My Presentation

An applehead bahlness wearing a tow sack with schtriwwelich hair was gretzing about dippy ecks. So I tolls her, madam, I’ll switcher yer a polecat fer dem dippy ecks, if I getsuh bulbenik wid it. She certainly was schmegegge. She said her hoonanny was in buck pasture, but it aint why she was a moldoon . From these few short sentences it is not difficult to ascertain how the typographic mode of communication has also lent itself to a collective, yet unconscious, sense of alienation. I am too far steeped in my own decadent generation to fully engender primary orality within myself, but from my campfire experiences and time spent with my dogs I might be able to assume some of those underlying premonitions that might be felt if you were to place a being of oral antiquity in a visually illuminated and defined world such as our own. All semblance of niche united knowledge—gone. The tiniest expression or nuance or individual thought—not to be found. The chances of phonetically communicating in such a way that everyone around can understand—slim. Yet the urgency to correctness and conformity will heavily impose themselves on this wayward traveler as not only does typographic space demand staunch coherency (especially if nationalism is to prevail) to its rigid, grammatical formulations, but that space becomes so expansive and specialized that it becomes impossible for this oral alien to experience the cultural tradition as a patterned whole.
To first understand how expansive print has made the [American] cultural repertoire, simply walk into your nearest bookstore. There is, upon immediate entrance, an overwhelmingly vast amount of material to read in too little time that one cannot feel, as he reaches his life’s decrescendo, that he has learned or experienced all that was available to him. This scenario is entirely the opposite of an oral era where “every social situation cannot but bring the individual into contact with the groups’ patterns of thought, feeling and action: the choice is between the cultural tradition—or solitude” (Goody, 59). What has become so decadent and lamentable about my generation is the immediate gratification and the infinite amounts of personal selection available to a young boy or a girl. If Tiny Tim does not want to be a laborer he can go to school and learn another trade that, although lacking the social utility that a tight-knit, patterned oral community would necessitate, might earn him far greater riches and joys in life. The advent of print, and its production of textbooks from which Tim can study, enabled these choices. If Dainty Daisy decides she wants to study the pooping patterns of ungulates west of the Great Divide where the regional air quality is dense with Legionella, she may also specialize in this field. Yet this notion of specialization is fundamentally at odds with those of daily life, common knowledge, and an oral culture’s need immediate social utility. This conflict, teases Jack Goody, “is embodied in the long tradition of jokes about absent-minded professors” (Goody, 60).
Professors, though, are not the only ones who forget. Due to the size and unchecked propagation of the literate gamut, the amount of information that relates to a cultural, patterned whole that any one present-day individual knows must be miniscule in comparison with our Wayward Oral Alien. His culture is homeostatic whereby an equilibrium is achieved by “sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (Ong, 46). Print’s sheer producing and recording power has with it no system of elimination, and produces what Goody describes as “structural amnesia” which “prevents the individual from participating fully in the total cultural tradition to anything like the extent possible in non-literate society” (Goody, 57). Consequently, this system fosters a strong sense of alienation from one’s own culture. Nietzsche himself felt alienated after attempting to converse with Tiny Tim and Dainty Daisy, but resorted to small talk and calling them “Walking Encyclopedias” after realizing that, because of print, they were bratty, know-it-all, undergrads.
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries epitomize this accumulation of knowledge found in modern, literate persons. The enormous lexicon of information and vocabularies produced within the endpapers of these printed behemoths—the 1909 edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary contains over 400,000 entries—comprises what Einar Haguen termed and Walter Ong describes as the “Grapholect.” The written language of the grapholect arises from dialects—varieties of a language that are characteristic of a particular group of the language’s speakers. Though the United States does not have an official language, our grapholect is distinctly [North] American and from it a standardized, national language has emerged. The modern grapholect reestablishes connectedness throughout a nation once divided by various oral speech forms. Ong asserts that because all other English dialects are interpreted in the grapholect, that “those competent in the grapholect today can establish easy contact not only with millions of other persons but also with the thought of centuries past...”(Ong, 106).
This all speaks well and fine of a literate person today, but what of an illiterate person living in such a highly textual environment, or simply someone not as well-versed in the grapholect? Though Father Ong seems relatively optimistic about the emergence of the grapholect, Marshall McLuhan seems less than willing to accept print as a tool of human progress and emancipation while quoting Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication. “Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century” (Marshall McLuhan, 216). The consolidation of unique vernaculars into the dictionary which is to be our principal typographically communicative source creates “special classes of readers with little prospect of communication between them” (McLuhan, 216). Sadly, the dialects that have given our grapholect character, as well as those pockets of America that continue to use them, have been ousted, marginalized and are subject to constant complaints of “Grammar Nazis”.
Jack Goody brilliantly states that, unlike in an oral culture when the decision is either cultural tradition or solitude, “the mere fact that reading and writing are normally solitary activities means that in so far as the dominant cultural tradition is a literate one, it is very easy to avoid...” (Goody, 60). Thus, from a literate culture arises a new type of alienated man—the Byronic Hero who marches to the beat of his own drum, shuns appearances and the edicts of the unwashed, consumer-oriented society, and sounds his own dialect and “barbaric yawp”. McLuhan describes these Whitmanian characters as not only marginal, but also as oral and as having great appeal to the new, visually oriented literate crowd. “For the marginal man is a centre-without-a-margin, an integral independent type...The new urban or bourgeois man is centre-margin oriented. That is, he is visual, concerned about appearances and conformity or respectability” (McLuhan, 213). These qualities of marginality, orality, unrestraint, and adherence to nonstandard, and therefore quite possibly magical and certainly intriguing, vernaculars make, for the small collection of other washed and marginal characters who allow negative capabilities, artists such as Faulkner and Joyce a pleasure to read.
The new urban image is all about glamour and it has permeated our culture through every possible agency, as witnessed when perusing magazine stands or channel surfing. This commercialized ideal of glamour and the overarching importance of appearances take root in the literate instigation of grammar. In a world dictated by appearances, the need (as Kris of the Laughing Rats has demonstrated) for conformity, correctness, and an observable sense of Nationalism, makes it is hopeless for literates to live “without dictionaries, written grammar rules, punctuation, and all the rest of the apparatus that makes words into something you can “look” up...” (Ong, 14). Wayward Oral Alien is attempting, but unable, to decipher the sound two dots held in vertical alignment makes, to communicate the gutturalness of a line that tapers to a dot, to voice the agitation of a dot held over a dot with a tail or resonate the hesitancy of a squiggly dot, ampersand or an ellipses. “It is presumably impossible to make a grammatical error in a non-literate society, for nobody ever heard one” (McLuhan, 239). When the ink is firmly stamped and set, that which makes Mongolian Throat Singers spellbinding and a little flyting or stichomythia so scathing subordinates what is readily apprehend by the reader on the page, only to be imagined somewhere between the lines; and the second, intoned language that accompanies dialect and grapholect alike is relinquished to the realm of appearances, all true meaning lost.
Print permanently altered the conscious and unconscious realities of the literate individual since the invention of the printing press in 1440; until just recently, in an era of unrelenting, global, electronic stimulation, are we beginning to think on a more oral, socially intuit level—but only after we have disregarded spontaneity and succumbed to heavy introspection. We become more globally up-to-date through the urgings of textual media, more socially aware because that is every citizen’s responsibility according to the book. First we turn inward to the solitude of literature and print, which then tells us to turn outward to our community. It is this first step which Wayward Oral Alien and all marginal characters find unnecessary.