Human life without language

Jul 18 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Writer Carol Fenlon _220

Laura Davis meets the award-winning author exploring the lives of feral children

IN THE beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. For 2,000 years, this passage from the Gospel of John has linked religion with language at the very beginning of human existence.

Faith is what separates us from animals, argue the religious, while philosophers say it is language that defines the human being.

But, imagine if there were no words – no way of demonstrating our personalities through our precise choice of synonym or inflection, no books to read, soap operas without voices.

Would that make us less human?

This is the question Carol Fenlon posed herself when working on Consider the Lilies, the story of a feral child that recently won the Impress Prize for New Writers.

In her novel, Vicky is a 40-something woman who had been discovered in a barn as a nine-year-old child, neglected and capable of speaking only a few words.

“It’s difficult because you have to use language to explore what it would be like with no language,” explains Carol, 60, who is studying at Edge Hill University.

“The case I used to research Vicky’s language was an American one in the 1970s, of a girl kept in a basement until she was 13. She was kept tied to a chair and I think she was put in a cage at night. It was quite strange because there were other children in the family who were treated normally.

“She spoke in strings of words, not proper sentences. There’s an argument that, if you don’t acquire social skills by a certain age, then you never do.”

In Consider the Lilies, the story is told through the eyes of Hermit Jack, a GP who runs away from his life after the death of his daughter and meets Vicky while living on the streets of modern-day Liverpool.

During passages where Vicky is present, the action and the physical page are split in two, with her perception of the situation printed alongside Jack’s.

So while the following is happening to the former GP: “I slit my eyes open just a fraction and it’s a few moments before I realise it’s the girl from the cupboard. Is she going to attack me?”, for Vicky the experience is told without punctuation or any formal structure: “oldgreybeardman nonoise nonoise nonoise oldbeardgreyman no sleep eye move no sleep no body move see vicky vicky scared vicky no body move oldgreybeardman scared scare vicky”.

Other forms of language also help to tell the story – including a diary kept by Vicky’s mother, medical reports on her development as a child, and newspaper accounts of her discovery.

Carol first became interested in the subject while reading Savage Girls and Wild Boys, by Michael Newton, an account of many real cases of feral children. When further research revealed just how often feral children appear in fiction – Tarzan, Jungle Book and the recent Japanese animation, Princess Mononoke, are just a few of the many examples – she decided it would make an interesting topic for the PhD in creative writing she is currently completing at Edge Hill University.

“When you start looking, it’s surprising how often feral children feature in literature and film. There have been stories of children being deserted and growing up among animals since ancient times – Roman mythology tells of how Rome was founded by Romulus, who was brought up by a wolf,” explains Carol, who is originally from Worcester but now lives in Skelmersdale.

“There’s a poem by Seamus Heaney, Bye Child, which is based on a real-life case from the 1950s of a boy (Kevin Halfpenny) kept in a chicken shed in Ireland, and there are quite a lot of children’s books on the subject.