Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  Have the deaf always and everywhere been seen as “handicapped” or “inferior”? Have they always suffered, must they always suffer, segregation and isolation? Can one imagine their situation otherwise? If only there were a world where being deaf did not matter, and in which all deaf people could enjoy complete fulfillment and integration! A world in which they would not even be perceived as “handicapped” or “deaf.”28

  Such worlds do exist, and have existed in the past, and such a world is portrayed in Nora Ellen Groce’s beautiful and fascinating Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Through a mutation, a recessive gene brought out by inbreeding, a form of hereditary deafness existed for 250 years on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, following the arrival of the first deaf settlers in the 1690s. By the mid–nineteenth century, scarcely an up-Island family was unaffected, and in some villages (Chilmark, West Tisbury) the incidence of deafness had risen to one in four. In response to this, the entire community learned Sign, and there was free and complete intercourse between the hearing and the deaf. Indeed the deaf were scarcely seen as “deaf,” and certainly not seen as being at all “handicapped.”29

  In the astonishing interviews recorded by Groce, the island’s older residents would talk at length, vividly and affectionately, about their former relatives, neighbors, and friends, usually without even mentioning that they were deaf. And it would only be if this question was specifically asked that there would be a pause and then, “Now you come to mention it, yes, Ebenezer was deaf and dumb.” But Ebenezer’s deaf-and-dumbness had never set him apart, had scarcely even been noticed as such: he had been seen, he was remembered, simply as “Ebenezer”—friend, neighbor, dory fisherman—not as some special, handicapped, set-apart deaf-mute. The deaf on Martha’s Vineyard loved, married, earned their livings, worked, thought, wrote, as everyone else did—they were not set apart in any way, unless it was that they were, on the whole, better educated than their neighbors, for virtually all of the deaf on Martha’s Vineyard were sent to be educated at the Hartford Asylum—and were often looked at as the most sagacious in the community.30

  Intriguingly, even after the last deaf Islander had died in 1952, the hearing tended to preserve Sign among themselves, not merely for special occasions (telling dirty jokes, talking in church, communicating between boats, etc.) but generally. They would slip into it, involuntarily, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, because Sign is “natural” to all who learn it (as a primary language), and has an intrinsic beauty and excellence sometimes superior to speech.31

  I was so moved by Groce’s book that the moment I finished it I jumped in the car, with only a toothbrush, a tape recorder, and a camera—I had to see this enchanted island for myself. I saw how some of the oldest inhabitants still preserved Sign, delighted in it, among themselves. My first sight of this, indeed, was quite unforgettable. I drove up to the old general store in West Tisbury on a Sunday morning and saw half a dozen old people gossiping together on the porch. They could have been any old folks, old neighbors, talking together—until suddenly, very startlingly, they all dropped into Sign. They signed for a minute, laughed, then dropped back into speech. At this moment I knew I had come to the right place. And, speaking to one of the very oldest there, I found one other thing, of very great interest. This old lady, in her nineties, but sharp as a pin, would sometimes fall into a peaceful reverie. As she did so, she might have seemed to be knitting, her hands in constant complex motion. But her daughter, also a signer, told me she was not knitting but thinking to herself, thinking in Sign. And even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane—she was dreaming in Sign. Such phenomena cannot be accounted as merely social. It is evident that if a person has learned Sign as a primary language, his brain/mind will retain this, and use it, for the rest of that person’s life, even though hearing and speech be freely available and unimpaired. Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.

  Thinking in Sign

  IFIRST became interested in the deaf—their history, their predicament, their language, their culture—when I was sent Harlan Lane’s books to review. In particular, I was haunted by descriptions of isolated deaf people who had failed to acquire any language whatever: their evident intellectual disabilities and, equally seriously, the mishaps in emotional and social development to which they might fall prey in the absence of any authentic language or communication. What is necessary, I wondered, for us to become complete human beings? Is our humanity, so-called, partly dependent on language? What happens to us if we fail to acquire any language? Does language develop spontaneously and naturally, or does it require contact with other human beings?

  One way—a dramatic way—of exploring these topics is to look at human beings deprived of language; and deprivation of language, in the form of aphasia, has been a central preoccupation of neurologists since the 1860s: Hughlings-Jackson, Head, Goldstein, Luria all wrote extensively on it—and Freud too wrote a monograph in the 1890s. But aphasia is the deprivation of language (through a stroke or other cerebral accident) in an already formed mind, a completed individual. One might say that language has already done its work here (if it has work to do) in the formation of mind and character. If one is to explore the fundamental role of language, one needs to study not its loss after being developed, but its failure to develop.

  And yet I found it difficult to imagine such things: I had patients who had lost language, patients with aphasia, but could not imagine what it might be like not to have acquired language to begin with.

  Two years ago, at the Braefield School for the Deaf, I met Joseph, a boy of eleven who had just entered school for the first time—an eleven-year-old with no language whatever. He had been born deaf, but this had not been realized until he was in his fourth year.1 His failure to talk, or understand speech, at the normal age was put down to “retardation,” then to “autism,” and these diagnoses had clung to him. When his deafness finally became apparent he was seen as “deaf and dumb,” dumb not only literally, but metaphorically, and there was never any real attempt to teach him language.

  Joseph longed to communicate, but could not. Neither speaking nor writing nor signing was available to him, only gesture and pantomime, and a marked ability to draw. What has happened to him? I kept asking myself. What is going on inside, how has he come to such a pass? He looked alive and animated, but profoundly baffled: his eyes were attracted to speaking mouths and signing hands—they darted to our mouths and hands, inquisitively, uncomprehendingly, and, it seemed to me, yearningly. He perceived that something was “going on” between us, but he could not comprehend what it was—he had, as yet, almost no idea of symbolic communication, of what it was to have a symbolic currency, to exchange meaning.

  Previously deprived of opportunity—for he had never been exposed to Sign—and undermined in motive and affect (above all, the joy that play and language should give), Joseph was now just beginning to pick up a little Sign, beginning to have some communication with others. This, manifestly, gave him great joy; he wanted to stay at school all day, all night, all weekend, all the time. His distress at leaving school was painful to see, for going home meant, for him, return to the silence, return to a hopeless communicational vacuum, where he could have no converse, no commerce, with his parents, neighbors, friends; it meant being overlooked, becoming a nonperson, again.

  This was very poignant, extraordinary—without any exact parallel in my experience. I was partly reminded of a two-year-old infant trembling on the verge of language—but Joseph was eleven, was like an eleven-year-old in most other ways. I was partly reminded in a way of a nonverbal animal, but no animal ever gave the feeling of yearning for language as Joseph did. Hughlings-Jackson, it came to me, once compared aphasics to dogs—but dogs seem complete and contented in their languagelessness, whereas the aphasic has a tormenting sense of loss. And Joseph, too: he clearly had an anguished sense of something
missing, a sense of his own crippledness and deficit. He made me think of wild children, feral children, though clearly he was not “wild” but a creature of our civilization and habits—but one who was nonetheless radically cut off.

  Joseph was unable, for example, to communicate how he had spent the weekend—one could not really ask him, even in Sign: he could not even grasp the idea of a question, much less formulate an answer. It was not only language that was missing: there was not, it was evident, a clear sense of the past, of “a day ago” as distinct from “a year ago.” There was a strange lack of historical sense, the feeling of a life that lacked autobiographical and historical dimension, the feeling of a life that only existed in the moment, in the present.

  His visual intelligence—his ability to solve visual puzzles and problems—was good, in radical contrast to his profound difficulties with verbally based problems. He could draw and liked drawing: he did good diagrams of the room, he enjoyed drawing people; he “got” cartoons, he “got” visual concepts. It was this that above all gave me the feeling of intelligence, but an intelligence largely confined to the visual. He “picked up” tic-tac-toe and was soon very good at it; I had the sense that he might readily learn checkers or chess.

  Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal—unable to judge images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm. And yet, one still felt, he was of normal intelligence, despite these manifest limitations of intellectual functioning. It was not that he lacked a mind, but that he was not using his mindfully.

  It is clear that thought and language have quite separate (biological) origins, that the world is examined and mapped and responded to long before the advent of language, that there is a huge range of thinking—in animals, or infants—long before the emergence of language. (No one has examined this more beautifully than Piaget, but it is obvious to every parent—or pet lover.) A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world.2

  For Joseph, the beginnings of a communication, a language, had now started, and he was tremendously excited at this. The school had found that it was not just formal instruction that he needed, but playing with language, language games, as with a toddler learning language for the first time. In this, it was hoped, he might begin to acquire language and conceptual thinking, to acquire it in the act of intellectual play. I found myself thinking of the twins Luria described, who had been in a sense so “retarded” because their language was so bad, and how they improved, immeasurably, when they acquired it.3 Would this too be possible for Joseph?

  The very word “infant” means nonspeaking, and there is much to suggest that the acquisition of language marks an absolute and qualitative development in human nature. Though a well-developed, active, bright eleven-year-old, Joseph was in this sense still an infant—denied the power, the world, that language opens up. In Joseph Church’s words:

  Language opens up new orientations and new possibilities for learning and for action, dominating and transforming preverbal experiences.… Language is not just one function among many … but an all-pervasive characteristic of the individual such that he becomes a verbal organism (all of whose experiences and actions and conceptions are now altered in accordance with a verbalized or symbolic experience).

  Language transforms experience.… Through language … one can induct the child into a purely symbolic realm of past and future, of remote places, of ideal relationships, of hypothetical events, of imaginative literature, of imaginary entities ranging from werewolves to pi-mesons.…

  At the same time the learning of language transforms the individual in such a way that he is enabled to do new things for himself, or to do old things in new ways. Language permits us to deal with things at a distance, to act on them without physically handling them. First, we can act on other people, or on objects through people.… Second, we can manipulate symbols in ways impossible with the things they stand for, and so arrive at novel and even creative versions of reality.… We can verbally rearrange situations which in themselves would resist rearrangement … we can isolate features which in fact cannot be isolated … we can juxtapose objects and events far separated in time and space … we can, if we will, turn the universe symbolically inside out.

  We can do this, but Joseph could not. Joseph could not reach that symbolic plane which is the normal human birthright from earliest childhood on. He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no infant could have.4

  I began to wonder about other deaf people who had reached adolescence, adulthood perhaps, without language of any kind. They had existed, in considerable numbers, in the eighteenth century: Jean Massieu was one of the most famous of these. Languageless until the age of almost fourteen, Massieu then became a pupil of the Abbé Sicard and achieved a spectacular success, becoming eloquent both in Sign and written French. Massieu himself wrote a short autobiography, while Sicard wrote an entire book about him, of how it was possible to “liberate” the languageless into a new form of being.5 Massieu described his growing up on a farm with eight brothers and sisters, five of whom were, like himself, born deaf:

  Until the age of thirteen and nine months I remained at home without ever receiving any education. I was totally unlettered. I expressed my ideas by manual signs and gestures … the signs I used to express my ideas to my family were quite different from the signs of educated deaf-mutes. Strangers did not understand us when we expressed our ideas with signs, but the neighbors did.… Children my own age would not play with me, they looked down on me, I was like a dog. I passed the time alone playing with a top or a mallet and ball, or walking on stilts.

  It is not entirely clear what Massieu’s mind was like, given the absence of a genuine language (though it is clear that he had plenty of communication of a primitive sort, using the “home signs” that he and his deaf siblings had devised, which constituted a complex, but almost grammarless, gestural system).6 He tells us:

  I saw cattle, horses, donkeys, pigs, dogs, cats, vegetables, houses, fields, grapevines, and after seeing all these things remembered them well.

  He also had a sense of numbers, even though he lacked names for these:

  Before my education I did not know how to count; my fingers had taught me. I did not know numbers; I counted on my fingers, and when the count went beyond ten I made notches on a stick.

  And he tells us, very poignantly, how he envied other children going to school; how he took up books, but could make nothing of them; and how he tried to copy the letters of the alphabet with a quill, knowing that they must have some strange power, but unable to give any meaning to them.

  Sicard’s description of Massieu’s education is fascinating. He found (as I had observed with Joseph) that the boy had a good eye; and he started by drawing pictures of objects and asking Massieu to do the same. Then, to introduce Massieu to language, Sicard wrote the names of the objects on their pictures. At first, his pupil “was utterly mystified. He had no idea how lines that did not appear to picture anything could function as an image for objects and represent them with such accuracy and speed.” Then, very suddenly, Massieu got it, got the idea of an abstract and symbolic representation: “at that moment [he] learned the whole advantage and difficulty of writing … [and] from that moment on, the drawing was banished, we replaced it with writing.”

  Now Massieu perceived that an object, or an image, might be represented by a name, he developed a tremendous, violent hunger for names. Sicard gives marvelous descriptions of how the two of them took walks together, with Massieu demanding and noting the names for everything:

  We visite
d an orchard to name all the fruits. We went into a woods to distinguish the oak from the elm … the willow from the poplar, eventually all the other inhabitants.… He didn’t have enough tablets and pencils for all the names with which I filled his dictionary, and his soul seemed to expand and grow with these innumerable denominations.… Massieu’s visits were those of a landowner seeing his rich domain for the first time.

  With the acquisition of names, of words for everything, Sicard felt, there was a radical change in Massieu’s relation to the world—he became like Adam: “This newcomer to earth was a stranger on his own estates, which were being restored to him as he learned their names.”

  If we ask: Why did Massieu demand all these names? Or why did Adam, even though he was alone at the time? Why did naming give Massieu such joy, and cause his soul to expand and grow? How did they alter his relation to the things previously nameless, so that now he felt that he owned them, that they had become his “domain”? What is naming for? It has to do, surely, with the primal power of words, to define, to enumerate, to allow mastery and manipulation; to move from the realm of objects and images to the world of concepts and names. A drawing of an oak tree depicts a particular tree, but the name “oak” denotes the entire class of oak trees, a general identity—“oakhood”—that applies to all oaks. Giving names, then, for Massieu, as he walked the woods, was his first grasp of a generalizing power that could transform the entire world; in this way, at the age of fourteen, he entered into the human estate, could know the world as home, the world as his “domain” in a way he had never known before.7