Review of Walter J.

Ong's Orality and Literacy

Reviewed by Art Bingham

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed.
Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).

This book was first printed in1982 and then reprinted five times. References to page numbers in
this report are from the 1988 reprint.

About the author

Walter J. Ong, born in 1912, received his B.A. from Rockhurst College in 1933, his M. A. from
St. Louis University in1941, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955. He joined the
faculty of St. Louis University as a professor of English and French in1959, and later became a
professor of Humanities in Psychiatry in1970, holding all three positions until his retirement. He
is well- known in the field of rhetoric for his work on Petrus Ramus and also for the subject
matter of this book, how the shift from primary orality to literacy dramatically changes the way
humans think.

General overview of the book

Ong pulls together two decades of work by himself and others on the differences between
primary oral cultures, those that do not have a system of writing, and chirographic (i.e., writing)
cultures to look at how the shift from an oral-based stage of consciousness to one dominated by
writing and print changes the way we humans think. His approach to the subject is both
synchronic in that he looks at cultures that coexist at a certain point in time, and diachronic in
that he discusses the change in the West from being oral-based to chirographic which began with
the appearance of script some 6,000 years ago. In addition to pinpointing fundamental
differences in the thought processes of the two types of culture, he comments on the current
emergence in Western society of what he calls a second orality. This second orality, dominated
by electronic modes of communication (e.g., television and telephones), incorporates elements
from both the chirographic mode and the orality mode which has been subordinant for some
time.

The Organization of the book

The chapter titles, and especially the subtitles, suggest that the book can be roughly divided into
three parts for which the intended audience is anyone unfamiliar with the notion of primary
orality. Ong devotes the first three chapters of seven to "th ought and its verbal expression in oral
culture" something which he admits is likely to seem "strange and at times bizarre" since we are
so immersed in our own literate culture (1). In the next three chapters, 4 through 6, he discusses
"literate thought and expression in terms of their emergence from and relation to orality" (1).
Finally, in chapter 7, he suggests that in the future knowledge of the differences between orality
and literacy might produce new and interesting insights into our interpretati on of various kinds
of literature, and enrich already familiar types of literary criticism.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter One: The orality of language

In this chapter Ong briefly outlines some of the research that had been done by himself and other
scholars to describe the differences between oral and literate cultures. He defines the oral culture
to which he refers in this book as one where people ar e totally unfamiliar with writing. He
reminds us that these primary oral cultures are actually in the majority and that from a historical
standpoint writing is a relatively recent development; even among the 3,000 or so languages
which currently exist on ly 78 have a literature (page 7, from Edmonson 1971, 323, 332). Our
membership in a society as completely committed to writing and print as ours has made it
necessary for him, and others, to describe primary orality in relation to literacy. This necessi ty,
he says, led to the use of such preposterous terms as ‘oral literature,' one which "reveals our
inability to represent to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some
variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do wit h writing at all" (11).
Chapter Two: The modern discovery of primary oral cultures

Ong devotes most of his second chapter to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and
Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry's
investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Hom eric poetry, Ong states that
we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "the Homeric poems
valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue,
namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier- to put it more bluntly, the cliché"
(23). According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to
aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily
remembere d forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost. Ong then explains that
Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient
Greek culture. In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his
Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking
perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought
itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche" (28).

Chapter Three: Some psychodynamics of orality

In chapter three Ong provides a list of the characteristics of the way people of a primary oral
culture think and express themselves through narrative and discusses them in light of memory.
The characteristics of thought and expression are as follows:

1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.

2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.

3. It tends to be redundant or "copious."

4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.

5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference
to the human lifeworld.

6. Expression is agonistically toned.

7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.

9. It is situational rather than abstract.

All of the above characteristics contribute to the saliency and, consequently, enhance the
memorability of an utterance. Ong explains that this would be especially important to those
trying to memorize a poem or a tale because, whereas people from a liter ate society can always
refer back to a written text, those from an oral society must be able to process and memorize bits
of spoken, otherwise irretrievable information quickly. Utterances which fit the above
description would tend to leave a strong impr ession on the hearer and facilitate recollection.

Chapter Four: Writing restructures consciousness

Beginning with this chapter, Ong's focus shifts from a discussion of primary orality to the
development of script and how this restructures our consciousness. One of the most important
effects he discusses is the way that writing distances the originator of a thought from the
receiver. Writing does this by enabling the existence of discourse "which cannot be directly
questioned or contested as oral speech can be because written discourse is detached from the
writer (78). In addition, the further entrenc hed writing becomes as a mode of expression, the
more humans move from an oral-aural-based sensory world to one where vision reigns supreme.
This shift promotes the interiorization of thought, prompts us to see ourselves as situated in time,
and allows fo r precision, detail and the development of an extensive vocabulary. Ong ends this
chapter by discussing two major developments in the West which beautifully illustrate the
constant interaction of writing and orality, the development of the complex art of rhetoric and of
learned Latin.

Chapter Five: Print, space and closure

Print not only effected the West in the ways discussed by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change (i.e., implementing the Protestant Reformation, making universal
literacy a serious objective, etc.), but also had, according to On g, three more subtle effects. With
the development of print, Western culture moved even further away from a hearing dominated
sensory world to one governed by sight. More than writing, "print suggests that words are
things" (118). With the interiorizatio n of this view writing/printing was no longer done with the
intent to recycle knowledge back into the spoken world (as it was in, for example, Medieval
university disputations); things were no longer necessarily written in order to be read out loud. In
a ddition, print embedded the word in space more absolutely than did writing (123). Through
print, words become things that can be arranged on a page as they are in indexes, tables of
content, lists and labels (an extreme example being the arrangement of w ords in the poetry of
e.e. cummings). Finally, Ong suggests that print encourages closure, a feeling of finality that was
never present in, for example, oral storytelling.

At the end of this chapter, Ong briefly discusses the emergence, through electronic media such as
telephone, radio and television, of what he calls the second orality. Much like primary orality,
second orality fosters a strong sense of membership in a g roup. Unlike primary orality, however,
secondary orality is "essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently
on the use of writing and print," and the groups produced by second orality are much larger than
any produced by prim ary orality (136).

Chapter Six: Oral memory, the story line and characterization

Of the genres affected by the shift from orality to literacy narrative is the one which has received
the most attention. Ong devotes the sixth chapter to a survey of some of the differences between
the structure of narratives produced by these two types of cultures. Since primary oral cultures
are unable to manage knowledge in elaborate, more or less scientifically abstract categories, Ong
explains that the structure of oral narratives is such that it facilitates easy storage and retrieval of
informati on; narratives serve as oral storehouses of history. Rhapsodizing and linking together
episodes with little regard to a linear plot structure, the use of flat characters, and focusing on
interaction with the audience help to foreground the elements of an oral narrative and make them
easier to remember. With literate cultures narratives do not need to be structured mnemonically.
Consequently, the narratives of literate cultures tend to follow a linear plot-line, make us of
heavy subordination, and are s tructured such that the narrator/writer and reader are detached.

Chapter Seven: Some theorems

In this final chapter, Ong suggests that the concepts he has outlined in this book might provide
inspiration for new interpretation by adherents of New Criticism and Formalism, Structuralism,
textual and deconstructionist analysis, Speech-act and Reader- Response theory as well as those
engaged in the study of literary history, the social sciences, philosophy and biblical studies.
At the end of this chapter, Ong goes to great pains to indicate that he feels that neither orality nor
literacy is superior. Myron C. Tuman, in Words, Tools, and Technology (College English, 1983),
seems to have missed this. At one point Tuman criticize s Ong for conveying "the sense that
literacy offers a vast improvement over earlier techniques for storing verbal meaning," and
implies that this means that Ong feels that literacy is superior to orality (770). Later, however, he
criticizes Ong for depic ting literacy as opposite and somehow less attractive than primary orality
(777). Perhaps Tuman's confusion has to do with Ong's choice of words in stating that "both
orality, and the growth of literacy out of orality, are necessary for evolution of cons
ciousness"(175). In a "survival of the fittest" sense of the word "evolution," Ong's statement
could be construed as an implication that literacy is the "fitter" of the two. At the end of the
seventh chapter, however, Ong clearly states that he does not believe that literacy is necessarily
"superior" to orality (175).

In his short review of Orality and Literacy for the Winter 1982 issue of Et cetera, Paul Lippert
concludes "that for the study of culture and communication . . . this book will become a
landmark"(402). The fact that Methuen saw fit to reprint Orality an d Literacy five times
suggests that Lippert was correct. Ong's book and the work of others who investigated the
differences between orality and literacy in the early 1980s inspired considerable research, much
of it in areas that Ong suggests in his seven th chapter. However, fourteen years after its first
publication this book and its subject matter can still provide fertile ground for research. In 1982,
Ong could not have foreseen the popularity of audiobooks, or the widescale use of such
technology as editable voice-mail telephone service and the synchronous text-based
communication made possible by the internet. No doubt, the time is right for a sequel to Orality
and Literacy, one devoted entirely to the second orality.

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