What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Toward the end of Pat's book, Weetamoo has some hard concerns about writing, itself. Young Metacom has learned to write the figure A. He pronounces it for her, and explains the white men's utility in writing – and the Indian need, therefore, to be conversant in it. I had to stop reading a while after I saw her response:

…What if, whenever we wanted a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of waiting for the right time and place and the right storyteller to tell it to us?

As it is with us now, when we learn a story, we must hear it again and and again, and repeat it to ourselves, until it can never be forgotten.1

Without training, it's exclusionary.I'd never thought of writing as a bastardization. But I'll tell you, for all its obvious, near-invaluable features, she's got a hell of a point. Let's turn the kaleidoscope and sort this out.

Do you read music? I've heard the argument that the invention of modern notation was an attempt to commodify music. Recordings hadn't yet been imagined, and short of a band of musicians to play at your will, written music was an ingenious, if possibly evil, form of property. Abstract it a step further, and you've got a deed: a paper, intrinsically meaningless, which references something meaningful. Nevermind the semiotics, you insatiable philosophs, cause Weetamoo's got a devastating point just for you (last two lines):

Also, when we are told a story, we usually hear it when we are gathered together, so it enters into all our hearts at the same time. If we only read the story alone by ourselves, written in Coat-man marks, we would not have to share it, or commit it to memory. It would just be a thing on a paper page that could be burned or trampled and lost, not something that will always live on because it is a part of us as a people.2

The introduction of transactions and agreements that could exist outside the memories of those who made them must have been threatening. Add to that that the stories on which a people depends to define itself could also be abstracted, and you've got got threats on land and cultural identity. Though I'm sure Metacom and the many who joined him had a lot of reasons, I could see justification in going to war over that alone. The basic English proposition by the early 1670s appears to have been: we're taking your land and culture, by turning agreements into curious drawings, with which we will justify everything. If you intend to preserve your culture, much less your land, you're going to have to use the tools of ours. Writing = game over for the Wampanoag.

…Thoth presents his new invention, "writing," to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians"…. King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge. He argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves….3

Our letterforms look like they're overcompensating.So Plato's retelling the story to prove that speech is superior to writing, right? Thing is, Plato keeps using the word pharmakos to describe writing, which can be translated equally as "drug" or "medicine." Derrida uses this as a basis to argue that by Plato's own reasoning, writing can be proven superior to speech. Then, as is his thing, he "freezes" the argument, asserting neither is superior. Language itself is the problem, and the world should just go on about itself, best it can with that information.

Well. That certainly makes a mess of things. And in the way that if everything is a mess, everything's fine… well, it seems we're fine.

Certainly writing and speech each have their functions, but it raises a strange question our culture: why are we so obsessed with archiving? In the old days of humanity, time and retelling determined the relevance (survival) of stories. Think half of the canon would have survived without the archive of writing? And likewise, what if we'd come upon those stories only through storytellers? Like the end of Fahrenheit 451. Imagine books as something you went to see performed. Not a play, but a performance by an individual. Reading her book to you, from memory.

Makes me want to put words in front of folks again.

Hm. Hm.



1-2 Smith, Patricia Clark. Weetamoo: Heart of the Pocassets. New York: Scholastic. 2003.
3 Contains excerpts from Postman, Neil. Technopoly. New York: Vintage. 1992.