FINALLY a New Entry

So, Spring Break really threw me off for my entries. I had no Internet access for 11 days and that's killer for a journal that's supposed to be continually updated. I hope I'm not the only one who slacked off a little this last week. :O) I also hope that Spring Break was relaxing for you all. I need at least another week off to recover from the week I was gone, but, no matter. Only about 7 weeks left in the semester!

On Thursday we discussed sections of Ong chapters 4-7 that struck us. On page 103 Ong writes "With writing, words once 'uttered', outered, put down on the surface, can be eliminated, erased, changed. There is no equivalent for this in oral performance, no way to erase a spoken word...Corrections in oral performance tend to be counterproductive, to render the speaker unconvincing. " This made me think about some of the reasons that the oral word is so strong. The power of the spoken promise in oral culture has already been discussed. The signature is irrelevant to them while the promise is the most binding of contracts. I don't know how many of you watch TV courtroom dramas or movies, but sometimes a lawyer will ask that a witness's answer be "stricken from the record" and the judge often grants the request meaning that the divulged information cannot be taken into account when making a final decision on the case. That's just stupid. As Ong says, we cannot take back what we've said as much as we might like to. Similarly, we cannot forget what we've heard once we've heard it. Those jurors aren't going to 'forget' what that witness said even if they are supposed to. The spoken word is too powerful to be erased or forgotten without some kind of memory erasure system.

I also thought that Ong's discussion of Finnegan's Wake as a text written for the print medium despite its obvious roots in the oral culture. It could not be copied in huge numbers without print because there's no way that the weir spellings and sentence structures could be easily reproduced. Also, Wake is a prime example of a text that cannot be understood without thhe knowledge of all past printed texts. It's a really interesting aspect of intertextuality at work here. :O)