The Question of Literacy in The Hunger Games (Pt. 3): Scripted or Unscripted?

Continued from Pt. 2

It is Catching Fire that introduces the reader to one of the grand literacy themes in the Hunger Games trilogy, which can be best summed up in the question:  scripted or unscripted?  Up to this point, we have become acquaited with the artiface of the capital in The Hunger Games, and we have learned, in particular, of the artiface of the games, which require the tributes to play to the audience, deliberately providing the grand entertainment in order to have their efforts to engage the Capital rewarded in the form of help in the arena as the citizens throw support behind their favorite tribute by buying gifts to help that tribute survive.  However, the artificiality very deliberately does not translate into something that is scripted.  Unlike in Brave New World, in which the "feelies" are scripted (by such as Helmholz Watson), the entertainment in the capital seems reality-based, like the games.  Other events in support of the games are televised, including, significantly, interviews with Caesar Flickerman, which are not scripted, but are the result of coaching from the District mentor and Effie Trinket (in the case of Disctrict 12), who is a kind of escort to the tributes.

That entertainment is artificial, but not script-based does not seem to have much to do with literacy--after all, we have reality television, and though the games are extreme, there is an element of familiarity to the genre of television portrayed.  It is in Catching Fire, when Peeta and Katniss are given scripts, and when Katniss tries to write for herself a memorial of Rue that the script--or lack thereof--becomes important.  During the victory tour, Peeta and Katniss are expected to follow a set routine, which Katniss describes:

Peeta and I will be introduced, the mayor of 11 will read a speech in our honor, and we’ll respond with a scripted thank-you provided by the Capitol. If a victor had any special allies among the dead tributes, it is considered good form to add a few personal comments as well. 

Her dilemma is that though she knows she should add a personal statement about Rue and Thresh,  she faces what one of my English teachers in high school would call the "tyrrany of the blank page":  "every time I tried to write it at home, I ended up with a blank paper staring me in the face."  (56-57).  However, as the narrative stresses over and over, Katniss cannot perform by creating or recreating context in her mind alone.  She can not fool herself into acting--or in this case, writing--as if the contrived or imagined situation is real.  By contrast, she is able to deliver a speech to District 11, following Peeta's gift of one month of their winnings every year--once she is actually present in the moment:

“Wait, please.” I don’t know how to start, but once I do, the words rush from my lips as if they’ve been forming in the back of my mind for a long time. “I want to give my thanks to the tributes of District Eleven,” I say. I look at the pair of women on Thresh’s side. “I only ever spoke to Thresh one time. Just long enough for him to spare my life. I didn’t know him, but I always respected him. For his power. For his refusal to play the Games on anyone’s terms but his own. The Careers wanted him to team up with them from the beginning, but he wouldn’t do it. I respected him for that."  

. . .  

I turn to Rue’s family. “But I feel as if I did know Rue, and she’ll always be with me. Everything beautiful brings her to mind. I see her in the yellow flowers that grow in the Meadow by my house. I see her in the mockingjays that sing in the trees. But most of all, I see her in my sister, Prim.” My voice is undependable, but I am almost finished. “Thank you for your children.” I raise my chin to address the crowd. “And thank you all for the bread.” (60-61)

Katniss's struggles with writing her feelings, contrasted with her ability to speak in context, stresses one of the essential properties of writing.  It is decontextualized.  Usually, this observation is made of writing itself--that it is, as Walter Ong noted, "separate from the human life-world."  The book is decontextualized; the reader has to recreate the context from the available clues.  However, the writer is often separate from the context as well.  Katniss's difficulty stems from that decontextualization, and recalls Wordsworth's description of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranqility."  Clearly, Katniss is not a poet, since even when she feels "powerful emotion," her recollections, which cannot really be said to take place "in tranquility," do not translate into words.

When the Quarter Quell is announced, and Peeta and Katniss are reaped and then, without being allowed to say goodbye, taken to the Capital, Katniss actually muses on the limitations of literacy, and specifically, its removal from the immediacy of real life as it is happening:

I sit on the bed, knowing I will never write those letters.  They will be like the speech I tried to write to honor Rue and Thresh in District 11. Things seemed clear in my head and even when I talked before the crowd, but the words never came out of the pen right. Besides, they were meant to go with embraces and kisses and a stroke of Prim’s hair, a caress of Gale’s face, a squeeze of Madge’s hand. They cannot be delivered with a wooden box containing my cold, stiff body.  (188-189)

Writing lacks immediacy; it is decontextualized, cold and impersonal.

Although Katniss can conjure words when she is moved, Peeta is represented in the novel as being particularly good with words, particularly as compared to Katniss, and by Katniss in particular.  The difference is that Peeta is able to perform on command, to play to a crowd, and that he can lie--he can "make anyone believe anything" (346).  In short, Peeta has a natural gift for rhetoric.  Nevertheless, on the victory tour, he is also scripted, with a speech prepared by the Capital.  In Distrct 11, he deviates:

Peeta had his personal comments written on a card, but he doesn’t pull it out. Instead he speaks in his simple, winning style about Thresh and Rue making it to the final eight, about how they both kept me alive — thereby keeping him alive — and about how this is a debt we can never repay. And then he hesitates before adding something that wasn’t written on the card. Maybe because he thought Effie might make him remove it.  (59)

Peeta's addition is the offer of one month of their winnings each year, which prepares the way for Katniss's speech, which in turn incites defiance in District 11.  The result for Peeta and Katniss is that, seeing how easily they can cause a crisis, they resolve to stick to the script:

Listen to a speech in our honor. Give a thank-you speech in return, but only the one the Capitol gave us, never any personal additions now.  (71)

Katniss's commentary is telling, and reveals another weakness of writing:  it can be discovered, and censored.

There are a few other interesting literacy moments in Catching Fire:  Snow reading the card with the Quarter Quell challenge, supposedly written 75 years before, but clearly altered; Madge's access to capital newspapers by way of her father the Mayor of District 12;  Peeta making notes on the other victors, then tearing the pages of notes from his notebook of victors who were not reaped.  The idea of being scripted continues into Mockingjay--the artificiality of the Capital and Katniss's inability to conform to others' expectations is a major theme in the book, and the "Propos" in District 13 further develop the theme and help the reader to discover Katniss, and Katniss to discover herself.  The underlying point, however, is that literacy has limitations--not everyone can use it to their advantage, as Katniss certainly is unable to command written language.  Literacy is risky, since it can be discovered.  And if she can't be scripted, Katniss can't easily help the rebels by being their mouthpiece in Mockingjay.  Literacy carries very little power in the Hunger Games Trilogy.

What, then, is its power?  I think the answer is something much more akin to the power of Peeta's painting.

To be continued in Pt. 4

The Pensieve as Literacy Magic

In The Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling introduces a very interesting device, the Pensieve.  Harry, while waiting for Professor Dumbledore to return to his office, is attracted by the glow of the silver strands of memory in the stone bowl, and unwittingly plunges into three of Dumbledore's memories--memories that have significance for the mysterious events involving Barty Crouch.  When Harry is recalled by Dumbledore to the present, he asks Dumbledore what the Pensieve is. Dumbledore's explanation runs as follows:

"This? It is called a Pensieve," said Dumbledore.  "I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind."

[.....]

"At these times," said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, "I use the Pensieve.  One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure.  It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form." (596)

 The Pensieve proves to be an extremely useful device from a narrative perspective--it provides instant flashbacks, and gives a character who is not a participant in a memory access to that memory from the perspective of the person who was there.  Thus, the author is able to fill in a lot of gaps and give a character (Harry) the tools to figure out the puzzle and unravel the mystery--and of all of the novels, Goblet of Fire has a plot that is most like a mystery (well, ONE of its plots--there are a few).

But when I refer to the Pensieve, I refer to it as "Literacy" magic, not "Literary," magic.  So its function as a plot- and flashback-enabling device is not what I have in mind.  Rather, the Pensieve, in the story--in Dumbledore's description--in the wizarding world (we're suspending our disbelief now) functions rather like writing, and registers as symbolic of written accounts of thoughts (and, to a lesser extent, dreams).

Now, writing the above, it occurs to me that Harry has, in fact, gone into Dumbledore's office in order to tell Dumbledore about a dream.  Meanwhile, he becomes absorbed in the thoughts that Dumbledore siphoned out of his head in order to be able to look at them more clearly (perhaps objectively?) and to make connections.  Considering that Freud's method of dream analysis relied heavily on analysis of written accounts of the dream--whether written by the dreamer (often himself) after waking from the dream, or written down by a second party (himself) while the dreamer recounted them verbally--having Harry's quest to tell Dumbledore his dreams interrupted by the Penseive becomes somewhat more interesting.  According to the model that Freud provides in The Interpretation of Dreams (or perhaps a different/shorter work on the subject?), dream analysis in fact looks much more like close reading than like the typical model of patient on the couch and psychiatrist in the chair.  Had Harry written his dream instead of rushing to Dumbledore's office to wait, he might have had a fuller account of the dream as well as a text to analyze, though his written accound would be mediated by the choices he made as a writer--which would arguably be different than his choices if providing a verbal account.  Freud saw significance in the representation of the dream in language; the Pensieve, however, keeps the memory contained in a nonwritten, verbal state.  The extra layers of consciousness that go into writing a dream or memory do not create that overlayer, and the immediacy of the perceotion remains unmediated by the deliberate processes of inscription and the thought processes involved in forming the perceptions into words and sentences.

Nevertheless, for all of its immediacy, the Pensieve is like written language because, lacking a magical device to record memory as it actually happened, and to frame it without the application of additional layers of language and conscious thought, the tool we have to record memory is, in fact, writing.  And writing functions, according to Walter Ong (and other literacy theorists, like Goody, whom he quotes), in much the same way as a Pensieve in Goblet of Fire and future books:

"Texts are think-like, immobilized in visual space, and subject to what Goody calls 'backward scanning.'" (Ong 97)

Here's a nice summary of the concept:

Goody (1977) explains that writing transforms speech by abstracting its components. Words in written texts are more "thing-like" (Ong, 1982, p. 97). Their meaning can be looked up in other written texts and do not require direct ratification through interpersonal situations. Written texts enable backward-scanning of thought to make corrections and resolve inconsistencies. This self-analysis or criticism is inhibited by face-to-face communication in oral cultures. 

Writing enables both the recording and the dissecting of verbal utterance. Literate cultures have permanent records of past thought which can be compared and questioned skeptically. Such skepticism enables the building and testing of alternative explanations of knowledge. In ancient Greece, the shift from oral to literate thought processes resulted in the "logical, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition" of Plato. (Goody and Watt, 1968, pp. 68-69)

So looking back over things and being able to make connections and draw conclusions is a consequence of literacy, according to the foundational 20th century theorists.  It is the permanence and fixity of the written word--the knowledge that it will not change from one reading to the next--that allows us to refer back to what we read earlier at a later date, when some new idea occurs to us, or when some new data presents itself to us, or when we grow in knowledge or understanding.  (And this, incidentally, is why I reread--and reread--and reread.  The book does not change.  But I do.  And the situation of reading does as well.)  

The Pensieve has all of this as well--without the mediation of written language, which can distort the actual memory.  Memories can be modified and distorted, as we realize in The Half-Blood Prince, but in general, they are not mediated by the conscious process of writing.  In Goblet of Fire, the Pensieve shows memories.  They can be replayed and examined.  They do not change because rather than being subject to retelling, they are direct and permanent records of the event as it was received by the mind of the person who experienced it. So like writing--only better.

But I still don't like the name Penseive.  Too punny.

Dragonfly: Jenny Reading Pt. 2 (A Literacy Moment, contd.)

In Dragonfly in Amber, we get, alongside Jenny's love of books, details about the literacy of the Fraser household, and also something about the character of reading in the 18th Century:

The manor boasted a small library, in fact, and if the evening leisure between work and bed was short, still it usually included at least a few minutes' reading. (580)

"The manor boasted" a small library--which was, indeed, a boastable feature.  Here's a little blurb from an article on the topic of book ownership in 18th Century Scotland:

Late eighteenth-century Scotland saw a period of growth in the availability of print material set against the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet despite much scholarly attention having been paid to the Enlightenment and an increasing interest in the books people were reading, little attention has been paid to the books that would have been found in individual Scottish houses and what they reveal about Scottish mindsets in these years. This paper addresses this topic, using a local case study of after-death inventories of personal possessions. These rich records reveal the size of household libraries, the varieties of books they contained, variation by occupation and social class, and the extent to which their owners engaged with and were influenced by debates and ideas of the time. In addition, the evidence allows us to consider the uses to which different types of books were put, examine differences between urban and provincial Scotland, and consider how and where people bought their books.

(Thank you, EBSCO and Scottish Historical Review! And if I'm silently thumbing my nose at Wikipedia, Wikipedia is none the wiser.)  The main thing to note here (besides the very interesting research!) is that the availability of print materials increases in the late  18th century.  The early Outlander novels take place in 1743-45, with the Lallybroch library being compiled some time before, as both of Jamie's and Jenny's parents are dead by the time the events in the first book take place (their father is only recently dead).  So the library would have had to predate this growth in printing, which demonstrates the wealth of Lallybroch as well as the special place reserved for literacy and learning in the Fraser household.

Further, reading is a communal activity, though I do question whether French novels--which were notoriously scandalous to Louisa May Alcott's 19th Century American heroines--would have been good family read-aloud material. Both because of the scarcity of reading materials (who would have two copies of a novel?) and the rarity of literacy (in a later chapter, Claire notes that a woman watches her write "with an almost superstitious awe" (633)), reading aloud would definitely have been typical in the 18th Century.  Numerous scholars--notably, literature scholar turned literacy theorist Walter Ong--have discussed the influence of oral storytelling even in 19th Century novels.  Ong famously mentions how "the author intones dear reader" as a reminder of the storyteller or the reader in a communal setting.  It is a nice touch to see this social reality of reading included in a work of historical fiction, though the little glimpses of literacy do not become important until later novels in the Outlander series.

Given its limited function--what function does literacy serve in the plot? it's fairly incidental--one might wonder why it is included at all, or question this bold assertion of Jenny's literacy.  Would she have been educated?  We are led to believe that her class and her family's inclinations toward learning make this possible.  But as the female head of household, mother of three at this point...  What is reading for her?  What use would she have had for literacy?  Would she have had time to read?  If reading is an adventure, is it an escape?  Does it distract from other duties?

The narrative answers these questions very succinctly:

"It gives ye something to think on as ye go about your work," Jenny explained, when I found her one night swaying with weariness, and urged her to go to bed, rather than stay up to read aloud to Ian, Jamie, and myself.  She yawned, fist to her mouth.  "Even if I'm sae tired I hardly see the words on the page, they'll come back to me next day, churning or spinning or waulkin' wool, and I can turn them over in my mind." (580-581)

In fact, Jenny's reading allows her mind to escape while her body remains very much present.  And this is something that readers of Gabaldon's fictions can very much appreciate, I think.  It is perhaps a contrast to more male-centered versions of escapist reading (I'm thinking of E. M. Forster's "The Celestial Omnibus"--you can read about it in greater detail here) that her transcendent reading does not remove her from the material world of people who depend on her.

Interestingly, at this point in the scene, the issue of literacy drops completely, transitioning into a description of the somewhat unsavory occupation of "wool-waulking," but not without leaving the reader with a compelling discourse on literacy and its use in the life of an individual--the 18th Century stay-at-home mom.  Most stay-at-home mothers whom I know (at least through blogging) are either readers, writers, or seamstresses,* and almost always combinations of two or more, as if this life of the mind is a natural extension of the daily lives that they live with their children, managing their homes.  It seems, in fact, an essential part.  And the internet enables and gives testimony to it.

Thinking about what a busy woman--too busy to read, but who reads nevertheless--gains from literacy, I was reminded of my favorite poem by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "An Atlas of the Difficult World."  This poem provides Rich's own discourse on literacy, as the voice of the poet envisions the people who will read the poem, and recounts the reasons they will read:

I know you are reading this poem  

late, before leaving your office  

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window 

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet 

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem 

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean 

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven 

across the plains’ enormous spaces around you. 

[....] 

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light 

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, 

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know 

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick 

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on 

because even the alphabet is precious. 

And among the seemingly endless, democratic, Whitmanic catalog, these lines stand out:

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove 

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand 

because life is short and you too are thirsty. 

The lines straddle the line between hope and despair, but "life is short and you too are thirsty" resonates as the most profound testimony to the function of literacy--of literature--in the life of an individual.  The written word feeds us.  Gives us nourishment.  Specifically, like a mother.  A mother's mother.

There are, of course, religious resonances in the idea of being fed by the w/Word--but let's leave it at literacy for now.  Reading.  It is what it is--but what does it do?

A: It feeds the soul, which sustains the body.

Literacy--in either context--keeps the body from forgetting that it also possesses a soul.

*I use the outdated, gendered term "seamstress" and reject the more contemporary "sewers," which evokes toilet water in my mind.