Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 22:39:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Linda Wright 
To: books@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Subject: Embrace of the Page

Let's see, didn't someone ask about who was having sex with whom in the Phaedrus? The question reminds us that procreation and life are characteristics associated with the spoken word. The written word, on the other hand, falls on barren soil, has no parent to defend it. Sex and discourse; writing and entombment. Or it is "entomement"?

While pondering the intimacy of the spoken word vs. the barrenness of writing, I came upon "The Spoken Word and the Written Word"^{note 1}, wherein William Chase Green considers "when, and why, did the Greeks write rather than speak?". More importantly for my questions, he also asks "what effects on their works did their spoken or their written nature have?". Greene's answers come in the form of life=speech, death=written word, naturally enough since he too is discussing Phaedrus. He continually makes contrasts such as "daily personal intercourse" (i.e., the spoken word) vs. thoughts "mummified by the written word". Lysias' written speech does have the effect of killing the fires of passion (in the Phaedrus), rather than fanning the flames of desire. And a very effective testimony to Plato's condemnation of the written word it is. Instead of words written in the living soul, speech seems to suffer rigor "codicis" when subjected to the embrace of the page. It is mourning for the loss of intercourse of souls which seems to be as significant and painful as the denial of a sexual relationship.

We've seem to have adjusted to the loss of intimacy as our insatiable textual urges now exhibit. Written correspondence--textual discourse--has a greatly renewed importance in today's electronic communication. Is the embrace of the page now so cold? Carol Dana Lanham, in an article on medieval epistolography^{note 2}, comments "you could by a letter (it seemed) transport yourself across time and distance to speak, tamquam praesens [as if present], with someone. . .". Twelfth century or twentieth? Parchment or electrons? I have to give it more thought.

[1]William Chase Greene. "The Spoken Word and the Written Word." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 60 (1951), 23-59. (I found the first few pages and the last few to be the most useful for this course.)

[2] Carol Dana Lanham. "Freshman Composition in the Early Middle Ages: Epistolography and Rhetoric before the Ars Dictaminis." Viator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1992), 115-134.