by Oliver Sacks
8. This was indeed the case when Wright’s book was published in 1969. Since then there has been an explosion of writings about deafness by the deaf, of which the most remarkable is Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, by the deaf linguists Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. There have also been novels about the deaf by the deaf, for example, Islay by Douglas Bullard, which attempt to catch the distinctive perceptions, the stream of consciousness, the inner speech of those who sign. For other books by deaf writers, see the fascinating bibliography provided by Wright in Deafness.
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. 9
9. Wright, 1969, p. 25.
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. 10
10. Wright uses Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘eye-music,’ for such experiences, even when there is no accompanying auditory phantasm, and this is used by several deaf writers as a metaphor for their sense of visual patterns and beauty. It is especially used of the recurrent motifs (the ‘rhymes,’ the ‘consonances,’ etc.) of Sign poetry.
He gives a fascinating description of this first happening—of its immediate occurrence with the onset of deafness: 11
11. Wright, 1969, p. 22.
[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. 12
12. There is, of course, a ‘consensus’ of the senses—objects are heard, seen, felt, smelt, all at once, simultaneously; their sound, sight, smell, feel all go together. This correspondence is established by experience and association. This is not, normally, something we are conscious of, although we would be very startled if something didn’t sound like it looked—if one of our senses gave a discrepant impression. But we may be made conscious, very suddenly and startlingly, of the senses’ correspondence, if we are suddenly deprived of a sense, or gain one. Thus David Wright ‘heard’ speech, the moment he was deafened; an anosmic patient of mine ‘smelt’ flowers, whenever he saw them (Sacks, 1985); and a patient described by Richard Gregory (in ‘Recovery from early blindness: a case study,’ reprinted in Gregory, 1974) could at once read the time on a clock when he was given his sight (he had been blind from birth) by an eye operation: before that he had been used to feeling the hands of a watch with its watch-glass removed, but could make an instant ‘transmodal’ transfer of this knowledge from the tactile to the visual, as soon as he was able to see.
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.’ 13
13. This hearing (that is, imagining) of ‘phantasmal voices,’ when lips are read, is quite characteristic of the postlingually deaf, for whom speech (and ‘inner speech’) has once been an auditory experience. This is not ‘imagining’ in the ordinary sense; but rather an instant and automatic ‘translation’ of the visual experience into an auditory correlate (based on experience and association)—a translation that probably has a neurological basis (of experientially established visual-auditory connections). This does not occur, of course, in the prelingually deaf, who have no auditory experience or imagery to call upon. For them lip-reading—as, indeed, ordinary reading—is an entirely visual experience; they see, but do not hear, the voice. It is as difficult for us, as speaker-hearers, even to conceive such a visual ‘voice,’ as it is for those who have never heard to conceive an auditory voice.
The congenitally deaf, it should be added, may have the richest appreciation of (say) written English, of Shakespeare, even though it does not ‘speak’ to them in an auditory way. It speaks to them, one must suppose, in an entirely visual way—they do not hear, they see, the ‘voice’ of the words.
When we read, or imagine someone speaking, we ‘hear’ a voice, upon the inward ear. What of those born deaf? How do they imagine voices? Clayton Valli, a deaf Sign poet, when a poem is coming to him, feels his body making little signs—he is, as it were, speaking to himself, in his own voice. But what if other voices are imagined, or dreamed, or hallucinated? The mad often suffer from ‘hearing voices’—other voices, often accusing voices, nagging and cajoling them; do deaf people, if they go mad, suffer from ‘seeing voices’ too? And, if so, how are these seen? As hands in mid-air making signs; or as whole-body visual apparitions making signs? I have found it oddly difficult to get a clear answer—as it may be difficult, sometimes, to get a dreamer to tell you how he dreams. He is given to understand something, in the course of his dream, but whether by sight or sound, how, he is unable to say. There are as yet too few studies on hallucinations, dreaming, and language imagery in the deaf.
The question of how much the postlingually deaf may continue to ‘hear’ has analogies to the ways in which those blinded late in life may continue to ‘see,’ and continue, one way and another, in waking and dreams, to live in a visual world. The most extraordinary autobiographical account of this has just been provided by John Hull (1990). ‘During the first couple of years of blindness,’ he writes, ‘when I thought about peo
ple I knew, they fell into two groups. There are those with faces, and those without faces…The people I knew before I lost my sight have faces but the people I have met since do not have faces…as time went by, the proportion of people with no faces increased.’ With those whom he knew, there would be vivid images of their faces as they spoke to him—though images fixed by his last impressions before he became blind, and therefore increasingly outdated. With others, of whom there were no actual visual memories, there were, at one point, incontinent visual ‘projections’ (perhaps analogous to Wright’s auditory ‘phantasms’ and the phantom limbs of amputees: such ‘sensory ghosts’ are created by the brain when it is suddenly cut off from normal sensory input).
In general, Hull found, as the years went by, he moved deeper and deeper into what he calls ‘deep blindness,’ with less and less memory of, imagination of, or need for, visual images, and more and more the sense of being a ‘whole body seer,’ living in an autonomous and complete world of body sensations, touch, smell, and taste, and, of course, hearing—all these senses now greatly enhanced. He continues to use visual images and metaphors in his speech, but these, increasingly, are only metaphors for him. It is probable that those who have been deafened late in life, similarly, may gradually lose more and more of their auditory memories and images, as they advance into the exclusively visual world of ‘deep’ deafness. When Wright was asked if he would like his hearing back, at this stage, he answered, no, he now found his world complete.
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. 14
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. 15
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, 16 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 monstrosit
ies 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: 17
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.