Page 90 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 79

into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats,
and hearing all manner of reason?
(Milton, Areopagitica)

This is writing in which the ‘raw material’, the ‘stuff’ of English words and
clauses, is shaped by the demands of classical rhetoric, itself influenced by the
grammar of the rhetorically trained elites of classical antiquity. What dominates
here, and provides the structure of the text, is a specific conception of the
structure of argument; the structure of sentences follows from that. Sentence-
syntax is shaped by the needs of the textual structures which fulfil the social need
to ‘show learnedness’. The demands of that rhetoric are to pile point on point in
an argument, and to contrast the edifice of piled-on points with an edifice of
equal weight as counters to these points.
The clause-structure of the sentences is hugely complex. The opening sentence
of this passage contains ten clauses: ‘we know … good and evill grow up
together … the knowledge of good is involved … and interwoven … the
knowledge is to be discerned … those seeds were confused … which were
imposed … psyche culls out seeds … and psyche sorts them asunder … the
seeds were intermixed’. Sentence and clause internal structures are complex; for
instance, the conjoined subject noun of the second clause – ‘good and evill …
grow up together’ – is transformationally ‘raised’ or ‘fronted’ before the subject
of the sentence to become the theme of the sentence ‘good and evill we know
…’ In this process ‘good and evill’ take on the feel of being the object of the first
sentence, ‘we know good and evill’.
This is not a structure derived from everyday interaction. It is one specialised
form of an elite social group – of the academies and of those not just trained
there but seeking ‘preferment’ from there – speaking and writing in highly
specific environments; it is not their language of the everyday. The textuality of
the writing, and deriving from this textual structure the syntax of sentences, both
had specific social origin and motivation.
Here, simply for comparison, and to show that this had become the regularity
of a resource, is an extract from Bacon’s long essay The Advancement of
Learning.

Surely, like as many substances in nature which are solid do putrify and
corrupt into worms; so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to
putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesom, and (as I may
term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness
and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This
kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen: who
having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety
of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly
Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of
monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time,