Vintage Sacks

by Oliver Sacks

  Not much has been written about deafness by the deaf. Even so, considering that I did not become deaf till after I had learned the language, I am no better placed than a hearing person to imagine what it is like to be born into silence and reach the age of reason without acquiring a vehicle for thought and communication. Merely to try gives weight to the tremendous opening of St. John’s Gospel: In the beginning was the Word. How does one formulate concepts in such a condition?

  It is this—the relation of language to thought—that forms the deepest, the ultimate issue when we consider what faces or may face those who are born, or very early become, deaf.

  The term “deaf” is vague, or rather, is so general that it impedes consideration of the vastly differing degrees of deafness, degrees that are of qualitative, and even of “existential,” significance. There are the “hard of hearing,” fifteen million or so in the U.S. population, who can manage to hear some speech using hearing aids and a certain amount of care and patience on the part of those who speak to them. Many of us have parents or grandparents in this category—a century ago they would have used ear trumpets; now they use hearing aids.

  There are also the “severely deaf,” many as a result of ear disease or injury in early life; but with them, as with the hard of hearing, the hearing of speech is still possible, especially with the new, highly sophisticated, computerized, and “personalized” hearing aids now becoming available. Then there are the “profoundly deaf”—sometimes called “stone deaf”—who have no hope at all of hearing any speech, whatever imaginable technological advances are made. Profoundly deaf people cannot converse in the usual way—they must either lip-read (as David Wright did), or use sign language, or both.

  It is not merely the degree of deafness that matters but—crucially—the age, or stage, at which it occurs. David Wright, in the passage already quoted, observes that he lost his hearing only after he had acquired language, and (this being the case) he cannot even imagine what it must be like for those who lack or have lost hearing before the acquisition of language. He brings this out in other passages.

  My becoming deaf when I did—if deafness had to be my destiny—was remarkably lucky. By the age of seven a child will have grasped the essentials of language, as I had. Having learned naturally how to speak was another advantage—pronunciation, syntax, inflexion, idiom, all had come by ear. I had the basis of a vocabulary which could easily be extended by reading. All of these would have been denied me had I been born deaf or lost my hearing earlier than I did. [Italics added.]

  Wright speaks of the “phantasmal voices” that he hears when anyone speaks to him provided he can see the movement of their lips and faces, and of how he would “hear” the soughing of the wind whenever he saw trees or branches being stirred by the wind.15 He gives a fascinating description of this first happening—of its immediate occurrence with the onset of deafness:

  [My deafness] was made more difficult to perceive because from the very first my eyes had unconsciously begun to translate motion into sound. My mother spent most of the day beside me and I understood everything she said. Why not? Without knowing it I had been reading her mouth all my life. When she spoke I seemed to hear her voice. It was an illusion which persisted even after I knew it was an illusion. My father, my cousin, everyone I had known, retained phantasmal voices. That they were imaginary, the projections of habit and memory, did not come home to me until I had left the hospital. One day I was talking with my cousin and he, in a moment of inspiration, covered his mouth with his hand as he spoke. Silence! Once and for all I understood that when I could not see I could not hear.3

  Though Wright knows the sounds he “hears” to be “illusory”—“projections of habit and memory”—they remain intensely vivid for him throughout the decades of his deafness. For Wright, for those deafened after hearing is well established, the world may remain full of sounds even though they are “phantasmal.”16 intensely vivid for him throughout the decades of this deafness . For Wright, for those deafened after hearings is well established, the world may remain full of sounds even though they are “phantasmal.”17

  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.18 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.

  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, when brought to Paris in 1800, was admitted to the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes, which was at the time supervised by the Abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard, a founding member of the Society of Observers of Man, and a notable authority on the education of the deaf. As Jonathan Miller writes:

  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 primitives, Red Indians and orangutans, the intellectuals of the late eighteenth century hoped to decide what was 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 startling
ly 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.

  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 setup. 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:

  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 1830s.

  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. 19

  But what was manifest was as nothing to the destitution inside—the destitution of knowledge and thought that prelingual deafness could bring, in the absence of any communication or remedial measures. The deplorable state of the deaf aroused both the curiosity and the compassion of the philosophes. Thus the Abbé Sicard asked:

  Why is the uneducated deaf person isolated in nature and unable to communicate with other men? Why is he reduced to this state of imbecility? Does his biological constitution differ from ours? Does he not have everything he needs for having sensations, acquiring ideas, and combining them to do everything that we do? Does he not get sensory impressions from objects as we do? Are these not, as with us, the occasion of the mind’s sensations and its acquired ideas? Why then does the deaf person remain stupid while we become intelligent?

  To ask this question—never really or clearly asked before—is to grasp its answer, to see that the answer lies in the use of symbols. It is, Sicard continues, because the deaf person has “no symbols for fixing and combining ideas . . . that there is a total communication-gap between him and other people.” But what was all-important, and had been a source of fundamental confusion since Aristotle’s pronouncements on the matter, was the enduring misconception that symbols had to be speech. Perhaps indeed this passionate misperception, or prejudice, went back to biblical days: the subhuman status of mutes was part of the Mosaic code, and it was reinforced by the biblical exaltation of the voice and ear as the one and true way in which man and God could speak (“In the beginning was the Word”). And yet, overborne by Mosaic and Aristotelian thunderings, some profound voices intimated that this need not be so. Thus Socrates’ remark in the Cratylus of Plato, which so impressed the youthful Abbé de l’Epée:

  If we had neither voice nor tongue, and yet wished to manifest things to one another, should we not, like those which are at present mute, endeavour to signify our meaning by the hands, head, and other parts of the body?

  Or the deep, yet obvious, insights of the physician-philosopher Cardan in the sixteenth century:

  It is possible to place a deaf-mute in a position to hear by reading, and to speak by writing . . . for as different sounds are conventionally used to signify different things, so also may the various figures of objects and words. . . . Written characters and ideas may be connected without the intervention of actual sounds.

  In the sixteenth century the notion that the understanding of ideas did not depend upon the hearing of words was revolutionary.20

  But it is not (usually) the ideas of philosophers that change reality; nor, conversely, is it the practice of ordinary people. What changes history, what kindles revolutions, is the meeting of the two. A lofty mind—that of the Abbé de l’Epée—had to meet a humble usage—the indigenous sign language of the poor deaf who roamed Paris—in order to make possibl
e a momentous transformation. If we ask why this meeting had not occurred before, it has something to do with the vocation of the Abbé, who could not bear to think of the souls of the deaf-mute living and dying unshriven, deprived of the Catechism, the Scriptures, the Word of God; and it is partly owing to his humility—that he listened to the deaf—and partly to a philosophical and linguistic idea then very much in the air—that of universal language, like the speceium of which Leibniz dreamed.21 Thus, de l’Epée approached sign language not with contempt but with awe.

  The universal language that your scholars have sought for in vain and of which they have despaired, is here; it is right before your eyes, it is the mimicry of the impoverished deaf. Because you do not know it, you hold it in contempt, yet it alone will provide you with the key to all languages.

  That this was a misapprehension—for sign language is not a universal language in this grand sense, and Leibniz’s noble dream was probably a chimera—did not matter, was even an advantage.22 For what mattered was that the Abbé paid minute attention to his pupils, acquired their language (which had scarcely ever been done by the hearing before). And then, by associating signs with pictures and written words, he taught them to read; and with this, in one swoop, he opened to them the world’s learning and culture. De l’Epée’s system of “methodical” signs—a combination of their own Sign with signed French grammar—enabled deaf students to write down what was said to them through a signing interpreter, a method so successful that, for the first time, it enabled ordinary deaf pupils to read and write French, and thus acquire an education. His school, founded in 1755, was the first to achieve public support. He trained a multitude of teachers for the deaf, who, by the time of his death in 1789, had established twenty-one schools for the deaf in France and Europe. The future of de l’Epée’s own school seemed uncertain during the turmoil of revolution, but by 1791 it had become the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, headed by the brilliant grammarian Sicard. De l’Epée’s own book, as revolutionary as Copernicus’ in its own way, was first published in 1776.