The Homeric Question
For centuries, readers of Homer faced a puzzle. The Iliad and Odyssey were revered as the greatest secular poems in Western literature, yet they exhibited peculiarities that troubled careful examination. Epithets repeated mechanically—"swift-footed Achilles," "rosy-fingered dawn," "the wine-dark sea"—where careful word choice should vary with context. Inconsistencies persisted where revision should have corrected them. The structure was episodic where narrative logic seemed to demand climactic organisation.
Scholars split into opposing camps. The "Analysts" argued that the texts were assembled from earlier written fragments, their inconsistencies evidence of clumsy editorial compilation. The "Unitarians" insisted that structural coherence proved single authorship, the peculiarities being features of Homeric style to be appreciated rather than explained away. Both camps shared an assumption so fundamental it went unexamined: they were dealing with texts—written documents whose peculiarities required textual explanation.
Milman Parry, an American classicist who died in 1935 at thirty-three, dissolved the puzzle by asking a different question. What if Homer was not a writer at all? What if the mechanical epithets, the formulaic phrases, the episodic structure were adaptations to oral composition—to the constraints of memory and real-time performance?
The answer explained everything. The epithets were chosen for metrical fit, not semantic precision. Homer had repertoires of phrases diversified enough to fill any position in the hexameter line; "swift-footed Achilles" and "brilliant Achilles" and "godlike Achilles" served as metrically interchangeable modules rather than carefully selected characterisations. Close examination revealed that only a tiny fraction of the epics' words were not parts of formulas—and devastatingly predictable formulas at that.
The formulas chunked information into memorable units because oral knowledge exists only when it can be recalled. The episodic structure persisted because climactic linear plot requires what oral composition cannot provide: the ability to survey a story's entirety, eliminate all but a few highlighted incidents, arrange what remains in strict chronological order.
The implications devastated literate sensibilities. What schoolmasters had praised as particularly apt—the "wine-dark sea," "grey-eyed Athena"—turned out to be metrically determined. From Pope's insistence that good poetry treats "what oft was thought" in ways "ne'er so well expressed" through the Romantic demand for radical originality, Western literary culture had taught that the accomplished poet generates his own phrases rather than assembling prefabricated parts. Yet Homer, the greatest poet of all, appeared to be doing exactly what schoolboys did when they assembled Latin verse from phrase books. The very word rhapsodize, from the Greek for "to stitch songs together," now seemed ominous. "Instead of a creator," Ong observed, "you had an assembly-line worker."
Parry faced this paradox squarely. Homeric Greeks valued formulas not because they lacked imagination but because in an oral culture, knowledge that is not constantly repeated is lost. Fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration. The relationship between Homeric Greece and post-Platonic philosophy, however superficially continuous, was deeply antagonistic at levels neither Plato nor his contemporaries could consciously articulate. Ancient Greek civilisation marked the point in human history when deeply interiorised alphabetic literacy first clashed head-on with orality.
The Terminological Problem
Ong argued that the difficulty runs deeper than Homer. Our very language for discussing verbal art is contaminated by literate assumptions. The phrase "oral literature" is preposterous—a contradiction in terms revealing our conceptual imprisonment. Literature derives from the Latin litera, letter of the alphabet; to speak of oral literature is to define oral traditions by what they are not.
Ong compared this to describing horses for people who have never seen one by calling them "wheelless automobiles" and cataloguing differences—hooves instead of wheels, hair instead of lacquer, hay instead of gasoline. Such apophatic description can never convey what a horse actually is, only what it fails to be relative to automobiles. The same distortion afflicts our thinking about oral traditions when we conceptualise them as variants of writing.
This conceptual difficulty extends beyond the academic. Writing, Ong observed, is "pre-emptive and imperialist." A literate person asked to think of the word "nevertheless" will inevitably visualise the spelled-out word; they cannot think purely in sound for even sixty seconds. Once writing takes hold of the psyche, there is no fully recovering what words are to purely oral people. Written words become thing-like residue—visible marks on surfaces that can be touched and examined. Oral tradition has no such residue; when a story is not being told, it exists only as potential in those who might tell it.
Ong distinguished between "primary orality"—the orality of cultures totally untouched by writing—and "secondary orality," the new oral culture of telephone, radio, television, and electronic media that depends entirely on writing and print for its existence. Primary oral culture in the strict sense barely exists today, since virtually all cultures have some contact with writing, but many communities preserve significant elements of oral consciousness. Understanding the difference matters because most contemporary discourse operates between poles, mingling oral and literate features in proportions rarely examined.
Consequent and Related Work
Subsequent work extended Parry's insights across cultures and media. His student Albert Lord conducted field research with Serbo-Croatian epic singers, demonstrating how oral poets compose in performance without verbatim memorisation. Eric Havelock showed how Greek philosophy emerged from the restructuring of thought made possible by writing, attributing the ascendancy of Greek analytic thought specifically to their introduction of vowels into the alphabet—a new level of abstract visual coding. Other scholars applied these insights to Old English poetry, African epic, early Chinese narrative, Classical Arabic poetry, and American folk preaching.
Jack Goody demonstrated that shifts traditionally labelled as magic-to-science or prelogical-to-rational consciousness can be more simply explained as shifts from orality to various stages of literacy. The contrast between "Western" and other worldviews may ultimately reduce to contrasts between deeply interiorised literacy and more residually oral states of consciousness.
The discovery that oral and literate thought differ fundamentally does not establish which is superior. Oral cultures produced powerful and beautiful verbal performances impossible to replicate once writing takes possession of the psyche. Yet without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials—science, history, philosophy, and even the explanation of language itself require literacy. This creates genuine anguish for people in predominantly oral cultures who recognise what literacy offers while knowing that entering the literate world means abandoning much that is deeply valued in oral tradition.
Ong framed his project as using the tools of literacy to reconstruct, as best we can, the preliterate consciousness that literacy itself has transformed. We can never fully reconstitute that past, but the attempt brings understanding of what literacy has meant for human consciousness.