Becoming Literate

Some suggestions for writing about literacy . . .

Though the people depicted in The Odyssey may be illiterate, they are by no means "primitive." They have a sophisticated sense of relationship to their land, to their past, and to each other. They have a complex political and economic system with various classes bound in a web of loyalties to family, clan, and king. Most of all, they have a profoundly rich set of answers to the fundamental questions of life -- Why do we live, and why do we die? Why is there suffering, and why is there joy? Where did we come from, and where will we go? All people everywhere ask the same basic questions, and they look to their culture for answers. An evolving culture, then, is an evolving set of questions and attempts to answer those questions.

The Odyssey represents a unique transition between the illiterate, mythic, "pre-historic" period of Greek culture, and the literate, well-documented Greece that is the direct ancestor of modern Western civilization. That is, The Odyssey was probably composed as far back as the eighth century B.C., well before any working alphabet had been adopted for the Greek language; however, the text of the poem obviously does now exist in written form, and may represent not only the original oral Odyssey, first written down in about the sixth century B.C., but also later additions and emendations.

The poem gives us a wonderful record of a time before record-keeping -- a time when "history" was an ongoing tradition of stories, poems, and songs. In fact, there seems to have been little or no distinction in people's minds between "history," "fable," "art," "religion," and "philosophy," or even between "reality" and "fiction." If something could exist in the imagination, then it was "real" in the only way that mattered to the Greeks, and if it could be remembered and passed along from one imagination to another, then it could become part of the culture, part of what would later be called "literature."

Paper 2, "Becoming Literate," calls on you to think about the way that a culture changes -- and, in some ways, doesn't change -- when its language attains written form. Suddenly all sorts of new questions arise: When is something important enough to record in writing . . . or, sometimes, when is something unimportant enough to record in writing, rather than commit to memory? Who gets to learn the skills of reading and writing, and what kind of status is gained, or lost? What happens to the culture's (or the individual's) powers of memory and imagination? How are the lines between truth and non-truth redrawn?

To develop Paper 2, you'll need to do two things. First, use techniques of listing, clustering, and/or freewriting to explore what happened when you learned to read and write. What was that like? How profoundly did it change you and your sense of the world, of what was important and what was unimportant? Once you get started, you'll soon find that you have a wealth of material to draw from! Then, second, choose one particular culture and find at least one authoritative source of information in order to learn how that culture made the transition to literacy, and how this changed the culture. You don't have to write a full-blown research paper, but you do have to find enough facts that you can tell that story in about 500 words.

Now you're ready to put Paper 2 together. Begin by thinking about the two stories -- your own and that of some particular culture -- and when you've found an especially interesting point of comparison, begin your draft by writing the part of your story that is relevant (perhaps 250 words or so), then continue with the historical story you've learned about, and conclude with some analysis that compares (and/or contrasts) the two stories.

Here are some ideas that might be useful, though you certainly aren't limited to these!

Some of the very oldest forms of writing were developed in the Middle East -- by the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Hebrews, and the Phoenicians. These cultures borrowed heavily from each other, and in each case writing was very much associated with spiritual authorities. You might want to look, for example, at the Old Testament, and discuss how the ancient Hebrews developed the Jewish religion with its all-important Torah. What kind of culture evolves from a religion based on scripture rather than oral tradition? What did it mean in your own life to learn to read the "word of God"?
Christianity presents an interesting case: here, the life and sayings of a presumably illiterate carpenter were recorded decades and even centuries after his death -- "recorded," though, not in the Aramaic language that Jesus probably spoke, but in Greek (which was the intellectual "lingua franca" of that era, much as Latin was the universal intellectual language of medieval Europe, or as English is today's international language of technology and commerce). The Bible, as we know it today, represents many layers of translation from one language (and culture) to our own, and some scholars see it as a kind of pastiche; nevertheless, many Christians consider the modern Bible, even in English, to be the authoritative voice of God. The Gospel according to John opens, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." What happens when key ideas are translated from one language to another -- can they maintain their integrity, or do they become colored with the culture of the new language? Does this matter?

The ancient Egyptians used stylized pictures, called "hieroglyphs," to depict their language, and so did the ancient Chinese, using the symbols we now call "characters." You might explore the contrast between forms of writing that depict ideas in pictorial form, and forms of writing (like the Roman alphabet we use for English) that depict sounds. Some languages, like those of the ancient Mayans or the modern Japanese, combine ideographic and phonetic symbols in their writing. How does writing translate the inner world of thoughts and sounds to a visible outer form?

Whereas some cultures have developed literacy "organically" (from within their own traditions and for their own purposes), most have had literacy thrust on them by outsiders, such as conquerors or missionaries. In these cases, learning to read has meant acquiring new religions, new political systems, and new technologies. For example, Christian missionaries brought literacy to northern Europe, most of Africa, and all of the Americas. What happens when a new culture of literacy supplants an older, pre-literate culture? What happens when people such as refugees or economic migrants move into a new culture and have to learn to read in order to survive?

When people learn to read and write in their own language, they normally have at least four or five years' worth of experience speaking that language; it's curious, then, that people learning a second language usually learn to speak it and read it at the same time. In what ways do reading and writing help us in learning a language, and in what ways do they hinder us? How does learning a second language reinforce or alter our understanding of our mother tongue?

San Francisco, California

February, 1998

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