Eyeing and Wording in Cymbeline

Abstract

Seeing something and saying something about that seeing: what happens in between? Several different stories are possible. Simplest of all is the most recent story, the one that psychophysics tells. Light rays, moving at certain frequencies of billionths of a meter, are focused by the lens of the pupil on the rods, cones, and ganglia of the retina, where they are converted into electrical impulses that travel to the brain, setting off in turn other electrical impulses as the brain’s nerve network crosses the visual data with speech functions to send yet more electrical impulses along the nerves to the muscles of the diaphragm, larynx, tongue, lips, and nose, which convert the electrical signals into speech.¹ Simple, really. One protagonist, three episodes, no conflicts. Gestalt psychology complicates the story by attending to the pre-verbal character of visual sensations and by questioning the adequacy of speech to specify these sensations.² Structuralist linguistics complicates the story still further. Every reader of this chapter knows already that the relationship between visual images and the words that name them is arbitrary, and hence conventional. Ferdinand de Saussure, according to students’ reports of his Course in General Linguistics (1916 and later editions), liked to use two pictograms, one showing what most speak-ers of English would instantly call “tree,” the other showing “horse.”