For a relevant essay of related interest, see the American field anthropologist David M. Smith's 1997 essay "World as Event: Aspects of Chipewyan Ontology" that is reprinted in the ambitious anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (New York: Hampton Press, 2012, pages 117-141).
Incidentally, the ambitious 2012 anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology also includes the Melville scholar Thomas D. Zlatic's lengthy essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville's 1857 Novel] The Confidence-Man" (pages 241-280).
Now, as to later manifestations of the plain style, see Walker Gibson's discussion of tough-talk and tough-talkers in his 1966 book Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Style (University of Indiana Press). Once again, I admit that I have no idea how what he characterizes as tough-talk and tough-talkers may, or may not, be related to sailor talk.
In what Ong himself might style his own agonistic spirit, he admiringly discusses Gibson's 1966 book in his frequently cited 1975 PMLA article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" (compared, that is, to the oral storyteller's live audience), which he reprinted in his 350-page 1977 essay collection Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 53-81). It is also reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 405-427).
Now, in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards' new 2021 book Sailor Talk (pages 7, 58-59, 70-73, and 81), she briefly discusses Ong's most widely translated book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).
However, Ong does not explicitly discuss sailor talk or coterie speech, both of which Mary K. Bercaw Edwards discusses in both her 2009 book and her new 2021 book. Nor does Ong exactly discuss the plain style in his 1982 book - or Walker Gibson's tough-talk and tough-talkers. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say of Ong that he is primarily interested in the psychodynamics of orally based thought and expression, but he is also interested in the psychodynamics of textuality, because he sees writing as restructuring consciousness - as Melville's writing undoubtedly enabled him to restructure his consciousness, as he himself was aware.
It strikes me as fair to say that Mary K. Bercaw Edwards is not deeply interested in Melville's inner psychological development as a person as a result of his writing Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849a), Redburn (1849b), White-Jacket (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and Clarel (1876). Evidently, neither is Ong, who has little to say about Melville.
However, Ong is keenly interested in consciousness. In Ong's 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 10-11), he makes the following statement about Erich Neumann's Jungian account of the stages of consciousness:
"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with it tail in its mouth, as well as be other circular or global mythological figures, (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])."
Ong's astute 1971 essay "Rhetoric and the Origins of Consciousness" in his essay collection Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (pages 1-22) is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, page 93-102).
Ong also sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981, pages 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [page 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.
It seems to me that Melville's writing opened a trajectory of inner psychological development of his consciousness. In the process of writing his two ambitious experimental novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), he most likely experienced what Neumann refers to as the liberation of his ego-consciousness from endogamous kinship libido in his psyche.
In any event, for further discussion of Melville's 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, see my OEN articles "July 4, 1776; July 4, 1876; July 4, 2020" (dated June 25, 2020) and "Is Melville's 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem worth reading today" (dated July 8, 2020):
For further discussion of the residually oral culture in which Melville grew up, see Chapter Two: Melville as Hearer and Reciter of Poetry in Hershel Parker's 2008 book Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, pages 23-30).
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