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Review: Signs of Writing

Some books are written within a single discipline, talk to that discipline, but are of little interest elsewhere. Others, by contrast, have a relevance that goes well beyond the narrow confines of their immediate audience. Signs of writing belongs to the latter category. The discipline that informs Roy Harris's book is semiotics the study of signsbut in a work that is heralded as the first General Theory of Writing, Harris draws on a wide range of other disciplines for his analysis, including graphic design, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and art. This breadth immediately gives the book a multidisciplinary interest, not least because Harris's analysis rethinks much of what several of these areas have taken for granted about the way that writing works. Most people nowadays, if asked to explain what writing is, would say that it is a system that allows (verbal) communication to be put in a durable form; one that can transfer the thoughts of person A to person B across distances of time and space. Whilst this at first glance seems self evident, the problem with such a definition is that once writing is framed like this, it becomes very much a secondary adjunct to the theory of the spoken language in which these thoughts are formulated. This is the reason that Harris's work is the first general theory of writing. Semioticians (and other theorists who have drawn on the work of such people as de Saussure) have assumed that the distinct qualities of writing such as (linear) direction are simply a direct translation of (linear) speech. This, Harris demonstrates, is palpably untrue. Consider the following: CAESAR KILLED BRUTUS Are we to read this as 'Caesar killed Brutus' or 'Brutus killed Caesar'? Such a possible confusion could not happen in speech. It is a problem that is unique to the written text. And what about the classic 'magic' square: