WHY????!!?!?!??!?! and a bunch of other things

Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy asks a very interesting question on page six.  He writes "it will be well to set the stage here by asking why the scholarly world had to reawaken to the oral character of language"  especially since as he later notes "writing can never dispense with orality." (6, 8 respectively).  I understand his argument of the importance of orality especially since of the 1000s of languages spoken on the planet only 78 have written literature's.  However I must admit that at this point of my studies, and I consider this the starting point, I cannot even venture a guess as to WHY orality became pushed under the rug.  Ironically, as I write this blog every time I type the word ORALITY a squiggly little red line appears to inform me that the internal Safari dictionary is devoid of a entry for the word.  It seems that academia phased out the concept of orality so much so that it fails to find a place in the all knowing spell check database.  My only guess as to the nefarious reasons to the state of this situation can be likened to the feeling that permeates our society of new technology.  No one wants the old gremlin with the 8-track, they much prefer the shiny new Hummer with the DVD player or more explicitly, who needs orality when there is literacy?

Like all things considered old and out dated, or better yet "vintage,"   A trendy group of individuals are bound to rediscover this "vintage" orality and thus reinvent cool with spoken language as opposed to its written and print counterpart.  Obviously Ong sees potential in oral culture and though some may disagree I think some aspects of the Hip-Hop culture would agree.  Hip-Hop artists commonly freestyle their music much like the original Jazz musicians.  The lyrics spoken by these artists never find their way onto a written CD cover and generally change from show to show much like the Jazz musicians 70 years ago, some of which who were musically illiterate.   I bring this up not because I maintain a specially affinity to Hip-hop but simply because their culture came to mind to prove my point in thinking of orality. 

The unfortunate nature of the Literate culture is the tendency to forget.  In my World Literature class we are reading Viking Sagas about the discovery of Vinland (North America)  These sagas were originally of the Oral tradition but then with the advent of writing became part of Old Norse literature.  Here's where the story gets interesting.  When the sagas were written down, the bards, elders, and storytellers forgot them because they were now written down and they didn't need to remember them.  Well over the course of almost 1000 years of history, thanks to cultural blending with the development of better technology and poor printing, the sagas were lost in the fabric of time both in oral and written form.  The major viking nations of Scandinavia and Iceland lost their written history of one of the most important discoveries of the Common Era.  The story doesn't end there however.  A small group of Islands in the North Atlantic called the Faroe Islands the Viking culture lived on.  These extremely remote islands retained the sagas in their original oral form.  Due to the remoteness of the Islands and the remoteness of the local language no system of writing had been developed.  The Faroe Islands remained a "primary oral" culture until the late 18th century and thus preserved most of the original Viking sagas passed down from over 1000 years ago.  

Why is memory and orality important?  Well as seen above, because books have a habit of burning, rotting, or disappearing.  So much of the history of the world is lost thanks to lost texts.  I would venture to guess much of the questions scientists have about the history of the world was written down someplace but somehow slipped through the cracks in time.  Now if only those texts were remembered like they were for the first 40,000 years of human existence, we would have far fewer questions to answer.