Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

IN 2004, SCOPE, A BRITISH ORGANIZATION FOCUSING ON people with cerebral palsy, launched a campaign called “Time to Get Equal,” in which they highlighted the various forms of discrimination that people with cerebral palsy were exposed to by care professionals, the various care institutions, and the general public. A Web site, www.timetogetequal.org.uk, provided personal accounts of some of the ways in which such people had been negotiating their day-to-day lives. One of the supporting images (figure 1) used to launch the campaign is fascinating in its suggestive use of literary echoes. To the right hand side of the frame, we see a man with a round hole in the center of his face, through which is visible the blue wall behind him. Just above him and to his left are the words: “I’m disabled. Not someone to look straight through.” The words are placed to act like a speech or thought bubble similar to those used in cartoons, but with the contours of the bubble removed. The picture has been taken in such a way as to cast a shadow on the blue background against which he stands. Whereas the man clearly has a hole in his face, the shadow of his face looks like that of a man screaming. There is an optical illusion at play in the picture that suggests a double speech act. The subtle literariness of the way the words are placed and the screaming penumbral projection behind the man are further augmented by the first sentence of the printed text right below the picture: “Please do not see me as the invisible man.” The kinship evoked between the person in this picture and the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel is telling, because as in Invisible Man, the problem is not one of not being seen, but of being framed within a discourse of stereotypes and expectations that serve to efface a person’s identity. While people routinely “look straight through him,” the person with cerebral palsy, like the Invisible Man, constantly wants to scream. I shall have more to say about Ellison’s novel in the next chapter, particularly in relation to his own ironic treatment of Brother Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood and who happens to have a concealed disability.

The Scope poster and Web site serve to highlight in a highly succinct and effective way some central features of disability studies. From at least the 1980s, the main interest of scholars in this field has been to shift the discussion of disability away from the medical discourse that had dominated such discussion previously and to see disability as woven out of a range of problems connected to the architectural environment, the public-transport system, and most important, to the often ill-concealed social attitudes that attend people with disabilities. In this regard, the term disability is no longer taken as referencing the notion of a reduced ability deriving from an impairment, but speaks to the built and social environments that generate difficulties for the disabled person’s capacity to live a full and fulfilled life (Corker and French 1999; Linton 1998; Davis 2002, 33–46). Once viewed from this angle, disability can no longer be seen as the product of tragic circumstances and thus be understood simply as the presumed sad fate of the individual (Oliver 1990). The notion of disability as personal tragedy places people with disabilities within a narrative in which accommodation to the impairment is squarely their own responsibility or that of their families. The medical and social systems are then tasked with corrective, ameliorative, or reprimanding roles, reminding the person with disability to “get a grip” and take charge of the process of his or her self-improvement and adjustment. Indeed, in the medical model, the person with disability is placed under an obligation to want to get well, his or her multiple social roles of parent, worker, spouse, and so on being suspended temporarily in exchange for a sign of strenuous effort toward improvement. (Murphy 1990; Wendell 1996, 87–109). Shifting the focus of disability to see it as primarily the product of social circumstances complicates even the notion of impairment. As the sociologist Oliver notes, the dominance and indeed proliferation of certain impairments can be directly linked to social systems. Thus in Africa there is a direct correlation between poverty and such diseases as polio. Additionally, it is not uncommon to see people with physical impairments reduced to begging on street corners or living a generally twilight existence, concealed from the eyes of the public. And it is not idle to note that the many civil wars that have blighted the continent, from Angola and Mozambique to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, have served to greatly increase the number of people with impairments. All these wars may be directly attributed to incoherent political and social structures that, for some, have made the instrumentalization of disorder an attractive option for the resolution of social conflicts.¹

In the contemporary West, on the other hand, noncongenital impairments such as spinal-cord injury and various workplace-related impairments derive directly from the relations of production within capitalism. Certain injuries and impairments are more likely to be sustained by factory and construction workers than by those who spend their time in an office, for example. If we recall the effect of disasters such as the chemical leakage at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal in 1984 and the terrible impairments incurred among the local population because of it, we see a worrisome link between global capitalism and local disabilities. And to render matters even more complicated, it could be argued that the land-mines sown into the land in Angola and elsewhere are a direct product of cold-war politics and therefore an extension of the cynical underside of the West’s military-industrial complex. “Long cited as one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, the early UN estimate of 10 to 15 million landmines contaminating Angolan soil is still widely cited.” These are the words of the Landmine Monitor Report (1999, 117) on Angola. Viewed through a wider lens of social structures and international formations, disability ceases being an individual affliction to be borne silently by the person with an impairment. However, when the intricate links between social or international systems and such impairments are exposed, the response is often a mixture of guilt, bewilderment, and denial on the part of the nondisabled. I will be using the terms “impairment” and “disability” interchangeably, even though “impairment” refers to the specific physical or cognitive deficiency that leads to a reduced capacity to fully actualize all aspects of one’s life and “disability” to the socially regulated parameters that exacerbate the effect of the impairment. In practice, it is almost impossible to keep the two separate, since “impairment” is automatically placed within a social discourse that interprets it and “disability” is produced by the interaction of impairment and a spectrum of social discourses on normality that serve to stipulate what counts as disability in the first place.

It is not only the oppositions between impairment and disability that are rendered unstable once we begin to see disability within a social as opposed to a medical discourse. Various other oppositions are also destabilized, such as those that might be discerned in the distinctions between congenital and adventitious disability, between disease as causative factor and impairment as effect of disease, between physical deformity and madness, and between the material consequences of blindness or deafness and that of nonvisible disabilities. The central reason for this instability is that though different kinds of disability can be shown to have historically followed different rhythms and patterns of institutional evolution in the West and elsewhere, viewed from the perspective of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997) calls the normate, disability has always been the object of a negative comparison to what is typically construed as corporeal normality. The attitudes that have historically attended people with disabilities have varied over time, but reiterated in all epochs is the idea that they carry an excess of meaning and therefore offer an insistent invitation to a series of interpretative and institutional framings. Thomson (1996, 1) puts it succinctly when writing in the context of the display of freaks: “By its very presence, the exceptional body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation.” Seen from the perspective of the normate, the boundaries that might be taken to differentiate and divide various disabilities are frequently blurred. The disabled body has historically invited, compelled, and incited a variety of responses in spite of whatever specific impairments may be at issue. Even as different impairments become the touchstones or focal points for intensified social processes of corporeal hierarchization in different historical periods, certain symbolic representations and social attitudes were regularly transferred across disabled groups. As Stiker (1997, 72) puts it, writing of the Middle Ages: “Beyond these figures, so important in the Middle Ages—the beggar, the monster, the criminal—lies the silhouette of the disabled, borrowing features from the other three all at the same time or successively, and yet sharply contoured, taking us down into the depths of as yet unthought social ideas.” Even though in Western societies the disabled are no longer directly linked in the social imaginary to monsters and criminals, the point of Stiker’s remark is that persons with disabilities, located on the margins of society as they are, have historically taken on the coloration of whatever else is perceived to also lie on the social margins of society. It is this that allows Scope to invoke the Invisible Man in promoting awareness about cerebral palsy as a potent reminder of the interlinked construction of such margins.

Disability scholarship allows us to glean certain repeated features from the general social treatment of the disabled (Stiker 1997; Braddock and Parish 2001). These repeated features will become pertinent for discussing the literary and aesthetic representation of disability, since I will be trying to show that the literary domain invokes some of these attitudes but dissolves them into the tapestry of representation. What follows next is not an attempt at a full survey of the history of disability discourse in the West, but only a review of some salient features that will become pertinent to my later literary discussion. Disability studies scholars already familiar with this history may wish to skip to the next section, where I outline the main theoretical emphases of this study. In this brief review section, I shall at various points correlate the social treatment of disability to specific texts and generic conventions in preparing the way for outlining what I mean by the concept of aesthetic nervousness.

Classical antiquity shared with the biblical period the fact that various forms of disability were interpreted as signs of the operation of a spiritual or metaphysical realm. Various texts in the Old Testament insisted, for example, that lepers could not be admitted to the world of normals. In the Old Testament, legal uncleanness attached to people with disabilities, who, even though permitted to participate in cultic observances, could never become priests who made sacrifices (Stiker 1997, 24). The Greeks, on the other hand, saw disability and disease as punishment from the gods, while for the ancient Egyptians, disability and disease were no longer instances of punishment for sin but the signs of a metaphysical drama (Stiker 1997, 39–46). From the ethnographic essays on disability in Ingstad and Whyte’s Culture and Disability (1995), one can also get the impression that various tribal peoples share a similar perspective with regard to disability to that of antiquity. Whyte (1995, 273–274) describes these as generally following a therapeutic itinerary governed by an impulse toward the placation of causal forces. In all these instances, the divine and metaphysical orders are seen to be proximate to the human life-world. Disability is then interpreted in various ways as a function and sign of that proximity.

“The body,” Mary Douglas (2004, 142) tells us in Purity and Danger, “is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures.” This observation is forcefully illustrated in the medieval period. In the early Middle Ages, writers such as Isidore of Seville (560–636) were able to proffer a taxonomy of monstrosity in which the disabled take their place beside monsters. His twelve-part taxonomic grid starts off as follows: (1) hypertrophy of the body, (2) atrophy of the body, (3) excrescence of bodily parts, (4) superfluity of bodily parts, (5) deprivation of bodily parts, and then through various gradations on to the mixture of animal and human parts and to monsters proper. Isidore of Seville’s taxonomy of the monstrous proceeds from the view that the most useful model for such a taxonomy was the human body itself. Indeed, the symbolic force of the body throughout the Middle Ages is particularly strong because of the influence of Neoplatonism, which allegorized the body as the “little cosmos” within which was contained the cosmos itself (Williams 1996, 107–108). Isidore of Seville’s taxonomy is ultimately also a normative grid; the degrees of embodied impairment-as-monstrosity are inherently part of a moral map of the corporeal body itself and the ways in which society might relate to it. Though his taxonomy seems extreme to modern eyes, the assumed ethical implications of impairment are also discernible in literary texts of different periods and cultures. In chapter 2, I shall outline a typology that takes account of such ethical implications as they relate to distinctions within the aesthetic domain in its attempts to “make sense” of the disabled body. As I shall show, the ways in which disability is represented in literary writing makes for a range of differentiated aesthetic dispositions that simultaneously reflect both an ethical and a literary dimension to such representations.

By the later Middle Ages, disability is defined by interlocking subsystems of social attitudes and treatment. On the one hand, charity is the dominant response to disability. Disability is seen as a sign of the variety of God’s creation, the specific impairments being read off as challenges to man’s sense of pride and self-sufficiency. Thus the nondisabled were encouraged by the church to respond with charity toward people with disabilities. Because disability was closely aligned to disease and disease was often interpreted as a form of plague and punishment for past sins, along with the encouragement to charity there also persisted an idea of disability as a sign of divine disfavor. The two attitudes—charity and fear—were by no means mutually exclusive.

In places such as France, lepers formed distinctive urban communities almost akin to monasteries (Stiker 1997, 68). Fourteenth-century England, on the other hand, saw a complex attitude of city authorities toward the management and containment of disease and disability. This was in spite of the persistent link made between the medical and religious grounds for social intervention. Furthermore, the fate of persons with disability was inextricably tied to that of the poor. With the progressive collapse of the medieval social structure and the decline of the monasteries and their eventual abolition in 1536, charity for the poor gradually moved from its traditional voluntary framework to become a special tax levied at the parish level. Starting in the 1500s, the Poor Laws that came out regularly for two centuries ensured that the link between the sick poor and people with disability—and the attempted alleviation of the causal connections between the condition of the disabled and poverty—increasingly became the focus of legislation and municipal activity. The 1571 census of the city of Norwich, for example, counted about a third of the sick poor as being either sick, sickly, or very sick. They were described as “weak, diseased, bed-ridden, lame, crooked, or suffering from stone, gout, dumbness, deafness, broken legs, diseases of the mouth, broken ribs, thigfola [fistula?], or were one-legged or one-handed” (Pelling 1998, 85). As was the case in France, lazarhouses for people suffering from leprosy and other communicable diseases were established outside the city walls. It was, however, traditional for lepers and lunatics as well as epileptics and sometimes the sick poor to share an asylum, thus making their later institutional prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as on Robben Island in South Africa in a sense unremarkable.

Health practices were quite multifarious in the later Middle Ages, with overlapping and sometimes contradictory elements. Thus, on the one hand, lazarhouses were used for the treatment of conditions that negatively affected the working capacity of the patient and also of the poor, in the case of infectious diseases. On the other hand, diseases seen as “intractable,” such as those associated with people with severe mobility impairments or lunatics, were sometimes ignored. Intractable conditions “aroused a response from passers-by without involving the same risks of quarantine, confinement, and cure, even though such disabilities would not necessarily inhibit authorities from using the whip” (Pelling 1998, 96). It is clear that the boundary between disease and institutionalization was very thin indeed and that social attitudes extended from a sense of tolerant charity to one of moral panic.² At the same time, the late medieval period also saw a challenge to notions of aesthetic beauty. This is most marked in the paintings of Brueghel, who placed disabled characters in several of his most prominent paintings. As Mitchell and Snyder (2000, 4–5) show, Brueghel’s masterworks “rely upon the representational power of deformity and disability to expose the bodily life repressed within classicism,” seizing upon “disability’s power to disrupt and variegate the visual encounter with unblemished bodies.” We shall return to Mitchell and Snyder and their notion of the distortion and variegation of the visual encounter more fully in the next section.

Even as there appeared to be a variegated response to physical disabilities, madness, on the other hand, was consistently viewed throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance period as a form of divine punishment. Examples abound from the work of didactic writers such Aelfric, Abbot Leofstan of Bury St. Edmunds, John Mirk, and others to show how clearly the link was made between madness, divine retribution, and demoniacal possession (Harper 2003, 29–74). As Harper shows, this link was itself reflected in the Middle English romance and in the writings of people such as Chaucer, whose Miller and Summoner both tell stories that play upon such beliefs. Madness was also linked to witchcraft, with the bloody excesses of the witch and heresy hunts eventually breeding official and public skepticism about the links between madness and demoniacal possession. By 1563, Johannes Weyer was to write a medical thesis that wove an ingenious religious-cum-medical argument to show how mistaken the view was about the link between madness and demoniacal possession. He was followed by other writers who collectively cast scorn on the popularly held beliefs that had dominated the witch hunts (Porter 2002, 25–33). What is pertinent in these accounts, however, is the persistence of what we noted earlier with regard to the Greeks, Egyptians, and others in antiquity, namely, the idea that disability (in this case madness) reflected the proximity between the divine or metaphysical world and the human lifeworld.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a marked shift came when, with the emergence of a scientific medical discourse, the disabled were subjected to taxonomies of scientific measurement and ordering. The idea of the education or reeducation of disabled people grows out of the Enlightenment. But coinciding with this is the consolidation of carceral complexes such as the prison and the hospital, the hospital for lunatics and other persons with disability having grown out of charity houses since the Middle Ages. Increasingly, concerns were also raised in the period about the primary role of sexuality in generating disease and disability. The 1889 Report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf, and the Dumb et Cetera worried that disabled offspring might result from sexual intercourse between people with physical disabilities, leading to “one more of the minor streams which ultimately swell the great torrent of pauperism” (xii). In that period, an explicit link was established between diseases such as syphilis and blindness, to the degree that an immediate correlation was made between blindness and sexual behavior. Blindness was taken as a sign of presumed sexually questionable behavior and moral deficiency. This correlation finds a peculiar focus in the literature of the Victorian period (see Holmes 2002). In opera, on the other hand, the relation between disability and presumed sexual behavior is used as a shorthand for tragic failings. In their fascinating study of the relationship between opera and disease, Hutcheon and Hutcheon (1996, 22) write that “the history of syphilis in Europe from 1495 on has been a history of Christian interpretations of this disease based on the earlier plague model: as a divine scourge, but this time specifically against the sexually sinful” (22). They go on to show in their discussion of Wagner’s Parsifal how Amfortas’s shameful wound, tactfully transferred from the character’s genital area to his chest by Wagner in a revision of his sources, prevents him from carrying out his social and moral tasks as leader of the Grail realm. But Amfortas receives his disabling wound as he sinks into the arms of the beautiful Kundry, “consistently represented in nineteenth-century cultural vocabulary of the syphilitic prostitute” (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 1996, 22, 62). She dies at the end of the opera as recompense, but not before the connection between sexually transmitted disease and the tragic and disabling effect it has on the hero has been suggestively established.

Even though many wars had historically been fought in the West and had led to the proliferation of disabilities, it may be argued that part of the sense of outrage we share today—and how that fed into specific legal instruments and institutions for addressing the needs of people with disabilities—derived mainly from World War I and World War II. The literary writing of direct participants in the wars bore witness to the degree to which war proliferated impairment and disability in the name of unsustainable ideals. In Britain, noted World War I soldier-poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen depicted the mental and physical disorders that were caused by the war (see Sassoon’s “They” and Owen’s “Disabled” as interesting examples). The two poets met in Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Owen was undergoing treatment along with a hundred and fifty other British officers for mental conditions related to trench warfare. Sassoon had been sent there on suspicion of mental illness for criticizing the war in a London newspaper.

The two World Wars not only led to the consolidation of psychoanalysis, with terms such as post–traumatic stress disorder being properly understood in relation to shell-shocked soldiers, but also generated the main parameters of disability rehabilitation and compensation as they are known today. In the United States, as medical treatment for people with disabilities borne from the wars merged with vocational education and training, a fundamental ideal of rehabilitation began to gather momentum through the activism of figures such as Howard Rusk, Mary Switzer, Henry Kessler, and others (O’Brien 2001, 31–45). And as prostheses for soldiers developed, so also did the more widespread notions of replacement, compensation, and rehabilitation evolve and become part of the institutional apparatuses that were put in place to take care of all people with disabilities. Today’s special-education programs are direct descendants of the medical discourse of rehabilitation from the two World Wars.

Attitudes to disabilities in the West also evolved in response to interactions with other races. The colonial encounter and the series of migrations that it triggered in its wake served to displace the discourse of disability onto a discourse of otherness that was correlated to racial difference. Even as colonialism provided extra-European “social laboratories” for the development of discourses to do with bourgeois civility, female sexuality, and the nature of criminality and policing, it also led to the intermeshing of such external colonial realities into the rhythms of the West’s own social evolution. Part of this intermeshing involved the increasing mixture between Europeans and outsiders both in the colonies and in Europe itself, with sharp lines regularly being suggested about what constituted the inside and outside of society.³ Disease provided a particularly supple set of metaphors to modulate some of the social anxieties that emerged in the colonial period around interracial encounters, both in Europe and in the United States, with the discourse on leprosy in the period being particularly productive. Whereas the disease had disappeared from Europe and had declined as a salient theological concept by the end of the Renaissance, during the period of nineteenth-century imperialism the disease was discovered as quite common in parts of the world that the Western nations were annexing and colonizing. And with the germ theory of disease having emerged as one of the more important scientific advances, a new anxiety about race relations began to take hold. Vaughan (1991, 77) writes of “the projection on to Africa of a powerful Christian disease symbolism and the attempt to engineer socially a ‘leper identity’ in the particular circumstances of colonialism” by the British. In the United States, on the other hand, the germ theory heightened fears that contact with “inferior” races might threaten the safety and future of the “superior” race; new immigration laws were drafted to take account of this perceived new threat (Gussow 1989, 19–20). In certain quarters, an increasingly paranoid connection was made between foreign migrants, the transferability of diseases, and the dangers that these posed to the United States:

Note the moral panic intricately interwoven into the references to then contemporary American history. Tellingly, the foreigners are already marked out as morally dangerous in the phrase “unprincipled, vicious and leprous hordes of Asia,” so that the entire discussion of the effect of race mixture is not just one inflected by the terror of miscegenation but essentially by the idea of threatened moral negation. What is evident from these and other similar remarks is that the West’s continuing contact with the rest of the world through the colonial adventure and the attendant flows of people across borders serves to problematize and disrupt any straightforward trajectory of attitudes toward disability that might be adduced in looking solely at developments in the West itself. I shall pay some more attention to the colonial encounter and the status of the intersection between disease, criminality, and disability in chapter 7, on the history of Robben Island.

If, as Ingstad and Whyte’s 1995 collection of ethnographic essays on disability persuasively demonstrates, in many non-Western cultures disability is tied to normative injunctions and to powerful enactments of metaphysical beliefs, then it has to be conceded that the constant migration of people from other parts of the world to the West also implies a transfer of such beliefs and interpretations. Whyte’s concluding essay in the collection is particularly useful in arguing the dialogical relationship between non-Western and Western attitudes to the disabled. Even though she does not state this explicitly, it is possible to glean a synchronic model from her account, in which to simultaneously read off attitudes to disability in the West and elsewhere. Thus we might speak of multiple discourses of disability operating in the West today, one that proposes itself as entirely scientific and rational and another that is still tied to different therapeutic itineraries that involve the placation of causal forces. The two discourses are not necessarily contradictory but must be seen as part of a continuum of responses around disease and disability today.

Even though in the modern world the notion of the proximity of the divine and metaphysical orders to the human lifeworld is no longer predominant, such beliefs have still flared up from time to time in a variety of contexts. The idea of the proximity of the two realms has only been residualized as opposed to being entirely superseded. The relation between residuality and emergence is not to be seen as a cycle but rather as a dialectical mutation in which a variety of “old” and “new” ideas are sometimes reconstellated to produce new perspectives and realities (Williams 1977). Such a reconstellation regarding disability is what led to the attempt to exterminate people with disabilities along with Jews during the Third Reich.⁴ Even though there had always been people with disability in Germany, historically treated in similar ways to others elsewhere in Europe, the intense nationalist redefinition that took place during the Third Reich shifted the salience of disability as a socially meaningful sign. Disability ceased being a mere cipher of the proximity of the metaphysical realm to the human lifeworld and rather became the signal of danger to the purity of the nation as such. Joined to the presumed inalienable racial otherness of Jews, disability came to bear the burden of a moral deficit that was thought to threaten the national character as such and thus, along with Jews, had to be violently extirpated.

Certain present-day responses to disability even among people presumably sharing an enlightened mode of thinking still hark back to unexamined sentiments of a bygone era. Thus it is not at all uncommon for some still to think that impairments are a sign of some special metaphysical disorder, or that people with disability carry their impairments because of mistakes in their past life. A classic instance of such a disposition is seen in the remarks made by Glen Hoddle, who was quoted as saying that people with disabilities are born that way for karmic restitution. His remarks led directly to his sacking as manager of the English soccer team, but it was the furor that broke out in the wake of his comments that is of significance. Coming from a Christian who also believes in reincarnation, Hoddle’s remarks divided opinion sharply. Whereas disability groups and politicians were incensed at his remarks, commentators from various parts of the world including from well outside the United Kingdom jumped to his defense.⁵ But it is the range of disablist images that were used to describe him in the media that was telling about largely unacknowledged social attitudes toward persons with disabilities. As was quietly pointed out in a letter in The Guardian:

There are three key elements I want to highlight from this brief historical account of the social treatment of disability. First is the implicit assumption that disability is an “excessive” sign that invites interpretation, either of a metaphysical or other sort. As will be clear from the work of the various writers we will be looking at in this study, the category of the “metaphysical” is dissolved into that of an aesthetic problematic, sometimes figured in the form of an interpretative difficulty or impasse, at other times as something that is concealed from view but that has serious ramifications for how interpersonal relationships among the characters are conducted. Following from this first point is the issue of subliminal fear and moral panic. Several disability scholars have already noted the degree to which the disabled body sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness and indeed of the social frameworks that undergird the suppositions of bodily normality. I will suggest, however, that in literature this subliminal unease manifests itself within the structures of the literary discourse itself, generating a series of crises in the protocols of representation. Finally, I want to highlight the degree to which the social treatment of disability has historically been multifaceted and sometimes even contradictory. Again, these contradictions take on a particular salience when we come to the literary-aesthetic domain, because what we find is that literature refracts social attitudes and sometimes renders them even more complicated than they are in reality. As already noted, the reality of people with disability is overlaid with the suppositions and implicit social attitudes of a nondisabled world, making their “reality” as much a product of excessive interpretation as of mundane fact (if mundanity can ever be ascribed to the condition of disability). Literature does not merely reflect any already socially interpreted reality, but adds another tier of interpretation that is comprehensible within the terms set by the literary-aesthetic domain. In the next chapter, I will address a typology of the figuring of disability in literature to provide a provisional map of the interconnections between these three observations. But first, we require a definition of key terms.

Let me begin formulaically: Aesthetic nervousness is seen when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are shortcircuited in relation to disability. The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identified. However, in most texts aesthetic nervousness is hardly ever limited to this primary level, but 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. The final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between the reader and the text. The reader’s status within a given text is a function of the several interacting elements such as the identification with the vicissitudes of the life of a particular character, or the alignment between the reader and the shifting positions of the narrator, or the necessary reformulations of the reader’s perspective enjoined by the modulations of various plot elements and so on. As I shall show throughout this study, in works where disability plays a prominent role, the reader’s perspective is also affected by the short-circuiting of the dominant protocols governing the text—a short-circuit triggered by the representation of disability. For the reader, aesthetic nervousness overlaps social attitudes to disability that themselves often remain unexamined in their prejudices and biases. The reader in this account is predominantly a nondisabled reader, but the insights about aesthetic nervousness are also pertinent to readers with disabilities, since it is the construction of a universe of apparent corporeal normativity both within the literary text and outside it whose basis requires examination and challenge that is generally at issue in this study. The various dimensions of aesthetic nervousness will be dealt with both individually and as parts of larger textual configurations in the works of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee. The final chapter, on the history of disability on Robben Island in South Africa, will be used to refocus attention from the literary-aesthetic domain to that of the historical intersection between disability, colonialism, and apartheid. This will help us see what extensions might be possible for the concept of aesthetic nervousness beyond the literary-aesthetic field.

There are two main sources for the notion of aesthetic nervousness that I want to elaborate here. One is Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s highly suggestive concept of the normate, which we have already touched on briefly, and the other is drawn from Lennard Davis’s and Mitchell and Snyder’s reformulations of literary history from a disability studies perspective. As Thomson (1997) argues in a stimulating extension of some of Erving Goffman’s (1959) insights about stigma, first-time social encounters between the nondisabled and people with disabilities are often shortcircuited by the ways in which impairments are interpreted. She puts the matter in this way:

To this we should quickly recall Mitchell and Snyder’s remark concerning the degree to which Brueghel’s paintings succeeded in disrupting and variegating the visual encounter between bodies in painting. Clearly, disruption and variegation are also features of real-world encounters between the nondisabled and persons with disabilities. Thomson proposes the notion of the “normate” to explicate the cluster of attitudes that govern the nondisabled’s perception of themselves and their relations to the various “others” of corporeal normativity. As she persuasively shows, there are complex processes by which forms of corporeal diversity acquire cultural meanings that in their turn undergird a perceived hierarchy of bodily traits determining the distribution of privilege, status, and power. In other words, corporeal difference is part of a structure of power, and its meanings are governed by the unmarked regularities of the normate. However, as the paragraph quoted above shows, there are various elements of this complex relationship that do not disclose themselves as elements of power as such, but rather as forms of anxiety, dissonance, and disorder. The common impulse toward categorization in interpersonal encounters is itself part of an ideal of order that is assumed as implicit in the universe, making the probing of the explicit for the implicit part of the quest for an order that is thought to lie elsewhere. It is this, as we noted in the previous section, that persistently leads to the idea that the disabled body is somehow a cipher of metaphysical or divine significance. Yet the impairment is often taken to be the physical manifestation of the exact opposite of order, thus forcing a revaluation of that impulse, and indeed, of what it means to be human in a world governed by a radical contingency. The causes of impairment can never be fully anticipated or indeed prepared for. Every/body is subject to chance and contingent events. The recognition of this radical contingency produces features of a primal scene of extreme anxiety whose roots lie in barely acknowledged vertiginous fears of loss of control over the body itself (Grosz 1996; Wasserman 2001; Lacan 1948, 1949).⁷ The corporeal body, to echo the sonnet “Death Be Not Proud” by John Donne, is victim to “Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men” and subject to “poison, warre, and sicknesse” as well. The dissonance and anxiety that cannot be properly articulated via available social protocols then define the affective and emotional economy of the recognition of contingency. In other words, the sudden recognition of contingency is not solely a philosophical one—in fact, it hardly ever is at the moment of the social encounter itself—but is also and perhaps primarily an emotional and affective one. The usefulness of the social model of disability is precisely the fact that it now forces the subliminal cultural assumptions about the disabled out into the open for examination, thus holding out the possibility that the nondisabled may ultimately be brought to recognize the sources of the constructedness of the normate and the prejudices that flow from it.

Since the world is structured with a particular notion of unmarked normativity in mind, people with disabilities themselves also have to confront some of these ideas about contingency in trying to articulate their own deeply felt sense of being (Murphy 1990, 96–115). At a practical and material level, there are also the problems of adjustment to a largely indifferent world. As Wood and Bradley (1978, 149) put it: “On a material plane the disabled individual is … less able to adapt to the demands of his environment: he has reduced power to insulate himself from the assaults of an essentially hostile milieu. However, the disadvantage he experiences is likely to differ in relation to the nature of the society in which he finds himself.” Contradictory emotions arise precisely because the disabled are continually located within multiple and contradictory frames of significance within which they, on the one hand, are materially disadvantaged, and, on the other, have to cope with the culturally regulated gaze of the normate. My use of the word “frames” in this context is not idle. Going back to the Scope poster, it is useful to think of such frames in the light of physical coordinates, as if thinking of a picture frame. The frames within which the disabled are continually placed by the normate are ones in which a variety of concepts of wholeness, beauty, and economic competitiveness structure persons with disability and place them at the center of a peculiar conjuncture of conceptions.

Thomson’s notion of the relations between the normate and the disabled derives ultimately from a symbolic interactionism model. To put it simply, a symbolic interactionism model of interpretation operates on the assumption that “people do not respond to the world directly, but instead place social meanings on it, organize it, and respond to it on the basis of these meanings” (Albrecht 2002, 27). The idea of symbolic interaction-ism is pertinent to the discussion of literary texts that will follow because not only do the characters organize their perceptions of one another on the basis of given symbolic assumptions, but as fictional characters they are themselves also woven out of a network of symbols and interact through a symbolic relay of signs. Furthermore, as I shall show incrementally in different chapters and in a more situated form in the chapter on J. M. Coetzee (chapter 6), symbolic interactionism also implies the presence of an implied interlocutor with whom the character or indeed real-life person enters into a series of dialogical relationships, thus helping to shape a horizon of expectations against which versions of the self are rehearsed. Following Thomson’s lead, the first aspect of aesthetic nervousness that I want to specify is that it is triggered by the implicit disruption of the frames within which the disabled are located as subjects of symbolic notions of wholeness and normativity. Disability returns the aesthetic domain to an active ethical core that serves to disrupt the surface of representation. Read from a perspective of disability studies, this active ethical core becomes manifest because the disability representation is seen as having a direct effect on social views of people with disability in a way that representations of other literary details, tropes, and motifs do not offer. In other words, the representation of disability has an efficaciousness that ultimately transcends the literary domain and refuses to be assimilated to it. This does not mean that disability in literature can be read solely via an instrumentalist dimension of interpretation; any intervention that might be adduced for it is not inserted into an inert and stable disability “reality” that lies out there. For, as we have noted, disability in the real world already incites interpretation in and of itself. Nevertheless, an instrumentalist dimension cannot be easily suspended either. To put the matter somewhat formulaically: 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. Ultimately, aesthetic nervousness has to be seen as coextensive with the nervousness regarding the disabled in the real world. The embarrassment, fear, and confusion that attend the disabled in their everyday reality is translated in literature and the aesthetic field into a series of structural devices that betray themselves when the disability representation is seen predominantly from the perspective of the disabled rather than from the normative position of the nondisabled.

In his essay entitled “Who Put the The in The Novel?” Lennard Davis (2002) explores the links that have largely been taken for granted in literary history between the novel form, an English nation, and the various destabilizations of the social status of character that help to define the essential structure of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The realist novels of the two centuries were based on the construction of the “average” citizen. This average citizen was nonheroic and middle class. But the average citizen was also linked to the concept of “virtue.” As Davis notes, “Virtue implied that there was a specific and knowable moral path and stance that a character could and should take. In other words, a normative set of behaviours was demanded of characters in novels” (94). Entangled with these dual notions of the average citizen and of virtue were implicit ideas of wholeness, with no major protagonist in the entire period marked by a physical disability. Undergirding the novel’s rise then is a binary opposition between normal/abnormal, with this binary generating a series of plots. Essentially, the key element of such plots is the initial destabilization of the character’s social circumstances, followed by their efforts to rectify their loss and return, perhaps chastened, to their former position. Crucially, however, as the nineteenth century progresses the negative or immoral gets somatized and represented as a disability (95–98). One of the conclusions Davis draws from his discussion is that plot functions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “by temporarily deforming or disabling the fantasy of nation, social class, and gender behaviors that are constructed norms” (97).

In taking forward Davis’s argument, there are a number of qualifications I want to register. Distinctive in his account is the link he persuasively establishes between nation, the average citizen, virtue, and specific forms of novelistic emplotment. That cannot be questioned. However, it is not entirely accurate that the binary of normal/abnormal starts with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels or indeed that they inaugurate the plots of the deformation of social status. On the contrary, as can be shown from an examination of folktales from all over the world, the plot of physical and/or social deformation is actually one of the commonest starting points of most story plots (see Propp 1958; Zipes 1979), so much so that it is almost as if the deformation of physical and/or social status becomes the universal starting point for the generation of narrative emplotment as such. As Davis points out, in agreement with established scholarship on the novel, the crucial term that is introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is “realism,” the notion that somehow the novelistic form refracts a verisimilar world outside of its framework. But realism is itself a cultural construction, since for the Greeks their myths were also a form of realism. What needs to be taken from Davis’s account is the effect that the collocation of the social imaginary of the nation and the production of a specific form of bodily and sexual realism had on the way the novel was taken to represent reality. In each instance, the assumed representation of reality depended upon unacknowledged views of social order deriving not just from an understanding of class relations but from an implicit hierarchization of corporeal differences. Even though Davis is not the only one to have noted the peculiar place of the disabled in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel (see Holmes 2000, for example), it is in clarifying the status of the disabled body as structurally constitutive to the maintenance of the novel’s realism that he makes a distinctive contribution to literary history.

However, in trying to extend the significance of the constitutive function of deformation from the novel to other literary forms, we also have to note that “deformation” can no longer be limited solely to that of social or class position, as Davis suggests in his discussion. From the novels of the early twentieth century onward, the deformations emerge from the intersection of a variety of vectors including gender, ethnicity, sexuality, urban identity, and particularly disability, these providing a variety of constitutive points for the process of emplotment. Indeed, Davis himself notes in another context the reiteration of disability in the works of Conrad. A similar view can be expressed of the work of Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain), and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” among others. I choose the phrase “constitutive points” as opposed to “starting points” to signal the fact that the social deformation does not always show itself at the beginning of the plot. In much of the work we will look at, from Beckett and Soyinka through Morrison and Coetzee, there are various articulations of a sense of social deformation. However, the deformation is not always necessarily revealed as inaugural or indeed placed at the starting point of the action or narrative as such. It is often revealed progressively or in fragments in the minds of the characters, or even as flashbacks that serve to reorder the salience of events within the plot. The varied disclosures of social deformation are also ultimately linked to the status of disability as a trigger or mechanism for such plot review and disclosure. In that sense, the range of literary texts we shall be exploring is not undergirded exclusively by the binary opposition of normal/abnormal, but by the dialectical interplay between unacknowledged social assumptions and the reminders of contingency as reflected in the body of the person with disability.

The notion of dialectical interplay is crucial to my model of interpretation, because one of the points I will repeat throughout the study is that a dialectical interplay can be shown to affect all levels of the literary text, from the perspectival modulations of the narrator (whether first or third person) and the characters to the temporal sequencing and ordering of leitmotifs and symbolic discourses that come together to structure the plotlines. Even though, as Davis rightly notes, the plots of social deformation dominated the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, this view cannot be limited solely to novelistic discourse. Following the point I made a moment ago about the near universality of such plots, I want to suggest that we consider the plot of social deformation as it is tied to some form of physical or mental deformation to be relevant for the discussion of all literary texts. This is a potentially controversial point, but given the ubiquity of the role of the disabled in texts from a range of cultures and periods it is difficult to shake off the view that disability is a marker of the aesthetic field as such. Disability teases us out of thought, to echo Keats, not because it resists representation, but because in being represented it automatically restores an ethical core to the literary-aesthetic domain while also invoking the boundary between the real and the metaphysical or otherworldly. Along with the category of the sublime, it inaugurates and constitutes the aesthetic field as such. And like the sublime, disability elicits language and narrativity even while resisting or frustrating complete comprehension and representation and placing itself on the boundary between the real and the metaphysical. When I state that disability “inaugurates” the aesthetic domain, it is not to privilege the “firstness” or “primariness” of first-time encounters between the disabled and nondisabled characters, even though this has been implied in my reliance on Thomson. Rather, I intend the term “inaugurate” in the sense of the setting of the contours of the interlocking vectors of representation, particularly in narrative and drama, which are the two literary forms that will feature mainly in this study. My position overlaps with Davis’s but extends his insights to accommodate a more variegated methodology for understanding the status of disability in literary writing.

The analogy between the inaugural status of the sublime and of disability serves to open up a number of ways in which the structurally constitutive function of disability to literary form might be explored. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant follows his discussion of the beautiful and its relation to purposelessness or autonomy with the discussion of the sublime and its inherent link to the principle of disorder. For Kant, “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of purpose” (1987, 31), the idea here being that only the lack of a determinate or instrumental end allows the subjective feeling of beauty to occur. The sublime, on the other hand, is an aspect of understanding in confrontation with something ineffable that appears to resist delimitation or organization. It exposes the struggle between Imagination and Reason: “[What happens is that] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [the imagination,] our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power” (108; translator’s brackets). Even while generative of representation, the sublime transcends the imaginative capacity to represent it. As Crockett (2001, 75) notes in glossing the nature of this struggle, “the sublime is contra-purposive, because it conflicts with one’s purposeful ability to represent it.” The implicit dichotomy in the Critique of Judgment between the sublime and the beautiful has been explored in different directions by scholars in the intervening three hundred and fifty years since its formulation, but what has generally been agreed upon is the idea of the resistance of the sublime to complete representation, even if this resistance is then incorporated into a motivation for representation as such.⁸ What the representation of disability suggests, which both overlaps and distinguishes itself from the sublime as a conceptual category, is that even while also producing a contradictory semiotics of inarticulacy and articulation, it is quite directly and specifically tied to forms of social hierarchization. For disability, the semiotics of articulation/inarticulation that may be perceived within the literary domain reflect difficulties regarding its salience for the nondisabled world. This, as can be gleaned from the Whyte and Ingstad collection already referred to, cuts across cultures. Thus even if the ambivalent status of disability for literary representation is likened to that of the sublime, it must always be remembered that, unlike the effects of the sublime on literary discourse, disability’s ambivalence manifests itself within the real world in socially mediated forms of closure. We might then say that disability is an analogue of the sublime in literary-aesthetic representation (ineffability/articulation) yet engenders attempts at social hierarchization and closure within the real world.

Disability might also be productively thought of as being on a continuum with the sublime in terms of its oscillation between a pure abstraction and a set of material circumstances and conditions. Considered in this way, we can think of the sublime as occupying one end of the spectrum (being a pure abstraction despite generating certain psychological effects of judgment and the impulse to represent it in material forms) and disability occupying the other end and being defined by a different kind of oscillation between the abstract and the material. For unlike the sublime, disability oscillates between a pure process of abstraction (via a series of discursive framings, metaphysical transpositions, and socially constituted modalities of [non]response, and so forth) and a set of material conditions (such as impairment, accessibility and mobility difficulties, and economic considerations). It is not to be discounted also that many impairments also involve living with different levels of pain, such that the categories of pain and disability not infrequently imply each other. It is disability’s rapid oscillation between a pure process of abstraction and a set of material conditions that ensures that the ethical core of its representation is never allowed to be completely assimilated to the literary-aesthetic domain as such. Disability serves then to close the gap between representation and ethics, making visible the aesthetic field’s relationship to the social situation of persons with disability in the real world. This does not necessarily mean that we must always read the literary representation in a directly instrumental way. As noted earlier, the intervention of the literary representation is an intervention into a world that already situates disability within insistent framings and interpretations. The literary domain rather helps us to understand the complex processes of such framings and the ethical implications that derive from such processes.

Finally, it is to Mitchell and Snyder’s book Narrative Prosthesis (2003) that I wish to turn in elaborating what I mean by aesthetic nervousness. Mitchell and Snyder follow David Wills (1995) in trying to define literary discourse as essentially performing certain prosthetic functions. Among these prosthetic functions are the obvious ones of using the disabled as a signal of moral disorder such that the nondisabled may glean an ethical value from their encounter with persons with disabilities. Since Mitchell and Snyder are also keen to situate narrative prosthesis as having significance for the lived experience of disability, they also assign an inherently pragmatic orientation to what they describe as textual prosthesis: “Whereas 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” (8). They make these particular remarks in the context of films and narratives in which persons with disabilities somehow manage to overcome their difficulties and live a happy life within the realm of art. In such instances, the representation of disability serves a pragmatic/cathartic function for the audience and the reader. More significantly, however, they also note that even while disability recurs in various works as a potent force to challenge cultural ideas about the normal and the whole, it also “operates as the textual obstacle that causes the literary operation of open-endedness to close down or stumble” (50).

This last observation brings their discussion of narrative prosthesis very close to my own notion of aesthetic nervousness, except that they proceed to expound upon this blocking function in what can only be nonaesthetic terms. This is how they put it:

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 sociocultural understandings. While agreeing with them that the ultimate test of the salience of a disability representation are the various social and cultural contexts within which they might be thought to have an effect, I want to focus my attention on the devices of aesthetic collapse that occur within the literary frameworks themselves. 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.

When it comes to their specific style of reading, Mitchell and Snyder are inspired by Wills to elaborate the following provisional typology:

Again, their method is defined by an assumption of narrative pragmatism or instrumentalism; that is to say, the literary text aims solely to resolve or correct a deviance that is thought to be improper to a social context. Unlike them, I will be trying to show that this prostheticizing function is bound to fail, not because of the difficulties in erasing the effects of disability in the real world, but because the aesthetic domain itself is shortcircuited upon the encounter with disability. As mentioned earlier, disability joins the sublime as marking the constitutive points of aesthetic representation. Aesthetic nervousness is what ensues and can be discerned in the suspension, collapse, or general short-circuiting of the hitherto dominant protocols of representation that may have governed the text. To my mind, in this paragraph Mitchell and Snyder are attempting to define processes of representation that may occur separately (i.e., across individual and distinguishable texts) as well as serialized within a particular text. One of my central points is precisely the fact that even when the disabled character appears to be represented programmatically, the restless dialectic of representation may unmoor her from the programmatic location and place her elsewhere as the dominant aesthetic protocols governing the representation are short-circuited.

To establish the central parameters of aesthetic nervousness, then, a number of things have to be kept in mind. First is that in literature, the disabled are fictional characters created out of language. This point is not made in order to sidestep the responsibility to acknowledge language’s social efficaciousness. Rather, I want to stress that as linguistic creations, the disabled in literature may trade a series of features with the nondisabled, thus transferring some of their significations to the nondisabled and vice versa. Furthermore, I want to suggest that when the various references to disability and to disability representation are seen within the broad range of an individual writer’s work, it helps to foreground hitherto unacknowledged dimensions of their writing and, in certain cases, this can even lead to a complete revaluation of critical emphasis. Consider in this regard Shakespeare’s Richard III, for instance, which is of course very widely discussed in disability studies. However, in Shakespeare disability also acts as a metaphor to mark anomalous social states such as those involving half-brothers and bastards. Indeed, there is a studied pattern in Shakespeare where bastards are considered to be internally deformed and villainous, their bastardy being directly correlated to a presumed moral deficit. And so we have the elemental and almost homicidal competition between half-brothers that reappears in conflicts between Robert Falcon-bridge and his bastard brother Philip in King John, between Don John and Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, between Edmund and Edgar in King Lear, and between Richard III and Edward in Richard III. This last play is of course grounded on the resonance of jealousy and brotherhood, as well as on the Machiavellianism of a deformed protagonist. There the disability is placed at the foreground of the action from the beginning and brings together various threads that serve to focalize the question of whether Richard’s deformity is an insignia of or indeed the cause of his villainy.⁹ Thus to understand Richard III properly, we would have to attend equally to his disability and his bastardy in the wider scheme of Shakespeare’s work. Once this is done, we find that our interpretation of the character has to be more complicated than just recognizing his villainy, which of course is the dominant invitation proffered by the play. The choice of Beckett, Soyinka, Morrison, and Coetzee is partly meant to serve this function of establishing the interrelations between disability and other vectors of representation among the wide oeuvre of each writer. However, comparisons and contrasts within the work of individual writers or indeed between them will not be made chronologically or with the suggestion of evolution and change in the representation of disability. Rather, I shall be focusing on thematic clusterings and on making links between apparently unrelated characters and scenes across the various texts to show how the parameters of aesthetic nervousness operate within individual texts as well as across various representations. Also, the writers will be used as nodal points from which to make connections to the work of other writers. Thus each chapter, though focusing predominantly on the individual writer in question, will also provide a gateway for connecting these writers to various others that have had something to say about disability. Each chapter is conceived of as comparative both in terms of the relations among the works of the main writers in the study and between these and the many other representations of disability that will be touched upon over the course of the discussions.

I want to emphasize my view that to properly establish the contours of aesthetic nervousness, we have to understand disability’s resonance on a multiplicity of levels simultaneously; disability acts as a threshold or focal point from which various vectors of the text may be examined. Thus, as we shall see with respect to Toni Morrison, though her physically disabled female characters seem to be strong and empowered, there is often a contradiction between the levels of narratorial perspective, symbolic implication, and the determinants of the interactions among the characters themselves that ends up unsettling the unquestioned sense of strength that we might get from just focusing on what the disabled women in her texts do or do not do. With Beckett, on the other hand, we find that as he proliferates devices by which to undermine the stability of ontological categories, he ends up also undermining the means by which the many disabilities that he frequently represents in his texts may be interpreted. As can be seen from the vast scholarship on Beckett, it is very rare that his impaired characters are read as disabled, even though their disabilities are blatant and should be impossible to ignore. Rather, the characters are routinely assimilated by critics to philosophical categories and read off as such. This is due to the peculiarly self-undermining structures of his works, both the novels and the plays. Beckett is also unusual among the writers in this study in that he seems to fulfill a central feature of what Sandblom (1997) describes as the inextricable link between disease and creativity. Pertinent to the discussion of Beckett’s work is that he himself suffered endless illnesses ranging from an arrhythmic heartbeat and night sweats to cysts and abscesses on his fingers, the palm of his left hand, the top of his palate, his scrotum and, most painfully later in life, his left lung. Often these cysts and abscesses had to be lanced or operated upon, leading to great and regular discomfort. It is not for nothing then that the deteriorating and impaired body held a special fascination for him. He used the disabled, maimed, and decaying body as a multiple referent for a variety of ideas that seem to have been at least partially triggered by encounters with others and his own personal experience of pain and temporary disability. This is something that has passed largely unremarked in the critical writings on Beckett, and I propose to center on it to discuss the peculiar status he assigns to disability and pain in works such as Endgame and Molloy, both of which should to all intents and purposes be “painfull” but are not.

In a way, Wole Soyinka’s work is quite different from that of the other three in the study. His writing focuses more securely on a set of ritual dispositions drawn from a traditional Yoruba and African cultural sensibility. This sensibility is then combined with an intense political consciousness, such that each of his plays may be read as partial allegories of the Nigerian and African postcolonial condition. The combination of the ritualistic with the political is something for which Soyinka has become notably famous. What I shall show with regard to his work are the ways in which disability acts as a marker of both ritual and the political, but in ways that interrupt the two domains and force us to rethink the conceptual movement between the two. The final chapter, on Robben Island, will be used to bring to conclusion a particular vector of interpretation that will have been suggested in the chapter on Beckett, given further elaboration in the discussions of Morrison and Soyinka, and picked up and intensified in the one on Coetzee. I shall discuss this in various guises, but they will all come together under the conceptual rubric of the structure of skeptical interlocution. In essence, the idea derives from Bakhtin’s proposition of the inherent dialogism of speech acts, that anticipation of an interlocutor even when the context of communication does not seem to explicitly denominate one. The choice of the plays of Beckett and Soyinka allows a certain salience to the idea of the (skeptical) interlocutor, since as dramatic texts they incorporate dialogue as an explicit feature of dialogism. But what I have in mind in relation to the structure of skeptical interlocution is a little bit more complicated than can be captured solely in dramatic texts. Rather, I mean to suggest that there is always an anticipation of doubt within the perceptual and imagined horizon of the disabled character in literature, and that this doubt is incorporated into their representation. This is so whether the character is represented in the first person, as we see in Beckett’s Molloy, or in the third person, as we see in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. The chapter on Coetzee will be used to focus on the difference between speech and the elective silence of autistic characters and on the ways in which these raise peculiar problems for the status of the skeptical interlocutor in literary writing. Autism features in that chapter not just as a dimension of disability but as a theoretical paradigm for raising questions about narrativity as such. However, it is when we come to the chapter on Robben Island that the structure of skeptical interlocution will be allowed to take life (literally and metaphorically, as will be demonstrated). The structure of interlocution with regard to the history of Robben Island will help to shed light on how aesthetic nervousness might be extended from discussions of the literary-aesthetic domain to an analysis of historical personages and real-life events.

I should like to address a point of potential confusion that may have arisen in this introduction. So far I have proceeded as though the literary representation of disabled persons and the aesthetic nervousness that attends such representation can be taken as an analogue to the real-life responses toward people with disabilities by society at large. This fusion of levels is only partially intended. For, as I noted earlier, there is no doubt that literary representation of disability somewhat subtends real-life treatment of disabled people in a variety of ways. However, I also want to note that the aesthetic nervousness of the literary-aesthetic domain cannot by any means be said to be equivalent to the responses to disabled persons in reality. To say that the literary model provides an analogue to reality does not mean that it is the same as that reality. The epistemological effect of representation is quite different from the emotional effects of misunderstanding and stereotyping in the real world. Thus the first may be used to illuminate aspects of the second but must not be taken to have exhausted or replaced it. Our commitment must ultimately be to changing the world and not merely reading and commenting on it.

It is important also to state at the outset that central to the ways in which I propose to establish the parameters of aesthetic nervousness is the device of close reading. This seems to me necessary in order to be able to do full justice to the subtle cues by which the literary text “stumbles” (to return to Mitchell and Snyder) and by which the literary representation reveals the parameters of aesthetic nervousness. Apart from Morrison, none of the writers in this study has previously been read from the perspective of disability studies. Part of my task will involve the rather boring process of taxonomizing the disability representations we find in the works in question. This will be done to provide a map of the varied uses to which the writers put the disabled in order to allow us to discern patterns that are elaborated upon or repeated across the works. It is a happy coincidence that all four writers are Nobel Prize winners and thus likely to be widely taken up in literary curricula. My choice of them was not informed by this fact, however (in fact, Coetzee was part of my study long before his Nobel Prize). I settle on them because of my years of teaching and thinking about their work in different contexts and the fact that they enable us to see a full range of discourses regarding disability and other details of literary representation. I wish to see students and other readers being able to pay close attention to all the subtle details of literary representation well beyond the focus on disability, even if that is their starting point. The focus on disability is thus meant to achieve two related effects: One is to make more prominent the active ethical core that is necessarily related to disability and that hopefully helps to restore a fully ethical reading to literature. The other is that from using disability to open up the possibility of close reading, I hope to encourage us to lift our eyes from the reading of literature to attend more closely to the implications of the social universe around us.