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May 2013 March 2013 February 2013 December 2012 November 2012 May 2012 July 2011 April 2011 February 2011 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 August 2009 May 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 POST: PRCIS: THE MUSE LEARNS TO WRITE: REFLECTIONS ON ORALITY AND LITERACY FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT By Brook Ellingwood | Published February 1, 2009 This is another short paper for the Evolution and Trends in Digital Media class. I chose this book because it came out during my undergraduate studies when I was first being exposed to the Orality and Literacy concepts that Walter J. Ong and others had developed. Havelock was recommended to me by the amazing Charlie Teske, but my studies were moving from media theory to media practice and I didnt read him at the time. Even though The Muse Learns to Write didnt quite fit the criteria for supplemental readings, Ken Rufo let me choose it because he had almost assigned it as a reading for the Evolution class. Anyone who really wants to understand whats going on in media today has to go back to the emergence of literacy in Ancient Greece. Seriously. I wish more people in upper management over media properties would learn this stuff. OVERVIEW Eric A. Havelocks final book synthesizes, revises, and summarizes theories he developed over his long career as a classical scholar. His concern is with the impact on Greek modes of thought by the transition from orality to literacy, and he acknowledges the work of others in this field, such as Walter J. Ong, while maintaining his own pioneering stature and likely influence on Harold Innis while lecturing at the University of Toronto and, therefore, also on Innis acolyte Marshall McLuhan. ORAL WRITERS, WRITTEN SPEECH In his first chapter, Havelock asserts that the concept of self, or the separation of the knower from the known was made possible by growing literacy. This idea is central to his arguments about orality and literacy and will be explored further in the book. Socrates voice is a paradoxical one in that he uses the oral tradition to argue for reforms only

made conceivable by the changes in Greek thought brought on by literacy. Plato, only some 30 to 40 years younger than Socrates, both thinks and presents in the manner of the literate culture even as he writes allegories arguing that writing is detrimental to society. While no record of Socrates teachings exists from his own time, Havelock believes he used poetry, formerly a mnemonic device to aid information storage in an oral society, as a rhetorical device to more persuasively present his ideas. His disciples then, being of a new literate generation, then wrote them down. In Platos case, his writing was in prose, marking a break with the poetic oral tradition of previous Greek generations. One additional idea from the first chapter that helps explain Havelocks focus on the Greek transition to literacy is that of all the methods of writing emerging in various Near Eastern cultures, the Greek alphabet was uniquely capable of capturing, not just the content, but also the style of the oral tradition. In written form, the Homeric epics use lager vocabularies and express greater detail than the Sumerian transcription of The Epic of Gilgamesh or Hindu Vedic literature. Havelock suggests that the original source material for these oral works was all equally rich, but the atomic structure of the Greek alphabet allowed for better transcription than the other writing systems. The concept of authorship as applied to the Homeric epics, as well as the even more shadowy bard Hesiod, raises further questions. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain passages in which the author who we know as Homer, invites the Muse to sing the poems. Central to the exploration of orality and literacy is the idea that the Muse was literally believed to be external to the presenter, who acted as a medium channeling the received oral tradition. MODERN REFLECTION OF ANCIENT CHANGE Having laid the conceptual ground work for the book, Havelock turns the scholarly magnifying glass on himself. He makes no bones about his own centrality to the exploration of orality and literacy, placing his own 1963 book Preface to Plato alongside four other works published in that watershed year: Claude Lvi-Strausss La Pense Sauvage, McLuhans The Gutenburg Galaxy, Ernst Mayrs Animal Species and Evolution, and the article The Consequences of Literacy by Jack Goody and Ian Watt. In his opinion these diverse works all contributed in their own ways to a new understanding of how the medium of writing changes the thinking of societies in which writing becomes commonplace. What was it that made 1963 a watershed moment in the exploration of media and thought? Early in the book Havelock describes his own traditional literary early-20th Century education in classical literature, then in a brief chapter entitled Radio and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric he remembers a time in 1939 when faculty and students at the University of Toronto trouped out into the street where a loudspeaker had been set up. There, they stood and listened to a live broadcast of a speech by Adolf Hitler in which he urged Canada to withdraw from World War II. Havelock recalls how he didnt understand the literal meaning of the German words, but was transfixed by Hitlers rhythms and expressiveness. Havelock cites also Franklin Roosevelts mastery of the radio medium as a part of the time he remembers. Thus, it is a roughly forty year exposure to radio that Havelock credits with influencing thinkers in seemingly unrelated disciplines. Eventually their conclusions dovetailed into theories of orality and literacy that are credible today. He speculates that, even though they didnt know each other, on that day in 1939 Marshall McLuhan may very well have been in the same Toronto crowd and had a similar experience. Socrates and Plato were commenting on the impact of introducing written media to an oral culture, while Havelock, McLuhan, and others were commenting on the impact of re-introducing oral communication as a primary medium to a written culture. Unlike the events of some two-and-

a-half millennia ago, however, the new media forms of the 20th Century served to augment the written culture rather than displace it. THINK DIFFERENT In exploring examples of cross-cultural collision Havelock anecdotally illustrates different modes of thinking between literary and oral cultures and traces how the growing study of spoken language in the mid-20th century eventually led to deeper study by Innis and McLuhan, among others, on the impact of media themselves. In the oral mind, the world is understood in terms of objects and actions. To a non-literate in one survey a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log couldnt be broken in to subcategories. Where a literate mind might separate the log into one group, and the tools into another, the subject saw them all as part of one group, connected by the similarity of use, namely to hit, saw, or chop wood. The literate idea expressed in the verb to be is missing in the non-literate mind. The tools can only do, they cant be. Lacking the idea of being, the oral mind lacks the sense of self as the literate mind understands it. The question of whether text can speak occupies a short chapter, which explores the paradoxes present in trying to experience a written medium as an oral medium. It concludes with a very short overview of Millman Parrys experience recording the oral epics recited by non-literate Yugoslavian peasant bards, noting the irony in the title of The Center for the Study of Oral Literature at Harvard, where Parrys recordings of Balkan songs are archived. A THEORETICAL TRYPTIC Havelock presents a General Theory of Primary Orality, predicated on the idea that no society can exist without methods of passing information to successive generations. Some information, such as architectural norms, may be deduced by looking at examples but in a non-literate society the only way to pass more abstract information is orally. To ensure effective memorization of this information, it is expressed in rythmic, repetitive patterns. Poetry, then, takes a place as the most important form of communication in oral cultures, while in literate cultures it is typically seen as a pastime. Rather than a fictional personification of inspiration the Muse in Greek oral culture was the keeper of the culture itself. In his chapter on the Special Greek Theory of Primary Orality, Havelock presents five conditions of continuity of practice between orality and literacy, which only Ancient Greece can meet. Other societies in which there is a record of the transition meet some of the requirements, but Greece alone meets all five of them. In the emerging literate Greek culture, the standards and practices of Greek oral culture were slow to transition, with the result that some of the first literature composed for text still followed the conventions and practices of orality. Thus when we read Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, and other early Greek followers of the tradition of the Muse, we are experiencing oral thought in a literate medium. Havelock points out that our literate minds find it easier to read later Greeks whose writing had become more influenced by literate thought. In the oral literature there are object and there are actions. He provides examples illustrating how the concept of self-reflection is not present in the orally-aligned works, although to make them comprehensible, even grammatical, modern translations rework the original to provide this thought framework. Not only does this limit topics to the concrete, but it alienates literate readers. We have become nearly unable to recognize descriptions of human behavior that dont include self-reflection and conscious decision. By providing us a glimpse of pre-literate thinking, Ancient Greek literature allows us to understand that these ways of thinking about ourselves and the world are created by our shared experience of written media, and are not essential characteristics of human thought. The Special Theory of Greek Literacy follows, presenting more consideration on the role of orality

in shaping early literature. An example is found in Hesiods discourse on justice. In the oral mind, a discourse would require as its subject something that has behavior, like a person or an object. A concept like justice that only has existence cant properly be described. So, he has taken a large leap towards literate thinking. But, bound by the rules of orality, he must build a discourse on a new topic by reference to mentions of justice that his audience will be familiar with, which are limited to the oral tradition. So, while literacy has allowed him to address a new topic, he lacks the means to be truly original and individualistic in his discourse. In fact, he cant actually discuss the concept, but can only describe people or objects doing something. His discourse is metaphorical, not because its the best way to approach the topic, but because its the only way to approach the topic. He is trapped between tradition and emergence. For the Muse to learn to write then, she will need to supplement the verb to do with the to be. And as she does, the language containing the culture moves from poetry to prose. Plato tries to use writing to preserve the thoughts of his teacher, Socrates, but because he has developed a literate mind and writes in prose rather than poetry, he frames his discourses as dialogs, reaching back to the pre-literate ideal that Socrates defended. But Havelock credits the Socratic vocabulary as the source of the concept of self, indicating that Socrates, or at least his students, had already moved their thinking towards the literate. Finally, Havelock takes on the task of critiquing his own special theories, devoting the final chapter to putting The Special Theories on Trial, perhaps in a nod to Socrates own fate. Objections are touched on briefly but honestly. By acknowledging areas where he may have been tripped up by his own ingrained habits of thought, Eric A. Havelock nicely caps a lifetime of study. Havelock, E. A. (1986). The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press. Categories: Academic, Master of Communication Tags: Digital Media, Evolution and Trends, Orality and Literacy. Bookmark: Permalink. Follow comments: RSS feed. Post a Comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. 3 COMMENTS

Edith Davidson Posted September 17, 2009 at 8:39 am | Permalink My book, Intricacy, Design, and Cunning in the Book of Judges by E. T. A. Davidson (Xlibris 2008) is a literary criticism of the 7th book of the Bible. I have studied Judges for about 30 years and analyzed it to find all kinds of amazing things in this ancient anthology of short stories that no one before has ever noticed, so far as I know. I finally concluded that it was originally created by storytellers before the age of writing and transmitted by storytellers over the centuries until finally it was frozen at a later time when put into writing. Some of the (many) things that I discovered about its language are what Havelock also finds in the oral literature of Greece. I had come across a sentence by Havelock in an article on film noir in PMLA (January 2008) and used it in an article I was writing last year. His sentence about the function of storytelling capsulated what I had learned in my many years of teaching world literature in colleges and universities-works like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Ovid, Beowulf, the Icelandic Sagas, Cervantes, Voltaire, etc. and also (very importantly) what I had learned from comedy and present-day

storytellers. The sentence I quoted from Havelock iappears I n my unpublished paper, Complexity and Design (2008), in which I summarize the unique characteristics s of the style of the Book of Judges: My passage: Ancient stories were created in order to bring the community together, build team spirit and patriotism, foster a collective memory of the societys values, and transmit these values from one generation to the next. In a preliterate era, writes classics professor Eric Havelock, a collective social memory, tenacious and reliable, [was] an absolute social prerequisite for maintaining the apparatus of any civilization. Judges as we have it possibly represents the point at which the oral and the written forms intersected, the site where traditional storytelling finally developed into written art. What Israel needed was strong leadership, valiant warriors, and cooperative tribes. But it did not have them. As in oral literature, there is no prose treatise in Judges about morals and ethics, but only questions the stories raise about the behavior of the various men and women who jump into the fray to save Israel. Yesterday, I read Havelock for the first time and was excited to learn that The Muse Learns to Write confirms many of my conclusions about a similar period of time in ancient Israel. One reason why this is important to me is that I believe that Judges, which is many respects is fictional, is the first book of the so-called histories of the Bible which contains traces of actual history, and that this actual history is different from what most (perhaps all) other scholars thought it meant. I find these traces in what I call the archaeology of the language. Through my analyses, I was able to build up a picture of that society an incomplete picture, to be sure, but nevertheless a picture. This language, like that of the Greek oral literature (as discussed by Havelock) shows; but doesnt tell. It doesnt give us the prose explanation of what the stories mean. What the stories mean is something that might be discussed with the audience, after the performance was overor much later in time by readers like me. If you would like to read my paper, I would be glad to send it to you by email. E. T. A. Davidson

Brook Ellingwood Posted September 17, 2009 at 9:05 am | Permalink Professor Davidson, Id be honored to read your paper. While Ive been fascinated by these ideas since being exposed to them as an undergrad in the 1980s by Charlie Teske at The Evergreen State College, Ive applied them to my pursuit of a professional, rather than academic career. My current studies are likewise towards a professional Masters degree, but I was thrilled when the class I took last Winter gave me a chance to return to the rise of literacy and the way it shaped human thought. As we go through increasingly rapid introductions of new media forms, this understanding becomes less historic and more relevant to our future. -Brook

louis berger Posted December 6, 2010 at 12:48 pm | Permalink Hi you may be interested in having a look at my Language and the Ineffable: A Developmental

Perspective and its Applications, a quite radical view of what language is, to be published by Lexington Books in the next couple of weeks. If you like, send me an email address and Ill send you a pdf of the publishers informative flyer. Regards. POST A COMMENT Your email is kept private. Required fields are marked * Name * Email * Website Comment You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

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Eric A. Havelock: The Muse Learns to Write: reflections on orality and literacy from antiquity to the present (Yale University Press: 1986)

What has been called the Literate Revolution in Greece is not one more programmed concept conjured out of the air. It is a theory which...explains meanings concealed in a thousand passages of Greek literature from Homer to Aristotle. It explains what Charles Segal has called the curious dynamism, never since duplicated, of the high classic Greek vocabulary and syntax. It explains the Greek invention of philosophy. The word revolution, though convenient and fashionable, is one that can mislead if it is used to suggest the clear-cut substitution of one means of communication for another. The Muse never became the discarded mistress of Greece, She learned to write and read while still continuing to sing. The following pages seek to describe how this came about. (Havelock, pp.22-3)

One of the difficulties of thinking about language is that you have to use language to think about it. A linguistic act has to be directed upon itself. Once written down, the act could be visualized and this visual thing could be separated from the act of speaking and laid out in a kind of visual map. But what was the nature and significance of the speaking act itself? What has been its role in mans history? (Havelock, p.34) As Eric Havelock explains in the first chapter of this deceptively slim book, he spent much of his long life attempting to explain a series of strange features found in all early Greek writings; most evident in the fragments of Pre-Socratic philosophers, but present throughout...only to die away during the fourth century B.C.E. Now, this may appear one of those harmless, yet erudite, pursuits that university professors are fabled for but, make no mistake... Havelocks work was revolutionary in truth, and it has taken the Classics decades to begin accepting his conclusions, which chronicle a major shift in human history: the consequences of the Greek invention of the full alphabet from the Phoenician syllabary which preceded it.

The art (or science?) of writing in the Near East had through millennia slowly promoted the invention of signs that had phonetic values, as distinct from the visual ones symbolized in early Egyptian hieroglyphs. Progress in this direction had got as far as identifying the syllables of a spoken tongue and assigning characters to them. The number of syllables is tremendous, and the resultant sign system became difficult to memorize and cumbrous to use. The Phoenicians, searching for economy, cut down the number by inventing a shorthand, which grouped syllables in sets, each set having a common denominator - or sign - representing the initial consonant of the set.... The reader, therefore, who used the system had to decide for himself which vocalic to use out of the [set].... Drastic economy (you would easily memorize the names of such an alphabet) was purchased at the price of drastic ambiguity. (Havelock, pp.59-60) The Greek system got beyond empiricism, by abstracting the nonpronounceable, nonperceptible elements contained in the syllables. We now style these elements con-sonants.... Their creation separated out an unpronounceable component of linguistic sound and gave it visual identity. The Greeks did not add vowels (a common misconception: vowel signs had already shown up in Mesopotamian Cuneiform and Linear B) but invented the (pure) consonant. In so doing, they for the first time supplied our species with a visual representation of linguistic noise that was both economical and exhaustive: a table of atomic elements which by grouping themselves in an inexhaustible variety of combinations can with reasonable accuracy represent any actual linguistic noise. The invention also supplied the first and last instrument perfectly constructed to reproduce the range of previous orality. (Havelock, p.60) To achieve a complete transfer to a system of visual recognition requires a comparable visual fluency. This the pre-Greek systems could not provide, and so they could not compete adequately with the oralism which they partially recorded, but which continued to flourish as the habit of a majority. Even today this seems to hold true in societies that are not officially alphabetized. (Havelock, p.100) That is why Greek orality requires its own special theory.... The Hebrew example furnished in the Old Testament is not a parallel case. The instrument of inscription was imperfect. It could not hear the full richness of the original oral tradition. The vocabulary as it is written shows a steady tendency to economize and simplify both thought and action. This adds ritual dignity to the record, but at the cost of omitting the complexities of physical and psychological response.... The same holds true for the remains of the Sumerian and Babylonian so-called epics....These

versions were to be used and read and, maybe, intoned on ceremonious occasions by scribes, but not recited expansively in festivals of the people. Such scripts tend to ritualize their accounts of human experience and so simplify it and then make this simplified version authoritative. Primary orality by contrast controls and guides its society flexibly and intuitively, and its alphabetized version in Greek continued this flexibility.... There was no single institutionalized priesthood, and no attempt to form a canon out of what was being inscribed. (Havelock, p.91) In an age of relativism with regard to cultural comparisons, this argument is likely to encounter strong resistance - albeit now on different grounds to that which attended its first statement. Yet, the evidence is clear enough - vocabulary counts are straightforward measures, and they strongly suggest a qualitative difference between these systems. However, there are also other barriers. Many (unfairly) still associate Havelocks careful work with the dubious notions of Marshall McLuhan - the infamous lava lamp of cultural theory - whose bombastic books still clog the shelves of secondhand book dealers worldwide. Here, Havelock politely acknowledges McLuhans praise, but also makes clear the fact that he does not share many of McLuhans ideas. Furthermore, he is also briskly dismissive of the usual suspects in the Humanities canon. Freud, Levi-Strauss, Derrida - all are briefly noted only to be dismissed, as their models are clearly irrelevant to the actual evidence Havelock is struggling with. And similarly, while he finds contemporary work from anthropology suggestive, he strongly denies that it can be seen as fully comparable: [Examples from anthropology] exemplify societies which either have never charged themselves with the responsibility of maintaining a developed and complex culture, or have ceased to do so.... In the latter [case], having come in contact with literate cultures which have either invaded or infiltrated them, they have surrendered control of their economic, military protection, and legal system to governements that are literate in their methods of management. The surviving orality of such societies...ceases to be functional, that is, to carry the responsibilities of a memorized code of behavior. The great epics, the chanted choruses, the ritualized performances slip into forgetfulness.... All that is left is residual entertainments...[and] the language used is no longer a governing language. It can, however, with the help of literacy, be modeled into forms that are attractive and interesting, and have an appeal both aesthetic and romantic. (Havelock, p.45) Havelock does note the importance of the Parry-Lord hypothesis on the oral nature of Homers Illiad & Odyssey, however, but his own argument on that score - first outlined in the groundbreaking Preface to Plato (1963) - has far wider implications...

Preface to Plato sought to shift attention, so far as the original Greek epics were concerned, away from improvisation towardd recollection and remembrance, applied to content as well as style, and on a larger scale of reference, since what was now embraced was the whole tradition of the society for which the bard sang, something which it was his didactic purpose to conserve. (Havelock, p.11) For while Parry and Lord have successfully convinced us that Homer was an oral poet, their analyses stopped well short of thinking through the full implications of this discovery, for the development of Greek thought, in a whole variety of areas, crucially set the stage for much that has come after. And if the ancient Greeks were less literate than we think, yet genuinely singular in their newly literate experience, just how did this connect with their startlingly original worldview(s)?

The Homeric epics considered as records of the orally preserved word...meets the following criteria of authenticity: 1) they have been framed in a society free from any literate contact or contamination, 2) the society was politically and socially autonomous both in its oral and literate periods, and consequently possessed a firm consciousness of its own identity, 3) as far as responsibility for the preservation of this consciousness rested upon language, that language had originally to be a matter of oral record with no exceptions, 4) at the point where this language came to be transcribed the invention necessary for the purpose was supplied by the speakers of the language within the society itself, 5) the application of the invention to transcribe anything and everything that might be both spoken and preservable continued to be controlled by [native] speakers. (Havelock, pp.86-7) Quite simply, there are no other cases that satisfy these criteria. The Greeks, as far as we know, never used the Phoenician syllabary they adapted, and we have also found no evidence of transplanted texts from the then more civilized Middle East during the lengthy (and crucial) development period. So, early literate Greece, quite simply, had nothing to read. Facing the full implications of this is very difficult - particularly for scholars who organize their lives around texts but it is crucial to seeing that Havelocks argument for literacys slow advance is not radical...it is the only conceivable one when the full situation is considered. And, if this was the case, how did the earlier Greeks - and the other large-scale urban non-literate societies we find in history - organize and regulate the custom & law that made their society workable. This goes to the heart of the oralist question, which is quite other than we might superficially think...

Unrehearsed conversational language...is astonishingly flexible and mobile, and it always has been. That is what talk is.... [But] oralist theory has to come to terms with communication, not as it is spontaneous and impermanent, but as it is preserved in lasting form. We become familiar with this form as it exists in our textbooks, our laws, our religious scriptures, our technologies, our history, philosophy, literature.... Of course, it can intrude into our daily talk, and often does. Any discussion of a serious topic is bound to use its terms, its vocabulary, its ideas. It slips so easily into our casual converse that when we cease to be casual, we normally do not think of the difference, but the difference is there - two idioms woven into one, but of separate genius, the one designed for immediate communication, the other for serious preserved communication.... The [latter] have to posess stability. They have to be repeated from generation to generation, and repetition must be faithful, or else the culture loses its coherence.... The solution discovered by the brain of early man was to convert thought into rhythmic talk.... Variable statements could then be woven into identical sound patterns to build up a special language system which was not only repeatable, but recallable for re-use. (Havelock, pp.64-71) So much of the Homeric narrative involves situations, scenes, and performance which are ritualized, that is, are not only described formulaically, but also rendered as typical of what the society always did under such circumstances.... Much of the thematic content noted by Lord turn out to occur in contexts that are social-political: they continually recall and itemize the rules of order to be followed in such things as holding an assembly, making a collective decision, conducting a banquet, arming for battle, issuing challenges, organizing funerals, and even carrying out such technical procedures as navigation, ship-building, house-building, and the like. The list is inexhaustible, even though in our imagination the narrative itself, kindled by the bards skill, takes precedence over it. Such was the evidence [that]...the intentions of the Homeric were bifocal. On the one hand they were recreational: the poetry was the product of an art designed to entertain, this being the preferred criterion by which modernity has judged them, usually adding the qualification that the entertainment is somehow mysteriously elevated. On the other, the poetry must also be seen as functional, a method for preserving an encyclopedia of social habit

and custom-law and convention, which constituted the Greek cultural tradition at the time when the poems were composed. (Havelock, p.58) Even at our literate level, the average adult would prefer to take a novel to bed with him, rather than a treatise.... The narrative format invites attention because narrative is for most people the most pleasurable form that language, spoken or written, takes. Its content is not ideology but action, and those situations which action creates. Action in turn requires agents who are doing something or saying something about what they are doing, or having something done to them. A language of action rather than reflection appears to be a prerequisite for oral memorization.... We tend to think of the oral storyteller as concerned with his overall subject (a literate term) for which he creates a narrative structure (again a literate term). The more fundamental fact of his linguistic operation is that all subjects of statements have to be narrativised, that is, they must be names of agents who do things, whether actual persons or other forces which are personified. The predicates to which they attach themselves must be predicates of action or of situation present in action, never of essence or existence.... One law of narrative syntax in oral poetry, noted by specialists, takes the form of parataxis: the language is additive, as image is connected to image by and rather than subordinated in some thoughtful relationship. But the parataxis habit is only the tip of the iceberg or (a better metaphor) the set of clothing which contains the living body of the language. This living body is a flow of sound, symbolizing a river of actions, a continual dynamism, expressed in a behavioral syntax, or (if the language of modernistic philosophy is preferred) a performative syntax. Recognition of it is crucial to the formation of a true general theory of primary orality, one which also prepares us to confront a profound transformation that has since occurred in the nonperformative language we use today. (Havelock, pp.75-7) But while the range of evidence Havelock brings to bear is formidable, and cross-disciplinary without making a show of it, to me at least his comparisons of modern translations of ancient Greek texts with their literal counterparts remain the most startling - and convincing - proofs that something revolutionary did take place way back then, and that language was genuinely different before literacy gradually changed the way we think:

Translation of the high classical language into a modern literary tongue, when the effect is compared with the original, at once brings out the dynamics of the oral tongue and what has happened in the transfer to a literate syntax. Oedipus opens the play that bears his name with a public address in which he describes the citys condition: The town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells (Grene 1954). In the English of this widely used modern version...the grammatical structure is atomistic, item is added to item using the connections supplied by the verb to be and the preposition with. The whole effect is static. Meaning is accumulated piece by piece. The original Greek says: The city altogether bulges with incense burnings. (Havelock, p.95) Although there has been a considerable amount of work done on the oral/literate transition, resistance to the importance of this idea has seemingly been highest amongst Classicists, with the unfortunate consequence that the most original scholar in the area - Havelock - has been little read by those outside the discipline, despite the crucial importance of the ancient Greek experience - the most original, prolonged, and intriguing transition of this kind in human history. With major implications for the development of our intellectual approaches, not to mention the concept of selfhood itself, Havelocks work can be profitably juxtaposed with that of important theorists in a variety of disciplines, from Mikhail Bakhtin, Ernest Gellner, Merlin Donald and Peter J. Wilson - the potential list is inexhaustible - a process which would enrich all. But Eric Havelock, sadly, will not be available to aid in this process. The Muse Learns to Write was his swansong,

composed in his eighties in a last attempt to sum up his findings...and raise interest in them outside his recalcitrant profession. So...move beyond cultural relativist & gendered language sensitivities - since these have no real bearing on the actual dispute at hand - and listen to him. Because this is a major piece of the human puzzle yet to be fully integrated into our broader understandings...

In the Greek case...we face the paradox that, whereas the alphabet by its phonetic efficiency was designed to relace orality by literacy, the first historic task assigned to it was to render an account of orality itself before it was replaced. Since the replacement was slow, the invention continued to be used to inscribe an orality which was slowly modifying itself in order to become a language of literacy. (Havelock, p.90) The absence of any linguistic framework for the statement of abstract principle confers on the high classic tongue a curious and enviable directness, an absence of hypocrisy. The particularism of orally remembered speech has the continual effect of calling a spade a spade, rather than an implement designed for excavation. The speech will praise or blame but not in terms of moral approval and moral disapproval based on abstract and manufactured principles.... [But] it is far easier to translate Plato. The propositional idiom with the copula which we continually fall into is precisely what Plato wished the Greek language to be converted to, and he spent his entire writing life trying to do this. When he turns against poetry it is precisely its dynamism, its fluidity, its concreteness, its particularity that he deplores. (Havelock, p.94) Yet there is another side to the coin. Alphabetized speech offered its own forms of freedom, even of excitement. Oralism had favored the traditional and the familiar, both in content and style. The need to conserve in memory required that the content of memory be economical. You added to it only cautiously, slowly, and often with the loss of previous material to make room for addition in what was a drastically limited capacity. Oral information was packaged tightly (to use an anachronistic metaphor). The resources of documentation were by contrast wide open.... Alphabetized speech, given its ready fluency of recognition, now allowed of novel language and of novel statement (should individual minds be tempted to indulge in such) which a reader, scanning as he read, could recognize at leisure and take in and think over. (Havelock, p.109-10)

John Henry Calvinist

AUTHORSHIP IN ANTIQUITY AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Did Demosthenes Publish His Deliberative Speeches? | Main | Literature and Literacy in Ancient Greece NOVEMBER 13, 2005 The Muse Learns to Write Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.

Havelock devotes the first three-fourths of the book to a description of his long-term research agenda and a review of the relevant literature and prevailing views on the topic of orality. His program of investigation provides an excellent model for junior scholars who are in the process of developing their own research agendas. His overviews of Levi-Strauss, Goody and Watt, McLuhan, Mayr, and Preface to Plato consitute a solid introduction to 20th century orality/literacy research. This text would be a good one to position in the beginning weeks of a course on the subject. The new research in this book actually begins in chapter eight, entitled A General Theory of Orality. Havelock draws a sharp distinction between ordinary, everyday language and the storage language that characterizes the oral tradition. This second type is ritualized, rhythmic, and poetic and/or narrative in nature, providing a means of containing vital cultural information and passing it along in easily memorizable, relatively static forms (70-75). (This is the speech that orality theory focuses on, especially when linked to literacy theory, which concerns the written form of this information.) The emphasis here is on culture: a general theory of orality must build upon a general theory of society. It requires communication to be understood as a social phenomenon, not a private transaction between individuals (68). The Greek mnemones performed this function, but Havelock argues that Greek culture demands special theories of orality and literacy because of several distinguishing elements: [Homeric epics] were framed in a society free from any literate contact or contamination. The society was politically and socially autonomous both in its oral and literate periods and consequently possessed a firm consciousness of its own identity. As far as responsibility for the preservation of this consciousness rested upon language, that language had originally to be a matter of oral record with no exceptions. At the point where this language came to be transcribed the invention necessary for the purpose was supplied by the speakers of the language within the society itself. The application of the invention to transcribe anything and everything that might be both spoken and perservable continued to be controlled by Greek speakers (86-87). Havelock claims that no other instance of transition from orality to literacy can meet all these five requirements (87). Contrary to his earlier work in Preface to Plato, he now suggests that we cannot assume that a great, sudden rupture of literacy occurred in Athenian or Greek society. Rather, the move was gradual, and the alphabet encountered an initial long period of resistance after its invention (90). When it was finally accepted, written Greek preserved the flexibility of oral Greek, a phenomenon that stands in contrast with the simplification of other contemporaneous written languages. Havelock also theorizes that the shift to literacy transformed Greek thought, introducing the active verb (107), the concepts of selfhood (113) and psyche (114), and the notion of intellectualism (115). (See also Ong, Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought, 1985.) Still, while all of this was going on, the oral remained partnered with the literate throughout Socrates and Platos lifespans (116). I am under the impression that Havelocks theories have become canonical (but not entirely undisputed) in the 20 years since the publication of this work. His work is pertinent to my project, since once knowledge is shifted from the oral commons and encapsulated in writing, it becomes much easier to think of it as a thing that can be owned. (This notion becomes much more pertinent on down the line, with the rise of the medieval scriptural economy and then the development of Caxons and Gutenbergs presses.) The Muse Learns to Write is certainly relevant to the study of authorship in antiquity, since it gives us a way to consider how the shift toward encapsulated knowledge began. Posted by at November 13, 2005 2:34 PM | Books | Greek | Literacy COMMENTS