Explorations 193 with principles they attract the highest intellectual ability into the academic field, said Innis, and Roman Law countries are strong in the social sciences for this reason. Always the totalitarian, inclusive and drastic character of the oral tradition in law and society. Always the fragmentary, loop-holed, and limited aspect of law in the written tradition. These remarks imply no value judgements, no preferences. To distinguish the properties of these things avoids the confusion of moral clamor. Clarification permits co-existence, and resolution of conflict. MILTON HAD HIS DAUGHTERS I HAVE MY DICTAPHONE 13 Henry James on his death-bed called for his Remington. It was brought and the sound of its keys soothed his delirium. Dictating to a typist during the last 25 years of his life, Henry James revolutionized his prose. Dictation permitted the slow elaboration of those vast periods of The Golden Bowl. And dictation changed the style of Wyndham Lewis after his blindness. Here is the early, visual Lewis: There are torsos moving with bemused slowness on all sides; their helmet-capped testudinate heads jut this way and that. In their clockwork cadence the exhausted splash of the waves is a sound that is a cold ribbon just existing in the massive heat. The delicate surf falls with the abrupt clash of glass, section by section. After his blindness the prose of Lewis became less pigmented, less kinesthetic. It acquired narrative ease: Pullman had noticed long before this that both giants had kicked off their shoes, which lay, very minute footwear, not far from where their feet were moving. Their clothes had everywhere burst asunder. But it was at this moment that with enormous splutters and gasps,. they suddenly levitated…two vast nudities rose into the air and disappeared over the roofs. But they made their exit buttocks uppermost. Most prominent among American representatives of the oral manner in prose is William Faulkner whose latest novel The Town (volume two) opens: