Notes from the Walter Ong Collection

Earlier today we talked about scanning and posting Ong’s annotations to his Ramus and Talon Inventory. I’m not sure when he stopped updating his revising copy of the book, but he kept updating the book for years. It turns out that Harvard UP let the copyright expire and Ong renewed the copyright in his own name in 1986. I’m not 100% certain yet, but the plan is to scan the entire book and add it to the Walter J. Ong Collection online.

from Rev. of Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian. Translation and Text of Peter Ramus Rhetoricae Distinctiones in Quintilianum. Trans. Carole Newlands. Intro. James J. Murphy. Quarterly Journal of Speech (1987): 242-3:

Professor Murphy’s Introduction makes many new or otherwise important points, including the following. At the center of Ramus’s program was an attack not on Aristotle alone but rather on the three great ancient auctoritates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, whom “from the very outset Ramus viewed … as related” (7). Ramus in principle preferred Plato over Aristotle (7)–but I’m afraid that Ramus’s concept of Platonic dialectic was uncommonly shallow, even in his day and much more in ours, being interfered with by his own program for a dialectical or logical ‘method’ which was, in fact, a computer programming “tree”–Ramus had the beginnings of computer software but not computers. Ramus, Murphy notes, had two attitudes toward Cicero, complementary, not contradictory (10): he praised Cicero’s oratory but dammed Cicero’s rhetorical theory–pretty much on the same grounds as theories of Aristotle and Quintilian: they were not simple enough, not processed so as to proceed in “straight and orderly lines” (43, quoted from Ramus) through simple definitions treating first the more general and then the more specific parts of the discipline” (242).

from Rev. of Eighteenth-Century British Logica and Rhetoric, by Wilbur Samuel Howell. William and Mary Quarterly 29.4 (1972): 637-343:

Howell makes clear (pp. 152 ff) that ‘elocution’ (in the sense of the fifth part of Ciceronian rhetoric, previously called pronuntiatio or actio) was stressed largely out of a need to improve reading outloud from texts, especially pulpit reading. But this indicated, first, that oral delivery was working in an economy quite different from that of earlier ages, when normally delivery was not from text at all, even a memorized text, but was instead the actual oral creation of an oration, with the help of the topics or ‘places’ and of thematic and formulaic memory and perhaps a few notes, in the existential situation in which the orator found himself when he rose to his feet. Ancient orators, if they wrote out their orations at all, normally wrote them out after they had given them, sometimes years afterwards.

(more…)

An interesting study by researchers at Ohio State University finds that there is a direct inverse relationship between “lack of knowledge” and recognition memory:

Verbatim memory is often a property of being a novice,” said Sloutsky, who is also associate dean of research at the university’s College of Human Ecology . “As people become smarter, they start to put things into categories, and one of the costs they pay is lower memory accuracy for individual differences.

I can’t help but think of Ramus and his classification diagrams and Ong’s original title for his dissertation: “The Clunch Fist of Method: Ramus, Topical Logic, and the Hollows of the Mind.” The “hollows of the mind” refers to a shift in thinking about the mind, one in which the mind is thought of as a container to be filled with knowledge in the same way a book is filled with knowledge. Ong discusses this in “System, Space, and Intelect in Renaissance Symbolism.”

Link found at hyperguru.com

Crossposted at Machina Memorialis.

Another letter to his parents. This one dated 14 Janvier 1952:

“What do you think of this as a title, possibly: The Clunch Fist of Method: Ramus and the Modern Mind? (Clunch means clenched — old form, from a quotation. I’ll have to explain the title, but that’s what a book is for, to explain.” [An early typescript draft of Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue uses a similar title.]

In a letter dated Sept. 18, 1953, Ong mentions that he’s been buying hundreds of books for SLU [this is also mentioned in earlier letters, and Ong did indeed purchase hundreds of early (pre-1800) printed books for the Saint Louis University Libraries, some of the 7,000 pre-1800 printed books I walk past to get to my desk]. He notes that prices have jumped, which makes it harder for him to buy good books when he finds them as he has limited funds (being a Jesuit), and suggests that if his parents were to send some money, he could buy some books on their behalf and gift plates could be placed in them. In a letter dated Oct. 12, 1953, Ong thanks his parents for the $100 to buy books with.(Before the jump in price, Ong had been buying books for anything from $.25 - $2.00.) There are a number of rare books in the St. Louis Room’s pre-1800 printed book collection with gift plates indicated them as gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Ong, Sr.

The University of Chicago Press has republished Ong’s Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, with a forward by Adrian Johns.

I came across a letter to Fr. Ong from the famous New Critic Bill Wimsatt. Well, actually, there are a number of letters both to and from Wimsatt, but I found one in particular worth noting. It’s part of an exchange of letters between the two while Fr. Ong is doing his dissertation research in France. (Wimsatt was putting together a pannel for the 1952 English Instutute at Columbia University and Ong agreed to present. Ong’s paper, which someone delivered for him as Ong was able to extend his time in France, was titled “Ramus: the Clunch Fist of Method”* and was eventually published as “Ramus: Rhetoric and the Pre-Newtonian Mind.) In this letter Wimsatt refers to the fallout over William F. Buckley’s book God and Man at Yale in which Buckley more or less accuses Yale of being populated by atheists and socialists.

*At one point, Fr. Ong intended to use the title The Clunch Fist of Method: Ramus, Topical Logic, and the Hollows of the Mind for what became Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.

I guess I could note here that there is a letter to Ong from McLuhan in which McLuhan suggests Ong consider attending Yale for his Ph.D. in order to study under Wimsatt. While at Saint Louis University, McLuhan wasn’t doing media studies. Rather, he infused life into the program by bringing New Criticism/Practical Criticism with him from Cambridge.

Looked through more Ramus and Ramus related books today. I also worked through Fr. Ong’s copies of the Saint Louis University Bulletin 1953-1984 and Publications and Research 1984-1994. Since the archives already has a copy of each volume, we’re going to toss most of these, but Fr. Ong has corrected typos and omissions to his publications lists.

Flipped through a number of books today, more of Fr. Ong’s working copies and some books on or related to Ramus. It’s easy to enter into a hypnotic state when flipping through a book few or no annotations. When that starts to happen, I get up and do something else. Usually something else is browsing the filing cabinets, which are well organized and labeled, though it’s taking me some time to figure out how Fr. Ong filed specific items.

In the filing cabinets I found a folder titled “Art: Some Sketches by Walter Ong.” Among other things is an envelope labeled “1931-32 done during German class Rockhurst College.” Most of the sketches in that envelope are of hands and heads. There’s also some really good drawings of animals, which Fr. Ong copied out of a book. I want to do a multimedia piece with images, sound, text, and maybe video gathered from the archives, and if I do put it together, I want to use some of these.

Weather permitting, we hope to bring the collection over tomorrow. We’ll see.

One of the major misreadings of Ong’s work, I think, is the idea that he believes something just magically happened, that somehow a switch in the human brain was flipped from “oral” to “literate.” A good close reading of Orality and Literacy, let alone a braod reading of Ong’s work, will show that it’s not this simple. To begin with, this oral/aural to visual shift is itself tied to conceptions of space, but also involves issues of presence and a number of other things. Any way, I found the following passage interesting, not because any of it is new to me but because of how it works as a synopsis of Ong’s work. The passage is from “From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: A Study of the Significance of the Allegorical Tableau.” (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17.4 (1959): 423-440), an essay few of Ong’s critics have read:

With the invention of printing, this notion [of the book] itself undergoes metamorphosis. Rather than a record of something one had said, a book now became an object, belonging more to the world of things and less to the world of words [....] Book titles change from addresses to the reader to become labels like the labels on boxes, for, with the spread of printing, books become items manufactured like tables and chairs. As objects or things, they obviously ‘contained’ knowledge. And since knowledge could be ‘contained’ in books, why not in the mind as well?

At this point the whole intellectual world goes hollow. The mind now ‘contains’ knowledge, especially in the compartments of the various arts and sciences, which in turn may ‘contain’ one another, and which all ‘contain’ words” (16).

The whole essay is quite worth reading. It’s one of those key texts Ong critics ought to read before leveling their charges. In this article, Ong makes it clear that the cognitive shifts which he discusses aren’t a “great leap” (to use Daniel’s term) but a slow development through time connected with but not necessarily the cause of changes in communication.

Noting that Copernicus’s De revolutionibus was published at the same time as Ramus’ work, he writes:

“The rise of the notion of system as applied to the possessions of the mind is only one in a kaleidoscope of phenomena that mark the shift from the more vocal ancient world–truly an audile’s world–to what has been called the silent, colorless, and depersonalized Newtonian universe” (25).