We interact with Homer as a text--and a printed text, not a handwritten one. I've got his poems sitting on a shelf about five feet away from me right now. Yet the poems themselves are not texts, not written objects, but spoken; the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed and performed orally, and then somehow translated into a written form which still bears traces of orality. We often think we understand the nature of oral epics (a bard with a very powerful memory recites a poem he has memorized) but we're wrong: the bard doesn't recite the poem, but re-creates it, assembling the narrative as he goes along, using a store of formulaic epithets, formulaic plot structures, and formulaic characters to generate a coherent whole. No two recitations of the Iliad were ever identical (a researcher in South Africa found only 60% correlation between multiple epic recitations by the same bard!), and even the sequence of events might shift from one telling to another. The epic must be loosely plotted, for precisely this reason. As Ong suggests, an oral epic with the tight plotting of a modern detective novel would fall apart if the smallest detail were forgotten (and would be impossible to pass on from generation to generation)
The act of reciting oral poetry, then, has very little to do with the line-by-line way modern schoolkids memorize poems. Instead, it's similar to the procedural generation techniques used in older computer games like Rogue and Diablo, and newer ones like Spore, Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress: the bard has completely internalized a set of rules which will allow him to assemble phrases and plot elements into a complete story. This procedural generation of knowledge doesn't just characterize the oral epic; it's a feature of oral thought as well. Ethical knowledge is encoded, not in holy books, but in short proverbs which can be combined into longer discussions on morality; genealogies are not stored in lists with dates (as in the small green book my family owns which traces my maternal grandmother's line back to the 15th century), but in a series of "A begat B, and B begat C" operations, which allow the genealogist to begin with Adam and arrive at Abraham--but not, necessarily, to simply open the book of memory to Methuselah in the way that I can open the small green book and learn the name of my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother.
The challenge of oral culture is that all knowledge must be stored in the mind, and the only possible solution is, as Ong puts it, to "Think memorable thoughts." He goes on: "In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence. Your thought must come into being in heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in alliterations and assonances, in epithetic and other formulary expressions". The form of oral thought determines its content, much in the same way as writing, or print, or electronic media, changes the ways in which we're capable of thinking.
Plato, for example, although he expresses some anxiety about the ways that writing destroys human memory, is unable to prevent his literacy from inflecting his work. His dialogues are really faux-dialogues, "imitations", to use a loaded term, of philosophical discussions that could never have been transmitted orally (this is why the surviving words of pre-Socratic philosophers exist only in short proverb-like fragments; a would-be analytic philosopher in the year 1000 BC simply lacked the tools to pass his hard-won analytic knowledge to future generations). In the Republic Plato characterizes Homer as not "capable of knowledge", as having "no contact with the truth", but he doesn't realize that oral poetry is, like clay tablets and parchment, a medium through which cultures transmit information.
The oral poem is a repository of ancestral knowledge, but it's hardly a stable medium. Oral cultures are constantly in flux, constantly adapting to changing situations, says Ong, and it's this focus on the present which, paradoxically, allows members of primarily oral cultures to firmly believe that they have not tampered with the traditions of the ancestors. Here are two examples of how quickly orality can adapt:
Some decades ago among the Tiv people of Nigeria the genealogies actually used orally in settling court disputes have been found to diverge considerably from the genealogies carefully recorded in writing by the British forty years earlier (because of their importance then, too, in court disputes). The later Tiv have maintained that they were using the same genealogies as forty years earlier and that the earlier written records were wrong. What had happened was that the later genealogies had been adjusted to the changed social relations among the Tiv: they were the same in that they functioned in the same way to regulate the real world. The integrity of the past was subordinate to the integrity of the present.And in Ghana:
Written records made by the British at the turn of the twentieth century show that Gonja oral tradition then presented Ndewura Jakpa, the founder of the state of Gonja, as having had seven sons, each of whom was ruler of one of the seven territorial divisions of the state. By the time sixty years later when the myths of state were again recorded, two of the seven divisions had disappeared, one by assimilation to another division, and the other by reason of a boundary shift. In these later myths, Ndewura Jakpa had five sons, and no mention was made of the two extinct divisions. The Gonja were still in contact with their past, tenacious about this contact in their myths, but the part of the past with no immediately discernible relevance to the present had simply fallen awayMembers of oral cultures insist that they merely repeat the traditions handed down to them, but their knowledge is intensely conditioned by the present, and by the community in which they're immersed. Writing (and print and, later, electronic culture) allows us to detect some of these changes; in the absence of writing, however, changes would not "exist" because they could never be observed. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody writes it down, will we be able to say 100 years from now that the tree fell?
There's a couple ways I could close this post. Ong writes in pre-Internet days, and it would be fascinating to examine his ideas in the context of the digital ecosystems we inhabit. There's some amazing stuff in Orality and Literacy about the way writing, and especially print, transforms the word from a sound (for Plato, on the threshold between eras, poetry is still "heard") to an object, something which can be seen (as in avant-garde poetry). Does the Internet continue this process, or transform the word into something entirely new? I could also discuss some of the religious implications of Ong's book. To stick to my own religious tradition: just about everything the Bible says about Jesus, with the exception of the theological content of the epistles, spent several decades in oral form before codification. If the written word has an oral foundation, how ought we to interact with the Bible? And if Christ is the word of God, is he primarily spoken or written?
Instead of following either of these paths, I'd like to return to something I wrote on this blog half a year ago:
It's easy enough to (mostly) transition away from digital books and digital music. The hard step--the impossible step, to be honest--will be to internalize the books and CDs that I own. I've already taken ownership of this stuff (it's no longer data on my hard drive, but real physical objects that take up space on my shelves), but I want to remember it better, to return in some way to a pre-literate memory. I want to be able to close my eyes and see the structure of Don Quijote laid out in front of me. I want Shakespearean soliloquies, Bible verses, and Radiohead in my mind, not on my bookshelf. I want to read and listen, but I want even more to write and sing.Reading Orality and Literacy made me realize that my idea of orality, as expressed in that post, was a bit naive. I was assuming that, in oral culture, cultural artifacts exist inside the mind--inside a given mind, as if a human being's mind were a book or a hard drive. I wasn't sufficiently aware of the the importance of communal memory, as an always-flawed attempt to fix and transmit knowledge. The community is equally important in the preservation of written texts, or printed or digital ones: if a text isn't part of a community's conversation, it will slowly fade out of existence. The written word fades much more slowly than the spoken word, but it too is transient. In the long haul, texts which are forgotten will slowly rot away (as H. G. Wells foresaw) and websites deemed irrelevant will cease to be hosted; research libraries and web archives are only able to exist under particular political and economic conditions, which are not likely to be eternal.
Ong is right to respect oral culture, to try to find a way to describe it on its own terms, without resorting to unhelpful terms like "illiteracy". He's also right to recognize that the movement from oral to written culture, and from written to print and print to digital, drastically restructures human thought. Ultimately, though, our technological advances, as tremendous as they are, don't change the fact that knowledge--all of the knowledge we have and will ever develop--arises out of, and is shaped and maintained and transmitted by, the communities to which we belong. It's not enough, then, to have Cervantes or Shakespeare or Bradbury in my mind. "Internalizing" culture is good, but if experiences aren't shared, do they really exist?
0 comments:
Post a Comment