The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  There is, of course, much in the historical record to justify this skepticism about the hermeneutic enterprise with regard to disability. Not only has disability been taken as a sign of God’s wrath or God’s grace in a variety of religious traditions (bespeaking divine punishment or divine election), but as the administration of disability passed from the religious order to the medical over the course of the past two centuries, the disabled body became the object of biopower, defined by the medical and medicalizing gaze that could determine whether a body was to be institutionalized, sterilized, or (quite often, in the history of the United States) shipped back from Ellis Island to its country of origin. Rarely is the interpretation of disability in the social sphere benign, let alone beneficial, to the people being interpreted. But I want to stress how counterintuitive this injunction against interpretation should be for literary criticism. It is as if disability should not mean but be, as if depictions of disability should involve (say) blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, or achondroplasia with no other semiotic functions or implications.

  There are, however, literary texts and traditions in which disability is presented simply as disability, and not as a sign of something other than itself. In an unpublished paper titled “When the Saints Come Crippin’ In,” Alice Sheppard argues that whereas Christian writers of the first millennium typically understood disability as a sign of one’s moral state or as an occasion for charity and/or miraculous cure, Old Norse epics present disability simply as itself—as a war wound with no greater semiotic significance, or as cleft lip and palate signifying nothing other than cleft lip and palate. A more contemporary example can be found in Moby-Dick, which may be of more interest to disability studies insofar as Captain Ahab, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, is often adduced as an example of a character deformed by disability: as Mitchell and Snyder argue, Ahab is led to megalomania and madness by the loss of his leg to the white whale. But as James Berger has pointed out in response to Mitchell and Snyder, Melville’s text contains a countervailing example, that of Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby, who has lost an arm to Moby-Dick and tells Ahab emphatically (and cheerfully) that he wants nothing more to do with the whale: “He’s welcome to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me” (340). For Captain Boomer, then (and, at least in this instance, for Melville), a lost arm is nothing more than a lost arm. Thus, writes Berger, “I agree with [the] description of Ahab as semantic terrorist, but am not convinced by Mitchell and Snyder’s argument that his status is entirely a function of his disability” (170). Sometimes, it appears, the representation of disability involves no metarepresentation of the thing(s) the disability itself is understood to represent. The disabled cigar is just a disabled cigar.

  This uncontroversial observation has profound implications for the theory of narrative prosthesis, leading me to want to qualify Mitchell and Snyder’s most sweeping claims about what all narratives inevitably do. But Berger’s argument has profound implications for my own work as well, which I should address at once. The argument that disability does not work toward one determined end, or follow one inescapable trajectory, in Moby-Dick (or, for that matter, in any literary text) is central to this book, even if it imposes severe limits on the range and scope of my analyses. That is, I am committed here not to the project of encyclopedic typology but to the affirmation of radical individuation. It is a truism in the intellectual disability community that when you have met one person with autism, you have met . . . exactly one person with autism. The range of behaviors and possible positions on the autism spectrum are simply too bewilderingly diverse to admit of generalization.4 The same is true, to an extent, with the condition I know best, Down syndrome; though the underlying biochemistry, the chromosomal nondisjunction and its genetic consequences, may be the same (hence the “syndrome” part of Down syndrome), the expression of trisomy-21 throughout the human population spans a wide range of talents, deficits, and proclivities. I am going to insist, therefore, on a radically Heraclitean understanding of disability and narrative, whereby we can never step in the same interpretive river twice. And I want to up the ante on the truism about autism: when you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism . . . once. The next time you meet that person, he or she will be slightly different, and so will you. The same holds true for literary characters: when you meet one Captain Ahab, or Michael K, you have met one Captain Ahab, or Michael K, once. The next time you encounter them, they too will be slightly different, and so will you.

  The relation between the literary and the nonliterary (or what is called, by some holdouts in remote outlying precincts of the profession, the real world) is critical to the most important point of intersection between Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis and Quayson’s theory of aesthetic nervousness. In a passage that seems to run athwart the claim that disability invites an “undergirding authorization to interpret,” Mitchell and Snyder write that the presence of disability in a text produces a glitch in the hermeneutic machinery: “Disability recurs . . . as a potent force that challenges cultural ideals of the ‘normal’ or ‘whole’ body. At the same time, disability also operates as the textual obstacle that causes the literary operation of open-endedness to close down or stumble” (50; emphasis in original). Quayson acknowledges that this aspect of Mitchell and Snyder’s work “brings their discussion of narrative prosthesis very close to my own notion of aesthetic nervousness,” but takes his distance from it on the grounds that “they proceed to expound upon this blocking function in what can only be nonaesthetic terms” (25). “This is how they put it,” he writes:

  This “closing down” of an otherwise permeable and dynamic narrative form demonstrates the historical conundrum of disability. [Various disabled characters from literature] provide valuable counterpoints to their respective cultures’ normalizing Truths about the construction of deviance in particular, and the fixity of knowledge systems in general. Yet each of these characterizations also evidences that the artifice of disability binds disabled characters to a programmatic (even deterministic) identity. (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 50)

  Thus Mitchell and Snyder’s idea of the shutting down or stumbling of the literary operation is extrinsic to the literary field itself and is to be determined by setting the literary representations of disability against the socio-cultural understandings. . . . Also, I would like to disagree with them on their view of the programmatic identity assigned to the disabled, because, as I will try to show by reading the disabled character within the wider discursive structure of relations among different levels of the text, we find that even if programmatic roles were originally assigned, these roles can shift quite suddenly, thus leading to the “stumbling” they speak of. I choose to elaborate the textual “stumbling” in terms of aesthetic nervousness. (25)

  This polite disagreement, and the invocation of the extrinsic that precedes it, opens onto questions of enormous scope. What is the nature of “the literary operation of open-endedness,” and how can it be made to close down or stumble? Perhaps the encounter with a character like Ahab, whose quest is not only for the White Whale but for a system of fixed, stable meanings, provides an answer: disability disrupts any regime of signification into which it enters. We are very close here to Quayson’s notion of an active ethical core in the depiction of disability that serves to disrupt the surface of representation. But is it illegitimate to appeal to the extraliterary for justifications concerning representation? What are literary representations representations of, if not of the extraliterary? And who in disability studies—who in any realm of endeavor—would want to pursue an inquiry into the representation of disability in literature that did not have implications and possible consequences for the lives of people with disabilities? One strains to imagine a branch of queer theory that proceeds as an academically sanctioned interpretive enterprise but has no
concern for the lives and livelihoods of queer people. What would be the point of the enterprise if it were “academic” in the sense of an “academic” question, a moot point, a question that does not matter?

  And yet one does not want to make the case for the study of disability in literary criticism (if “one” is me) solely on the grounds that it is important for reasons that derive from social policy rather than from protocols of reading. There must be something about the reading of disability as reading that changes the way we read, just as there was something about queer theory as a theory of reading that secured queer theory’s role in the contemporary canon of literary criticism and theory. When Carol Poore writes that the critique of representations of disability “is necessary because of the grave consequences these widely accepted negative images had and still have for the lives of people with disabilities” (261), I want to say that the object is unimpeachable—but that it does not tell us why that critique should be part of the apparatus of literary criticism (as opposed to media studies, communication, sociology, or policy studies). What does the study of disability tell us about the practices of reading?

  Even though Mitchell and Snyder predicate one aspect of their theory—on the stumbling or shutting-down of the open-endedness of the literary text—on what Quayson rightly calls extraliterary criteria, they, like Quayson, are clearly making claims about what the study of disability in literature brings to the discipline of literary criticism (and particularly to the study of narrative). The limitation of their account is that it has more or less the degree of programmatic determinism they ascribe to narrative prosthesis, whereby narrative always and inevitably does X. My contention is more modest, but more defensible: some narratives do X. Some do not.

  In contrast to Mitchell and Snyder, Quayson offers a more varied and supple reading of disability and narrative insofar as his “typology of disability representation” enumerates no fewer than nine possible functions for aesthetic nervousness: disability as null set and/or moral test (as in A Christmas Carol, The Sound and the Fury, or the film There’s Something about Mary); disability as the interface with otherness (race, class, sexuality, and social identity); disability as articulation of disjuncture between thematic and narrative vectors (as in Disney’s Finding Nemo); disability as moral deficit/evil; disability as epiphany (as in To Kill a Mockingbird); disability as signifier of ritual insight (as in the case of Tiresias); disability as inarticulable and enigmatic tragic insight (as in One Hundred Years of Solitude); disability as hermeneutical impasse (as in The English Patient, and, as we shall see, in Coetzee’s Foe and Life and Times of Michael K); and disability as normality.5

  The category of disability as normality is of particular interest to me, and not merely because Quayson assigns my own book, Life as We Know It, to that category.6 For Quayson, aesthetic nervousness denotes the process by which “the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability” (15). The category of disability as normality, however, seems to be exempt from the dynamics of aesthetic nervousness—and it seems to be dominated by nonfiction, memoirs, and autobiographies. Discussing Life as We Know It and Robert Murphy’s book The Body Silent, Quayson writes,

  In both of these instances, the accounts are being written with a full sense of the complexity of responses that attend disability; it is not a stereotype or condition that can be easily assimilated to an essentialized category. Thus, even though there is often some degree of nervousness and anxiety about the implications of living with a disability, there is none of the aesthetic nervousness that we find in the literary accounts. . . . Since in the (auto)biographies of persons with disability the representation is conducted consistently from the point of view of the persons with disabilities and their caregivers, the opportunities for a “collapse” of the dominant protocols are curtailed. (51)

  The category thus roughly corresponds to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “realistic” mode of visual representation, in which disability is simply itself, and not (in Garland-Thomson’s typology) wondrous, sentimental, or exotic.7 But it is problematic for the same reason that Garland-Thomson’s category is problematic: “the real” is not a self-explanatory realm where things are just what they are. In literature and the visual arts, “realism” is an effect of protocols of representation, devices and techniques that produce the illusion of mimesis; “the real” is what appears when a master artificer has deployed those devices with an art that conceals the art. It is no wonder that Quayson is drawn to nonfiction for this category, and yet nonfiction, like fiction, is made up of language, the same slippery stuff that opens onto deconstructive rabbit holes in the work of Melville or Montaigne. “Realism” cannot stand as an uninterrogated category after Roland Barthes has finished rereading and rewriting Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z; nor can it escape the warping effects of queerness once one comes to terms with the fact that one of the categories in the drag balls documented in Paris Is Burning is that of “realness.”8

  For my purposes, then, the “real” and the “normal” should (and will) be considered just as weird as everything else we humans do when we represent people and events to each other in the form of narratives. I do not deny that there are texts, like the one I wrote in my attempt to represent my son at a young age, that try to render disability as ordinary rather than extraordinary. But I insist that the strategies for doing so are as artificial as any other strategies employed by artificers—and, more broadly, that the standards for apprehending a text or a visual representation as “artificial” or “realistic” vary considerably by time and place. One of the more ambitious undertakings of this book is to use the study of intellectual disability in narrative to ask what the “real” and the “normal” consist of, and to lay bare the crafty procedures that go into the cultural production of artifacts we now take to be ordinary, straightforward, unproblematic representations of the world.

  One final theoretical point before I turn back to readings of literary texts. In the course of Aesthetic Nervousness, Quayson never quite explains what “short-circuited” means in the proposition that “the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability.” It is possible to read the suggestion casually, whereby “short-circuited” means something akin to “skewed” or just “messed with”: disability will derange your dominant protocols of representation. The casual reading has much to recommend it, because there are any number of instances in which disability will derange your dominant protocols of representation, as this book will show; yet a short circuit is not the same thing as a derangement (or a skewing, or a messing-with), and the term deserves at least as much scrutiny as the multivalent term “prosthesis” in Mitchell and Snyder. It remains to us, in other words, to do more with Quayson’s metaphor than he does. For when electrical current is diverted through an area of lower resistance, some functions that the current is supposed to serve may very well be “disabled,” in the sense one uses when one disables a smoke alarm.9 This residual sense of “disability” carries none of the stigma associated with forms of cognitive or physical disability.10 No one stigmatizes a smoke alarm by removing its batteries, just as no one denigrates or devalues a function on one’s computer by disabling it. “Disabling” an aspect of narrative by way of a short circuit, therefore, implies no normative judgments about what a narrative ought to be.

  This may seem to be a banal point. Who would think that the term “disability” is necessarily stigmatizing, or that referring to the disabling of some aspects of narrative necessarily entails a normative view of narrative (or anything else)? The reason for my caution has to do with the general reluctance, in disability studies as in the disability rights movement, to talk about disability in terms of function. Inevitably, it seems, any discussion of functionality with regard to disability will involve some normative ideas about how bodies and minds should function (eyes should see, ears should hear, legs should walk, brains should be
able to decode facial expressions and distinguish reality from fantasy), and thus any admission that disability involves a reduction or loss of function threatens not only to return us to the idea of disability as lack, but to give up on the foundational distinction between disability (as a social phenomenon) and impairment (as a somatic phenomenon). All disability thereby becomes impairment, and the idea that disability studies examines disability as the social organization and administration of impairment is lost altogether. This seems too steep a price to pay for a rigorous reading of Quayson’s short circuit.

  But there is a way to talk about function without repudiating the key insight into the social character of disability. As John Searle argues in The Construction of Social Reality, the dividing line between the world of “brute fact” (rocks, quarks, planets, electromagnetic radiation) and “social fact” (money, institutions, values, forms of government) is provided precisely by the attribution of function. “Functions are never intrinsic to the physics of any phenomenon,” Searle writes, “but are assigned from outside by conscious observers and users. Functions, in short, are never intrinsic but are always observer relative” (14; emphasis in original).11 Thus, if one were to say “the heart pumps blood” (this is Searle’s example), one would be speaking of brute fact; but if one were to say “the function of the heart is to pump blood,” one is in the realm of social fact, because “we are doing something more than recording these intrinsic facts. We are situating these facts relative to a system of values that we hold” (14). So, for example, when Maria Truchman-Tataryn writes, in “Textual Abuse: Faulkner’s Benjy,” that “interpretations of Benjy perpetuate oppressive stereotypes of disability as diminished in function and therefore in human worth” (515), two points need to be made in response. One is that nothing is gained by denying that some disabilities do entail diminishments in function. The other is that everything is to be gained by disarticulating “degree of function” from “degree of human worth.” The point is not to try to pretend that all disabilities are purely a matter of social stigma; the point, rather, is to insist that “function” can never be a meaningful measure of human worth.