Retention of knowledge

Walter J. Ong's devotes most of his second chapter of his book Orality and literacy to a brief account of studies done by Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the noetic characteristics of oral cultures. After summarizing Parry's investigation of the tradition of the oral epic and his writings on Homeric poetry, Ong states that we cannot but be convinced that Parry was correct in concluding that "the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier- to put it more bluntly, the cliché" .
According to Ong the Greeks of Homer's age relied on such formulaic uses of language to aid in the retention of knowledge. Without writing, if thoughts were not expressed in easily remembere d forms and were not constantly repeated, they would be lost.

Ong then explains that Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato, extended Parry's conclusions to include the entirety of ancient Greek culture. In Ong's words, Havelock shows how "Plato's exclusion of the poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorizat ion of the alphabet in the Greek psyche".

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Jean-Philippe Pastor