Monday, January 19, 2009

On the streets of Macondo (with Michelangelo)...


In chapter 4 of Ong's book Orality and Literacy he, with the support of Plato, says that literacy and writing are artificial, secondary acts. Orality comes directly from our consciousness, but literacy comes from somewhere else, from what someone else has written. Relating to my previous blog, literature, then informs our consciousness whereas with primary orality, communication is informed by consciousness.


This brings me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Macondo is struck by an inescapable plague of insomnia. The not sleeping part is good because it allows the Buendias and the inhabitants of Macondo (which, as of this point in the beginning of the novel, is an oral culture) more hours of productivity. The side effect of insomnia is a loss of memory. Because they cannot cure the insomnia, they must combat memory loss. They do this first by labelling everying. Then, as their memory continued to fade, they labeled everything with descriptions of what it is used for. In essence, a culture whose reality was oral, and therefore a direct result of their imaginations and consciousness, becomes literal where what has been labeled informs the reality of the insomniacs. Maybe literacy is to blame for the rise and fall of Macondo?


And what a difference written words make, heh? Even the little letters and punctuation in them. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion was caused by comma misuse. I learned from Lynda Sexson of one little slip that had extreme social consequences: St. Jerome, the man who translated Hebraic scriptures into Latin used the word "horn" instead of "beam of light" (as they are the same word in Hebrew), and, as a result, Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with horns instead of beaming with light from having met Yahweh. Most classical art of Moses depicts him with horns and Jews have suffered the bigotry of being said to have horns. The above was done by Michelangelo

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