THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY
THE RETRIEVAL OF ORALITY

Summary/Abstract: The present paper draws an analogy between oral thought and acting (stage) thought. As Walter J. Ong pointed out in his classic work Orality and Literacy (1982), orality shapes an empathic, relational, situational, operational, concrete, polemic and committed thought, which presents striking similarities with the mental processes of an actor while trying to convert a text into oral communication. Thus the stage becomes the privileged space where the terms of the reconciliation between the written word and speech are negotiated. Could this coexistence of written culture and of orality in theatre allow us to think the stage is the field on which “secondary orality” appeared first, a lot earlier than Ong believes? Doesn’t theatre generate, with the actor’s swing between the written part and the word spoken on stage, “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print”? In order to sustain the said analogy, the second part of this paper consists of a short presentation and discussion of several testimonies by Romanian actors.

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