Abstract

Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is a novel which consists of printed words formed inliterate culture. Monthly serial release, the publishing format of this work, however, creates aninherent lack of continuity. When readers read one part of the serial, they may not have read thecontents of the previous parts. This resembles sound; they disappear as they are heard. Publishingformat is an element of the media which controls practicalities of work in the real world. This is
why the composition of David Copperfield reflects oral culture. Elements of this culture are listedby W. J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: redundancy, monumental characters and bizzare characters.
Repeating the same information and including impressive characters are necessary for orally told
stories to be kept in the memory after the sound, rendered unrepeatable by the context of the event,disappears. Regarding David Copperfield as an oral culture work, this paper does not insist that it isbecause the author and the readers belonged to an oral culture nor because the work was often readout. According to Ong, oral or aural media which is based on written or printed words is“secondary orality”. When this study suggests that David Copperfield, a serialized novel belongs toan oral culture, the focus is on this “secondary orality”.
While the publication form, and the composition and the characters demanded by the form havefeatures of orality, David, the protagonist in the story is described as a literate person, and, assuggested by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, he understands letters and writing froma very modern perspective. David, for example, divides the time and space. This is a special sense
peculiar to literate people since this sense is formed by stabilizing the sound in space using letters.

Besides, as McLuhan and Ong point out, writing separates the writer and written words, and writers
are never emotionally involved in what they are writing while speech requires immediate response
from both the speaker and the audience. David, as he narrate the story, tries to externalize his
painful past and to separate it from him. What is more, David is a character who registers
fundamental ties to literacy communication. This leads the work to have elements of literaryculture.
This mixture of orality and literacy seen in David Copperfield reflects the environment ofnineteenth-century Britain, an age of media revolution, in which new media were formed thoughmost people did not realize it. The electric telegraph was a light speed literary media element, but at
the same time, it forms an intelligence network. Tom Standage shows in The Victorian Internet that
this network was understood as being something like spider’s web in the nineteenth century. It istrue that information at one point in this network instantly reaches anywhere within it, just as is thecase with a spider’s web. The electric telegraph system makes a community even if the scale isphysically limited. As McLuhan and Ong insist, sound and oral speech make communities. Reading
letters, on the other hand, is a closed and personal act. The electric telegraph thus changed theenvironment in the real world into a fusion of orality and literacy. However, it was recognized not
as a form of informative media but as a form of psychic medium by many people at the time. It wasdifficult to understand that a message could reach to a distant place while the letter still remained in
the possession of the writer. McLuhan claims that people can never perceive the environment they
live in and that only art makes it visible. He calls such art “anti-environment” art. DavidCopperfield, being a mixture of orality and literacy is an example of the “anti-environment” art,
and it is this very media that communicates not only messages within the story, but alsometa-messages which reflect reality.