On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy

It is only fair to attribute the popularity of the terms orality and literacy in many branches of humanistic studies to Walter Ong. His publication, in 1982, of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, marks a significant stage in the conceptual study of oral tradition, and especially of its relation to other traditions of communication and signification. However, while the contrastive procedure in Orality and Literacy etched in stark relief some of what Ong considered fundamental differences between the oral and written, some markedly similar submissions had been made by him in his earlier works, notably The Presence of the Word (1967) and Interfaces of the Word (1977). To that extrent—and this does not detract from the eminence of their author or the timeliness of the ideas—the arguments of the later work do not represent such a radically novel thesis as we have seemed inclined to think in the last decade and a half.

More than this, the binarism represented by the contrast of the two terms transcends the question of alternative media or modes of communication. Ong's arguments hinge on the cultural differences that arise from, and are symbolized by, the two communicative orders. For this reason, it is useful to sketch the terminological history of orality and literacy as a binary complex. This has indeed partly been done by Ong himself, who admits his indebtedness principally to Eric Havelock, Milman Parry, and Albert Lord (Presence 17-110; Interfaces 92-120 and 272-302; Orality and Literacy 6-30). According to him, Parry's philological inquiries revolutionized Homeric studies and resolved, once for all, the age-old Homeric question. For Parry found that "the distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition" (Ong, Orality and Literacy 21). Metrical exigencies and the constraints of human memory compelled the oral poet to take recourse to formulae, standardized themes, epithetic expressions, stock or "heavy" characters, and a copious and repetitive style. These findings by Parry were later confirmed and extended by Lord's study of contemporary Balkan epic poets in his well-known The Singer of Tales (1960). But it is to Havelock that Ong owes his elaboration of the consequences of the acquisition of literacy by the oral poet and an oral culture.

In a more recent essay, Havelock, while acknowledging the primacy and necessity of oral language, restated the revolutionary impact of literacy on Greek society and Western civilization—much the same point he had made in Preface to Plato (1963), Origins of Western Literacy (1976), and The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982). The Greek alphabet, he argues, was unique and infinitely superior to earlier Egyptian, Sumerian, and Phoenician writing systems because it "provided an exhaustive table of atomic elements of acoustic sound that by diverse combinations could represent the molecules, so to speak, of linguistic speech" ("Oral-Literate Equation" 25). The importance of its introduction into Greek society lies in its enhanced storage and retrieval capacity—a function earlier served primitively by oral poetic rhythm. Another consequence was the replacement of the narrative, activist, agent-oriented syntax of Homeric poetry, with a "reflective syntax of definition, description, and analysis," which, according to Havelock, is typified by Platonic prose ("Oral-Literate Equation" 25). This was not a mere stylistic shift. On the contrary, it embodied a change in the psychological preconditions of the act and process of communication. In other words, it resulted in alterations in the organization and operation of the human consciousness. Therefore, it is not surprising that Havelock attributes to this shift the advances of Western knowledge and civilization. As he explicitly states, "Without modern literacy, which means Greek literacy, we would not have science, philosophy, written law or literature, nor the automobile or the airplane" ("Oral-Literate Equation" 24).

If the claims made by Havelock jar on us as somewhat extravagant, the support lent...