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Orality, Literacy, and Medieval TextualizationAuthor(s): Walter J. OngSource: New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 1, Oral and Written Traditions in the Middle Ages(Autumn, 1984), pp. 1-12Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468772.

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Orality,Literacy, nd Medieval TextualizationWalterJ. Ong

L ITERARY HISTORY is no longer entirely iterary.f we are sen-sitive now to intertextuality,o the dependency of textsfortheir existence and meaning on othertexts,we are sensitivealso to the historicalorigins of literatureout of oral verbalization.Skilledoral art formspreceded and in partpredetermined he styleof the writtenworks which constitute iterature n the strict ense.Although writingwas ultimately o transmute ral performance ntoquitenewgenres,nevertheless,ven after he ntroduction fwriting,oral mindsets nd waysofexpressionhave persisted n literaryworkseverywhere, romantiquity o the present day. For centuries itera-turecarries veryheavyresidue of what have styledprimary rality,the pristineoralityof cultureswith no knowledge of writing.Thisresiduenotablydiminishesfrom heage ofRomanticism n, althoughit never entirelydisappears. Therefore, literaryhistorymust showsome awareness of orality-literacynteractions, ast and present.In theEuropean Middle Ages interactions etweenorality nd lit-eracy reached perhaps an all-timehigh. The Middle Ages had noprint, hough they prepared thewayfor t. In medievalmanuscriptculture,books weresubtly ssimilatedmore to oral utterance nd lessto the world of physical objects than theyare in a high-technologyprint ulture. This is perhapsone reasonwhydeconstructionistsyp-ically nalyzetexts omposed forprinting, otpretypographicmanu-script exts.)Manuscriptswerecommonly ead aloud or sotto oce venwhen the reader was alone. Speed readingwas of course impossible,so whynotvocalize? Vocalizationhelped thereaderto absorbthefullmeaning notsimply ome logocentric meaning),to eat thewords,as Joussehas explained in La Manducation e laparole. In earlyprinteven typesetwords tended in significantwaysto be managed not asvisual units but as sound units.2In preprintculturemanuscriptbooks had no titlepages, visuallyorganized labels which were to be an inventionof print,3 nd oftentheydid notevenhave titles.Preprintmanuscriptswere,and still re,catalogued normallyby their ncipits,heir firstwords,whichcouldbe typically conversation-likeddresstothe reader: Here youhave,dear reader, a book written y so-and-so about.... They end notwith curt abel, The End, but typically gain talking o someone:

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYHere ends The Parliament fFowls held on St. Valentine's Day, asrecountedbyGeoffreyChaucer. Thanks be to God. ( Explicitpar-

liamentum auium in die sancti Valentini tentum,secundum Gal-fridumChaucers. Deo gracias. This explicit o Chaucer's Englishpoem occurs in Latin.)It is true thatmanuscript odices were bulky bycomparisonwithlaterprintedworks-parchment was much thicker nd stiffer hanmostpaper was to be, and witha quill pen one could hardlycopylengthy exts n letters he size ofpica typeor the muchsmaller gatetype ommoninprint. n theirrelativemassivenessmanuscript ookswere thusquite conspicuouslyobjectsor things. But twocopies ofthe same worknevermatched physically s objects; scripts nd for-matsfor the same work differedwith ach copy; and even theparch-mentvaried in texture and color frompage to page. What gave awork ts dentity onsistedvery ittle n what t ooked like. The workwas what t aid whensomeonewasreading t, onvertingt nto soundin theimagination r,more likely, loud. If a personcould notread,he or she could never tell if two manuscriptbooks were the sameworkor not. Of course, two printedtextstoday also constitute hesame work not because of what they ook like but because of whatthey ay-or, more accurately,whattheybringa reader to say,for atextdoes not say anything f itself.Yet commonly nough one cantell,without eadingthem, hatthousands of individualprintedbooksdo saythe same thing, re the same work,because of whatthey ooklike physically: n a given edition each copy is an exact replica ofeveryother.Such experience of physicallymatching printedbooks, togetherwithour late typographichabitof silentreading,has subtly lteredour senseofthetextbydissociating tnotably, houghneverof courseentirely, romthe oral world,makingthe book less like an utteranceand more like othervisibleand tangible things. Printedbooks vir-tually lwayshave tables of contents ;theyare felt more as con-tainers,withtitles nd titlepages servingas labels do on boxes. Inmanuscriptculture, texts were somewhat more like proclamations.Chaucer concludes several of hispoems with n envoy, endingoffhis textto address itselfto someone, like a speaker. He wroteTheParliament fFowls,he explains, because afterhe had been readingabout Scipio AfricanusMajor, the latter ppeared tohimin a dreamto converse withhim and take him on some travels.The way thisdream-vision onversationgrowsdirectly ut ofreading suggestshowmanuscriptbooks could be feltto be close to oral exchange. Author-ship in a manuscriptculture was not marked by absences quite somuch as it is in print. Hence, again, deconstructionistsre little t-tractedto manuscriptworks.)

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATIONThe European Middle Ages were bound to oralityfurthern thattheir iterature xhibited on all sides the heavy residue of primary

orality hat stillmarked literatecultureseverywhere.This residue isevident in popular verbal art forms,withtheirregularlyheavy orheroic characters, ypecast as Noah's wifeofthemystery lays), ntheformularyententiae hichsupportso much medievalthought, nthe episodic narrativenot onlyof oral storytelling ut also of textscomposed inwriting,nthe ove offlitingexemplifiedpar excellenceby the body-souldebates or by The Owl and theNightingale),n theaddiction to amplificationgrownout of the oral need forcopia,forcontinuous flow of discourse (foran oral performermust never hes-itate-though he or she can indeed pause), and in much else.Besides carrying heavy residue of primaryorality,medieval lit-eraturewas also suffusedwith n academic orality. his was fostered,first,by the academic study of rhetoric inherited fromantiquity,where,as the artof public speaking,rhetorichad been the center ofeducation. The supreme aim ofGreek and Roman educationwas toprepare therhetor,he orator or public speaker,who was consideredthe ideallyeducated man. Writing killswere learned not for them-selves but to make a betterpublic speaker or rhetor. lthoughoverthe centuriesrhetorichad been surreptitiouslyccommodating tselftowriting s culture became morechirographic, eep inthe medievalpsyche the central,though most often unacknowledged, academicparadigm for discourse, including writtendiscourse, remained theoration rather than the text.At this point orality-literacyelationsbecame a bitdizzying.Medievaluniversities rovideda moretextuallyoriented education than classicalantiquity ad. Unlikeantiquity,heybuilt courses on textualcommentary: ollowing tandardprocedure,Thomas Aquinas's lectures s bachelor oftheology, orexample,hadbeen a Commentaryn theSentencesfPeterLombard.But for all theirtextuality,medieval universities were radicallyoral as universitiestodayno longer are. There were no written xaminationsor exer-cises.All the textualization n themilieu was intendedto be recycledin one way or another back into the oral world in disputationsorotherpublic oral performances.Academic orality-literacy ixescould affect ven the unletteredbya kind of cultural osmosis. Rhetoricas studied and practicedby lit-erates could intensifyorms fverbalization elovedbyoral tradition,such as, forexample, the elaborate,arabesqued figuresof speech incourtly ove literature r themeticulously alanced antitheses f theCiceronian style.The calculating, nalytic ultivation f such devicesmade possible by written hetorictextbooksbroughtsuch forms toperfections that would have eluded a purely oral performer,nomatterhow skilled n otherways. Compare theprecision-tooled ar-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYallelismsof the deadly attacks nd counterattacksn Cicero's VerrineOrations r the schematic antitheses n St. Anselm of Canterbury'sProslogium ith theirequivalents n recorded and transcribed otallyoral Africanpraise poems, howevercannilycrafted hesemaybe, orwithOld Englishtexts tillrooted in oral performance f whichtheyare virtually ranscriptions. t is true that Cicero did not read hisorationsbutwrote the text afterthe orationshad been given,that s,after heyhad come intobeing (withcareful,but notverbatim, lan-ning) in an existential ncounterof orator withreal audience. Cicerodoubtless tidiedthingsup a bit n his written exts, orrevision s oneof the great opportunitiesthatwriting ffers, s oral performancedoes not. But the tight, nalyticorganizationof Cicero's oral-styleeffectss possible onlyto themindconditionedbywriting venwhenit s extemporizing rally. Similarly,Anselm's work was composed inwriting, uttheprayers nd theapostrophes n it are essentiallymini-orations.Writing ould, of course, affect he style ven of illiteratesto a degree iftheywere constantly xposed to the literate rality fthose whose sensibilitynd mentaloperationshad been conditionedbywriting.Medieval social institutions alled for intricate nteractionsandoftencompetitionbetween oral and literateworlds. Brian Stock'sre-cent large-scalestudyhas shown major effects f orality-literacyn-teractions n philosophyand theology, n psychology especiallyonanalysis of sensoryperception),on development of Christian doc-trine, n reformmovements, n hereticalmovements, nd on secularand ecclesiastical olitics.4MichaelClanchyhas shown howlegal prac-ticein the British sles mingledorality nd literacy ut restedprin-cipallyon an oral base into the fourteenth entury,while Italyhadmuch earlier incorporated writingmore thoroughly nto its legalworkby developing a notarial system hat made written ocumen-tation ompetitivewithoral testimony orverifiability.5ithout ucha system,writtendocumentation was quite commonly produced bywhat we todaywould considerprofessionally ontrivedforgery. ralwitnesses ould certainly otbe forged, nd they ould be rigorouslycross-examined o expose other falsifications. o one rated oral tes-timonyhigherthan texts.Perhaps the most distinctive eatures of medieval orality-literacyrelationswere those associated with the state of Latin vis-a-vis hevernaculars.Because of thestateofLatin,theEuropean MiddleAgeshad a special relationship owriting,nd consequently o orality, if-ferent rom hatofclassicalantiquity nd ofpostmedieval imes.TheWesternEuropean Middle Ages were markedbywhat can be styledculturaldiglossia: theyused for some purposes a high language,

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATIONLearned Latin,and forotherpurposes low languages, the vernac-ulars. By comparison to Latin, the vernacularswere basicallyoral,althougha verysmall number of vernaculardialectswere workingtheirway intowriting.By contrast,Learned Latin was notmerelywrittenanguage or a literary anguage, but a textualized anguage.Textualizationmarks a special intensityn the relationship f lan-guage towriting. his relationship an develop in varying tages.Ofthe countlesslanguages which human beings have spoken over themillennia, lmost none have anyconnectionwithwriting tall or everwillhave-since mostof themhave disappeared unrecorded. It hasbeen calculatedthat of all theconjecturally ensof thousandsof lan-guages spokensince thebeginningofhuman life, nlysome 106haveever had a literature, nd thatof the some 3000 or more languagesspoken today,onlysome 78 as yethave a literature.6The relationshipof language towriting eginswhen someone de-vises a wayof putting hewords of a language into a script.But thefactthata writing ystemhas been devised for a particular anguagedoes notnecessarilymake anydifference t all to the language or itsspeakers.When a present-day inguist aboriouslyworksout a moreor less adequate wayto transcribe previouslyunwrittenanguage,few fanyof the speakersof the language normally earn to write t.The script figures in linguistic ournals but not in the languagespeakers' lives.Often the speakersof the language are even incred-ulous about itswritability,elievingthatonlycertain anguages, notincludingtheirown, can be written.Many languages, now as in thepast,have never had enough speakers to make writingworthwhile.If onlyfive hundred speakers know a language, what sortof effortcould theyput intoteachinghowto write t,and whatwould theyusewriting oron any continuingbasis?Once a scripthas been devised fora language, various stages oflimited iteracy an develop.7One stagemaybe styled emiliteracyrcraft iteracy Havelock), the literacyof a scribal culture; here thescriptcomes intouse for some limitedpracticalpurposes, generallyeconomicor administrative, ut entersdirectly nlyinto the livesofthespecial entrepreneurs alled scribes. One hiresa scribetowritedocument as one hires a shipwright o build a ship.If writing ecomes more widespread, the culture tself, s a wholeor in significantparts, can become fully iterate.In such cultureswritingprovides new resources for thought-unlimited verbatimpermanency, backward scanning with the resultingopportunitiesfor reflectiverevision,8detailed sequential analysis, and so forth.These resources alter the mental processes of the culture n signifi-cantways.9A bodyofdiscursivetexts-not merelyof listsor of var-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYious economicrecords,which are commonin earlyscribal ultures-becomes an integral part of the resources of the culture. One cancompose inwriting, ut together n a writing urfaceutteranceswithno independentoral existence.To be fully t home in sucha culture,one needs to be able to read. Oralityand textuality ow interplayvigorously n the language. Consciouslyor unconsciously, peakersmodel theiroral utterance n forms fthought nd expressionwhichhave come intoexistenceonlybecause of the resourcesprovidedbywriting,whilewritten xpression continually ccommodates itself ooral variations.A language at thisstage is a literaryanguage. But itis not totallydependent on texts.Oralitycan still take the measureof writing, ather than vice versa: thus Old English texts,becausethey ontinueto undergo oral change, are written ariously n Kent-ish,WestSaxon, Mercian,or Northumbrian, r in mixtures f thesedialects,and in various formsdependent on the date-old, middle,late Mercian-because the scribes were controlledbydevelopmentsin thespokenlanguages which tookplace quite independently f thewritten exts.AncientLatin had qualified as a literary anguage, certainly.Theculture of ancient Rome was decisively iterate: literacymade theRoman Empire possible.10But the Latin of the Middle Ages, whichI have styledLearned Latin,had a commitment owriting hatwentfarbeyond that of the literaryanguage of ancientRome: LearnedLatin was a fully extualized anguage, tied to the text as simply it-erary anguages are not. The commerce betweenorality nd literacyin Learned Latin was notquiteso freeas thatust describedforpurelyliteraryanguages. Since Latin had ceased to be a vernacular roundA.D. 500-700, no one who spoke ithad learned it as a firstanguage,a mothertongue, orally acquired, tied to the firstgrowthof con-sciousness out of the earlyinfant'sor child's unconscious: everyonewho knew Latin had learned it throughthe use of writing.Writingin one wayor anothercontrolledall its oral use. In Learned Latinthere was no longer anybabytalk,forexample, norwere therechil-dren's expressions: seven-year-olds earned to use it, as best theycould, in fully dult form.Learned Latin was not a dead language, if by dead we meanincapable of furthergrowth. t grew like a weed, developingthou-sands upon thousands of new terms over the centuries, nd even afew new idioms, though for the most part it was totally nert n itsgrammar.1l t was not dead in thesense thatno one spoke it. Overthecenturies,millions fpersons virtuallyllmales) spoke it,volublyand oftenpassionately, romtheelementary choolsthrough heuni-versities,n lawcourts, necclesiastical ircles, n medical and scientific

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATIONcircles-if you did not knowLatin, there was no wayto know med-icineor physicsor advanced mathematics, o wayto treat these sub-jects in the vernaculars,no vernaculartexts,no vernacular words.Yet everything hat was spoken in Learned Latin was necessarilymeasured against itswritten exts,for ndependently f these it hadno existence.No one could speak it who could notwrite t and whohad not earnedto speak itthroughwritingt. t was a chirographicallycontrolled anguage, or, as we mayput it,a textualized anguage. Itstextualizationwould have far-reaching onsequences formanycen-turies,withinand outside Learned Latin circles: for example, tex-tualizedLatinset theobjectivesof earlymodernlexicography.Whenvernaculars came into theirown with the appearance of full-blownvernacular dictionaries in the eighteenth century, exicographerscommonly mbitionedraisingthestatusofone or another vernacularbysubjectingthe vernacularsto the chirographic and latterly ypo-graphic)control which had marked the conditionof Learned Latin.This textualizedmindset s the distantbackgroundnot onlyof pre-scriptionist inguistics, ut also of attitudes toward language whichmark ome forms f present-day econstruction,nd itsuggests omereasons whydeconstructive nalysisspecializes largely n textsfromthe eighteenthcenturyto the present,thatis, fromthe age of tex-tualizingprojects.To theLatinist, nd to the Latinist'sheirs,the textwas the arbiter. Even today most scholars are stillquite contenttoreferunreflectively o the verbalizationof an oral performer n anonwrittenanguage as the performer's text. Orality s thoughtofby analogywithwriting, lthough it was antecedentto writing, ndalthoughonlya tinyfraction f languages have everbeen written.Even the few writtenmedieval vernacularswere felt somehow tobe oral languages bycontrastwith Latin. By farmostwritingn theMiddle Ages was in Latin, and Latin had the preemptiveclaim toliteracy.Calling a person unlettered, lliteratus,diota, id not neces-sarilymean thathe or she could not read or writebut ratherthat heor she did not know Latin, the language whichwas alwayslearnedthroughreading and writing.12 he illiteratir idiotaewere indocti rrustici, ountry bumpkinswho communicatedin a language whichwas low because not learned throughwritten rammatical ules-that s, theycommunicated n vulgar Latin shaping itself nto a ver-nacular or in some other, non-Romance vernacular. Chirographicrootinglegitimized anguage, and since Latin and Greek were theonlyWestern languages withwrittengrammaticalrules, theywerethe onlyworthwhile anguages. Greek was littleknownin the Westand thus Latin was in effectthe paradigm of linguistic xcellence.Sixteenth-century ationalisticpatriots-the Pleiade in France, Sid-

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ney's circle in England-would stillbe haunted by the implicationthatFrench and English and all vernacularswere low. The firstwritten rammarsfor vernacularswere ust being workedout, andin TheApology orPoetrywrittenca. 1580-84, published posthu-mously,1595) Sidneywould set up a ratherdesperate breastwork odefendEnglish againstthechargeoflackingwritten ules: he proteststhat grammar it mighthave, but it needs it not; being so easy ofitself. 13Whatwe have called culturaldiglossia can of course be found invarious forms lsewherethan n the WesternEuropean MiddleAges,in thepastand in thepresent. n thepast,somewhat imilardiglossiawas engendered in cultures dominatedbySanskrit, lassicalChinese,classicalArabic,and Rabbinical Hebrew (notGreek,wherethe highform,the neo-Attickoine,maintained intimate ontact withthe stillhigher ancient Atticon theone hand and the low demotic Greekdialectson the other-Greek neverspawnedother anguagesas Latinspawned the Romance vernaculars).Like Latin,so Sanskrit, lassicalChinese,classicalArabic,and RabbinicalHebrewwere all chirograph-icallycontrolled anguages used almost exclusivelybymales. All bynow are no longer rulingover cultures as high languages, havingbeen eithermore or less demoticizedor rendered in effect ociallynonfunctional Sanskrit-used onlyin a fewspecialized ournals orin specializededucation) or only restrictedlyunctionalLatin). In thepresent, many other cases of culturaldiglossia exist,perhaps nonemore spectacularthan that n Papua New Guinea, with populationof some 3,300,000 people speakingover 700 mutuallyunintelligiblelanguages.'4 The high language thus far is English, n which thewritten onstitutionhas been drawn up. Attempts o translatetheEnglish-languageconstitution nto one or anotherof the local lan-guages have thus far been unsuccessful:none of these anguages hasan adequate lexicon or linguistic ode, so thatall one can do is toprovidein the two argest anguages,Tok Pisinand Motu,some sortofparaphraseofpartsof theconstitutionnd ofthe egal proceduresitmore or less governs.But none of these other instancesof cultural diglossia seems tohave had an effect n the entirety f the human race comparable tothat of medieval culturaldiglossia. This set the stage for the univer-sities,first n Europe, thenultimately ll over theworld,for all uni-versities verywhere oday are largely ndebted for their structuresto medieval WesternEuropean antecedents. The high language,Learned Latin,providedthe matrixfirst ormedievalphilosophy ndscience and then for incipientmodern science. In accord with thecommonpractice,Newtonthought ut and wrotehisPhilosophiae a-

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATIONturalis rincipiaMathematicanLatin and published t nLatin in 1687.Only after several other Latin editionswas it finally ranslated ntoEnglish n 1729. Itwould appear likely hat textualized, hirograph-icallycontrolled anguage such as Learned Latin aided greatly n es-tablishing he distancebetweenobserverand observed,betweentheknower and the known,thatscience,and especiallymodernscience,required.No longera mothertongue,Learned Latin left ll its usersfreeof the rich, emotional, unconscious,but oftenconfusingly ub-jective nvolvements fa language learnedorallyfrom nfancy,whereknowerand known, ubjectand object,formeda kindof continuumthat could be broken up only gradually and perhaps never com-pletely.The culturaldiglossia establishedbyLatin has been studiedin greatand learned detail byErnst Robert Curtius in EuropeanLit-erature nd theLatin MiddleAges,15 ut not in the perspectives ug-gestedhere,which need much more development.Latin-vernacular ulturaldiglossia does not relatedirectly o all ofthe matters reated in the studies here, but it formsone large andsignificant ackdrop for the diverse orality-literary ixes that areexamined in the presentissue of NewLiterary istorynd thathelpmake medieval culture so fascinating.Brian Stock,who in The mpli-cations fLiteracyas described in painstakingdetailthe textual om-munities which so distinctivelymark the Middle Ages, here treatsthe fascinating etymological associations of the term textustself(whichI have suggested does etymologically ave special relevancenot only to written materials but also to oral performance,oftenthoughtof as weaving or stitching -rhapsoidein,o stitch ong to-gether orally).16 tock goes on to show within he textualizedLatinuniverse the deep cleavage between rhetorical and philosophicalworldviews, cleavage relatedin variouswaysto orality nd literacycontrasts.Franz Bauml worksdirectly n the orality-literacyorder to showthe existence of pseudo-oral styles, n which some textsclaim au-thority ecause of their oral roots, although other textsclaim au-thority ecause theyare based not on oral utterancebut on othertexts.Aaron J. Gurevich explicates the constant nteraction f oraltradition nd literary radition n accountsof visions-some visionsare validated because theyare said to be set down from an oral ac-count of the visionexperience,others because one can read aboutthis n manyother visions. Paul Zumthorshows how farfrom tex-tualizationmedieval oral performancecould be: voice (not so muchwhatvoice says,but voice itself) and gestureconveythe meaning oforal poetry, nd the functionof the linguisticform s to stylize hespoken word withoutbreakingit. In thissetting ne findspositive

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groundsfor what iterates endto see onlynegatively-for example,absence of unity. An orallycomposed poem is less like a textthanit is like a dance. (Hence the distortion,noted earlier here, whentodaywe persist n thinking nd writing f oral texts. )JillMann showshow oral proverbialwisdom is neithernaive noroftenhigh-minded.Proverbsurge calculation, caution,self-interest,and pessimismeven about the effectiveness f proverbsthemselves.Needless to say, a textual collectionof proverbsthat undertakestoput it all together s antithetical o proverbialwisdom,which com-monlyadvertisesthe discontinuity etweenreality nd explanation.Althoughthe author does notmake thepointherself,nothing ouldbe more telling hanthisessaytodispel the beliefthat logocentrismis connectedwithorality.The proverbsshe discusses are as antilo-gocentric s anydeconstructionistmightbe.Studying arlymedieval Russian cultureas a system,. P. Smirnovconcludes that texts n this culture have a compensatoryfunction,fillingn the lack ofconnectionbetweenthesociophysical nd other,transcendentalworlds. Texts had nonaesthetic,practical purposes:religious,cognitive, ocially regulatory,political.Smirnovmakes nocomparisonbetween texts nd oral tradition, ut in thelightof Gur-evich'scontribution,ne feelsthat n thecategoriesSmirnov dvertsto,the oral traditionwould function n much the same way.The always ive question as to how much silentreadingwas prac-ticed in earlier ages commands Manfred Gunter Scholz's attention.He studies presentation nd receptiondirections n manuscripts flate medievalGerman strophicepic and concludes that oral readingmayin some waysoften have been even more committed o oralitythan the most convinced oralistsmighthave imagined.The directionsingen nd/oderesenwould appear torefer ven to theprivatereader,who was assumed to wanttheoptionnotmerelyof readingbut alsoof actually ingingthe strophesaloud to himself r herself.The derivationof textsfromtexts n a literate ulture s paralleledby the derivation of oral narrativefrom oral narrative n an oralculture. ButJesseByockshowsthat the generationof oral narrativewas not alwaysso simple. Conflictresolution was a major ongoingactivitynmedievalIceland,whichwaskept nsomekindofturbulentorderbya system f continuousfeuds. Feuds surfacedand resolvedthe tensions that the society ivedunder. Icelandic saga is explainedbyattention to unstructured,episodic conflict resolution throughfeudsending in reconciliation nd/orrevengebetter hanby ookingforanalogues and influencesfromforeignnarrative ources.Therewere many foreign influences, of course, but, centrally, celandicsagas and the traditionsthey represent grow out of the Icelandic

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ORALITY, LITERACY, AND MEDIEVAL TEXTUALIZATIONsocial world. The feud contextwould appear to me to advertiseanoral groundingofthesagas: oral narrative smoredirectly onnectedwith hetotalityf the social world thanfully iterary arrativeneedbe. Oral culturetotalizes, nd makes orality tselfprettymuch con-tinuous with ocial existence.EricHavelock,towhose work all those interested norality-literacycontrasts we so much, rounds out this ssue bylookingback to theborderlinecase of ancientGreekdrama,composed inwriting houghrendered orally to a live audience. He shows that,despite its tex-tuality,Greek drama was deeply oral in its acoustic echoes, whichderive fromthe mnemonic requirementsof oral composition,andwhichinclude such thingsas prophecyand fulfillment,r riddlingand solutionof riddles,or choral anticipation nd reflection n ac-tion.An oral noeticeconomyshows in the stillgenericcharacteriza-tion n thedrama. It certainly oes, but I would still rgue for someinfluence of writing: it seems that Oedipus is a somewhat moreround character than Achilles,more interiorized, hough far lessso thanFreud made him out to be by filtering reek drama througha sensibilityonditionedbynovels.One of themajor lessons of a symposium uch as thiswould seemtobe that extual nalysis odayneeds everywhere otake nto accountthe multiformelationships f texts oorality, elationshipswhich recomplex, especiallydiachronicallybut also synchronically.Most lan-guages, after ll, have neverbeen written nd neverwillbe. They allbegan as oral, and mostremained so. Yet for all itsvigorousorality,medievalculturepivotedaround a strange anguage, Learned Latin,whichprogrammatically osteredoralitybut at the same timewas sotextualized that it appeared never to have been a grammaticallymalleable, unwritten ongue. Seldom have oralityand literacy p-peared in such highcontrast.

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY

NOTES1 MarcelJousse,La Manducation e la parole Paris, 1975).2 WalterJ.Ong, OralityndLiteracy: heTechnologizingftheWord London and NewYork, 1982), pp. 120-21.3 S. H. Steinberg,Five Hundred YearsofPrinting, rd ed. (Harmondsworth, 1974),pp. 145-46.4 Brian Stock,The mplicationsfLiteracy:WrittenanguageandModelsof nterpretationin the leventh nd TwelfthenturiesPrinceton,1983).5 M. T. Clanchy,FromMemoryo Written ecord:England 1066-1307 (Cambridge,Mass., 1979).

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12 NEW LITERARY HISTORY6 Munro S. Edmonson, Lore: An Introductiono theScienceofFolklore nd Literature(New York, 1971), pp. 323, 332.7 JackGoody and Ian Watt, The Consequences of Literacy, n Literaturen Tradi-tional ocieties,d. JackGoody (Cambridge, 1968); JackGoody,The DomesticationftheSavageMind (Cambridge, 1977).8 Goody and Watt, Consequences, pp. 49-50.9 Ong, OralityndLiteracy,p. 78-116.10 William M. Ivins,Jr.,Prints nd Visual CommunicationCambridge,Mass., 1953).11 Stock,TheImplicationsfLiteracy, . 21.12 Stock,pp. 27, 68, 166, 235.13 Sir Philip Sidney,An Apologyor Poetry,d. Geoffrey hepherd (London, 1965),p. 140.14 Paul W. Brennan, Issues ofLanguage and Law inPapua NewGuinea, LanguagePlanningNewsletter,, No. 2 (1983), 1-7.15 Ernst RobertCurtius,EuropeanLiteraturend the atin MiddleAges, r. Willard R.Trask, Bollingen Series, 36 (1948; rpt.New York, 1953).16 Ong, OralityndLiteracy,p. 113-14.


ong- medieval textualization

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