Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

For the next several years Clever lived like a mad aristocrat: imprisoned in luxury, disallowed to venture beyond the twenty-room house and the ten acres of land surrounding it, yet with his every crazy whim slavishly attended to by a revolving crew of graduate students who kept him company, cared for him, fed and washed him, entertained him, and were always, and with steadily increasing desperation, trying to teach him sign language. As Clever got older and the experiment wore on, Troutwine frantically jumped from one methodological tack to another, changing methods of data collection and analysis in accordance with the nature of the results. Over the years, the logistics of the Clever Hands project exponentially compounded in complexity and eventually spiraled out into unmanageable oblivion. Not one fluent ASL signer ever worked on the experiment. Troutwine would sit Clever down for hours of deliberate instruction in a makeshift “classroom” they built in the house. His teachers would make signs and try to get him to mimic them, often molding his hands to make the signs. In order to keep getting funding from the National Science Foundation, Henry Troutwine (who gradually withdrew in all ways but in name from the daily experiments, and in the end had little actual contact with Clever) was forced to publish the results. What he called his data were measured by things like how many signs Clever had made on his own, with no instructional prompting, and whether or not he was making the signs in appropriate contexts. Such data were deeply vulnerable to subjective interpretation and often too amoebic and vague to measure; ergo, the data were difficult to gather in any way that conformed to acceptable scientific methodology. Clever learned hundreds of signs, but never used them in any way that met the experimenters’ definition of language. He never acquired anything that could be called syntax, never had anything resembling grammar. Although young Clever’s cuteness made him a darling of the public — he was featured on TV talk shows and so on (maybe even because of this public interest in his cuteness) — within the scientific community the Clever Hands experiment fell under deep scrutiny, then doubt, then outward hostility, until Troutwine lost his funding and the experiment went under. Troutwine shut down the project, closed the facilities, and washed his hands of it all. Then, to save face, he decided to join the opposition, and denounced the project as a failure in a paper he published in Science in 1979. In the paper, he lay down his arms and supplicated the forgiveness of the scientific community, declaring that language was an innately human capability, the Cartesian break between man and beast was all true, and any future animal language experiments were a foolish waste of time. Troutwine voluntarily agreed to abjure, curse, and detest his previous opinions on the matter, and he did not mutter “it still moves.” His penance paid, the true church of science absolved Henry Troutwine and welcomed him back into the fold, and it was henceforth decreed that all animal language experiments were sheer bunkum.

Meanwhile, Clever himself was abandoned. He was removed from his home in Princeton and for lack of a place to put him was shipped back to Bill Lemon’s farm in Oklahoma, where — for the first time in his life — he had to interact with other chimps. A lifetime of human pampering had made Clever shy, neurasthenic, and poorly socialized, and he had trouble getting along with other chimps. Four years later, Lemon also ran completely out of money, and began to sell off his chimps. He sold most of them to biomedical research facilities. Clever himself was sold to the Alamogordo Primate Research Facility on Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He was never experimented on, though. When it leaked to the public that Clever Hands, the famous and adorable sign language chimp, sat languishing in a three-by-five-foot wooden box in the desert, waiting to be injected with hepatitis in order to be tested with experimental drugs, a small public outcry arose among animal rights activists. Eventually Clever wound up on a wildlife preserve in Texas. The wildlife preserve had no other chimps, and he spent several more years living in solitary confinement, until the Lawrences bought him and retired him to their ranch in southwestern Colorado, where he has been living ever since.

Clever had probably enjoyed a happier life than either Hilarious Larry or Lily. Larry’s and Lily’s minds had been reared only in dens of iniquity: noisy, smoke-filled tents resonant with squabbling and shouting voices and caterwauling children, where they would be treated to beatings, whippings, shocks and scourges if they did not clamber onstage to dance, to mock and humiliate themselves, to ride tricycles and remove their garments before the eyes of strangers. Hilarious Larry and Hilarious Lily were both broken, rattled, traumatized spirits; the ranch was as friendly a convalescent home as any for these two damaged souls to while away their days unto the ends of their haunted existences — but as content as their retirement may have been, they would clearly never be well again. But Clever was a somewhat different story: he had, in his way, been loved. He had been treated with respect by his handlers. Some of them, in any case. Of course their failure to “teach” him sign language was a failure not of Clever’s understanding, but of theirs. He still tried to communicate in sign language.

Now and then Clever would try to sign to me, thinking that maybe he finally had someone to talk to. I wish I could have understood him. Sadly, I did not. Instead he found in me a chimp who understood him only in the way that most humans would — that is, in every way but linguistically. One could easily look into Clever’s eyes and see that a great mind, a cultured consciousness, was alive and working away in there — but was pitifully imprisoned behind an opaque wall of incommunicability. His human adopters had gone so far with him and no farther; and the result was that they ignited in his soul a fierce desire to communicate, but provided him with inadequate tools to do so. His consciousness was like an unfinished sculpture whose clay had been allowed to harden before it had fully taken shape. You could see this in his eyes. For prerequisite to language is the desire to communicate, and prerequisite to the desire to communicate is the acknowledgment of the existence of consciousness outside of oneself.

I own that it sounds kitschy, Gwen; it sounds like sugary romanticism to say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but I wish that poeticism weren’t so shopworn, because I think that it is true. Look into the eyes of another being — the eyes! — these two glistening globs of light-perceiving jelly in our skulls are our only external organs that shoot directly back into our brains. When you look, and look directly and look deeply, into the centers of another creature’s eyes — into the eyes of another being that has consciousness, emotions, a mind — then you have a profound crisis of experience (or you should, if you’re doing it right): you realize that this other being that is outside of your body lives in a world that is entirely other to your own, and that it may know things that you may not, and that you may know things that it may not, and that it may be possible to exchange information — and then you will want to talk. You will want to exchange your worlds. This is the beginning, not yet of language, but of the mother of language, the desire to communicate. This desire begets the birth of the conversation, and a conversation should strike us as the most beautiful and miraculous phenomenon we know of: the collaborative sharing of consciousnesses that creates the necessity for external symbols. Then comes — all in a wild rush of experimentation and improvisation — symbolic logic, vocabulary, syntax, etc., etc. But you must first have this seed of language, the desire to communicate. And the tragedy of Clever Hands was that he was permitted to take these first and most important steps — to look into another’s eyes, recognize the other, and want to compare worlds — yet he never learned to “speak.” At least not in a way that could be responsibly documented and published, in any case. But that is a matter having to do with the nature of science, not the nature of nature. It’s a pity they are not always the same thing. It was as if Clever Hands were forced to live in a glass box, through which he could see others and hear what they were saying, and yet those outside of his prison could not hear him. He lived a lonely life.