Writing, Memory and Subalternity in the Early Modern World
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)
Antonio Castillo Gómez, Universidad de Alcalá
Miguel Martínez, University of Chicago
‘The job of peasants, you might say, is to stay out of the archives’. With this famous dictum from his the Art of Not Being Governed, J.C. Scott (2009, 34) summarized the antagonism between writing and the people, between the documentary and record-keeping practices of state authority, on the one hand, and the livelihood and survival of subaltern groups in the premodern world, on the other. In a way, avoiding capture by writing — in the form of tax rolls, census, enclosure acts, police reports, muster rolls, or lawsuits — might have allowed working people, women, and other subordinate groups to lead better lives. Paradoxically, thus, their lives would be traceable in the memory of humanity only to the extent that they failed to escape the trap of the archive. There is a lot of truth to Scott’s witty provocation. For some working people of the past, history lessness and non literacy must have been reasonably preferable options. In his ethnohistory of upland Southeast Asia, Scott also proposes that literacy is not a one-way trip: it can be lost or purposefully forgotten. Some peasant peoples of the Southeast Asian mainland massif tell themselves, in the form of oral legends, that they once had writing, when they were a lowland, state-bearing people, but at some point — often in their flight from the valleys to the hills — they abandoned literacy, or it was stolen from them. The Akha people, for instance, used to tell that they once had writing, but in their flight from the Tai to the mountains, hunger made them eat the buffalo scrolls where they kept their communal memory and they thus forgot how to read and write. Orality, says Scott, has certain advantages, for ‘the absence of writing and texts provides a freedom of maneuver in history, genealogy, and legibility that frustrates state routines’ (220). Oral cultures, moreover, tend to be more democratic, less rigidly stratified by the distribution of cultural capital, freer from the authority of the written letter, more reliant on collective decision. Inasmuch as writing is a technology of statecraft and empire-building, nonliteracy may even be, for some groups, a conscious resistant strategy of state-evasion. Lévi-Strauss concluded, rather gloomily, that writing ‘seems rather to favor the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind’ (1968, 291). Whether we agree or not with Lévi-Strauss, it is hard to deny that for many subaltern subjects of the past writing meant more often than not taxes, punishment, and forced labor. That antagonism between writing and the common people is real also in the medieval and early modern world. In medieval England, during the 1381 uprising, a chronicler said that those found with an inkwell would rarely escape the wrath of the rebels, who actively burned archives and documents (Justice 1994, 18). Erasing the written instruments and traces of their own oppression was in fact common in other premodern revolts. During the anti-fiscal revolt of Évora (Portugal) in 1637, ‘forão trazidos ao fogo todos os livors reaes que servião aos direitos públicos, romperão as balanças donde se cobrava o novo imposto da carne … Saquearão os cartorios, desbaratando papéis e livros judiciaes’ (Melo 1660, 31–32, quoted in Bouza 1998, 41, n. 63). In Brittany, a revolt against the fiscal effects of stamped paper in 1675 and the outcry against seigniorial rights led again to the burning of documents seized from their châteaux(Bercé 2020b, 123–124). During the sack of Rome, some common Spanish soldiers used the writings of a humanist scholar who had written about them, literally, as toilet paper (Martínez 2016, 38–39). Some Diggers and Levelers, Christopher Hill showed in The World Turned Upside Down, occasionally aimed at classical languages: ‘For the radicals Latin and Greek had been the languages of the Antichrist, as they were the languages of the universities, law, medicine, the three intellectual élites’ (1975, 355). In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, rebel Jack Cade instructs to hang a clerk ‘with his pen and ink-horn about his neck’, for he cannot be ‘an honest plain-dealing man’ if he knows how to read and write (Wood 2013, 256). In many ways, it is not only that the people do not need the writing technologies of the lettered class to build and preserve their memory. It would in fact seem to be the case that their memory is in frontal opposition to literacy, writing and the class oppression that both seem to signify.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15269
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15269
