In Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (which, as its title suggests, is sympathetic to the project of reading literature in broadly evolutionary terms), William Flesch suggests that the hard-core literary Darwinists are, at bottom, hostile not only to literary theory but to certain kinds of textual interpretation more broadly. For Flesch, the evocritics fail to say anything particularly illuminating about individual literary works not only because they are committed to an ever-since-the-Pleistocene approach but also because they have surprisingly low expectations of literature itself:
The people tempted to apply evolutionary psychology to the explanation of literature tend to be extremely reductive. . . . Although they would certainly not put it this way, they think they have good reasons to suppose that literature cannot be as subtle and as deep as the best literary criticism takes it to be, or rather they think there is no good reason to suppose that literature could be as subtle and deep as literary criticism claims. (1)
This sounds unlikely—seriously, there are professional literary critics who think that literature isn’t all that?—but Boyd’s work bears it out completely, arguing that “meaning” is epiphenomenal, a second-order effect that deserves lower priority than allegedly more pressing matters:
Academic literary criticism tends to focus on meaning, on the themes of traditional critics or the ideologies of more recent ones. But works of art need to attract and arouse audiences before they “mean.” Every detail of a work will affect the moment-by-moment attention it receives, but not necessarily a meaning abstracted from the story. Our minds can focus on only a few things at once. To hold an audience, in a world of competing demands on attention, an author needs to be an inventive intuitive psychologist. Yet criticism has tended to underplay the “mere” ability to arouse and hold attention. (232)
At this point, I think, it becomes clear that the interpretive shortcomings of literary Darwinisms are not bugs in the system; they are features of the system’s design. For Boyd, attracting and arousing the attention of audiences is prior to any audience’s understanding of “meaning,” and the attraction-and-arousal mechanism is to be understood in (his version of) evolutionary terms. It does not have to be this way; Flesch, for instance, manages to devise a kind of Nussbaumian Poetic Justice-plus-neuroscience argument about why we like to see punishment meted out to rapscallions, mountebanks, and assorted social cheaters, and he focuses almost exclusively on texts by Dickens and Shakespeare in which justice is or is not done. Flesch generously exempts Zunshine from his indictment of evocriticism, and rightly so; however, in raising the question of justice and “altruistic punishment” (also known as comeuppance), Flesch points to something that will turn out to be devastating for Zunshine’s Getting Inside Your Head (which was published five years after Comeuppance).
Recall that in Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine had claimed that the novel “in its currently familiar shape” arose because of Theory of Mind. Getting Inside Your Head effectively undermines that argument by claiming that all human cultural productions arose because of Theory of Mind. If that is the case, and if there is nothing to be said about any specific cultural production other than “this too is the product of Theory of Mind,” or (in Boyd’s version) “this too required its creator to attract and hold our attention,” why should my argument in this book have anything to do with evocriticism and its second cousin, cognitive literary criticism? My sense is that a theory of Theory of Mind is potentially relevant to a study of intellectual disability in fiction, but there is a larger question at stake here as well, and it has to do with (of all things) justice. Zunshine is right to think that scenes of embodied transparency, in which we can divine the mental states of others, are important elements of fiction. But surely they are not the only, or even necessarily the primary, reason that humans create and consume narratives. Sometimes, we ask other questions: What happens to the characters, and is what happens to them right and just? (Mental states may be part of this question, but the abstract question of justice is not.) What kind of world is being created in this fiction? If it is prose narrative, what is the language like? If it is film or visual art, what does it look like?
In her reading of the film Quiz Show, Zunshine unwittingly offers a handy example of how the Theory of Mind approach can miss the moral forest for the cognitive trees: “The quiz shows promised one kind of cognitive management and delivered another—that was their real ‘scandal’” (100). This makes sense only if you believe that the contestants on Twenty-One and Tic-Tac-Dough were really performing embodied transparency, whereupon you feel betrayed when you realize that their reactions were scripted. If you’re a reader like Zunshine, you watch game shows to see emotions, and you want to see real ones. But surely the real scandal of the quiz shows, for most people, was not that they promised one kind of cognitive management and delivered another. The real scandal is that they purported to show real competition but did not. We thought we were watching a fair contest; we didn’t know the entire game was rigged. Somehow, that seems more important than the cognitive benefits I might have derived from seeing how contestants behaved in the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.
At a key moment in Getting Inside Your Head, Zunshine brushes off alternate ways of perceiving art, such as the possibility that representations of women might have something to do with ideas about sexuality: “A hypothesis that a given group of paintings featuring women reflects its time’s anxiety about women’s sexuality will be true about any group of paintings featuring women. It is thus trivially true because it does not predict anything about any specific painting or representational tradition” (176). It is a curious charge, since of course the same thing can be said of readings relying on Theory of Mind: they will be trivially true about any narrative that offers scenes of embodied transparency. But they will be irrelevant to forms of art, abstract or otherwise, that do not offer such scenes, and they will be indifferent to or determinedly clueless about questions of right and wrong—in quiz shows as on all the stages of the world.
✴ ✴ ✴
I said in my introduction that my method here is formalist; yet no matter how formalist I try to be in my reading of literary works dealing with intellectual disability, it remains impossible to bracket out entirely the question of justice. Especially when we turn our attention to what, if anything, an intellectually disabled character knows about the narrative he or she inhabits, we are inevitably asking highly specific questions about specific texts, questions that are not well addressed by answers like “the author tried to win and hold your attention” but that can be broached, in a rudimentary way, by answers like “we are predisposed to be interested in what other people think, and in whether what happens to them is right and just.” And as Frank Kermode would remind us, none of us knows where our (personal or collective) narrative trajectories might take us. It is one thing, therefore, to note that Steinbeck’s Lennie Small is marked, from start to finish, by his inability to understand his own narrative and its (ultimately fatal) consequences, and to try to develop an argument from that observation; this is merely a matter of literary criticism. It is quite another thing to note that in Texas, an inmate can be legally executed, despite the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling on the unconstitutionality of capital punishment for people with intellectual disabilities, if he or she has a mental capacity that, in the determination of the court, exceeds Lennie’s. That was the legal basis for the execution of Marvin Wilson in 2012, an execution whose rationale was strenuously criticized by Steinbeck’s son Thomas and by the legal analyst Andrew Cohen, who noted that Wilson “could not handle money or navigate a phone book” and was “a man who sucked his thumb and could not always tell the difference between left and right, a man who, as a child, could not match his socks, tie his shoes or button his clothes.”10
In the 2004 decision Ex Parte Briseno, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wrote,
Most Texas citizens would agree that S
teinbeck’s Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt from execution. But does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?
Put another way, is there a national or Texas consensus that all of those persons whom the mental health profession might diagnose as meeting the criteria for mental retardation are automatically less morally culpable than those who just barely miss meeting those criteria? Is there, and should there be, a “mental retardation” bright-line exemption from our state’s maximum statutory punishment?
The idea is a simple and utterly reprehensible one: the understanding of intellectual disability in fiction can be used as a device for exempting some people with intellectual disabilities from the Supreme Court decision in Atkins v. Virginia—and killing them.
As we saw in Martian Time-Slip, where narrative experiments with time and textual self-awareness were intertwined with discussions of genocide with regard to people with intellectual disability, the interpretive stakes are always high when the subject is intellectual disability, because the stakes are ultimately about who is and who is not determined to be “fully human,” and what is to be done with those who (purportedly) fail to meet the prevailing performance criteria for being human. I have had moments, over the years of writing and thinking about this book, in which I have said to myself that I do not care whether this book has any impact on public policy or on the scales of social justice; it is a work of literary criticism, meant to continue and expand a conversation among a small group of specialists who practice the arts of advanced literacy. For that task, too, requires attention, just as scholars in history, philosophy, and the arts need to take more adequate account of the importance of disability to their fields. And yet in the course of my reading, I have found myself time and again in the position Ato Quayson marks out for himself at the end of Aesthetic Nervousness. After performing all his readings of the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Quayson finds himself contemplating the work of the Centre for Democratic Development in Ghana—specifically, his own 2006 lecture to mark the passage of Ghana’s Persons with Disability Act. “I kept asking myself,” Quayson writes, “both then and afterward: what is the relation between Aesthetic Nervousness and an occasion such as this, between a discussion of the representation of disability in literature and the condition of the lives of disabled persons on the streets of the city where I grew up?” (207–8).
To this question, Quayson first proposes an intermediary answer grounded in the protocols of textual analysis:
It entails reading disability not as a discrete entity within the literary aesthetic domain, but as part of the totality of textual representation. In this totality, everything is linked to everything else such that in isolating a detail of disability for analysis we take it not merely as a particular detail, but as a threshold that opens up to other questions of a textual and also ethical kind. (208)
It is then a short distance—though it seems to entail a precipitous ratcheting-up of the stakes—to Quayson’s final answer to the question, his conclusion that “our ultimate obligation as literary critics must be addressing the particularities of injustice of the world in which we live” (210). When it comes to disability—and, I would argue, intellectual disability a fortiori—even the most formalist readings are never strictly formalist: disability studies in literature might move beyond the analysis of individual bodies and minds, but its ultimate concern will always be centered on bodies and minds, and the nature of the social fabric that constitutes the relation between bodies and minds.
I have argued that if disability studies is going to have greater influence on the world of literary criticism, the degree of influence it can and should have, it needs to pay closer attention to the textuality of texts. But disability studies will never be only about the textuality of texts. The question of what Lennie knows about the narrative he inhabits is a formal question; it is also a social question. As I said in my opening pages, I hope that this book has made this argument so effectively that it has become obvious. And yet I remain thoroughly unconvinced that anything I have written in this book will have any effect on public policy or on the scales of social justice. I know, for instance, that it will not bring back Marvin Wilson, and that it does not provide any legal grounds for barring the execution of people like him in the future. But if, finally, I have convinced you that the study of intellectual disability is also the study of sociality; if I have convinced you that a disabled narrative or a fictional disability can change what you see and believe; if I have convinced you that every performance criterion for being human is pernicious; if I have convinced you that studying intellectual disability in literature is a worthwhile endeavor and that even so outlandish a novel as Martian Time-Slip has serious implications for addressing the injustice of the world in which we live—then I will have done all I can imagine doing in a book like this.
Notes
Introduction
1 The film opens with a teenaged Magneto realizing his metal-bending powers as his parents are led off to Auschwitz. We move to the present, where the U.S. Senate is debating a bill that would require all mutants to wear identifying marks; Professor Xavier, in his wheelchair, looks over the proceedings from a balcony. Elsewhere, an adolescent Rogue inadvertently puts her boyfriend into a coma by making out with him, whereby we learn that (a) Rogue can extract the life force from other creatures, and (b) the mutants acquire their talents when they reach puberty. Professor Xavier has established a special school for mutants, where they can develop their abilities fully. And over the course of the film, the most mutant-phobic U.S. senator is “converted” into mutant form. In other words, the X-Men are coded as gay gifted Jewish kids with disabilities.
2 The most comprehensive discussion of literary Darwinism to date can be found in Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” and the subsequent debate among Kramnick, Paul Bloom, Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Vanessa Ryan, G. Gabrielle Starr, and Blakey Vermeule in Critical Inquiry (2012).
3 The story goes like this. When I was four, my father took me to the main branch of the Queens Public Library, about four miles from our house. Whether I wandered off or he lost track of me, I do not know; all I know is that suddenly I could not find him anywhere. Terrified, I left the library to see whether he was on the street. There was a bus depot nearby, and I knew—at four!—that I could get home on the Q65 bus (I was always a New York City mass transit aficionado). Weirdly, however, I convinced myself that I could not take a bus because I did not have fifteen cents for the fare, forgetting that children under six ride free. At that point I began to cry, whereupon a woman stopped and asked whether I was lost. I told her I had lost my father in the library; she asked if I knew my address and phone number (I did: 45–74 158th Street, LE9–1202). She took me back into the library, to the information desk, and had my father paged. He appeared, vastly relieved and full of gratitude for the arrival of this helpful woman (as well he should have been), and the story ended happily.
Nick never left my sight in Alderman Library.
4 In 5 Readers Reading, Norman Holland had argued that any reader who mistook Miss Emily for an Eskimo would be clearly misreading the text: “One would not say, for example, that a reader of . . . ‘A Rose for Emily’ who thought the ‘tableau’ described an Eskimo was really responding to the story at all—only pursuing some mysterious inner exploration” (12). In Is There a Text in This Class?, by contrast, Stanley Fish concedes the point but argues that the range of acceptable readings of “A Rose for Emily” is not constrained by the text itself: “The Eskimo reading is unacceptable because there is at present no interpretive strategy for producing it, no way of ‘looking’ or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are ‘ways’) that would result in the emergence of obviously Eskimo readings. That does
not mean, however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself” (346).
5 The Internet abounds with such speculations, as well as suggestions that Meg herself is on the Asperger’s end of the spectrum. But for a brief, thoughtful consideration of the drawbacks of such diagnoses, see Stephanie Allen Crist, “Should We Label Characters?”
6 I address the implicit disability hierarchy, and the resistance of intellectual disability to processes of destigmatization, in my brief discussion of Erving Goffman’s Stigma in “Term Paper.”
7 See, for instance, the remarkable collection of essays in Autism and Representation (ed. Mark Osteen), Margaret Price’s searing Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, and Catherine Prendergast’s terrific essay “The Unexceptional Schizophrenic: A Post-Postmodern Introduction.” Osteen’s introduction to Autism and Representation offers a particularly pointed critique of the disability hierarchy as it has been (to date) reproduced within disability studies.
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