Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

In oral cultures, thought processes are limited by the necessity of recollection. If complex knowledge is not remembered then it can never be recalled or verified and is worthless. Communication with an interlocutor is a necessary component of memory in oral cultures, but even that does not suffice to preserve knowledge unless that knowledge is itself memorable. Thinking must therefore be done in mnemonic patterns, which are often rhythmic and poetic, and by using rhetorical strategies and familiar formulas. Ong states that words are a type of formula, and just as wordless thoughts are neither memorable nor communicable, so too are thoughts lacking the more elaborate formulas of orality useless within an oral society. Formulas and proverbs are the building blocks of sophisticated and memorable oral thought patterns because they are repeated back and forth within oral communities, aiding recall and retention of the wisdom they represent. In oral cultures worldwide, wisdom and justice in legal matters rely on the skillful application and adaptation of universal proverbs.

Ong provides an inventory of some of the characteristics of the mnemonic-based thought found in oral cultures.

1)  Additive rather than subordinative

Subordination features heavily in literate thought and sentence structure, whereas oral thought structures and speech patterns tend more toward the additive.

2)  Aggregative rather than analytic

A common format of aggregate in oral cultures is the epithet composed of an adjective followed by a noun. Such standard epithets are established cumulatively over generations in an oral culture, and because they are memorable, they resist any analysis or alteration that could undermine them.

3)  Redundant or ‘copious’

Ong states that orality necessitates a greater focus on reiteration and repetition in thought. In public speaking, redundancy allows the audience to better comprehend and remember the speaker’s words. Such repeated “copia” also allows the speaker to maintain a flow of words without hesitating or faltering as they progress.

4)  Conservative or traditionalist

According to Ong, the need to repeat established wisdom in order to preserve it in oral cultures naturally leads to mindsets that are traditional and conservative. Writing takes over conservative mnemonic functions, freeing the mind for analysis, speculation, and innovation.

5)  Close to the human lifeworld

Knowledge and thought is kept close to relatable everyday experiences in oral cultures, as the means to retain abstract or uncontextualized information does not exist. Skills are passed on through apprenticeship, observation, and practice.

6)  Agonistically toned

Orality is closely connected with conflict and struggle not only because of the hardships inherent to many oral cultures, but because the mode of communication naturally invites interaction, opposition, and contradiction. Oral narratives often celebrate violence and focus on external matters and interpersonal relationships. Such agonistic dynamics are key to Western culture, institutionalized as they were long past the introduction of literacy by the art of rhetoric.

7)  Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced

According to Ong, the lack of distance between speaker and audience prohibits objectivity, and the communal nature of oral artforms naturally creates a strong connection with the characters of a narrative. The lack of distance often manifests grammatically, with tellers of The Mwindo Epic for example often switching to the first person perspective.

8)  Homeostatic

In oral cultures, recollection of past events shifts to suit the needs of the present; recitations that do not please current audiences are dropped and forgotten, and historical facts change to match the realities of current society. Without dictionaries to track the etymologies and histories of word forms, vocabularies solely consist of words as they are presently used.

9)  Situational rather than abstract

Operational thought is the predominant cognitive characteristic of oral peoples, in contrast with the abstract thought preferred by literate peoples. Ong notes that A. R. Luria’s Cognitive Development explores this dichotomy in more depth using Luria’s fieldwork with remote oral societies of the USSR.

Verbal memory was important in oral cultures, although as Milman Parry (1902-1935) posited and Albert Lord (1912-1991) further explored, memorization in oral cultures was very rarely done through verbatim repetition. Fieldwork around the world, and particularly with the oral bards of the Balkan region, illustrate the difference between primary oral memorization and that of literate peoples.

According to Ong, the personality structures of people from oral cultures are generally more communal and extroverted than those of literate people. This likely stems from the introspective, individualistic nature of literate activities, such as reading and writing, and shows in the tendency of oral people to externalize schizoid behaviors while literate people tend to internalize. Oral cultures generally place significant focus on speech and convert most interactions into agonistic clashes as though every conversation were a verbal spar. For instance, in the residual oral culture of Cork, Ireland, it is traditional always to answer a question with another question. Such oral cultures can be described as “Verbomotor”—that is to say, reliant on person-to-person interaction rather than nonverbal and objective visual input. Ong adds that even post-oral cultures can have enough residue from oral cultures to retain the verbomotor “person-interactive” style rather than the “object-attentive” approach of modern literate cultures.

Type figures known as “heavy characters” feature significantly in oral narratives. Frequently these are important heroic characters doing memorable public deeds. There are many reasons and influences contributing to this feature of oral narratives, such as the lifestyle and values of oral communities. A major factor is the mnemonic needs of oral noetic processes. According to Ong, outsized heroic figures, groups of like characters, and bizarre monsters all feature heavily in oral narratives worldwide because their presence contributes to the economic organization of narrative elements and the memorability of the narrative. Early works of literate cultures such as fairy tales retain such elements. After three centuries of print culture, English literature has developed beyond the need for heavy characters to mobilize knowledge through their stories, tending instead toward more complex characters such as antiheroes and everyday protagonists.

Ong states that the psychodynamics of orality are influenced by the unique interiority of sound compared with the other senses. Sound is the most unifying and immersive sense, placing the listener at the center of their sensory landscape all at once and incorporating the person’s speech into the noise of their surroundings. According to Ong, one major orality-literacy contrast comes from the fact that chirographic cultures focus on the analytic sense of sight, while oral cultures focus on sound. People from primary oral cultures therefore think in a more holistic and personal manner, whereas people from literate cultures think in a more abstract and impersonal way.

Spoken words have the effect of unifying their audience into a close knit whole, observes Ong. On a larger scale, a shared language is similarly able to unify its speakers into a community group. The spoken word is often also associated with the spiritual, retaining an important role in religious ceremonies and dogma long past the introduction of writing and the creation of sacred texts.

Words are only considered “signs” in literate cultures, as such a visual analogy doesn’t naturally appeal without writing. Real signs are motifs and images, like the symbols of the zodiac or a power button, and people from oral cultures are generally unconvinced by comparisons between words—for them a sound-based action—and signs. Just as pinning down so ephemeral a concept as time into discrete and manageable segments of visual space through technologies like calendars and clocks is useful and comforting in everyday life, so too does the envisaging of words as signs function for literate people. Ong adds, however, that uncritical loyalty to this flawed analogy is limiting, and a difficult bias to deconstruct.