Review of Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.

The Transition from Orate to Literate Cultures

About 3,500 years ago human beings around the world began to organize themselves into social systems that relied heavily on technological ingenuity. Historians and anthropologists have described this time period as a series of various "shifts," from the "magical" to the "scientific," or from the "pre-logical" to the "rational," even from the "savage" to the "domesticated." These "shifts," Walter Ong argues in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, may be best understood as transitions from oral cultures to literate ones. Because of the inherent chirographic and typographic bias of their text-based disciplines, in which significance is associated with what is seen and not heard, written and not spoken, historians and anthropologists have been slow to recognize that concomitant with all these cultural "shifts" is the gradual usurpation of oral modes of communication by the "technology" of writing.

In fact, the word "text" (derived from a word meaning "to weave") is actually more compatible with oral utterance than with literature (which derives from the word for alphabetic letters, literae). Oral discourse is often thought of in terms of weaving or stitching. The Greek word rhapsoidein (rhapsodize) means "to stitch songs together." (p. 13) Borrowing heavily from each other, poets in primary oral cultures recalled and repeated formulas of popular rhythmic patterns and themes to rhapsodize songs. The poet(s?) Homer, like all oral poets whose songs and storytelling gave birth to literature, had an "abundant repertoire of epithets diversified enough for any metrical exigency that might arise as he stitched his story together." (21)

The clichéd elements, consistent characterization, and impeccable structure of the Iliad and Odyssey are what gave many the impression that they were the creations of a single author. But as Milman Parry pointed out in a 1928 dissertation on the subject, the "literary" style of both epics suggest an economy enforced by oral methods of composition. Formulaic thought patterns are essential for wisdom and effective administration in oral cultures. Oral rhyme schemes help commit ideas to memory. The force of these poems lies in their residual orality (24).

Writing and Print

What Ong calls the technology of writing transformed human consciousness. Not only did it allow for the representation of words as signs, it gave a linear shape to thought and provided a critical framework within which to think analytically. He concurs with Eric A. Havelock's position that the beginnings of Greek philosophy were bound to the restructuring of thought brought about by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic displays a rejection of the old, warm, mobile, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture "in favor of keen analysis and dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorization of the Greek alphabet." Plato's term "idea" (eidos, form or model) is, like writing, visually based and derives from the same root as the Latin "video," which means "to see" (80). His philosopher-kings were "seers" more than speakers.

From its genesis, the technology of writing helped stratify societies and was associated with a privileged elite. The earliest writing systems--Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics--were the property of priests. Ong argues that writing, by abstractly separating the knower from the known, "is capable of interiorizing the self against whom the objective world is set." Is it any wonder that "the great introspective religious traditions"--Hinduism, Judeo-Christianity, Islam--"are text-based?" (105). The literate segments of populations, those who could read and interpret "The Word," assumed an occult power that elevated their status and helped to disseminate the texts upon which that power was based.

While democratizing what was once exclusively the property of privileged classes, the invention of the printing press in 1436 furthered writing's distance from the sound-world to the world of visual space. But this is a totalizing space: "Control of position is everything in print," Ong argues. ""We are impressed by its tidiness and inevitability: perfectly regular lines, justification, symmetrical margins" (122). Print (or typography), by commodifying writing, created a sense of the private property of words. The uncited borrowing of another's words that was the stuff of communal oral cultures became a sin called "plagiarism." Copyright laws, first introduced in London in 1557, are the modern world's response to the threat of intellectual theft.

What Ong calls "the interiorization of print" allows for an emphasis on introspection. Hence, the flat characters of oral cultures are replaced by the round characters worshipped by literate ones. Ong suggests that "the development of modern depth psychology parallels the development of the character in drama and the novel, both depending on the inward turning of the psyche produced by writing and intensified by print" (154-5). In the 20th century especially, the "literary" novel's association with the genre of realism was widely perceived as natural; novels that were not "realistic" were relegated to the ranks of science fiction, fantasy, and other popular genres.

Why not an Orate Education?

While not central to the book, Ong's study has pedagogical implications. Because literacy standards remain the benchmark for assessing student performance, it is possible for remarkably gifted but "orate" students to fall to the wayside. And yet, orality has not been usurped by literacy completely and still plays an important role in high-tech societies where success is often associated with vocal and communicative savvy. Clearly, a high premium is placed on the ability to express oneself orally in Western culture. School systems, however, continue to operate on the assumption that facility with skills essential to writing and reading (and, hence, "critical thinking") are the highest achievements of education. Ong's study warrants a critical examination of such assumptions.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (New Accent Series, Terrence Hawkes, ed.) New York: Routledge, 1982.