So, remember that whole thing about A Literature of Sign, and how the heck are you supposed to put ASL into a book for an English audience when ASL has no standard orthography?
Well, Sara Nović does some stuff. True Biz is a 2022 novel about the administration, students, and families of students of the fictional River Valley School for the Deaf boarding high school. It's straight-up realistic fiction, practically literary, exploring civil rights and what it's like to grow up deaf in a hearing world--really not my usual genre, but dangit, I liked it anyway, and it's certainly linguistically interesting. There is so much linguistically-interesting stuff, in fact, that I gave up and stopped putting in bookmarks after page 87 out of 381 in the hardcover edition--so, I will not be quoting every example of non-English representation in this review, just a representative sample that's indicative of the range of techniques used.
The first notable thing Nović does in this novel is not use quotation marks to set off dialog, even when characters are speaking orally. It's a little jarring at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly. I am not sure what the authorial intent behind this decision was, but for me it had the effect of turning off (or rather, failing to turn on) my internal voice when encountering dialog, thus distancing my experience of the text from the mental audio loop. Which I could totally believe is part of the intent, since it's a book about Deaf people!
One of our viewpoint characters is Charlie, a severely hard-of-hearing girl whose parents opted for a cochlear implant that doesn't really work right, resulting in language deprivation. She begins learning ASL when transferred to River Valley, and her experience is contrasted with that of Austin, a native signer from a multi-generational Deaf family. Charlie doesn't alwasy understand everything that is being said to or around her, in ASL or in English, and Nović represents this with underscores inserted into dialog in place of words that Charlie missed. Where relevant, there misunderstandings are resolved diegetically--so you, the reader, understand exactly as much and in the same way Charlie. For example:
[The headmistress] looked back at Charlie. _____ here at school will be key, she said. As with any language.
The what? said Charlie.
The headmistress removed a notepad from beneath a pile of paperwork.
IMMERSION she wrote.
Immediately before this, we get a nuanced introduction to simcomm (simultaneous communication), although it is not explicitly referenced that way.
To sign and talk at the same time was an imperfect operation, the headmistress warned, and one Charlie wouldn't see much of at River Valley after today. Charlie longed to find meaning in the arc of the woman''s hands, but that meant looking away from her lips, something she couldn't afford to do.
ASL conversations are all translated into English in italics, but Nović captures some of the spatial nature of ASL by arranging the dialog in columns according to the speaker, so each speaker's ASL dialog is spatially separated on the page just as their signing spaces would be separated in reality. Even when quoting a single ASL speaker, not in a conversation, their words and dialog tags will be confined to a distinct column separated from the flow of the main text, emphasizing the spatially-confined nature of the ASL utterance. The first example of such a conversation is as follows:
You hungry?
Hi, sweetie. How's school? All set up?Getting there.How was the meeting?Fine, she said.
The girl struggled in mainstream.
No surprise there.I'm sure you'll fix her right up.We will. Come eat.
Right at the beginning of the book, I was uncertain whether this was intended to be a book for a Deaf audience, or a book to explain Deafness to a hearing audience. One particular feature shifted me solidly to the "this is for us hearies" side, though--the periodic inclusion between chapters of non-fiction explanatory notes on aspects of ASL and of Deaf culture and history that may be relevant to understanding whats going on in the adjacent chapters. This feels like a form of paratext, but where linguistic paratext usually takes the form of, e.g., name pronunciation guides in the front matter or back matter, or glossaries in an appendix--all presentations which can be easily skipped over if the reader doesn't care about them--this is interleaved with the main text, so it must be engaged with. This seems like an excellent way to present additional information about a minority culture in the real world, but I am uncertain how well it would translate to, for example, explaining a conlang in a fictional world. I was slightly reminded of this by the fictionally-non-fictional excerpts from the eponymous guide in Brandon Sanderson's The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England (review forthcoming), so it might be workable.
Finally, Nović occasionally includes schematic illustrations of signs inline in the text. Most pervasively, each chapter is headed with an illustration of the ASL fingerspelling handshape for that chapter's viewpoint character's first initial. In a couple of places, however, where Charlie is learning new signs, dictionary-style schematic illustrations of complex signs are included in parallel with the italicized-English translations. This is not at all space efficient, so it can't be used everywhere, but limited deployment works to help teach the reader a small number of signs and provide an initial mental image to help inform how you interpret subsequent conversations as signalled by the ASL-specific page formatting.
If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation!
No comments:
Post a Comment