“Sorbonne’s dyslexia”

 

Seraphina couldn’t read. Not an unheard of state of affairs in 2023, but in her case the cause was biological... Her hearing and speech were unimpaired, and her oral vocabulary was above average, but her brain lacked the synaptic architecture necessary to fit meaning to written words and phrases. Mosel Kazenstein, the Albequerque-based neurologist who examined Seraphina in the desert when she was seven years old, diagnosed her as having Sorbonne’s dyslexia with pronounced cortical dysplasia.

“What’s that mean?” Seraphina had asked him.

“It means you can't read,” Mosel replied.

— Sewer, Gas & Electric, chapter four

The name given to Seraphina’s affliction in Sewer, Gas is a made-up dig at the deconstructionist philosophy of Jacques Derrida (who once taught at the Sorbonne in Paris), but a mental deficit similar to the one she suffers from—actually called alexia—does exist. Unlike Seraphina’s congenital version of the disorder, real-world alexia is typically the result of damage to a previously healthy brain, either by a stroke or a blow to the head.

Localized brain damage can lead to weirdly specific deficits: as the novel suggests, alexics cannot understand written language, but may remain perfectly fluent in both the spoken word and tactile languages like Braille. Sufferers of motor alexia still comprehend written and printed words, but can no longer read them aloud. And in yet another condition called “word blindness” or alexia without agraphia, the afflicted lose the ability to read but can still write and take dictation.

Oliver Sacks’ books The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars contain numerous fascinating case histories of neurological disorders like alexia. Especially interesting are Sacks’ descriptions of the often very creative ways in which the sufferers strive to cope with their disorders. In Sewer, Gas, Seraphina has a literate pet robot to help her decipher text; Sacks’ patients’ work-around solutions are no less inventive, even if most of them don’t have access to nearly the same level of technology.

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