Humans on the Cusp of Literacy

it's the biggest thing around

When the brothers Grimm went around in the early 19th century collecting fairy tales for their Kinder- und Hausmärchen — Children and Household Tales — they were the literate sons of a district magistrate. The people that they collected stories from were not.

The same thing applies in a biography of British writer Thomas Hardy I am reading, by Michael Millgate. Hardy was born in 1840, went to school and became literate, but his dad was a stonemason, one step above peasant. These rural people had an oral culture of songs and tales.

From time to time [Hardy]… wrote out the words of ballads… which his mother or some other relative had remembered, or which he himself had heard sung at parties, harvest suppers, and the like.

Hardy’s dad played the violin at these occasions, and often Hardy would play with him.

So when Hardy became a writer he wrote about the illiterate, oral, rural world he grew up in, and set down the folkways in his notable novels like Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Actually, the novels were really often about people like him struggling at the class and literacy divide.

Wouldn’t you know, I am also reading a book about Chinese folktales and myths. They are all handed down verbally until someone writes them down. The early written versions are fragmentary.

Then there is a book on the history of philosophy, and it starts with the pre-socratics in Greece, of which only “fragments” survive. Then there are chaps like Homer that stitch a bunch of tales together into a jolly good story.

Not to mention C.G. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. He argues, with lots of examples, that all religious ideas come down to us through oral tradition, and there is nothing new. And at some point they get written down.

Reading all these books at once I am deeply struck by the shattering transition that takes place when a person, or a culture, becomes literate. In the pre-literate world, you only know what has been spoken or sung about in your hearing. But once you become literate, your world is transformed.

Oh, and don’t forget Gutenberg and the printing press.

Why does it matter? For me, it matters because it helps me understand the world. For instance, maybe the problem with the “oppressed peoples” of which we’ve heard tell is not that they are oppressed but that they are not literate, or not very literate.

More research in needed, experts agree.