by Oliver Sacks
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: 18
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: 19
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. 20
20. As early as the sixteenth century some of the deaf children of noble families had been taught to speak and read, through many years of tutoring, so that they could be recognized as persons under the law (mutes were not recognized) and could inherit their families’ titles and fortunes. Pedro Ponce de Leon in sixteenth-century Spain, the Braidwoods in Britain, Amman in Holland, and Pereire and Deschamps in France were all hearing educators who achieved greater or lesser success in teaching some deaf persons to speak. Lane stresses that many of these educators depended upon signs and finger spelling to teach speech. Indeed, even the most celebrated of these oral deaf pupils knew and used sign language. Their speech was usually poorly intelligible and tended to regress as soon as intensive tutoring was curtailed. But before 1750 for the generality, for 99.9 percent of those born deaf, there was no hope of literacy or education.
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 Abbe Sicard asked: 21
21. Lane, 1984b, pp. 84-85.
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 Abbe de l’Epee:
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 fi
gures 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. 22
22. There have been, however, purely written languages, such as the scholarly language used for over a thousand years by the elite Chinese bureaucracy, which was never spoken and, indeed, never intended to be spoken.
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 Abbe de l’Epee—had to meet a humble usage—the indigenous sign language of the poor deaf who roamed Paris—in order to make possible a momentous transformation. If we ask why this meeting had not occurred before, it has something to do with the vocation of the Abbe, 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. 23
23. De l’Epee exactly echoes his contemporary Rousseau, as do all the eighteenth-century descriptions of Sign. Rousseau (in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his Essay on the Origin of Language) conceives of a primordial or original human language, in which everything has its true and natural name; a language so concrete, so particular, that it can catch the essence, the ‘itness,’ of everything; so spontaneous that it expresses all emotion directly; and so transparent that it is incapable of any evasion or deception. Such a language would be without (and indeed would have no need for) logic, grammar, metaphor, or abstractions—it would be a language not mediate, a symbolic expression of thought and feeling, but, almost magically, an immediate one. Perhaps the thought of such a language—a language of the heart, a language of perfect transparency and lucidity, a language that can say everything, without ever deceiving or entangling us (Wittgenstein often spoke of the bewitchment of language), a language as pure and profound as music—is a universal fantasy.
Thus, de l’Epee approached sign language not with contempt but with awe. 24
24. Lane, 1984b, p. 181.
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. 25
25. This notion that sign language is uniform and universal, and enables deaf people all over the world to communicate with one another instantly, is still quite widespread. It is quite untrue. There are hundreds of different signed languages that have arisen independently wherever there are significant numbers of deaf people in contact. Thus there is American Sign Language, British Sign Language, French Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, and Mayan Sign Language, although these have no relation to spoken English, French, Chinese, etc. (More than fifty native sign languages, from Australian aboriginal to Yugoslavian, are described in detail in Van Cleve, 1987.)
For what mattered was that the Abbe 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’Epee’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’Epee’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’Epee’s own book, as revolutionary as Copernicus’ in its own way, was first published in 1776.
De l’Epee’s book, a classic, is available in many languages. But what have not been available, have been virtually unknown, are the equally important (and, in some ways, even more fascinating) original writings of the deaf—the first deaf-mutes ever able to write. Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 ‘Observations’ of Pierre Desloges—the first book to be published by a deaf person—now available in English for the first time. Desloges himself, deafened at an early age, and virtually without speech, provides us first with a frightening description of the world, or unworld, of the languageless. 26
26. Lane, 1984b, p. 32.
At the beginning of my infirmity, and for as long as I was living apart from other deaf people…I was unaware of sign language. I used only scattered, isolated, and unconnected signs. I did not know the art of combining them to form distinct pictures with which one can represent various ideas, transmit them to one’s peers, and converse in logical discourse.
Thus Desloges, though obviously a highly gifted man, could scarcely entertain ‘ideas,’ or engage in ‘logical discourse,’ until he had acquired sign language (which, as is usual with the deaf, he learned from someone deaf, in his case from an illiterate deaf-mute). Desloges, though highly intelligent, was intellectually disabled until he learned Sign—and, specifically, to use the word that the British neurologist Hughlings-Jackson was to use a century later in regard to the disabilities attendant on aphasia, he was unable to ‘propositionize.’ It is worth clarifying this by quoting Hughlings-Jackson’s own words: 27
27. Hughlings-Jackson’s writings on language and aphasia are conveniently brought together in a volume of Brain published shortly after his death (Hughlings-Jackson, 1915). The best critique of the Jacksonian notion of ‘propositionizing’ is to be found in Chapter III of Henry Head’s wonderful two volumes, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech.
We do not either speak or think in words or signs only, but in words or signs referring to one another in a particular manner…Without a proper interrelation of its parts, a verbal utterance would be a mere succession of names, a word-heap, embodying no proposition…The unit of speech is a proposition. Loss of speech (aphasia) is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionize…not only loss of power to propositionize aloud (to talk), but to propositionize either internally or externally…The speechless patient has lost speech, not only in the popular sense that he cannot speak aloud, but in the fullest sense. We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.
This is why, earlier, I spoke of prelingual deafness as being potentially far more devastating than blindness. For it may dispose, unless this is averted, to a condition of being virtually without language—and of being unable to ‘propositionize’ which must be compared to aphasia, a condition in which thinking itself can become incoherent and stunted. The languageless deaf may indeed be as if imbecilic—and in a particularly cruel way, in that intelligence, though present and perhaps abundant, is locked up so long as the lack of language lasts. Thus the Abbe Sicard is right, as well as poetic, when he writes of the introduction of Sign as ‘opening up the doors of…intelligence for the first time.’
Nothing is more wonderful, or more to be celebrated, than something that will unlock a person’s capacities and allow
him to grow and think, and no one praises or portrays this with such fervor or eloquence as these suddenly liberated mutes, such as Pierre Desloges: 28
28. Lane, 1984b, p. 37.
The [sign] language we use among ourselves, being a faithful image of the object expressed, is singularly appropriate for making our ideas accurate and for extending our comprehension by getting us to form the habit of constant observation and analysis. This language is lively; it portrays sentiment, and develops the imagination. No other language is more appropriate for conveying strong and great emotions.
But even de l’Epee was unaware, or could not believe, that sign language was a complete language, capable of expressing not only every emotion but every proposition and enabling its users to discuss any topic, concrete or abstract, as economically and effectively and grammatically as speech. 29
29. It was indeed his ignorance or incredulity in this that led him to propose, and impose, his entirely superfluous, indeed absurd, system of ‘Methodical Signs,’ which to some extent retarded the education and communication of the deaf. De l’Epee’s apprehension of sign language was both exalted and depreciated. He saw it, on the one hand, as a ‘universal’ language; on the other, as having no grammar (and thus in need of the importation of French grammar, for example). This misapprehension persisted for sixty years, until Roch-Ambroise Bebian, Sicard’s pupil, seeing clearly that the indigenous sign language was autonomous and complete, threw the ‘methodical signs,’ the imported grammar, out.
