But the ethical core need not be triggered by the presence of, or even by a reference to, a character with an intellectual disability. Intellectual disability can be a textual matter—a matter for the text, and a motive for its characters—even when there are no characters with intellectual disabilities to be found. As I suggested in the introduction, this is what is at stake in A Wrinkle in Time. Fourteen-year-old Meg Murry has been dropped to the lowest section in her grade—one of her frustrated teachers says, “I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student” (11)—partly because she is a discipline problem. Her peers consider her to be a dim-witted troublemaker. And one of the reasons for Meg’s bad behavior is that everyone believes that she has an intellectually disabled sibling:
On the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the boys had said something about her “dumb baby brother.” At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye. (12)
L’Engle’s readers know that Meg’s five-year-old brother, Charles Wallace, is not dumb. Though he is a late-talking child, he is (as he himself knows) a biological sport, a mutation, an anomalously brilliant child who has a grasp of general relativity and possesses some telepathic powers on the side even though he does not yet know how to read. Indeed, he is savvy enough to know that it is probably best if people do not think much of him: “I’m afraid it will make it awfully hard for me in school next year if I already know things. I think it will be better if people go on thinking I’m not very bright. They won’t hate me quite so much” (34).
Both Murry parents have multiple doctorates in the sciences (the father is a physicist, the mother a microbiologist); the family is practically bursting with big brains. But the stigma of intellectual disability haunts Meg and Charles Wallace, whom people think of as “morons”—or, more politely, as being a few cards short of a full deck, especially when compared to the unremarkable ten-year-old twins, Sandy and Dennis: “The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there” (16). Here, the stigma associated with intellectual disability structures the Murry household, precisely because the Murry household is so defined by and invested in intelligence, with Meg seeking to avoid or contest the stigma (hence the fisticuffs upon hearing a random unkind word) and Charles Wallace seeking to find a shelter in stigma in order to avoid becoming the object of fear and hatred: better to be thought a moron than a freak. The ethical core at the heart of A Wrinkle in Time, then, does not arise from any one character or any one set of attributes, but from the more generalized presence of social stigma.
I want to establish this point early in my argument because (a) it is counterintuitive—who thinks of A Wrinkle in Time in terms of disability?—and (b) it gets at one of the key limitations of Quayson’s otherwise capacious framework, his insistence that “the primary level” of aesthetic nervousness “is in the interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identified” (15). It is notable that Quayson characterizes that interaction in terms of “nervousness”; the term suggests a potentially productive anxiety and unease, and is therefore more supple—and even more hopeful—than terms like “disgust,” “repulsion,” or “horror” (reactions that are far from unthinkable, and in many times and places were the normate norm). No doubt the concept owes much to Erving Goffman’s staging of that encounter: “When normals and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence . . . there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology” (13). What is most appealing about Quayson’s formulation, in other words, is that it has the potential to reframe that primal scene, recasting the disgust, repulsion, or horror evinced by nondisabled characters in the presence of disability as a matter of aesthetic nervousness. One thinks of the visceral disgust with which Victor Frankenstein first beholds his creature, and then one thinks, with Quayson, of how that encounter “is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structure, and so on” (15). “Aesthetic nervousness” allows even the most horrified (and horrifying) encounters with disability to be transformed into something else, something potentially revelatory, something that raises questions not only with regard to the ethical core of a text but also with regard to its form and texture.1 And yet the theory remains based on the representation of characters with disabilities, rather than on textual tropes, rhetorical devices, and narrative strategies for constructing (and deconstructing) disability.
Likewise, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of “narrative prosthesis” is more a theory about characters with disabilities than a theory about narrative. But because “narrative prosthesis” is the single most influential account of narrative in disability studies, I should explain the differences between Mitchell and Snyder’s work and the kind of inquiry I am pursuing here. Published in 2000, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse is a landmark work, a field-defining theoretical statement that any subsequent account of disability and narrative cannot fail to address (and, indeed, Quayson’s theory of “aesthetic nervousness” does address it, and there are many points of overlap between the two books). Very much like Quayson, Mitchell and Snyder insist that “within literary narratives, disability serves as an interruptive force that confronts cultural truisms” (48), but their account of that interruptive force relies cannily on the claim that disability is always the occasion for interpretation; it always signifies something other than itself, it is always rendered as enigma and challenge:
It is the narrative of disability’s very unknowability that consolidates the need to tell a story about it. Thus, in stories about characters with disabilities, an underlying issue is always whether their disability is the foundation of character itself. The question is not whether disability is cause or symptom of, or distraction from, a disturbing behavioral trait, but whether its mystery can be pierced by the storyteller. (6)
In some cases, however, the representation of disability is not mysterious at all; when Mitchell and Snyder write that “disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device” (47), one thinks of a text like Richard Wright’s Native Son, which renders disability metaphorical in such a way as to suggest that sightless eyes are a window on the soul, as in the unsavory moment in Boris Max’s defense of Bigger Thomas at which he turns to the woman whose daughter Bigger has killed, crying, “And to Mrs. Dalton, I say: ‘Your philanthropy was as tragically blind as your sightless eyes!’” (393). I call the moment “unsavory” because it cannot possibly be a wise defense strategy to blame Mrs. Dalton for the death of her only child, and because Max does so in a narrative that has already made remarkably heavy-handed use of the trope of blindness, as when Bigger thinks, “Jan was blind. Mary had been blind. Mr. Dalton was blind. And Mrs. Dalton was blind; yes, blind in more ways than one” (107).
Native Son deploys disability so as to render disability as a moral failing, and manages, in so doing, to ignore the material detail of the disability itself: it may be crucial to the plot that Mrs. Dalton was not able to see Bigger in Mary’s room that night, but once Mrs. Dalton has performed her function in the plot, her blindness is important to Native Son only in a metaphorical sense. This, surely, is what Mitchell and Snyder mean by an “opportunistic” metaphorical device. But Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis goes well beyond this, opening onto strategies for reading that are inventive and provocative—and yet, as we shall see, potentially reductive as well. Mitchell and Snyder start from the salutary point that disability is often underrecognized by readers, even though “disability has functioned throughout history as one o
f the most marked and remarked upon differences that originates the act of storytelling” (54). This is a version of the above claim that disability demands a story; for an illustration of this principle I usually turn to my sister-in-law’s business partner, one of whose arms ends at the elbow. Over the years, she has grown weary of people asking her what happened to her arm; noting that the people who were rude enough to ask tended also to be people who were visibly (if subtly) disappointed in the answer that she was born this way, she began to reply, with an affect somewhere between deadpan and insouciant, “shark attack.” For Mitchell and Snyder, however, stories that are inaugurated by disability follow a post-shark-attack trajectory that forms one aspect of their theory of narrative prosthesis, inasmuch as the narrative works to make the disability disappear:
A simple schematic of narrative structure might run thus: first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner. (53)
This simple schematic holds up very well for certain Disney animated films as well as mainstream Hollywood fare like the 1997 James L. Brooks film As Good as It Gets.2 The preferred mode of Disneyfication involves resignifying a character’s disability as a unique and valuable talent, as when Dumbo’s ginormous ears turn out to be the species anomaly that enables him to fly (and to become the circus’s central attraction). Relatedly, a character’s disability can be compensated for by a unique and valuable talent, as in Happy Feet, when Mumble, a penguin who is unable to sing a “heartsong” to attract a mate and who is ostracized by his fellow penguins as a result (and whose disability may have something to do with the fact that his father did not take proper care of the egg during incubation), turns out to be a species-anomalous tap-dancing penguin whose talent eventually helps save his species.3
However, it is not clear that this narrative structure will hold for all, or even most, depictions of disability in narrative (it will not work for Ariana Dumbledore in Harry Potter), let alone fictions like A Wrinkle in Time where the stigma of intellectual disability operates even in the absence of any characters with intellectual disabilities. And even when narratives do work to efface disability, to rehabilitate or fix the deviance that provides the story with its central motive, the theory of narrative prosthesis as advanced by Mitchell and Snyder seems to run in two different directions. The first direction leads to the conclusion that narrative about disability is not merely opportunistic but parasitic: “Our phrase narrative prosthesis is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). Leaving aside the obvious objection that literary narratives have at their disposal a wide array of devices for generating representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight, the most important aspect of this claim is that narrative thereby does a disservice to actual people with disabilities, insofar as “while stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic figure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (48). A more disturbing corollary of this claim holds that “disability inaugurates narrative, but narrative inevitably punishes its own prurient interests by overseeing the extermination of the object of its fascination” (56–57; emphasis mine), and that corollary follows from the insistence that “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign [sic] in excess” (53; emphasis mine). I will get back to these matters of inevitability and inexorability in a moment, but for now, it should suffice to suggest that this aspect of narrative prosthesis offers a disability-studies version of the hermeneutics of suspicion, in which narrative engages with disability to nefarious, “prurient,” and potentially harmful ends. As Mitchell and Snyder write in their opening pages,
Beyond this elucidation of disability as transgressive of social ideals, this literary strategy also has a visceral effect on the lives of disabled people. While disability’s troubling presence provides literary works with the potency of an unsettling cultural commentary, disabled people have been historically refused a parallel power within their social institutions. In other words, while literature often relies on disability’s transgressive potential, disabled people have been sequestered, excluded, exploited, and obliterated on the very basis of which their literary representation so often rests. Literature serves up disability as a repressed deviation from cultural imperatives of normativity, while disabled populations suffer the consequences of representational association with deviance and recalcitrant corporeal difference. (8)
It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell and Snyder are tempted—though they finally (and wisely) refuse the temptation—to “condemn the literary as bankrupt with regard to disability” (9).
The other direction, however, leads not to the conclusion that narrative inevitably effaces or exterminates disability (and contributes to the immiseration of people with disabilities), but rather that the effort to efface or exterminate disability in some literary texts often fails, and in its failure, offers a disability-studies version of the Russian formalist belief, first enunciated by Viktor Shklovsky, that the function of the literary is to “lay bare the device.” Here, Mitchell and Snyder start by asserting the reparative function of the prosthesis, but turn instead to the argument that the device ultimately serves to lay itself bare:
While an actual prosthesis is always somewhat discomforting, a textual prosthesis alleviates discomfort by removing the unsightly from view. . . . [T]he erasure of disability via a “quick fix” of an impaired physicality or intellect removes an audience’s need for concern or continuing vigilance. . . . The prosthetic function in most of the works that follow, then, is to undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs. In part, this book is about the literary accomplishment of a faulty, or at least imperfect, prosthetic function. The effort is to make the prosthesis show, to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion. The prosthetic relation of body to word is exposed as an artificial contrivance. Disability services an unsettling objective in these literary works by refusing its desired cultural return to the land of the normative. Ironically, the accomplishment of the works under scrutiny here is to expose, rather than conceal, the prosthetic relation. (8; emphasis in original)
I suspect that the word “ironically” is the key to this line of thinking: the prosthesis tries to hide the unsightly from view, as in the argument that narrative serves to rehabilitate or fix deviance, but despite itself, winds up calling attention to itself, thereby exposing rather than concealing the prosthetic relation.
In this schema, the undecidability of disability is most likely related to the phenomenon whereby disability is presented as riddle and enigma, a mystery to be pierced by the storyteller. This aspect of Mitchell and Snyder’s theory has startling implications for the practice of literary criticism, implications that I think have largely gone unremarked to date. Their skepticism about interpretation stems from a well-grounded sense that some bodies are more legible, more marked, than others:
The problem of the representation of disability is not the search for a more “positive” story of disability, as it has often been formulated in disability studies, but rather a thoroughgoing challenge to the undergirding authorization to interpret that disability invites. There is a politics at stake in the fact that disability inaugurates an explanatory need that the unmarked body eludes by virtue of its physical anonymity. (59–60)
Here, one is left with the impression that the disabled body is always already matter for interpretation and the nondisabled body is not. That impression is strengthened at the end of Mitchell and Snyder’s chapter “Narrative Prosthesis and the Mat
eriality of Metaphor,” where they write, “If the nondysfunctional body proves too uninteresting to narrate, the disabled body becomes a paramount device of characterization” (64). That is an enormous “if,” asking us to agree that narratives tend to avoid telling the stories of nondysfunctional bodies because those stories are not sufficiently interesting. But even more important, one is left with the impression that interpretation itself does violence to disability—and people with disabilities:
The knee-jerk impulse to interpretation that disability has historically instigated hyperbolically determines its symbolic utility. This subsequent overdetermination of disability’s meanings turns disabled populations into the vehicle of an insatiable cultural fascination. Literature has dipped into the well of disability’s meaning-laden depths throughout the development of the print record. In doing so, literary narratives bolstered the cultural desire to pursue disability’s bottomless interpretive possibilities. The inexhaustibility of this pursuit has led to the reification of disabled people as fathomless mysteries who simultaneously provoke and elude cultural capture. (61)
The Secret Life of Stories Page 5