The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  Nevertheless, I stress intellectual disability here for a number of reasons. The first is the simplest: the formal experiments and textual effects I explore in the second and third chapters, dealing with time and self-awareness, are predicated precisely on fictional forms of intellectual disability. Physical disability seems not to implicate features of mind so readily as intellectual disability; though physical disability may involve trauma and other complex psychological and psychoanalytic processes, it does not entail the kind of metacognitive meditations on cognition that I examine here. Another reason has to do with disability hierarchy, and the unfortunate but persistent fact that intellectual disability is more readily and widely deployed as a device of dehumanization than is physical disability; its ramifications for understanding the social, and understanding the social text woven into the literary text, are therefore all the more illuminating.6 And the last reason has to do with the hierarchy within disability studies itself, which has been challenged in recent years (chiefly by people working on autism and on mental illness)7 but which remains very much in effect, whereby physical disability stands in for disability in toto. The foundational works in the field, like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, were quite explicit about this, and indeed much of the disability rights movement (and the fundamental “social model” distinction between impairment, a matter of bodies, and disability, a matter of social relations and built environments) was launched from the (much-needed) perspective of people with physical disabilities.8 But the foregrounding of physical disability has proven remarkably resilient even when it is not warranted, as evidenced by (to take one prominent example) the many criticisms of the television series Glee that took the show to task for featuring a nondisabled actor playing a wheelchair user, criticisms that largely overlooked the fact that the show also features a young woman with Down syndrome portraying a young woman with Down syndrome.9 This is not to say that the critiques of the show’s use of Kevin McHale, the actor playing Artie in a wheelchair, were not warranted; they were, especially with regard to the episode titled “Wheels,” in which Artie (a) remarks that he cannot fake his disability, and (b) takes part in a wheelchair dance to Ike and Tina Turner’s version of “Proud Mary” that bears no relation to the choreography actually employed by wheelchair dance companies. And it is not to say that the show’s portrayal of Becky Jackson, played by Lauren Potter, is beyond criticism as a representation of a young woman with Down syndrome. It is merely to say that the day is (or should be) long past when work in disability studies can allow physical disability to stand in for disability in general, while leaving intellectual disability unmarked and unremarked.

  At the same time, I will leave it to others to decide whether the operative term here should be “developmental disability” or “cognitive disability” (or some other variant) rather than “intellectual disability.” I have heard numerous arguments in all directions, as is common in the disability community; I remember when the phrase “person with Down syndrome” was to be preferred to “Down syndrome person,” on the grounds that the terminology should be “people first”—until some people decided that “people first” terminology had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that a “person with Down syndrome” has Down syndrome and nothing else. I remember when the word “neuroatypical” was to be preferred to references to “autists,” “autistics,” or “people with autism”—until some people decided that “neuroatypical” had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that everyone who is not on the autism spectrum is neurotypical (which is palpably not the case). So if some people prefer developmental or cognitive (or some other variant) to intellectual disability, I invite them to use those terms in their own work, in the understanding that no terminological choices are beyond criticism. Likewise, as to “disability”: I remember the conference session at which someone criticized my use of the term “cognitive disability,” not because he objected to the term “cognitive” but because he objected to the term “disability,” which, he insisted, should be replaced by “difference.” The title of the conference? “Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy.” If a speaker’s use of the term “disability” is objectionable at a conference expressly devoted to cognitive disability, then all our words are the wrong ones. We will have to find a new language in which to express our need for a new language.

  As for my emphasis on the “fictional” nature of the intellectual disabilities I examine here: I am relying on the ancient—and yet always critical—insight that literary characters are not real people. Even when we are talking about literary characters with disabilities (or to whom disabilities can be or have been attributed), we are still not talking about real people. We are talking about fictional people with fictional disabilities—some of whom are presented, in various novels, in terms of their relation to narrative. The fact that the fictional disabilities under study here are intellectual disabilities just makes them all the more appropriate and provocative for the study of fiction. My methodology is formalist throughout, shuttling between plot and technique, content and form, fabula (the raw material of a story, arranged in linear temporal order) and szujet (the manner in which a story is told), even while acknowledging that none of those oppositions can be maintained in any pure form.

  My last prefatory note, then, has to do with the texts I have chosen for this study. Nothing about this project—not even the endless and unavoidable disputes over disability terminology—has given me more anxiety than this. I have mentioned that the idea for this book first took presentable form in my paper for the MLA conference on disability studies in 2004. That paper was occasioned by a rereading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, a rereading that has mostly survived my re-rereadings of the past decade and more. But I soon found myself overwhelmed with possible examples; the phenomenon I observed at work in The Woman Warrior suddenly seemed to appear everywhere, in different guises. And the phenomenon itself became more complex the more I looked at it: where first I saw the deployment of intellectual disability as a motive for storytelling in the text, I soon realized that that deployment also had implications for the text’s metafictional relation to itself. The question before me was no longer just a question of women driven mad by forms of patriarchy (important though that be), but also a question of a text’s struggle, so to speak, to find its narrative relation to characters who became increasingly unable to understand narrative. This train of thought, wending its way through the following years, led me eventually to Don Quixote; and yet by the time I felt prepared to give public presentations on intellectual disability and self-awareness in Don Quixote, I was met with the question of whether my reading of the Quixote didn’t also have potential resonance for readings of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. (Short answer: yes it does. And that is why Pale Fire appears in chapter 3.) My initial forays into disability and speculative fiction produced the same result: if I am arguing that disability is central to films like Total Recall and The X-Men, what do I think of This Alien Shore? Or the role of precogs in the fiction of Philip K. Dick? Or Octavia Butler’s monumental Xenogenesis trilogy? Or Theodore Sturgeon’s very weird and unsettling More Than Human?10

  This book is evidence, I hope, that I took those questions seriously, even when I eventually decided, in the cases of Butler and Sturgeon, to leave the work to others (and there is a growing body of terrific work on Butler and disability). But at a certain point I had to put aside my example anxiety and write. This book, as a result, is not comprehensive; it makes no claim to be A Rhetoric of Intellectual Disability in Fiction. It may be better, I have decided, to write a short and sharp book, delineating a few of the most important and engaging uses of intellectual disability in fiction, than to attempt the encyclopedic. If these arguments prove persuasive, perhaps they will generate an endless series of cascading and overlapping readings, some of which will inevitably point to the many oversights and missed opportunities I am unable to prevent or anticipate—and some of which might help to suggest
that the phenomena I describe here are not idiosyncratic, not limited to a small handful of texts from among the world’s vast stores of narratives, but, as I suggested at the outset, ubiquitous.

  Chapter One

  Motive

  At a critical moment in the eerie “King’s Cross” chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which takes place in a limbo after Voldemort has zapped Harry with the “avada kadavra” killing curse, Albus Dumbledore—who was killed at the end of the previous installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—tells Harry about the youthful indiscretion that constituted his early (and long-unacknowledged) fascist phase, when he teamed up with the evil genius Gellert Grindelwald to propose a plan for world domination in which Muggles around the globe would be subject to rule by an elite cabal of wizards (led, of course, by Dumbledore and Grindelwald). “You know what happened,” Dumbledore says. “You know. You cannot despise me more than I despise myself.” Harry protests, “But I don’t despise you—” “Then you should,” Dumbledore replies, proceeding to explain why:

  “You know the secret of my sister’s ill health, what those Muggles did, what she became. You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana.

  “I resented it, Harry.”

  Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance.

  “I was gifted. I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.

  “Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them. I loved my parents, I loved my brother and sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.

  “So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness. Trapped and wasted, I thought! And then, of course, he came. . . .”

  Dumbledore looked directly into Harry’s eyes again.

  “Grindelwald. You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.” (715–16)

  Dumbledore’s youthful crisis comes to a head when his brother, Aberforth, returns and throws cold water on Albus’s plan to seek the Deathly Hallows with Grindelwald—“I did not want to hear that I could not set forth to seek Hallows with a fragile and unstable sister in tow”—and precipitates a quarrel between Dumbledore and Grindelwald that ends in his sister Ariana’s apparently accidental death. Grindelwald flees, and Albus Dumbledore comes to his senses, realizing that “I was left to bury my sister, and learn to live with my guilt and my terrible grief, the price of my shame” (717).

  In October 2007, in a talk at Carnegie Hall a few months after the release of Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore is gay. The reaction among Rowling’s millions of fans was mostly one of surprise, since there are no textual “clues” to Dumbledore’s sexual orientation. Apparently, Dumbledore’s attraction to Grindelwald was partly ideological, borne of a burning resentment toward Muggles and a self-aggrandizing sense that a person of his brilliance was being wasted in a small wizard village; but it was also sexual, and his alliance with Grindelwald stemmed partly from his love for Grindelwald. But lost in all the commotion and commentary was something obvious, something hidden in plain sight, something explicitly written into the text: Dumbledore’s desire to distinguish himself from his suddenly disreputable family, and most of all from his disabled sister.

  Indeed, the first desire cannot be disentangled from the second, because the disabled Ariana is the reason for the decline of the Dumbledore family. At age six, Ariana is assaulted by three Muggle boys when they witness her doing magic. The nature of the assault is not made clear. But as Aberforth explains to Harry and Hermione Granger, “it destroyed her, what they did. She was never right again” (364). She winds up confined to her house for the rest of her life, and the Dumbledore family concocts a cover story—the story of “ill health” Albus mentions to Harry. “She wouldn’t use magic,” Aberforth explains, “but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn’t control it, and at times she was strange and dangerous.” Her father “went after the bastards that did it,” but does not explain himself to the wizard authorities, “because if the Ministry [of Magic] had known what Ariana had become, she’d have been locked up in St. Mungo’s for good” (364). This, then, is why Dumbledore père is sent to the remote wizard prison, Azkaban. As for Dumbledore mère, she is accidentally killed when Ariana is fourteen and unable to control one of her rages. Albus is therefore compelled to return home upon graduating from Hogwarts, very much against his wishes; but, as Aberforth notes with great bitterness, he wasn’t much of a caretaker:

  “He was always up in his bedroom when he was home, reading his books and counting his prizes, keeping up with his correspondence with ‘the most notable magical names of the day’ . . . he didn’t want to be bothered with her. . . . Bit of a comedown for Mr. Brilliant, there’s no prizes for looking after your half-mad sister, stopping her blowing up the house every other day.” (365–66)

  This, writes the tabloid journalist Rita Skeeter (with more warrant than usual, for her), was “the best-kept secret of Dumbledore’s life” (355), not the relatively uncontroversial (and, in the world outside the text, widely welcomed) news that Albus Dumbledore is gay.

  What Rowling is doing with the tale of Ariana is more than backstory, more than the standard “as you know, Bob” mode of exposition (though the Harry Potter series includes plenty of that, as well). Rowling is installing intellectual disability at the heart of a narrative that includes no direct representation of a character with intellectual disabilities. We never meet Ariana, not even in flashback; the only representation of her is the portrait on Aberforth’s wall, which turns out to be a top-secret magical portal to Hogwarts (all the other secret passages are being watched). Ariana’s only “action” in the plot of Deathly Hallows is to serve as the spectral vehicle for that spectral portal. But her larger thematic function is decisive, and sets her “brilliant” brother’s life on its trajectory: he becomes infatuated with Grindelwald, and the ideal of wizard authoritarianism, partly because he is ashamed of his association with his disabled sister and (justifiably) furious at the Muggles who are the cause of his sister’s condition, his father’s imprisonment, and (indirectly) his mother’s death. Ariana’s death, in turn, becomes the impetus for Dumbledore’s revaluation of values, his emphatic turn against Grindelwaldism, and his lifelong commitment to Muggle rights, tolerance for all magical creatures, and struggles against entrenched hierarchies and unjustifiable inequalities of all kinds.

  Intellectual disability, then, serves as the ethical core of a narrative in which it never explicitly appears. “Ethical core” is Ato Quayson’s term, and it is crucial to his groundbreaking concept of “aesthetic nervousness”: “disability,” Quayson writes, “returns the aesthetic domain to an active ethical core that serves to disrupt the surface of representation” (19). Much of my argument here will elaborate and extend this critical insight, and Quayson’s more programmatic statement that “the representation of disability oscillates uneasily between the aesthetic and the ethical domains, in such a way as to force a reading of the aesthetic fields in which the disabled are represented as always having an ethical dimension that cannot be easily subsumed under the aesthetic structure” (19). My readings will try to put pressure on the ideas of “disruption” and “oscillation” at work here; additionally, at times my argument will have less to do with the representation of characters with intellectual disabilities as characters than with the question of these characters’ relation(s) to narrative—the specific narrative they inhabit, and to narrative as such. (As we will see, depending on the nature
of the intellectual disability and the parameters of the narrative in which it occurs, the meaning of “narrative as such” can range from “individual stories” to “entire lives” to “unimaginable time scales.”) Finally, following Quayson’s suggestion that “the final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between the reader and the text” (15), I will turn to a number of literary narratives in which, unlike Harry Potter (where Ariana’s disability is a motive force in Dumbledore’s life and in the narrative he creates for himself), intellectual disability warps the very fabric of the text itself, producing “disabling” effects in readers’ comprehension of narrative. This argument will involve narratives in which intellectual disability not only produces what Quayson calls a “hermeneutic impasse” within the text (with regard to content) but also sets the terms for readers’ engagement with the text (with regard to form).

  But before I get to these readings, I must pause over two aspects of Quayson’s argument. The first concerns this “ethical core”: whence does it appear? In Aesthetic Nervousness it is presented almost as a fact of nature, an uninterrogated lump, itself an ethical core within Quayson’s text. The example from Harry Potter is straightforward in this respect; after all, Dumbledore père winds up in Azkaban for his retaliation against the Muggle boys, so it does not require much digging to find that questions of justice are at stake. For what is the appropriate moral response to a disabling assault on a young child? What are the obligations of her family members to the larger (wizard) society they inhabit? What, in turn, are the obligations of the larger society to the disabled child? It does not appear that wizard society offers much in the way of “reasonable accommodation”; the reason Ariana is kept at home, with lethal consequences for her mother, is that the only alternative is institutionalization in St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. The question of justice confronts us at every turn, and surely the ethical core proceeds from or is structured by that question in its various forms. And as we will see in the following chapters, there is an ethics of narrative at stake as well, and the animating question will be what the character with an intellectual disability knows—or can know—about the narrative she or he inhabits.