8 In “The Social Model of Disability,” a critique of the social model of disability, Tom Shakespeare offers a retrospective look at the movement he helped to found, and notes its reliance on the model of physical disability.
9 For representative criticisms of the episode, see David Kociemba, “‘This Isn’t Something I Can Fake’: Reactions to Glee’s Representations of Disability,” and S. E. Smith, “No Glee for Disabled People.”
10 After submitting the manuscript of this book, I taught an undergraduate honors seminar in the fall of 2014 that drew on some of this material. One of the questions on the final exam asked students to write on the relation between intellectual disability and a character’s capacity for understanding the narrative s/he inhabits. One of my students, Kassia Janesch, wrote a response that linked Life and Times of Michael K to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go on the grounds that Michael K and Kathy H. have so little understanding of the larger social fabric precisely because they were raised in institutions (Huis Norenius and Hailsham, respectively) whose purpose it is to prevent them from understanding the larger social fabric. Moreover, like many academic critics, Ms. Janesch traced Michael K’s Bartleby-esque refusals to speak to the rules of Huis Norenius, “the twenty-one rules of which the first was ‘There will be silence in dormitories at all times’” (105). Ms. Janesch argued, then, that even though Kathy H. is positively chatty compared to Michael K, she is a severely restricted narrator who is incapable of understanding the cloning/organ donation program until the chapter in which Miss Emily explains its history, and that her inability to understand her place in the scheme of things, like Michael’s, is produced by the institution that disables her. This strikes me as exactly right, and suggests to me that analyses of the relation between intellectual disability and self-awareness (in characters and in texts) can go well beyond the parameters I have sketched out here.
Chapter 1. Motive
1 For a brilliant reading of how the encounter with intellectual disability can be transformed from shock and horror into a distinctly modernist aesthetic, see Janet Lyon, “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew.”
2 The now-classic reading of disability in As Good as It Gets can be found in the introductory chapter of Robert McRuer’s pathbreaking book, Crip Theory.
3 I discuss Dumbo and Happy Feet (as well as other thematized treatments of disability in mainstream film) in a TEDx talk, “Humans, Superheroes, Mutants, and People with Disabilities.” To those observations I now have to add one from my School for Criticism and Theory seminar participant David Ferguson, who alerted me to the moment in Wreck-It Ralph when Vanellope von Schweetz, a character in the video game Sugar Rush, complains that she is not a glitch (a programming error in the game), but, rather, has pixlexia.
4 Indeed, Joseph N. Straus has suggested that “autism might eventually follow the path of neurasthenia and hysteria into quaintness and irrelevance,” and that “this process may be hastened by the increasing incoherence of the category” (“Autism as Culture,” 465).
5 Finding Nemo, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tiresias, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The English Patient are Quayson’s examples; the rest are mine.
6 It was a very pleasant surprise to see my work adduced by Quayson, and I believe that being assigned to the “disability as normality” category is generally a good thing, a sign that one has represented disability as part of the ordinary fabric of human life; though my subtitle calls Jamie an “exceptional” child, I did indeed try, throughout the book, to render his exceptionality as part of a species norm. But sometimes I wonder whether I should have evinced some aesthetic nervousness, in Quayson’s terms. Shouldn’t I be trying to disrupt the dominant protocols of something? Since it is too late to rewrite Life as We Know It, I will have to devote this book to that project instead.
7 See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.”
8 I am relying in part on Robert McRuer’s critique of Garland-Thomson’s typology in “Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies,” in Crip Theory: where Garland-Thomson writes, “Realism aims to routinize disability, making it seem ordinary” (363), McRuer replies, “If we are in the realm of routinizing a particular cultural construction and making it seem ordinary, are we not potentially in the realm of ideology?” (180). (McRuer proceeds to adduce the Barthes of Mythologies rather than the Barthes of S/Z, but otherwise we are on the same page. Neither he nor I can remember which of us brought up Paris Is Burning, which may or may not have been adduced in the Q-and-A at the Emory conference on disability studies at which he presented the first version of this paper.)
9 I owe this point to Leon Hilton, one of my seminar participants in the School for Criticism and Theory. He did not mention smoke alarms, but he did put much-needed pressure on Quayson’s “short circuit.”
10 See my entry on “Disability” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 87–89.
11 I discuss this aspect of Searle’s work in Rhetorical Occasions (40–41).
12 Similarly, later in the text, the narrator writes, “I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves” (186).
13 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”; I will return to Shklovskian moments of defamiliarization at the end of chapter 3. For a nonfictional version of this kind of narrative hyperdetail, see Cary Henderson, Partial View: An Alzheimer’s Journal, and Henderson’s description of taking his dog for a walk: “I normally go out with my little doggie twice a day. That is when she gets her food and assimilates her food and she’s ready to get rid of what’s left of her food. So I go out twice a day to process my little doggie” (48).
14 I think here not only of toddler Nick angrily telling me that my not-stories were not stories, but of the screenwriting seminar in the film Adaptation, in which the renowned script doctor Robert McKee (played by Brian Cox) tells an auditorium of aspiring writers, “You cannot have a protagonist without desire—it doesn’t make any sense, any fucking sense.”
15 I owe this point to Frank Desiderio, a student in my fall 2013 undergraduate senior seminar, “More Human Than Human.”
Chapter 2. Time
1 In my fall 2013 senior seminar, my student Hannah Burks suggested that Benjy’s eschewal of apostrophes in conjunctions (i.e., “dont”) makes some of his text look like contemporary texting.
2 The film critic Andy Klein, writing in Salon, testifies eloquently to the difficulties of trying to reconstruct any fabula at all. Though he assures us that “while things may seem confusing when you first watch the film, Nolan has been very careful to make sure that, when reassembled, everything in the main part of the film—everyone’s behavior and motivations—makes perfect sense,” he ultimately acknowledges that there is no way to establish a fabula that would make sense of everything not in the main part of the film:
Still, even after so many viewings, after reading the script and discussing the film for months, I haven’t been able to come up with the ‘truth’ about what transpired prior to the film’s action. Every explanation seems to involve some breach of the apparent ‘rules’ of Leonard’s disability—not merely the rules as he explains them, but the rules as we witness them operating throughout most of the film.
3 For a reading of Faulkner’s Appendix that challenges Faulkner’s reading of The Sound and the Fury, see Philip Cohen, “‘The Key to the Whole Book.’”
4 I am borrowing this argument from Janet Lyon, who will eventually want it back.
5 Frank opens the essay by citing André Gide’s remark that Lessing’s Laokoon, on the relation between the visual and the literary arts, “is one of those books it is good to reiterate or contradict every thirty years” (221); the same could be said of Frank’s essay, one of the touchstones of modernist criticism—written by a man who was only twenty-seven at the time. Fr
ank does not discuss The Sound and the Fury; in a follow-up essay, he devotes himself entirely to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a novel he rightly considered underappreciated and that remained underappreciated for a few more decades. However, his remarks on Ulysses can stand in very nicely for Benjy’s section, and for The Sound and the Fury as a whole:
Joyce cannot be read—he can only be re-read. A knowledge of the whole is essential to an understanding of any part; but, unless one is a Dubliner, such knowledge can be obtained only after the book has been read, when all the references are fitted into their proper place and grasped as a unity. Although the burdens placed on the reader by this method of composition may seem insuperable, the fact remains that Joyce, in his unbelievably laborious fragmentation of narrative structure, proceeded on the assumption that a unified spatial apprehension of his work would ultimately be possible. (234–35)
6 For a brief history of our understanding of time, see Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Though it is widely reputed to be the least-read bestseller of (cough) all time, it really is quite readable.
7 I owe this point—and my understanding of the term—to the savvy gamers among my School for Criticism and Theory seminar participants, Sandra Danilovic and David Ferguson.
8 A similar dynamic informs Dick’s even more minor novel, We Can Build You, where a narrative about building lifelike android replicas of Abraham Lincoln and Edwin Stanton gradually unpacks itself as a narrative about clinical depression, partly by way of the Lincoln character.
9 At this point, SCT participant David Ferguson suggested, the novel is basically “game over,” in the sense that the entire text is officially schizophrenic.
10 Quoted in Rita Kempley, “‘Magic Negro’ Saves the Day, but at the Cost of His Soul.”
11 This line of thought was inspired, albeit obliquely, by Ian Baucom’s presentation at the School for Criticism and Theory, “History 4°C: Search for a Method.”
12 The challenge to the humanities was first articulated (or issued?) by Dipesh Chakrabarty, in “The Climate of History,” and has been taken up with remarkable speed and energy. See, e.g., the special double issue of Symplokē, “Critical Climate,” 21.1–2 (2013).
13 It has always puzzled me that complaints about jargon in literary criticism never focus on the field of narratology, which is nearly impenetrable to the uninitiated.
14 Perhaps the most sustained answer is that of Arthur Geffen: Dilsey’s pronouncement
surely refers to the vision she has shared with Shegog of the beginning and the end of Christ’s life on earth and of two of the endpoints of Christian sacred history—the crucifixion and the judgment. . . . Her words may then indicate that she, like Shegog, has seen God face to face. However, the statements, particularly when taken in the context in which they are later uttered, appear also to be comments on the doom of the family she has served all her life. That Dilsey is a seeress possessing intense awareness that the Compson line is dead has been commonly observed, but why does her prophetic insight emerge from the church service? Perhaps Dilsey, having moved for a time into the sacred plane of existence, can now see with utter clarity the fate of those condemned to inescapable profanity. (185)
Geffen is working with Mircea Eliade’s distinction between sacred and profane time, and is emphatic about Benjy’s role as the vehicle between the two. Taking off from Dilsey’s claim that Benjy is “de Lawd’s chile,” followed by “en I be His’n too, fo long, praise Jesus” (317), Geffen writes, “on first reading, one might imagine that Dilsey’s use of the term ‘de Lawd’s chile’ refers to all human beings, all God’s children. However, closer inspection proves this false, for she refers to herself as one who is not yet the Lord’s child; this reward will come to her only in the afterlife. Benjy then achieves a condition on earth which she can achieve only in the other world. Clearly, Benjy’s capacity for transcending profane time is a primary manifestation of his special condition” (179).
For a similar reading, see Burton, “Benjy, Narrativity, and the Coherence of Compson History”: “For [Dilsey] Benjy, whom she includes among those the Lord accepts, is ‘de Lawd’s chile’ and thus has access to an eternal rather than local view of time. . . . Her sense of Benjy’s timelessness finds a visual analogue in his rapt response to Reverend Shegog’s sermon on the resurrection” (217).
15 My analogy for these two endings is the strategy of the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road: a grand, cosmic summing-it-all-up conclusion (where “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” maps onto Dilsey’s revelation) and the deliberately deflationary “Her Majesty,” right down to its false final note, maps onto the final sentence of the novel.
16 I owe this point to School for Criticism and Theory seminar participant Michael Sawyer.
17 See, for the gory details, Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World; Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst; Noll and James W. Trent, Mental Retardation in America; and Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind.
Chapter 3. Self-Awareness
1 I note that my discussion of narrative technique in The Speed of Dark is anticipated by the reader’s guide itself. Specifically, I find to my surprise that I am answering prompt number 3 of the “Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion”:
Lou Arrendale is the novel’s main character, and most of its events are related in his voice, through his eyes. Yet sometimes Moon depicts events through the eyes of other characters, such as Tom and Pete Aldrin. Discuss why the author might have decided to write this story from more than one point of view. Do you think it was the right decision?
Allow me to pass on this question, and say simply that it was a decision that has implications for the handling of disability and narrative irony.
2 See, e.g., Osteen:
It is difficult to accept when, given the chance to undergo an operation that will cure him of autism, Lou agrees to be normalized. . . . Is Lou behaving as his character would, or following a prescripted authorial program designed to provoke an argument or provide another recovery narrative? Because Moon is a neurotypical writer (and the mother of an autistic son), readers may suspect that her protagonist’s decision is more a neurotypical wish-fulfillment than a free choice. (38)
But perhaps the point is precisely that much is lost when Lou agrees to be normalized, not least of which is his relation to Marjory, which had constituted the emotional center of the novel?
3 I assume that the references to Aristotle and Freud are self-explanatory, but for readers not immersed in literary theory, I can explain the mentions of de Lauretis and Ricoeur. I am thinking of de Lauretis’s brilliant rereading of Oedipus in chapter 5 of Alice Doesn’t, “Desire in Narrative,” and Ricoeur’s rereading of Freud’s reading of Oedipus in “Hermeneutics: The Approaches to Symbol,” particularly the observation that “Sophocles’ creation does not aim at reviving the Oedipus complex in the minds of the spectators; on the basis of a first drama, the drama of incest and parricide, Sophocles has created a second, the tragedy of self-consciousness, of self-recognition” (516).
4 For more on this phenomenon, see Berger:
Mark Haddon has said that Christopher . . . is not necessarily meant to be taken as a person with autism. The term never appears in the novel, and Haddon expressed his preference that future editions delete “autism” from their covers so that Christopher might be presented “with no labels whatsoever,” either inside or outside the book (Interview). This preference is made, of course, in spite of Christopher’s manifesting many of the classical or stereotypical evidences of autism. . . . We should take Haddon’s comments as both true and not true, both evasive and appropriate. Christopher clearly resembles what one thinks of as a high-functioning autistic person—as though his author had carefully studied popular accounts of autism by Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Uta Frith, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Oliver Sacks and constructed Christopher accordingly. (192–93)
5 “Neverthel
ess,” Osteen suggests at the end of his discussion, “Curious Incident is by far the best novel with an autistic character yet published, and though it promulgates certain stereotypes, it presents autism as just another way of being human. When I’ve taught the novel in undergraduate literature classes, an initial caution not to interpret Christopher’s traits as typical of all autistic people helps to counteract the perils of stereotyping” (40).
6 Exceptions to this rule should be made for neurotypical narrators who are (a) induced to reverie by the taste of a madeleine, (b) obsessed with their sister’s “honor,” (c) Beckettian, or (d) belonging to the emperor. As I will suggest by way of Haddon’s use of Woolf later in this chapter, modernism often challenges the idea of “neurotypical” narrative regardless of whether any specific character has an identifiable intellectual disability.
7 In Avatar, the obligatory magical unobtainium substance being mined on Pandora is actually called “unobtainium.” To most viewers, this may have sounded like an especially awful piece of scriptwriting, but it is actually one of the film’s more gracious touches: “unobtainium” has been a geek joke for decades, chiefly among SF fans and aerospace engineers. Sometimes it denotes a rare, valuable, and expensive substance necessary for space flight; sometimes (as in science fiction, as in Avatar) it is a MacGuffin that serves as a critical element of the plot.
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