ABSTRACT
Carolyn Steedman What can I say? What can I write with Marguerite perched in a corner by my side?
(Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, November 1796)'
Accounts of the origin of writing are part of Europe's oldest cultural history. Writing, like speech, has demanded explanation; but explanations of spoken language do not encode the deep ambivalence of all our originary accounts of writing, taken here to include myths, allegories, and conjectural histories. Myths of writing, whilst expressing doubts about their topic, also always dealt with writing as a psychological process - an activity that brings about cognitive and affective change in the individual acquiring it - and as a social practice, that has the power to alter relationships within given social structures. The myth of writing originating in the Ancient World does precisely these two things. But to rehearse the Greek account of the origin of writing, and to do this first of all, is not really to begin at the beginning, but rather at some place near the end, and to tell another kind of story altogether, a specifically nineteenth-century European myth of origin.
