Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet. If something is read by someone in Star Wars, it’s almost certainly off of a screen (and even then, maybe being translated by a droid), and it’s definitely not for entertainment purposes. As early as the 1990s-era expanded Star Wars books and comic books, we’re introduced to ancient Jedi “texts” called holocrons, which are basically talking holographic video recordings. Just how long has the Star Wars universe been reliant on fancy technology to transfer information as opposed to the written word? Is it possible that a good number of people in Star Wars are completely illiterate?
To be fair, finding a science fiction or fantasy universe richly populated with its own indigenous art—and more specifically, its own literature—is rare. As Lev Grossman has pointed out, “No one reads books in Narnia.” Harry Potter himself doesn’t really have a favorite novelist, and most of the stuff Tolkien’s Gandalf reads comes in the form of scrolls and prophecies…not exactly pleasure reading. Fantasy heroes don’t seem to read for pleasure very often, but usually you get the impression that they can read.
Very popular science fiction does a little bit better here, with characters on both Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica being pretty into novels and poetry. Notably, both of these universes have some kind of news media (as does Harry Potter.) And it’s in this lack of news media where the possibility of widespread illiteracy in the Star Wars galaxy starts to become more and more likely….
If you simply stick to the Star Wars films, there is no news media of any kind. Despite the fact that we see cameras circling around Queen/Senator Amidala in the Senate, they don’t seem to be actually feeding this information anywhere. Are they security cameras, like the ones that recorded Anakin killing little tiny Jedi kiddies? This theory achieves a little more weight when you consider that the conversation in The Phantom Menace Senate scene is all about how Queen Amidala can’t verify the existence of a coming invasion. She’s got no pictures, and stranger still, no reputable news source has even written about the blockade of Naboo. Even if we put forth that cameras in Star Wars are only for security and not for news, that still leaves the question of why there are no journalists. A possible answer: it’s because most people don’t read, which means that over time most people in this universe don’t ever learn to read.
“But wait!” you might be saying, “I remember seeing little pieces of text on the screen that Artoo sends to Luke to read. Also there is writing on the tractor beam controls, and people in the ships are looking at buttons with letters on them!” Well, I’d like to point out that even in the case of Luke Skywalker, these letters and pieces of writing are directly related to tasks. Pilots for the Empire are probably functionally literate, because they go through some kind of training academy. However, I think the visual evidence suggests a culture much more reliant upon technology and droids than is immediately apparent.
Uncle Owen needs a droid who can speak “bocce,” and then says something about the binary language of load lifters. Okay, so Uncle Owen needs a translator and someone to do math for him. This doesn’t sound like a guy who has gotten a suitable education. I suppose it’s possible that Luke picked up some reading here and there, but we don’t see any books or any evidence to suggest he’s a fluent reader. It seems like all the characters in Star Wars learn how to do is punch certain buttons to make their machines do what they need to do, and everything else is left up to droids.
In our own culture, pictograms have rapidly replaced words on traffic signs, restrooms, etc. The buttons being pressed by the Death Star control room workers might not even be letters. They might be pictograms representing different functions; functions like “death ray blast” and “trash compact.” Plus, how could those guys read anything in those helmets, anyway?
Attack of the Clones sees Obi-Wan Kenobi go to the Jedi Library, but again, this research facility seems less about books and more about pretty colors, interactive holographic maps, etc. The amount of actual reading even someone like Obi-Wan does is still limited. Now, I imagine Jedi can probably read and are taught to read, as are rich people like Princess Leia and Padme Amidala and Jimmy Smits. But everything in Star Wars is about video chat via holograms, or verbal communication through com-links. Nobody texts in Star Wars!
It seems like this society has slipped into a kind of highly functional illiteracy. Surely, for these cultures to progress and become spacefaring entities, they needed written language at some point. But now, the necessity to actually learn reading and writing is fading away. Those who know how to build and repair droids and computers probably have better jobs than those who can’t. This is why there seems to be so much poverty in Star Wars: widespread ignorance.
The idea of education becoming obsolete due to cultural changes isn’t without a science fiction precedent. In the Star Trek pilot “The Cage,” Vina speaks of a culture that “forgets how to repair the machines left behind by their ancestors.” I’m postulating that the same thing happened with literacy in the Star Wars galaxy. People stopped using the written word, because they didn’t need to, and it slipped away from being a commonly held skill.
And to bring up evidence from the expanded universe material a little more: in those stories even ancient Jedi records exist in the form of holograms. I’d say the switch to visual/audio communication from written communication has been underway for a long time in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s also possible people in Star Wars are simply not as imaginative as we are. Maybe the humans and aliens populating A Galaxy, Far, Far Away are totally boring people who simply used the written word for the purposes of getting their basic culture off the ground – for commerce only, rather than for reflection or pleasure.
The final nail in the coffin which proves widespread illiteracy is how fast stories of the Jedi mutate from a fact of everyday life into legend, seemingly overnight. This is because the average citizen of the galaxy in Star Wars receives his/her/its information orally, from stories told by spacers in bars, farmboys on arid planets, orphans in crime-ridden cities, etc. Without written documents, these stories easily become perverted and altered quickly. This is the same way Palpatine was able to take over in Revenge of the Sith. He simply said “the Jedi tried to kill me” and everyone was like, “okay.”
Padme points out that liberty dies “with thunderous applause,” but really their liberty is dying because most of them can’t read and are powerless and disenfranchised. In fact most of the surviving characters at the end of the prequels are the bad guys, and they can probably read. The Jedi seem to be the most educated people in the prequels, but that changes when they all get killed. This would be like a real life Empire going and burning down all the colleges and schools and killing all the teachers. The academy, the keepers of literacy would be gone. And once that happens, it’s easy for a tyrannical empire to take over, to control the information. Maybe Padme should have said “this is how literacy dies…”
But, what’s sad about Star Wars is that its inhabitants (save for our heroes) seem so complacent and lacking in imagination that this sort of thing was bound to happen in one way or another. In reality, if a whole culture relied exclusively on a group like the Jedi to not only guard justice and truth, but also be the only educated, literate people around, that culture would be seriously screwed up. Meanwhile, these people simply rely on their droids to do everything else.
Obi-Wan may have put a lightsaber in Luke’s hand, but really he and Qui-Gon should have been going around teaching people on poor planets to read years and years prior. After all, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good book in your hands.
Ryan Britt is a staff writer for Tor.com.
I agree with most of what you said, but I’d have to argue at least a couple of points:
“Okay, so Uncle Owen needs a translator and someone to do math for him. This doesn’t sound like a guy who has gotten a suitable education.”
I have a machine to do math for me. Several, in fact, one of which is doing math for me right now. This isn’t because I’m uneducated, but because I need something that can do more calculations faster than I can reasonably do them by hand. I could imagine a similar thing is going on with Uncle Owen’s farm equiptment, and that he wants a “centeral computer” that can coordinate and repair things faster than he could.
Likewise, with speaking Bocce, the ability to speak a foreign language is hardly universal, especially when speaking it isn’t critical for every day life. Based on Luke and Beru’s conversation, I got the impression that having something around to translate Bocce was convenient but hardly necessary. It would be similar to someone in the American Southwest not speaking Spanish: hardly uncommon, even amongst the educated.
“If you simply stick to the Star Wars films, there is no news media of any kind.”
Isn’t there? Correct me if I’m misremembering, but I seem to remember that there were reporters around at the beginning of the Revenge when Obi-wan and Anakin brought Palpatine back.
Wheel of Time characters read for fun – at least Perin and Rand do. They have read Jain Farstrider, Matt on the other hand might never have picked up a book in his life. JR makes mention of libraries in several settings for example, The Queens Blessing has a library.
There was a short story “Literacy” by Donald Moffitt in Analog back in the 90s that made a huge impression on me. It walked through the transition from literacy to reliance on robots to read for you. I was really upset by it as a teenager.
In-universe, I wonder if the lack of reading has to do with the sheer volume of cultures and languages coexisting? That anyone working in contact with outsiders just can’t expect anyone else to be able to read their language, so writing any single language isn’t worthwhile? The lack of news media is a more troubling omission, though. You’ve made the Star Wars universe a more sinister place.
You know, while I appreciate the trollish-ness of the argument and respect any attempt at flaming Star Wars fans, I kind of take issue with your argument. At what point is reading a critical plot device when dealing with the core plots of the trilogies? Is that before or after they are running for their lives or fighting a civil war?
I mean we never see anyone read in Jurassic Park, should we then assume Doctors Grant and Malcolm are illiterate? We also never see the characters of Star Wars use the bathroom, can we then draw the conclusion that they have no digestive system?
@1 And isn’t the beginning of Revenge done in the style of a WWII newsreal? Or am I confusing that with the cartoon?
An interesting premise. Lucas certainly (and I’m sure without meaning to or even realizing what he had done) created a universe where the illiterate can get along almost as well as the literate. It’s certainly a fascinating way to explain why the Jedi went from a fact of daily life to mockable legend in less than 20 years.
FWIW, Middle-Earth inhabitants do read. Their literature is the sagas of earlier ages. Frodo and Bilbo not only could read and write but they composed poetry. Although I would certainly expect the peasants to be largely illiterate, as in our own middle ages.
@2, yeah. One of the oft-overlooked nuances of WOT is that it features a post-medieval created world. Printing presses make a big difference.
A real world analogue to the killing of the Jedi might be the Burmese junta running off the Indian-Burmese population, and thus the bulk of the country’s middle and professional classes, to disastrous effect.
First off – “Now, I imagine Jedi can probably read and are taught to read, as are rich people like Princess Leia and Padme Amidala and Jimmy Smits…” made my day.
Second off, for all of its flaws, the post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG Rifts has a great explanation for the lack of literacy in the “civilized” areas – it’s a deliberate attempt to control the masses. By putting everything in verbal or visual mediums, the cattle…er, people can’t read old stories about how things were ‘before’ and it makes it so much easier to filter what’s going out. If the government tells you that they know what’s best, and they’re the ones that feed you and protect you, obviously they must know what’s best for you, right? Might be more in-line with the Empire’s mindset, if not the Republic’s, but still.
Hell, look at our current situation. Cursive writing has fallen out of the standard curriculum at a lot of public schools, limited keystrokes in a text have given us an entire tech-dialect (not even considering how many grown adults I know that send texts that are a combination of “nmdim” & “jsyk” and “rotflmao” and an ungodly amount of typos because they don’t bother to go back and fix what they tried to type in the first place) , and my phone already has an app that lets me send icons instead of words.
On a less depressing note, it may be more along the lines of the street signs. How many different languages are spoken on all the different planets in the galaxy? It has to be easier to use pictograms than try to teach Basic to a guy who’s only going to go back to his native tongue as soon as he leaves Mos Eisely.
Bilbo not only writes poetry, he writes a novel! Well, officially There and Back Again is a memoir, but he does fictionalize bits of it, and I kind of imagined it as a book to read for enjoyment as an adventure story rather than a history.
I think this humanizes Star Wars quite a bit. It makes the world seem less plastic and more real, which is good for a fantastic space opera. Definitely it colors “good” vs “bad” a bit. If the Jedi were complicit in keeping the masses ignorant, than were they really much better than the Sith? In fact, we just accept that the Sith are bad because we’re told they are (by the Jedi). Do ordinary SW citizens lives get worse when Palpatine takes over?
In “Attack of the Clones” we also see some arcane blueprint/ schematic writing with the images of the yet-to-be Death Star. There is some basic level of literacy and techincal competence by some characters as we see Han and Chewy pilot and navigate the Milennium Falcon without the aid of ‘droids.
They also do their own repairs for the most part, though R2 D2 is shown to do a better, quicker job. Maybe they are “old fashioned” but at least they’ve read the manual…. Lando is seen reading from a mainfest in “Empire” if memory serves as well. (I didn’t do a rewatch, so if that’s faulty, mea cupla)
The Old Republic Galaxy had a lot of social problems: social apathy, lack of political involvement, tolerance for slavery, unethical use of cloning (even before Palapatine’s power grab. IE: One of “Attack of the Clones” most disturbing scenes is the killing of Padme’s stand-in, a sentient being whose murder is quickly forgotten by the authorities) and a features a relationship between Anakin and Padme’ whose beginnings would have had her in a courtroom in our culture.
But to your point, the Old Republic was also a place where Jar Jar Binks won elected office. Somone was surelyt asleep at the switch there.