Orality and Literacy: Part 1

To be completely honest, I found Orality and Literacy to be quite dense and difficult to read. I read the first chapter twice, so I could understand it, and it wasn’t until the second time around that I started developing an interest in what the author was writing about. The author brought up several points in the first chapter alone that I had never considered before. For example, because we live in a literate culture, when someone is speaking to me, I process what they are saying as formed letters in my mind. Literacy has permeated the way we think, speak, interact with others, and live.

                

Ong writes about how orality is independent of the written, but the written is entirely dependent on the oral. An interesting concept when we realize that we think of primarily oral cultures as primitive. In America particularly, I think, we associate this idea of intelligence with the ability to write. We refuse to hand out certificates of competence (GED/equivalent) without one being able to read and write at a certain level. But what if someone who fails to achieve literacy would have thrived in a primarily oral culture? There are thousands of adults in the United States that we consider to be illiterate because they cannot read or write. Thousands. If literacy is so closely tied to intelligence, or someone’s ability to survive or thrive in this world, then why do we still have so many who have not developed the ability to read and write?

                

That also brings up a good point: reading and writing, in its most basic form, is a developed ability. Speech, in its highest forms, is also a developed ability, but the lowest level of speech (making verbal sounds) is not a developed ability, it is a natural ability. One could argue that babies are born with the inherent ability to “speak”, albeit in their own language of crying and cooing. Humans have since developed these noises into a system of carefully placed sounds to create a complex verbal language. In many “non-primitive” cultures, we have then developed our languages into the written form. I believe one could argue that the same pace of development has also occurred within primarily oral cultures as well, but rather than develop written versions of their language, they are developing exceptional memories, better listening ability, and a more complex oral language. So “primitive”, in the common sense that we use to describe lesser-things as primitive, may be the wrong phrasing.

                

I find it particularly interesting that we are learning about how important orality is to literacy, and yet I never would have known any of this information, or have come to any of these conclusions had it not been for the literature that we have been assigned in this class. It brings to mind the complex connections that exist between literacy and orality, and the dependency that we have on both of them to have a successfully functioning society in America and other literate cultures.