When Jonty Claypole was growing up with a stutter, the role models available were not encouraging: Porky Pig; Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours; and, of course, the novelty single “Stutter Rap”. A condition that humiliated Claypole and countless stuttering contemporaries was seldom played for anything but laughs in popular culture.
That may have changed – a little – but it has not changed enough. The project of this book is to unravel some of the cultural and medical history of, and explain the complex and varied conditions that affect, what are usually called “speech disorders” – and to argue that their impact on those who have them is substantially worsened by a society that insists on seeing them straightforwardly as disorders in the first place. Claypole marshals everyone from Deleuze and Guattari to Lewis Carroll and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to give evidence.
He addresses the four most common such conditions. There’s his own, stuttering or stammering: “involuntary, audible or silent repetitions or prolongations in the utterance of short speech elements”. There are the tics associated with Tourette syndrome: involuntary vocal exclamations typically accompanied by physical movement. There are various forms of aphasia – which can govern difficulty in finding words, ordering or pronouncing them – usually the result of some sort of brain injury. And there’s dysarthria, which is difficulty in pronouncing words intelligibly as a result of nerve or muscular damage from conditions including cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s or motor neurone disease.
Do these belong together? Claypole makes the case that they do – though that is as much a political decision as a neurological one: “Considered individually, they can appear rarefied or obscure conditions. As a result, the case for research funding has sometimes been hard to make, and campaigns to tackle social prejudice have rarely reached critical mass.” That grouping, though often richly suggestive, does pose one of the book’s main problems: you’ll find no opposition in arguing that discrimination, mockery and prejudice against people with disfluency is wrong; but it’s harder to make the case for seeing conditions caused by serious injury as empowering.
Claypole’s broad argument, in any case, is that not only the disfluent, but all of us would benefit from overcoming the default prejudice in favour of verbal fluency. Here he follows Andrew Solomon’s line in Far from the Tree, which explored what the author called the “horizontal identities” of those with a whole range of nonstandard conditions that have traditionally been stigmatised as disability. Just as we’ve seen a movement for neurodiversity when it comes to people on the autism spectrum, Claypole says, we need to extend that idea to people with neurodiversity of language.
The causes of these speech conditions are not fully understood. They seem to be primarily neurological, but their expression can be cultural and psychological. For those who stutter – a condition that seems to come and go capriciously – situational anxiety strongly affects how it manifests. The pathologisation of the condition – the idea that it’s something to be “cured”; the visible embarrassment it often causes in fluent interlocutors – does much, Claypole says, to exacerbate its negative effects and occlude its positive ones.
As he argues, people with speech disorders are often more creative and linguistically able than those without. People such as Claypole with an “interiorised stutter” (ie “passing” for fluent) become adept at finding the easier-to-pronounce synonym, or the run of syllables that will let them jump into a tricky word. Where the “hyper-fluent” can sound convincing by half-consciously stringing together shopworn set phrases, if you’re trying to avoid stuttering, or you’re a person with dysarthria spending precious and limited energy getting each sentence out, you really have to think about what you’re saying. Tourettic tics and aphasic substitutions show their own, albeit involuntary, creativity. And the paralinguistic means by which the disfluent enhance their communication have an expressive richness of their own.
Inasmuch as this book has a single villain, it’s Sigmund Freud. As long ago as the mid-19th century, proto-neurological accounts of the origins of speech disorders – and impressively humane and patient-centred approaches to resolving them – were starting to emerge. But the great 20th-century vogue for psychoanalysis, as Claypole explains, set back understanding of speech disorders for decades. Psychoanalysts with little or no therapeutic experience built tottering edifices of bullshit on foundations of horse manure. Stuttering on consonantal sounds, pronounced the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, indicated “sphincter action ... with anal inhibition”. He thought tics, on the other hand, were “stereotyped equivalents of Onanism”. Not hard to see how – just as when autism conditions were blamed on “refrigerator mothers” – this view tended to shame and stigmatise; not to mention being therapeutically worse than useless.
Claypole’s argument would have benefited from a tighter focus and a more rigorous grounding in linguistics. He doesn’t, it seems to me, make a clear enough distinction between spoken and written language. The fluencies we value are more plural than he allows, and in his most disorganised and least convincing chapter – on “The Tyranny of Fluency” – he zooms between Hitler’s speeches, Logan Paul’s YouTube videos, Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present, Ted Talks, the history of logocentrism and the rise of capitalism in as many pages.
But if its theoretical flights sometimes seem too vague, and its assault on “fluency” at once too scattershot and too utopian, his book is nevertheless humane, thought-provoking, and rich in experiential detail. I especially enjoyed a nugget from one of Claypole’s many interviews, with the writer Colm Tóibín, who recalled “a little fucker called Titch Hogan. He would follow me home from school going ‘dud-duh-duh-duh’ the whole way. I put his mother into one of my books.”
• Words Fail Us: In Defence of Disfluency is published by Wellcome/Profile (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
