Blue Collar Rocket Science

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 didn’t read him at the time. Even though “The Muse Learns to Write” didn’t 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 what’s 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. Havelock’s 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 Plato’s 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 Havelock’s 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 Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage, McLuhan’s The Gutenburg Galaxy, Ernst Mayr’s 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 didn’t understand the literal meaning of the German words, but was transfixed by Hitler’s rhythms and expressiveness. Havelock cites also Franklin Roosevelt’s 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 can’t 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 Parry’s 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 Parry’s 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 don’t 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 Hesiod’s 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 can’t 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 can’t actually discuss the concept, but can only describe people or objects doing something. His discourse is metaphorical, not because it’s the best way to approach the topic, but because it’s 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.