The oralists versus the signers
J.M.A. Rees
DEAFNESS: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT by David Wright Faber, £4.99, pp.201 SEEING VOICES by Oliver Sacks Picador, £12.95, pp. 186 he titles of these two books could usefully be exchanged. Deafness, even with the addition of 'A Personal Account', is too prosaic for David Wright's entertaining and subtle autobiography which takes us from his childhood in South Africa, the onset of deafness at the age of seven, through deaf schooling at a ruthless but effective establishment in Northampton, England, to his time at Oriel College, Oxford. (The Rector of Lincoln had been less than sympathetic to his application, pointing out that he would indubitably be run over in the street in his first week). We are given only tantalising glimpses of his 'Further Education' in the 'University of Soho'. As he was trained in the oral (lip-reading and speaking) tradition, much of his life has been given to 'seeing voices'. His persistence in overcoming shyness, speaking to captive strangers in railway trains, guests at parties, fellow loungers in pubs, may have produced moments of tension and embarrassment in company but they have served to develop a genial and highly observant skill with his pen. Oliver Sacks himself describes David Wright's narrative generously as 'the most beautiful account of acquired deafness known to me'.
It is accompanied by a comprehensive and up-to-date history of deaf education, 'By the Effigy of St Cecilia', a story that covers several centuries and countries and goes to and fro across the Atlantic. It reminds us how quite unimagined effects flow from individual acts of charity. Pedro Ponce de Leon, a 16th-century Spanish monk, began to teach a convert who was unable to enter the Benedictine Order because, being deaf and dumb, he was unable to make his confession. His training methods were sought out by the Spanish grandees, whose rigid caste system and in-breeding accentuated many hereditary illnesses, for the existence of a deaf-mute son and heir resulted in vast estates passing by law to distant relatives. In 18th-century France, the Abbe de L'Epee was drawn to his life's work by fear that deaf children might die in ignorance of the means of salvation. At one period he was not only teaching but feeding and clothing 60 child- ren from his own resources, and training teachers from other parts of Europe. If the Pre-Revolution Church of France had Talleyrand and other cynics in its ranks, it also had its saints.
It was the Abbe who introduced into deaf-teaching the ‘signes methodiques', sign language, principally as a means of communication between the deaf them- selves. He was less concerned with fitting the high-born deaf for public life or social duties and the method could enable a larger number of pupils to be taught more rapidly.
Warfare between oralists and signers has been endemic and often intense, con- ducted with 'militant hysteria'. Oliver Sacks is a wholehearted supporter of sign language, which he sees not as just a `No wine or women, but 1 don't mind if you sing about them'. utilitarian means of communication but as a living art form with as strong a structure and as great a potential for poetic use as the English of the Authorised Version. His book might well have been called just Deafness, or Thoughts on Deafness, for it is quite unsystematic and travels a winding and sometimes dusty road through some history, some case-studies, recent resear- ches and neurological studies of the inter- relation of sign language and the brain. It ends with an over-excited account of a rebellion at the world's only degree- conferring University for the Deaf, Gal- laudet, in the United States, in March 1988. It is a warm-hearted book but, as an outsider from the hearing world, he cannot provide the innumerable insights that give David Wright's story its hold upon the reader: the deaf child's views of parental anxieties, the friendships with normal hearers, the search for independence. As a neurologist, Sacks is deeply interested in the workings of different halves of the brain. This dichotomy seems to have in- vaded his authorship. Much of the book is set out for two minds to read: one half progressing through argument while another voice chatters away in lengthy and discursive footnotes, afterthoughts, re- servations and digressions that constantly distract the eye and the mind.
He laments the victory of the oralists at what he terms 'the notorious' International Congress of Educators of the Deaf at Milan in 1880. He believes that the free and expanding use of sign languages gives a great feeling of solidarity and 'coming-of- age' to deaf communities (yet 'often fearful and diffident of the outside world'). He perceives the ease with which signs in different 'tongues' can be assimilated more easily than spoken languages. Yet he never illustrates its originality or its potential for poetry in a way that we can appreciate. (His principal example, variations of the words 'look at', is not very convincing.) It is hard to see how sign language could convey some of his more speculative and academic pages (e.g. how would he put across his own ruminations in sign when they are as wordy as 'the brain as having a great neurological redundancy and plastic- ity, and of this being subsequently "pruned" by experience; here reinforcing synapses. . .'). No doubt he could, but we should like to know how! Perhaps a video should be produced in support.
If sign language is to be one of the structured means of communication in the future, it will still have to find its Virgil, its Dante or its Shakespeare. Until then, David Wright's path, searching the great literature of the past and realising what a vast amount the hearing world has to offer, for all its apathy and ignorance, seems the valuable one to follow.
J. M. A. Rees is the author of Sing a Song of Silence: A Deaf Girl's Odyssey, publish- ed by the Kensal Press in 1983.
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