English 766

Dr. Kenneth Sherwood

4 October 2005

Leon Stennis

Literacy Needs Orality and Vice Versa

The question of which is the most powerful in literature, orality or literacy, came to mind as I read the readings for this week. The question is akin to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I stress akin because the analogies do not have total similarity.

What this week’s reading assignments from Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales, Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Dennis Tedlock’s The Spoken Word, and John Miles Foley’s “How to Read an Oral Poem” prove is that both orality and literacy are important in literature. They compliment or supplement each other and serve in ways that the other cannot.

When I use caution with the work akin in talking about the similarity of the chicken vs. egg argument and the orality vs. literary argument, it is because the similarity centers on the fact that both arguments tend to deal with what is most important. The two arguments become dissimilar on the “which came first” question. With the chicken and egg analogy the debate can go on forever. That is not so on the orality and literacy analogy issue. We all know that orality came first. However, on the question of “which is most important,” the debate on orality and literacy could go on forever too.

Fortunately, the readings provide some powerful ammunition for both sides of the orality vs. literacy debate. They tend to neutralize my position on the issue to the point that I swing back and forth, depending on which medium of communication I am more involved with at the time.

I agree with the statements about the principles of oral form made by Milman Perry and used by Lord in his introduction. “…They would be a starting point for a comparative study of oral poetry which sought to see how the way of life of a people gives rise to a poetry of a given kind and a given degree of excellence,” Perry said (1). “They would be useful in the study of the great poems which have come down to us as lonely relics of a dim past. We would know how to work backwards from their form so as to learn how they must have been made.” Without a study of the principles of oral form we could not have learned so much about the epic poetry of Homer and the other classic poets, Native American poetry, etc?

I found particularly interesting Lord’s statement about the use of writing and “setting down” oral texts. “The use of writing in setting down oral texts does not per se have any effect on oral tradition. It is a means of recording. The texts thus obtained are in a sense special…” he said. (128). “…They are not those of a normal performance, yet that are purely oral, and at their best they are finer that those of normal performance. They are not `transitional,’ but are in a class by themselves.” This helps to debunk the notion that writing or literacy has superiority over orality. As Lord shows in this case, writing is a supplement; it compliments the work of the recorder of oral traditions.

My belief that both orality and literary have powerful roles to play in literature is also supported by Ong in Orality and Literacy when he refers to a statement by Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics. “Writing, he (de Saussure) noted, has simultaneously ‘usefulness, shortcomings and dangers.’ Still, he thought of writing as a kind of compliment to oral speech, not a transformer of verbalization,” Ong wrote (5). Ong demonstrates the power of oral communication in oral performances with an example. “When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity with themselves and with the speaker,” he writes (73). “If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again.”

The value of oral performance in learning about extinct or nearly extinct cultures is high, but it is also time consuming as Miles indicates in his “How to Read and Oral Poem.” He notes that the undertaking of a transcription of an accurate or precise work to illustrate or demonstrate an oral culture is no small task. “To take realistic account of the diversity of oral poetry and the crucial importance of context, the ‘how’ must involve a variety of perspectives, not one but many nontexual approaches…” he said (81). “…We need a full menu of methods, a collection of perspectives that will allow us to understand the whole range of Oral Performances, Voice Texts, Voices form the Past, and Written Oral Poetry,”

As Dennis Tedlock indicates in his introduction to The Spoken Word, sound and its effectiveness is also a very important ingredient in making oral performances authentic and credible. “It is not only the voice of the storyteller that is set free by sound recording, but also the ear of the mythographer he said” (1-2). “Even as the story is being told, the ear already takes in a broader spectrum of sounds than the anxious ear that tried to hear how each word might be spelled.” Tedlock also notes that gestures by the performer can affect the quality of an oral performer, both negatively and positively. “We might still draw a hard line between voice and gesture, but the fact that bodily movement can affect sound of the voice is only the beginning of the problem with distraction,” he said (9).

While we as Americans are a very literate society that benefits from all of the benefits of both orality and literacy it is not always easy to remember the value of orality to societies that have little or no literacy or those societies that are not as literate as ours. I think that is the case because we sometimes forget how much of the world is not literate. In addition to being reminded of that number, the readings for this week help us understand better the value of oral literature and oral performances, and to have a better appreciation for how oral traditions are preserved through to performances and transcriptions.

Fortunately, as Ong suggests, there is still a lot we can learn from oral cultures, both past and present. “The more sophisticated orally patterned thought is the more it is likely to be marked by set expressions skillfully used,” he said (35). “This is true of oral cultures generally from those of Homeric Greece to those of the present day across the globe.”