1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  Similar observations have been made of isolated deaf adults—there was one such deaf man in the Solomon Islands, the first in twenty-four generations (Kuschel, 1973); they too will invent gestural systems, with a very simple syntax and morphology, by which they can communicate basic needs and feelings to their neighbors—but cannot by themselves make the qualitative leap from such a gestural system into a complete, fully grammaticized linguistic system.

  We see here, as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries point out, poignant attempts to invent a language within one lifetime. And, essentially, this cannot be done, because it requires a child, and a child’s brain, exposed to a natural language, to create and transmit, to evolve, a natural language. Thus sign languages are historical creations that require, at the very least, two generations for their genesis. Sign may become still richer, evolve, with several generations, as was the case on Martha’s Vineyard, but two generations are enough.

  We see the same situation with speech. Thus when linguistically different communities meet and have to communicate, they develop an improvised, grammarless pidgin. Grammar only appears in the next generation, when the children bring it to their parents’ pidgin, creating a rich and fully grammaticized creole. This at least is the thesis of the linguist Derek Bickerton (see Restak, 1988, pp. 216-217). Thus, a deaf Adam and Eve would improvise signs but lack language; a true, grammatical sign language would evolve only with the development of their children, Cain and Abel.

  It seems clear that grammatical potential is present, even explosively present, in every child’s brain, and that it will leap out and actualize itself given the least opportunity. This is particularly clear in the case of deaf children who have been isolated, but who are finally, serendipitously, exposed to Sign. In this instance, even the briefest exposure to a fully grammaticized sign language can serve to initiate a huge and rapidly spreading change. A glimpse of a subject⁄object usage, or a sentence construction, may ignite the latent grammatical power of the brain and produce a sudden fulguration, and a very rapid conversion from a gestural system to a true language. Grammar can spread, among such children, like a contagion. It must take a very exceptional degree of isolation, indeed, to prevent this happening.

  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 visited 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 had become 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. 53

  53. Massieu’s enthralled naming of trees and other plants helped to define them in unique perceptual categories (‘this is an oak, this is ‘oakishness’!’), but not to define them in a more conceptual way (‘Ha, a gymnosperm!’ or ‘Ha, another crucifer!’). And many of these ‘natural’ categories, of course, were already familiar to him. There was much more difficulty with unfamiliar objects, which had not previously been part of the perceptual world. This is hinted at in Massieu, and absolutely clear with the Wild Boy, Victor. Thus when Itard, Victor’s teacher, taught him the word ‘book,’ this was first taken to refer to a particular book, and the same failure occurred with other words, all of which he understood to name some particular thing, not a category of things. Sicard introduced Massieu, at first, to images, and thence conducted him to (what Levy-Bruhl, in his studies of primitive thinking, calls) ‘image-concepts.’ Such concepts are necessarily particular, because one cannot have a generic image.

  L.S. Vygotsky writes: 54

  54. Vygotsky, 1962, p. 5.

  A word does not refer to a single object but to a group or class of objects. Each word is therefore already a generalization. Generalization is a verbal act of thought and reflects reality in quite another way than sensation and perception reflect it.

  He goes on to speak of the ‘dialectic leap’ between sensation and thought, a leap that requires the achievement of ‘a generalized reflection of reality, which is also the essence of word meaning.’ 55

  55. L.S. Vygotsky was born in Byelorussia in 1896, and as a very young man published a remarkable book on the psychology of art. He then turned to systematic psychology, and in the ten years before his death (from tuberculosis, at the age of 38) produced a unique corpus of work, which was seen by most of his contemporaries (including Piaget) as showing outstanding originality, indeed genius. Vygotsky saw the development of language and mental powers as neither learned, in the ordinary way, nor emerging epigenetically, but as being social and mediate in nature, as arising from the interaction of adult and child, and as internalizing the cultural instrument of language for the processes of thought.

  His work aroused great suspicion among Marxist ideologues, and Thought and Language, which was published posthumously in 1934, was banned and suppressed a couple of years later, as ‘anti-Marxist,’ ‘anti-Pavlovian,’ and ‘anti-Soviet.’ His work and theories could no longer be mentioned publicly, but were treasured by his pupils and colleagues—A. R. Luria and A.N. Leont’ev, above all. In later life,
Luria wrote that meeting a genius such as Vygotsky, and getting to know him, was the most crucial event of his life and he often saw his own work as ‘nothing more than a continuation’ of Vygotsky’s. It was largely through Luria’s courageous efforts (for he too had been banned and forced into ‘internal exile’ at different periods) that Thought and Language was republished (in Russian and German) in the late 1950’s.

  It was published in English, finally, in 1962, with an introduction by Jerome Bruner. It decisively influenced Bruner’s own work—his books of the 1960’s (most notably Towards a Theory of Instruction) are powerfully Vygotskian in tone. Vygotsky’s work was so ahead of its time in the 1930’s that one of his contemporaries described him as ‘a visitor from the future.’ But in the past twenty years he has provided, increasingly, the theoretical underpinning for a variety of important studies on the development of language and mental processes (and thus the education) of the child, including those of Schlesinger and the Woods, which focus on deaf children. It is only now, in the late 1980’s, that Vygotsky’s collected works are being made available in English, again under the general editorship of Bruner.

  Addendum (1990): It is only now that Vygotsky’s collected essays on ‘Defectology,’ including his crucial 1925 essay on special education for the deaf, are published in English (see Vygotsky, 1991 and Knox, 1989). ‘Defectology,’ it must be said first, it not only a hideous word, but a misleading one, for it is not defects that it is concerned with, but the very opposite adaptations, compensations (perhaps indeed it should be called ‘intactology ‘). Vygotsky was passionately opposed to the evaluation of handicapped children in terms of their defects or deficits, their ‘minuses’; he valued them instead for their intactnesses, their ‘pluses.’ He did not see them as defective, but different: ‘A handicapped child represents a qualitatively different, unique type of development.’ And it was this qualitative difference, this uniqueness, Vygotsky felt, that any educational or rehabilitative enterprise must address: ‘If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child,’ he writes, ‘then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means; and, for the pedagogue, it is particularly important to know the uniqueness of the course along which he must lead the child. This uniqueness transforms the minus of the handicap into the plus of compensation.’

  Development of higher psychological functions, for Vygotsky, is not something which occurs ‘naturally,’ automatically—it requires mediation, culture, a cultural tool. And the most important such cultural tool is language. But cultural tools and languages, he argues, have been developed for the ‘normal’ person, the person with all his sense organs, his biological functions, intact. What then will be best for the handicapped, the different person? The key to his development will be compensation—the use of an alternative cultural tool. Thus Vygotsky comes to the special education of the deaf: the alternative cultural tool, for them, is sign language—sign language which has been created for them and by them. Sign language addresses the functions, the visual functions, that are still intact; it is the most direct way of reaching deaf children, the simplest means of allowing their full development, and the only one that respects their difference, their uniqueness.

  Thus, for Massieu, nouns, names, nominals came first. Qualifying adjectives were needed, but these presented problems.

  Massieu did not wait for the adjectives, but made use of names of objects in which he found the salient quality he wanted to affirm of another object…To express the swiftness of one of his comrades in a race, he said, ‘Albert is bird’; to express strength he said, ‘Paul is lion’; for gentleness, he said, ‘Deslyons is lamb. ’

  Sicard at first allowed and encouraged this, and then, ‘reluctantly,’ started to substitute adjectives (‘gentle’ for ‘lamb,’ ‘sweet’ for ‘turtledove’), adding, ‘I consoled him for the goods that I had stolen from him…[explaining] that the additional words I was giving him were [equivalent] to those I was demanding that he abandon.’ 56

  56. Kaspar Hauser, after his release from years of languagelessness in a dungeon (described later in this chapter) showed an identical tendency to use such metaphors at first, toward a sort of natural, naive, childlike poetry…which his teacher, von Feuerbach, demanded he ‘abandon.’ One sees in the history and evolution of many peoples and cultures such a ‘primitive’ poetic language at first, subsequently displaced by more analytic, abstract terms. One sometimes feels that the loss may be as great as the gain.

  Levy-Bruhl, similarly, describes how the Tasmanians ‘had no words to represent abstract ideas…could not express qualities such as hard, soft, round, tall, short, etc. To signify hard they would say, like a stone; for tall, big legs; round, like a ball; like the moon; and so on, always combining their words with gestures, designed to bring what they were describing before the eyes of the person addressed’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1966). One is irresistibly reminded here of Massieu as he learned language—of how he would say, ‘Albert is bird,’ ‘Paul is lion,’ before he acquired, or turned to, the use of generic adjectives.

  Pronouns also gave particular problems. ‘He’ was at first mistaken for a proper name; ‘I’ and ‘you’ were confused (as often happens with toddlers); but finally they were understood. Propositions aroused especial difficulties, but once grasped were seized with explosive force, so that suddenly Massieu found himself able (in Hughlings-Jackson’s term) to ‘propositionize.’ Geometrical abstractions—invisible constructs—were the hardest of all. It was easy for Massieu to put square objects together, but a different achievement entirely for him to grasp squareness as a geometrical construct, to grasp the idea of a square. 57This, in particular, aroused Sicard’s enthusiasm:

  57. Massieu’s acquiring the idea of a square, through the medium of a common word, a symbol for it, was (consciously and unconsciously) Sicard’s answer to Hobbes. For Hobbes had argued, a century and a half earlier, that though a deaf person might work out that the angles of a triangle were the sum of two right angles, and even follow Euclid’s proof of this, he could not conceive this as a universal proposition about triangles, because he lacked a word or symbol for ‘triangle.’ Lacking common nouns, lacking abstract language, Hobbes thought, the deaf could not generalize. Perhaps, said Sicard; but if they use common nouns, use abstract language, use sign language, they can generalize as well as anyone else. One is reminded, as one reads Sicard, of Plato’s theory of ideas and education, especially in the Cratylus and Meno. First, says Plato, one must see actual chairs or squares—all sorts of objects with squareness (or any other quality)—only then can the idea of squareness come, the archetypal or ideal square of which all squares are merely copies. In the Meno an ignorant and illiterate youth, with no idea of geometry, is gradually inducted into the truths of geometry, gradually drawn to higher and higher levels of abstraction, through the questions of a teacher who is always a stage ahead and who, by the form of his question, allows the pupil to advance to his stage. Thus, for Plato, language, knowledge, epistemology, is innate—all learning is essentially ‘reminiscence’—but this can only occur with another, a mediator, in the context of a dialogue. Sicard, a born teacher, was not really instructing Massieu; he was drawing him out, educing him, by means of such a dialogue.

  ‘Abstraction has been achieved! Another step! Massieu understands abstractions!’ exulted Sicard. ‘He is a human creature.’

  Several months after seeing Joseph, I happened to reread the story of Kaspar Hauser, subtitled ‘An account of an individual kept in a dungeon, separated from all communication with the world, from early childhood to about the age of seventeen.’ 58

  58. Anselm von Feuerbach’s original account was published in 1832, and translated into English—as Caspar Hauser—in 1834. It has been the subject of innumerable essays, articles, books; of a film by Werner Herzog; and of a remarkable psychoanalytic essay, by Leonard Shengold, in Halo in the Sky.

  Though Kaspar’s situation was far more
bizarre and extreme, he reminded me of Joseph in a way. Kaspar, a young boy of about sixteen, was discovered one day in 1828, stumbling down a street in Nuremberg. He had with him a letter telling something of his strange history: how he had been given away by his mother, when six months old—she was penniless and her husband was dead—to a day-laborer with ten children. For reasons that never became clear, this foster father confined Kaspar in a cellar—he was chained, seated, and could not stand—without any communication or human contact for more than a dozen years. When he needed to be toileted or changed, his father-jailer put opium in his food and did what was necessary while Kaspar was unconscious in drug-sleep.

  When he ‘came into the world’ (this expression was often used by Kaspar to ‘designate his first exposure in Nuremberg, and his first awakening to the consciousness of mental life’), he rapidly learned that ‘there existed men and other creatures,’ and fairly rapidly—it took several months—started to acquire language. This awakening to human contact, this awakening to the world of shared meanings, of language, led to a sudden and brilliant awakening of his whole mind and soul. There was a tremendous expansion and flowering of mental powers—everything excited his wonder and joy, there was a boundless curiosity, an incandescent interest in everything, a ‘love-affair with the world.’ (Such a rebirth, a psychological birth, as Leonard Shengold points out, is no more than a special, exaggerated, almost explosive form of what normally occurs in the third year of life, with the discovery and emergence of language.) 59