Review of Eric A. Havelock's "The Muse Learns to Write"

About 28 centuries ago, one of the most importance occurrences in what would eventually become Europe took place: the sudden evolution of the Phoenician syllabary into the full Greek alphabet we know today. Before this time, absolutely all information had to be transmitted orally: from contracts between parties to how to become a Greek citizen to knowledge of everything from your complex family genealogy to how to engage on the battlefield. Two scholars, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, together proposed an idea which would have allowed all pre-literate poets (like Homer) to improvise their poetry; it also gives a cohesive set of explanations concerning why Homeric poetry looks the way it does. Their thesis, later picked up by the likes of Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, is called the Parry-Lord thesis. “The Muse Learns to Write” is Havelock’s last major work and mostly a book-length meditation on the Parry-Lord thesis. It is also a summa which tries to recapitulate an entire career’s worth of ideas while tying up loose ends. Because of this, its length – under 130 pages – it seem like a short, precursory introduction into the idea of orality. It is far more complex than its length would initially lead you to assume.

Havelock, for many years a Sterling Professor of the classics at Yale, is interested not so much in the shape of Homeric poetry, but rather the forms that occurred in human consciousness that were caused by the shift from orality to literacy. Also, how does this important transition inflict itself also upon the texts themselves, deforming or reshaping their meaning and content? 

Some questions are so important that they may be almost counted to be scandalous: “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 this 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 man’s history?” (Havelock, 34). According to Havelock, not even the emergence of Greek philosophy escaped the influence of the orality-literacy transition. He cites the unique character of Plato, whose denunciation of poetry as a form of rhetorical decadence marks a sharp break from his own written prose (a prose which, should be noted, is highly indicative of his own background as a dramatist). Since so much of philosophy was born of Plato’s dramatic dialogues involving Socrates, we have to ask ourselves whether even the most basic presuppositions of philosophy – ideas of freedom, individuality, and what it means to know could not have gone untransformed by the orality-literacy transition. 

Havelock goes on to present both a general and specific theory of Greek orality, as well as looking at the work of people whose work is closely related to his own, like Marshall McLuhan and Harold McInnis. For a one-stop précis of Havelock’s work, this is a wonderful place to start. As I said above, this is a summa, so it touches on many ideas, especially the ones on the orality-literacy break, which is most fully set forward in his earlier and more scholarly book “Preface to Plato” (1963).