British anthropologist Jack Goody’s book Myth, Ritual and the Oral weaves in and out of the various social effects that literacy may have on orality. In this collection of essays whose origins span several decades, his central argument is that the written word is an additive, not a replacement, to existing oral traditions. Societies influenced by both modes of communication are left with a new kind of orality, which he calls the “lecto-oral.”
The focus of this book is broad, perhaps because of its format. It is organized into chapters that reflect shorter essays written by Goody at different points in his long career. Some of the essays have received seemingly light revisions for publication here. Others, the last two chapters in particular, provide prescient arguments for literary and oral traditions as complementary components of a larger system of human communication. The effect of such organization is that the book’s personality changes significantly each time it turns attention toward a new subject. For example, an intellectual history exploring the scholarly dichotomy between the sacred and the profane pairs unusually with a discussion on the rise of the novel from fanciful diversion to the dominant literary form of our time. However, lecto-orality arises as the book’s main concern, as it appears repeatedly from the first page to the last.
Lecto-orality is presented as oral tradition operating within literary conventions. The utterances of a lecto-oral society are framed by the standards of the written word with regard to textual fixity, memorization practices, and truth value. To make analyses along these lines, Goody sets up language along several spectra—words are either fixed or variable; printed or spoken; true or false. The extremity of these constructs allows him to highlight the ways in which language really represents a dense system of meaning with manifold social implications. Practical scholarship, he suggests, is rooted in the close study of texts within their individual frames of performance.
On the other hand, Goody is willing to classify texts as members of conventional genres like myth, legend, and folktale. His major identifier for these genres seems to be the age of the audience, with myth and legend belonging to the realm of serious adult sociality, and folktales being reserved almost exclusively for children’s amusement. Goody holds fast to these conclusions, based partly on his years of fieldwork studying mythology among the LoDagaa people of Ghana.
Some of the issues that Goody confronts along the way are shared by folklore studies. What problems do we invite by crisply identifying literacy and orality as separate modes? How does the fieldworker-scholar unconsciously prejudice representations of the culture being studied? To his credit, Goody cites the work of folklore studies luminaries like Stith Thompson. Yet scholarship exists that could leaven the aforementioned dialogues with productive, more contemporary viewpoints. Linda Dégh, and many academic folklorists beside her, would enthusiastically expand upon Goody’s definition of folklore as non-written forms shared by illiterate sub-groups within literate cultures. Richard Bauman would thoroughly expand upon Goody’s suggestion that textual and generic rigidity rests on the shifting ground of performative agency. The gap in scholarly discourse, perhaps, is owed to the position of folklore studies as a discipline apart—not quite anthropology and not quite literature, not quite social science and not quite fine art, but the kind of pursuit that privileges the creativity of the small group in a theoretical framework best described as humble, as Dorothy Noyes has written.
In the end, the good work that Goody’s book does is to provoke further discussion regarding scholarly assumptions about orality and the cultures from which it is perceived to arise. Does oral tradition survive in harmony with, or in spite of, literary convention? Whatever the answer is, this query is likely to meet a familiar (and sympathetic!) audience with the academic folklorist, who has been working through such issues for some time.
WORKS CITED
Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dégh, Linda. 1994. American Folklore and the Mass Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Noyes, Dorothy. 2008. “Humble Theory.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1): 37–43.
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[Review length: 686 words • Review posted on October 26, 2011]