It has been conclusively demonstrated by the distinguished linguist William C. Stokoe and others that sign language is a distinct and autonomous language with its own specific rules of grammar and syntax. It is the native language of the deaf, not English, which is one reason for the relative scarcity of deaf writers, another being the suppression of instruction in sign language-since a man who has never received methodical instruction in his own language can hardly be expected to write well in another language. But read Ballin and find out for yourself what sign language means to the deaf.
Yet the autobiographical centering of narrative on conflict between the deaf individual and the hearing society does not mean that the deaf writer is so preoccupied with the problems of the deaf in society as to forego the luxury of writing about the subtler and finer aspects of human perception and feeling. The Frenchman Eugene Relgis, a deaf friend and disciple of Romain Rolland, has written a more or less veiled autobiography (one chapter of which is included in this book) which sheds interesting light on what deafness means to a sensitive and intelligent young man who senses more keenly than most the attendant humiliations and Psychical tortures and yet succeeds in refining his powers of observation and imagination to a rare degree.
But Relgis' hero, while not unique, is not really representative of the deaf majority. The deaf Steppenwolf, the lone deaf outsider, is rarely encountered in real life in the United States. In Europe and elsewhere, for historical reasons there exists a sharp cleavage between deaf intellectuals and artists and the deaf man in the street, so that there such outsiders account for a much larger proportion of the deaf population. Belgis illustrates the danger of the isolation of the deaf intellectual from the community: toward the end of his fictionalized autobiography he loses his contact with reality so much that he resorts to the notorious miracle-cure motif and is thus perhaps the only deaf writer to give credence to a fallacy that has been foisted upon the public by misinformed hearing authors: if he had only associated with the other deaf a little more, if he had only studied the anatomy of hearing, he would have known that no cure is possible for those with a sensorineural hearing loss, i.e., for a majority of the deaf.