Deaf Sentence

In Brief Lives: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of David Lodge as his favorite novelist, as having covered the various phases of Kenny's life in fair synchrony, from troubled English Catholic (The British Museum is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go?), to academic (Changing Places, Small World, etc.), to older man hard of hearing (Deaf Sentence).  On hearing, Kenny writes of learning from the radio that an Oxford historian had been convicted of murder, trying with his wife to guess who might be the victim and who the murderer, and his wife suddenly understanding that he must have heard "Oscar Pistorius", not "Oxford Historian".

My own hearing is not what it was, or anyway not what it should be. I thought that I should follow up on Deaf Sentence, and have done so. On the first page, I learned of

what is known to linguists as the Lombard Reflex, named after Etienne Lombard, who established early in the twentieth century that speakers increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages. When many speakers display this reflex simultaneously they become, of course, their own environmental noise source, adding incrementally to its intensity.

(American restaurateurs love to produce the Lombard Reflex; I loathe it.)

 It is the conviction of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics that blindness is tragic, deafness comic. Lodge does get a good deal of comedy out of Bates's difficulties with noisy rooms, batteries that fail in hearing aids, and so on. I found myself grateful that I have rather more hearing left, and and am slightly older than Bates. On the other hand, the depiction of hearing aids is not encouraging.

Ultimately death does come into the novel--as part of history, as a wife's, as a father's.

I am glad to have read the book, and grateful to Kenny for having mentioned it.