THE LITERATE MIND AND THE ORAL PAST

In the past few decades the scholarly world has newly awakened to the oral character of
language and to some of the deeper implications of the contrasts between orality and writing.

Anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists have reported on fieldwork in oral

societies. Cultural historians have delved more and more into prehistory, that is, human
existence before writing made verbalized records possible. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–
1913), the father of modern linguistics, had called attention to the primacy of oral speech, which
underpins all verbal communication, as well as to the persistent tendency, even among scholars,
to think of writing as the basic form of language. Writing, he noted, has simultaneously
‘usefulness, shortcomings and dangers’ (1959, pp. 23–4). Still he thought of writing as a kind
of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization (Saussure 1959, pp. 23–4).

Since Saussure, linguistics has developed highly sophisticated studies of phonemics, the way
language is nested in sound. Saussure’s contemporary, the Englishman Henry Sweet (1845–
1912), had early insisted that words are made up not of letters but of functional sound units or
phonemes. But, for all their attention to the sounds of speech, modern schools of linguistics
until very recently have attended only incidentally, if at all, to ways in which primary orality,
the orality of cultures untouched by literacy, contrasts with literacy (Sampson 1980).
Structuralists have analyzed oral tradition in detail, but for the most part without explicitly
contrasting it with written compositions (Maranda and Maranda 1971). There is a sizable
literature on differences between written and spoken language which compares the written and
spoken language of persons who can read and write (Gumperz, Kaltmann and O’Connor 1982
or 1983, bibliography). These are not the differences that the present study is centrally
concerned with. The orality centrally treated here is primary orality, that of persons totally
unfamiliar with writing. Recently, however, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics have been
comparing more and more the dynamics of primary oral verbalization and those of written
verbalization. Jack Goody’s book, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), and his
earlier collection of his own and others’ work, Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968), still
provide invaluable descriptions and analyses of changes in mental and social structures incident
to the use of writing. Chaytor very early (1945), Ong (1958b, 1967b), McLuhan (1962),
Haugen (1966), Chafe (1982), Tannen (1980a) and others provide further linguistic and cultural
data and analyses. Foley’s expertly focused survey (1980b) includes an extensive bibliography.
The greatest awakening to the contrast between oral modes of thought and expression and
written modes took place not in linguistics, descriptive or cultural, but in literary studies,
beginning clearly with the work of Milman Parry (1902–35) on the text of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, brought to completion after Parry’s untimely death by Albert B.Lord, and
supplemented by later work of Eric A.Havelock and others. Publications in applied linguistics
and sociolinguistics dealing with orality literacy contrasts, theoretically or in fieldwork,
regularly cite these and related work (Parry 1971; Lord 1960; Havelock 1963; McLuhan 1962;
Okpewho 1979; etc.). Before taking up Parry’s discoveries in detail, it will be well to set the
stage here by asking why the scholarly world had to reawaken to the oral character of language.
It would seem inescapably obvious that language is an oral phenomenon. Human beings
communicate in countless ways, making use of all their senses, touch, taste, smell, and
especially sight, as well as hearing (Ong 1967b, pp. 1–9). Some nonoral communication is
exceedingly rich—gesture, for example. Yet in a deep sense language, articulated sound, is
paramount. Not only communication, but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to
sound. We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this
statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words
only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the
pictureis set. Wherever human beings exist they have a language, and in every instance a
language that exists basically as spoken and heard, in the world of sound (Siertsema 1955).
Despite the richness of gesture, elaborated sign languages are substitutes for speech and
dependent on oral speech systems, even when used by the congenitally deaf (Kroeber 1972;
Mallery 1972; Stokoe 1972). Indeed, language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many
thousands of languages—possibly tens of thousands—spoken in the course of human history
only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced
literature, and most have never been written at all. Of the some 3000 languages spoken that
exist today only some 78 have a literature (Edmonson 1971, pp. 323, 332). There is as yet no
way to calculate how many languages have disappeared or been transmuted into other
languages before writing came along. Even now hundreds of languages in active use are never
written at all: no one has worked out an effective way to write them. The basic orality of
language is permanent. We are not here concerned with so-called computer ‘languages’, which
resemble human languages (English, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Twi or
Shoshone etc.) in some ways but are forever totally unlike human languages in that they do not
grow out of the unconscious but directly out of consciousness. Computer language rules
(‘grammar’) are stated first and thereafter used. The ‘rules’ of grammar in natural human
languages are used first and can be abstracted from usage and stated explicitly in words only
with difficulty and never completely. Writing, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the
potentiality of language almost beyond measure, restructures thought, and in the process
converts a certain few dialects into ‘grapholects’ (Haugen 1966; Hirsh 1977, pp. 43–8). A
grapholect is a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing.Writing gives a
grapholect a power far exceeding that of any purely oral dialect. The grapholect known as
standard English has accessible for use a recorded vocabulary of at least a million and a half
words, of which not only the present meanings but also hundreds of thousands of past meanings
are known. A simply oral dialect will commonly have resources of only a few thousand words,
and its users will have virtually no knowledge of the real semantic history of any of these
words. But, in all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and
lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound,
the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings. ‘Reading’ a text means converting it to
sound, aloud or in the imagination, syllable- by-syllable in slow reading or sketchily in the
rapid reading common to high-technology cultures. Writing can never dispense with orality.
Adapting a term used for slightly different purposes by Jurij Lotman (1977, pp. 21, 48–61; see
also Champagne 1977–8), we can style writing a ‘secondary modeling system’, dependent on
a prior primary system, spoken language. Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed
without any writing at all, writing never without orality. Yet, despite the oral roots of all
verbalization, the scientific and literary study of language and literature has for centuries, until
quite recent years, shied away from orality. Texts have clamored for attention so peremptorily
that oral creations have tended to be regarded generally as variants of written productions or,
if not this, as beneath serious scholarly attention. Only relatively recently have we become
impatient with our obtuseness here (Finnegan 1977, pp. 1–7). Language study in all but recent
decades has focused on written texts rather than on orality for a readily assignable reason: the
relationship of study itself to writing. All thought, including that in primary oral cultures, is to
some degree analytic: it breaks its materials into various components. But abstractly sequential,
classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without
writing and reading. Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any
form, learn a great deal and possess and practice great wisdom, but they do not ‘study’. They
learn by apprenticeship—hunting with experienced hunters, for example—by discipleship,
which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering
proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, by assimilating other formulary
materials, by participation in a kind of corporate retrospection—not by study in the strict sense.
When study in the strict sense of extended sequential analysis becomes possible with the
interiorization of writing, one of the first things that literates often study is language itself and
its uses. Speech is inseparable from our consciousness and it has fascinated human beings,
elicited serious reflection about itself, from the very early stages of consciousness, long before
writing came into existence. Proverbs from all over the world are rich with observations about
this overwhelmingly human phenomenon of speech in its native oral form, about its powers,
its beauties, its dangers. The same fascination with oral speech continues unabated for centuries
after writing comes into use. In the West among the ancient Greeks the fascination showed in
the elaboration of the vast, meticulously worked-out art of rhetoric, the most comprehensive
academic subject in all western culture for two thousand years. In its Greek original, techn
rhtorik ,‘speech art’ (commonly abridged to just rh torik ) referred essentially to oral speaking,
even though as a reflective, organized ‘art’ or science—for example, in Aristotle’s Art of
Rhetoric—rhetoric was and had to be a product of writing. Rh torik , or rhetoric, basically
meant public speaking or oratory, which for centuries even in literate and typographic cultures
remained unreflexively pretty much the paradigm of all discourse, including that of writing
(Ong 1967b, pp. 58–63; Ong 1971, pp. 27– 8). Thus writing from the beginning did not reduce
orality but enhanced it, making it possible to organize the ‘principles’ or constituents of oratory
into a scientific ‘art’, a sequentially ordered body of explanation that showed how and why
oratory achieved and could be made to achieve its various specific effects. But the speeches—
or any other oral performances—that were studied as part of rhetoric could hardly be speeches
as these were being orally delivered. After the speech was delivered, nothing of it remained to
work over. What you used for ‘study’ had to be the text of speeches that had been written
down—commonly after delivery and often long after (in antiquity it was not common practice
for any but disgracefully incompetent orators to speak from a text prepared verbatim in
advance—Ong 1967b, pp. 56–8). In this way, even orally composed speeches were studied not
asspeeches but as written texts. Moreover, besides transcription of oral performances such as
orations, writing eventually produced strictly written compositions, designed for assimilation
directly from the written surface. Such written compositions enforced attention to texts even
more, for truly written compositions came into being as texts only, even though many of them
were commonly listened to rather than silently read, from Livy’s histories to Dante’s Comedia
and beyond (Nelson 1976–7; Bäuml 1980; Goldin 1973; Cormier 1974; Ahern 1982).

DID YOU SAY ‘ORAL LITERATURE’?

The scholarly focus on texts had ideological consequences. With their attention directed to
texts, scholars often went on to assume, often without reflection, that oral verbalization was
essentially the same as the written verbalization they normally dealt with, and that oral art
forms were to all intents and purposes simply texts, except for the fact that they were not written
down. The impression grew that, apart from the oration (governed by written rhetorical rules),
oral art forms were essentially unskillful and not worth serious study. Not all, however, lived
by these assumptions. From the mid-sixteenth century on, a sense of the complex relationships
of writing and speech grew stronger (Cohen 1977). But the relentless dominance of textuality
in the scholarly mind is shown by the fact that to this day no concepts have yet been formed
for effectively, let alone gracefully, conceiving of oral art as such without reference, conscious
or unconscious, to writing. This is so even though the oral art forms which developed during
the tens of thousands of years before writing obviously had no connection with writing at all.
We have the term ‘literature’, which essentially means ‘writings’ (Latin literatura, from litera,
letter of the alphabet), to cover a given body of written materials—English literature, children’s
literature—but no comparably satisfactory term or concept to refer to a purely oral heritage,
such as the traditional oral stories, proverbs, prayers, formulaic expressions (Chadwick 1932–
40, passim), or other oral productions of, say, the Lakota Sioux in North America or the Mande
in West Africa or of the Homeric Greeks. As noted above, I style the orality of a culture totally
untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, ‘primary orality’. It is ‘primary’ by contrast
with the ‘secondary orality’ of present-day high-technology culture, in which a new orality is
sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their
existence and functioning on writing and print. Today primary oral culture in the strict sense
hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects. Still,
to varying degrees many cultures and subcultures, even in a high-technology ambiance,
preserve much of the mind-set of primary orality. The purely oral tradition or primary orality
is not easy to conceive of accurately and meaningfully. Writing makes ‘words’ appear similar
to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can
see and touch such inscribed ‘words’ in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral
tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an of ten-told oral story is not actually being
told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it. We (those who read
texts such as this) are for the most part so resolutely literate that we seldom feel comfortable
with a situation in which verbalization is so little thing-like as it is in oral tradition. As a result—
though at a slightly reduced frequency now—scholarship in the past has generated such
monstrous concepts as ‘oral literature’. This strictly
preposterous term remains in circulation today even among scholars now more and more
acutely aware how embarrassingly it reveals our inability to represent to our own minds a
heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they
have nothing to do with writing at all. The title of the great Milman Parry Collection of Oral
Literature at Harvard University monumentalizes the state of awareness of an earlier generation
of scholars rather than that of its recent curators. One might argue (as does Finnegan 1977, p.
16) that the term ‘literature’, though devised primarily for works in writing, has simply been
extended to include related phenomena such as traditional oral narrative in cultures untouched
by writing. Many originally specific terms have been so generalized in this way. But concepts
have a way of carrying their etymologies with them forever. The elements out of which a term
is originally built usually, and probably always, linger somehow in subsequent meanings,
perhaps obscurely but often powerfully and even irreducibly. Writing, moreover, as will be
seen later in detail, is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate
other things to itself even without the aid of etymologies. Though words are grounded in oral
speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person, asked to
think of the word ‘nevertheless’, will normally (and I strongly suspect always) have some
image, at least vague, of the spelled-out word and be quite unable ever to think of the word
‘nevertheless’ for, let us say, 60 seconds without adverting to any lettering but only to the
sound. This is to say, a literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely
oral people. In view of this pre-emptiveness of literacy, it appears quite impossible to use the
term ‘literature’ to include oral tradition and performance without subtly but irremediably
reducing these somehow to variants of writing. Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral
performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature’ is rather like thinking of horses as
automobiles without wheels. You can, of course, undertake to do this. Imagine writing a treatise
on horses (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of horse
but of ‘automobile’, built on the readers’ direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to
discourse on horses by always referring to them as ‘wheelless automobiles’, explaining to
highly automobilized readers who have never seen a horse all the points of difference in an
effort to excise all idea of ‘automobile’ out of the concept ‘wheelless automobile’ so as to
invest the term with a purely equine meaning. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles
have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes;
instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on.
In the end, horses are only what they are not. No matter how accurate and thorough such
apophatic description, automobile-driving readers who have never seen a horse and who hear
only of ‘wheelless automobiles’ would be sure to come away with a strange concept of a horse.
The same is true of those who deal in terms of ‘oral literature’, that is, ‘oral writing’. You
cannot without serious and disabling distortion describe a primary phenomenon by starting
with a subsequent secondary phenomenon and paring away the differences. Indeed, starting
backwards in this way—putting the car before the horse—you can never become aware of the
real differences at all. Although the term ‘preliterate’ itself is useful and at times necessary, if
used unreflectively it also presents problems which are the same as those presented by the term
‘oral literature’, if not quite so assertive. ‘Preliterate’ presents orality—the ‘primary modeling
system’—as an anachronistic deviant from the ‘secondary modeling system’ that followed it.
In concert with the terms ‘oral literature’ and ‘preliterate’, we hear mention also of the ‘text’
of an oral utterance. ‘Text’, from a root meaning ‘to weave’, is, in absolute terms, more
compatible etymologically with oral utterance than is ‘literature’, which refers to letters
etymologically/(literae) of the alphabet. Oral discourse has commonly been thought of even in
oral milieus as weaving or stitching—rhaps idein, to ‘rhapsodize’, basically means in Greek
‘to stitch songs together’. But in fact, when literates today use the term ‘text’ to refer to oral
performance, they are thinking of it by analogy with writing. In the literate’s vocabulary, the
‘text’ of a narrative by a person from a primary oral culture represents a back-formation: the
horse as an automobile without wheels again. Given the vast difference between speech and
writing, what can be done to devise an alternative for the anachronistic and self-contradictory
term ‘oral literature’? Adapting a proposal made by Northrop Frye for epic poetry in The
Anatomy of Criticism (1957,pp. 248–50, 293–303), we might refer to all purely oral art as
‘epos’, which has the same Proto-IndoEuropean root, wekw-, as the Latin word vox and its
English equivalent ‘voice’, and thus is grounded firmly in the vocal, the oral. Oral
performances would thus be felt as ‘voicings’, which is what they are. But the more usual
meaning of the term epos, (oral) epic poetry (see Bynum 1967), would somewhat interfere with
an assigned generic meaning referring to all oral creations. ‘Voicings’ seems to have too many
competing associations, though if anyone thinks the term buoyant enough to launch, I will
certainly aid efforts to keep it afloat. But we would still be without a more generic term to
include both purely oral art and literature. Here I shall continue a practice common among
informed persons and resort, as necessary, to self-explanatory circumlocutions—‘purely oral
art forms’, Verbal art forms’ (which would include both oral forms and those composed
in writing, and everything in between), and the like. At present the term ‘oral literature’ is,
fortunately, losing ground, but it may well be that any battle to eliminate it totally will never
be completely won. For most literates, to think of words as totally dissociated from writing is
simply too arduous a task to undertake, even when specialized linguistic or anthropological
work may demand it. The words keep coming to you in writing, no matter what you do.
Moreover, to dissociate words from writing is psychologically threatening, for literates’ sense
of control over language is closely tied to the visual transformations of language: without
dictionaries, written grammar rules, punctuation, and all the rest of the apparatus that makes
words into something you can ‘look’ up, how can literates live? Literate users of a grapholect
such as standard English have access to vocabularies hundreds of times larger than any oral
language can manage. In such a linguistic world dictionaries are essential. It is demoralizing to
remind oneself that there is no dictionary in the mind, that lexicographical apparatus is a very
late accretion to language as language, that all languages have elaborate grammars and have
developed their elaborations with no help from writing at all, and that outside of relatively
hightechnology cultures most users of languages have always got along pretty well without any
visual transformations whatsoever of vocal sound. Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and
beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even
possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human
consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful
creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. Literacy,
as will be seen, is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of
history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the
explanation of language (including oral speech) itself There is hardly an oral culture or a
predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast
complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons
rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that
moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and
deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living. Fortunately, literacy,
though it consumes its own oral antecedents and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys
their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too. Literacy can be
used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at
all—at least to reconstruct this consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly (we can never
forget enough of our familiar present to reconstitute in our minds any past in its full integrity).
Such reconstruction can bring a better understanding of what literacy itself has meant in
shaping man’s consciousness toward and in high-technology cultures. Such understanding of
both orality and literacy is what this book, which is of necessity a literate work and not an oral
performance, attempts in some degree to achieve.