On
orality
SATISH C. AIKANT
AN understanding of the contemporary
culture will necessarily have to consider the pervasive existence of orality. Our relationship to the world about us is
articulated and constructed in language, which is constituted not only by words
or sentences, but by a variety of verbal and written forms ranging from spoken
conversation, songs, stories, ballads, epics, novels, poems, proverbs and
folklore etc. It is through such
different kinds of verbal and non-verbal discourses in language that our
knowledge of ourselves and the world is created,
sustained, broken down, recreated and transmitted.
Although literature, generally, has come to
be associated with written forms, yet many western as well as non-western
cultures have produced an extraordinary range of verbal,
or non-written ‘literary’ genres. Even though people may not be ‘literate’ in
the sense of having reading and writing skills, it does not necessarily mean
that they cannot respond to the diverse aspects of human life such as
aesthetics, ethics, power, nature, social organization, religion, politics,
economics, and art, etc. India is an example of a culture that has
traditionally emphasized the primacy of oral/aural expression as against the
written or textual.
Samuel Johnson described all European
literature as a series of footnotes to Homer, as all western philosophy has
been descried as footnotes to Plato. Plato’s writings come to us in the form of
dialogues which preserve the contours of oral dialectic. In one of Plato’s
dialogues called Phaedrus, Socrates discusses with Phaedrus the
comparative merits of speech and writing as vehicles for the communication of
truth. Socrates points out that writing, which at best only replicates ideas or
serves as a mnemonic device, weakens the mind, and that the writers
might make a pretense of wisdom without its having any basis in reality. He goes as far as to charge
that writing is inhuman, deals with issues extraneous to the mind, and causes a
confusion of knowledge and information with wisdom and understanding. He might
have added with a foresight that writing is rather artificial, technology
conscious and reflectively contrived. It is speech which is structured through
the entire fabric of the human person.
In the
West, linear thinking places a high premium on factual knowledge. The oral
culture, on the other hand, places priority on relationships, which produces a
concept of dynamic truth, not a focus on facts. A printed text encourages
closure, a feeling of finality that was never present in oral storytelling,
since orality is open ended. The fluidity of word
meaning, social context, and collective memory gave the members of particular
oral communities unity and solidarity, enabling them to wield what might be
termed their ‘collective conscious’ that is not observed in written cultures.
Even though one may note that the written
texts are necessarily surrounded by a penumbra of the oral, the manifestation
of an oral narrative involves much more than the reading of a written text
does: sound, sight, movement and language work simultaneously in a
multidimensional, multisensory experience. The fateful illusion of modernism was
the belief that the true and ultimate meaning and authority was lodged in the
text, to be discovered by careful reading, and, conversely, that meaning could
be once and for all put into the text in such a way that it regulated its own
interpretation.
The fact of the matter is that writing
distances the originator of a thought from the receiver by creating a
discourse, which cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can
be, because written discourse is detached from the writer. The tension between
eye and ear, the demands imposed by learning to alternate between understanding
a text and understanding a spoken word gives rise to linguistic
self-consciousness. Yet, the semantic autonomy of written discourse, and the
self-contained existence of the written work, are
ultimately grounded in the presumed objectivity of meaning of oral discourse
itself. Modern folklore and ethnography grew out of an essentially hermeneutic
insight that imposing western-literate categories on ‘oral literature’ resulted
in a failure to understand both the nature of the language being analyzed, and
the ways in which its immediate users understand that language.
Orality is used to describe forms of storytelling and knowledge sharing
that characterize every epoch. Oral storytelling traditions were driven by a
fluidity, spontaneity, and reflexivity in sharing knowledge. The form of
sharing organically changes and evolves as it is reproduced through the spoken
word, to listening publics who are aware that this evolving continuity is part
of the essence of communicating knowledge.
In India we have the hallowed tradition of
the oral, sabd, loosely translated as Word,
being elevated to the level of Brahman. Anadi
nidhanam brahma sabdatattavm
yadaksharam, meaning that the beginning-less and
endless Brahman is the essential nature of the Word. The two great epics the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana composed in Sanskrit were initially orally transmitted,
before being written down and preserved in the form of manuscripts. Although these
‘Pan-Indian’ epics continue to exist as written texts down to the present day,
both epics have innumerable ‘versions’ both in written and oral forms. In
various versions the plot, events and characters of the Sanskrit Ramayana are
significantly altered. Paula Richman has done considerable work on it. A.K. Ramanujan has alluded to 300 Ramayanas.
Similarly, the Mahabharata is found in diverse religious and performative contexts in northern, western, and southern
India. These are the versions and not garbled copies of the Sanskrit text. It
is better to imagine these different versions as existing simultaneously side
by side produced and received in an interactive process that continues even
today. The singers and performers of these regional Mahabharatas
do not completely rely on written texts: the knowledge they have of their
Mahabharata is oral, drawing inspiration from their own traditions.
The oral is ubiquitous. Vyasa
and Valmiki can be found everywhere in the art and
literature of India, ancient and modern, as several characters, tropes and
narratives that invariably appear to us as familiar are nonetheless different
in different contexts. Drawing upon a basic cultural register they hardly
require introduction to any given audience, and at each site where they turn
up, an interpretive community and space emerge, to make them pertinent for the
occasion. This simultaneous process of reading and writing is always ongoing,
unfolding within a framework that often blurs the boundaries between the two.
The
alternative, ‘other’ traditions of producing, storing and transmitting
knowledge are still prevalent and indeed valued in India in ways that
constitute and illustrate aspects of our cultural diversity. Most famously, it
was the four Vedas, commonly dated from 1500 BC, and thus probably the oldest
extant scriptures in the world, which were orally transmitted from generation
to generation until the coming of writing and, subsequently, print, and
continue to be so transmitted in some small priestly communities even today.
The fact that texts of such length and
complexity have been orally preserved for three and a half millennia with
phenomenal accuracy, is remarkable enough in itself.
The Rigveda alone contains 1028 hymns in over
10,000 verses of four lines each. No less remarkable is their mode of
transmission. In the case of these scriptures, not only do the words need to be
repeated exactly, but there is a particular rhythm, cadence and sonority that
need to be faithfully replicated if the verses are to carry their spiritual
charge.
According to Walter Ong,
the orality of a culture totally untouched by any
knowledge of writing or print is ‘primary orality’.
It is primary in the context of the ‘secondary orality’
of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality
is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that
depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today even
though writing has become the dominant mode of expression in every culture,
even in high technology ambiance, the resonance of primary orality
exists and is preserved.
In the
post-literate world, there is a noticeable shift to a new,
or secondary orality, generating new media forms. The
present generation learns and processes information in terms of media such as
television, radio, telephone and computer. The Internet, while information
oriented, is also oral in its focus and format. The secondary orality has created new communities that articulate
emergent personal and social concerns. Blogging, for example, which is situated
somewhere between orality and textuality,
provides an opportunity to resist mainstream culture’s construction of
information and knowledge in an attempt to challenge the authority of
traditional modes of communication. It is also conversational in format, as the
speaker is very much present, while the audience is conceptualized and
negotiated.
Opinion on the internet may be spontaneous
and tentative, but increasingly shows signs of becoming organized, leading
sometimes to unprecedented consequences. Much like primary orality,
secondary orality fosters a strong sense of
membership in a group. Unlike primary orality,
however, secondary orality is essentially more
deliberate and self-conscious, based on the use of writing and print, and the
groups produced by secondary orality are much larger
than any produced by primary orality.
Media
theorist Marshall McLuhan called ‘secondary orality’
as a fulfilment of history, a return of what had been exiled or repressed for a
long time by writing and printing. We listen, we watch, somewhat as our people
used to do before radio, before television, before satellites and computers.
Yet our modes of thinking and of using language and conducting discourse are
still very much sounded and cadenced and projected by the older habits of orality. Orality did not just
happen a long time ago. It survives and lives on.
The boundaries between the oral and the
written have become much more fluid. In a globalized, and technology driven
world, we are better equipped today to capture and record performative
acts, that are both temporal and lasting in the domain of the oral, bringing
plurality of perceptions. Perhaps the best thing about orality-based
formats and media is that these are cultural unifiers in the modern world.
Digital technologies can provide platforms
for preserving and revitalizing oral traditions as well as enabling new forms
of storytelling and expression. However, threatened by the constant assault of
technology, orality faces the countervailing prospect
of a digital dystopia.