"Knowledge Not Purchased by the Loss of Power": Wordsworth's Meditation on Books and Death in Book 5 of The Prelude

At the end of the Phaedrus, Socrates inveighs against writing, as against a kind of idol worship. "You know, Phaedrus," he says,

that's the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. (275d) ¹

The main charge against writing, however, is, paradoxically, that it weakens memory and leads to forgetfulness. In the story that Socrates tells, when the god Theuth comes to King Thamus with an invention that "will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories," Thamus replies, "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written" (274e-275a). Theuth (or Thoth) is the Egyptian deity traditionally associated with writing, and Thamus is the Greek name for the sun god Ammon, which means that, as in the Prometheus myth, two deities are in conflict over the giving of a particular technology to man. As against the "dead discourse" of writing, which is a kind of imitation or image of "living speech" (276a), Socrates insists that "any work . . . is a matter of reproach to its author . . . if he regards it as containing important truth of permanent validity" (277d); for only what is "written in the soul of the listener" can be of value (278a). As for the poet or the lawgiver (Homer or Solon), only if he "can demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth" does he deserve to be considered, if not "wise" ("the epithet is proper only to a god"), at least a "lover of wisdom" (278c-d). ²

There are peculiarities in this denunciation of writing, even apart from the question of how it fits into the larger themes of the dialogue--beauty, love, and the soul. First of all, the complaint that written words "seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent" is strangely reminiscent of biblical injunctions against idol worship--in particular, of the famous passage from Psalms: "They have mouths but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths" (135: 16-17). Furthermore, the argument that written words close off meaning rather than open it because they cannot be interrogated is curiously unconnected to the claim that writing weakens memory; one suspects a hidden motive of some kind, as if separate shards were being pieced together to form a line of attack that was not explicitly stated or formulated, either because it could not be or because the author (Socrates or Plato) did not wish it to be. Why is it that one god invents writing while another, embodying wisdom, abjures it?

I suspect that an important factor behind the attack on writing is the desire--one that figures prominently in many of the Platonic dialogues--to transcend the fear of death. It is the main theme of the Crito, for example, and a central current in the Republic, where it is implicated in the attack on poetry. What the poets say, remarks Socrates at the beginning of Book 3 of the latter dialogue, "is neither true nor edifying to men who are destined to be warriors," and he gives as an example the famous passage from Odyssey 11 in which Akhilleus's shade tells Odysseus that he would rather be the poorest peasant in...