Grapholexia
Among the phenomena of writing explored in Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy is the rise of the “grapholect,” which he defines as a “transdialectical language formed by deep commitment to writing.” The national languages and of course the literary languages that we know today are scarcely imaginable without such deep commitment to writing; one of Ong’s themes is the ramifying effect of writing upon the minds of literate speakers. Linearity, classification, all forms of “study” in its recognizable sense, as well as the awareness of vast archipelagos of words beyond one’s immediate cognitive and expressive control, are some of the dubious endowments of the native grapholexic, in Ong’s reckoning.
Do grapholects exist as such? If a language is a dialect with a navy, is a grapholect simply a language with a dictionary? Is writing a rupture not only in language, but in our natural history? Or do the literate endowments of reading, studying, and patterning actually manifest a biological propensity (even if, as it would seem, it’s a propensity for “defying” biology)?
Clearly writing and language are deeply intertwined. Yet there are grapholects, and then there are grapholects; the climate imposed by writing is not distributed equally in either expression or intensity from one forest of words to the next. Even (indeed especially) within the most massively ramified of grapholects, such as English, there exist microclimates of expression, idiom, and effect—running from the literary genres and idioms of commerce, office, and academy down to the inflorescences of individual style. Such languages have their stratigraphy also; the dialects and modes of earlier times lie buried in the libraries and scholarly apparatatuses, out of which intrusions, upheavals, and eruptions occur with varying frequency and local intensity.
And then there are the scholarly and classical languages. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese, often derided as “dead languages,” are hardly morbid in the same way as a language like |Xam (a Bushman language of South Africa whose last few speakers died in the first decades of the twentieth century). Perhaps the scholarly tongues would more properly be termed “zombie languages”—with writing as the magic formula that sustains their existence.
But even among these last, the variation is extreme. Classical Chinese, the idiom of both poetry and the foundational texts of Chinese philosophy, seems to manifest a continuity of some three or four thousand years’ duration—and yet within that continuity there is marvelous diversity of genre, form, and style. Historically, Chinese has been understood as a language that divides its speakers into classes; the gulf between a tiny literate elite and the illiterate masses, it’s often said, has been created and enforced by the difficult tuition of written Chinese. And yet with its compound of dense allusiveness, compacted vocabulary, and spacious syntax, the rudiments of Classical Chinese texts can be decoded by most speakers of the modern tongue with a felicity unthinkable for nonlearned speakers of Western languages faced with Latin. Rupture and continuity provide far more complex patternings than any reflexive Orientalism or Western progressivism would allow.
