Page 160 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 149

life as being relevantly addressed by the description. What is it in her life that
will make sense of ‘indulging yourself in all things Venusian’, and what is ‘the
drift’ that she needs to get? How, and with whom, can she give ‘the girl a good
sendoff’? And similarly with Pisces, what was the ‘heat’ which is now ‘being
turned off’, and in what ways does this Piscean know that he cannot ‘sit back and
take it easy’? How can he ‘come back to earth’ to ‘finish what he started’?
What may seem the quirky problems raised by reading a horoscope – though
readers of such texts see nothing quirky in that – turns out to be the entirely normal
act of reading that all readers need to engage in constantly. If the meanings of the
horoscope text seem particularly vacuous – what heat was turned off? What was
started that needs to be finished off? – vacuous, in that each question can have as
many different answers as there are readers, then that is only because we allow
ourselves to be persuaded that reading is not usually like that. Of course the
degree of vacuity varies, and even with the horoscope there are days when the
reader is struck by the aptness of the brief prediction and others when there is no
‘reading’ available to her or to him. But the processes and the principles are the
same.

The world as told: reading as interpretation
I want to turn now to an examination of contemporary forms of what there is to
read. If what reading in the narrower sense is depends on what – in any society –
the usual forms of ‘graphic’ communication are, it becomes essential to engage
in that kind of analysis. In addition, and as my framing metaphor of from telling
the world to showing the world suggests, what there is to read has been
undergoing fundamental changes. We are moving into a world in which image will
be much more dominant as a public mode of communication.
The strongly felt relation between sound and letter in Western alphabetic
societies is at times so strong that letter and sound are confused and are seen as
the same, and not only in popular common sense. Statements such as ‘English has
five vowels: a, e, i, o and u’ can be found in manuals produced for teacher
education even now. English has five letters for representing, depending on how
we analyse them, about twelve vowel sounds (not counting diphthongs and triph-
thongs). There is a reality to the letter–sound relation, but it is more tenuous than
is usually assumed. Nevertheless, it does make writing relate closely to speech,
particularly for people who are not deeply embedded in a literate culture. Sub-
vocalisation is one sign of this: people sound out the writing that they are
reading, more or less fully. (We know that in western Europe reading used to be
‘reading aloud’ until some five hundred years ago.)
For readers who sub-vocalise, reading is a process – I call it transduction –
which moves writing back from its visual/graphic form into a spoken form, from
letters to sounds. Speech has many linguistic features which writing does not
have – intonation, duration and rhythm for instance – and even though these are
not marked in written texts (with truly rare exceptions) they are restored to