On the borders of literacy and orality

From the introduction to the book I passed around yesterday, Oral Performance, Popular Tradition, and Hidden Transcript in Q:

Pioneering scholars such as Werner Kelber, recognizing just how inappropriate were the assumptions of print culture still being followed in classical form-critical analysis, sought ways to understand the sayings of Jesus more adequately as oral performance. It is now being recognized in Gospel studies as in the study of ancient literature more generally that whether or not they existed in written form, texts were recited aloud before groups of people.

This is getting into my part of the discussion, the borderland between literate and oral cultures. That can be, as in archaic Greece, a society where writing is just being introduced. It can also be a society where writing is of long standing (the alphabet was invented in Canaan) but where literacy is primarily limited to educated elites, as has been the case for the majority of recorded history.

I will add (off-topic) that knowing what we now know about the nature of oral transmission has certain very profound implications for the history of early Christianity. It is widely recognized that none of Jesus' teachings were written down in his lifetime; the earliest extant writings associated with Christianity (the letters of Paul, plus the Q literature) date from some twenty years later. The earliest form of the Passion narrative is some twenty years later than these. Given, for example, the tendency in oral societies traditions to fit their traditions to their needs, do these saying reflect Jesus' teaching -- or the needs of the Christian community decades later?

Storytelling fails to grab my attention

Sorry. It should, because modern storytelling is the mirror image of my project; instead of oral poetry to written text, it's the expression of written text in an oral environment.

Everything comes back to my project

Even the cannibalism book I checked out today. I quote, from p. 4 of Eat Thy Neighbour:

When the blind poet Homer wrote his immortal works, the Iliad and the Odyssey in the seventh century BC, he would have been hard pressed not to have included at least one story about someone who ate someone.

Emphasis mine. Leaving out the whole orality/literacy angle of the origins of the Homeric epics... How could a blind poet have written anything before automatic composition and the creation of braille?

In which this class hampers my reading enjoyment

So I am reading this book, a reprint originally published in 1980. And it's going well until I can't stop looking at the type, and noticing that they're using worn plates.

Hearing-Dominance yields to Sight-Dominance

Linking a bit in Ong to discussion in class... I am not one of the people who listens to podcasts. The main reason is that I'm a visual person; I can't just listen to somebody talk. I need a visual. Actually, I prefer text (that word again! -- written alphabetic text) to anything else. I read faster than I hear anyway.

Ong - Wrong

Ong says that Homo sapiens first appeared 50,000 years ago. He's off by a factor of four; try 200,000. Even "anatomically modern humans", Homo sapiens sapiens, appeared about 130,000 years ago, though perhaps we only spread throughout the Old World at about Ong's point in time.

It's a minor point but it annoyed me, and I think everyone saw me shake my head.

Human - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Simpsons Reference Goes Here

Just some commentary on Homer, inspired by Ong's discussion... To my mind, the Iliad and Odyssey are obviously works composed in the oral tradition to be written down. Most scholars now date the epics to the sixth century BC, well after the creation of the Greek alphabet.

There are several reasons I believe that the poems were composed to be written down. The most important is their sheer length. The Iliad is over 15,000 lines long and the Odyssey over 12,000. (For comparison, Beowulf, a literary creation and considered a very long poem, is only about 3200 lines.) They are both far too long to have ever have been performed as unified works; it would have taken several nights to read either. We tend (influenced by the use of the term to describe movies) to think that "epic" means "long", but epic poetry was probably never meant to describe anything on this scale.

Second, there is the well-established narrative and psychological unity of the poems. Ong dismisses this rather shortly, but while the poems use oral language and themes it's the genius of the poet that puts these together brilliantly.

Third, there is no sign that these poems were ever actually transmitted orally; there's little variation between versions, which would be expected if they were. (See Ong on the lack of "exactness" in oral tradition.)

So anyway, here's what I think happened... In the 6th century BC, someone (perhaps the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos; Cicero says that the epics were written down on his orders) got the best poet he could find to compose a "great work" in the epic tradition, getting scribes to record it. This work was the Iliad. Some years later, the same poet or someone trained by him was brought in again, and that led to the Odyssey. Copies of the two works were made -- at major expense considering their length -- and eventually were accepted as the paramount works of epic poetry at a time when epic must have been on the decline.

Words, signs, icons

Reading Ong, 74-76, "Words Are Not Signs", oddly made me think about the replacement of text-driven menus with icons on computers. I hate it. I am a word guy, and I hate having to interpret icons. Apparently, the new version of Office has replaced the text menu with something called "The Ribbon", which I dread. Anyway, icons are not intuitive to me, anyway. Words I get.