There and here

“That’s how it is—we’re literate. And we’re word processors now too, since information theory and the computer are hooked up together. That’s dandy. But why do we lock ourselves into one mode? Why either/or? We aren’t binary. Why have we replaced oral text with written? Isn’t there room for both?”1 This is Le Guin, in the essay, Text, Silence, Performance. The question is one that animates much of her novel, Always Coming Home, in which an unnamed editor collects stories and texts about the Kesh, a people who may live many years from now in what we today call California. The Kesh are literate—all Kesh children learn to read and write—but they maintain an oral culture alongside that literacy: a cyclical, rather than linear view of time; many spoken performances, plays, chants, and songs, some of which are forbidden from being written down; and the privileging of spoken dialogue as the means of building understanding among people, especially when in conflict. The editor of the book…