Repetition: Important in Oral Cultures, Redundant in Literature Cultures

One thing I saw revisited in the first part of the reading was the importance of repetition. At first it was the criticism of homer’s work by Milman Parry (Ong 21). This drew me in because of the stigma’s around the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are works of art, hailed for centuries as an epic. So when I read Parry call them just mimicked verse of other poets I was taken aback. It seems like a piece of writing that has been hailed for so long as a great work of art would have been called on this kind of poor craftsmanship many years if not centuries ago.

            Then I looked at the psychodynamics of orality. This chapter exposed a lot of things that I had not thought about and ideas that hadn’t occurred to me. I found it interesting that the idea of repetition is different for oral cultures than in modern literary cultures. Older oral cultures would repeat stories, proverbs and different things that needed to be remembered on a regular basis. This would mean things spoken so often that people would remember them because they were stuck in their heads. This ability to engage and store this information, transferring it from generation to generation is very important for oral cultures.

These days it is annoying and condescending if people repeat stories. No one sits and listens to a story over and over again without saying, “this one again!” or getting annoyed with people who repeat stories. In my experience I had a story about getting in a car wreck in my sophomore year of college. I told it a lot to many different people and my best friend would always be around for the stories. It got to a point where I got one telling the story to a new acquaintance and my friend lashed out at me saying that the crash was the only thing I talked about anymore when it actually just a repeated story I told to new people. When you don’t need to plant information in people’s heads then the information becomes redundant. Instead of educating to be passed on it sits and  festers every time a story gets introduced.