Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization

Although writing was ultimately to transmute oral performance into quite new genres, nevertheless, even after the introduction of writing, oral mindsets and ways of expression have persisted in literary works everywhere, from antiquity to the present day. For centuries literature carries a very heavy residue of what I have styled primary orality, the pristine orality of cultures with no knowledge of writing. This residue notably diminishes from the age of Romanticism on, although it never entirely disappears. Therefore, literary history must show some awareness of orality-literacy interactions, past and present. In the European Middle Ages interactions between orality and literacy reached perhaps an all-time high. The Middle Ages had no print, though they prepared the way for it. In medieval manuscript culture, books were subtly assimilated more to oral utterance and less to the world of physical objects than they are in a high-technology print culture. (This is perhaps one reason why deconstructionists typically analyze texts composed for printing, not pretypographic manuscript texts.) Manuscripts were commonly read aloud or sotto voce even when the reader was alone. Speed reading was of course impossible, so why not vocalize? Vocalization helped the reader to absorb the full meaning (not simply some logocentric meaning), to eat the words, as Jousse has explained in La Manducation de la parole. 1 In early print even typeset words tended in significant ways to be managed not as visual units but as sound units.2