These imperatives inform the double synaesthetic transformation of hearing at issue in Zampanò's analysis. To describe the “descriptive ability of the audible," Zampanò offers the following formula:
$$
\mathrm { S o u n d + T i m e = A c o u s t i c \ L i g h t }\tag{47}
$$
As a medium for measuring space, sound provides an acoustic analogy for light: like light, it is omnispatial and pervasive. For this reason, concludes Zampanò, "speaking can result in a form ofseeing" (47).
Following a contrast with animals that, we are told, use sound to create acoustic images and “see" the shape of sound, Zampanò modifies this formula. More accurate to the mode of imaging of the human eye, which is neither active nor passive and which merely requires an object to be illuminated, is the following formula:
$$
\mathrm { S o u n d + T i m e = A c o u s t i c \ T o u c h }\tag{47}
$$
Sound measures distance and thus approximates the function of vision by translating distance into touch, by opening a bodily modality in which seeing is feeling. That is why, “to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or closed, is to have already seen’ a sizable space” (50).
To grasp how this synaesthetic transformation and reembodiment of vision reconfigures the task of reading, we must turn to the mythological history. Myth, Zampanò notes, testifies to the insurgency of Echo who, despite suffering “total negation” of body and “near negation of voice," still manages “to subvert the gods' ruling." In so doing, Echo offers herself as a model for the reader, who is, after all, faced with the task of inhabiting an impossible spatial object, an object whose impossibility is a function of the disembodied logic of digital replication. Her example introduces the principle for the conversion that reading must effect; as Zampanò stresses, "her repetitions are far from digital, much closer to analog. Echo colors the words with faint traces of sorrow (the Narcissus myth) or accusation (the Pan myth) never present in the original" (41, emphasis added). Like Echo, the reader must breathe life into the orthographic, transforming it from an exact inscription of the past into the catalyst for the new, the unpredictable, the future.
Indeed, Echo furnishes an example of how—to adopt the language of information theory—information is turned into meaning: "Her voice has life. It possesses a quality not present in the original, revealing how a nymph can return a different and more meaningful story, in spite of telling the same story” (42). Just like Pierre Menard's echo of Don Quixote in the famous Borges story to which Zampanò compares it, the ‘exquisite variation" introduced by Echo marks the difference between information in a purely technical sense and information as intrinsically imbued with embodied meaning.
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