I'm reading Cynthia Ozick's "How Helen Keller Learned to Write/With the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, Keller forged a path from deaf-blind darkness to unimaginable artistry" — from June 8, 2003 in The New Yorker.
I'm reading that because — and I can't remember why — I got to thinking how hard it is to believe that Helen Keller could have acquired the language skills needed to write the works attributed to her. (You, who are not blind, can see the entire text of her "Story of My Life" at Project Gutenberg.)
Ozick writes:
“The Story of My Life” was attacked in The Nation not for plagiarism in the usual sense but for the purloining of “things beyond her powers of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word. . . . One resents the pages of second-hand description of natural objects.” The reviewer blamed her for the sin of vicariousness. “All her knowledge,” he insisted, “is hearsay knowledge.”...
[The criticism] “Helen Keller is a living lie”—regularly resurfaced, in the form of a neurologist’s or a psychologist’s assessment, or in the reservations of reviewers. A French professor of literature, who was himself blind, determined that she was “a dupe of words, and her aesthetic enjoyment of most of the arts is a matter of auto-suggestion rather than perception.”
A New Yorker interviewer complained, “She talks bookishly. . . . To express her ideas, she falls back on the phrases she has learned from books, and uses words that sound stilted, poetical metaphors.”
But the cruellest appraisal of all came, in 1933, from Thomas Cutsforth, a blind psychologist. By this time, Helen was fifty-two, and had published four additional autobiographical volumes. Cutsforth disparaged everything she had become. The wordless child she once was, he maintained, was closer to reality than what her teacher had made of her through the imposition of “word-mindedness.”
He objected to her use of images such as “a mist of green,” “blue pools of dog violets,” “soft clouds tumbling.” All that, he protested, was “implied chicanery” and “a birthright sold for a mess of verbiage.” He criticized
the aims of the educational system in which [Helen Keller] has been confined during her whole life. Literary expression has been the goal of her formal education. Fine writing, regardless of its meaningful content, has been the end toward which both she and her teacher have striven. . . . Her own experiential life was rapidly made secondary, and it was regarded as such by the victim. . . . Her teacher’s ideals became her ideals, her teacher’s likes became her likes, and whatever emotional activity her teacher experienced she experienced....
Her rebuttal to word-mindedness, to vicariousness, to implied chicanery and the living lie, was inscribed deliberately and defiantly in her images of “swordblade” and “rainbow waters.” The deaf-blind person, she wrote, “seizes every word of sight and hearing, because his sensations compel it. Light and color, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him.
She was not ashamed of talking bookishly: it meant a ready access to the storehouse of history and literature. She disposed of her critics with a dazzling apothegm—“The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction”—and went on to contend that history itself “is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth.”
४९ टिप्पण्या:
That’s why the Annie Sullivan character is the star of the play The Miracle Worker.
"She disposed of her critics with a dazzling apothegm—'The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction'—and went on to contend that history itself 'is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth.'”
A postmodernist, avant la lettre.
This is what intellectuals do. They attack and smear anything that is different.
The core competency of being and intellectual or expert is knowing everything.
They make really terrible people and end up being college professors education majors, and journalists.
Keller's overcoming her handicaps and her rise as an advocate for the handicapped just another example of white privilege.
It is, and has been, a commitment of the academic left that no one should be admired except perhaps Joe Stalin, Chairman Mao, Barack Obama and other leftist icons.
"That’s why the Annie Sullivan character is the star of the play The Miracle Worker."
Lots about Anne Sullivan in the linked article, but the play ends at the point when Keller suddenly understands what language is. There is a lot of story that follows!
I just don't understand how she would learn the fluidity of full sentences.
And — as the critics quoted in the snippet said — why was her head full of ideas that come from the world of people who are not deaf and blind? Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
“Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
— T. S. Eliot
Thomas Merton used "Raids on the Unspeakable" as a book title. In this case, Helen Keller's ventures were raids on the unseen and the unseeable.
This would have pleased literary theorists who were convinced that all literature was cobbled together from past reading and very rarely let in "reality."
As for the psychologist, what direct perception, what real "reality," can you have when you've lost two of your five senses, and the three that you have left aren't the most acute? It may be annoying to smart alecs, but if you want to write vividly aren't you forced to write about things that you haven't actually perceived?
interesting how this ties in to the Go Ask Alice post.
Now they're not complaining that is NOT written by her, but that she "COULDN'T KNOW what she wrote"?
Next, you'll be telling me, that Xaviera Hollander's The Happy Hooker was "embellished" too!
Aren't ALL autobiographic stories fiction? Mine sure is*
Mine sure is* And remember That, if you're a policeman! Plus, the '80's are so far past the Statue of Limitations, that you can barely see it from there
Lars Porsena said...
Keller's overcoming her handicaps and her rise as an advocate for the handicapped just another example of white privilege.
Part of being a leftist/statist is making sure you have a stable of dependents.
People that work hard and overcome on their own make bureaucrats and government workers obsolete.
Keller will be very unpopular in academia.
Was there no synesthesia back in the day?
I mean, I guess I can see (see!) how her blind critics could be nettled by her use of sighted imagery, sort of in the way that some deaf people get angry when hearing people perceive their world as less full and complete than the hearing world. But if your perceptions, if your mode of perception doesn't resonate with the general population, you have three choices, it seems to me:
1. Talk only to those who share your mode of perception, without caring about the rest of the world. This seems to me to be what a lot of CRT and other critical theory activists do, except that they seem to want all of society to convert to their mode of perception rather than trying to persuade everyone else that they have something important to say.
2. Use the language of the larger world to get your story out, regardless of whether your fellows accuse you of inauthenticity. This seems to me to be what Keller did.
3. Talk to the larger world, but in your own perceptual terms (with modifications and explanations as needed), trying to get them to share in your mode of perception as well as you're able. This is the hardest one and requires the greatest artistry.
It seems to me that it would have been a wild coincidence for Keller to have become blind and deaf AND to have possessed that level of artistry. Maybe you could say she could have developed it in response to the privations of her experience, but not everyone gets great at something just because it's hard to do.
Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
Shorter me: she may indeed have had an idiosyncratic form of expression, but realized that no one who didn't share her experience could understand it, or in those days would have tried to.
Lars Porsena said...
Keller's overcoming her handicaps and her rise as an advocate for the handicapped just another example of white privilege.
Already said by Anita Cameron -- a Black disability rights activist .
Goes right along with today's twitter debate-Did Anne Frank have white privilege?
Ann Althouse said...
I just don't understand how she would learn the fluidity of full sentences.
And — as the critics quoted in the snippet said — why was her head full of ideas that come from the world of people who are not deaf and blind? Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
Because her ideas were conveyed to us by the forms of expression we are comfortable with.
Anything idiosyncratic would have had to be conveyed in a way we would understand without speech or words. Most of those communications would be difficult to record and store.
She would communicate those things through touch taste and smell. Those forms of communication have issues with long term storage.
remember Valedictorian With Non-Verbal Autism Gives Unforgettable College Commencement Speech??
where she'd just stand there? And her mom(?) would move her hand over the keyboard, clicking the keys that she thought her daughter meant to type?
Where, if her mom(?) wasn't doing the typing, she couldn't type?
Where, if her mom(?) didn't know the answer, she didn't either?
remember?
SURE You do ! https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/05/valedictorian.html
Reminds me of the arguments against Shakespeare having written the plays because some people consider him uneducated. Perhaps true, but more likely elitest snobs who how anyone else could accomplish what they couldn't, especially people they look down on.
It is fair to wonder how it happened, but telling to demand that couldn't have.
"Goes right along with today's twitter debate-Did Anne Frank have white privilege?"
Ever read the David Sedaris essay about visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and coveting it as great real estate?
Darmok on the ocean, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.
Here it is in The New Yorker.
"I had the impression she lived in a dump, but it’s actually a very beautiful building, right on the canal."
What do you see in your mind's eye when I say "purple square"? I have no real proof we all see the exact same thing- none of us do.
Helen Keller is a fraud, and Anne Frank had white privilege.
We live in cruel times.
Just a few short clips worth adding that may give a tiny snip of context Keller & Sullivan on her learning to speak
Keller travelling & speaking later on in life
And — as the critics quoted in the snippet said — why was her head full of ideas that come from the world of people who are not deaf and blind? Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
Aren’t all of our heads filled with ideas that come from the world of people? The ideas being the words that have been developed through millennia by our ancestors, to which we attach our individual perceptions. A blind/deaf person may lack the individual perception for the words that attach to visual or auditory phenomena but why shouldn’t they be allowed to use the word according to whatever it has come to mean to them?
And as for Keller’s own idiosyncratic form of expression- wasn’t that what she was doing as a young child before Sullivan taught her the existence of language?
Keller and Anne Frank as examples of "white privilege" are examples of the mindless stupidity of the left today. It comes of excess prosperity of the dull normal mind. There is no need for these people to earn a living or to build a house or to find food. They exist as drones, accomplishing nothing and pretending to be clever. Henry Rogers felt is was necessary to change his name to Ibrahm X Kendi, a vaguely African sounding name, to sell his books. Nobody would buy a book on racism from a guy named Henry Rogers who came from a middle class family and went to private schools.
Kendi was born in the Jamaica neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens,[4][2][6] to middle-class parents, Carol Rogers, a former business analyst for a health-care organization,[4] and Larry Rogers, a tax accountant and then hospital chaplain. Both of his parents are now retired and work as Methodist ministers.[4][7] He has an older brother, Akil.[4]
From third to eighth grade, Kendi attended private Christian schools in Queens.[8] After attending John Bowne High School as a freshman, at age 15, Kendi moved with his family to Manassas, Virginia, in 1997 and attended Stonewall Jackson High School for his final three years of high school,[9] from which he graduated in 2000.[7][8]
In 2005, Kendi received dual B.S. degrees in African American Studies and magazine production from Florida A&M University.
His PhD is also in "African American Studies."
That video clip of Keller in India is fascinating. So she could speak, which would then be repeated/relayed by a her assistant so that others could understand it (but the translated connection, once heard, is unmistakable). And so it would be with her writing, not so? I wonder if any of these debunking experts have ever had anything published. If so: Was it edited? Changed in any way at all?
And: "she "COULDN'T KNOW what she wrote"?"
It makes me also wonder: How could they know that she couldn't know what she wrote?
'Helen Keller is a fraud...'
There are some who say this is true...
There are numerous videos on YouTube of Helen Keller speaking and interacting with others in her adult years. People are too quick to think that genuine and sincere people are fakes and that the fakes are real and genuine.
Keller was forced to use words to describe her existance, which for many years was wordless. And Althouse and other critics complain when it doesn't sound genuine enough. Bless their hearts.
Sounds like she was postmodern when pressed but trained to use dated Victorian expression in her writing. That was more common at the time than the more terse new Hemingway style anyway.
Or, if it didn't come out that way naturally, the editors would see to it that the final product sounded appropriately high-toned.
Think of Harper Lee's editor working over TKAM.
How easy is it to put into words what there are no words for? Should she have just written nothing, been a literary mute, along being blind, deaf and dumb, in order to satisfy her critics?
And the grapes were probably sour.
The little green monster (am I allowed to use a color) jealously is showing. Since they were not capable of doing what she did, they have to denigrate her achievements.
"Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?"
That is an excellent question.
“The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction”—and went on to contend that history itself “is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth.”
This would in many cases, apply to art as well. For instance, in a recent post you brought up the painting by Karl Bryullov, "The Last Day of Pompeii". I've thought about this topic for years as that event has always made me wonder just what it actually was like. And we've had no shortages of depictions in books, cinema, poetry, and paintings. All of them based on stories and descriptions by others of what may have taken place there. But I've still wondered what was it really like back then, over those few days?.
We take what we know or can know, and we extrapolate from there. I can describe the coast off Dubrovnik right now, without ever having been there, simply by reading other's descriptions. After reading 10 or so, I'll have a good idea of how to describe it well. Of course I'd describe it better having seen it for myself, but we're talking degrees of accuracy not known by most.
When I read the headline I thought it was going to be about Mary Baker Eddy.
"Aren’t all of our heads filled with ideas that come from the world of people?"
That's how music works.
“It’s all one song!”
- Neil Young, 1996
"...why was her head full of ideas that come from the world of people who are not deaf and blind? Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?"
Possibly her life and work is an argument by demonstration against materialism, - that we're only what our bodies are. If Keller - and you and I - are essentially the capabilities of the meat that we are heirs of, then we are mutually unreachable. My meat is not yours. But if there is a humanitas via which we mutually communicate even in our individuality, what may be possible? Love perhaps.
The joke--to call it that--about the Anne Frank House is that it ignores the context. The Franks were hiding in a small space, from dedicated murderers. I'll give Sedaris the benefit of the doubt that he's mocking ignorant tourists.
The materialist SF writer Thomas Disch wrote a poem that described the worldview of a deep-ocean tubeworm (from memory):
Up, uppitty, up.
Down, downitty, down.
But Helen Keller didn't know she was a tubeworm, poor girl.
When I was an antiquarian bookseller, I had a 1st Edition of her book "The Story of My Life", "inscribed and "signed" in penciled block script made utilizing a template: "To Mr. Clarence Hawkes Who beholds the World Beautiful through a Soul-Sense Keener than Sight. Helen Keller. Cambridge June 16th, 1903."
Clarence Hawkes studied with Keller at the Perkins Institute for the Blind after having lost his eyesight at 13 in a hunting accident..... Despite his handicap he became the author of popular nature and animal stories set in a variety of rural and wilderness locales. "His writing reflects the true instinct and feeling of a born naturalist, and he has long been accepted as the peer of men like Ernest Thompson Seton and the late Jack London." --- TIME magazine, Apr. 19, 1926."
Books like that make booksellers' hearts go pitty-pat.
History has been called a lot of things, but one of the best is, "An exercise in imaginative empathy." Ranke thought that the goal is to tell a story "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" (as it actually was) using every piece of evidence we can unearth, and reevaluating the old evidence when we can.
Which is say that all historical reconstruction is construction, an effort of will and choice to see through other eyes and hear through other ears. That either excites a person or it doesn't, and I'm the first type.
Always recalling John Lukacs' observation that the end of historical inquiry isn't certainty, but understanding.
I read the article. You can't describe Helen Keller as lucky but her life was marked by some fortuitous events. Her parents were loving, informed enough to seek help and affluent enough to purchase it. It was a kind of miracle that she was paired with Anne Sullivan: a teacher who was smart enough to realize the child's extraordinary intelligence. They lived together for many years and complemented each other admirably. There must have been some love in the connective tissue between them....Anne Sullivan married John Albert Macy. He was a Harvard instructor who moved in with them. I wonder if they had any threesome action. I wonder if it would enhance or detract from the reputation of these women if interesting details of their friendship were revealed... Sadly, we know little about Helen Keller's love life except that she had a brief engagement with a "finger spelling Socialist" named Peter Fagan... Helen lived to be eighty-eight and was celebrated for most of her life. Anne Sullivan had a horrendous childhood: physical abuse and abandonment and time in a harsh orphanage. She had a stroke at thirty five, became blind and died at seventy. In a lot of ways, her life was harder and definitely shorter than that of Helen's.
I just don't understand how she would learn the fluidity of full sentences.
She read books.
After that visit, Keller spent nearly every winter studying at Perkins: “In the school where Laura Bridgman was taught I was in my own country.” Keller studied French, arithmetic, geography, and other subjects. She especially enjoyed the library of embossed books and the tactile museum’s collection of bird and animal specimens.
. . .
In 1909, she donated many braille books to the Perkins library.
Hearsay knowledge?! HEARSAY knowledge?! When a reviewer's entire stance is defined by a pun that bad, put one hand on your wallet and the other on a gun.
Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
I'm having a difficult time understanding the first part of the question. I get the 'what it was like' part, but the 'idiosyncratic' part seems out of place. Language forms our view of existence. She learned language from those around her. Why would any of that have been idiosyncratic? Had she learned language from the Hutu, her sense of expression would have been built on their oingo bongo speech forms.
I knew a Swedish woman who very fluently spoke 5 Western languages, but she said that she felt the most herself speaking in English which was not her mother tongue(s). She later became a powerhouse in Swedish television.
Why should Helen Keller's command of language have been idiosyncratic? She communicated in the language she knew and which expressed her understanding of the world and her place in it.
- Krumhorn
Every time I think I've plumbed the depths of human stupidity and worthlessness, I'm shown how wrong I am.
The people attacking Keller are some of the worst people it's ever been my misfortune to read
This post ties in nicely with the immediately following post about Hillsdale! Both deal with the idea of educators causing harm to their pupils by teaching them mimicry rather than how to think.
I have read of the problem of Hellen Keller becoming so good with language after being completely incapable of using it.
The answer may be that she was not born blind and deaf but had an illness at 19 months that caused her disabilities. She had some exposure to the world by sight and sound that helped form her mind. It was a matter of recovering her abilities, which must have been far easier.
"She was defended by Alexander Graham Bell..."
Come on, you know you secretly wish his last name was 'Cracker' instead...
I think it's possible.
Helen Keller had language until the brain injury caused by illness at the age of 19 months. She was still able to communicate after that, badly.
There isn't a definite language window for all people all the time. My oldest son only gained the ability to speak complex sentences properly at age 17. My understanding of the literature was that he couldn't do that, but he did. The answer seems to be that the language was in there but the ability to plan and express it lagged.
Brain damage is funny.The story of the Miracle Worker is the refusal to accept the disability as an excuse to lower expectations.Keller wasn't stupid.
My son supposedly is too disabled to do things he does every day. He interviewed for three different jobs this week.
I worked with a man who could barely see. He said he didn't disclose his disability to employers. He wouldn't be hired. The job we were doing didn't require reading. Our supervisor knew but higher management never did. He was easily the best performer.
So, have expectations for disabled people. A lot of disability is socially imposed.
Ann Althouse said...And — as the critics quoted in the snippet said — why was her head full of ideas that come from the world of people who are not deaf and blind? Why didn't she have an idiosyncratic form of expression that conveyed what it was like on the inside for her?
Wittgenstein had that as "if a lion could speak we could not understand him."
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