A professor of mine once posed the
question: “What do you truly know?” My
obvious initial response was, “What do you mean, what do I know?
Isn’t that why I’m here? To
expand upon the wealth of knowledge that I already know?”
After tossing the question around for a few days, I finally realized what
she was getting at--knowledge equals experience, and experience promotes memory.
In today’s culture of hypertext and cyberspace, the opportunities for
experiential learning are becoming a thing of the past. The
bard has been replaced by digital and virtual technology that effectively stores
the information we need to know into a confined space, thus giving the modern
literate a license to forget. The
elimination of experience squelches memory.
This
is the concept that Michael Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman explore in the
“Orality and the Problem of Memory,” a chapter in the book Information through the Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer
Revolution. “For us,” they
say,
The term ‘memory’ evokes the
image of a thing, a container for information, or the content of that container.
Thus, from our literate viewpoint, the Iliad
preserves the knowledge of the Trojan War.
But in jumping to this conclusion, we lose sight of the Iliad
as an oral phenomenon, as the singing of a song. It is not so much a thing as an act, a gestalt uniting bard
and audience in a shared consciousness. This
phenomenon has little in common with that desiccated thing we literates call
“memory.” In the world before
writing, memory is the social act of remembering.
It is commemoration. (15)
The memory of oral culture is a
holistic experience, combining mind, sight, and situational relevance.
The bard creates an image so immediate and significant to the audience
that separating themselves from the experience is impossible.
In oral culture, everyone experiences the Iliad.
The images and meters are constructed so that they become a part of the
audience’s collective reality. The
images contained within an epic represent large-scale visual aids.
“Each epic consists of a sequence of scenes or situations that serve to
map the action of the narrative” (25). These
sequences are linked together to form patterns that serve as the foundation for
memory. The relevance of the
knowledge imparted through memory is dependent upon the various themes that
arise in the bard’s tale. “Themes
usually depict events, such as assemblies, journeys, and battles” (18).
Situational relevance dictates how each person will experience the Iliad.
Though the interpretations may be different, the experience is still
translated into the collective consciousness.
If
oral culture commemorates the situation through experience (or experiential
learning), how can print culture map an experience to commit it to memory?
We moderns regard
memory as a container filled with information, a notion strongly reinforced by
the terminology of our computer culture, with its “hard drives,” “RAM,”
and “databases.” This notion,
however, originated long before computers, with the spread of literacy, for
writing enables us to convey the same information, with the same truth value, to
different people in different times and places. On this account, it fosters what we might call a
“textual” model of memory, whereby the mental objects contained within our
heads are akin to the pieces of information stored in writing. (24).
The
act of commemoration in oral cultures is nothing like the sequencing of
information that is used to create the computer language of databases, RAM, and
hard drives. These devices of
“memory” serve as containers that collect and store information.
“The textual model misleads because it emphasizes one function of
memory, the storage of information, at the expense of another function, the act
of recollection” (24). People in
oral culture did not perform this function of memory, but rather, they performed
something else. They performed
through experience and the activity of commemoration.
Commemoration is holistic, rather than just using one or two senses. The
sensory memory of Antiquity has been replaced by information.
The information contained in a page of a book, or the words we type onto
a page, can be conveniently retrieved, and then ultimately forgotten—until the
same situation that called us to retrieve the information in the first place
arises again. This act of
recollection creates a fragmentation of the act of knowing because “it
separates the knower from the known” (29).
Orality, on the other hand, bridges the gap between the knower and the
known. The sensory stimuli present
in oral culture provide a sense of community experience.
“Commemoration binds the community together as a living entity rather
than passively storing information about it” (16). Imagine a group of slaves in the American-south sharing
stories during the night. These
stories were not only a means of making it through the night, but a
commemoration of freedom. It is a
social memory that resonates through the souls of that group.
The modern reader of the same story could not experience the story in the
same manner as the young slave. He
or she can only skim its contents for historical information, and there is no
guarantee that its images will uphold their informational relevance.
[In an oral
culture] commemoration establishes a common memory of the past, providing all
members of the community with the same point of reference. As the true instrument of consensus, social memory does not
embody an authorized version of the past, fixed for all time.
Instead, the activity of commemoration continually reinterprets the past
in the light of an ever-changing present. In
so doing, commemoration enables the community both to cohere in the present and
to (re)define its aspirations for the future: memory working forward. (27)