Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?
The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.
Edmund Wilson once remarked that F. Scott Fitzgerald mispronounced more words than any other educated person he knew. And Fitzgerald took as his orthographic guide his own sense of how a word should look, and sometimes how he remembered how it should look. I don’t think he cared. As Mencken points out in his survey of American orthography, from Benjamin Franklin to Noah Webster, Americans have been going at the English language as one in need of the American stamp. “Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell, i.e. who spell phonetically and logically, he [Webster] made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters…”
Dyslexia, of course, is not simply a matter of phonetically adjusted lexical alterations, but a sort of difference in the regard cast on the printed or written word that sees bushes and entanglements where we who are lexic have been taught to see only the flow and the norm.
In M.J. Philpott’s A Phenomenology of Dyslexia:The Lived-body, Ambiguity, and the Breakdown of Expression, he gives a succinct description of the condition:
“Dyslexia is marked by delay in acquiring advanced linguistic functions such as grammar, and general slowness in completing written and reading tasks . With some variations, the key features of dyslexia are widely accepted as entailing difficulties in learning to read and/or spell, much of which stems from problems of ordering and sequencing letters/words/digits, e.g., reversing the letters within a word. Other problems that can occur as a correlate of these difficulties could involve trying to locate abstract notions, such as identifying a left or right side of a perspective, or trying to locate the days of the week.”
Philpott’s article takes seriously the subjective end of the dyslexic situation – he is, himself, a dyslexic. Between the ages of six and seven, he had to deal with his school’s disapproval of his “laziness” – after which his parents found a school that dealt with dyspraxias of various kinds. But, as he writes, “although I have learned to cope through various self-monitoring strategies, my handling of structuring a piece of writing, the time it takes to complete, and elementary writing/spelling and reading mistakes are still highly problematic.”
Here, though, is the part that interests me the most in this phenomenologically oriented account:
“A second, and perhaps deeper phenomenon, involves problems related with maintaining the flow or sequencing of language. This is associated with problems I have with the slowness of my linguistic tasks, for although I am not necessarily distracted from my task, it is as though the momentum of my work starts to slow right down, or even stop altogether. As I experitence this phenomenon—although I can be composing a sentence quite easily and lucidly, and although it feels as if a certain momentum is underpinning my composition quite unknown to myself, and through no effect of what could be crudely termed “inattention”—I will suddenly realize that the composition process, indeed the page/screen itself has lost all its vivacity, and the momentum that carried me before has completely broken down.”
I recognize this. Not only in my own writing practice, but in the letters of writers like Flaubert and Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. In the career of Pessoa and Robert Walser. And it makes me wonder if there is not some distinct, historically conditioned dyslexic instance in the field of writing that comes into play in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the thick realistic novel, where the loss of vivacity is part of the drama of composition. Flaubert’s letters are an extended witness to this loss and recovery, this dyslexic instance.
That instance is a great secret watermark in, for instance, the poetry of modernism, in the working towards failure which so often seems to be summoned by it to, as it were, countermand it.
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