Orality & the characteristics of literacy

I’ve been wondering whether writing (blogging) as I read will be helpful in keeping track of the things I’m reading about. Hopefully so. I’m going to give it a shot anyway.

So after a couple of months away from writing, I find myself thrown in to a chapter about storying selves – the process of developing narrative identities and using narrative storytelling as a means for really exploring the notion of who we (as a society, and as individuals) are. There are a stack of books on my desk that look at orality and literacy in its various forms, from Ong to Bruns, each, I suppose, thinking in different ways about this self that we construct with words to play out our preferences.

This chapter by Narasimhan (in Olson & Torrance, see reference below) is kind of dense, and not entirely relevant (it deals with the development & use of language in India and Greece, amongst other topics such as the representation of spatiality vs temporality) but it has a few passages that I think will prove quite useful for this chapter as well as the introduction to this thesis.

Writing is also claimed to have been an essential force in the emergence of an autonomous psyche making up the inner world of individual human beings: The hallucinations of Homeric heroes gave place to the reflective introspections of the post-Homeric Greek tradition. Writing and subsequently, to an even greater extent, printing made it possible to draw a clear distinction between “utterance” and “text” (177).

This notion that writing marked a clear shift towards an articulated, reflective, expressive individuality that facilitated the move to understanding the self is quite interesting, and an idea that I think would be useful in the introduction to the thesis. Writing and speaking are markedly different activities, of course — texts are bound by a sort of physicality, a permanence, that spoken word (even when recorded) never possesses.

I find there to be something quite romantic about the idea that we are because we have the words to say we are. That language underpins so much of our idendity kind of fills me with a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling, because I’m such a language nerd, and because I spend quite a lot of time trying to articulate what’s going on in my life and in my mind (although I am articulating something just by thinking about it, really, because I very much think in words rather than images etc).Narasimhan notes,

…a characterising feature of language behavior is that it enables one to articulate aspects of the world and the self” (181).

I also like this concept that, as we write, we write to another space and time:

Writing, ohwever, is intrinsically a distanced activity. One writes for an individual that is separated from oneself in space and time (181).

You don’t write to the person next to you (although I suppose this is changing, in many ways, with the rapid uptake of online social networking – many times I’ve chatted in text form to my housemates, who are in the next room, so tha’ts an example of using the written word to converse proximally). In terms of time, we are certainly using the written word to converse with those with whom we share temporality more than ever… that’s a way that it’s changed. It would be worth thinking about this.

Finally, one of the things that I have discussed in chapter… two? I think? is this idea that writing is a technology – it’s aided by tools, it’s a learned (rather than natural) skill, and even the development of the written language itself: the decision to write characters in certain ways and have them produce particular sounds and words in combination. I believe that Walter Ong talked about this, and I feel that the following fits together nicely with this:

In the language of representations and their uses, the orality-literacy contrast reveals itself as the contrast between craft techniques based on apprenticeship and tradition and engineering techniques based on theorized science (182).

reference: Narasimhan, R. (1991). ‘Literacy: Its characterization and implications’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance [eds.]. Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 177-197

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