Ong's Orality Part Deux

Okay, so now that we've laid out a little ground work about what an oral and literate culture is, and how they differ, it's time to delve a little deeper.

The third chapter of Orality and Literacy is entitled "Some Psychoanalytics of Orality." In it, he begins to define the way the primary oral cultures process information and language. His first example throws back to the idea that we are visual learners:

Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever 'looked up' anything... the expression 'to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning. Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might 'call' them back -- 'recall' them. But there is nowhere to 'look' for them... They are occurrences, events (30).

 That's an interesting concept to try to wrap your mind around. No only do the actions of the words we use to describe the visual way we handle information-- 'to look up'-- but the word itself implies visual stimulus. The last line is particularly interesting. To describe a word, but more specifically an utterance, as an event. An occurrence. That is something completely forlorn to our way of thinking. What that implies is that it can be missed or looked over (not looked... see? it's inescapable! misheard or not heard or missed). If a piece of the story is left out, that adds to the subjectivity of the story that gets passed on to other storytellers in other regions and so on. That will be addressed more in a later post.

Well, without the visual, how is it that an oral culture can learn and, more importantly, retain information? The same way someone memorizes a poem, or a guitar player memorizes scales, or the way you finally learned all the words to that song on the radio so you won't be mumbling every other word:  mnemonic patterns.

In order to fully remember all the stories, which are all the histories and folklore, in an oral culture, the listeners would use "heavily rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antithesis," and other devices to help recall. Another aspect is the use of cliches which, as Ong says,

can be 'looked up' in books of sayings, but in oral cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them (35).

It's almost the exact same concept as musicians training their ears. For various intervals on between pitches, there are certain mnemonic devices that can be used. A tritone, or a diminished 5th, which would be a C to a Gb, is the open interval of the song "Maria" from West Side Story, or the interval used throughout The Simpson's theme song. By comparing each interval with a familiar song, it gives a frame of reference to the player's ear that makes learning much easier. But I mean really, who needs more of a reason to remember Natalie Wood?


Ong says the understanding of mnemonic thought provides a baseline to understanding other aspects of their thought processes. He categorizes characteristics of their thoughts and expressions in nine different ways. For the sake of time I will just list them, but I may come back and expound later.

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.
8. It is Homeostatic.
9. It is situational rather than abstract.

These aspects of the primary oral culture are characteristic of their patters of thought and expressions. They, as Bingham says, "contribute to the saliency, and, consequently, enhance the memorability of an utterance." Instead of relying on specific words or, obviously, a text, the narrator tries to mesh the story with his framework of proverbs, maxims, and cliches that he has picked up over the years. This way, like the musical mnemonic devices, he has a frame of reference he can refer back to on the spot if ever he loses his place or forgets a line.