How Writing Changed Us: Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong (1982)

Walter Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982) A careful survey of the state of orality studies, or better, the study of spoken language. Since the 80s, the field has proliferated, with increasing emphasis on how we generate speech in different contexts. That spoken and written language were different was obvious. What was less obvious was that the written language was not the superior mode. In fact, spoken language, exhibiting as it does the vagaries of regional and class dialects, was often deprecated as a primitive and even degraded form of the proper language as recorded in writing.
      Ong does not attack this attitude directly, but shows that an oral culture uses language differently than a literate one. He’s concerned that literate readers of the earliest writings aren’t aware enough that these are records of oral compositions, and hence of oral modes. He does a wonderful job of describing and explaining how people without writing construct(ed) their songs, stories and orations using standard tropes and repetitive patterns as scaffolds for building the performance in real time, and certainly each time adapted to whatever audience listened to them. What Homer memorised was not an unbroken stream of thousands of lines of verse, but pieces of the story, which (he) would select, adapt, and reconstruct. Ong’s evidence is both field work by anthropologists who recorded the myths and histories of non-literate peoples, and also the bits of speech embedded in the epics as recorded.
     Ong (and his fellow scholars) go a step or two further. They claim that literacy changes the way we understand the world. What’s written is read, not heard. The text takes precedence over the writer, and eventually become detached from the writer. When we read old books, we read them as independent and objective witnesses to the past, often not realising how much we reconstruct a text, any text, as we read it. Hence the mistaken belief that we can understand the “literal meaning” of a text.  In an oral culture, speech and speaker are one: the story exists only while it is being spoken, and the relation between the audience and the speaker’s utterance is personal, immediate, and fleeting. A written text preserves what was though and understood generations before us. A speech exists only while it’s spoken, and memory of what the now dead ancestors thought and understood is reinterpreted every time it’s spoken. Written law can be consulted. Spoken law depends on trust in the speaker. Grasping the difference between the oral and the written may help us understand why so many of our present day conflicts are about what words signify. We tend to believe that if we understand the text we understand reality, and if we understand reality, we know the truth.
     I found the book heavy going at times, and have already begun to re-read it. Ong’s style is clear, and he has nice dry wit. His observations cast a new light on the effects of electronic media. The Wiki article on him adds a great deal to my comments.
     Recommended. ****