ABSTRACT
Walter J. Ong is quite strident when drawing attention to the counterpart to violence in primary epic, noting that effusive approbation is found “everywhere in connection with orality.” Of course, what the double-sided exaggeration often fosters is a highly polarized world, a storytelling environment built out of affective opposites. That intense brutality in concert with an intense bathos unavoidably induces into other binaries: good versus evil, virtue versus vice, villains versus heroes. As alphabetic readers—as trained silent readers, even more—the people appreciation of verbomotor speech has been massively restricted. Verbomotor speech is consequently more likely to strike the reader as “insincere, flatulent, and comically pretentious.” If the people turn to the twentieth-century hit masala film, however, the people find plenty of contemporary evidence for those linked characteristics of agonistic oratory–high violence–high glorification–and resultant polarization.
