Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (excerpt)
This excerpt from a monograph on deafness in Western culture is designed to frame our ensuing conversations about ontologies of speech and silence. It is informative but not infallible or unproblematic (as with Aristotle). Please read with a critical eye.
Francois Truffaut, Wild Child (L’Enfant Sauvage, 1971)
Based on the journals of an eighteenth-century doctor, The Wild Child is the true story of a boy found naked, speechless, filthy and living on all fours in a forest near Aveyron in 1798. Truffaut himself plays the doctor who takes the eponymously “savage” boy into his charge and attempts to “civilize” him.
Why is the wild boy the way he is? And what does it mean to be “wild”? How do language and articulate speech fit into the equation? Does the wild boy have a “voice” in the story? Is he free? How does the film understand freedom (from the perspective of different characters)?
What does it mean to be human or animal? How does this film relate to the passage of Aristotle’s Politics we read in our first class?
What does it mean to be “civilized”? Can a person become civilized? How? What is the philosophy of pedagogy or education advocated by Itard?
Consider that the Wild Boy of Aveyron turned up in the midst of the French Enlightenment, an era of fervent philosophical inquiry into the nature of man outside of culture, occasioned in part by the country’s colonial expansion into territories regarded as savage or wild. How might we read the film as a colonialist allegory?
On the subject of form, how would you characterize the genre of the film? Medical case study? Narrative drama? By what techniques does Truffaut align his film with either these or other genres?
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