amycamus's Full Review: Russ Rymer - Genie a Scientific Tragedy: A Scienti...
It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever forget his or her first encounter with Genie. Mine came years ago, in a developmental psychology class, when the professor offered a film in place of the lecture she was unable to give due to an unavoidable absence. The film was an hour-long PBS special, and from the first image, of a hauntingly strange, beautiful, otherworldly child, I fell, and kept falling, into the terrible story of Genie.
The PBS show had been based on Russ Rymer’s book “Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight From Silence.” There are times in a reader’s life when he or she encounters a character so compelling that the urge to come closer, to inhabit the world of the character, is overwhelming. But what if the character is not fictional, but a living, breathing person, and beyond that, one with a life so devastatingly horrific that the desire to come closer seems, at best, inappropriate? Such is the case in the confrontation with Genie, and such was the case with those involved in Genie’s life. This attraction, rooted in a desire to understand, to help, to rescue, and, ultimately, to grapple with the circumstances of a life so difficult to believe, so nearly impossible to accept, is the subject of Rymer’s unforgettable account. There are some books like Rymer’s about which a review is beside the point and completely unnecessary, because the story is so important and compelling, and told so heartbreakingly, that additional words fall woefully short. And so with that inadequacy, and in that context, I find myself nonetheless writing one, in an effort to deal with the weight of Genie’s story.
The moniker in the subtitle to Rymer’s book, “an abused child,” absurdly, almost palatably belies the horrific degree of Genie’s mistreatment (the subtitle has mercifully been changed in subsequent editions to the more appropriate “A Scientific Tragedy”). It is a deeply ugly story. From infancy until her nearly blind, domestically-abused mother led her into a Los Angeles social welfare office 13 long years later, Genie was kept in a dark room, strapped down to an infant’s potty seat for the duration of each day, and kept in a wire mesh crib at night; often force-fed (she retained an inability to chew solid food); often beaten when she made a sound; and exposed to almost no human speech except her father’s occasional violent reprimands. Says one of the psychologists assigned to her case, “As far as I’m concerned, Genie was the most profoundly damaged child I’ve ever seen…there has been nothing in other cases to approach it. It was orders of magnitude worse.”
But Rymer’s book is not so much about the horrors of abuse as it is about the “forbidden experiment,” the millennia-old question of the origin of language, i.e. – if a child was raised in complete isolation, without human contact, would the child acquire language, and if so, what kind of language would it be? This is a topic that has been a major focus of linguists and psychologists since the disciplines came into existence. It is the centerpiece of the grand question of nature versus nurture. Prior to Genie, its most famous study subject was “Victor,” the so-called “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” discovered in the late 18th century in France, and subject of the ground-breaking, revolutionary, controversial studies by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard. And as Rymer points out, while the scientific community has rightfully found “the forbidden experiment” deeply unethical, “natural” examples of such an experiment have been almost universally treated with a less than exemplary ethical behavior.
Rymer details the extraordinary moment in the study of this question during which Genie seemed to drop, as though out of the blue Southern California sky, into the midst of a revolution in the study of the language question. Not long before her discovery, Noam Chomsky had come out with his radical and polarizing view of language as innate, as embedded in the form of syntactical structures in the genes, a theory that immediately divided linguists into nativist and non-nativist camps. Mere months before Genie’s discovery, additional research had given strong credence to the idea of language as having an inherently biological basis. And outside of linguistics, yet another contributing factor in setting the context for Genie’s splash into the scientific community was the Los Angeles premiere, a few months after her discovery, of François Truffaut’s film, “The Wild Child” (about Victor of Aveyron). Attended en masse by Genie’s observers, the film abbreviated the life of Victor, and optimistically stopped at the height of his progress in learning language. This fact of art was to have a deep influence on those studying Genie and hoping for a miraculous affirmative answer to the question of whether acquisition of language was possible after a hypothesized “critical period” which Genie had, by most suppositions, already passed.
Thus, the world into which Genie fell was one primed to the point of explosion for study of her unusual case. As one of the psychologists involved in her study stated, “Genie had become a prize. There was a contest about who was going to investigate her, and how.” And thus, Rymer’s book moves from considerations of the great questions of language and nature to perhaps even grander questions, those concerning the scientific and ethical abuse that followed Genie’s discovery by those entrusted with her care and with study of her case. For here had fallen a strange angel, a child whose father had essentially performed the famous “forbidden experiment,” allowing the scientific world, so ethically opposed to a clinical experiment of this type, to step in nonetheless – often with magnanimous intentions - to cull the consequences of Genie’s misfortune.
For all its difficult subject matter, “Genie” is an exquisitely written account. One almost feels Rymer, so touched by Genie’s virtual inability to use spoken language, compensates by insuring that his own use of it takes nothing for granted. He treads the difficult tightrope of telling Genie’s story factually, not judgmentally, while at the same time fully engaging our emotions. It is a story of a child’s welfare colliding with the dubious exigencies of scientific research - and, more importantly, perhaps, for those of us who are lay readers - with the best intentions of those touched by her desperate case, including us, as readers. This is a book one reads with (to borrow a beautiful phrase of Isak Dinesen) “all one’s soul…in one’s eyes.” It’s an engrossing but quite emotionally difficult work. As a reader, I found myself completely riveted, cheering Genie’s remarkable progress, nearly praying for her triumph over such a terrible and terrifying childhood. Her mysterious uniqueness, so immediately apparent in those first images of the PBS show I’d seen, cast a strange spell. Apparently, this spell had a nearly universal effect, for she was indeed a remarkable child. Her frailty, her strange movements, her penetrating eyes mesmerized all of those who came in contact with her. Moreover, she exhibited several striking, peculiar abilities. While she struggled to form sentences more than two or three words in length, she topped the charts in spatial ability tests. As well, she possessed an almost spooky ability to communicate non-verbally. As Susan Curtiss, a linguistics graduate student assigned to her case, said, “Genie was the most powerful non-verbal communicator I’ve ever come across.” By example, Curtiss tells of Genie’s unusual obsession with anything plastic, and of the time she and Genie were out walking and Curtiss suddenly heard a familiar sound. “A woman in a car that had stopped at the intersection was emptying her purse, and she got out of the car and ran over and gave it to Genie and then ran back to the car. A plastic purse. Genie hadn’t said a word.”
As I read, I also found myself increasingly dismayed and angry over the competing researchers, pulling Genie this way and that in order to have research rights over her. A simultaneous parallel competition, one equally angering and perhaps more immediately germane to us as readers, with our own hearts bursting in response to Genie’s dire tale, occurred among those wanting to be Genie’s guardian, wanting to be her rescuer, wanting to be the ones who led her out of her dark past into the shining light of a healthy adult life. It is a dark warning about how the best of intentions, and the most deeply emotional of responses, can nonetheless have terrible consequences.
I would rather not reveal where the various competitions for Genie as human being, as research subject, and as ward of the social service system lead; readers will discover that for themselves. “Genie” is a journalistic work that succinctly, sensitively, and eloquently not only deals with the horrors of Genie’s case, but wrestles with the great questions of linguistics and psychology, and more importantly, with the ethics of science and with the fundamental question of how we relate to one another as human beings. For these reasons, it is important reading not just for scientists, linguists, and psychologists, but also for all of us. At heart it deals with our universal engagement with the other. Rymer forces us, as readers, to examine our own responses to Genie’s case, and by extension to those who, for whatever reason, cannot speak for themselves. It commands our most respectful, concentrated responsibility in our human interactions. It is a cautionary tale that asks hard questions that reach beyond the ostensible subject matter of the book, urging us to turn a grateful spotlight to our least attempt at communication and a demanding mirror to our own humanity.
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