ABSTRACT
One of the first characteristics that the author try to lure her audience into discerning, she do by way of un-contextualized gestures. This, as Walter J. Ong reminds the people, is a rhetorical style that is additive rather than subordinative—with the former style stemming from oral delivery and the latter reflective of an inscriptive “tidying up” of those more conspicuously oral elements. The implication is, of course, that orally transmitted narratives cannot be structurally cohesive—tightly compact—in the way that alphabetic readers are trained to anticipate or favor. In fact, the very possibility of a “pyramidal plot”—one built on an ever-tightening rise in action and build of tension—is also a byproduct of a novel’s or script’s capacity to be written out and, hence, reorganized, modified, condensed, finessed, and so forth. Conversely—and in a kind of grander replication of the additive rhetorical style—the plots of lengthy oral narratives are episodic.
