WALTER J. ONG, S.J. (1912-2003): IN MEMORIAM

Jack Foley

God created the evolving world, and it’s still evolving.
       --Walter J. Ong

       The death of Walter J. Ong, S.J., at the age of 90 brings to an end the career of one of the most remarkable intellects of the twentieth century. Ong’s rich, cultivated work reached far beyond its academic origins to become one of the most illuminating critiques ever written of this complex, enormously troubled period. It was Ong’s particular brilliance to be able to enter by sheer imagination and sympathy into the deep past, into a period when writing had not yet presented itself to consciousness, and to use what he found there as a way of understanding the present. Though polite obituaries appeared in various places, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, Father Ong’s passing was not at all noted by the New York Times, and, unfortunately, the Los Angeles Times article, written by Mary Rourke, wrongly suggests that this author’s immensely lucid work is “difficult”:

His writing style was dense and complex, not easy to grasp...“Ong is the sort of guy the experts read,” said Thomas J. Farrell, whose 2000 book, Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies, has helped make the scholarly priest’s work more accessible. 1/

 Farrell, a former student of Ong’s and now associate professor in the department of Composition at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, insists that Ong “was first and foremost a priest. He said daily Mass at 5:30 a.m., regularly heard confessions and wore cleric’s garb wherever he went.”

       This is Walter J. Ong on the subject of texts. The passage is from one of his finest books, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (1977):

A text as such is so much a thing of the past that it carries with it necessarily an aura of accomplished death. In our highly literate culture, where everyone who cannot read and write is considered defective, and culturally is indeed so, literacy is often superstitiously regarded as totally unexceptionable and thus a statement such as this, attributing to literacy a negative quality, associating writing with death, is quite scandalous. Nothing but good should be said about writing and reading as such. Of course, this suggests the Latin saying, De Mortuis nil nisi bonum [Say nothing but good of the dead]

       If, however, we dismantle our defenses and recognize that real words are always sounds, always events, which exist only while they are going out of existence, that real words are not marks on a surface, the truth about texts better appears. In oral or oral-aural communication both speaker and hearer must be alive.

       Walter Jackson Ong was born in Kansas City, Mo., November 30, 1912. His vocation came upon him while he was in high school, and he entered the Society of Jesus in 1935; he was ordained as a priest in 1946. Ong was a graduate student studying under his famous mentor, Marshall McLuhan, when he completed his MA in English at St. Louis University; he then went on to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. In 1955 he joined the faculty at St. Louis University, where he taught for 36 years; his specialty was Renaissance literature. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Father Ong to the White House Task Force on Education. From 1968 to 1974 he served on the National Council on the Humanities and in 1978 was president of the Modern Language Association of America. Though he held a position in the English department, in recognition of the wide range of his learning St. Louis University named him University Professor of Humanities in the 1980s; he was also professor of humanities in psychiatry at St. Louis University’s medical school. “He knew everything about everything,” his friend the Rev. John Padberg, said, “and he was genial and loved to talk...[His] conversation could go any number of directions, from fly fishing to the latest theology to what was going on in European politics.” Among Ong’s many books the most widely circulated was Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982 and translated into a dozen languages. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry by Walter J. Ong, Thomas J. Farrell, Paul A. Soulcup (editor) and Alvin D. Staggs is forthcoming. Ong had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several years before his death on August 12, 2003.

       For me, Father Ong’s work was a marvelous revelation of, among other things, the relationship of performance to Modernism--a relationship which had not been made clear by any of the famous critics for whom Modernism was the central issue of the twentieth century. I suggest in O Powerful Western Star that at the heart of Western poetry is a split, a confusion, a multimedia situation which is never resolved but remains in a continual, and at times enormously creative, state of tension. Ong’s investigation of “the new orality” of the electronic era caused current critics--Dana Gioia among them--to recognize a hidden history of poetry, a history which was not told by those critics for whom the poem was entirely a written object. The fact is that Modernism is permeated by performance, but this is not generally known because the considerable body of criticism Modernism amassed was completely unaware of it--or regarded it as unimportant. In a recent review of Ezra Pound’s musical productions

Richard Taruskin suggests, “Pound insisted that poetry was not ‘literature’ but a performance art.” One can find such insistence in many other “founding” poets of the twentieth century. (Yeats’ experiments with the radio are important here--as is Marinetti’s equally deep interest in “La Radia.”) It wasn’t Modernism which insisted on the “literary” as opposed to performance; Modernism was extraordinarily interested in performance: rather, it was the influential literary critics who wrote about Modernism. These critics made Modernism famous (and even gave birth to “Post Modernism”), but they also misunderstood certain aspects of the movement. Ong was quite clear about our cultural need to maintain ourselves as a “literate” people, a people interested in “literature,” while at the same time maintaining our interest in the electronic media. His extraordinarily fertile work constantly suggests ways in which the electronic and the literary can find co-existence, even mutual illumination.

       Walter J. Ong’s writings are a lifelong meditation on the nature of the “word”; even his titles (Presence of the Word; Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word; Interfaces of the Word) insist upon its “presence,” and it is of no small significance that “the Word” is a traditional way of referring to Christ. Ong’s training as a Catholic priest alerted him to the interpenetration of the visible and the invisible. In his media work he postulated two violently agonistic worlds and then demonstrated how these worlds connected. “Since we are isolated,” he writes in Fighting for Life (1981),

we cannot directly enter into one another’s personal awareness. I cannot share your direct knowledge of yourself, nor can you share my direct knowledge of myself. The gap between our two inner selves cannot be closed. But we can bridge the gap...by love. All human communication, even the most vapid, involves some kind of love, communion, union, some regard for the other person as a person. This love may be so mingled with other attitudes, disdain, fear, brutality, that it becomes itself cruel. But it is there...When total hostility sets in...verbal communication ceases and the person is “cut,” no longer addressed at all, treated as a thing.

       It is precisely this isolated, closed human person, thrown back on himself or herself, who is also paradoxically the most open of beings. For persons have intelligence, are capable of intellectualized knowledge, and through such knowledge are open to the entire universe, to everything. Through their intelligence, women and men can take into themselves, in one way or another, all there is--which is not of course to say that they all do so or that even one of them ever does so, but only to say that the possibilities of knowledge open them to all the universe and all the universe to them. A human being is open closure.... 2/

The movement from orality in the West to the modern technological world took some six thousand years (calculating the departure from orality as dating from the beginning of script around 3500 B.C.), and it was quite unconscious in the sense that only in the past few decades has the Western world effectively taken note even of the existence of oral cultures as radically distinct from writing and print cultures.
       Interfaces of the Word (1977)

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The word comes to each of us first orally in our “mother” tongue. Its association with mother and early nature and nurture is why speech is so closely involved with our personal identity and with cultural identity, and why manipulation of the word entails various kinds of alienation...[T]he language which introduces us as human beings to the human lifeworld, not only comes primarily from our mother but belongs to some degree intrinsically to our mother’s feminine world...An infant’s contact with its mother is a distinctively oral and lingual one in more ways than one. Tongues are used early for both suckling and for speaking, and language is usually, if not always, learned while a child is still at the breast (or bottle). Who wipes an infant’s mouth, and how many times a day? First languages especially are associated with feeding, as all languages are to some extent.
       Interfaces of the Word (1977)

Speech is easy. It grows out of the child’s natural lalling stage, when sounds are spontaneously produced. It is not drilled into the child with the grim determination that often marks the teaching of writing. Speech develops out of simple play with sounds, by gradual specialization in the sounds useful in the language of the child’s culture and gradual neglect and atrophy of the sounds not useful. Writing, on the other hand, is learned by concentration or application, and it rarely becomes for any individual, even professional writers, so spontaneous or flowing as speech. Few persons can write while carrying on other activities--walking, riding horseback, playing baseball, washing dishes. One can talk during all these activities and many others besides.

       The muscular activity producing speech, moreover, does not result in fixity, in a “product.” Quite the contrary, for the spoken word vanishes immediately. Writing, however, terminates in fixity: it fixes marks in space, and by virtue of a rigid code of rules. The fixity of writing sets this medium at odds with the spoken medium which never fully accommodates itself to fixity. The writer is constrained by the artificial rules involved in writing, and also by the fact that because what has been written is motionless, it can be returned to and corrected in a way that speech cannot; the possibilities of greater accuracy themselves generate the need for greater constraint. One can “hold” or “cling” or “adhere” or “stick” to the letter.

It may be that dealing with written texts especially fosters anxieties and constraint.
       The Presence of the Word (1967)

Today’s textual scholars...are feeling the effects of the new orality. Whereas earlier textualists were perhaps somewhat compulsive about securing the text of an author, present-day editors are outspokenly aware that there may be no single text. In editing Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson does not hesitate to print poems for which there is no final version, but only a set of alternatives of which sometimes all have been rejected by the author. Texual scholars have in fact liberated themselves from much of the compulsiveness of writing and print, for they have been the ones who chiefly have awakened us to the oral substratum of many texts, in particular those of the Bible and Homer.

       But the parallels between constrictive anality and chirography [handwriting, penmanship] remain. And between anality and typography the parallels become spectacular. For, if constriction is closely associated with writing, it is of the absolute essence of print. The concept of “print” itself necessarily involves pressure. The key instrument of printing is the press. A type (typus in Latin, from the Greek) means originally the mark of a blow, a stamp, print, or footprint, the product of pressure again. Type is “set,” placed in rigid lines, by hand or by a machine. The lines, of uneven lengths, are “justified”--spaced out to the same length--which is to say forced to comply to a set measure. (Columns of such type are often lined up between “rules,” as in newspapers.) The set type is then “proved” or tested to see if all the rigorous conventions have been complied with, and it is then “corrected.” In the form or chase it is “locked up” with the aid of quoins--wedges which put the type and chase under extreme internal pressure and which are manipulated with a “key.” The form or chase is in turn locked under pressure into a press, which itself presses the type onto the final printed sheet. Even afterward, when set type is taken out of a form and put aside in storage, it is tied up tightly.

       All this appears natural enough to those used to dealing with printing. How else, one asks, could it be? And of course there is no other way. But this is the very point. How strange is this typographical world of compression and visually inspected, locked-up chunks of metal and wood when compared with the world of speech in its original, oral-aural habitat, where words “flow” and indeed must flow without constraint. Speech at its oral optimum must be free from all this sense of hindrance of pressure that is inseparable from print.
       The Presence of the Word (1967)

*
With print, for the first time, a teacher could stand before a class and say, “Everybody turn to page 84, fifth line from the top, third word from the left,” and everyone could find the word. In a manuscript culture the students might all have had manuscripts, but you would have had to pronounce the word and wait for them to locate it because it would be in a different position on a different page in virtually every manuscript.

       With print, books literally line things up more drastically and indexes become important...[T]he index becomes a highly effective and widespread retrieval device. A book is now felt as a container in which “things” are neatly ordered rather than as a voice which speaks to the reader.
       Interfaces of the Word (1977)

*
       In the older oral-aural society, encyclopedism had had to be a matter of poetry, combined with the other great oral-aural speech form, oratory, which in turn was largely poetic, as poetry was largely oratorical. For Plato, this world was gone. Like his master Socrates, in hitting out against the Sophists he hit out also against the other great oral form, oratory. Of course, these perspectives explain the Greek achievement only to a degree. There remains the question why, of all the alphabetized peoples, it was the Greeks who first reacted this way to the new structures, social and psychological, which the alphabet had brought about.
       The Presence of the Word (1967)

[M]y treatment of discourse and thought as rooted ineradicably in orality contrasts with [Jacques] Derrida’s chirographic and typographic focus in his De la grammatologie and other works.
       Interfaces of the Word (1977)

       Chirographic and typographic folk find it convincing to think of the word, essentially a sound, as a ‘sign’ because ‘sign’ refers primarily to something visually apprehended. Signum, which furnished us with the word ‘sign,’ meant the standard that a unit of the Roman army carried aloft for visual identification--etymologically, the ‘object one follows’ (Proto-Indo-European root, sekw, to follow). Though the Romans knew the alphabet, the signum was not a lettered word but some kind of pictorial design or image, such as an eagle, for example...

       Our complacency in thinking of words as signs is due to the tendency, perhaps incipient in oral cultures but clearly marked in chirographic cultures and far more marked in typographic and electronic cultures, to reduce all sensation and indeed all human experience to visual analogues...

       Oral man is not so likely to think of words as ‘signs,’ quiescent visual phenomena. Homer refers to them with the standard epithet ‘winged words’--which suggests evanescence, power, and freedom: words are constantly moving, but by flight, which is a powerful form of movement, and one lifting the flier free of the ordinary, gross, heavy, ‘objective’ world.

       In contending with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Derrida is of course quite correct in rejecting the persuasion that writing is no more than incidental to the spoken word. But to try to construct a logic of writing without investigation in depth of the orality out of which writing emerged and in which writing is permanently and ineluctably grounded is to limit one’s understanding, although it does produce at the same time effects that are brilliantly intriguing but also at times psychedelic, that is, due to sensory distortions. Freeing ourselves of chirographic and typographic bias in our understanding of language is probably more difficult than any of us can imagine, far more difficult, it would seem, than the ‘deconstruction’ of literature, for this ‘deconstruction’ remains a literary activity.
       Orality and Literacy (1982)

       At least since Freud the modern world has been aware of the potential in logotherapy [healing by means of the word] and of the need to define its range--the possible effectiveness of the use of speech in restoring a person to health, as by vocalizing the contents of consciousness in free association, by dialogue between physician and patient, by interpretation of dreams or of other phenomena, and the like. But in classical antiquity the problem of discovering the proper role for the word in therapy was the reverse of that encountered when modern psychotherapy came into being...With Freud and those who have come after him (whether followers or pursuers) the problem has been to reestablish the effectiveness of verbal (generally oral) therapy in a milieu overreliant on the purely somatic. With the ancient Greeks, the problem was to sort out what might be truly therapeutic in the welter of verbal activities generated by a culture where both mores and academic education were dominantly rhetorical...

       [I]n a culture without writing, speech serves not only to express what is lodged in the mind, but in its various stylized configurations--its themes, formulas, proverbs, epithets, and the like--also to store and retrieve verbalized knowledge. Without the storage systems which writing later provides, knowledge has to be constantly regurgitated and uttered (“out-ered”) or it simply disappears. Speech has to be given special patterns of a mnemonic sort, for man knows only what he can recall, and the only resource for verbal recall in an oral culture is memory. Nothing can be “looked” up (with the eye); everything must be “called” up or “recalled” (retrieved by voice and ear). Speech patterns are crucial. For this reason, even in the most laconic early cultures, utterance is attended to and valued in ways it will seldom be once writing takes hold...

       [A]n oral noetic economy tends to connect all knowledge, even the most abstract, more or less directly with the human lifeworld and in this way limits abstraction...

       [I]n an oral culture, which knows words only in their natural habitat, that is, the world of sound, words necessarily carry with them a special sense of power. For sound always indicates the present use of power. A primitive hunter can see a buffalo, smell a buffalo, touch a buffalo, and taste a buffalo when the buffalo is dead and motionless. If he hears a buffalo, he had better watch out: something is going on. No other sensory field has this dynamism which marks the field of sound. So long as words are known only directly and without interference for what they ultimately are--sounds--and cannot possibly be imaged to be what they really are not--marks on a surface--they are sensed as physically powered events, happenings, of a piece with all present actuality...

       Aristotle...rejects the old oral world less totally than does Plato, despite the latter’s protestation of love for the spoken word...Aristotle is less rationalist than Plato. Plato had admitted verbal therapy only at the conscious levels reached in rational conviction and persuasion. Aristotle acknowledged this kind of therapy, but added the therapy of katharsis, which was to a degree effected by conscious, intense insight into the human situation but also by factors less articulate, more “musical.”
       Foreword to Pedro Lain Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity (1970)

[I]f knowing is like sight, the subject can know himself only by making himself something to be looked at. Translated in terms of the description of sight as concerned with surfaces only, this is to say that the subject can know himself only by making himself an exterior, despite the fact that he is to himself and to other conscious beings as well an interior, a beneath-surface or beyond-surface. In the last analysis, you cannot quite make your self an exterior. Although you can be the object of your own knowledge, you can be so only in a quite special way.
       Interfaces of the Word (1971)

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Focusing on voice and song, and all the things to which voice and song relate, and ransacking all available sources, [Oral Poetry: An Introduction] moves in a direction totally opposite to much current critical speculation, which, the author declares, in concentrating on “text” has not only failed to refocus our long text-bound horizons but “blurred the picture all the more by reinscribing the long-standing tendency to sacralize the letter in a burlesque of our mental processes.”
       Foreword to Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction (1990)

*
Sound...reveals the interior without the necessity of physical invasion. Thus we tap a wall to discover where it is hollow inside, or we ring a silver-colored coin to discover whether it is perhaps lead inside. To discover such things by sight, we should have to open what we examine, making the inside an outside, destroying its interiority as such.
       The Presence of the Word (1967)

Although [James] Joyce’s text [Finnegans Wake] is very oral in the sense that it reads well aloud, the voice and its hearer do not fit into any imaginable real-life setting, but only the imaginative setting of Finnegans Wake, which is imaginable only because of the writing and print that has gone before it. Finnegans Wake was composed in writing, but for print; with its idiosyncratic spelling and usages, it would be virtually impossible to multiply it accurately in handwritten copies...Typography had made the word into a commodity. The old communal oral world had split up into privately claimed freeholdings. The drift in human consciousness toward greater individualism had been served well by print. Of course, words were not quite private property. They were still shared property to a degree. Printed books did echo one another, willy-nilly. At the onset of the electronic age, Joyce faced up to the anxieties of influence squarely and in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake undertook to echo everybody on purpose.
       Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982)

*
[W]ith telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the age of ‘secondary orality.’ This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment and for its use as well.

       Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality. Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture--McLuhan’s ‘global village.’ Moreover, before writing, oral folk were group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself. In our age of secondary orality, we are group-minded self-consciously and programmatically. The individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitive. Unlike members of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because they have had little occasion to turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward. In a like vein, where primary orality promotes spontaneity because the analytic reflectiveness implemented by writing is unavailable, secondary orality promotes spontaneity because through analytic reflection we have decided that spontaneity is a good thing. We plan our happenings carefully to be sure that they are thoroughly spontaneous.

       The contrast between oratory in the past and in today’s world well highlights the contrast between primary and secondary orality. Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments. Thus in a sense orality has come into its own more than ever before. But it is not the old orality. The old-style oratory coming from primary orality is gone forever. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the combatants--for that is what they clearly and truly were--faced one another often in the scorching Illinois summer sun outdoors, before wildly responsive audiences of as many as 12,000 or 15,000 persons..., speaking for an hour and a half each. The first speaker had one hour, the second an hour and a half, and the first another half hour of rebuttal--all this with no amplifying equipment. Primary orality made itself felt in the additive, redundant, carefully balanced, highly agonistic style, and the intense interplay between speaker and audience. The debaters were hoarse and physically exhausted at the end of each bout. Presidential debates on television today are completely out of this older oral world. The audience is absent, invisible, inaudible. The candidates are ensconced in tight little booths, make short presentations, and engage in crisp little conversations with each other in which any agonistic edge is deliberately kept dull. Electronic media do not tolerate a show of open antagonism. Despite their cultivated air of spontaneity, these media are totally dominated by a sense of closure which is the heritage of print: a show of hostility might break open the closure, the tight control. Candidates accommodate themselves to the psychology of the media. Genteel, literate domesticity is rampant. Only quite elderly persons today can remember what oratory was like when it was still in living contact with its primary oral roots.
       Orality and Literacy (1982)

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[T]he so-called “work” of oral art...is always live performance. It is really not a “work,” but an action.
       Interfaces of the Word (1977)

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He who knew so much of breath
And who looked beyond our “look”
Enters now the “press” of death:
Walter Ong’s a living book.

--Jack Foley

       1. The Times ran an obituary on Monday, August 25, 2003. It is available at

       2. It seems extraordinary that a Roman Catholic priest should be advocating so unequivocally the pursuit of “knowledge”: not “innocence” but “knowledge.” It is perhaps evidence of how far the modern Church can reach. In the world of Dante’s Catholicism the pursuit of knowledge can be a great sin--the sin of “curiosity.” It is the reason why Adam and Eve were exiled from Eden. Dante’s Ulysses cries out from the depths of his place in Hell,

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.
Take thought of the seed from which you spring:
you were not born to live as brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Jack Foley