"The Delicatest Ear of the Mind"

The phrase is Wallace Stevens's and I appropriate it to remind us that we too easily and too eagerly blind that ear. We teach the eye to see and to forget that prior to vision the call must sound. But the eye seeing sees all; it locates meaning and fixes it with steady gaze. When the eye leads, the ear learns to hear one meaning alone and it is this, Stevens tells us, "to be destitute". To hear one meaning, however, is as attractive as innocence; indeed, it is innocence. To lose this innocence is to open the ear to voices of the past, as well as to those of the present, to find saving grace in the gaiety of language, in the ability to create worlds of meaning, to form words whose sounds echo and re-echo in the mind's ear. But we resist this loss of innocence, pressure the ear into hearing one voice, one meaning, one version of the way things are. This resistance finds strength in the printed word which strikes the eye more forcefully than the ear. Reading more often than not is silent reading in which the ear need not, consciously at least, participate. Voice is in danger of becoming what Walter Ong calls a "soundless code on the printed page" (1977, 294) where the word is disengaged from actuality. To see words on a page is to separate them, to be separate from them, whereas to hear words is to participate. Oral speech is participatory speech.

It is for this reason that Robert Leeson, in Reading and Righting, locates in the ancient storytelling tradition his model for what story can and should do: bring us together, old and young, male and female. Leeson argues that the printed word has narrowed the audience for story, and that without reaching out to a broad popular audience literature will find it difficult, if not impossible, to survive. The writer's problem is that he or she is distanced from his or her audience, and print turns the story "from a service into a commodity." This "gives the writer a freedom and independence which are also isolation and alienation" (161). The interchange between storyteller and listener which was "alive and creative" becomes "confused, problematic, sometimes oppressive with the printed word" (162). He finds optimism, however, in the "growth of alternative publishing, of black, feminist, and community projects" and in the "return of writers to the ancient role of storyteller, travelling round the schools, not only telling stories but encouraging the next generation to write their own" (14). T.V. too, he tells us, marks a return to "the oral tradition" (184).

It may be true that T.V. has "picked up strands from our earliest lives: acting, talking, dancing and singing which all belong to the oral tradition" (184), but it is also true that T.V. is a powerful force in the termination of the voice as so many works of science fiction (the recent film Robo Cop offers an example in its satiric versions of the T.V. news and the T.V. commercial) point out. T.V., like the computer terminal, is a means of storing knowledge just as the book has been for the past five hundred years. The voices that speak to us from such terminals are voices terminated-artificial, simulated voices, rather than living unmediated voices. Perhaps the most bizarre example of this is the T.V. commercial in which a crowd of young people stare entranced at a large computer screen from which the disembodied head of Max Headroom speaks of the thrill of Coca-Cola. He exhorts the cheering crowd to "Catch the Wave." This has the illusion of orality, the illusion of communal participation in an oral "happening." "Catch the Wave," however, is a slogan, not an oral formula which functions as a retrieval device. As Ong points out, "The formulary devices of a primary oral culture are conservative devices, ordered to the treasuring and use of hard-earned lore. Slogans, by contrast, are typically action-oriented, fitted to short-term goals" (1971, 299). Once Max's commercial...