Grammars of Creation

by George Steiner

Many years ago, one evening in Massey College, I sat with Robertson Davies, Norrie Frye, Kathleen Coburn (the world’s greatest Coleridge scholar), when there walked in a very much younger Marshall McLuhan. Astounded, and without thinking, I turned to Professor Frye, and said, “There’s Marshall McLuhan.” I cannot hope to reproduce the air of sardonic melancholy which immediately invaded Norrie’s features. He had a long look, and said, “So the man alleges.” This is to say what Toronto was at that moment – and perhaps will be again? – the absolute centre for the study of Letters and the Humanities, possibly in the world. I wonder whether it has struck our host, B. W. Powe, and those with us this today, that reading and writing are a brief, ephemeral form in human history. Millennia of orality precede and surround the written word and the arts of reading. Homer is immediately closer to Flaubert or Proust. Homer is twenty thousand years removed from the far origins of the mythological material he deals with. Endless communities on earth do not have what we consider to be literature. There is no community on earth known to anthropology that does not have music. I will come back to that, music being far more universal than language. There is also a second great code – mathematics – untranslatable and universal, which I will also come back to shortly.

The historical prestige, the authority (I am simply translating the Latin, “auctoritas”) of reading and writing may well prove to have had a relatively brief run in the history of the species from, say, the early Proto-Chinese inscriptions and Sumerian clay tablets to the nascent age of the electronic – a blink of the eye in the biological and social history of man. The origins of classical literacy are highly specific. They are those of the priesthood, of power, or of what Max Weber called “an aristocracy of the intellect,” or what we can also call a clerisy, les clercs. The capacity to write and read was in the hands of a gradually expanding elite. Remember that Socrates only twice consults a written text in the whole of that great classical corpus. There are only two moments when he asks for a scroll to be brought to verify a citation. Jesus probably did not know how to write. The pericope of the woman taken in adultery, in that mysterious passage in the Gospel according to John about tracing words in the dust and immediately effacing them, is, according to biblical scholarship, a much a later insertion. Neither Socrates nor Jesus published.