Chapter 11 - Prose Sense and Its Soundings

Summary

Oriented by theoretical work form C. S. Peirce and Walter Ong through conceptual poet John Cayley, from John Stuart Mill on poetry as ‘overheard’ to Steven Connor on the ‘white voice’ of silent enunciation – as well as, in contrast, by book sculpture in the conceptual mode of the bibliobjet, closed to all reading – this essay lends intensive granular audition to passages from Dickens through Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. Its effort is to register, and further to generalise, the phonemic dimension of what, loosely but famously called ‘secret prose’ in Dickens by Graham Greene, I will be identifying (after Ong’s ‘secondary orality’) as the ‘secondary vocality’ of the reading event in cases of uniquely impacted audiovisual overlap identified as ‘graphonic’ wording.