CityReads | The Written Words are Forever

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The Written Words are Forever

The written words change the way we see the world and also the way we act upon it.

Martin Puchner, 2017. THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization, Random House.

Sources: 

http://www.martinpuchner.com/written-world.html

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/04/written-world-literature-shaped-history-martin-puchner-review

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/books/review/written-world-martin-puchner-social-life-of-books-abigail-williams.html

The origins of writing date back some 5,000 years to the Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets used for commercial records. The story of literature begins around 1200 BCE with The Epic of Gilgamesh, which celebrated the adventures of the "writer-king" of Uruk in what is today Iraq. Martin Puchner's THE WRITTEN WORLD: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization takes the reader on a wonderfully rich tour through the places and texts that have shaped our lives and history. Circling the globe and spanning human history from the invention of writing to the Internet age, Puchner's book is a lively account of how literature has transformed humanity. From an ancient Chinese library carved on nine-foot-high stone steles, to tracing Goethe's route through Sicily in search of "world literature", a phrase coined by the German writer in 1827, and on to a contemporary conversation with Derek Walcott on St Lucia, this is a truly global survey.

Puchner opens, by way of illustration, with Alexander the Great. Under his pillow at night he had, alongside his dagger, a copy of the "Iliad." The narrative gallops on to Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cuneiform and Gilgamesh. In chronological procession there follow Buddha, Confucius, "The Tale of Genji", the Mayas, the Gospels, Gutenberg, Muhammad, Luther, Cervantes, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Marx and Engels, the African epic of Sunjata — on, on and on to Derek Walcott and Harry Potter.

The Italian Baroque painter Ciro Ferri (1634–1689) imagines Alexander the Great reading Homer in bed.

The power of writing

Writing had been invented in Mesopotamia, five thousand years ago, for other purposes, such as economic and political transactions. One story about the origin of writing tells of a king of Uruk who came up with the idea of sending a threatening message, pressed onto clay, to a rival king. When presented with the incomprehensible signs that stored the words spoken by the king of Uruk, the rival king declared his allegiance, so impressed was he by this miraculous way of making clay talk. Writing was used by scribes to centralize power in cities and to control the hinterland.

Literature isn't just for book lovers. Ever since it emerged four thousand years ago, it has shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth. It is what texts, especially foundational ones, do: They change the way we see the world and also the way we act upon it. The influence of foundational texts such as the Bible, texts that accrued power and significance over time until they became source codes for entire cultures, tell people where they came from and how they should live their lives.

The invention of writing divides human evolution into a time that is all but inaccessible to us and one in which we have access to the minds of others.

While the world had fallen into chaos, these ancient texts had survived, thanks to writing. Now they were able to bring readers in tune with a better past that would otherwise have been lost.

The history of literature

The history of literature began in the fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia where literature originated and followed its triumphal march across the globe. Along the way, literature evolved from being the exclusive possession of scribes and kings to reaching increasingly larger numbers of readers and writers. This democratization of literature was aided by technologies from the alphabet and papyrus to paper and print, all of which lowered the barriers of entry, opening the literary world to more people, who then innovated new forms—novels, newspapers, manifestos—while also affirming the importance of older foundational texts. Jaipur, with its readers from every walk of life and the clashing of old and new texts, seemed like a good bookend to this story.

The larger story of literature has unfolded in four stages. The first stage was dominated by small groups of scribes, who alone had mastered the early, difficult writing systems and therefore controlled the texts they assembled from storytellers, texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Bible, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

Egyptian granite statue, third millennium B.C.E., of a seated scribe.Credit 43

As the influence of these foundational texts grew, they were challenged, in a second stage, by charismatic teachers such as the Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus, who denounced the influence of priests and scribes and whose followers developed new styles of writing. I began to think of these vivid texts as teachers' literature.

French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) shows Socrates philosophizing shortly before his death, in the company of his students.

Japanese woodblock print by Yashima Gakutei, dating from the early nineteenth century, of ten disciples of Confucius.

In a third stage of literature, individual authors started to emerge, supported by innovations that made access to writing easier. While these authors first imitated older texts, more daring ones such as Lady Murasaki in Japan and Cervantes in Spain soon created new types of literature, above all, novels.

Murasaki being divinely inspired to write the Tale of Genji. The artist, Suzuki Harunobu (1725– 1770), used separate woodblocks for each color to accomplish multicolor printing

Finally, in a fourth stage, the widespread use of paper and print ushered in the era of mass production and mass literacy, with newspapers and broadsides, as well as new texts such as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or The Communist Manifesto.

French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) shows Socrates philosophizing shortly before his death, in the company of his students.

Together, these four stages, and the stories and inventions that made them possible, created a world shaped by literature. It is a world in which we expect religions to be based on books and nations to be founded on texts, a world in which we routinely converse with voices from the past and imagine that we might address readers of the future.

How technologies have changed and will change literature?

The alphabet revolution, begun in the Middle East and Greece, made writing easier to master and helped increase literacy rates. The paper revolution, begun in China and continued in the Middle East, lowered the cost of literature and thereby changed its nature. It also set the stage for the print revolution, which first occurred in East Asia and then, hundreds of years later, in northern Europe. There were smaller revolutions, such as the invention of parchment in Asia Minor and of the codex in Rome. In the last four thousand years, there have been a handful of moments when new technologies radically transformed literature.

The invention and spread of paper and print gave literature wings. So too the web in our day. Our current technological revolution is throwing at us every year new forms of writing, from email and e-readers to blogs and Twitter, changing not only how literature is distributed and read but also how it is written, as authors adjust to these new realities. At the same time, some of the terms we have recently begun using sound like earlier moments in the deep history of literature: Like ancient scribes, we are once again scrolling down texts and sitting hunched over tablets. How to make sense of this combination of old and new?

Perhaps you are reading these words in a book printed on paper or on a screen, unless you are wearing glasses that somehow project words into your field of vision. But no matter what device you’re using, you’ll either be flipping through pages or scrolling through a continuous piece of text. Notice the combination of old and new. Most people had stopped scrolling ever since the papyrus scroll gave way to the parchment book, but now, after two millennia, this act of scrolling has suddenly come back because the unending string of words stored by computers is closer to a continuous scroll than to discrete pages. Similarly, people hadn’t been writing on tablets for hundreds of years, but now we see them everywhere. When I squint, today’s tablet users look strangely like ancient scribes sitting cross-legged with their writing implements in their laps.

The most striking feature of literature has always been its ability to project speech deep into space and time. The Internet has supercharged the first, enabling us to send writing to any place on earth within seconds. But what about time? The endurance of electronic media over time has already emerged as a problem because of the rapid obsolescence of computer programs and formats.

But the most important lesson from the history of literature is that the only guarantee for survival is continual use: A text needs to remain relevant enough to be translated, transcribed, transcoded, and read by each generation in order to persist over time. It is education, not technology, that will ensure the future of literature.

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