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From Tongue to Text

Along with Walter Ong, Jack Goody was among the earliest of the modern generation of scholars to look at orality as an abstract and discrete concept. Since, unlike Ong, he combined his theoretical approach with extensive fieldwork in Africa, Goody's work was an early vade mecum for Africanists interested in reconstituting African history by means of the newest weapon in the arsenal, oral tradition. For many, though, Goody struck a discordant note because his major premise was that writing qua writing is in the nature of a necessary pre-condition for historical thought in the 'modern' mode, since continuous and abstract reflection about the past requires the ability to refer to past thought on the matter as captured and preserved in written form. Depending to an extent on just how 'historical' is to be defined, this view of things is scarcely congenial to those who prefer to argue that the past of societies where all knowledge was orally transmitted until very recently can still be studied profitably even 'historically'. But even scholars most committed to the notion that orality per se is not an insuperable impediment to certain knowledge about the past will benefit from the wealth and breadth of argument that Goody has amassed. The present collection offers eleven essays, nine of them already published, often in slightly different form. While this inevitably leads to a degree of repetitiveness as well as disparateness, it is useful to have this corpus available en ensemble. The area to which Goody has ultimately devoted most attention in these articles is ancient Greece. Chapter 1 ('The historical development of writing') devotes considerable attention to the career of the Greek alphabet, while the following chapter (' Literacy and achievement in the ancient world') is virtually a gloss on its predecessor. Although they have not lost their value entirely, these chapters have to no small extent been overtaken by the spate of recent interest in the origins and growth of the Greek alphabet. In particular, much interest has been devoted of late to arguments concerning the route, timing and influence of the Phoenician alphabet in this process. While the matter is far from being solved (and is probably insoluble), these discussions are peculiarly germane since the earlier the demonstrable date, the greater the adverse effects on arguments about the 'oralness' of such compositions as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Goody finds it necessary to include a brief chapter arguing against the delightfully ingenuous belief of many Indologists that the Vedic hymns were transmitted orally for a millennium or more without being changed until being committed