Memory is like Writing on Water
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He shrank from killing him,
since his heart was awed by such action, but sent him away, handing him
murderous symbols, inscribed on a folding tablet, enough to destroy
life, and told him to show it to his wife’s father, that he might
perish.
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Iliad VI: 181
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to
Dawn
In his dedication
to Emperor Vespasian the older Pliny (23 – 79 AD) said he could have simply published his
work and defend it from criticism by saying that he had written the
work for
the "humile vulgus,"
the
uneducated
crowd
of
peasants
and
artisans
(Pliny
N.H. praef. 6),
in other words people who usually couldn’t read. Pliny was kidding of
course,
but we detect in the criticism a hidden agenda. "When the law is put
in
writing," said Euripides in The Suppliants, "rich and
poor alike have equal justice, and the weaker prevails over the
stronger if
justice is on his side,"
and who among the owners of traditions, chariots and manure tainted
marble
floors could possibly have wished that to happen? Therefore, under the
phony pretext that this would be "incomplete and subject to
misinterpretation and abuse," it was
explicitly forbidden to put Jewish law in writing, until Rabbi Yehudah
ha-Nasi's reform in 200 AD brought a change of attitude.
In the Roman Empire’s elementary
schools the kids still chanted their Homer and Virgil from the only
textbook in
the room – the teacher's memory. At the marts and basilicas neither the
shopkeepers
nor their patrons did do much writing, except for large purchases such
as the
sale of an ox. The transaction for 115 sesterces is recorded on a wax
tablet from
45/58 AD; two centurions signed as witnesses (FIRA II, 137).
In Pompeii the archives of the
financial agent L. Cæcilius Jucundus,
consist of 153 wax tablets mostly from 52 – 62 AD, suggesting that it
was
normal to write out receipts. The average loan was about 4,500
sesterces; the
smallest was 342 sesterces. Apparently Jucundus
had
illiterate clients who needed a notary to draft the document for them.
The earliest documents before the innovation of writing are the images
impressed on the symbolon of a Sumerian
trade
agreement; it appears the first fully literate person must have been a
merchant
or his banker, which could only add to the illiterate’s paranoia about “the
letter
that
kills” (II
Cor. 3: 6).
From before the third century
there has come down to us only one personal diary, the
Sacred Stories by Aelius Aristides (117 –
181 AD), a collection of therapeutic
dreams that were supposed to assist his doctor in the prognosis and
treatment
of Aelius’ illnesses. Aristides was a rich
and
neurotic hypochondriac who could afford to pay twenty dollars a piece
in modern
money for a single sheet of papyrus. Nevertheless, even the elites
continued to
rely on the spoken word. Phlegon of Tralles wrote his Book of Marvels to
entertain just
one person, the emperor, but when Augustus suffered from another of his
frequent bouts of insomnia, "he summoned story-tellers" (Suetonius), instead of reaching for the book and read
himself. Even the fully literate of this period did his best to
disguise this
under a stylistic veneer of quasi-oral formality. Virgil drafted in
prose
before versifying his epics for an easier delivery by the performer.
Much later
the French authors of the ancient regime would do exactly the opposite:
to
secure a literate and lean informality of their prose, they first
composed a
draft in verse, to make it obvious to the naked eye, what was to be
avoided (Casanova, Memoires). In ancient
times there was no shame in
illiteracy and writing remained the domain of schooled notaries and
scribes. Aurelius Sakaon of Theadelphia
held
important offices at Arsinoe in 310/330
AD. In a
petition to the prefect of the province, he employed the written word
to
declare himself an illiterate.
Most of the ancient letters were
written down at the stall of a local scribe around the corner, who
dragged a
meager living out of taking his client’s convoluted dictation. The
document is
often signed with the remark: "I wrote on behalf of X because he
writes
a slow hand." As your secretary could tell you, dictating a clear
exposition entirely from memory is an art form by itself, and much of
the
theological nonsense in St. Paul’s epistles is due to the simple fact
that it
had been written under dictation. Note how frequent dictating produces
formulas, like “dear Ms. Dobson, and so
on and so forth, – – therefore
delivery cannot be accomplished at the so and so date, yours
faithfully, bla-bla-bla,” which the
secretary – who knows her boss and his intentions – then transforms into proper language.
So
for
most
people
in
everyday
life,
the
glue
holding
together
recollections
and
ideas
was
not
the
letter.
Instead
the
illiterate
mind
works
with
the
memorable
turn of phrase, latches on to a catchy figure
of speech and recapitulates his statement in numerous clauses,
amplifying the story in the process. The ancients made the scanning of
words a science and whether to start a sentence with an anapest or
spondee became a matter of utmost concern.
As recent as 1958, the editor of Oldenberg's
translation
of Buddha’s Speeches was still naive
enough to espouse the idea that this sort of thing could preserve a
tradition, with
“the accuracy of a tape recording,”
even after a gap of five hundred years of oral transmission. Only after
putting
such recitals on tape for real, we woke up to the fact that even
Homer's Iliad had undergone numerous transformations,
in fact as many as there have been recitals, before the anonymous
transcript of
a scribe from approximately 750 AD helped to solidify the text. Nobody knows anything about
Homer as a person; the ancients told five different stories of his life
and
whereabouts. Some even think “Homer” is not really a proper name but
the term
for an epic performer. Of his works the Iliad
is the most preliterate “text” in our tradition.
Somebody – perhaps the Homer, they say, was a schoolteacher
in Ephesus – made one day the revolutionary step to transcribe an oral
performance, a delivery that up to then entirely had depended on the
mnemonic skills of an illiterate performer. What this means is
difficult to imagine for a fully literate person. Such performer has no
other possible reference than the memory of previous recitals, and it
is not something he can go back to and look it up or listen to it by
the push of a button. All he has to aid his performance is his faith that the current
delivery is true to tradition. This is the point of origin for our
religious concept of “faith,” as well as for the Socratic idea of
“knowledge”
as a form of remembering. “Faith” simply means remembering the word of
tradition. For the epic performer’s
psychology, such faith was a necessary protection of his sanity and
shielded
him from any nagging suspicion whether his recollection was accurate.
To the present day, the Tiv-Peoples
of
Nigeria
still
base
their
solicitations
on
oral
genealogies.
Joseph
C.
Miller
reports,
that
in
recent
years
these
genealogies
have
been
diverging
considerably
from
the
careful
transcripts the
British colonial administration had commissioned forty years earlier in
order
to prevent exactly this from happening. Yet the Tiv
tenaciously maintain that their current recollections are accurate and
that it
must be the transcripts that are at fault (The African Past speaks,
Hamden,
Conn. 1980). In Yugoslavia, the
illiterate singer of epics, Demo Zogic,
used to tell
his informant that he had reported "the song, word for word,"
when the comparison between the tape recordings and earlier transcripts
in
shorthand proved that he had done nothing of the kind (A.B.
Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge Mass. 1960). One may think, what's the harm in making
up things as we go along, after all the Iliad is just a poem, a
"just so" story. Yet the illiterate, who lives in a purely oral
environment, although he has a concept for lying, has none yet for
"fiction." It is a luxury he can’t afford without losing his mind.
In Homer’s days shorthand was not yet around and writing a
slow-going affair. There must have been many episodic transcripts
before Homer
edited and stitched together these fragments. The Greek term for “epic”
literally means: (orally) “stitching together.” The process of creating
a text
on paper lifted the principles of composition to a new level.
It seems that in the fifty years between the final transcript
of the Iliad and the first draft of
the Odyssey, composing a story had taken a new
direction. There were first attempts to create a climactic plot
– which is still missing in the Iliad
– and the coherence of the plotting no longer depended on incessant
recapitulating. Unlike the listener, a reader doesn’t need these
constant
reminders; he can thumb back in his copy to the point where he’d lost
the
thread. He is now empowered to choose at his own convenience when and
where to
refresh his memory. We take this for granted by now, but then and there
it made
a world of difference. The story of the homecoming sailor, whose
meandering
travel did lead him to the remotest reaches of the known universe,
became the
first fantasy novel of the Western world. Nevertheless, the medium of
expression – the epic hexameter – still continued imitating the
familiar convention.
The translator Rodney Merrill has accomplished something
previously thought entirely impossible. He has introduced the Greek
hexameter
into the English language as it was meant to be, as a line not merely
scanning
the beats, accents and stops, but also measuring the length of the
vowels, such
as the difference between “loot” and “lot.” Merrill has proven himself
a
veritable ferryman between the languages and traditions, giving us
every nuance
of the original, all the redundancies and convolutions, yet with the
delicate
touch of a literate person, who is aware that he is addressing a
literate
audience. Merrill does never make us feel the inert artificiality of
oral
conventions. What this means, a modern reader can gauge from reading
the King James Bible, where the translator has
attempted to add to the dignity of the text with archaic elocutions.
From the
beginning, neither the King James nor
the Iliad were received as a reflection
of the informality of every day speech, nor were they meant to. Oral
deliveries
are striking a contrived posture and even in Homer’s times the epic
convention was
of an artificial and aloof “sublimity,” that left the critic of a
literate age,
like Longinus, at great pains to make it look natural and informal. The
concept of the incidental narrator, who unburdens himself on his reader
with the ease of snow slipping from the leaves in the trees, is a
rather recent innovation.
Surely, whoever he was, this Homer had more strings on his
harp than merely taking down a dictation. The story of the Odyssey has been engaging us ever
since it was recited in the halls of Peisistratus of Athens (561
– 528 BC), but it may have never seen the light
of day, were it not for the taunts of Homer’s original audience, when
he was reading to them the Iliad. There was this
slightly comical figure of a balding schoolmaster who had the audacity
to just sit there and read from a scroll, making a mockery of the
singer’s craft. A professional singer of epics was a widely respected
figure, a welcome guest at the table of the nobility whose genealogies
he was expected to embellish with divine pedigrees. Like a rock star he
traveled with a whole retinue of apprentices and groupies who carried
the master’s purple cushion and his harp. Everybody seemed to agree: a
recital from a given text was cheating. The people listening to “Homer”
heckled the man to do better than such wandering bard. The sentiment is
still around; I still remember the math teacher at school banning our
pocket calculators from the classroom. Yet in the end Homer silenced
the taunts by delivering the first genuine text, the Odyssey, something never heard
before its first publication in approximately 700 BC, and of which
there was only Homer’s original script known to be in circulation.
In
the
1930s
the
Russian
psychologist
Alexander
Romanovich
Luria (1902 – 1977)
investigated the psychology of
perception, problem solving, and memorization among undereducated
minorities in
Central Asia. Luria's work became a corner stone for the study of the
illiterate
mind. He later moved on to the study of aphasia, focusing on the
relation
between language, thought, and cortical functions.
For instance an illiterate person
will find it challenging to categorize things in terms of universals.
For him
everything is related to a concrete situation. Geometrical figures are
addressed not as circles, squares and triangles, but as “mirror,”
“door,” “house,” “apricot
drying board” – whatever is at hand (Luria). When asked to find the odd one out among a
hammer, a saw, a log of wood and a hatchet, the illiterate might
reason, “they are all alike. The saw will saw the log
and the hatched will chop it. If one of these has to go, I throw out
the
hatchet, because I will need the hammer later on.” When pointed to
the
difference between “tools” and “building material” the answer is “I hear you, but even if we have tools we
still need wood, otherwise we can’t build anything” (Luria). The man is obviously not stupid, yet when
asked how to define a tree in three words, he says: “Two
words! Apple tree, elm, poplar.”
What
transpires
from
Luria’s
work
I’ve
found
reflected
in
the
Iliad
as well. The studies of Milman Parry (1902
– 1935, The Making of Homeric Verse, Oxford University Press, 1971)
had prepared me for the heavy redundancy of style, which is
recapitulating the
same thing over and again as a constant reminder for the performer. In
one
instance even, there is the scene where two of the combatants stop
inflicting
blows on each other, sit down and in the middle of an ongoing battle
exchange
the family trees of their ancestry back to the point where the ancestor
of one
of the two had been hospitable to the other’s. Then they rise, shake
hands and turning their backs on each other look for picking a fight
with someone else. As a scene of recognition this is as cumbersome as
it gets, but what the performer is trying to convey is not the
cordiality of two former allies now fighting on opposite sides, but to
give us the genealogy, probably of the patron sponsoring this
particular performance; everybody can see that. Nevertheless I was not
at all prepared for the variety of asides about matters that should be
non-essential for progressing with the story. Not as if a modern author
would despise to add here and there a peripheral detail.
The
odd
observation
and
the
rambling
diversion
can
add
credibility
to
the
story.
In
the
arsenal
of
the
experienced
liar
the
loose
apropos
detail,
delivered
without
a twitch, is his most formidable weapon. Yet what
Homer is giving us is something different altogether.
His similes inform us about
crafts and skills; even give a catalog of implements and things. On
first sight
these seem to be just a load of superfluous digressions; to remember
the sheer
number of these similes – more than 200 in the Iliad –
is not at all conducive to their presumed function as
a "mnemonic aid" (Eric
Alfred Havelock, 1903 – 1988, The Literate Revolution in Greece and
its Cultural Consequences, Princeton UP, 1981).
Which leaves me with a nagging suspicion.
What if the "story" in
the Iliad may actually be secondary? What if it is merely the
vehicle for an encyclopedia of tribal lore: how to till the ground with
a pair of oxen, how to build a campfire, how to cook a barley soup, how
to dress a wound and avoid sepsis, how to craft a piece of armor. Apart
from a formal apprenticeship, stringing technical knowledge into a
story was the only way for an oral society of remembering and
verbalizing their skills.
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Fifty years after the Iliad, the Odyssey
is already from
a different world; despite the generic formulas it is a climactic
story, told
for the frivolous sake of telling the story. An illiterate author
without any
text to aid the memory would have never been able to visualize the
“calculus of
destiny” beyond a loose agglomeration of situations. The unifying
closure, tying
together all the loose strands, as in the final, tightly motivated
shootout
between Ulysses and the suitors, would be beyond his grasp. Dynamics of
this
nature have affected the transition from the oral to the written record
since
times immemorial. The alleged events in the life of Mohammed have
become more
and more “historical” simply by repeating and passing on the story:
“If one storyteller mentions
a raid, the next one will tell you the exact date of this raid, and the
third furnishes
you with even more details. Waqidi (d. 823) wrote years after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768) and will always give precise dates,
locations, and names where Ibn Ishaq
has none, give accounts of what triggered the expedition, provide
miscellaneous
information to lend color to the event, as well as present a reason
why, as was
usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder that scholars are
fond of Waqidi: where else does one find
such wonderfully precise
information about everything one would like to know? But given that
this
information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And
if
spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations
between Ibn Ishaq
and Waqidi,
it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated
in the
three generations between the Prophet and Ibn
Ishaq
(Patricia
Crone, Meccan Trade And The Rise Of
Islam, 1987,
pp. 223-224).
© – 1/24/2009 –
by michael sympson, 3,000 words, all rights
reserved
