Books
Rachel Aviv
Tuesday, February 2 2006
-
photo: Bennie Cytrynbaum
Shell: Words, words, words
Details:
By Marc Shell
Harvard, 217 pp., $27.95
Most Popular
-
Scientology's Crushing Defeat A previously unpublished saga of an $8 million check
-
The Houses That Ruthlessness Built Welcome to middling baseball in sleek new cathedrals
-
Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem There's still no culprit for a notorious noose at Teachers College—but plenty of evidence behind the firing of Madonna Constantine
-
Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein Juicy details plucked from the garbage of a movie mogul
-
Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem, Part 2 How the Teachers College administration went from supportive to skeptical in the Constantine case
Marc Shell, a Harvard comp lit professor with a stutter, made a high school foray into literary criticism by comparing the speech patterns of Hamlet to those of Porky Pig. Both figures are "scant of breath" and speak "trippingly on the tongue." Shell, whose principal told him that a speech defect was a "sure sign" of being "retarded," invoked the fumbling pig ("Th-th-that's all folks!") to convince his classmates that the paralyzed prince had a medical condition as well as an emotional one. "Words, words, words," Hamlet stammers. "Except my life, except my life, except my life."
In Stutter, his impressive survey of cultural figures with "cloven tongues" (including God), Shell describes the trauma of being unable to speak right. If you can't pronounce your name, he says, people will assume you don't know it. One partial remedy for stammering is to take on a new persona: sing, act, learn a new language. Henry James dealt with his impediment by speaking French. Carly Simon "felt so strangulated talking" that she "did the natural thing"—perform music. For the more than 50 million people in the world with a "handicap in the mouth," picking the right words becomes an emotional process. (When Somerset Maugham, also tongue-tied, read his novels out loud, he'd replace "difficult" terms with their synonyms.) Anxious and isolated, stutterers often find more creative modes of expression. It's one way out of what Roger Rabbit calls "p-p-p-p-p-p-p . . . jail!" The other option is silence.
Recent Articles
More by Rachel Aviv
A Girl's Life
To chick or not to chick, that is the question
Double Jeopardy
Quiz show: Two books reveal the pleasures and perils of trivial pursuits
The Intelligencer
Inside the hypercompetitive world of high-IQ societies
Food for Thought
Talking with the LeFevres, a competitive eating couple
A Celebration of Bighearted, Idiosyncratic Indie Journals
Village Voice Insiders
- Weekly villagevoice.com
- Weekly freebies and Special Offers
- Daily "What To Do in NYC" E-mail
- Information on the Performing Arts
| buy, sell, trade 3,429 | musician 2,720 |
| rentals 18,450 | jobs 5,701 |
| adult entertainment 9,518 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|
