The mute speak - the writing of disabled authors Stephen Hawking, Christopher Nolan and Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer

Humanist, March-April, 1996 by Denise Noe

Quite often in popular fiction, we meet a character who can hear but not talk. Such mutes are rare in real life. It is vital to note at the outset that mute in this context means "lack of language" rather than "lack of vocalization." Sign languages are just as valid as spoken ones, and the deaf community is a very proud, accomplished, and articulate group. Indeed, many deaf people do not even consider themselves "disabled" but, rather, members of a linguistic minority. However, our fictional, hearing mutes do not know sign and thus truly lack language--although they understand it.

What do these uncommunicative characters represent? One answer to this question is obvious--and sexist. Observed Yvette Mimieux, an actress who played such a role: "It's probably a male fantasy--a woman who can't talk." But fictional male mutes also appear, usually in horror tales. Irrespective of gender, they are spooky, these strangely silent people. What have they seen? What secrets are they keeping? Will they break through that barrier of silence?

The three books discussed in this essay all attempt to answer these questions. Unlike their fictional counterparts, each of these mute authors is physically disabled. They also tell their secrets.

Stephen Hawking grew up able-bodied and able to speak. While a graduate student working on his doctoral thesis, he started losing his coordination and was diagnosed as having motor neuron disease, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease. In the years that followed, Hawking's body deteriorated while he did landmark work in physics.

Though most of his limbs are now paralyzed and his voice box has been removed, Stephen Hawking has never stopped communicating. With the help of a laptop computer, the scientist uses one finger to tap out his thoughts. His words appear on a screen and can be heard through a vocal synthesizer. Through this slow, arduous process, Hawking has lectured and written many complex scientific papers as well as A Brief History of Time, a popular work on cosmology in which Hawking discusses scientific answers to the most basic questions--why does the universe exist? will it exist forever?--for a lay audience.

While Hawking's achievements would have brought him fame in any case, his disability ensures that his photograph appears in any article about him. The great physicist in his wheelchair, muscles dramatically wasted, seems to personify what the Economist called "the universe in a nutshell."

Christopher Nolan's silence is the most ironic since he is a literary genius. Severely afflicted by cerebral palsy since birth, Nolan has never spoken or signed a word in his life, yet his poetry has been compared to that of Joyce, Keats, and Yeats. The drug Lioresal has given Nolan a minimal degree of muscular control in his neck so that he can hit the keys on a typewriter by means of a stick affixed to his head. (This process may, be even more arduous than that used by Hawking. Through use of this "unicorn," Nolan wrote the poems, short stories, and plays collected in Dam-Burst of Dreams as well as his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock.

Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer may be the most tragic figure under discussion. Like Christopher Nolan, she has cerebral palsy; unlike him, she lacks even minimal muscular control. As the title of her autobiography indicates, she says "yes" by raising her eyes, "no" by lowering them, and "maybe" with a curled lip. She also "talks" through her "word boards"--laminated pieces of white cardboard on which words, phrases, and numbers are arranged in rows and columns. The person with whom she communicates points to a row to ask if a word she wants to say is there; she answers with her eyes. Then the two must go through columns and rows together until they get to the word she picks. Thus, she conveys thoughts and experiences but cannot share with us the specific rhythm and pattern of her thoughts. Unlike Hawking and Nolan, she must have a coauthor.

Why now? one wonders. Why is our age one in which so many of the "mute" are talking? The answer is twofold, both scientific and cultural. Christopher Nolan's Lioresal and Stephen Hawking's computerized voice synthesizer are blessings of modem science. (A striking irony: a voice synthesizer is also used by Koko the signing gorilla. The political and social upheavals of the last decades--beginning with the civil-rights movement of the 1960s through the second wave of the women's movement and the more recent activism of disabled groups--have opened our ears to the previously silenced. We hear because we listen. Indeed, in the case of Ruth Sienkiewicz, Mercer, the cultural milieu may deserve total credit, as she has benefited from no drugs or technological devices.

As a result, the works of these authors teach us much about our common humanity. People are different, but they are far more alike than different. In I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes, Sienkiewicz-Mercer opens her chapter on the Belchertown Institution with a sentiment common to institutional residents everywhere, whether they are college students, hospital patients, or jail inmates: "FOOD.LIKE.SHIT."