Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

IN A LITTLE-KNOWN WORK PUBLISHED IN 1971 TITLED The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature, Peter L. Hays attempts the highly ambitious project of accounting for all representations of limping heroes in Western literature from classical times to the early twentieth century. His argument is at once simple and complex. Focusing exclusively on male characters, and drawing out implications from the Bible, the Torah, Homer, and other sacred and classical texts, Hays maintains that limping heroes may all be taken as emblematic variants of infertility. From this premise, it is a short step to suggesting that such limping figures be seen as residual signifiers of ritual and that the limping hero is often linked not just to natural infertility but also to emotional and spiritual sterility. Hays amasses a phenomenal range of examples to prosecute his argument. The examples range from Greek gods and heroes such as Hephaestus, Achilles, and Oedipus to figures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels by Melville, John Barth, James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, and many others. An appendix at the end of the book, titled “The Hospital,” provides an extensive and fascinating list of such limping heroes in world literature. There are 308 entries on the list. This for midable enterprise by no means exhausts the range of limping characters in Western literature, but it at least sets out certain parameters about what can be achieved and the pitfalls to be avoided.

Even though Hays does not acknowledge this himself, it is clear that what he is attempting invites comparison with the broad literary overviews exemplified by the work of earlier critical synthesists such as Northrop Frye and Erich Auerbach.¹ The ambition in all these works is the same: to provide a model by which a vast range of literary texts might be read as illustrating recurrent tropes across history. In the cases of Frye and Auerbach, an attempt is made to historicize the emergence and transformation of certain tropes, but even this effort is subsumed under the task of establishing broad parameters for understanding such a literary history through detailed close readings of textual examples. Hays has not got the same historicizing impulse as the earlier two, but like them he is also intent on defining a universal literary history. Exclusively tropological readings of literary works were of course not uncommon in the heyday of New Criticism, where the literary text was taken to be autonomous and self-sufficient and the task of the critic was solely to unearth the processes by which paradox, contradiction, and irony served to give salience to particular literary details. The question of the ethical disposition of the literary texts under scrutiny by the New Critics was rarely raised as an independent question, except in so far as it could be connected to notions of poetic sincerity, itself to be seen as a set of literary devices. The readings were thus intrinsic and focused mainly on definitions of the literary-aesthetic field as a demarcation of the beautiful and the sublime.²

Hays writes out of that tradition, but he opens himself to special criticism in implicitly drawing an analogy between images of disability and the literary tropes of Nature, Quest, and Rebirth cycles without questioning the basis of that analogy. His argument is unsatisfactory for staging a complete and unexamined linkage between emasculation and impotence on the one hand, and physical disability (limping) on the other, thus suggesting that physical disability is the mark of a constitutive lack. Even though his examples center exclusively on masculine figures, the implications he draws out from them pertain to physical disability in general. This is a highly dubious proposition and allows the moral panic that has historically obtained in social encounters between disabled and nondisabled people and that often gets refracted within literary discourse to become normalized and unquestioned. In other words, The Limping Hero ends up being the rationalization of a questionable response to physical impairment, namely, that impairment is the sign of a moral or other deficit.

Hays’s ambitious but ultimately deeply problematic project serves to outline one mode of scholarly response to disability that will not be taken up here. Instead, I will argue that the signs of aesthetic short-circuiting we find in literary texts subtend attitudes to disability that are widespread in the world today. And yet there is one thing that can be rescued from Hays’s book, and indeed from the work of the New Critics, which inarguably was the inspiration behind his effort. Though abjuring the ambitious attempt to provide an ironclad and singular tropological description that would account for all manifestations of disability in world literature, I do take the view that in establishing the parameters of representations of disability, it is important to attempt a close reading of literary texts in their totality, and not just in the precise place assigned to the disabled characters. This is because, as I suggested in chapter 1 and hope to show throughout this study, the place of disabled characters in the literary domain is assigned within a structure of literary relations. The point is that the structure of such literary relations enjoins us to isolate the disabled character for examination only as a preliminary step toward reinserting them into the intervolving thresholds of signification that are established in the relationship to other characters and to the images, social settings, and broader spatiotemporal concepts that are manifest with-in the text. In other words, disability is to be read as a fulcrum or pivot out of which various discursive details emerge, gain salience, and ultimately undergo transformation within the literary-aesthetic field. This idea of disability-as-pivot will be most fully explored in the chapter on Toni Morrison.

A close reading of disability in literature reveals that the place assigned to characters with disability is not necessarily singular. It may be predominantly constituted in one direction and yet either undergo shifts in the course of the narrative or indeed alter altogether to carry contradictory meanings. Comparison between texts throws up even greater complications. For example, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s madness in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is quite different from, say, Benjy’s cognitive impairment in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, even though they both share the capacity for superior if inchoate insight about their social surroundings. What is more, Jose Arcadio Buendia’s character is shaped within the context of magical realism, where the relations between realistic and fantastical details are nothing if not unsettled. It is in the totality of literary relationships established in the individual texts that their disability acquires distinctiveness, and a discussion of the two texts would have to pay close attention to such a totality. Additionally, it would be very difficult to sustain a sharp distinction in representations of physical and cognitive disabilities. As can quickly be seen, in literary writing physical impairments are often correlated to cognitive and mental conditions, even when the text might be focusing on one aspect as a preliminary to foregrounding a second or indeed third dimension of disability. As will be seen in chapter 3, in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, even though the eponymous character describes himself as having a variety of physical impairments, it is the flux of intricate and peculiar cognitive dispositions emerging from the first-person stream-of-consciousness mode of narration that defines the character for us. Furthermore, generic conventions serve to situate the disabled characters differently from genre to genre. In comedies, for instance, disability takes on a pantomime character and is meant to generate laughter. Thus we have the perennially effective potential for comedy inherent in works in which blindness and deafness are used to establish dramatic ironies. A well-known example is to be found in Hergé’s Tintin series, where the scientist Cuthbert Calculus is given to hilarious malapropisms due to his hearing difficulties.³ In Beckett’s work, on the other hand, the comedic disposition of his disabled characters is used to deflect attention from the pain and anguish that are involved in carrying physical impairments. Attending to the generic conventions out of which the disabled character is created then helps to highlight the nature of the contradictions that surround the representation of disability. Much of this study will be driven by an impulse of close reading, not so much to establish the autonomy of the text as to convey the subtle relations that secure the place of disabled characters within the literary-aesthetic domain. What I argue to be aesthetic nervousness may also be misread as a codification of a particular form of aesthetic ordering, rather than the collapse and discomposition of the putative textual order around the figure of disability as such. It is only an attentive close reading that would allow us to identify the precise nature of aesthetic nervousness that is focalized through and around the disabled character.

It is important to bear in mind that attitudes to people with disabilities at any historical conjuncture are often multifarious, even in contexts that appear more enlightened and progressive. It is literature more than anything else that helps refract these multivalent attitudes toward disability. The opposition between reflection and refraction is a crucial one. The literary-aesthetic domain does indeed remind us of reality, but in such a way as to interrupt our memory or recognition of it in order to place different emphases on what might be taken for granted. Because disability in the real world already incites interpretation, literary representations of disability are not merely reflecting disability; they are refractions of that reality, with varying emphases of both an aesthetic and ethical kind. As with chapter 1, this chapter will also be a survey and overview, but this time designed to outline a thematic typology of the numerous representations of disability, both physical and otherwise, that obtain in literature. The categories are by no means mutually exclusive; often it is possible to find aspects of more than one category focused through a particular disabled character or different categories running sequentially as the character is involved in various interactions with others. As a rule, the more central a disabled character is, the more likely they are to be used as illustrations of multiple categories. As will quickly become evident, however, it is not entirely possible to mechanically apply the categories outlined here to any of the highly complex texts we will be encountering in this study. The preliminary typology being drawn up here acts only as a productive heuristic map that I will refer back to sporadically over the course of the book.⁴ The provisional typology enables us to keep in view a way of correlating different texts and ultimately making generalizations about how such literary representations relate to social attitudes. This is a subject that will be returned to more fully in the concluding chapter.

The first and perhaps most obvious literary representation of disability is that in which it acts as some form of ethical background to the actions of other characters, or as a means of testing or enhancing their moral standing. Martha Stoddard Holmes (2002, 228) refers to this kind of representation as “critical null sets, convenient containers for the essential human emotions required by the nondisabled characters around them.” This particular form of disability representation is so ubiquitous as to be almost universal. In medieval literature, for example, the figure of the Loathely Lady, usually a hunchback with some repulsive facial features, was placed in the path of the chivalrous knight on one of his quests. Typically, the Loathely Lady extracted a promise of marriage in exchange for information with which the knight was to get himself out of a serious lifeand-death conundrum, after which, bound by the codes of chivalric honor, he reluctantly fulfilled his promise. In most variants of the story, after sharing a bed with the knight the Loathely Lady transformed into a comely lass, thus signifying both the perceived enigma inherent in the boon of knowledge proffered by the Lady and the problematic nature of female sexuality that women represent to men. Indeed, the boon might be read as a metaphor for femininity itself, for the question to which the hapless knight had to find an answer was nothing other than “What do women really want?” The answer that was whispered by the Loathely Lady was “sovereignty,” something that could be interpreted both contextually, in terms of the Loathely Lady’s ability to exercise her choice of marriage partner, and ontologically, as women’s essential desire not to be dominated by the patriarchal codes of the masculine world. It was never self-evident from the many variants of the story which of these two interpretations was correct, so that the difference between the Lady’s repugnant exterior and the obvious beauty that this exterior concealed came to represent an ethical conundrum as such.⁵ Though the Loathely Lady does not make a direct appearance in later Western literature, we find vestiges of the figure in various folk tales, with a good recent literary example in the figure of Circe in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Let us designate this class of representations disability as null set and/or moral test.

From the late fifteenth century through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disability representations were used to raise a different set of problems, sometimes going well beyond concerns with social hierarchies and relationships to embrace the confluence of imperialism and the production of various Others. Rereading Shakespeare’s The Tempest via a Wallersteinian world-system’s approach, Paul Brown (1994) has suggested that the play was as much concerned with Ireland as a semiperipheral object of British attentions as it was with Britain’s more distant imperial holdings in general. Thus Caliban, at once savage, wild man, and hunchback, could be read as a figure of the othered Irish. We find further salience for this unusual reading in nineteenth-century depictions of the Irish in British newspapers such as Punch and other London weeklies, in which the stereotypical Irish figure of Paddy was routinely depicted with simian features and a stooped back.⁶ The intersection of disability, imperialism, and the projection of otherness is also evident in other texts of the period. Gayatri Spivak shows in a well-known article in postcolonial studies how much the project of “soul making” in Jane Eyre depends fundamentally on a contrast being established between Jane and Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic. Interestingly, Spivak subsumes Bertha Mason’s insanity into her status as colonial other, but it is evident that giving equal emphasis to the two vectors of Bertha’s identity allows us to see how crucial her madness is within the binary opposition established between her and Jane. In tracking back the source of Bertha’s madness to a “colonial” encounter between her and Rochester in the West Indies of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys provides a corrective to readings that might hastily ignore the progress of Bertha’s distemper and subsequent madness, only the latter of which is represented in Charlotte Brontë’s novel.⁷

As Holmes (2002) also shows from a discussion of Victorian literature, twin sets (one disabled, the other not) were often used to outline differential trajectories of sexuality and its fulfillment in marriage. In such writing, female disabled characters were proffered in such a way as to deflect acute anxieties about the disabled person’s reproductive capacities as well as of the exercise of women’s sexuality in general. With a few exceptions, in the period disabled women become the focal point for playing out intense social anxieties about disease, sexuality, and disability. Contrastively, in the children’s genre of the masculine adventure narrative disability acts as a cipher of otherness-cum-moral test, with equal emphasis placed on the two parts of the equation. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, for example, disabled characters are used as a means of outlining the complex moral choices open to the protagonist as he traverses a strange geographical landscape away from home. Jim Hawkins is drawn into an adventure in which nearly every sailor he encounters has a defining impairment. The pirate who comes to stay at the Admiral Benbow and whose map is the initial starting point for the treasure quest has a horrible gash along his right cheek. Pew is a blind man, Black Dog is said to have a talonlike hand missing two fingers, and there is finally the stereotypical one-legged and now legendary Long John Silver himself. Being seafarers, these characters are all definitively anti-homely and other as well as carrying a variety of impairments. Jim is cast into an alien world populated by men whose disabilities are markers of a sharp otherness and moral deficit. It is for him a rite of passage, a process of self-discovery not just of strength of character, but also of how much their moral deficit echoes within him. This masculine adventure narrative, of a piece with others in the nineteenth century by J. M. Ballantyre, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, among others, placed the male protagonist in an extrametropolitan setting in which the difference he encountered was supposed to trigger a process of self-discovery that ultimately affirmed his superior status. This second class of representation will be designated disability as the interface with otherness (race, class, sexuality, and social identity).

Children’s genres also provide a useful way into understanding the subtle variations in the use of disabled characters within more complex forms of literary representation. In Disney’s 2003 oceanographic Finding Nemo, we see a quite remarkable and contradictory use of disability. Dory, who suffers from short-term amnesia, is clearly a superior guide to the paranoid and petulant Marlin, father of the lost Nemo for whom he is out searching the ocean. It is Dory who gets Marlin through many close dangers, as much by her superior wit as by her sheer ability not to be defeated by the sense of imminent danger. Hers is a moment-by-moment existence that does not bother either with the immediate past or the imminent future. And yet something peculiar happens at a critical turning point in the film. Marlin and Dory have made it through a forest of stinging jellyfish and onto the EAC (East Australian Current), which should take them to Sydney harbor, where it is believed Nemo was taken by the divers who had captured him earlier in the film. Both Marlin and Dory wake up from their misadventure in the jellyfish forest on the backs of turtles that are part of a large shoal on the EAC. When Marlin wakes up, he believes Dory is badly hurt, but as always, he is completely mistaken. She is already awake and excitedly playing hide-and-seek with the little turtles on the journey. They see him and pounce on him, pleading with him to tell them the story of his adventures. Marlin is reluctant at first but then proceeds with his story, which we are familiar with, having already seen it unfolding up to that point. The story he tells is picked up by the little turtles and in a series of relays is passed on as a form of oral mythmaking to swordfish, crabs, and dolphins (who talk while diving in and out of the surface of the ocean), and then on to birds, who in their turn pass the story on to the seagulls way out in Sydney harbor. Marlin’s story has thus become the currency of legend; he is a myth in his own time. The production of what is clearly meant to be the “memory” of the film in the form of an oral epic narrative, however, shows one apparently innocent but quite significant absence. At no point either in his account or in the long and complicated process of its dissemination and redaction across the seas is mention made of Dory’s role in their adventures. Ever. In other words, the mythmaking is a memory that itself suffers from some form of amnesia. But because the amnesia affects the remembered status of Dory—the only disabled character in the film that suffers from amnesia—it is almost as if to suggest that the process of mythmaking mimes her own forgetfulness on her behalf. Thus even though her disability makes her central to the process by which the main protagonist is aided in his quest, it is precisely that which discursively allows her to be effaced out of the memory of the action. We see in this particular use of disability a bifurcation of effects. On the one hand, Dory is clearly the instrument for clarifying motivational impulses for Marlin and for helping him to overcome the effects of the extreme paranoia of the sea he developed following the death of his wife at the start of the film. And yet, on the other hand, in the wider narrative discourse by which the medium establishes either proximity or distance with the perspective of different characters, there is a subtle design to memorialize the nondisabled character’s actions while peripheralizing that of the character with a disability. And it is not insignificant either that the nondisabled is male and the disabled is female, so that the enactment of memorial effacement has gender implications as well. By means of this effacement, Dory is rendered simultaneously central and peripheral, an insider and an outsider to the subtler meanings of the film. Surface reading will of course affirm her extremely important role, yet a closer examination reveals that all does not cohere properly around the surface interpretation.⁸

A similar duality between content and overall narrative design is evident in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India. There the centrality of the disabled child narrator is undermined by the fact that her precociousness is a feature only of the relationship between herself and the reader but not in the relations between herself and other characters within the novel. There is thus a contradiction that borders on implausibility, because she behaves like an adult to us but is an ordinary child within the narrative itself. In the case of Cracking India, the problem seems to be that Lenny is being proffered as an analogy for Pakistan, a young and mutilated country emerging from the partition of India that is nonetheless ancient in pedigree. The disability is thus a device of analogy and does not allow for the mimetic complexity that inheres in the experience of people with disabilities themselves. In this respect, the representation of such disabled figures is still distinct from the representation of nondisabled people, who in many demonstrable cases often reflect upon their sexuality, education, emotional predilections, and other aspects of their experience in their relationships with others. As can be seen, in these instances the disability is being used as a means of establishing multiple and often contradictory values. There is often a disjuncture between the content and the narrative structure, and the level at which this disjuncture manifests itself is around the disabled character. Noting the fact that it is impossible to entirely separate form from content, for heuristic purposes we shall designate this category disability as articulation of disjuncture between thematic and narrative vectors.

On a continuum with the categories we have seen thus far is one in which it is disability itself that carries the burden of moral deficit and evil directly. This does not prevent disability from also acting as the means by which to test the other characters with whom the disabled character interacts, but in this mode of representation they are taken as metaphorical encapsulations of the moral problematic as such, either in the form of a moral deficit or indeed of evil. When Macbeth is informed in V.v about the death of his wife, his much quoted “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech contains an unanticipated reference to disability. He says, among other things, that life “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” Why a tale told by an idiot? The point is not so much to suggest that he is faced with a life that resists interpretation, but that Life as he sees it is generically deformed and monstrous. It is for that that the idiot is referenced; it is at one and the same time a marker of deformity and unintelligibility. But the thing to note is that this reference is made only at the turning point of the action for the protagonist, when he is bereft of all support and has to recognize what paltry resources of self he has to fall back on. In a way, the choice of metaphor reflects more upon the protagonist himself as a self-fashioned monster than it does upon his environment. However, the reference to the idiot is supposed to encapsulate a deep insight about deformity and evil, whether these are taken as intrinsic to Macbeth’s character or as reflections of the moral decay he has engendered in the play.

As we noted in chapter 1, in Shakespeare disability also acts as a metaphor to mark anomalous social states such as those involving halfbrothers and bastardy. Richard III is an exemplary play 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 his villainy or the primary cause of it. Richard himself interprets his impairment as making him almost elementally different to all others: “I can add colours to the chameleon / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages / And set the murderous Machiavel to school” (3 Henry VI, 3.2.191–193).⁹ Contrastively, in Julius Caesar Cassius points out that because Julius Caesar is deaf in one ear and suffers from epilepsy he is not fit to rule; this serves as part of the justification for his assassination. Then in The Tempest, Caliban is the focus for disability-as-otherness and moral-conundrum. Whereas Ariel is a genial and androgynous shape-shifter whose freedom, as promised, is delivered, Caliban, on the other hand, is described as a “savage and deformed slave.” The question remains open whether Caliban is congenitally evil, having been born that way by Sycorax, or becomes warped because of his loss of the island and his mistreatment at the hands of Prospero. We shall designate this category of representation disability as moral deficit/evil.

Sometimes, in texts in which disability is a marker of a moral conundrum the impairment is concealed until a particular ethical impasse is arrived at within the text. Here, its use as signifier of moral disorder or deficit is more in terms of a sudden epiphany for the nondisabled character than a slow process of unfoldment about the disabled character’s problematic sense of his or her own identity, as is the case in Richard III. This is to be distinguished from instances where an impairment is mentioned as a mere detail of characterization that serves either to provide a mark of distinctiveness about the disabled character or as a means of differentiation for the nondisabled ones, but which nonetheless promptly recedes from the text.¹⁰ A good example of the epiphanic use of disability is provided in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Brother Jack, who conscripts Invisible Man into the Brotherhood, is described from the beginning as a “short insignificant-looking bushy-eyebrowed man with a quiet smile on his face” (287). The only peculiarity about him is his gait, which is described as a “rapid, rolling, bouncy, heel-and-toey step” (288). He is on the whole a genial person, and there is nothing to raise suspicion about him. After conscripting the narrator, Brother Jack becomes his defender when other members of the Brotherhood criticize what they see as the backwardness of his early speechmaking. As Invisible Man becomes more prominent in the Brotherhood, certain hitherto concealed ideological differences begin to emerge between him and other members of the organization. Matters of overall strategy come to a head after the politicized funeral of a former member of the Brotherhood in Harlem. Whereas Jack and the Brotherhood think that the people are only the seat of mindless passions that need to be “scientifically” channeled for a proper revolution to take place, Invisible Man insists that they be accorded the respect due a highly self-conscious people, who, through their experiences of racism and injustice, have a much deeper insight about what is best for them than the Brotherhood imagines. At the special meeting that has been called, tempers rise, there is thumping of the table, voices are raised at cross-purposes, and then, suddenly:

The uncanniness of this sudden “disembowelment,” as the narrator puts it, should not detract from the fact that until this point there has not been the slightest hint that Brother Jack had a glass eye. Even going back to carefully trace references to his eyes from the very beginning of his introduction into the text does not yield any sign of his impairment. There are many references to him wiping his eyes or his face with his hands, or staring intently at his interlocutors, but none of these descriptions betray the fact that there is anything wrong with his eyes. It is only now, at the point when a serious ethical distinction is being drawn between his ideas about class struggle and the narrator’s personal experiences among the people, that his disability is suddenly, and without prior preparation, foisted upon us. The unheimlich nature of this moment is registered in the mind of the narrator in the simultaneous speeding up and slowing down of the perception of the event: “ragged, light breaking patterns in swift droplets”; the repetition of the word eye attached to various metaphors from buttermilk and white prism distorted by light to the eerie eye staring from out of a well. Also, the offending eye seems to “erupt” out of Brother Jack’s face, as if invested with personal agency. By these means, the suddenness and unanticipated emergence of the impairment with the multifarious metaphors that are attached to it become the means to accentuate the unusualness of the entire event. The disclosure of the impairment acts much like a discursive punctuation mark, providing a vehicle for the intensification of ethical contradictions made sharply evident at that point in the text.

Similarly, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the disability of Tom Robinson, who has been falsely accused of raping a white girl, is concealed from us until the high point of the court scene. Told from the perspective of the child narrator Louise Scout Finch, the story progresses strictly as a pattern of discoveries open to her. Yet the disclosure of Tom Robinson’s disability is a multifaceted epiphany both for her and for the reader. The accused man is mentioned many times in the novel ahead of the trial scene, and each time we are given a little bit of information to add to the evolving picture of a hardworking and God-fearing black man who is innocent of the crime of which he has been accused. Yet a residual sense of doubt still remains for the child narrator because of the insistence with which the rest of the community outside the inner circle of Scout, her brother Jem, and her lawyer father Atticus are convinced of Tom’s guilt. As in Invisible Man, there is a buildup of tension in the immediate lead-up to the disclosure. The tension is almost unbearable and becomes palpable at the trial itself. Witnesses for the accused are called and questioned, and Tom is the last to be called in a long and absolutely riveting courtroom drama. He stands up slowly, and a revelation takes place:

Unlike what we saw with Brother Jack, here the sudden disclosure of the disability is meant not to raise doubts about the moral stature of the disabled character but to dispel them. When the jury, in spite of all the evidence that has been presented, returns a unanimous verdict of guilty, we sense with Louise Finch and her brother Jem that a major rupture has taken place in their view of the world. Tom Robinson’s withered arm joins the list of other disabilities we find in the novel—those of Calpurnia, Boo Radley, and Mr. Dolphus Raymond—all of which define the need for a cautious withholding of judgment in how different characters are evaluated. For it is not only Tom who is a victim of prejudice. Prejudice is the product of a tribal desire to demarcate between inside and outside, between what is acceptable behavior and what is not, and it cuts across understandings of race, class, and gender among the people of Maycomb. We may usefully name this category of disability representation disability as epiphany.¹¹ We shall have more to say on this in chapter 4, when we come to look at Toni Morrison’s Sula, Beloved, and Paradise.

The next major category of disability representation I want to highlight is that in which the disabled character is taken as a signifier of sacred or ritual processes. Examples abound in Greek literature and include figures such as Oedipus, Philoctetes (limping), and Ajax (madness). In the cases of both Oedipus and Philoctetes, their disability is taken to be salient only after they have committed a transgression that is considered to be polluting. In Oedipus’s case, it is the much commented upon patricide and incest, whereas with Philoctetes, his pollution comes from inadvertently stepping on the sacrificial snake and by that profaning the holy sacrifice the Greeks were performing on their way to the Trojan War. In both cases, their transgressions are considered as marking them with ritual danger, so that they have to be driven out to avoid the total destruction of the rest of the community. At the same time, there is also a desire by the wider society to acquire or at least gain access to a boon that these disabled characters possess and which is seen as critical for the well-being of the society. What is to be noted in these two cases is the temporality of the schema that defines the shift from innocence to ritual transgression and contagion and on to sacredness. Thus, in the case of Oedipus, it is only in Oedipus at Colonnus, a play that places him many years after his banishment, that we find the Thebans and the Athenians appealing for his blessing. In Philoctetes, on the other hand, the eponymous hero is first condemned to exile on the island of Lemnos and only later sought out by Odysseus and the Greek army to try to gain possession of the magic bow that had been bequeathed to him by Herakles. The entire encounter between Neoptolemus, tasked with tricking him out of the bow, and the anguished and homesick Philoctetes, is that between conscience and pain, between the call of duty and the bearing witness to the melancholy of the indescribable loss of homeland.

In other traditions, such as those of the Yoruba, Eshu, the limping trickster god of the crossroads, is not seen to carry any such contagion. His ritual role is quite different. As the trickster god, he often represents a trial of human perception, confounding what seems self-evident in order to establish the requirement of humility in the face of the ultimate inexplicableness of the human lifeworld. Robert Farris Thompson (1983) suggests that the spirit of improvisation central to African American music is a legacy of the improvisational performance qualities of the god that the slaves brought with them from Africa. On the other hand, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988) asserts that a direct line may be traced between the signifying monkey of African American folklore and the Yoruba Eshu. Eshu’s limp is thus the paradigm of access to multiple realities of both the real world and that of the gods. He represents a disabled character/god who provides superior insights into the phenomenal world and in this may be likened to similar characters from Greek myths such as Hephaestus, Tiresias, and Cassandra. Seen alongside the proliferation of Eshu-Elegbara cults in the New World, it is clear that the limping god of the Yoruba is interpreted as having a transhistorical and modern significance that goes beyond any ritual position assigned him in the traditional Yoruba pantheon from which he came. This class of disability representation may be termed disability as signifier of ritual insight. I shall illustrate this class more fully in the chapter on Wole Soyinka’s drama.

The blind hermaphrode Tiresias is well known in Western culture from his roles in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Euripides’ The Bacchae and perhaps needs no introduction. What is not often noted is the degree to which other disabled characters such as Cassandra and Io, both afflicted by madness through the Olympian gods’ capriciousness, share with Tiresias the role of uncommon insight but also become conduits for the articulation of the sense of tragic ethos that saturates the worlds in which they find themselves. Cassandra, a prophetess cursed by Apollo to carry the gift of prophecy yet never to be believed, foretells her own death to people who stand utterly in doubt about what she prophesizes to them. That is the poignant picture we get in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. When Cassandra tells the Argive chorus of old men about the murder of Agamemnon, which is taking place as they speak, she also serves notice of her peculiar ability to capture and express in her very person the tragic ethos of the unfolding action. A similar observation may be made about Io, who, transformed into a cow by Hera because of Zeus’s amorous interest in her, acts as a counterpoint to Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Even though Io lacks the prophetic insight of Cassandra, her wails as the gadfly stings her represent the saturation point of the tragic ethos. For unlike Prometheus, the trajectory of whose defiant response to Zeus’s punishment makes him decidedly epic rather than tragic, Io is bereft of any such grandeur and yet bears a burden of tragic knowledge that must nonetheless remain inarticulable. Further contrasts provided by Aeschylus in the play between Prometheus and Io deepen this meaning. Whereas Prometheus is immobile throughout the play (he is supposed to be bound to a rock, after all) and thus defines a locus of stability in that dramatic representation, Io has traversed many regions and climes before she enters the play. Her wanderings have been in search of relief from the gadfly’s painful stings. Yet her wailing must not be taken solely as wails of pain; they also embody a clouded knowledge of her condition that is frustrated from being properly articulated because of the attentions of the gadfly. Prometheus’s geographical stability, which is nevertheless coupled to an overarching prophetic reach, is then in sharp contrast to Io’s geographical range, which is undermined by the contraction and fragmentation of her consciousness. Io cannot express the full extent of her anguish and indeed knowledge of what has been made visible to her through her wanderings. She is condemned to a series of penetrating and desperate questions (making up fully sixteen of the first fifty lines assigned to her) that progressively prompt Prometheus to divulge a prophecy about the coming apocalyptic end of Zeus’s reign and the contribution that her own descendants will make to this.¹² In other words, her anguish issues forth in endless questionings only part of which can be answered by Prometheus, who even then assimilates his answer to a prophecy that serves to further emphasize his epic status. Read in terms of the apparently inarticulable burden of the tragic ethos, what we might term the Cassandra-Io complex of disability is to be found replicated in female figures as different as Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Brecht’s Kattrin, Marquez’s Rebeca (in One Hundred Years of Solitude), Allende’s Clara (in House of Spirits), Yvonne Vera’s Mazvita (in Without a Name), and Baby Suggs and Consolata, both of whom we shall see more of in the chapter on Toni Morrison. This is not to say that the category applies only to female characters. Yet it seems to me that it is female figures that exemplify it best, not because they are women but because the dialectical coupling of tragic insight with loss of articulation seems to be a structural feature generated through the prism of gender as opposed to prisms of race and class. Rarely does a routing through race and class reveal such poetic and charged figures as we have enumerated, yet gender always seems to provide the template by which the peculiar ontological difficulty is brought into view, especially when it is coupled with some form of violence or violation of the disabled female character. In all such instances, the recognition of the tragic ethos by the disabled female character coincides precisely with their inability to speak of the terrible tragic knowledge to which they bear witness. All that is left is a series of fragmented enactments of the self, posing an enigma for the characters around them as well as for the reader and spectator. This form of disability representation is a counterpoint to the more common one in which disabled characters are shown as bearers of superior insight. I want to term this class disability as inarticulable and enigmatic tragic insight and will have more to say about it in relation to Krotoa, the first Khoikhoi Christian convert, whose fragmented and tragic life will be part of the subject of the chapter on Robben Island.

Closely connected to the representation of disability as enigmatic tragic insight but in a much more elusive register are cases where the disability is considered the site of a major hermeneutical impasse. The lack of closure implied in this kind of representation may also have ethical implications, yet it is the problem of interpretation that remains paramount. Thus, in Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols” the young suicidal patient’s strange mental symptoms—shown in the impulse to interpret the natural elements as harboring something directly pertinent to his be-ing—are labeled by a scholar as “referential mania,” thus providing a key both to the patient’s illness and to the process of inference that is installed at the heart of the story. Yet the referential mania is exactly what it is, a manic urge to interpret, provoked by the disability, which nevertheless does not lead to any enlightenment. In such cases, it is the process of open-ended interpretation that is made salient, as opposed to any disclosure of meaning as such. Another good example of this process is provided in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. The context in which we find Count Almasy in Ondaatje’s novel, set in the deserts of Egypt during World War II, is such as to proliferate hermeneutical difficulties for both characters and readers. The English patient’s acute burns ensure that he remains a “skinless” and identityless being throughout the narrative. And precisely because of this he is the center of much interpretative interest. Each of the three other characters trapped in the bombed-out villa try to read meanings both into and out of him. Matters are complicated by the fact that he himself has what appears to be an encyclopedic cartographic knowledge of the desert. He says of himself that he is “a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map.” He has information “like a sea” inside of him and inhales history from books as if becoming at one with them (18). The height of the hermeneutical delirium implied by the English patient is made manifest in the relationship between him and Caravaggio, who seeks to extract information from him about his true identity:

The final category that we should bear in mind is the one in which the disabled characters are completely normalized and exist within the full range of human emotions, contradictions, hopes, fears, and vague ideas, just like any other character. The life writing of disabled people themselves has ensured an increasing number of such accounts, but such complex accountings are not solely from the pens of persons with disabilities. One difficulty with ascertaining the range of texts in this category is that if a writer does not declare him or herself to carry an impairment, it becomes almost impossible to detect signs of their disability from their writing.¹⁴ In terms of the nature of aesthetic nervousness in this set of disability representation, the key distinction to be drawn would have to be that between texts of a biographical or autobiographical kind and those that are plainly fictional. I have already referred to Murphy’s The Body Silent (1990) in chapter 1. Murphy’s autobiography is significant in that being a professional anthropologist, he pays close attention to the process by which his body progressively succumbs to the debilitating disease while also noting the changing reactions of people around him. The book then becomes a simultaneous documentary of his own subjective attitudes to his disability and the responses of the world around him. And in Michael Bérubé’s (1996, xii–xv) touching account of parenting Jamie, a child with Down syndrome, he writes of the unbearable cognitive dissonance that inheres in the situation. For, on the one hand, he contemplates what it must be to see his son through the eyes of others, yet, on the other, his engagement with the events of Jamie’s everyday life ensures that the child can only be seen by his parents as a unique individual. In both of these instances, the accounts are being written with a full sense of the complexity of responses that attend disability; it is not a stereotype or condition that can be easily assimilated to an essentialized category. Thus, even though there is often some degree of nervousness and anxiety about the implications of living with a disability, there is none of the aesthetic nervousness that we find in the literary accounts. And recall that one of the definitions of aesthetic nervousness is the collapse of the dominant protocols that govern the representation. Since in the (auto)biographies of persons with disability the representation is conducted consistently from the point of view of the persons with disabilities and their caregivers, the opportunities for a “collapse” of the dominant protocols are curtailed. The textual dominant is that which is pertinent to the exploration of the full complexity of living with disability. In the literary texts that fall under the rubric of representation of disability as normality, disability is used as a pointed critique of social hypocrisy and indeed of social institutions as such. This may be seen either in the depiction of the crisis of the individual, such as in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, or in terms of a critique of the entire carceral economy of medicalization, such as is found in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain or Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Signs of aesthetic nervousness may be discovered in such texts, yet the important dimension is the focus on acute social critique that provides the central emphasis to the writing. This final set will be termed disability as normality.

Let us recapitulate our categories:

These nine sets must be taken as a provisional mapping of the field only. There is no doubt that combinations of different categories will produce different emphases and therefore varying potential sets. As we will see in the course of this study, certain categories of disability representation are more dominant in the work of some writers than in others. Thus, in a purely preliminary way that will be further elaborated in specific chapters, it is possible to suggest that Beckett’s work displays a leaning toward a combination of categories 7 and 8 (disability as enigmatic insight and disability as hermeneutical impasse), while categories 5, 7, and 9 (disability as epiphany, disability as enigmatic insight, and disability as normality) seem more pertinent to a discussion of Toni Morrison. On the other hand, Wole Soyinka’s plays clearly invite exploration via categories 4, 6, and 8 (disability as moral deficit/evil, disability as ritual, and disability as hermeneutical impasse), with the inflection being heavily on ritual. We shall find in our discussion of autism and J. M. Coetzee, however, that his writing exemplifies a combination of 1, 2, and 8 (disability as null set/moral test, disability as interface of otherness, and disability as hermeneutical impasse). The chapter on Robben Island will be used mainly to illustrate sets 2 and 7, but this time from the perspective not of literary characters but historical figures whose identities were defined in confrontation with colonialism and then apartheid. I shall have moved by the end of the study from the close reading of textual details and literary genres to an exploration of the social and political conditions that undergirded concerns about disability within a specific historical context. The ideal of the provisional conceptual map outlined in this chapter and of Aesthetic Nervousness as a whole is thus a program for future reading and interpretation of both the literary and sociopolitical domain. This study is offered in that spirit.