Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
For me, trying to add mental images when reading a book would be as odd as trying to create my own verbal descriptions while watching an action sequence in a movie or listening to instrumental music. Different media, different mental processes.
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Reading is said to involve a combination of the two approaches. According to linguists like Saussure, the act of reading a single word involves the process of registering a signifier, a referent and the signification of the two. One of Roland Barthes' famous examples of this is the word
cat. The
signifier is the word itself; the
referent is the thing to which the word refers (in this case, the idea of the cat) and
signification is what happens when the two things become a single object in the mind.
Clearly, signification can have a strong visual component for many readers, but is a blind reader or writer any less capable of enjoying the full experience of the written word? By that logic, John Milton is a worse writer than James Patterson because the latter man is sighted.
Reading also involves using one's ear, and it can be used in at least three ways:
1. To conjure the sounds that take place within the story,
2. to the savor sonorous idiosyncrasies of style and
3. to hear the entirety of the sonata created by the language itself.
These three kinds of hearing fuse when it comes to dialogue, which is why plays can often seem close to music. But narrative descriptions (depending on the writer) can easily emphasize any aspect or all.
I like to read in a way that affords all of the lush possibilities of sound, but also to hear the story as the author might have done. Then again, I learned to write poetry and play Bach at about the same time, so the written word has always looked like notated music to me.