Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[marcus AT loyno.edu]

I’ve been reading a new book that I think might have
attracted Walker’s attention, Elizabeth Hess, Nim Chimsky:
The Chimp Who Would be Human.  Bantam, 2008.

As many folks will recall, WP was quite interested in the
efforts to communicate with chimps.  In 1970 (as I recall)
my wife and I were at a conference with Percy in New York
organized by Thomas Sebeok.  It was called The Clever Hans
Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales and People.
Later, I helped arrange to bring Herbert Terrace down to
Loyola in New Orleans to discuss his experiments with “Nim
Chimsky.”  Walker came to the city to attend Terrace’s
lecture.

Anyway, there’s a wonderful moment early in Hess’s book
that would have tickled Percy and I want to share it with
the list.  In her Introduction, Hess reviews the interesting
history of humans trying to communicate with chimps.  One of
these episodes took place in the 1920s and 1930s:

        “Three pioneer experiments investigating the chimp’s
capacity for language were particularly important in paving
the way for Project Nim.  The first one was set in motion in
the 1920s, when a husband and wife team, Winthrop N.
Kellogg, a psychologist at the University of Indiana, and
Luella A. Kellogg, also a psychologist, became intrigued by
the discovery of several feral children in Europe and India
and the subsequent debate on the effects of nature versus
nurture on childhood development.  If Winthrop Kellogg could
have adopted a feral child or placed a newborn in the wild,
he probably would have.  Instead, he and his wife decided to
reverse the situation and adopt a chimpanzee, the next best
thing to a feral child for the purposes of their research. .
 .
“On August 30, 1930, Luella Kellogg gave birth to their
son Donald.  On June 26, 1931, a healthy seven-month-old
female chimp named Gua came to live with the Kelloggs on
long-term loan from Yerkes.  For nine months, boy and chimp
were brought up virtually as twins.  They were dressed alike
and fed the same foods (except that Donald refused raw
vegetables) in an effort to treat them equally, the better
to make scientific comparison of the details of their
physical development, their behavior, and, the Kelloggs
hoped, their speech.  Each day the ‘siblings’ were
drilled for hours on individual words.  In addition, Gua’s
surrogate parents manipulated her lower jaw, hoping to
encourage her to get it moving.  Although there was much
chimp chat (‘oo-oo-oo-oo’) from Gua, neither Gua [n]or
Donald uttered word one.  Eventually Donald began making the
same sounds as his simian sibling.  When the Kelloggs
started to worry that the experiment might retard their
son’s development, Gua, sixteen months old, was returned
to a cage in Yerkes’s facility and the experiment was
ended.”

I can hear Walker’s ironic chuckle and his commiseration
for Donald being a “slow learner” of Chimp.

Marcus Smith