Some 25,000 years before written language, humans were already using counting devices. These were tallies, lengths of bone or wood that were scored crosswise to record a number of items—days, months, gifts, or any other set of countable things.1 When written language came along, it began as a means to preserve information that oral narrative and tally sticks were ill equipped to store, lists of names and places (onomasticons), census rolls, trading inventories, debt accounts, and, later, laws (Ong, 1982:99). In terms of style, lists are absolutely paratactic. That is, one item follows another just like cuts in a tally stick. It is said that oral narrative is also paratactic, one action following another, but as I pointed out earlier, this is not quite the case, for backlooping repetitions and shifts in time and place interrupt its sequential order. Nevertheless, I think we are justified in assuming that oral narratives represent a preliterate mind that, in its use of language at least, interpreted the world as a linear series of events, threadlike as the Greeks imagined each person’s fated life span.
With the introduction of writing we mark the shift from the mythic to the theoretic stage, but, as we do so, we need to remind ourselves, as Merlin Donald wisely advises, that each stage, momentous as its changes were, retained all preceding stages within its modi operandi. When, therefore, we consider the impact writing had on the making of verbal artifacts, we need to discern (1) the stylistic features of oral compositions that continued unchanged, (2) their stylistic features that were modified to fit the new medium, and (3) the new stylistic features that writing set in place.
Literacy, when it first arrives in a society, is rarely shared by the entire population, but rather by a scribal elite in the service of a political elite. It is principally through oral performance arts and formal recitation that written artifacts are first distributed. Residual orality thus continues in every society to which literacy has ever been introduced. Literates, too, continue to improvise conversational discourse and store in memory songs, jokes, proverbs, and family histories, even when mnemotechnics has become a lost art. In our own time, electronic media have invigorated oral culture and produced what Walter Ong (1982) called “secondary orality,” a technological extension of “primary orality,” the system of preliterate information exchange.
Writing, of course, whenever and wherever it arrives, has a considerable impact on oral culture. The first and most obvious effect is the editing of the oral repertoire through the selection of particular traditional compositions for inclusion in this new storage system, leaving those not selected for transcription to fade gradually from collective memory. That was how the narratives of the Greek “epic cycle” became extinct. Prior to its transcription, an oral work would have been in a perpetual state of variation, its lines and episodes continually altered and rearranged by performers competing for audiences. The transcription of just one of its variants eventually makes it the only authoritative version. A composition that in an oral culture possesses a vital variability, its “mouvance,” as Paul Zumthor (1990) called it, then becomes frozen in time and space like some delicate, elaborate carving.
Though the concept of authorship is so central to literate culture, it comes down to us from an older, preliterate belief that at the dim dawn of time certain gods or divinely inspired culture heroes invented specific skills or tools. The Greeks, for example, believed that Dionysos taught humans viticulture, Triptolemos gave them the plough, Hermes the lyre, and so forth. The Romans called these the “auctores,” the persons responsible for augmenting (L. augere) the store of human artifacts. The primary “authors” of cultural resources in a literate society also included the inventors of literary genres—e.g., Homer of epic, Hesiod of didactic verse, Thespis of drama, and Herodotus of history. Like Muses in mortal form, they represented in their paradigmatic works the ultimate authority for later writers. The ritual-derived poetic genres mentioned in chapter 7 now had fixed models for poets to imitate, ancient auctores that contemporary authors were to study night and day, as Horace advised.
When he gave that piece of advice (De Arte Poetica, 269–70), Horace framed it in very concrete terms: “You had better keep turning your Greek copies with nightly and daily hand” (Vos exemplaria graeca / nocturna versate manu, versate diurna). The exemplaria in question were probably copies of Greek dramas, since the addressees of Horace’s epistle were the Piso brothers, aspiring playwrights, who, as upper-class Roman students, would have had their own editions of Greek works in the form of scrolls that could be unrolled manually either forward or backward. This made it possible to reuse these verbal artifacts in ways that orally situated audiences were never able to manage. Spine-bound codices, which began replacing scrolls in the first century C.E., allowed page flipping, an even more efficient way to find and reread passages.
Silent reading, while certainly possible, was not customary, for most literates found it easier to murmur the words they read. When it was convenient to do so, they read prose, as well as verse, aloud, understanding that writing, like music, was meant to be sounded. While private reading was widely practiced, oral recitation long remained the norm among literates in the Greco-Roman West. This still was a culture of public vocality, and though virtually all the texts in circulation were authored by known scriptores, they were written ideally to be performed orally in public. For example, when Juvenal published his first satire, he began it this way: “Am I always to be a listener (auditor) only, and never retaliate, I that have so often been afflicted by the Theseid of hoarse-voiced Cordus? Shall that one have recited to me (mihi recitaverit) his Roman comedies and this one his love lyrics—and subject me to this with impunity?”2
These were some of the ways oral style accommodated itself to writing or exploited the advantages writing offered. Writing, however, had unique affordances of its own that led to the crafting of genuinely neopoetic artifacts, properly termed “literary” works.
The invention of prose was probably the most consequential development in the history of writing, but in Greece, as Eric Havelock (1963, 1986) has shown, prose only gradually acclimated itself to the culture. Plato wrote it, but in a form modeled on the dialogues of Athenian dramatists. Herodotus’ Histories (fifth century B.C.E.), the earliest extant work of Greek literary prose, reveals earlier oral stylistic features, or so Aristotle implies (Rhetoric 3.9.2) when he criticizes the historian’s prose for adhering to the “continuous style” (lexis eiromenê). This was the storyteller’s style, one event following the other in lockstep with occasional repetitions, digressions, and shifts in time and space, in short, Homeric parataxis transposed into written prose (Adrados, 2005). Writing sentences that simply added one thing after another, wrote Aristotle, was an “unpleasant” style, as tiresome as a footrace without a visible goal. He himself much preferred a periodic sentence style, one in which independent clauses were built upon dependent clauses, i.e., a hypotactic, rather than a paratactic, style.3 Hypotaxis (literally “under-arrangement”) gradually became the norm for literary and philosophic prose. It is also evident in the structure of the Aristotelian syllogism, with its first two premises, as dependent clauses, underlying its conclusion.
Do oral cultures think in syllogisms? The social anthropologist Jack Goody answered no: syllogistic reasoning presupposes a “graphic lay-out” (1987:221). A compound sentence, composed of equal elements strung together paratactically, cannot readily draw inferences from this series, whereas a complex sentence can successfully do so. Consider the following three examples. The first is a passage from Deborah and Barak’s song celebrating the assassination of the Canaanite general, Sisera, by the Israelite woman, Jael (Hebrew Bible, Judges, 5.25–27). The second is a syllogistic rendering of the topic. The third is a rewriting of the narrative passage in the hypotactic style.
(1) Water he asked, milk she gave him;
In a lordly bowl she brought him curd.
Her hand she put to the tent-pin,
And her right hand to the workmen’s hammer;
And with the hammer she smote Sisera,
she smote him through his head,
Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples.
At her feet he sunk, he fell, he lay;
At her feet he sunk, he fell;
Where he sunk, there he fell dead.4
(2) Major premise: All humans are mortal.
Minor premise: All Canaanites are humans.
Conclusion: All Canaanites are mortal.
(3) Women can sometimes perform great feats of courage, for example, Jael (Judges Chapter 4 & 5). Having invited the Canaanite general, Sisera, to her tent, she endeavored to keep him there, by giving him milk and a lordly bowl of curds, when he had only asked for water. When, exhausted, he fell asleep, his head resting on the table, she, having already removed a tent stake, hammered it through his temples. Though he was able to rise up briefly, he soon fell dead at her feet, having proven no match for a woman who was as clever as she was brave.
At this point I would expect someone to object to this comparison on the grounds that the three texts are totally incommensurable. Each is meant to accomplish a different end. The one is a triumphal expression of national pride extolling the courage of a particular woman. The second is an abstract generalization. The third sounds like a medieval exemplum. But that is exactly my point: oral narratives, syllogisms, and written texts are not only stylistically different, but each is constructed is such a way as to convey a different kind of information. The first, in paratactic style, represents an episode as a narrow series of actions. The second deduces an inferred conclusion from two parallel-processed premises. The third illustrates an initial generalization by referring to a biblical episode and, in hypotactic style, recounting it as a set of partially overlapping actions.
Every verbal style corresponds to a different cognitive style: when one changes, so too does the other. With that in mind, I will now conclude with some brief remarks on the cognitive evolution of the neopoetic artifact. I will begin by citing some public uses of writing and follow their changing cognitive implications as they evolve toward book literacy.
Besides list making, a privately stored form of writing, there was inscription (epigraphy), a public form used to proclaim messages or issue commands. Here words often accompanied the image of their speaker. Inscribed at the base of a statue, across a frieze, or close to a person’s mouth in murals or painted ceramics, such writings functioned as disembodied voices (Svenbro, 1976, 1993). Gravestones were voices, too, that often commanded attention: “stop, wayfarer” (siste viator), “remember you shall die” (memento mori). Monuments, after all, are built to be public admonishments, the scripted voices of a past that will not stop talking (Collins, 1996:123; Gilson and Gilson, 2012).
Marshall McLuhan’s (1962/2011, 1964) claim that literate cultures are visual and oral cultures auditory was at best a provocative simplification, at worst a misleading one. To clarify the cognitive implications of writing, we should first examine the cognitive processes involved in attending an oral performance. Oral performance is auditory and visual, listened to and watched (Mitchell, 2005). A rhapsode, when chanting a portion of an epic, would not only speak a third-person character’s words for the audience to hear, he would also imitate him or her, through voice or visual gesture.5 Since hearing and sight are noninterferent, these two perceptual systems can team up dyadically and process the verbal artifact concurrently, but, as is typical of such multitasking pairs, one will be more narrowly attended to, while the other receives broad, subsidiary attention. In the case of oral narration, it seems apparent that hearing is primary and vision is secondary. The visual presence and body language of the narrator will add to the illusion that the actions being described are actually taking place here and now. But, as I mentioned in the last chapter, visual perception has another cognitive consequence: it inhibits visual (mental) imaging, for while we focus on the skilled narrator’s features and gestures through which he communicates indexical and iconic signs, we find it difficult to respond to his symbolic signs, his words, by mentally imaging them as indices and icons. This constraint on the preliterate imagination helps explain why oral epic is filled with speeches and dialogues and why it is only briefly descriptive.
Writing introduced a significantly different cognitive procedure. The written page, unlike the storyteller, is silent and motionless. The reader, unlike the audience member, is personally involved in actualizing the event. The input channel is indeed visual, but it directly leads to a decoding process that restores the graphemes to imagined speech sounds, augmented by subvocal motor innervations, the phenomenon of “inner speech.” Because the written characters, unlike oral performers, are arbitrary graphic symbols signifying arbitrary linguistic symbols, they supply no indices or icons of their own. Writing therefore invites—actually, requires—the reader to imagine persons, places, and things that function as indexical and iconic signs. In short, writing exploits the brain’s visual system to focus, not on the visible page, as McLuhan claimed, but on the visual images language evokes.
The development of the publishing industry in Hellenistic and Roman imperial times promoted the private consumption of written texts by (relatively) silent, solitary readers. One of the early indicators of this neopoetic trend was Aristotle’s remark in his Poetics that tragedy can produce its intended effects even without dramatic action—simply by being read (1462a). As texts became more uniformly copied, and later, when it became customary to separate words with empty spaces, writing became more “transparent,” reading more fluent, and mental imagery more feasible. The most distinctive feature of neopoetics was the power of written texts to enlarge the imaginative capacity of readers and, with that, to facilitate mental time-and-space travel. The success of scripture-based visionary religions—the “religions of the book” (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)—was an effect, as well as a contributing cause, of the advancements in literacy from 500 B.C.E. to 700 C.E.
With the advent of the solitary, increasingly silent reader, new literary genres came into being. One was prose fiction, which mixed hyperbolic adventure with what we might now call “magical realism.” This genre, which in the Late Classical West included the Greek romances (e.g., Daphnis and Chloe) and Latin picaresque novels (e.g., Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’ Golden Ass), engaged readers in a new kind of verbal play, one in which the entire narrative was a fable understood to be factually untrue, yet somehow meaningful—at any rate, entertaining. The other was the lyric, the genre that by the sixteenth century C.E. would become what most readers consider the quintessential kind of poem. This latter outcome would have surprised Aristotle, who regarded tragedy as the paragon of poiêsis and epic a close second. He never deigned to mention the lyric, unless one interprets his passing comments on an obscure genre of Dionysian hymns, the dithyramb, as referring to lyric. This omission has provoked many centuries of critical head scratching and logical contortions, as Gérard Genette chronicled in his Architext (1992).
According to the standard view, the lyric originated as the text of a lyre-accompanied song. The relative brevity and strophic structure of the lyric does suggest it derives from the orally performed, musically accompanied composition. Like the song that has but one singer, the lyric is dominated by the first-person singular, addressing one or several others in I–You discourse and, being monologic, needs no other person’s vocal input or presence. Direct address in lyric therefore often takes the form of apostrophe to an absent other or speech directed toward a personified idea or object.
The literate lyric, however, has other features that rightly place it among literate artifacts. It may be recited aloud, but the social setting of an oral performance is not necessary. Its venue is the mind of a solitary reader thinking the thoughts of an equally solitary writer. Both writing and reading thrive in the absence of social distractions. The typical lyric tense is the present, a fact that further strengthens the correspondence between the reader, now reading, and the text-represented writer, now uttering thoughts. Emotionally toned thoughts of the past and the future—nostalgia, regret, fears, desires—are typical of this genre, but these temporal projections are usually framed by the present. In many respects, the intimate relation of reader with writer resembles that between the addressee and the addresser of a personal letter. This early form of literate communication, as private as inscription was public, was immensely popular both in early imperial Rome and in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Europe, two periods of intense lyric production. It should also be noted that in both these periods the writers of lyric poems, even those they labeled “carmina,” “songs,” and “odes,” seldom, if ever, intended them to be set to music. (Horace’s choral ode, the Carmen Saeculare, is a rare exception.)
The materiality of writing bestowed on the verbal artifact, be it prose or verse, a new instrumental status, affording readers new ways to pursue the old Delphic quest for self-knowledge. Now if one chose to experience mental exploration, one could reach out, grasp a book with one’s hand, open it, and through the instrumentality of the written page find oneself moving along seldom-visited inner pathways. As the paths diverge and the words take one to unforeseen places, where image and motor schemas flash and vanish, one realizes that this instrument is a mental travel device.
The question that has most intrigued me about this travel is why the itinerary includes places, thoughts, feelings, and events that I have no memory of having experienced. I know, the combinatory imagination has marvelous powers, but I think there are more factors involved. This venture into paleopoetics has been based on my assumption that, despite its plasticity, the brain, like every other organ of the human body, has evolved certain structures that have enabled individuals to live long enough to pass them on to their descendants—to us who owe our existence to the fact that we are preceded by an unbroken line of sexually successful survivors. It follows that just as we have inherited from them a number of visible traits that we have never had to struggle to acquire—e.g., our opposable thumbs and binocular vision—so we have also inherited a special form of mental multitasking. Besides our ability to use figure–ground differentiation to organize a visual field of objects, we can use a similar procedure to imagine a scene in the absence of physical objects. Although perceiving and imagining are not identical processes, they both represent a field of objects simultaneously in broad awareness and in narrowly focused attention, a pattern I have termed “dyadic” to emphasize its integrated duality.
Why our genus is so heavily dependent on this pattern may lie in the fact that Homo and its one surviving subspecies, H. sapiens sapiens, have had to manage relatively rapid evolutionary changes. Here Dual-Process Theory, viewed from an evolutionary perspective, would suggest that System 1 represents older cognitive processes that have now come to operate peripherally within a brain newly specialized to perform centrally focused System 2 activities. The two systems, as well as each set of paired traits, I submit, replicate the dyadic pattern.
This study of the preliterate imagination, this paleopoetics, has traced a series of major reorganizations of the brain’s capacity to connect with other brains through semiotic exchanges. These started with prehuman vocal and gestural indices, followed by iconic imitations, and then the mastery of symbolic signs vocally transmitted, semiotic adaptations that correspond to Merlin Donald’s episodic, mimetic, and mythic stages. At each stage along the way, the ratchet effect (Tomasello, 2009) determined that the older mode would be retained, but modified in order to serve the newer mode. In each case, the old and the new formed a dyad in which the old mode assumed functions associated with parallel activity and broad peripheral awareness, while the new mode specialized in serial activity monitored with narrowly focused attention.
In the last two chapters I examined how language and its verbal artifacts incorporated pre-language and protolanguage as parallel-processed background features, while full, spoken language, serially produced, became the new focus of human information sharing. When we turn to consider the impact of writing on speech, we find the same dyadic pattern reemerging, but now it is oral/auditory speech that shifts to the peripheral, supporting role, while the written text becomes the dominant means of information exchange. Once again, though, the older mode has remained operative and continues to be essential to the success of the new mode of communicating.
Whether in verse or prose, verbal artifacts embody the entire sweep of evolutionary change—the process of natural selection that gave us eyes to see with and ears to hear with, cries and gestures to make known our fears and desires, and sounds to name ourselves and all the living others that we share the earth with. Reading these verbal artifacts, we need to come close enough to their words to hear the ancient pulses and tones that still resonate within them. Confronting the silent printed page, we need to imagine the sound colors of vowels and consonants, those intricate phonemes, as they first amazingly bridged the empty space between separate minds. One of the achievements of what we now call “literature” is the power it still gives us to relive that moment and, in doing so, to touch and animate that deeply living past within us.