Image, Sound, Word. A Prehistory of Alphabetical Reading

Abstract

First purpose of the article is to exemplify how sounds and images interact to constitute the primal condition for the alphabetical reading. This act involves both the aural and visual sphere, accomplished over signs of twofold nature. Looking at them with the eyes, the reader is required to lend them his voice because they are still, mute and fixed on an external surface. Hence, the derived purpose of illustrating that alphabetical writing needs a detached support, whose action is never neutral: in the case of the page of the printed book, it owns a factitive function, prompting the user do something, in other words it provides and promotes a specific way of reading, different from the original one. In the last part of the paper a comparison has been proposed with those cultures, predominantly oral, where the written form is not usually alphabetical but composed with acoustic images and the writing surface is not the blank sheet but the memory of the locutor. In this context, likewise in the archaic Greece, where the alphabet was invented, writing is used to perform a rite. It is interesting that today the ritual character of reading reappears, especially in the cases of shared reading aloud.