs for writing
  • Medieval collectors through Erasmus compiled oral sayings, though often from other writings
  • Romantic Movement brought new respect for folk culture and oral tradition
• Linguistic resistance to oral-written distinctions: Early linguists resisted recognizing differences
  • Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield treated writing as simple representation of speech
  • Prague Linguistic Circle noted some distinctions but made little developmental use
  • Only recently has understanding emerged of orality as psychologically distinct from literacy
• Persistent textual bias: Even oral-aware scholarship retained written assumptions
  • Collectors assumed oral traditions aimed at verbatim repetition like texts
  • Lack of concepts for gracefully conceiving oral art without written reference
  • This bias continues even in sophisticated modern scholarship

The Homeric Question

Ong examines two millennia of Homeric scholarship to show how literate assumptions prevented understanding of oral composition.

• Historical development of Homeric criticism: Various theories emerged but all assumed textual models
  • Cicero and Josephus suggested revision or illiteracy but within literate frameworks
  • 19th-century Analysts saw texts as combinations of earlier written fragments
  • Unitarians maintained single authorship based on literary coherence standards
• Cultural chauvinism in interpretation: Each age interpreted Homer according to contemporary ideals
  • Poems regarded as most exemplary works, so interpreted as doing better what current poets aimed at
  • This prevented understanding oral poetry on its own terms
  • Even recognition of formula-based composition was seen as inferior to original creation
• Breakthrough insights: Some scholars approached oral understanding
  • Robert Wood suggested Homer was illiterate and used different mnemonics than literate culture
  • Rousseau thought Homer’s contemporaries lacked writing
  • But they couldn’t explain how such poetry actually worked

Milman Parry’s Discovery

Ong details Parry’s revolutionary demonstration that Homeric poetry resulted from oral composition techniques rather than literate planning.

• Parry’s fundamental insight: Homeric word choice depended on metrical needs of hexameter line
  • Earlier scholars noted this but Parry proved it systematically
  • Epithets like “wise Nestor” served metrical rather than precise descriptive functions
  • Virtually every word in Iliad and Odyssey appears as part of identifiable formulas
• Challenge to literary assumptions: Discovery threatened literate ideals of originality
  • Homer appeared to use “clichés” and prefabricated materials
  • This violated expectations that great poets create original language
  • Formulas were grouped around standardized themes (council, battle, hero’s shield)
• Revolutionary implications: Parry showed formulaic expression was essential for oral memory
  • Oral poets had no choice but to use traditional formulas and themes
  • The language of Homeric poems was specially shaped by generations of epic poets
  • This explained the mixture of early and late Greek forms in artificial epic dialect
• Connection to thought patterns: Eric Havelock extended Parry’s work to show oral noetic world
  • Homeric Greeks valued formulas because entire oral culture relied on formulaic thought
  • Fixed, formulaic patterns were essential for preserving and transmitting wisdom
  • Plato’s exclusion of poets reflected shift to chirographic (writing-based) thought

Consequent and Related Work

Ong surveys the scholarly revolution following Parry’s discoveries and its extension to other fields and cultures.

• Immediate developments: Lord and Havelock carried forward Parry’s insights
  • Lord’s Singer of Tales provided detailed field work with living oral poets
  • Havelock’s Preface to Plato connected oral-literate shift to philosophy’s origins
  • Studies extended to Old English, Serbo-Croatian, and other traditions
• Cross-cultural applications: Parry’s insights proved relevant worldwide
  • Isidore Okpewho applied analysis to African epic traditions
  • Studies emerged of Chinese narrative, Arabic poetry, American folk preaching
  • Work appeared on traditions from Balkans to Nigeria to New Mexico
• Anthropological connections: Anthropologists linked orality studies to broader cultural analysis
  • Jack Goody showed shifts from “magic to science” better explained as orality to literacy
  • Marshall McLuhan connected oral-textual contrasts to broad cultural patterns
  • Studies challenged conventional distinctions between “primitive” and “rational” thought
• Remaining gaps: Many fields could benefit from orality-literacy analysis
  • Julian Jaynes’s bicameral mind theory might reduce to orality-literacy shift
  • Various psychological and cultural phenomena await reinterpretation
  • Much more research needed to understand implications fully

Some Psychodynamics of Orality

Sounded Word as Power and Action

Ong explores the fundamental nature of sound and its implications for oral cultures’ relationship to language.

• Sound’s temporal nature: Sound exists only when going out of existence, unlike other senses
  • When pronouncing “permanence,” the “perma-” is gone by the time you reach “-nence”
  • No way to stop sound and still have sound, unlike stopping motion in vision
  • Hebrew term “dabar” means both “word” and “event,” reflecting this understanding
• Sound as power and action: Oral peoples universally consider words to have magical potency
  • Sound cannot exist without use of power - hearing indicates something is happening
  • All oral utterance comes from inside living organisms and is thus “dynamic”
  • Written words seem like “things” rather than powered events
• Names as power: Oral cultures view names as conveying power over what they name
  • Names do give power - vast vocabulary needed for understanding chemistry or any field
  • Oral peoples see names differently than written “labels” - real spoken words cannot be tags
  • Written representations can be labels; oral words are events in time

You Know What You Can Recall: Mnemonics and Formulas

Ong explains how oral cultures must structure all knowledge for memorable recall.

• Memory constraints shape thought: In oral culture, you know only what you can recall
  • No external text to return to for verification or retrieval
  • Complex solutions must be worked out in memorable patterns or be lost forever
  • Interlocutor virtually essential for sustained thought - hard to think alone for hours
• Mnemonic patterning required: Thought must come in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns
  • Repetitions, antitheses, alliterations, formulaic expressions all aid recall
  • Standard thematic settings (assembly, meal, duel) provide frameworks
  • Proverbs constantly heard and patterned for retention and ready recall
• Formulas as substance of thought: Fixed expressions form the content, not just vehicle, of thinking
  • “Red in morning, sailor’s warning” - countless examples from all cultures
  • Oral cultures use these incessantly, not occasionally as in literate cultures
  • Most sophisticated oral thought marked by skillful use of set expressions
• Legal and social functions: Law itself enshrined in formulaic sayings and proverbs
  • These ARE the law, not decorations to it
  • Judges articulate relevant proverbs to produce equitable decisions
  • All organized knowledge depends on formulaic structures for preservation

Further Characteristics of Orally Based Thought and Expression

Ong details nine key characteristics that distinguish oral from literate thought patterns.

(i) Additive rather than subordinative

• Oral preference for coordination: Oral cultures string together thoughts with “and” rather than subordinating clauses
  • Genesis creation story: “And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…”
  • Modern translations reduce “ands” to subordinate structures more familiar to print culture
  • Oral structures serve speaker’s convenience; written structures serve syntactic organization
• Different grammatical needs: Writing depends more on linguistic structure alone for meaning
  • Oral discourse has full existential context to help determine meaning
  • Written discourse must provide meaning through grammar since context is absent
  • This explains why oral structures seem “primitive” to literate minds

(ii) Aggregative rather than analytic

• Clustering rather than separation: Oral expression tends toward clusters of associated terms
  • Not “the soldier” but “the brave soldier”; not “princess” but “beautiful princess”
  • These aggregative epithets seem redundant and cumbersome to high literates
  • But they serve essential mnemonic and cultural functions in oral societies
• Political and cultural examples: Modern residually oral cultures show similar patterns
  • “Enemy of the people,” “capitalist war-mongers” - formulaic expressions from oral heritage
  • Soviet Union’s required epithets like “Glorious Revolution of October 26”
  • These maintain cultural coherence through formulaic stability

(iii) Redundant or ‘copious’

• Memory and continuity needs: Oral discourse must maintain continuity without external aids
  • Writing provides “line” of continuity outside the mind through text
  • Oral performers must keep context in mind while moving forward
  • Redundancy ensures both speaker and hearer stay on track
• Physical conditions encourage repetition: Public oral performance demands redundancy
  • Large audiences (12,000-15,000 in Lincoln-Douglas debates) needed repetition for acoustics
  • Speaker must keep talking while thinking of next idea - better to repeat than pause
  • Oral cultures value fluency, fulsomeness, volubility - the rhetorical tradition of “copia”

(iv) Conservative or traditionalist

• Knowledge preservation imperative: Oral societies must invest energy in repeating acquired knowledge
  • Knowledge not repeated aloud soon vanishes
  • This creates traditionalist mindset that inhibits intellectual experimentation
  • Wise old people who preserve stories are highly valued
• Writing changes relationship to past: Text frees mind from conservative memory work
  • Enables new speculation by taking conservative functions on itself
  • Residual orality measurable by amount of memorization required in education
  • Oral cultures do show originality but process it through traditional forms

(v) Close to the human lifeworld

• Contextualized rather than abstract knowledge: Oral cultures lack elaborate abstract categories
  • Must conceptualize knowledge with reference to human action and interaction
  • Cannot produce neutral lists divorced from human activity context
  • Even technical knowledge embedded in narrative rather than abstract description
• Narrative frameworks for information: Political information appears in action contexts
  • Homer’s catalog of ships presents names as involved in human doings
  • No equivalent to how-to manuals - trades learned by apprenticeship and observation
  • Abstract, self-subsistent knowledge corpora don’t exist in primary oral culture

(vi) Agonistically toned

• Verbal combat and struggle: Oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily combative
  • Proverbs and riddles used to engage others in intellectual combat
  • Bragging and verbal dueling regular features of oral narrative
  • “Flyting” - reciprocal name-calling found in oral societies worldwide
• Physical violence in oral art: Enthusiastic description of combat marks oral narrative
  • Iliad’s violence rivals modern television but with more exquisite detail
  • This gradually wanes in written narrative, moving toward interior crises
  • Violence connected to oral communication’s person-to-person dynamics
• Praise as other side of combat: Fulsome praise accompanies oral culture’s agonistic nature
  • African praise poems, classical rhetorical encomium tradition
  • Highly polarized oral world of heroes and villains, virtue and vice
  • This agonistic heritage institutionalized in Western rhetorical education

(vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced

• Identification with the known: Oral learning means achieving empathetic identification
  • “Getting with it” rather than objective distancing
  • Individual reaction expressed through communal reaction and “soul”
  • Narrator and audience identify strongly with heroes and characters
• Writing enables objectivity: Visual fixity of text creates distancing from content
  • Plato excluded poets because studying them meant identifying with heroes emotionally
  • Performance examples show narrator slipping into first person with hero
  • Oral communication unites people in groups; writing isolates individuals

(viii) Homeostatic

• Present-oriented equilibrium: Oral societies maintain balance by discarding irrelevant memories
  • Word meanings controlled by present real-life situations, not dictionary definitions
  • No sense of language as abstract “structure” separate from lived experience
  • Archaic terms lose meaning when referents drop from daily experience
• Genealogical adjustment: Studies show oral genealogies adapt to changed circumstances
  • Tiv genealogies recorded by British differed after 40 years to match new social relations
  • Gonja myths reduced founding sons from seven to five when two territorial divisions disappeared
  • Past restructured to serve present integrity rather than historical accuracy

(ix) Situational rather than abstract

• Operational rather than formal thinking: Oral cultures resist abstract categorical organization
  • Luria’s studies in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia showed illiterates’ situational thinking
  • When shown hammer, saw, log, hatchet - grouped by use rather than category “tools”
  • Insisted practical grouping more important than abstract classification
• Resistance to formal logic: Syllogistic reasoning seemed uninteresting to oral subjects
  • “Precious metals don’t rust. Gold is precious metal. Does it rust?” - “I don’t know, I’ve seen black bears”
  • Responses went beyond given statements to real-life knowledge, like solving riddles
  • Self-analysis particularly difficult - requires removing self from situational context

Oral Memorization

Ong contrasts oral memory practices with literate assumptions about verbatim repetition.

• Literate assumptions about oral memory: Past scholars assumed oral memorization aimed at verbatim repetition
  • No way to test this before sound recording - successive recitations couldn’t be compared
  • Literates projected their text-based memory practices onto oral cultures
  • Simultaneous recitation rarely sought to verify supposed verbatim accuracy
• Parry-Lord revolutionary findings: Yugoslav oral poets never sing same song twice
  • Singers learn themes and formulas, not verbatim texts
  • Each performance stitches together traditional materials differently
  • Learning to read/write disables oral poet by introducing concept of fixed text
• Oral memory as reconstruction: Singers need time to let story “sink into” their repertoire
  • Not memorizing specific version but absorbing themes and formulas
  • Performance reconstructs from traditional materials, not recalled text
  • Fixed materials are themes/formulas, not specific verbal sequences
• Claims vs. reality of verbatim repetition: Even when claiming word-for-word accuracy, variation occurs
  • Yugoslav singers protest they sing “just the same” but recordings show differences
  • “Word for word” means “like” in oral cultures, not exact repetition
  • Examples from Africa show 60% correlation at best in attempted verbatim repetition
• Special cases of greater accuracy: Some ritual or musical contexts approach verbatim repetition
  • Cuna magic formulas, Somali classical poetry with complex scansion
  • Japanese Heike chants stabilized by musical accompaniment
  • But even these show variability and depend heavily on formulaic construction

Verbomotor Lifestyle

Ong describes cultures where verbal skills and human interaction take precedence over object-oriented analysis.

• Word-oriented rather than thing-oriented: Verbomotor cultures depend more on effective word use
  • Courses of action depend significantly on verbal facility and human interaction
  • Less reliance on non-verbal, visual input from “objective” world of things
  • Even business becomes fundamentally rhetoric rather than simple economic transaction
• Interactive interpretation of information requests: Oral cultures interpret questions as personal challenges
  • Example from Cork, Ireland: “Is this the post office?” answered with “Wouldn’t be a postage stamp you were looking for?”
  • Request for information treated as something questioner is doing TO the person
  • Leads to verbal sparring rather than straightforward information transfer
• Communal vs. individual personality structures: Oral communication creates group unity
  • Writing/reading are solitary activities that throw psyche back on itself
  • Oral peoples externalize schizoid behavior where literates internalize it
  • Different manifestations: oral peoples show external confusion/violence, literates show internal withdrawal

The Noetic Role of Heroic ‘Heavy’ Figures and of the Bizarre

Ong explains how oral memory requirements generate distinctive character types and narrative elements.

• Memory needs create heroic figures: Oral cultures require “heavy” characters for effective memorization
  • Colorless personalities cannot survive oral mnemonics
  • Heroes must be monumental, memorable, and typically public in their deeds
  • Type figures emerge: wise Nestor, furious Achilles, clever Odysseus
• Bizarre elements aid recall: Strange features make characters more memorable
  • Easier to remember Cyclops than two-eyed monster
  • Three-headed Cerberus more memorable than ordinary one-headed dog
  • Formulary number groupings also mnemonic: Seven Against Thebes, Three Graces
• Print culture enables different character types: Writing eventually allows “ordinary” protagonists
  • Novel can move in everyday human lifeworld rather than heroic realm
  • Eventually produces “antihero” who runs away rather than confronting enemies
  • Heroic figures served specific function in organizing oral knowledge

The Interiority of Sound

Ong explores sound’s unique relationship to human interiority and consciousness.

• Sound registers interiority directly: Unlike other senses, sound reveals interior structures
  • Vision adapted for surfaces; can’t penetrate interiors without violating them
  • Touch destroys interiority to perceive it (making hole in box to feel inside)
  • Sound can determine interior contents without violation (rapping box, ringing coin)
• Sound incorporates rather than isolates: Hearing creates different relationship than seeing
  • Sight situates observer outside and distant from observed
  • Sound pours into hearer from all directions simultaneously
  • Places hearer at center of auditory world that envelopes them
• Correspondence with consciousness structure: Interiority and harmony characterize human awareness
  • Each person’s consciousness totally interiorized and inaccessible to others directly
  • Knowledge ultimately seeks harmony and unity, not fractioning
  • Sound’s unifying character corresponds to consciousness’s integrative nature
• Implications for oral cultures: Sound-dominated cultures feel themselves at center of cosmos
  • Man as umbilicus mundi (navel of world) in oral cultures
  • Only after print do humans think of world as surface spread before their eyes
  • Ancient oral world knew travelers and pilgrims, not “explorers” of mapped territories

Orality, Community and the Sacral

Ong examines connections between spoken word, community formation, and religious experience.

• Spoken word creates community: Speech manifests human beings to each other as conscious interiors
  • Audience becomes unity with themselves and speaker during oral address
  • When speaker asks audience to read handouts, unity shatters as each enters private world
  • No collective noun for readers like “audience” - “readership” is abstract concept
• Writing isolates: Text production and consumption are solitary activities
  • Large-scale oral unities possible: countries with multiple languages face unity problems
  • Writing and print create individual isolation from communal experience
  • Oral word naturally creates group cohesion
• Sacred dimensions: Most religions center spoken word in ceremonial life
  • God conceived as “speaking” to humans, not writing to them
  • Hebrew “dabar” means both word and event - refers to spoken word
  • In Christianity, Second Person of Trinity is Word spoken by Father
  • “Faith comes through hearing” - emphasis on oral reception of sacred truth
• Primacy of oral in sacred texts: Even text-based religions preserve oral primacy
  • Bible read aloud in liturgical services
  • Jesus left no writing though he could read and write
  • “Letter kills, spirit gives life” - breath carries spoken word

Words are not Signs

Ong argues against treating words as visual signs, showing this reflects chirographic bias.

• “Sign” as visual concept: Thinking of words as “signs” comes from sight-dominance
  • Latin “signum” meant visual military standard (eagle, etc.)
  • Primary oral cultures don’t experience words as visual labels or tags
  • Medieval shopkeepers used iconographic symbols, not written words for identification
• Pipeline model problems: “Media” metaphor treats communication as transfer of units
  • Assumes mind is box containing “information” units
  • Communication supposedly encodes, transmits, and decodes these units
  • This model fundamentally distorts actual human communication processes
• True communication requires feedback: Human communication demands anticipated response
  • Speaker must be in receiver position before sending anything
  • Must sense something in other’s mind to which utterance can relate
  • Communication is intersubjective - persons share interiorly with persons
• **Words as “winged”: Homer’s description suggests movement and freedom
  • Oral words constantly moving through flight rather than static signs
  • Writing reduces elusive temporal sound world to visual space
  • But real time has no divisions and cannot be truly spatialized

Writing Restructures Consciousness

The New World of Autonomous Discourse

Ong argues that writing creates fundamentally new kind of discourse detached from immediate human context.

• Context-free language creation: Writing establishes discourse that cannot be directly questioned
  • Oral speech can be challenged immediately by present listeners
  • Written discourse detached from author and original context
  • Creates “autonomous” discourse independent of immediate situation
• Textual authority problems: Books have strange authority that oral speech lacks
  • “The book says” becomes equivalent to “it is true”
  • Text states same thing after total refutation - inherently contumacious
  • This is why books have been burned - false texts persist indefinitely
• Comparison with oral autonomous discourse: Oral cultures have some autonomous forms
  • Ritual formulas and prophetic utterances where speaker is mere channel
  • Oracle not responsible for utterances - they come from god
  • Writing has similar “vatic” quality - relays utterance from absent source

Plato, Writing and Computers

Ong shows that contemporary objections to computers mirror Plato’s objections to writing.

• Four parallel objections: Same criticisms made of writing, then print, now computers
  • Writing/computers are inhuman, artificial products rather than natural thought
  • They destroy memory by providing external resource for internal capabilities
  • They cannot respond to questions - give back same words that prompted question
  • They cannot defend themselves like living speech in give-and-take dialogue
• Historical pattern: Each new technology faces identical resistance
  • 1477 criticism that printing makes men “less studious” by relieving memory work
  • Same “pocket calculator” complaint across centuries
  • Weakness: critics use new technology to make their criticisms effective
• Paradox of Plato’s position: His critique of writing only possible because of writing
  • Philosophical analytic thought required writing’s effects on mental processes
  • Plato’s “ideas” were visually based, coming from root meaning “to see”
  • His rejection of oral poets was unconscious rejection of oral, interactive lifeworld

Writing is a Technology

Ong emphasizes that writing is artificial technology, not natural human capacity.

• Complete artificiality: Writing differs fundamentally from natural oral speech
  • Every human culture learns to speak naturally
  • No one is born knowing how to write - must learn consciously contrived rules
  • Requires tools: styli, prepared surfaces, inks - complex technological apparatus
• Technology as consciousness enhancement: Artificiality enables human development
  • Technologies not mere exterior aids but interior transformations
  • Musical instruments example: violin, organ are machines that enable expression
  • Years of practice required to interiorize technological skill
• Writing more deeply interiorized than instrumental performance: Text becomes part of thought process
  • But must honestly face writing’s technological nature
  • Cannot understand what it is without relating to its past in orality
  • All technological transformations of word interconnected

What is ‘Writing’ or ‘Script’?

Ong defines true writing as representation of utterance, not mere pictures or memory aids.

• True writing vs. memory aids: Script represents words someone says or imagines saying
  • Pictures represent objects but don’t “say” anything without code
  • Notched sticks, quipus are memory aids but don’t control exact words
  • Writing determines exact words reader will generate from text
• Gradual development from memory aids: True writing systems evolve through intermediate stages
  • Some systems allow only approximate prediction of reading
  • Tightest control achieved by alphabet, though even this not perfect
  • “Read” could be past participle or imperative - context sometimes needed
• Writing as recent invention: True writing emerged only around 3500 BC among Sumerians
  • Homo sapiens existed 30,000-50,000 years before this
  • Most basic human technology for intellectual activity
  • Transforms speech and thought by moving from sound world to visual world

Many Scripts but Only One Alphabet

Ong surveys world writing systems and explains the unique invention of the alphabet.

• Independent script development: Many writing systems developed separately worldwide
  • Mesopotamian cuneiform 3500 BC, Egyptian hieroglyphics 3000 BC
  • Chinese script 1500 BC, Mayan script 50 BC, and others
  • Each emerged independently from picture writing or token systems
• Alphabet as unique invention: Developed only once by Semitic peoples around 1500 BC
  • Every alphabet derives from this original Semitic development
  • Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Korean - all trace to single source
  • Most democratic and adaptable system - easy for everyone to learn
• Greek innovation with vowels: Greeks added vowels to Semitic consonant-only system
  • Havelock argues this gave Greeks intellectual ascendancy over other cultures
  • More complete transformation of sound to sight
  • Could be used for unfamiliar languages, acquired by young children
• Alphabetic democratization: Contrasts with elitist character systems
  • Chinese requires 20 years to master, limits literacy to elite
  • Korean example: alphabetic signs for general public, Chinese characters for literature
  • Alphabet’s efficiency eventually forces replacement of complex systems

The Onset of Literacy

Ong describes how writing first enters cultures and its initial effects.

• Initial responses to writing: Often regarded as magical or dangerous power
  • “Grammar” became “glamour” through association with magic
  • Scraps of writing used as amulets for their permanence
  • Societies sometimes restrict literacy to special groups like clergy
• Craft literacy stage: Writing becomes trade practiced by specialists
  • Others hire scribes as they would hire stonemasons
  • Stage lasted centuries even in Greece until Plato’s time
  • Not individual necessity any more than mastering other trades
• Technological challenges: Early writing materials encouraged scribal culture
  • Wet clay, scraped animal skins, papyrus, wax tablets
  • Required special mechanical skills not all “writers” possessed
  • Paper manufacture in Europe only from 12th century
• Continued oral methods: Even literate composition often used dictation
  • Medieval authors commonly employed scribes
  • 11th-century Eadmer felt he “dictated to himself” when writing
  • Aquinas organized Summa in quasi-oral format with objections and responses

From Memory to Written Records

Ong shows how cultures slowly transferred authority from memory to written documentation.

• Resistance to written authority: Medieval England initially trusted collective memory more than documents
  • Witnesses more credible than texts because they could defend their statements
  • Jury of 24 mature men used to establish customs through remembered tradition
  • Documents authenticated by symbolic objects (knives) rather than notarial methods
• Dating problems reveal different time consciousness: Early charters often undated
  • Dating required choosing reference point - creation of world? Christ’s birth?
  • Medieval people didn’t live in abstract computed time
  • Most didn’t know current calendar year - no newspapers or dated material
• Oral economy of memory: Past without present relevance dropped from consciousness
  • “Remembered truth was flexible and up to date”
  • Customary law automatically current through selective forgetting
  • Past not experienced as itemized terrain of verifiable facts
• Charts and lists as writing innovations: Visual organization impossible in oral culture
  • Biblical geography given as action narrative: “Setting out from… they camped at…”
  • Genealogies as “begats” rather than simple name sequences
  • Oral drive to narrate rather than juxtapose static information

Some Dynamics of Textuality

Ong explores how textual conditions differ from oral communication contexts.

• Isolation of words in text: Written words lack fuller context of spoken words
  • Oral words always part of real, existential present with living persons
  • Text words appear alone, isolated from more-than-verbal situation
  • Writer works in solitude, conjuring fictional recipients
• Absence of vocal qualities: Text lacks intonation, tone, emotional coloring
  • Oral words must have some tone - impossible to speak without intonation
  • Punctuation provides minimal signals, but actors spend hours determining delivery
  • Same passage might be whispered or shouted depending on interpretation
• Fictional relationships: Both writers and readers must create fictional roles
  • “Writer’s audience is always a fiction” - must imagine unknown readers
  • Even diary writing requires fictionalizing addressee - pretending to talk to self
  • Medieval texts provided oral frameworks (dialogues, disputations) to help readers situate themselves
• Historical development of narrative voice: Evolution from oral frameworks to autonomous texts
  • Early texts used dialogues or frame stories to simulate oral contexts
  • 19th-century “dear reader” reveals ongoing problems of writer-reader relationship
  • Modern experimental texts explore extreme possibilities of fictional relationships

Distance, Precision, Grapholects and Magnavocabularies

Ong examines how writing’s distancing effects enable new forms of precision and vocabulary expansion.

• Enhanced precision through distancing: Removal from oral context develops verbal exactitude
  • Must foresee all possible meanings without gesture, intonation, or present hearer
  • Forces language to work independently with no existential context
  • “Backward scanning” allows elimination of inconsistencies impossible in oral flow
• Correction capabilities: Writing enables revision impossible in oral performance
  • Oral corrections supplement rather than replace errors
  • Written corrections can be hidden from reader completely
  • This precision can feed back into speech among literates
• Grapholect development: Written dialects become different from purely oral ones
  • National written languages isolated from original dialect bases
  • Develop vocabulary layers from non-dialectal sources
  • “Correct” grammar identified with grapholect rather than other dialects
• Massive vocabulary expansion: Writing enables unprecedented lexical growth
  • Webster’s Third contains 450,000 words, could include “many times” more
  • Assumes 1.5 million recorded English words vs. few thousand for oral dialects
  • Dictionaries impossible without print - handwritten copies too labor-intensive
• Dictionary authority: Print culture identifies “correct” language with written usage
  • Webster’s Third first to break with exclusively typographic sources
  • Previous dictionaries ignored non-printing users as “corrupt”
  • Shows how print creates normative power over language concepts

Interactions: Rhetoric and the Places

Ong traces how the ancient art of rhetoric mediated between oral and written cultures.

• Rhetoric as bridge between orality and literacy: Art of public speaking organized by writing
  • Greek rhetorike originally meant oral oratory
  • But systematic “art” required written analysis and organization
  • Enhanced orality by making conscious the principles of oral effectiveness
• Agonistic and formulaic heritage: Rhetoric preserved oral combative and traditional elements
  • Assumed all discourse aimed to prove/disprove against opposition
  • “Places” (topoi, loci) provided traditional seats of arguments
  • Commonplaces supplied both abstract headings and cumulative collections of sayings
• Academic dominance: Rhetoric remained central Western education for 2000 years
  • Far more important than philosophy in Greek culture
  • Maintained impression that oratory was paradigm of all discourse
  • Kept agonistic pitch of discourse high by present standards
• Gender implications: Rhetorical education exclusively male
  • Women writers developed different, less oratorical style
  • This non-rhetorical voice contributed significantly to novel’s development
  • Female style more conversational than platform-performance oriented

Interactions: Learned Languages

Ong analyzes how Latin became a purely academic language controlled entirely by writing.

• Sound-sight split: Latin became school language only after 700 AD
  • Spoken Latin evolved into Romance vernaculars
  • Written Latin preserved in education and official discourse
  • No alternative given hundreds of mutually unintelligible vernaculars
• Characteristics of Learned Latin: Completely chirographically controlled
  • Every speaker could write it - no purely oral users
  • Sex-linked male language learned in tribal puberty-rite setting
  • No connection to anyone’s unconscious like mother tongues
• Paradoxical relationship to orality: Though textually controlled, preserved oral elements
  • Classical ideal aimed at producing orators, not writers
  • Grammar and vocabulary retained from old oral world
  • Textual control enabled greater objectivity for abstract thought
• Scientific implications: Learned Latin crucial for development of modern science
  • Insulated discourse from emotion-charged mother tongue
  • Reduced interference from immediate lifeworld
  • Scientists through Newton commonly thought and wrote in Latin
• Other learned languages: Similar patterns in Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese
  • All no longer mother tongues, controlled by writing
  • Spoken only by males who learned them through writing
  • Such languages no longer exist - all current learned languages are also vernaculars

Tenaciousness of Orality

Ong demonstrates how oral residue persisted long after writing’s introduction.

• Slow transition from orality: Medieval and Renaissance cultures retained massive oral elements
  • Universities tested knowledge by oral dispute, not writing
  • Renaissance humanism revived antiquity and gave new life to orality
  • Tudor English style carried heavy oral residue in epithets, balance, antithesis
• Reading aloud practices: Written texts commonly meant for oral delivery
  • Through 19th century most texts expected to be read aloud
  • Influenced literary style from antiquity to recent times
  • 19th-century “elocution” contests tried to make print sound extemporaneous
• Rhetoric’s migration to writing: Gradual shift from oral to written focus
  • 16th-century textbooks began omitting memory and delivery from five parts
  • Eventually rhetoric meant study of effective writing rather than speaking
  • Three R’s replaced rhetorical education as literacy became commercial/domestic
• Residual effects: Even high-literacy cultures retain oral elements
  • Auditory processing dominated even early printed texts
  • McGuffey’s Readers designed for oral declamatory reading
  • Academic practices like doctoral defense preserve vestigial orality

Print, Space and Closure

Hearing-Dominance Yields to Sight-Dominance

Ong traces how print technology shifted the balance from auditory to visual processing of text.

• Revolutionary nature of alphabetic letterpress: Unlike earlier printing, used pre-existing letter units
  • Chinese had movable type but no alphabet - used pictographic characters
  • Koreans/Turks had alphabet and movable type but whole-word units
  • Alphabetic letterpress embedded word deeply in manufacturing process
• First assembly line: Book production pioneered replaceable-part manufacturing
  • Identical complex objects from interchangeable components
  • Industrial revolution later applied printing techniques to other manufacturing
  • Print reified the word more than writing ever did
• Persistent auditory processing: Manuscript culture remained marginally oral
  • Ambrose of Milan: “Sight is often deceived, hearing serves as guarantee”
  • Oration remained paradigm for all discourse through Renaissance
  • Even financial accounts “audited” (heard) rather than visually examined through 12th century
• Gradual visual takeover: Print eventually established sight-dominance
  • Early printed title pages seemed “crazily erratic” in visual word divisions
  • Divided major words with hyphens, put inconsequential words in large type
  • This suggests 16th century still felt reading as listening process set in motion by sight
• Spatial control mechanisms: Print locked words into position more rigidly than writing
  • “Composing” type meant positioning pre-formed letters by hand
  • Printing required absolutely rigid positioning and great pressure
  • Created sense of “cold, non-human facts” - “that’s the way it is”

Space and Meaning

Ong examines how print’s spatial organization created new possibilities for meaning-making.

(i) Indexes

• Manuscript vs. print indexing: Alphabetic indexes rare and crude in manuscript culture
  • Two manuscripts of same work never corresponded page for page
  • Each would require separate index - not worth the effort
  • When indexes appeared, often not understood or copied incorrectly
• Transition from oral to visual retrieval: Early indexes bridged auditory and visual cultures
  • “Index locorum” originally referred to rhetorical “places” or mental storage areas
  • These vague psychic “places” became physically localized on printed pages
  • Books shifted from utterance-like to thing-like status
• Title pages as labels: Manuscripts identified by “incipit” (opening words) like conversations
  • Print created title pages as labels for book-objects
  • Each copy identical object unlike individually produced manuscripts
  • Took lettered labels naturally as lettered objects

(ii) Books, contents and labels

• Books as containers: Print culture developed sense of books “containing” information
  • Earlier books were recorded utterances rather than stored objects
  • Print copies were identical objects, not just saying same things
  • Situation invited use of labels - lettered objects took lettered labels
• Physical completeness demands: Print intolerant of physical incompleteness
  • Newspaper pages normally all filled with “filler” material
  • Lines of type justified to exact same width
  • Conveys subtle impression that content also complete and self-consistent

(iii) Meaningful surface

• Exactly repeatable visual statements: Print enabled technical illustration revolution
  • Hand-copied drawings deteriorated through successive copying
  • Prints could provide identical visual information across all copies
  • Conjunction of exact observation with exact verbalization created modern science
• Impact on literature: Exact visual representation affected Romantic poetry and beyond
  • Pre-Romantic prose couldn’t produce detailed landscape description
  • Hopkins’s notebooks show new clinical attention to natural phenomena
  • This poetry grows from print world as much as Darwin’s biology

(iv) Typographic space

• White space as meaningful element: Print space itself carries imposed meaning
  • Complex charts impossible in manuscript culture due to copying variations
  • Print reproduces any spatial complexity with complete accuracy
  • “White space” achieves high significance in modern/postmodern world
• Literary exploitation of space: Poets increasingly used typographic possibilities
  • George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” uses line lengths to create visual wing-shape
  • Sterne’s blank pages in Tristram Shandy indicate unwillingness to treat subject
  • Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés” scatters text across page to suggest randomness
• Concrete poetry as climax: Ultimate interaction of sound and typographic space
  • Creates visual displays that can’t be read aloud but aren’t mere pictures
  • Represents dialectic between word locked in space vs. oral word’s temporal freedom
  • Connected to Derrida’s logomachy with printed (not just written) text

More Diffuse Effects

Ong surveys additional ways print affected Western thought and culture.

• Removal of rhetoric from education: Print eventually displaced oral-based rhetorical training
  • Quantified knowledge through mathematical analysis and diagrams
  • Reduced appeal of iconographic knowledge management
  • Led to “correctness” legislation for language based on textual norms
• Dictionary establishment: Print created climate for exhaustive lexicography
  • From 18th century, dictionaries based only on writers producing for print
  • Usage deviating from typographic norm considered “corrupt”
  • Webster’s Third (1961) first to break with exclusively print-based sourcing
• Personal privacy development: Print fostered modern sense of individual privacy
  • Smaller, portable books enabled solo reading in quiet corners
  • Shifted from social reading aloud to silent individual reading
  • Required homes spacious enough for individual isolation and study
• Private ownership of words: Print created new sense of textual property rights
  • Oral cultures had weak sense of ownership over poems or stories
  • Writing began resentment at plagiarism (Martial’s “plagiarius”)
  • Print led to royal privileges, Stationers’ Company, modern copyright laws
• Interior mental space concepts: Print encouraged thinking of mind as thing-like container
  • Removed words from active human interchange to visual surfaces
  • Exploited visual space for knowledge management
  • Mind’s possessions seemed held in inert mental space

Print and Closure: Intertextuality

Ong explores how print fostered sense of textual completeness and self-containment.

• Enhanced closure beyond writing: Print suggested finality more than writing
  • Visual and physical consistency across thousands of identical copies
  • Verbal correspondence checkable by sight alone using Hinman collator
  • Represents author’s words in “final” form unlike revisable manuscripts
• Physical intolerance of incompleteness: Print medium demands completion
  • Once forme locked up, doesn’t accommodate changes readily
  • Manuscripts remained open to dialogue through glosses and marginalia
  • Print readers more closed off from author, more absent
• Literary form effects: Print enables tightly closed narrative structures
  • Only drama had linear plotting before print (controlled by writing)
  • Novel’s tight plotting and detective story’s perfect closure impossible earlier
  • Print narrative much more interior and self-contained than oral
• Formalism and New Criticism: Print gives rise to “closed world” literary theory
  • Each work seen as sealed off in own world - “verbal icon”
  • Icon is visual concept unlike oral performance’s temporal event
  • Manuscript culture felt works connected to oral plenum
• Modern intertextuality concerns: Print culture creates anxiety about influence
  • Romantic notions of “originality” set works apart from outside influence
  • Modern writers agonize about whether producing anything new
  • Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” treats modern writer’s anguish
  • Oral cultures had no such anxieties about traditional materials

Post-Typography: Electronics

Ong briefly surveys how electronic media both intensify and transform print effects.

• Continued print production: Electronic devices produce more printed books, not fewer
  • Taped interviews generate thousands of “talked” books
  • Computer terminals replace older typographic composition
  • Electronic processing swells typographic output
• Intensified sequential processing: Computer maximizes word’s commitment to space
  • Further intensifies analytic sequentiality by making it instantaneous
  • Continues writing’s spatializing of word at higher intensity
  • Optimizes the sequential processing initiated by writing
• Secondary orality emergence: Electronic technology creates new oral age
  • Telephone, radio, television restore communal listening
  • Resembles primary orality in participatory mystique and present-moment focus
  • But deliberately self-conscious orality based permanently on writing/print
• Group sense transformation: Electronic orality creates much larger groups than primary oral
  • McLuhan’s “global village” vs. traditional tribal groups
  • Modern group-mindedness programmatic and self-conscious
  • Plan happenings carefully to ensure they seem spontaneous
• Contrast in public speaking: Modern electronic orality vs. old primary orality
  • Lincoln-Douglas debates: 1.5 hour speeches to 15,000 people outdoors
  • Highly agonistic style with intense speaker-audience interaction
  • Television debates: controlled, domesticated, anti-agonistic format
  • Electronic media cannot tolerate open antagonism or broken closure

Oral Memory, the Story Line and Characterization

The Primacy of the Story Line

Ong establishes narrative’s fundamental importance across all verbal art forms and cultural levels.

• Narrative’s foundational role: Underlies many other art forms due to time-based nature of knowledge
  • Human knowledge emerges from temporal experience
  • Even scientific abstractions based on narrated observations and experiments
  • Lyric poetry implies temporal events; proverbs arise from experience stories
• Universal but functionally variable: Found in all cultures but more functional in oral ones
  • Oral cultures cannot manage knowledge in elaborate abstract categories
  • Use human action stories to store, organize, and communicate knowledge
  • Substantial narratives become roomiest repositories of cultural lore
• Durability advantages: Narrative bonds knowledge in repeatable lengthy forms
  • Other oral forms either brief (maxims, riddles) or topical (orations)
  • Only narrative provides substantial, durable, non-specialized content
  • Serves to bond thought more permanently than other genres in oral cultures

Narrative and Oral Cultures

Ong explains why narrative serves special functions in primary oral cultures.

• Knowledge storage necessity: Oral cultures must use narrative for abstract information
  • No elaborate scientific categories available without writing
  • Stories of human action become vehicles for cultural knowledge
  • Examples: Trojan War stories, Coyote stories, Anansi tales, Sunjata cycle
• Substantial repositories: Major narratives contain enormous amounts of cultural lore
  • Complex scenes and actions accommodate diverse information
  • Can include historical, biological, sociological, religious knowledge
  • Far roomier than brief formulaic expressions
• Repetition requirements: Only narrative provides lengthy repeatable forms
  • Oral culture needs forms subject to repetition for durability
  • Ritual formulas may be lengthy but have specialized content
  • Orations are substantial but topical - disappear with their occasions

Oral Memory and the Story Line

Ong contrasts oral narrative structure with literate plot expectations.

• Episodic vs. climactic structure: Oral narrative not organized in climactic linear plots
  • Literate readers expect Freytag’s pyramid: rising action, climax, resolution
  • This plotting comes from drama - first written genre in West
  • Aristotelian plot structure unknown and impossible in primary oral cultures
• Homer’s compositional reality: “In medias res” not conscious artistic choice
  • Had no chronological organization of episodes available
  • No list possible in absence of writing to consult
  • Starting “in middle of things” was only natural way to proceed
• Memory vs. planned plotting: Oral poets guided by memory, not linear organization
  • Would inevitably forget episodes if trying chronological order
  • Material doesn’t yield tight climactic structure when chronologically arranged
  • Episodic structure was natural and inevitable way of handling lengthy narrative
• Peabody’s insights into memory: “Song is remembrance of songs sung”
  • Singer remembers themes and formulas, not conscious plot intentions
  • Performs conventional realization of traditional thought
  • No creative imagination in modern sense - processed new material traditionally

Closure of Plot: Travelogue to Detective Story

Ong traces development of linear plotting from orality through print culture.

• Print enables plot control: Author can outline, revise, manipulate until “final” form
  • Visual layout shows beginning, middle, end encouraging self-contained units
  • Increased conscious control replaces oral episodic patterning
  • Greater selectivity produces tight pyramidal plots through distancing from real life
• Drama’s pioneering role: First western form with tight structure because fully written
  • Paradoxically eliminated narrative voice to rid story of oral episodic patterns
  • Oral narrator naturally operated episodically like real-life experience
  • Writing’s distance from lived experience enabled careful selectivity
• Print’s definitive break: Novel eventually abandoned episodic structure entirely
  • Print locked words in space more definitively than writing
  • Novelist dealt more with text, less with imagined auditors
  • Itinerant hero persisted long as vestige of episode-stringing device
• Detective story climax: Perfectly pyramidal plot reached peak with Poe (1841)
  • Relentless rising tension, explosive climactic recognition, total resolution
  • Every detail crucial and misleading until climax reveals all
  • Interior focus: solution exists in detective’s mind first, then diffused
• Connection to textuality: Detective stories often center on decoding texts
  • Poe’s “Gold-Bug” - textual code interpretation solves existential problem
  • Henry James’s “Aspern Papers” - identity bound up in unpublished letters
  • Reflects print culture’s sense of isolation and closure

The ‘Round’ Character, Writing and Print

Ong traces evolution of characterization from oral “flat” to literate “round” characters.

• Oral requirement for type characters: Primary oral culture can only produce “flat” characters
  • “Heavy” figures needed for organizing story line and managing cultural lore
  • Odysseus embodies cleverness lore, Nestor wisdom lore, Achilles fury
  • Type characters serve essential mnemonic functions
• Gradual development of interiority: Round characters emerge through writing and print
  • Complex motivation and psychological growth make characters “real”
  • Process requires many developments: Christianity, drama, introspective traditions
  • But full ramification needs writing’s drive toward itemized introspection
• Greek drama’s pioneering: First approximations of round character in written tragedies
  • Sophocles’ Oedipus, Euripides’ characters more complex than Homer’s
  • Still public leaders rather than domestic characters of later novels
  • Writing enables increasing interiorization impossible in oral culture
• Print culture’s contributions: Novel brings round character to full development
  • Private reading enables introspective identification with characters
  • Print age marked by private Bible interpretation, frequent confession
  • Writing/reading as solo activities generate interior psychological worlds
• Modern psychology connections: Depth psychology parallels round character development
  • Freud understands real people like dramatic characters (Oedipus)
  • Both depend on inward turning produced by writing, intensified by print
  • Modern sense of human existence processed through textual technologies

Some Theorems

Ong presents theoretical implications of orality-literacy studies for various academic fields.

Literary History

Ong outlines opportunities for orality-literacy analysis in understanding literary development.

• Genre evolution patterns: Shift from orality through writing/print to electronics determines genre development
  • Epic essentially oral art form - written “art” epics are archaic imitations
  • Romances emerge from chirographic culture blending oral and written modes
  • Novel clearly print genre - interior, de-heroicized, tending to irony
• Women writers’ distinctive contributions: Excluded from rhetorical training, developed non-oral styles
  • Less formally oral style than men who received Latin rhetorical education
  • Helped make novel more conversational than platform-performance oriented
  • Major gap in understanding needs bridging through orality-literacy analysis
• Residual orality studies needed: Secondary oral culture and various oral residues await study
  • Radio/television create “literate orality” different from primary orality
  • Modern anglophone West African literature shows interesting oral-literate dynamics
  • Practical applications for teaching writing in transitional cultures

New Criticism and Formalism

Ong analyzes text-bound critical schools in light of orality-literacy dynamics.

• Textual bias of New Criticism: Insisted on poem as autonomous “verbal icon”
  • Assimilated verbal art to visual object-world rather than oral-aural events
  • Divorce between poem and context impossible in oral cultures
  • Oral performance simultaneously aesthetic, educational, celebratory, social
• Historical transition in criticism: Shift from rhetorical to textual mentality
  • Earlier criticism came from residually oral tradition, focused on author/context
  • New Criticism emerged with academic study of English after WWI
  • First major vernacular criticism developed in academic environment
• Problems with autonomous text concept: Text ultimately cannot stand independent of world
  • Roland Barthes: text has no meaning until someone reads it
  • Marxist criticism: “objectivity” actually reflects class-determined interpretation
  • All texts have extratextual supports and implications

Structuralism

Ong evaluates structuralist analysis of oral narrative and its limitations.

• Binary focus achievements: Lévi-Strauss achieved some freedom from chirographic bias
  • Analyzed oral narrative in abstract binary terms rather than written plot structures
  • Used language model with contrastive elements rather than story-line development
  • Avoided some assumptions about linear organization from literate culture
• Limitations of structuralist approach: Neglects specific psychodynamics of oral expression
  • Little attention to actual workings of oral memory and composition
  • Binary patterns achieved by ignoring non-fitting elements
  • Doesn’t explain psychological urgency or why story functions as story
• Oral composition complexities: Real oral narrative doesn’t always fit rigid analysis
  • Structure sometimes collapses - skilled narrators handle through digression
  • Oral organization differs from literate organization, not makeshift version
  • “Bricolage” concept reflects literate bias about oral composition

Textualists and Deconstructionists

Ong critiques postmodern textual theory for historical unreflectiveness about orality-literacy shift.

• Service and limitations: Derrida’s critique of “logocentrism” provides valuable service
  • Breaks up pipeline model of communication and representation
  • Shows writing has its own economy, cannot simply transmit speech unchanged
  • Parallels McLuhan’s “medium is the message” insight
• Historical complications: Recent orality-literacy work complicates textualist accounts
  • Plato’s relationship to orality thoroughly ambiguous
  • Could formulate phonocentrism clearly only because he could write
  • Logocentrism encouraged more by textuality than by attention to sound
• Text-bound paradox: Textualist critique remains curiously text-bound
  • Plays with paradoxes of textuality in historical isolation
  • No account of passage from oral “imitation” to print “dissemination”
  • Only way out through historical understanding of primary orality
• Deconstruction’s assumptions: Why assume language should be perfectly consistent?
  • Illusion of closed systems encouraged by writing, even more by print
  • Oral cultures had no sense of language as spatial “structure”
  • Architecture had nothing to do with language - memory, not building, was source

Speech-act and Reader-response Theory

Ong suggests how orality-literacy contrasts could enhance these approaches.

• Speech-act theory applications: Theory distinguishes locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary acts
  • Cooperative principle and implicature have different bearings in oral vs. written communication
  • Promising, greeting, asserting may mean different things in oral vs. literate cultures
  • Could develop to attend more reflectively to textual communication as textual
• Reader-response possibilities: Criticism aware that writing differs from oral communication in absence
  • Reader absent when writer writes, writer absent when reader reads
  • Little work relating reader response to evolution from primary orality to high literacy
  • Readers with residually oral mindset relate differently to texts than those with radically textual sense
• Secondary orality extensions: Both theories could illuminate radio, television, telephone use
  • These belong to secondary orality - consequent upon writing/print, not antecedent
  • Need relation to primary orality first for proper understanding
  • Practical implications for teaching reading and writing skills

Social Sciences, Philosophy, Biblical Studies

Ong surveys opportunities for orality-literacy analysis across academic disciplines.

• Philosophy’s technological dependence: Philosophy depends on writing technology for existence
  • All sciences and “arts” produced by mind using deeply interiorized technology
  • Logic itself emerges from writing technology
  • Should be reflectively aware of itself as technological product
• Biblical studies challenges: Most massive textual commentary tradition needs orality awareness
  • Form criticism increasingly aware of oral-formulaic elements
  • But tendency to model oral culture on literacy persists
  • In-depth appreciation of primary orality could open new textual understanding
• Unexplored connections: Historiography, sociology await orality-literacy impact
  • How interpret ancient historians who wrote to be read aloud?
  • What did print do to historical plotting and theme selection?
  • Philosophy needs attention to oral wisdom’s gradual development into analytic thought

Orality, Writing and Being Human

Ong argues for positive understanding of orality while maintaining literacy’s necessity.

• Beyond ‘primitive’ terminology: Orality-literacy contrasts replace limiting approaches
  • Terms like “primitive,” “savage,” “inferior” identify by deficiency
  • Lévi-Strauss’s “without writing” still negative assessment
  • “Oral” provides more positive, less invidious terminology
• Orality not an ideal: Literacy opens possibilities unimaginable without writing
  • Every oral culture encountered wants to achieve literacy
  • Orality not despicable - can produce creations beyond literates’ reach
  • Both orality and literacy necessary for consciousness evolution
• Relational rather than reductionist: Changes connect with orality-literacy shift without sole causation
  • Food production, trade, politics, religion all play distinctive roles
  • But most developments affected by shift from orality to literacy and beyond
  • Connection is relationism, not reductionism

‘Media’ versus Human Communication

Ong critiques pipeline model of communication in favor of intersubjective understanding.

• Problems with “media” model: Suggests communication transfers “information” units through pipes
  • Mind as box containing units encoded to fit pipe size
  • Distorts communication beyond recognition despite some applicability
  • McLuhan’s wry title: “The Medium is the Massage” not “Message”
• Feedback requirement: Human communication demands anticipated feedback to occur
  • Sender must be in receiver position before sending anything
  • Must address another - people don’t talk randomly to nobody
  • Speech shaped by anticipated response from specific audience
• Intersubjective paradox: Must be inside other’s mind to enter with message
  • No adequate physical model for this operation of consciousness
  • Signals capacity for true communities where persons share interiorly
  • Media model reflects chirographic conditioning toward informational rather than performance orientation

The Inward Turn: Consciousness and the Text

Ong connects orality-literacy evolution to broader patterns of consciousness development.

• Historical evolution of consciousness: Growth in articulate attention to individual interior
  • Self-consciousness coextensive with humanity, but articulateness takes time
  • Euripides’ crises more interior than Aeschylus’s social expectations
  • Modern philosophy increasingly concerned with self from Kant through existentialists
• Writing’s consciousness-raising role: Highly interiorized consciousness stages require writing
  • Oral immersion in communal structures gives way to conscious interaction
  • Writing introduces division and alienation but higher unity as well
  • Intensifies sense of self and fosters more conscious interpersonal relations
• Religious implications: Orality-literacy polarities enter ultimate human concerns
  • All religions have oral origins but major ones also develop sacred texts
  • Christianity particularly acute in oral-literate tensions
  • God’s Word as Son (spoken) vs. Bible as written word of God
• Modern evolution toward greater interiority and openness: Orality-literacy dynamics integral to consciousness development
  • Movement toward both deeper self-awareness and broader understanding
  • Technologies of word shape but don’t merely determine consciousness evolution
  • Future developments will continue this dialectical process

After Ongism

John Hartley examines contemporary relevance and criticisms of Ong’s work in the digital age.

• Continuing relevance demonstrated: Google Scholar shows over 7600 citations, more than other New Accents books
  • Topic importance increased since 1980s with convergence of media technologies
  • Contemporary media audiences also users and potential producers
  • Mix of orality and literacy in user-created content validates Ong’s insights
• Digital era paradox: Reading increased threefold 1980-2008 despite television growth
  • Internet overwhelmingly relies on textual communication
  • But also enables unprecedented convergence of oral, written, print modes
  • Need to rethink orality-literacy relations for new media age
• Gutenberg parenthesis concept: Tom Pettitt’s theory of print as historical deviation
  • Print era may be 500-year exception between longer oral periods
  • Primary orality (pre-Gutenberg) and secondary orality (post-Gutenberg) as norm
  • Digital interactive media restore earlier oral modes like instantaneity
• Criticism of progressivist ethnocentrism: Some see Ong as preferring literate over oral modes
  • Actually his Catholic background suggests preference for oral/medieval over Protestant/modern
  • Welcomes re-medievalization through electronic media’s secondary orality
  • But concentrates on Western traditions, universalizing what may be regional
• Binarism problems: “Great divide” theory between orality and literacy oversimplified
  • Binary opposition assumption structures Ong’s approach despite criticism of structuralists
  • Applied in education as “Great Leap” theory - reform schools by understanding oral modes
  • Can lead to “pedagogic primitivism” - romanticizing tribal learning
• Consciousness transformation claims questioned: Historians and psychologists skeptical of restructuring claims
  • Writing doesn’t supplant orality; new technologies supplement existing ones
  • No evidential warrant to step from technological history to claims about human mind
  • What Ong contributed was history of learning systems, not consciousness transformation
• Evolution and cultural change: Recent work enables understanding Ong’s insights through evolutionary theory
  • Consilience between sciences and humanities now possible
  • Can study cultural evolution without reducing to simple technological determinism
  • Ong’s “noetic” history connects with contemporary science of science and network intelligence