1989 - Seeing Voices (3 page)

It is another matter entirely, and one that is essentially unimaginable by the normal (and even by the postlingually deafened, like David Wright), if hearing is absent at birth, or lost in infancy before the language is acquired. Those so afflicted—the prelingually deaf—are in a category qualitatively different from all others. For these people, who have never heard, who have no possible auditory memories, images, or associations, there can never be even the illusion of sound.

They live in a world of utter, unbroken soundlessness and silence.
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14. This is the stereotypical view, and it is not altogether true. The congenitally deaf do not experience or complain of ‘silence’ (any more than the blind experience or complain of ‘darkness’). These are our projections, or metaphors, for their state. Moreover, those with the profoundest deafness may hear noise of various sorts and may be highly sensitive to vibrations of all kinds. This sensitivity to vibration can become a sort of accessory sense: thus Lucy K., although profoundly deaf, can immediately judge a chord as a ‘fifth’ by placing a hand on the piano and can interpret voices on highly amplified telephones; in both cases what she seems to perceive are vibrations, not sounds. The development of vibration-perception as an accessory sense has some analogies to the development of ‘facial vision’ (which uses the face to receive a sort of sonar information) in the blind.

Hearing people tend to perceive vibrations
or
sound: thus a very low C (below the bottom of the piano scale) might be heard as a low C
or
a toneless fluttering of sixteen vibrations per second. An octave below this, we would hear only fluttering; an octave above this (thirty-two vibrations a second), we would hear a low note with no fluttering. The perception of ‘tone’ within the hearing range is a sort of synthetic judgment or construct of the normal auditory system (see Helmholtz’s
The Sensations of Tone
, first published in 1862). If this cannot be achieved, as in the profoundly deaf, there may be an apparent extension of vibratory-sense upward, into realms which, for hearing people, are perceived as tones—even into the middle range of music and speech.

These, the congenitally deaf, number perhaps a quarter of a million in this country. They make up a thousandth of the world’s children.

It is with these and these only that we will be concerned here, for their situation and predicament are unique. Why should this be so? People tend, if they think of deafness at all, to think of it as less grave than blindness, to see it as a disadvantage, or a nuisance, or a handicap, but scarcely as devastating in a radical sense.

Whether deafness is ‘preferable’ to blindness, if acquired in later life, is arguable; but to be born deaf is infinitely more serious than to be born blind—at least potentially so. For the prelingually deaf, unable to hear their parents, risk being severely retarded, if not permanently defective, in their grasp of language unless early and effective measures are taken. And to be defective in language, for a human being, is one of the most desperate of calamities, for it is only through language that we enter fully into our human estate and culture, communicate freely with our fellows, acquire and share information. If we cannot do this, we will be bizarrely disabled and cut off whatever our desires, or endeavors, or native capacities. And indeed, we may be so little able to realize our intellectual capacities as to appear mentally defective.
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15. Isabelle Rapin thinks of deafness as a treatable, or, better, preventable form of mental retardation (see Rapin, 1979).

There are fascinating differences in style, in approach to the world, between the deaf and the blind (and the normal). Blind children, in particular, tend to become ‘hyperverbal,’ to employ elaborate verbal descriptions instead of visual images, trying to deny, or replace, visuality by verbality. This tended, the analyst Dorothy Burlingham thought, to produce a sort of pseudo-visual ‘false self,’ a pretense that the child was seeing when it was not (Burlingham, 1972). She felt it crucial to see blind children as having an entirely different profile and ‘style’—one that required a different sort of education and language—to see them not as deficient, but as different and distinctive in their own right. This was a revolutionary attitude in the 1930’s, when her first studies were published. One wishes there were comparable psychoanalytic studies of children born deaf—but this would need a psychoanalyst who, if herself not deaf, was at least a fluent, and preferably native, user of Sign.

It was for this reason that the congenitally deaf, or ‘deaf and dumb,’ were considered ‘dumb’ (stupid) for thousands of years and were regarded by an unenlightened law as ‘incompetent’—to inherit property, to marry, to receive education, to have adequately challenging work—and were denied fundamental human rights. This situation did not begin to be remedied until the middle of the eighteenth century, when (perhaps as part of a more general enlightenment, perhaps as a specific act of empathy and genius) the perception and situation of the deaf were radically altered.

The
philosophes
of the time were clearly fascinated by the extraordinary issues and problems posed by a seemingly languageless human being. Indeed, the Wild Boy of Aveyron,
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when brought to Paris in 1800, was admitted to the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, which was at the time supervised by the Abbe Roch-Ambroise Sicard, a founding member of the Society of Observers of Man, and a notable authority on the education of the deaf.

16. Victor, the Wild Boy, was first seen in the woods of Aveyron in 1799, going on all fours, eating acorns, leading an animal’s life. When he was brought to Paris in 1800, he aroused enormous philosophical and pedagogical interest: How did he think? Could he be educated? The physician Jean-Marc Itard, also notable for his understanding (and his misunderstandings) of the deaf, took the boy into his house and tried to teach him language and educate him. Itard’s first memoir was published in 1807 and was followed by many others (see Itard, 1932). Harlan Lane has also devoted a book to him, which meditates, among other things, on the contrast between such ‘wild’ boys and those born deaf (Lane, 1976).

Eighteenth-century romantic thought, of which Rousseau was so notable an example, was disposed to see all inequality, all misery, all guilt, all constraint as due to civilization, and to feel that innocence and freedom could only be found in Nature: ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.’ The horrifying reality of Victor was something of a corrective to this, a revelation that, as Clifford Geertz puts it:

There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not be…the nature’s noblemen of Enlightenment primitivism…They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognizable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases…As our central nervous system—and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neocortex—grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols…We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture (Geertz, 1973, p. 49
).

As Jonathan Miller writes:
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17. Miller, 1976.

As far as the members of this society were concerned the ‘savage’ child represented an ideal case with which to investigate the foundations of human nature…By studying a creature of this sort, just as they had previously studied savages and primates, Red Indians and orangutans, the intellectuals of the late eighteenth century hoped to decide what characteristic of Man. Perhaps it would now be possible to weigh the native endowment of the human species and to settle once and for all the part that was played by society in the development of language, intelligence, and morality.

Here, of course, the two enterprises diverged, one ending in triumph, the other in complete failure. The Wild Boy never acquired language, for whatever reason or reasons. One insufficiently considered possibility is that he was, strangely, never exposed to sign language, but continually (and vainly) forced to try to speak. But when the ‘deaf and dumb’ were properly approached, i.e., through sign language, they proved eminently educable, and they rapidly showed an astonished world how fully they could enter into its culture and life. This wonderful circumstance—how a despised or neglected minority, practically denied human status up to this point, emerged suddenly and startlingly upon the world stage (and the later tragic undermining of all this in the following century)—constitutes the opening chapter of the history of the deaf.

But let us, before launching on this strange history, go back to the wholly personal and ‘innocent’ observations of David Wright (‘innocent’ because, as he himself stresses, he made a point of avoiding any reading on the subject until he had written his own book). At the age of eight, when it became clear that his deafness was incurable, and that without special measures his speech would regress, he was sent to a special school in England, one of the ruthlessly dedicated, but misconceived, rigorously ‘oral’ schools, which are concerned above all to make the deaf speak like other children, and which have done so much harm to the prelingually deaf since their inception. The young David Wright was flabbergasted at his first encounter with the prelingually deaf:
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18. Wright, 1969, pp. 32-33.

Sometimes I took lessons with Vanessa. She was the first deaf child I had met…But even to an eight-year-old like myself her general knowledge seemed strangely limited. I remember a geography lesson we were doing together, when Miss Neville asked, ‘Who is the king of England?’ Vanessa didn’t know; troubled, she tried to read sideways the geography book, which lay open at the chapter about Great Britain that we had prepared. ‘King-king,’ began Vanessa. ‘Go on,’ commanded Miss Neville. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Be quiet.’ ‘United Kingdom,’ said Vanessa. I laughed. ‘You are very silly,’ said Miss Neville. ‘How can a king be called ‘United Kingdom’?’ ‘King United Kingdom,’ tried poor Vanessa, scarlet. ‘Tell her if you know, [David].’ ‘King George the Fifth,’ I said proudly. ‘It’s not fair! It wasn’t in the book!’ Vanessa was quite right of course; the chapter on the geography of Great Britain did not concern itself with its political set-up. She was far from stupid; but having been born deaf her slowly and painfully acquired vocabulary was still too small to allow her to read for amusement or pleasure. As a consequence there were almost no means by which she could pick up the fund of miscellaneous and temporarily useless information other children unconsciously acquire from conversation or random reading. Almost everything she knew she had been taught or made to learn. And this is a fundamental difference between hearing and deaf-born children—or was, in that pre-electronic era.

Vanessa’s situation, one sees, was a serious one, despite her native ability; and it was helped only with much difficulty, if not actually perpetuated, by the sort of teaching and communication forced upon her. For in this progressive school, as it was regarded, there was an almost insanely fierce, righteous prohibition of sign language—not only of the standard British Sign Language but of the ‘sign-argot’—the rough sign language developed on their own by the deaf children in the school. And yet—this is also well described by Wright—signing flourished at the school, was irrepressible despite punishment and prohibition. This was young David Wright’s first vision of the boys:
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19. Wright, 1969, pp. 50-52.

Confusion stuns the eye, arms whirl like windmills in a hurricane…the emphatic silent vocabulary of the body—look, expression, bearing, glance of eye; hands perform their pantomime. Absolutely engrossing pandemonium…I begin to sort out what’s going on. The seemingly corybantic brandishing of hands and arms reduces itself to a convention, a code which as yet conveys nothing. It is in fact a kind of vernacular. The school has evolved its own peculiar language or argot, though not a verbal one…All communications were supposed to be oral. Our own sign-argot was of course prohibited…But these rules could not be enforced without the presence of the staff. What I have been describing is not how we talked, but how we talked among ourselves when no hearing person was present. At such times our behaviour and conversation were quite different. We relaxed inhibitions, wore no masks.

Such was the Northampton School in the English Midlands, when David Wright went there as a pupil in 1927. For him, as a postlingually deaf child, with a firm grasp of language, the school was, manifestly, excellent. For Vanessa, for other prelingually deaf children, such a school, with its ruthlessly oral approach, was not short of a disaster. But a century earlier, say, in the American Asylum for the Deaf, opened a decade before in Hartford, Connecticut, where there was free use of sign language between all pupils and teachers, Vanessa would not have found herself pitifully handicapped; she might have become a literate, perhaps even literary, young woman of the sort who emerged and wrote books during the 1830’s.

The situation of the prelingually deaf, prior to 1750, was indeed a calamity: unable to acquire speech, hence ‘dumb’ or ‘mute’; unable to enjoy free communication with even their parents and families; confined to a few rudimentary signs and gestures; cut off, except in large cities, even from the community of their own kind; deprived of literacy and education, all knowledge of the world; forced to do the most menial work; living alone, often close to destitution; treated by the law and society as little better than imbeciles—the lot of the deaf was manifestly dreadful.
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