Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan: Writing Otherwise

In his essay "The Style of Autobiography", Jean Starobinski remarks, "One would hardly have sufficient motive to write an autobiography had not some radical change occurred [. . .] conversion, entry into a new life, the operations of Grace". From the beginning, the traumatic events of Keller's childhood — her loss of sight and hearing around age two — marked her not only as "outsider" and "other" but also as "autobiographer" even before she acquired language. "I can show so little visible proof of living", Keller confessed. Perhaps for this reason she filled the "white darkness" she lived in with writing — first with finger spelling traced in the hand, then with Braille, and finally with type. While each medium seemed to bring her closer to the dream — her own and her century's — of transparent communication, so each text she produced threatened to turn into a "black box", an instrument designed to collect and preserve data for analysis following a catastrophic event, but one that inevitably fails to illumine the inner world of Keller's deaf-blindness. This essay explores Keller's dreaming within the black box of writing, following her impossible desire for an "instrument which will show what takes place in the mind when we think".