Once upon a time there was a storyteller
And this storyteller was the keeper of cultural heritage in the days of old. Script had not been invented yet, or only in a very basic pictorial form, and thus all messages were passed orally from one person to the other, from one generation to the next. They were wrapped in songs, ballads, folk tales, and chants and told in front of an audience. The storyteller could be a bard, a priest, a traveller or your grandmother. A tale was repeated many times by many people living in all kinds of places. Each time the tale became a little bit different. Until, finally, it was another tale, shared in a different culture, in different time.
This type of culture - a system in which narratives depend on oral messages and testimonies - is called oral culture. We usually define the development of writing systems in an oral culture, scribal culture and print-culture. In Western countries we have left the oral phase behind us long ago when script was invented, but other societies still communicate this way. In oral cultures there was only a storyteller, who became a narrator much later in Western culture, which will be highlighted in this section. But who was this storyteller and what was so specific about his narratives?
When we think back of oral cultures we might be reminded of the Greece times and the blind Homer, who travelled to collect and share stories, which were written down much later, perhaps even by a different individual, or multiple individuals. This might be a highly typical example, but it immediately sets a tone of what orality is about. In oral cultures stories are told and preserved through sharing and retelling. As such, an oral culture is repetitive in nature. In an older yet still insightful essay Walter Benjamin (1937) wrote that ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained’. Linguistically oral stories are less polished than the written word, often redundant and less structured. The storyteller pays specific attention to actual surroundings and everyday life.
When describing his tales the storyteller takes his audience in account. He can see his listeners, pose them questions and steer the story in ways they like. Indeed Walter Ong (1982) shows how highly episodic these storytellers work to improvise the narrative, sometimes for the audience sake, sometimes because it is a better way to memorize content. They tap from different reservoirs and think of multiple ways in which a story can unfold. ‘In fact, an oral
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culture has no experience of a lengthy, epic-size or novel-size climactic linear plot,’ Ong describes and he exemplifies this by pointing out the absence of a logical chronology in, amongst others, The Illiad (id., p. 140). The structure of these stories was a consequence of their combination in a scribal manuscript. The absence of a clear plot forms a difference with the later writer, who does not improvise, but plans his story carefully, thereby freezing it. Those who read print adjust to a tale. In oral storytelling, the opposite happens (e.g., id., 45).
The performative element here is not just crucial for the audience’s sake. A storyteller relies strongly on his performative qualities. For instance, in the way a story is brought rhythm plays a role, as a format to perform a tale as well as a strategy for reminding it (id., p. 57-67). During his performance the storyteller also depends on gestures whereas a writer does not. Storytelling also means showing: working with your body and hands to rhetorically make it more convincing and entertaining. ‘Storytelling, in its sensory aspect,’ Benjamin (1937) explains, ‘is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling the hand plays a part which supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work’.
In scribal culture or manuscript culture, a writing system is invented and manuscripts are made by certain privileged literate citizens, varying from elitists to monks. In the history of Western countries this phase mostly refers to the Middle Ages where manuscripts were used to preserve information by the copying of these texts by hand. Going to a manuscript and reading it was usually a journey by itself, almost like a pilgrimage (e.g., Landow, 2006, p. 100). Upon arrival the reader had to invest some good time in understanding the hand writing and the many abbreviations. Scribal culture and its manuscripts were frequently associated with religion and magic (Ong, 1982, p. 92). Since most people could not read, the manuscript was perceived as a rare artefact, mediated by those who could read as a kind of priests or gurus. To some degree each manuscript was indeed unique since the copies varied a lot (Landow, 2006, pp. 99-103).
Writing manuscripts was an effort that especially in its early days involved rare tools and hard work rather than just jotting something down on paper as we do now. Until the 19th century literature relied mostly on scholarly or academic life. When reading manuscripts this could also be retraced in terms of style. For instance, literary styles were heavily oritical back then: formal, rhetorical and similar to lectures (Ong, 1982, pp. 92-94). They were meant to be read out loud and written with an imaginary listening audience in mind. The overlap between orality and writing also becomes apparent in other features of this culture, for instance, silent reading did not exist. Readers read these texts out loud. Indeed Ong emphasizes that
37 ‘manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in the retrieval of material preserved in texts’ (id., p. 117).
Importantly Walter Ong makes a difference here between oral cultures that feature primary orality and residual orality. The primary stage categorizes those cultures in which there is no writing system and all communication goes by telling and showing, as I described when I referred to oral cultures. Residual orality, however, depicts societies in which there is a writing system that is not mastered by the entire population but by cultural elite or professional scribers. In scribal cultures mass illiteracy and writing often go hand in hand because texts cannot be distributed so easily. In Ong’s terminology orality coincides with other cultural forms: scribal culture for instance does not exclude features of the oral mode such as reading out loud and imagining a text orated.
In print-culture this changes when press technology assures that texts can actually circulate in multiple copies rapidly. This happened in Western countries in the late eighteenth century when printing was refined and became widespread. The Gutenberg Press (ca. 1450) was already invented earlier, but it took some time for printing to be applied as such. Printing technologies had various consequences on the practices of reading and writing. Firstly, printing enabled widespread copies which enabled new genres meant for a mass audience such as newspapers. The circulation of texts directly influenced the literacy of the population, their education and need to be educated. Whereas manuscripts were often highly functional - aimed at the producer and selective educated readers - printing became consumer-oriented since a copy was far less work and could be distributed (Ong, 1982, p. 120).
Print-culture also redefined the way stories were made and published, because it changed texts into commodities, dependent on an audience and market. Publishers started to arise, critics and institutes that had to calculate what readers expected to get out of certain publication. Economics started to play a role. Because reproduction was made possible, authority and copyright became an issue. An author had to be recognized for the intellectual property he had created, in part because he now had to deal with the market mill: publishers, honorarium and more. Authors’ rights were grounded in eighteenth century laws (such as the Statute of Anne, 1709). The related notions of authenticity and originality dating from the Romantics are seen as a consequence of this by historians of print (Landow, 2006, p. 102).
But print-culture did not only create the need for copyright, it also secluded texts and changed them. A text became autonomous, frozen and sequential: organized in a strict, linear storyline. Where a text used to be dynamic, edited and had multiple versions, it was now made solid by its multiple copies. A writer had to be selective and revise his products with the
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help of established editors. This system made new formats possible, such as the novel, a carefully constructed linear story or specific popular genres as the detective, which lean on textual suspense and a climactic build-up (Ong, 1982, pp. 136-152). Reading then became what we know it to be, an act by an individual in silence. The reader sits by his fire place and the author is only an abstract persona for him, perhaps even a genius that crafted an extraordinary work. Where the storyteller used to guide his audience when he performed the tale, the modern reader makes sense of the content by himself (see also Atwood, 2002).
By enabling copyright and authorship, the image or persona of an author was also constructed in the Romantic era. Where we take the author for granted nowadays, he is a rather late phenomenon in the history of stories and writing, just like the artist and genius, all defined by their seemingly exceptional skills (Atwood, 2002; Foucault, 1984; Ong, 1982, pp. 131). The author stepped up a pedestal, away from the actual people that he could still reach when he was a mere storyteller. Not just his books had to be one of a kind: the Romantic author had to be one of a kind himself, a true creator, writing what meant something to him. Self-expression became a key value and stories became equated with individual narratives rather than collective endeavours, written by a distant genius, instead of one of our own. ‘The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual,’ Benjamin (1937) writes grimly, ‘who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.’
In the twentieth century there followed a debate over authorship, anticipated by more formalistic approaches to text (e.g., New Criticism) which paid attention to the text by itself, without extratextual information. Authorship was put on the agenda notably by structuralists as Barthes. Specifically Barthes’ essay Death of the Author (1967) influenced the way author- reader relationships were explored in literary studies. The essay argues against authorial intentionality as a way of interpreting texts. Biographical information or interpretations of the author should not be way of interpreting the text, rather this should rely on its readers as active interpreters. A text had to be perceived as a cultural product, dependent on conventions and other texts.
Barthes’ text inspired Foucault to write a lengthier essay in 1969 on authorship and the way the idea of an author regulates readers. He argues that earlier texts by Barthes and Derrida - though they made ‘the death of the author’ apparent - never really depicted how authorship concretely functions. Foucault analyzes how the author operates as a cultural phenomenon and influences our interpretation. First he goes into the author’s name, which classifies texts. A name becomes a way of labelling and depicting a work in terms of literary
39 history. Then he discusses the author function: conventions surrounding the author that influence the ways texts are made, distributed and read. He specifically coins four characteristics of the author function: Firstly, the author function came into existence because authors’ rights were required to show who owned a text, which was important when books were circulated more and fiction became property. Secondly, the author function does not affect all texts in the same way, for instance, we would not call someone who writes letters an author. Thirdly, the construction of an author is troublesome and differs from the construction of an individual identity: he is a regulating principle. Thinking a certain text is written by a certain author will affect our image of it and even solve inconsistencies in it. Lastly, the author is not the actual person but more of an alter ego, a persona.
Foucault ends with the remark that authorship is a limitation for textual interpretation and that it might vanish altogether. But what will happen if the author really dies? A new discourse will arise, Foucault predicts, ‘in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint’ (1984, p. 119). The envisioned system in which the author is absent will also lack authority. ‘All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur’ (id.). The kind of textual production online reminds us of Foucault’s conclusion.
Electronic writing
Quite recently the internet changed our perspective on writing, not only by enabling new technologies and media for writing, but also by providing platforms where everyone can upload his or her texts. Writing has become less dependent on print technology now, and indeed, many authors argue that although we still have print, we are at the start of a new paradigm or discourse (e.g., Ong, 1982; Landow, 2006). The internet has opened up texts in various ways in opposition to the print-culture in which texts were fixed, closed and the author remained distant.
As mentioned in the first chapter, the internet nowadays includes more participatory sites (e.g., SNS-sites, social networking sites such as Facebook) with comment functions. These also provide us with a large amount of texts that are actually responses of readers. Typical examples include sites as YouTube and Wikipedia, and practices as podcasting. These applications are usually covered under the umbrella term Web 2.0 (since 2001) hinting at the changed atmosphere online that encourages interaction and thus makes the internet an even more open, active, democratic platform. Though older technologies such as blogging
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provide somewhat similar interaction, Web 2.0 depicts convergence at a much higher, multimedial level and embedded in different systems. It thereby constructs a more active audience by making readers/viewers into contributors. When we deal with electronic texts, this new tension between producers and consumers should be emphasized as well. Landow manages to capture these changes briefly: ‘The characteristic flexibility of this reader-centred information technology means, quite simply, that writers have a much greater presence in the system, as potential contributors and collaborative participants but also as readers who choose their own paths through the materials’ (2006, p. 45). It would however be too easy just to refer to readers as contributors in this communication. The relation between the author, reader and text changes here in various ways.
Firstly, the electronic text relies less on institutionalized systems as the printed text. When a reader wants to comment on it, the text and author are often within reach, whereas in print-culture one has to go through different media or critics to give feedback and receive it. The comments on the text are not annotations or plenary texts but actually manage to become a part of the text through hyperlinks/comment systems that create a node or open text, rather than a disclosed text with subtexts (e.g., Landow, 2006, p. 99). The secluded, linear nature of the print text now makes way for a text that is less hierarchical. Naturally we should add that in print-culture there also exist possibilities to make more open texts for instance via footnotes that create texts-within-texts that one can optionally read (e.g., Aarseth, 1997, pp. 7-9; Landow, 2006, p. 120-121). Mind that footnotes are still sealed off from the main text, while annotations within electronic texts establish less of a hierarchy because they are linked to the content and become part of the text.
Secondly, electronic texts are less dependent on editors and large publishers. Note that this already changed when low-cost copy machines enabled small-press printing, as for example the fanzine scene has shown. We see that new editor mechanisms arise to assure that even grassroots publishing online has the desired quality for a certain platform. Through feedback of readers or appointed editors a lot of content is refined, polished and cleaned (e.g., chapter 3 deals with the beta-reading system in fan communities). Despite the opportunity to upload every work in progress, most writers will also reflect on this. Despite the varying skills and capacities of authors online, they will try to create the best text they can and perhaps switch to another site or host when they have developed more skills.
Furthermore an electronic text has a more fluid nature because it can be edited, removed and updated at will. It is less bounded by a paper publication that freezes it for a long time. Printed publications make a work more permanent. That is not to say that manuscripts
41 cannot be edited and prints cannot be updated in a second version, but the possibilities are far more limited than electronically. Indeed for a writer it is almost impossible to rewrite an entire narrative after it has been published, though some writers of fiction also changed their second editions immensely (e.g., the Dutch novel Nooit meer slapen by W.F. Hermans). In print-culture such moves tend to annoy critics who are concerned about which narrative was the most authentic. In contrast, when discussing electronic writing it is taken more or less for granted that texts can be rewritten at a certain point and uploaded again. Whereas print-culture forecloses a text, electronic texts remain dynamic. Thereby the text also looses its fixed, autonomous, canonical identity which poses new problems in terms of how culture circulates and what its legacy should be (e.g., Brownen, 2005).
Lastly, online texts not only provide a reader with the possibility to interact, but also to influence a story. By commenting on fiction that is still being written, the reader can have an input in the narrative itself. Certain online platforms as forums have also stimulated creative collaborations between artists all over the world. For instance, it is now possible to write a little bit, post it and let others continue the narrative. One can write a chapter in Word, let another author write another chapter and circulate all of this far more easily than earlier. As a communication medium the internet gives immediate possibilities that writing with a typewriter or by hand did not allow. A Word document can be sent in a few seconds to someone else who can continue writing the text. It cannot be denied that the internet and computer-mediated technology make collaboration more easy and stimulate the transforming of and attributing to existing texts. In short, the modern author is no longer the central, dominant figure he used to be, but is becoming more of a team player.
For some critics electronic writing and reading evokes a certain fear that something artistic is lost in the margins. A vague sense of an aura or something in the reader’s experience that might change the more we store and read our texts online. A notable advocate of this is Sven Birkerts (2006) who fears that electronic writing and publishing might not only afflict the quality of writing, but also the distribution of stories that are worthwhile and the