Seven Oaks Magazine.

Because he had a new book out, I once had to interview John Douglas, the former FBI agent credited with creating the computer profiling used to track down serial killers. One of his many tricks for finding them, he told me, was always to look for a guy who stutters. I’m reminded of this unpleasant encounter by Stutter (Harvard University Press, US$27.95) by Marc Shell, a Montreal francophone who teaches comparative literature at Harvard.

Stutter doesn’t dwell on the causes of stuttering (there are many other books to do that, almost no two of them in agreement). Neither is it a memoir of living with this particular handicap (though it has elements of that). Consistent with his role in academic life, it is, rather, a treatise on the semiotics of stuttering, full of complex yet playful ideas about stuttering’s relationship to linguistics and culture. “Literary critique is useful in analyzing stuttering,” he writes, “partly because the intellectual history of rhetorical terms […] often matches the scholarly development of concomitant ideas in neurology.” What’s of interest to general readers is the foundation of controlled but completely justifiable anger on which the book is built.

Shell doesn’t offer himself as a case study, but we are free to do so, using the autobiographical tidbits he supplies. Some people who stutter find that the handicap is far less severe in another language. But Shell, growing up in Québec, was able to stutter in both French and English and—what’s even more inexpressibly Canadian―to do so through the linguistic filter of his immigrant parents. “As I saw it,” he writes, “my speaking with a stutter and speaking with an improper (Yiddish) accent were similar problems.” All classrooms and other markets of social interaction are unbearable to the stutterer, but Hebrew school seems to have been an especially murderous ordeal for Shell growing up in the 1950s.

He was also a victim of the polio epidemic of that time, and feels sympathy for Charles Laughton’s character in the Josef von Sternberg film I, Claudius who says, “I limp with my tongue and stutter with my leg.” He cites the theory that there may well be a direct connection between stuttering and polio in cases such as his (and also, by the way, that of Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist). He also believes that he himself “was probably genetically predisposed to stutter. Several family members of mine stutter in some way. And researchers have demonstrated a familial—if not also genetic—predisposition to stutter [while] medical scholars point to similarities between stuttering and Tourette’s Syndrome.”

Even stutterers who happen to be intellectuals are so consumed with coping as best they can that they hesitate to examine the handicap too closely. An example would be the British theatre director, writer, performer—and medical doctor—Jonathan Miller, whose pronouncements on his problem are always most superficial. Clearly Shell isn’t such an individual. It’s simply that language is his field and so it’s via the study of language that he approaches the subject, as when discussing stuttering and otherness through such topics as the shibboleth (a word that native speakers wait to see how others pronounce to determine whether, and to what extent, the speakers are foreigners and outsiders). To those who stutter, Shell says, every word is a shibboleth. As a result, they tend to avoid unnecessary conversation. (“Muteness,” he writes, “is often a clearer symptom of stuttering than audible stammering.”) Later he adds that, for him, “a situation in which a silent person successfully pretends to be mute instead of ‘coming out’ as a stutterer is like that of a stumbling polio survivor in a plaster leg-cast pretending to be an athlete with a broken leg…”

As fashionable cultural-studies academics do these days, Shell draws a great deal of his text from pop culture. Porky Pig plays a more significant role in his argument than does Moses from the Bible or Demosthenes from Greek mythology. Yet he mentions only a few of the past outrages systematically perpetrated against stutterers, who once were thought to suffer demonic possession. In another era, they had their tongues slit with knives. Some ignorant people even believe that stuttering is infectious. But the commonest assumption about those who stutter (although I usually prefer anglicised terms, I resist the too-genteel “stammer”) is that they are, as people used to say, “retarded.” Even today, many are held back in school, as Shell was.

Perhaps the worst discrimination is simply the well-meaning idea that stuttering is a mere “impediment” when it’s a handicap—less horrible than blindness or deafness certainly but not of a different scientific order. But as Shell seems to say with a sigh, “Even the most ‘politically correct’ person […] would have to admit that at times he has laughed at the stutterer.” Here the stutterer walks a fine line indeed. To talk about the problem is to be accused of self-pity. Not to talk about is to shirk the educational outreach that so obviously needs to be undertaken. Shell takes his readers through much of the clinical vocabulary of speech therapy: raulism, palialia, dyslalia, dyshemia and so on. But in my view he pays too much attention to Marilyn Monroe. Let me explain.

She is one of the individuals (others include Winston Churchill and the actor James Earl Jones) whom stutterers are constantly told once stuttered horribly but who “overcame” their disability and went on to be what the culture most values: celebrities. The implication is that they ditched their handicap thanks to some moral superiority or at least a kind of Nietzschean willpower. “If they could do it,” friends, family and teachers seem to be saying with their sceptical expressions, “then why can’t you? Is the reason that you’re lazy as well as stupid?”

In fact, what we call stuttering is actually two related yet essentially different phenomena. Primary stuttering is a psychological disturbance that affects boys and girls at about age five or six and goes away in adolescence (is “outgrown,” as condescending grown-ups say). This is what Marilyn, Winston and James all had. Adult stuttering, which affects far more men than women by an overpowering margin, arrives at the same stage of life and may or may not have some psychological triggers. But it is especially a different problem, with one or more closely connected physiological causes, not yet precisely explored, in the speech centre of the brain (on the port side, amidships).

Speech is one of the most complex tasks the body performs. The neurological equipment necessary for talking involves an enormous number of protocols and moving parts, as it were. Not all the switching mechanisms in the adult stutterer’s speech centre perform as they should, in many instances no doubt due to tiny and otherwise unimportant episodes of brain damage incurred at birth. Life would have been so much less tragic for stutterers and those who care about them if only science had given the two problems different names—in somewhat the same way Canadians wouldn’t be so obsessed with comparing the Canadian dollar’s performance with the American dollar’s if the Fathers of Confederation had had the foresight to replace pound sterling with a currency unit called the beaver or the doubloon or something.

Shell writes: “The main cause of stutterers’ distress is neither the terrible stereotyping of stutterers—‘bad character,’ ‘low intelligence’ and so forth—nor the deplorable discrimination that keeps stutterers from reaching their potential in the school and workplace. What is all but unique about the stutterer’s world is the individual loneliness….” Stutterers are of necessity loners—and this only perpetuates some of the misconceptions. Which brings me back to John Douglas, the former FBI fellow.

Donald H. Wolfe’s new book The Black Dahlia Files (HarperCollins Canada, $36.95) is the latest of numerous works about a gruesome 1947 Los Angeles murder, never solved, in which a young woman was cut in half and dumped in a vacant lot. One earlier author suggested that his own fathers committed the crime; others were almost equally imaginative. Wolfe’s thesis is that the murderer was the mobster Bugsy Siegel. In making his argument, he also devotes several pages to a cold-case investigation done by Douglas in 1999. Douglas theorised that the killer was someone who had a “rigid, patient, compulsive and deliberate” personality—and probably “stuttered…”. If he were alive, Siegel, who was indeed a psychopathic killer, would probably sue for libel.

George Fetherling (www.subwaybooks.com) is a regular contributor to Seven Oaks and the author, most recently, of Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories. He entered speech therapy in 1955.