At present, many academics in the United States and Western Europe—Hugh Kenner among them—are greatly taken with the idea that speech is superior to writing. This fashion for orality appears to express a nostalgia for a form of populist primitivism. According to the classical scholar Eric Havelock, the oral culture of Ancient Greece was a “mnemonic world of imitation, aggregative, redundant, copious, traditionalist, warmly human, participatory.” Orality is therefore one expression of those close kinship bonds that belong to the extended family. And when Jacques Derrida imagines “the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude,” he is hungering for an intimate tribal and family world where the spoken word is your bond and there are no letters, no alienating signs.
As it happens, I belong to an East Indian extended family—my mother-in-law can neither read nor write and orality for her is a nuisance rather than a dream of plenitude. When she wants to send a letter she must either hire a scribe from the village or collar a member of the family who is literate. Although my skepticism about deconstructionist attitudes toward orality is artistic and professional, rather than simply personal, whenever I observe an academic attacking the written word I’m reminded of my mother-in-law, who would like to write us letters but can’t. Illiteracy in a house without a phone makes for distance and—if Derrida’s term has any meaning—différance.
The current fashion for speech really begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay “On
