Orality and Literacy by Ong Walter J.;

Author:Ong, Walter J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

INTERACTIONS: RHETORIC AND THE PLACES

Two special major developments in the West derive from and affect the interaction of writing and orality. These are academic rhetoric and Learned Latin.

In his Volume III of the Oxford History of English Literature, C. S. Lewis observed that ‘rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors’ (1954, p. 60). Lewis honors the magnitude of the subject by refusing to treat it, despite its overwhelming relevance for the culture of all ages at least up to the Age of Romanticism (Ong 1971, pp. 1–22, 255–83). The study of rhetoric dominant in all western cultures until that time had begun as the core of ancient Greek education and culture. In ancient Greece, the study of ‘philosophy’, represented by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, for all its subsequent fecundity, was a relatively minor element in the total Greek culture, never competitive with rhetoric either in the number of its practitioners or in its immediate social effects (Marrou 1956, pp. 194–205), as Socrates’ unhappy fate suggests.

Rhetoric was at root the art of public speaking, of oral address, for persuasion (forensic and deliberative rhetoric) or exposition (epideictic rhetoric). The Greek rhetor is from the same root as the Latin orator and means a public speaker. In the perspectives worked out by Havelock (1963) it would appear obvious that in a very deep sense the rhetorical tradition represented the old oral world and the philosophical tradition the new chirographic structures of thought. Like Plato, C. S. Lewis was in effect unwittingly turning his back on the old oral world. Over the centuries, until the Age of Romanticism (when the thrust of rhetoric was diverted, definitively if not totally, from oral performance to writing), explicit or even implicit commitment to the formal study and formal practice of rhetoric is an index of the amount of residual primary orality in a given culture (Ong 1971, pp. 23–103).

Homeric and the pre-Homeric Greeks, like oral peoples generally, practiced public speaking with great skill long before their skills were reduced to an ‘art’, that is, to a body of sequentially organized, scientific principles which explained and abetted what verbal persuasion consisted in. Such an ‘art’ is presented in Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric ( techn rhtorik ). Oral cultures, as has been seen, can have no ‘arts’ of this scientifically organized sort. No one could or can simply recite extempore a treatise such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, as someone in an oral culture would have to do if this sort of understanding were to be implemented. Lengthy oral productions follow more agglomerative, less analytic, patterns. The ‘art’ of rhetoric, though concerned with oral speech, was, like other ‘arts’, the product of writing.

Persons from a high technology culture who become aware of the vast literature of the past dealing with rhetoric, from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and on into the Age of the Enlightenment (e.g. Kennedy 1980; Murphy 1974; Howell 1956, 1971), of the universal and obsessive interest in the subject through

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