Vintage Sacks (7 page)

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 possible 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.

De l'Epée'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.

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:

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 Abbé 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:

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'Epée 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.

This indeed has always been evident, if only implicitly, to all native signers, but has always been denied by the hearing and speaking, who, however well intentioned, regard signing as something rudimentary, primitive, pantomimic, a poor thing. De l'Epée had this delusion—and it remains an almost universal delusion of the hearing now. On the contrary, it must be understood that Sign is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic—to philosophical analysis or to making love—indeed, with an ease that is sometimes greater than that of speech. (Indeed, if learned as a primary language, Sign may be used and maintained by the hearing as a continuing and at times preferred alternative to speech.)

The philosopher Condillac, who at first had seen deaf people as “sentient statues” or “ambulatory machines” incapable of thought or any connected mental activity, coming incognito to de l'Epée's classes, become a convert, and provided the first philosophic endorsement of his method and of sign language:

From the language of action de l'Epée has created a methodical, simple, and easy art with which he gives his pupils ideas of every kind, and, I daresay, ideas more precise than the ones usually acquired with the help of hearing. When as children we are reduced to judging the meaning of words from the circumstances in which we hear them, it often happens that we grasp the meaning only approximately, and we are satisfied with this approximation all our lives. It is different with the deaf taught by de l'Epée. He has only one means for giving them sensory ideas; it is to analyze and to get the pupil to analyze with him. So he leads them from sensory to abstract ideas; we can judge how advantageous de l'Epée's action language is over the speech sounds of our governesses and tutors.

From Condillac to the public at large, who also flocked to de l'Epée's and Sicard's demonstrations, there came an enormous and generous change of heart, a welcoming of the previously outcast into human society. This period—which now seems a sort of golden period in deaf history—saw the rapid establishment of deaf schools, usually manned by deaf teachers, throughout the civilized world, the emergence of the deaf from neglect and obscurity, their emancipation and enfranchisement, and their rapid appearance in positions of eminence and responsibility—deaf writers, deaf engineers, deaf philosophers, deaf intellectuals, previously inconceivable, were suddenly possible.

When Laurent Clerc (a pupil of Massieu, himself a pupil of Sicard) came to the United States in 1816, he had an immediate and extraordinary impact, for American teachers up to this point had never been exposed to, never even imagined, a deaf-mute of impressive intelligence and education, had never imagined the possibilities dormant in the deaf. With Thomas Gallaudet, Clerc set up the American Asylum for the Deaf, in Hartford, in 1817. As Paris—teachers,
philosophes,
and public-at-large—was moved, amazed, “converted” by de l'Epée in the 1770s, so America was to be converted fifty years later.