At some point one in every 150 children will lose the ability to speak in certain situations, though we still don’t fully understand why. Such children were once thought simply obstinate. As their silence was taken to be deliberate, the label “elective mutes” was applied to them by medical professionals as recently as 1994. Now, as Harriet Shawcross points out in her gripping account of different kinds of aphasia, the preferred term is “selective mutes” – to make it clear that this sort of silence is the result not of choice but of paralysing anxiety. Shawcross knows the territory intimately: at 13, she herself stopped speaking at school for nearly a year. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Unspeakable is a deeply felt attempt at making sense of this period in her life, and of how others manage when words fail them.
Elective mutism or selective mutism: in a therapeutic context, one consonant can make all the difference between a punitive and a sympathetic approach. Shawcross examines some of the more extreme methods enlisted to get selectively mute patients to speak, from ingesting “blessed wax” – used by a priest to cure a little boy in Switzerland in 1934 – to total-immersion-style American camps in which sufferers are exposed to a constant stream of chatter. Her own inability to communicate appears to have been a response to family upheavals and resolved itself without intervention, but she remains finely attuned to every kind of silence.
The development of “the talking cure” as a distinct therapeutic discipline was, ironically, given a boost by the rise of aphasia as a byproduct of combat disorder during the first world war. Traumatic memory is non-verbal; this is why it is so difficult for the brain to process it. Freud’s breakthrough realisation that certain psychosomatic symptoms are a response to trauma, and treatable if words can be put to the affect, came to be of crucial interest to British military psychiatrists trying to solve the enigma of shell shock. An early paper on the topic insisted that the afflicted had to regain ‘volitional control’ of their buried memories if they were to get better. Western mental health care has never looked back.
Shawcross is broadly sceptical, both about the curative power of words and of off-the-peg concepts of the self. When she goes to Nepal to interview survivors of the 2015 earthquake she learns about dukkha, an alternative understanding of suffering in which loss and grief are normalised rather than pathologised. What’s more, according to Nepalese ideas of the self, ‘feelings of distress do not originate in the brain, as neuroscience teaches us, but in an organ called the “heart-mind”’. As a result local talk therapies have had to be adapted to accommodate an entirely different understanding of what makes us human.
Still, the notion that we are sense-making animals is hard to shift. Trauma affects our ability to tell stories, to create a narrative with a fixed beginning, middle and end. Narrative Exposure Therapy, one of the treatments pioneered in Nepal, asks subjects to try to restore equilibrium to their memory of events by revisiting their experiences in minute detail, so as to transform them into “words on the page, contained and controlled”. But a Dutch psychotherapist quoted by Shawcross is horrified at the fact that earthquake victims were asked to recount their trauma: “When you tell the story you physically re-live it … so it will trigger all these responses, and you could easily be re-traumatised.”
What happens, then, when stories fall short? Shawcross is open to the idea that there is a central element of experience that lies beyond language, a view supported by recently popularised methods of processing trauma through Somatic Experiencing, focusing on bodily sensations without recourse to traditional talk therapy. As an adult she again seeks refuge in not speaking as a response to a difficult experience – this time, after coming out as bisexual. While on a silent Buddhist retreat in Scotland following “the relentless dialogue” of self-disclosure, she starts to appreciate that “silence could be cathartic, a salve for buried hurt, just as it could be repressive”. The final quarter of the book explores the restorative action of withdrawing from language, steering clear of triteness by including cautionary tales about instances where an unguided enthusiasm for meditation has triggered depression in 21st-century practitioners. She consults a psychologist who hazards, not very helpfully, that “these contemplative methods were probably developed for people who had a much more robust sense of self” than ours. In other words, unless you are a 12th-century ascetic, do not try this at home.
Beyond all this talk about social and cultural constructions, however, is the more fundamental truth that language is self-referential. To grasp it is, as Wittgenstein knew, still not to grasp a content of any sort. We only ever speak about words, never about the world. The American poet George Oppen, who couldn’t write a line for 25 years and whose story Shawcross weaves into her account with skill and sensitivity, liked to stress that “words were not transparent. They got in the way”. Yet words are what we have. Unspeakable is billed as a study of the power of silence, but is as much an affirmation of the vital safety net of speech.
One of the most touching cameos in this compassionate book is the picture of Mother Hildegarde, a nun at the Tyburn Convent, an entirely silent Benedictine order in London. When Shawcross arrives to interview her she finds a woman “who starts telling me about silence before she has fully sat down, barely stopping to draw breath”. After two and a half hours of this, Shawcross observes that “she seems to miss chatting”. Mother Hildegarde agrees, adding in a magnificent understatement that “when you are in the monastery you keep it down”. She also reveals that her father cut her off for two years after she told him that she had decided to join the order. “I am struck once again,” Shawcross writes, “by the way silence is so often met with anger.” Perhaps it’s neither speech nor silence that is the problem, only the context in which they occur.
• Elizabeth Lowry’s novel Dark Water is published by riverrun. Unspeakable is published by Canongate (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
