The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  But in the course of that brief Facebook conversation, as we caught up on partners and kids and professions (literature professor, clinical psychologist), I mentioned that I was sitting at a table across from Jamie, who had just handed me a list of twenty-five kinds of sharks. To which Phyllis replied, “I am sure you did not know that my brother is autistic.” Well, I could have plotzed. Needless to say, I did not know that; I did not know anything about this person, starting with the fact that she had a brother. And a brother with autism, in the 1960s (Andy Eisenson was born in 1957). Oh my goodness, I thought at once, what that must have meant for her mother—to have a child with autism at the precise historical moment when autism was being attributed to “refrigerator mothers.” How difficult that must have been. Followed almost immediately by, Oh goodness, and then along comes this very smart girl, the younger sister. I can’t even begin to imagine the family dynamics, except that no, wait, yes I can. And the story quickly went still deeper: Sylvia Eisenson, Phyllis’s mother, was in fact a psychologist in the New York City school system. She was A.B.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, of all places, where I taught for twelve years. She knew very well what Bruno Bettelheim was doing with Leo Kanner’s refrigerator-mothers theory, and had actually written to Bettelheim to tell him that his work was destructive to loving parents. She received a reply from an underling, telling her to get therapy.

  All this I learned in the course of one Facebook chat, which somehow went from “Oh yes, I remember you” to serious familial and emotional matters in the course of a few minutes. Life in the disability community can be like that; I remember a conference at which someone introduced herself as the parent of a child with Down syndrome and we wound up talking about our then-teenaged sons’ desires for friends, especially girlfriends, within ten minutes. Because there is so much shared terrain, casual conversations can suddenly turn into serious discussions of special needs trusts and the ethics of getting your child or sibling to sign over his power of attorney. And then, a few days later, after Phyllis had gone back to look at her copy of A Wrinkle in Time, she wrote:

  just read the first chapter of “Wrinkle”, and Meg is described with her glasses and braces and general awkwardness. And I thought—that is at least partly why I liked this book so much—there I am, though without the spunk to duke it out with the kid who said something mean about my brother.

  When I read that note I had yet another Oy, what did I say moment: Oh yes, I remember you with your glasses and braces and general awkwardness? (It turns out the braces came later. I did not remember any braces.) But it was the second sentence that grabbed me. No doubt young Phyllis Eisenson, or anyone with a sibling with an intellectual disability, would read Wrinkle with that inflection, with a sense of protectiveness for the more vulnerable family member: wasn’t this one of the lessons we learned in Reader-Response Criticism 101?

  From one angle it is a rudimentary point, a truism: of course we all bring to every text the welter of experiences, associations, encounters, and intertextual relations we have accumulated over the years. Reader-response criticism made much of this rudimentary point for much of the 1970s, with earnest Critical Inquiry forums on whether readers or texts make meaning, whether meaning is determinate or indeterminate, and whether the hypothetical “Eskimo reading” of Faulkner’s “Rose for Emily” can be ruled out of court.4 But from another angle, this exchange seemed (and seems) to me to open onto a principle of considerable breadth, one that has not yet been considered by literary criticism influenced by disability studies. It is the complement to the Rob Spirko-induced insight that disability in literary texts need not be located in, or tied to, a specific character with an identifiable disability; it is the Phyllis Eisenson-induced insight that disability in the relation between text and reader need not involve any character with disabilities at all. It can involve ideas about disability, and ideas about the stigma associated with disability, regardless of whether any specific character can be pegged with a specific diagnosis. This opens the field of criticism considerably; and I am going to insist that this is a good thing, not least because I am determined to cure disability studies of its habit of diagnosing fictional characters.

  To begin with, this insight serves as an essential corrective to Ato Quayson’s framing of “aesthetic nervousness” in terms of the encounter between disabled and nondisabled characters. For my sixth-grade classmate (and, I suspect, for many people like her), relations between disabled and nondisabled people were at stake in the opening pages of A Wrinkle in Time, even though the novel itself contains no characters with intellectual disabilities in a family chock full of geniuses. (And I hope, also, that my remarks on Wrinkle will help put to rest—or at least demonstrate the superfluity of—recent speculations that Charles Wallace Murry is himself on the autism spectrum.)5 My argument throughout this book is that even as disability studies has established itself in the humanities in a way that was unthinkable twenty years ago, it has still limited itself to too narrow a range of options when it comes to literary criticism; and though I am (obviously) being facetious about the idea of “curing” disability studies of anything, I am quite serious about the conviction that disability studies limits itself unnecessarily, as a new branch of criticism and theory, whenever it confines itself to determining the disability status of individual characters. Disability studies need not and should not predicate its existence as a practice of criticism by reading a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other, even when a text explicitly announces that one or more of its characters is (for example) on the autism spectrum. It is not that a character’s condition is irrelevant to how we read him or her; rather, we should avoid the temptation to think that a diagnosis “solves” the text somehow, in the manner of those “psychological” interpretations of yesteryear that explain Hamlet by surmising that the prince is, unbeknownst to himself, gay.

  I bring up that silly interpretive option for Hamlet because, as we will see in the following chapter, the revelation that Albus Dumbledore is gay (an insight vouchsafed to us by no less an authority than the author herself) has helped to obscure the role of intellectual disability in determining the course of young Dumbledore’s career: here, the realization that character X has Y disability stands in place of the more productive realization that character X does Y because of Z. But there is more at stake in the Eisenson-induced insight, I think. In opening the question of the potential relations between disabled and nondisabled characters (and readers’ potential relations to those relations) so as to include characters who are merely presumed to be intellectually disabled by their fellow characters (such as Coetzee’s Michael K and Friday), we come to recognize intellectual disability not only as the expression of somatic/neurological conditions but as a trope, a critical and underacknowledged thread in the social fabric, a device for exploring the phenomenon of human sociality as such. This is not merely a matter of remarking that the idiot and the holy fool offer strategic insight into human hierarchies and the contingency of systems of value, though it is partly that; it is also a matter of gauging how literary works depict systems of sociality in part by including characters who either are or are presumed by their fellow characters to be constitutively incapable of understanding or abiding by the social systems by which their worlds operate. As Margaret Atwood’s unnamed narrator/protagonist in Surfacing bluntly declares, “Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform” (69). Though there is much more to it than that.

  The idea that intellectual disability might provide the grounds for a literary examination of “human sociality as such,” when combined with the idea that our species is made up of natural-born storytellers, is what leads me to engage with the recent branch of literary criticism known variously as “evocriticism” or “literary Darwinism.” In my conclusion, I will argue (among other things) that this branch of criticism is so aggressively invested in the reinstateme
nt of a normative conception of the human—indeed, an “evolutionarily grounded” normative conception—that it has nothing interesting to say about disability as a form of human variation (and nothing very interesting to say about individual literary texts). But one of the evocritics, Blakey Vermeule, has hit upon a fascinating possibility for literary disability studies—paradoxically, by taking one of the most problematic and undertheorized accounts of intellectual disability (in this case, autism) at face value. I will pursue that possibility briefly here, because it will help set the stage for the chapters to follow.

  In her 2010 book, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?, Vermeule starts from a most unpromising place: with Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory of autism as “mindblindness,” a theory that has been enormously influential among cognitive psychologists but has next to no credibility among many people in the autism community. (As we will see later, it is a theory that informs both Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the first edition of Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction.) The idea is that people with autism are “mindblind”—that is, they are incapable of understanding that other people have minds of their own. The empirical/experimental basis for the theory is astonishingly thin: it is called the “Sally-Anne test,” and it involves a scenario in which (a) Sally puts an object under a cup, (b) Sally leaves the room, (c) Anne takes the object or puts it under another cup, and (d) Sally returns to the room. The subject is then asked, Where will Sally look for the object?, and if the subject is incapable of understanding that Sally is unaware of what Anne has done, the subject is mindblind. The experiment is problematic on its face, as a diagnostic for autism; but for now, I want to suggest that Vermeule does something very strange with it, and in the course of doing so, renders the concept useful to disability studies.

  In a chapter devoted chiefly to satire (and its relevance to cognitive psychology, which I will set to one side), Vermeule introduces the notion of “situational mind blindness.” In an obvious sense, this is a severe misprision of Baron-Cohen’s theory, since mindblindness is not a state one can occupy situationally, much less adopt at will. To make matters worse, Vermeule’s discussion is punctuated by remarks such as “Mind blindness is undoubtedly a tragedy for autistics and their families, although some autistics seem to be gifted with heightened visual capacities” (196) and “People who lack mind-reading capacities somehow give us greater insight into our own capacities to dehumanize other people” (198). The proper response to this, in brief, would be something like “People who attribute mindblindness to others give us greater insight into their capacities to dehumanize other people.” Interestingly, Vermeule herself comes close to this formulation when she writes, “Situational mind blindness is a trope of dehumanization, albeit a very complex one: the point of it is to deny other people the perspective of rational agency by turning them into animals, machines, or anything without a mind” (195). Again, I have to leave much to the side here—this time, the supposition that animals do not have minds. And because Vermeule adopts Baron-Cohen’s theory wholesale, it does not occur to her to suspect that the attribution of mindblindness is itself a trope of dehumanization.

  However, the idea that mindblindness might be strategically attributed—not to people with autism, here, but to any object of comedic or satiric ridicule (Vermeule considers the trope to be especially useful for, if not constitutive of, satire)—is an insight that leads us away from the actual (diagnosable) attributes of literary characters and toward an understanding of how tropes of stigma and dehumanization might work even in literary texts in which there are no identifiable characters with disabilities. Even more productively, Vermeule’s reading of What Maisie Knew, earlier in her book, suggests that mindblindness “is a way of acknowledging the social order by opting out of it” (97); in Maisie’s case, this entails encouraging her hideous parents to believe that she is intellectually disabled (she is, in other words, playing dumb) so that she will not have to participate in their destructive forms of gamesmanship. “Becoming stupid is Maisie’s revenge, her turn of the screw,” Vermeule writes. “She opts out of la ronde simply because she refuses to be a tool in someone else’s hands” (98).

  Now we are getting somewhere. The attribution of mindblindness, on the one hand, and a character’s strategic adoption of mindblindness, on the other, open onto complex readings of the social text regardless of whether any individual character can be definitively tagged as a person with an intellectual disability, and (even better) regardless of whether the theory of mindblindness has any utility for the understanding of the autism spectrum. Indeed, both strategic and situational mindblindness can be at work even in texts where the character in question is widely suspected (both by his or her fellow characters and by legions of readers) of having an intellectual disability: witness Coetzee’s Michael K imagining that he can opt out of the brutal social order of martial law and omnipresent checkpoints: “If I look very stupid, he thought, perhaps they will let me through” (40). Even for Michael K, with his harelip and his slow mind, the adoption of strategic mindblindness is not simply a question of character attributes. It is a question of characters’ relations to social systems, and hence to sociality as such. To return to where this train of thought started, from a Facebook chat with a former grade-school classmate, this is why it does not matter whether Charles Wallace Murry is a child on the autism spectrum. What matters is the web of social relations that constitutes other people’s responses to Charles Wallace, and that intensifies to Meg’s fierce, protective love of him.

  ✴ ✴ ✴

  Part of what I am attempting here can be aligned with Tobin Siebers’s project in Disability Aesthetics and Joseph N. Straus’s work in Extraordinary Measures. To wit, I hope to offer rigorous formal textual analyses informed by the past two decades of work in disability studies, and yet to broaden the purview of literary disability studies so that the field is not confined to the representation of human bodies and minds in literary texts. This is a bit tricky (as we will see in the following pages), because in all but the most exceptional cases, literary texts engage with issues surrounding physical and intellectual disability by representing human bodies and minds. What else would we be talking about but bodies and minds, if the subject is disability? And yet disability is also, always already, a social relation, involving beliefs and social practices that structure the apprehension of disability—and of putative human “norms.” That is why Siebers can apply the insights of disability studies to architecture, urban studies, and city planning, as when he reads Detroit by way of the legacy of American “ugly laws”; that is why Straus can apply the insights of disability studies to modernist experimental music, in a move that draws heavily on Siebers’s insight that modernist experimentalism has everything to do with the exploration of disability and nonnormative modes of being human. (That, in turn, is an insight shared and inspired—in a different register, as Siebers notes—by the Nazi curators who put together the “degenerate art” exhibition of 1937 and who promoted an aggressively idealized visual repertoire for the depiction of the human form.) Admittedly, Straus tends to ground his readings of modernist experimentalism in the individual conditions of composers’ bodies, as when he suggests that “the fragmented musical surface of [Stravinsky’s] Requiem Canticles, with its discrete, isolated textual blocks, may be heard as a metaphorical recreation of physical disintegration, of a body fracturing and losing its organic wholeness” largely because “these late-style characteristics may be related to the increasingly difficult physical circumstances of Stravinsky’s old age” (87). But the reading of the work as a “metaphorical recreation” of disability in no way depends on whether its composer was infirm or capable of running marathons; the formalist reading affords us insight into the operation of, and the violation of, human social norms that construct our sense of what is right and proper, what is in just proportion and in good working order.

  It may be objected here that Siebers’s and Straus’s wor
k, in extending disability studies beyond the readings of individual bodies and minds, depends more on ideas about physical disability than on ideas about intellectual disability. This is a point I will readily grant, not only with regard to Siebers and Straus but with regard to the following chapter on motive. There is no reason why the idea of disability as narrative “motive” should be confined to intellectual disability; physical disability is deployed as a motive device in countless narratives. The classic example (in disability studies) is Moby-Dick, where Ahab’s disfigurement is the motive for his determination to turn the voyage of the Pequod into something other than your ordinary profit-generating whaling expedition. But examples abound everywhere, especially in speculative fiction, as when George Saunders’s “flaweds” in the novella Bounty (including the narrator, who has claws in place of feet) try to avoid capture and removal to the Western United States, where they will be enslaved; or as when the leaders of Earth, in C. S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore, shut down the portals that enable interstellar travel once they learn that traveling at speeds greater than light induces startling genetic mutations. (There is a savvy narrative wrinkle in This Alien Shore, however, insofar as the mutants who do eventually learn how to navigate the “ainniq”—the wormholes in space—are marked as intellectually disabled in ways that suggest that they are on the autism spectrum. Not that their specific diagnosis is important; what matters is their narrative function.)