Oral and Written Literatures: A Comparative Study

Introduction:  Oral literature predates written literature by many centuries; languages existed in the vocal and aural domains and it was much later that utterances were assigned symbols or letters. Oral literature is a much discussed topic with regard to indigenous cultures in Africa, the Americas, India, China, and wherever indigenous people have maintained their unique culture and traditions. In this unit, you will see how oral literature is different from written literature, without, however, being encased in watertight compartments. There is considerable overlap between these two. The need to look at oral literature and written literature under one heading underlines the fact that oral literature has considerably influenced written literature. There are numerous examples from Africa, India, North and South America, Europe, etc., of the different ways in which oral literature has influenced written literature.

Oral Literature Commonly known as ‘Folklore’, Oral Literature can be described as ‘verbal art’; art that is delivered orally and transmitted orally from person to person, generation to generation, region to region, etc., by word of mouth. Oral Literature denotes traditional forms of entertainment. OL may include epic poems, folk tales, folk songs, myths, legends, ballads of people and events, etc. In fact, OL exists in the ‘vocal’ (speaking) and ‘aural’ (listening) domains, in the broad world of ‘sound.’ And therefore, OL is manifest in ‘performance.’

Literature is what we commonly understand as ‘literature,’ that is, novels, poems, stories, essays, or anything that is ‘primarily’ written down. It is a written art.

Orature: As we have seen earlier, ‘literature’ itself means something that is written down, so the term ‘Oral Literature’ seems to appear oxymoronic. Pio Zirimu, the Ugandan linguist, had coined the term ‘orature’ to bestow a higher status to the verbal arts that did not come through in the term ‘Oral Literature.’ ‘Oral Literature’ was considered inferior to ‘Written Literature’ and he rejected the term. But his brief definition of orature as the use of utterance as an aesthetic means of expression remains tantalizingly out there, pointing to an oral system of aesthetics that did not need validity from the literary. The term however has spread, and one reads variously of Hawaiian Orature, Namibian Orature, Ghanaian Orature and many others. Yet the term ‘Oral Literature’ has continued to remain in currency in academic circles and is also used more widely than orature.

Oral and Written Literatures: A Comparison

If we take these two concepts ‘Oral Literature’ and ‘Written Literature’ separately, then it would appear that Written Literature is the opposite of Oral Literature – OL is ‘vocal/aural’ and WL is ‘written.’ But there is some relationship between OL and WL. Indeed there is, and for that we will have to look at how Oral Literature has influenced and impacted Written Literature. So, here, we would be looking at Written Literature in a culture or language that is influenced by Oral Literature. You will have to also bear in mind that OL is sometimes available as WL and WL in many cases is transmitted orally.

Story telling has an old and long history, as old as man. The practice of storytelling has existed ever since man learnt to speak. Probably people in the olden times (maybe prehistoric days) had nothing better to do after they were done with the day’s hunting, than sit around the fire and spin tales, fictional, and of days gone by. This might sound as if the ‘oral’ story telling is a phenomenon of old times. In actuality even today in many cultures, the oral tradition plays a vital and significant role. For instance, the Caribbean culture is largely oral and this is also true of many cultures across the world. Folklore is another form of what we call ‘oral literature.’ It is basically the creative expression of the traditional beliefs and customs of people which is told by the old grandfather/mother to the little children, and passed on by these children when they grow up to their own children. The stories keep changing from generation to generation, and new elements get thrown into the story which are more contemporary and related to the changes in the society/culture. Why are these stories told? What are these stories about? The purpose of these oral stories could be to entertain, to inform, to instil values in people, etc. In short, they could be told for any number of reasons.

Some literary features overlap both Oral Literature and Written Literature.  1. Sound (Voice) vs. Symbol (Print): Based purely on physical evidence, it can be said that literature signifies a written art work and folklore refers to an oral art. Folksingers, minstrels, bards, traditional folk theatre artists, community storytellers, etc., are generally considered to be unlettered and untouched by the print medium. Voice was the only medium through which they expressed their art and through which they got their art from the mouths of others like them. However, many folksingers and storytellers today are literate and sometimes incorporate what they read into their songs and tales. 2. Fluid vs. Fixed: Folktales and songs are fluid, that is, the way they are told and sung or performed changes with each performance, though the essence or the main theme or storyline remains the same. The singer or storyteller never tells the same story twice, each performance is different. A written work never changes once it is printed. The book will have the same story to tell at each reading or ‘performance.’ As long as the book exists and people care to read it, the ‘telling’ never changes. 3.Simplicity vs. Complexity: It might appear that folk art is simpler than literature. The folktale, the ballad, and the oral epic are simple forms of art that have arisen from innocent impulses and therefore lack the complexity that one sees in literature. However, oral literature has its own importance and space. We can say that as societies grew increasingly sophisticated, the simple forms gave way to written genres which met the same expressive needs. For example, the ballad form is a very popular genre in oral literature. 4.Style and Structure: Oral Literature differs greatly from Written Literature in matters of structure and style. Sometimes it would appear that in terms of structure and style, there is a great gap separating oral and written expression. It is generally accepted that Oral is characterised by features like repetition, stock epithets, stock characters, a marked preference for fantasy over reality, and an emphasis on action. And the opposite of these would seem to characterize Written Literature. And all these so-called Oral Literature features are also seen in written literature, right from Shakespeare to all the thrillers, mysteries, detective novels, and romances. 5. Authorship: One of the long-standing distinguishing features that appear to separate Oral Literature and Written Literatures is that of authorship. We have understood that Written Literature is the creation of a single individual and that folksongs and stories are communal compositions, arising collectively from the community. 6. Audience: Among all the features, it is the Audience that marks the clearest difference between Oral Literature and Written Literature. Simply put, the oral narrative cannot exist without an audience. Literature is and can be written in isolation for an imagined audience, an audience which might never read the written work of art.

Importance of Oral literature to the development of  Written Literature:

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o  is a Kenyan writer, who started writing in English and now writes in his native Gikuyu and Swahili. He has written novels, plays, stories, and influential essays in literary and social criticism. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o talks about ‘orature’ (Oral Literature) in his essay “Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature” (2007). This is an important essay which gives us an African perspective to Oral Literature.  A. K. Ramanujan’s research on texts in three languages – Kannada, Tamil, and Sanskrit, on classical Tamil poetry, Kannada Bhakti poetry, linguistics, translation studies, folklore, and oral tradition, makes him the world’s most influential scholar on South Asian language and culture. Ramanujan’s essays on folk tradition “The Indian Oedipus,” “Tell it to the Walls: On Folktales in Indian Culture,” “A Flowering Tree: A Woman’s Tale,” “On Folk Mythologies and Folk Puranas,” and many more have become iconic over the years. On the back of his extensive work on Indian folk traditions, his views on oral and written literature assume critical importance. In the essay “Who Needs Folklore? The Relevance of Oral Traditions to South Asian Studies” (1990), Ramanujan discusses oral and written literature in his easy style with interesting examples. Ramanujan says that the relations between oral and written traditions in any culture are not simple oppositions and that they interpenetrate each other and combine in various ways.

Almost all literatures of the world have been influenced by their respective oral traditions, either directly or indirectly, at some point. Here, we shall look in some detail at two texts, Hayavadana, a play by Girish Karnad (Sanskrit-Kannada-English: India), and Things Fall Apart (Igbo-English: Nigeria), a novel by Chinua Achebe, and see how oral literature has influenced their respective literary works.

Conclusion: Thus, the oral literature plays a vital role for the growth of written literature. Yet Oral literature has its own place in the field of Comparative Studies. Still the art of oral literature is existing in many societies which carries the values of the societies from one generation to the next.