Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents) by Walter J. Ong

Author:Walter J. Ong [Ong, Walter J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2007-03-15T23:00:00+00:00

SOME DYNAMICS OF TEXTUALITY

The condition of words in a text is quite different from their condition in spoken discourse. Although they refer to sounds and are meaningless unless they can be related—externally or in the imagination—to the sounds or, more precisely, the phonemes they encode, written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.

Yet words are alone in a text. Moreover, in composing a text, in 'writing' something, the one producing the written utterance is also alone. Writing is a solipsistic operation. I am writing a book which I hope will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, so I must be isolated from everyone. While writing the present book, I have left word that I am 'out' for hours and days—so that no one, including persons who will presumably read the book, can interrupt my solitude.

In a text even the words that are there lack their full phonetic qualities. In oral speech, a word must have one or another intonation or tone of voice—lively, excited, quiet, incensed, resigned, or whatever. It is impossible to speak a word orally without any intonation. In a text punctuation can signal tone minimally: a question mark or a comma, for example, generally calls for the voice to be raised a bit. Literate tradition, adopted and adapted by skilled critics, can also supply some extratextual clues for intonations, but not complete ones. Actors spend hours determining how actually to utter the words in the text before them. A given passage might be delivered by one actor in a shout, by another in a whisper.

Extratextual context is missing not only for readers but also for the writer. Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience. 'The writer's audience is always a fiction' (Ong 1977, pp. 53–81). The writer must set up a role in which absent and often

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