Show of Hands: A Natural History of Sign Language

5. Deaf Gain: Visible Language in the Modern World

85 5 Deaf Gain:Visible Language in the Modern World This chapter considers the modern growth of understanding about the visual bases of language generally . We will also trace the evolution of the dissemination of language in the visual mode, which has grown with the technological innovations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the contribution that the deaf experience makes to our understanding of how to use visual modes of communication in general.We start in what seems at first to be an unlikely place—consideration of an influential work of literary theory from the early twentieth century. A recently released volume includes an original essay by Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” on the relevance of Chinese writing to modern poetry, along with the well-known 1919 posthumous version edited by Ezra Pound, and a critical essay by Haun Saussy (2008).The volume also contains additional pieces by Fenollosa. Many scholars consider the central piece in the volume, Pound’s edited version of Fenollosa’s original essay, to be an important source document for Imagism,a central force in the development of Modernist poetry early in the twentieth century. However, the essay has been roundly criticized by scholars of the Chinese language for naively representing the Chinese writing system as “ideographic” or pictorial. Saussy argues that the essay is better understood not as a serious 86 | Deaf Gain analysis of the system of Chinese characters (although Pound’s alterations may make it seem less serious in this regard than Fenollosa originally intended),but as a philosophical manifesto on the nature of human language in general and poetry in particular. Of special interest is its exposition of the nature of the visual perception of reality that inevitably underlies language of all kinds,whether it is ultimately expressed audibly or visually. In this regard, Fenollosa/Pound take up many of the concepts that later become important in the cognitive movement in linguistics—especially iconicity,gesture,and metaphor. Pound’s goal was to strip away the frills and trappings of the Victorian era in poetry from which the Western world was emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. Pound was thus led to announce an “ideogrammic” method, to show how abstraction could arise from concrete visual images . According to Saussy, in this regard Pound, through his understanding of Fenollosa, saw Chinese writing as a model for “valid thinking.” [Fenollosa] got to the root of the matter, to the root of the difference between what is valid in Chinese thinking and invalid or misleading in a great deal of European thinking and language. The simplest statement I can make of his meaning is as follows: In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a ‘color.’ If you ask him what a color is, he tells you it is vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. If you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being,or non-being,at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth. . . . Deaf Gain | 87 The Chinese will use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation , or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures. . . . He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint? He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE CHERRY IRON RUST FLAMINGO That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does . . . when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. (Saussy, Stalling, and Klein 2008, 4–5) Thus, according to Fenollosa/Pound, the Chinese...