Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy is a classic. Ong carefully, brilliantly pinpoints the ways that writing alters human consciousness. Much of what we graphocentric Westerners think is natural to the human mind isn’t. It’s the product of centuries of reading and writing and shaping our minds by written words. We don’t know how odd we are: “of all the many thousands of languages – possibly tens of thousands – spoken in the course of human history only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to produce a literature.” Ong invites us to image a world where no one can ever “look up” anything, since there’s nothing to look at. Not my world, I’m happy to say.
In its basic form, language is “articulated sound.” That sound not only communicates but also shapes thought itself. Even after we commit language to written form, sound echoes in the background: “‘Reading’ a text means converting it to sound, aloud or in imagination.” Sound has its own phenomenology. It “exists only where it is going out of existence . . . not simply perishable but essentially evanescent.” We can’t stop a sound and examine a static sound-image like we can stop a motion picture to pore over a frame. To be sure, “all sensation takes place in time,” but sound has a special connection with time. (What are to we make of silence, then? Ong says it “lies outside the sound world,” but I wonder if that’s right.) Sound is dynamic; it comes from living things.
People whose minds are formed by orality think and express themselves in a certain way. Oral narrative and argument adds (and . . . and . . . and); it doesn’t subordinate (while . . . then . . . meanwhile). Clusters of words chime together – not “dawn” only but “rosy-fingered dawn.” Speech in oral cultures is copious, redundant. Tied to a specific situation, an utterance can’t be checked later, so the speaker repeats himself to make his speech memorable. Sparse, analytical thought arises with writing. Oral cultures conserve; they know knowledge is difficult to come by and precious, passed from generation to generation through repetition. Progress is limited and painful.