Let's start at the beginning which is also the end.
The fundamental Literacy is the Literacy of Oral Culture: the capacity to speak and listen in public. For this literacy to be submerged, made invisible or even contemptible, in the light of some other Literacy is little short of a crime against humanity, a crime against the human intellect, against the intellectual resources of the nation in which such submersion of basic literacy occurs. For one thing, it cheapens or thinks public life if those lacking some other literacy are by that fact excluded from public discourse. It was recognition that among the ruling classes, at the 'highest' levels of public discourse, this thinning was occurring that was an energizing factor in the great satires of Swift and Pope. The "Projectors" who so often are the butt of that satire were scribblers, private persons who came not out into the light of public scrutiny but lurked in their abodes, sending forth their proposals in printed form only. The projector of "A Modest Proposal" is the archetype here, along with the victor in the diving contest in Dunciad II.
Now the Print Culture that dominates (or seems to dominate) public life in 'advanced' Barbarism - uh, I mean capitalism - has been challenged for the second time in the Occupations that swept the world last fall; the first time was the challenge of the Black Liberation Movement from the Montgomery Boycott through the Breakfast Program of the Panthers. That challenged was crushed and erased from public memory. The threatening voices of Fannie Lou Hamer, of Carl Oglesby, of Bobby Seale, of the Speak Bitterness session, of the radical feminists, of the Berkeley students on that police car, Of the Ithaca convicts, of Fred Hampton - all tamed and trivialized if not forgotten.
This is NOT an attack on print literacy, which is at the center of much that is the best as well as the worst in developed Barbarism. But the various literacies have to be 'valued' in some contet: only oral culture is a given. Pound, or his source for Sigismundo material, put it nicely:
And they want to know what we talked about?
"_de litteris et de armis, praestantibusque ingeniis_,
Both of ancient times and our own; books, arms,
And men of unusual genius,
Both of ancient times and our own, in short the usual subjects
Of conversation between intelligent men."
Books live only in conversation. As mere books, or as the private pleasure of the isolated - abstract - human individual they lose their life. I suppose the supreme text on this is the Temptation of Athens in PR IV. In the history of Milton criticism one finds the same sort of mournful howls over this passage as my remarks on Forced Literaby have on this list. "Works of Art" are a modern (Platonic) inventon, part of moderen mythology and ideology. Again Pound is useful here:
And Clara Leonora wd come puffing so that one
Cd hear her when she reached the foot of the stairs Square, chunky, with her crooked steel spectacles And her splutter and her face full of teeth And old Rennert wd sigh hevily And look over the top of his lenses and She wd arrive after due interval with a pinwheel Concerning Grillparzer or --pratzer Or whatever follows the Grill--and il Gran Maestro Mr Lizst had come to the home of her parents And taken her on his prevalent knee and She held that a sonnet was a sonnet And ought never to be destroyed, And had taken a number of courses And continued with hopes of degrees and Ended in a Baptist learnery
Somewhere near the Rio Grande.
(I'm afraid I couldn't preserve the shape on the page here.)
A sonnet is a sonnet - that is, it is a mere dead thing, its function as a topic of the conversation of "intelligent" persons lost.
Print culture or "writing" literacy is non-authoritarian, non sadistic, only so long as it is subordinate to the central human literacy of speaking and listening and responding to what one hears. So subordinated, it is a powerful tool of freedom. Not so subordinated and it is a tool of tyranny and sadism. It is the secret pleasure of the _idiotes_, the merely private person, glorying in his/her possession of so superior a Good; glorying in his/her superiority to the "illiterate."
Carrol