Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

2. For the account of social attitudes toward disability in fourteenth-century England, I draw mainly on The Common Lot, Margaret Pelling’s fascinating book of essays on social conditions in Elizabethan England. But see also Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (1995); and Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner, eds., Londinopolis (2000) for corroborative accounts from other parts of the country. Henri Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability (1999) is a more Foucauldian study of disability in Europe and attempts to account for changing social attitudes to disability as they emerge from the nexus of attitudes, institutional practices, and social relations. By this genealogical means he seeks to show the degree to which twentieth-century attitudes to disability derive from and yet are sharply differentiated from what came before. His central premise is that the desire to see everyone as alike is what underlies contemporary notions of disability. This he sets out to systematically challenge. Stiker’s is the best such account I can think of, and it even surpasses Foucault in focusing not only on madness but on wider questions of corporeal difference.

3. The notion of empire as a laboratory for the sharpening of various discourses in Europe is from Ann Laura Stoler (1995). On the relation between empire and criminal profiling, see Pablo Mukherjee (2003). The point about the intermeshing of metropolitan and extra-European realities is well made by various postcolonial writers such as Edward Said (1994), Robert Young (1995), and Benita Parry (2004).

4. See the fascinating video documentary by Snyder and Mitchell, A World Without Bodies (2001). The scholarly literature on the Nazi extermination of people with disabilities is vast. Stefan Kuhl (1994) and Henry Friedlander (1995) provide good overview arguments, with Kuhl also looking at the contribution of debates in the American eugenics movement of the 1920s to what ultimately became the nightmare of Nazi experimentation. Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River (1994) presents a moving literary account of the ways in which the intersection between anti-Semitism and disablism affects the evolving consciousness of Trudi Montag, the dwarf girl who is the sensitive protagonist of the novel.

5. David Millikan’s arguments from Australia, in which he launched a robust defense of Hoddle’s right to the expression of his religious beliefs regardless of how it might be offensive to others, exemplified this tendency. See http://www.shootthemessenger.com.au/u_feb_99/c_soccer.htm. Also relevant in this regard was a piece by Kevin Carey, available at http://www.g21.net/do59.htm. Kevin Carey is described on his Web page as “director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a political theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet”—clearly a well-educated, middle-class former public servant with an interest in the rest of the world, whose opinions are not to be dismissed as those of a quirky fraction.

6. Richard Downes, letter to the editor, The Guardian, February 3, 1999.

7. On first considering this point about the vertiginous fears of the nondisabled regarding disability I focused primarily on Lacan’s discussion of the mirror phase and his exploration of the imagos of dismemberment that come up for people under psychic stress. From this, I elaborated what I termed the primal scene of the encounter between the disabled and the nondisabled, which, as I argued, was riven by constitutive emotional ambiguities. Even though I still find that perspective persuasive, in the current discussion I want to leave the contours of the psychoanalytic interpretation to one side and instead invoke the work of philosophers and disability writers who have thought and written about this matter. For my earlier argument, see “Disability and Contingency” in Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003). At any rate, though I didn’t know it then, the argument about Lacan and the primal scene of disability had already been quite persuasively put by Lennard Davis (1995, 140–142) and so will not be reprised here.

8. For the discussions of the sublime and the beautiful that I have drawn upon, see Allison (2001), Crockett (2001), Ashfield and de Bolla (1996), Caruth (1988), and de Man (1990). The issue of whether the sublime triggers an ethical recognition or not is a contentious one and not yet settled on either side, but Ashfield and de Bolla provide a good account of how the ethical debates on the sublime have unfolded in British literary history from the eighteenth century onward.

9. For particularly insightful readings of Richard III from a disability studies perspective, see Mitchell and Snyder (2000, 95–118) and Lennard Davis.

1. I think here mainly of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and Fables of Identity (1963) and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953), exemplary works of literary synthesis that combine literary history with astute close readings of texts.

2. Sometimes the assumed sublimity of the literary text made the critic gasp for words. This is the sense one gets from R. P. Blackmur when he writes regarding Wallace Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier” that “to gloss such a poem is almost impertinent” (2003, 116). The injunction to fall silent is one that can plainly not be respected in a discussion of literary representations of disability, thus marking a necessary critical distance between the current enterprise and the work of the New Critics. “Speaking for,” in terms of taking a clearly ideological position, is now as much part of the literary-critical domain as the hitherto dominant enterprise of “speaking about” the literary text and limiting oneself strictly to the domain of the text under discussion. For an astute discussion of some of the reasons for the shift in critical practices, see Andrew DuBois’ introduction to Close Reading (2003), in which R. P. Blackmur’s essay just cited is to be found.

3. See also “Exploring the ‘Hearing Line’: Deafness, Laughter, and Mark Twain,” Christopher Krentz’s (2002) insightful essay on hearing and comedy in Twain.

4. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (2002) also provides a helpful typology of representations in which she identifies the rhetoric of the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the realistic. Her discussion draws mainly on photographs of disabled people used for advertisements and art exhibitions in the twentieth century. The distinction to be drawn between Thomson’s account and what is presented here is that there are more subtle gradations to be established in literary works. The various categories often overlap or indeed shift between more than one rhetoric, to use her word. A typology of disability representation thus has to be both suppler and more provisional, since the variety of literary expression makes it impossible to arrive at an all-encompassing mode of explanation. See also Martin Norden (1994) for a discussion of types of representation of disability in cinema.

5. Redactions of the tale of the Loathely Lady are to be found in various sources. Particularly well known are those told by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The Wife of Bath’s account is itself traceable to “The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell,” which can be found in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Bryan and Dempster 1941). A more modern rendition of this story is provided in Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Sword and the Circle (1981), which itself draws upon Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Sutcliff’s story, written essentially for children, accentuates certain details of atmosphere and of the Loathely Lady’s personal qualities, such as the mellifluous timbre of her voice and the class markings of her clothes. Particularly telling is the effect of the Loathely Lady’s disability in almost freezing the knights’ capacity for speech and gesture when she is brought to the castle. This serves as a fascinating example of the social nervousness that nondisabled people exhibit on first-time encounters with persons with disabilities, a nervousness Thomson writes of in Extraordinary Bodies (1997).

6. For a riveting discussion of such cartoons, see L. Perry Curtis’s Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1997).

7. To get the full value of Spivak’s remarks, it is best to read her essay alongside Benita Parry’s critique/response. Both pieces are helpfully anthologized in Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 2, edited by Diana Brydon (2000).

8. It has to be noted, however, that even though Dory’s extreme form of short-term amnesia makes her stand out in the film, she is not the only one to carry a disability. Nemo himself has one fin smaller than the other and the character of the black-and-white fish in the dentist’s aquarium has one mangled fin. He is himself a peculiar figure whose characterization combines an interplay between light and darkness. He only becomes benign after almost getting Nemo killed in one of his many fruitless plots to get himself and the other fish out of the small aquarium they have been trapped in and back into the sea.

9. Cases in which an impairment is taken as a direct insignia of evil abound in literature: Captain Hook in Peter Pan, the much-discussed Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, Zaita in Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, and the protagonist of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume are just a few examples. Dreamworks’ recent Shrek 2 has an entire tavern filled with all kinds of disabled characters. The tavern is supposed to be the source of the baddies in the film (they turn out not to be so bad in the end); Captain Hook is shown playing the piano at the tavern.

10. It is useful to recall here Irving Zola’s (1987) remarks on how rare it is for detectives who use wheelchairs in detective stories to complain when faced with architectural impediments to their mobility (such as a flight of stairs, for instance). Their impairment suddenly vanishes from the account. See his “Any Distinguishing Features?—The Portrayal of Disability in the Crime-Mystery Genre.”

11. Though it is difficult to make a generalization about this kind of epiphanic disability, it has to be noted that such discursive deployments of disability may be seen in various texts of a postcolonial nature, such as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things around the character of Kuttapen, the doomed Velutha’s brother, and in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is fascinating for first hinting that Okonkwo’s stammer is the mark of a cultural deficit and then completely effacing that deficit while the narrative establishes his credentials as a lord of the clan. It is only at the very end, with the killing of the district administrator’s messenger, that we suddenly see that his lack of verbal facility was indeed a serious deficit: he kills the messenger against the background of his gathered tribesmen coming to talk about their most recent humiliation at the hands of the white man. The descent of his machete marks for him an assertion of the masculine warrior ethic for which he had always been rewarded. But for them its descent is his final severance from a society that has changed imperceptibly due to the colonial encounter. It is only here at the climactic moment of the narrative that we see that his stammer was indeed a severe cultural deficit that would ultimately lead to his being peripheralized by the culture. The next time we encounter him, Okonkwo is hanging from a tree, a suicide. As we shall see in chapter 4, Toni Morrison’s work displays a broad range of such epiphanies tied to disability.

12. See the Vellacott translation of Prometheus Bound (1961), lines 561–630.

13. Other examples of the use of disability as enigma or hermeneutical impasse can be found as variously as in Hoffman’s The Sandman, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, among various others. What has to be remembered is that even while illustrating different vectors of disability representation, what is central to these accounts is the enigmatic aura that surrounds the impairment, whether this is visible or otherwise. The aura is designed to generate an open-ended problem of interpretation for the characters as well as the readers. For a discussion along similar lines related to war wounded, see Amanda Claybaugh’s (2005) excellent piece in the Yale Journal of Criticism, which discusses the responses to Berthold Lindau, the disabled character in Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes, itself set in the period just after the U.S. Civil War.

14. Helen Deutsch has argued that the impairments carried by writers such as Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, and Samuel Johnson, among others, gives a particular quality to their works, something that has long been denied by mainstream scholars. She elaborates her argument in Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (1996); see also her piece in Snyder et al. (2002). Nancy Mairs (1996), Anne Finger (1990), Audre Lorde (1982), and others have written sensitive works of both a fictional and semiautobiographical nature from the perspective of people who are disabled themselves. On the other hand, we have highly sensitive fictional works such as Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch and Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River as but two examples from nondisabled writers.

1. This production of Endgame ran from March 10 to May 1, 2004.

2. Variously and respectively, Kate Bassett in the Independent, March 14, 2004; Michael Billington in The Guardian, March 11, 2004; Alistair Macauley in the Financial Times, March 12, 2004; and Susannah Clapp, The Observer, March 14, 2004.

3. On Beckett as postmodernist/deconstructivist, see for instance Ihab Hassan, Steven Connor, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Begam, among others. On Beckett as existential humanist read through a general perspective of phenomenology, see Trevise, St. John Butler, David Hesla, and Stanton Garner, among others. Within these two broad rubrics, there are also two methodologies in evidence, the genetic and the intertextual. The genetic approach attempts to uncover the specific philosophical debts that Beckett owes to various philosophers, while the intertextual approach tries to show how close his own thought and practice has been to those of philosophers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, and others. For an overview of these approaches, see Lane (2002).

4. Indeed, others have drawn up such an inventory, but for different purposes. See, for example, Pierre Chabert (1982), Marie-Claude Hubert (1994), Katherine M. Gray (1996), and John Wall (2000). Such an inventory would include works such as Murphy (1938), Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) (1958), Rough for Theatre I (1950s), All That Fall (1956), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961), and Play (1963).

5. As Gontarski (1985, 242) notes in his analysis of Beckett’s style of composition, his slow process of writing usually progresses in this fashion: after the initial image or incident is recorded (often straight from memory or the unconscious), what follows is a shaping process that includes: (1) deleting detail, explanation, and often connection; (2) rejecting, consciously destroying those artificial, manmade, extrinsic systems of chronology and causality; and (3) creating an alternative arrangement or internal relationship that will emphasize pattern if not order. Thus it would be very risky to read off any biographical details as directly pertinent to the interpretation of any of his characters. Biographical details have to remain purely speculative.

6. For a fuller discussion of the theme of surveillance in Molloy, see Uhlmann (1999).

7. There is also a play on the mechanized gaze and technological interlocutor. This is combined with the compulsion to act and the necessity and terror of being seen. Thus in Krapp’s Last Tape he hugs the tape recorder and listens to it intently as a means of interacting with different parts of himself. The tape recorder becomes both an interlocutor and a prosthesis of his own voice. Again, in Play, the spotlight acts as a prosthesis of the audience, but it also generates anxiety because of the impossibility of verifying the status of this technological interlocutor. The direct effect is an incitement to narrate.

8. A similar question may be posed of Murphy, where Murphy makes a conscious preference for mind over body yet finds himself of a necessity having to perfect repetitive rituals to calm his body in order to liberate his mind. He calls this at a point in the novel the big world versus the little world, his choice being firmly with the little world. Murphy, however, raises another level of difficulty because of the role of the third-person narrator, who at every turn proliferates lacunae at the level of the narrative technique, whether this has to do with the reporting of an event in the past, the description of various characters, or the unfolding of the plot. Thus it is that every level of the text seems riddled with shifting gaps, all of which are not helped by the highly dense and often Latinate register of the language of the novel in general.

9. For an overview of these and an independent allegorical reading of the play, see Jane Allison Hale’s piece in Steven Connor (1992).

10. There are variant terms that are used to refer to users of wheelchairs in disability studies: “wheelchair user” and its variants “chair user” and “user of a wheelchair,” to the more specific “x or y uses a wheelchair,” where the emphasis is as much on the agent-user as on the wheelchair itself. In all such instances, the idea is to refer to the user in such a way as not to assimilate his or her identity to a function of the technological prosthesis, whatever that might be given the impairment. See Albrecht et al. (2001) for a range of essays that pick up and elaborate on these and other terms in disability studies. However, in the case of Hamm, the wheelchair is so much an inescapable part of his identity that it would be inadequate to say he was merely a user of the wheelchair. Everything that he does is linked to the fact that he is immobilized and in a wheelchair, thus my preference for the term “wheelchair bound.”

11. Though this is not really the place for it, it would be interesting to contrast the dialectic of movement/immobility in Endgame to the one we see in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, which was touched on briefly in chapter 2. The main difference between the two plays would be in the construction of an epic topos around Prometheus’s stillness, something that is then contrasted to the various entrances and exits of the other characters in the play. Endgame has no such epic topos, since its “geography” is entirely domestic and not given to imaginative elaborations beyond it. Furthermore, whereas Aeschylus’s play introduces a degree of geographical extension with the entry of each of the characters that come to speak to Prometheus (Oceanus, Io, and then the hated Hermes), in Endgame that geographical extension is, strictly speaking, not allowed, since all the characters seem to be constrained both in their physical conditions and in the reach of their imaginations. Even when “nature” outside the stage is admitted into account, it is admitted only to be undermined in its status as provider of epistemological verity or ontological sustenance.

12. On the odd logic of necropoltics, see Achille Mbembe’s 2003 essay of the same title.

13. Recalling Shakespeare, similar doubts can be raised about Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet III.iv. As far as I can tell, it is humanly impossible to drown and sing at the same time, but this is what Gertrude claims Ophelia was doing when she drowned. Her description is obviously not solely about the death of the young woman. Apart from being a fascinating example of ekphrasis in Shakespeare, it is also clearly an attempt to deflect the responsibility for the suicide away from the mentally ill Ophelia and onto the surrounding environment. But this deflection of responsibility goes beyond that. It is also implicitly an attempt to rehabilitate insanity and to retranscribe it aesthetically as a moment of transcendence, when, as it were, the mad character of Ophelia acquires a oneness with nature. This is surely a sign of aesthetic nervousness. For further accounts of the challenges to realism imposed by disability, see Zola’s (1987) account of the representation of detectives with impairments in the history of the crime/mystery novel.

1. The texts she pays close attention to in Playing in the Dark are as follows (with the disability in parentheses where relevant): Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It (mental disorder, vii–xii); Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Sapphira, slave mistress who is also a wheelchair user, 18–28); Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (31–32, 51–54); Herman Melville, Moby Dick (monomaniacal leg-amputee Ahab); Bernard Bailyn, On William Dunbar (39–44); Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (’Lizabeth, deaf-mute daughter of Jim, and the pretend-deaf duke, 54–57); Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (central character Harry has an amputated arm, 58, 70–80); Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden (80–91).

2. In fact, the device of using a narrative moment as the nodal point for the interweaving of fragmentary reflections both for the third-person narrator and for individual characters in the narrative is a distinctive feature of many of Morrison’s novels, at least in those since Song of Solomon, when the device becomes most prominent. Thus, in Song of Solomon we have the opening sequence with the suicide of the man from the insurance company who attempts to “fly” off the ledge of the building. This initial moment becomes an intersecting point for various others over the course of the narrative. In Beloved, we have Sethe’s terrible choice as such a moment, and Love returns to the time of Heed’s marriage to Cosey as the foundational ground upon which several characters try to recall the past and reframe their own present circumstances. Sometimes, as in the contradictory accounts that Milkman gets from his father and mother about the cause of the coldness in their marriage, the business of the bones that hang from the rafters of Pilate’s house, or the events surrounding the Ruby men’s invasion of the convent, the nodal story becomes the point of hermeneutical impasse for the characters, leading to multiple and contradictory interpretations and the general breakdown of communication among them. For the reader, the process of making meaning of what we read requires a vigilance similar to what we see in the case of Violet in Jazz, who when walking has to pay particular attention to the cracks in the pavement so that she does not slip into them (23; see also The Bluest Eye, 35– 36). Is it the case, then, that from the very narrative devices Morrison deploys she is suggesting that we are all subjects of a hermeneutical delirium in our quest for meaning?

3. The image of bird’s wings also operates as the signal of possession in Sethe’s case in Beloved. When the four horsemen come to seize her and her children, Sethe is suddenly possessed by an ungovernable feeling that is captured in the image of hummingbirds: “Little hummingbirds stuck needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew” (163).

4. Several critics have commented on Eva’s deity-like functions, among them Hortense Spillers (2003, 112), for whom Eva behaves “as though she were herself the sole instrument of divine inscrutable will.”

5. The conflicting issues that parents have toward their children with disabilities is amply discussed by social workers and disability scholars. For a representative view on this, see Wiess (1994) and Read (2000).

6. Even though the novel does not tell us what exactly is on Plum’s mind and thus does not give us enough to properly evaluate the reason for his drug habit, it would not be excessive to compare him to Shadrack, the only other returnee soldier the narrative gives us. Having himself suffered from harrowing experiences in the war, Shadrack returns to Medallion a recluse, living on the outskirts of the community in a hut. He is generally considered to be mentally disabled. Shadrack institutes an annual National Suicide Day, which takes place every January 3 since 1920. With his bell, the disheveled prophet annually rouses the community to the sense of an ending on this special day until, at the end of the novel, it marks a true apocalypse: several people die in a landslide amid melting ice within a giant tunnel (160–162). In this way, Shadrack is discursively aligned with Plum as a witness to the sense of an ending that, in one case, is articulated through an annual communal ritual and, in another, is completely internalized and only expressed through a desire for self-destruction. For a discussion of the sense of an ending in modern literature, see Frank Kermode (1968).

7. Sethe’s notion of rememory may fruitfully be understood within the framework provided by Teresa Brennan in her book The Transmission of Affect (2004). Brennan argues that complex affects (love, hate) are not merely made up of emotions but also involve judgment. Thus she is able to elaborate the concept of affective transmission to argue that individual identity is far from self-contained, but is rather porous and inherently transgressed by the affects of others. In the case of Sethe’s rememory, the transmitted affect is necessarily communal rather than merely individual, since the implication that Sethe raises is that the negative affect has leaked into history itself and saturated the moment of its leakage, thus reorienting it as a granulated moment. On the relationship between trauma and interpretation, see Cathy Caruth (1996); also, with respect to the evaluation of history in the present and the general concept of granulated reality see Quayson (2003, 76–82, 125–135).

8. On epiphanies in literature, see Martin Bidney’s Patterns of Epiphany (1997).

9. In this regard, it would be interesting to compare Baby Suggs’s contemplation of primary colors to William Blake’s implied questioning of the inherent contradictions within God’s creation in his poem “Tyger.” For the question that Blake poses has no answer: “What immortal hand or eye / dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” This question is not dissimilar to that implicitly posed by Baby Suggs’s retreat: “God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so. Instead she told Stamp she was going to bed to think about the colors of things.…Strangers and familiars were stopping by to hear how it went one more time, and suddenly Baby declared peace. She just up and quit. By the time Sethe was released she had exhausted blue and was well on her way to yellow” (177).

1. On the Ogun heroic ideal, see Soyinka’s own discussion in Myth, Literature, and the African World (1975). Also, see Ketu Katrak (1986) and Quayson (1997, 67–78).

2. My discussion of Greek terms here is drawn from G. E. R. Lloyd’s In the Grip of Disease: Studies in the Greek Imagination (2003).

3. It is true that at the end of the play the chief priest and the rest of the community feel not a sense of elation and freedom but one of despair and foreboding. Guilt has taken the place of joy and a feeling of liberation. And yet there is something dissatisfying even about this, because Eman is not given any energetic poetic lines that would stick in the mind (at least not of this reader). We are then not wrong to assume that the community’s feeling of guilt is more because of the frayed and difficult ritual process.

4. In Freud’s account, the blurring of the boundary between the mechanical and the physical is one of the main ways of producing the sense of unheimlich. See his well-known essay on “The Uncanny” (1919). Also, see Neil Hertz (1985). We shall return to Freud later in the chapter.

5. It might also be possible to cast Goyi as some sort of marionette, but I must admit that this is purely speculative, as there is no evidence from existing accounts of performances of the play that he has ever been cast in such a way. However, the thematic possibilities that this might open up are quite enticing.

6. The most extended discussion of biopower is of course that provided by Foucault in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. But see also Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998), for the relationship between biopower, notions of the sacred, and the constitution of political sovereignty.

7. The threat of violence that never quite breaks out to the surface until the very end is a characteristic device in Soyinka’s drama; the best examples of this are The Road and Kongi’s Harvest, two plays that, as we have seen, also close on a note of enigmatic open-endedness.

8. I elaborate more fully on a view of uncanny as the retranscription of an inchoate sense of systemic disorder in my chapter on literature, history, and South Africa’s TRC, in Quayson (2003, chap. 4). See also Quayson, “Symbolization Compulsions: Testing a Psychoanalytic Concept Through African Literature” (2004).

9. The best historical contexts for understanding the nature of the systemic uncanny are those to do with war, the rumors of war, and generalized social upheaval. The Rwandan genocide and the events in the months following the September 11 attacks in New York are cases in point. But I write this a day after the July 7 suicide bombings in London, in which at least thirty-seven people were killed and several more injured. All media reports spoke of the fear and uncertainty unleashed by the bombing. For good discussions on violence, trauma, and the uncanny, see the essays in Robben and Suarez-Oroco (2000). And for a fascinating discussion specifically dealing with instances of the endemic chaos and incoherence of African life that may bring forth the sense of the systemic uncanny as I describe it here, see Mbembe (2001, chaps. 3–4) and Chabal and Daloz (1999).

10. For the pitfalls of literary psychoanalysis, especially its attempt to set up a proximity between the author and his or her work, see Brooks (1988).

11. We may also find further corroboration for this argument about the centrality of disability to his work from looking at his poetry. Poems such as “Abiku” (an inspiration behind Okri’s The Famished Road) and the more recent “Doctored Vision” (2002) both encapsulate the ways in which disability generates a creative payout for him.

1. It is also important to note with respect to Disgrace and Foe that the inarticulacy of the disabled characters in those novels is also used to raise not just the problem of interpersonal meaning-making but the additionally complex one of the veridical processes implied in the genre of the detective thriller, a genre that both novels gesture toward in subtle and as yet unaccounted for ways.

2. Films such as Rain Man (dir. Barry Levinson, 1988), Silent Fall (dir. Bruce Beresford, 1994), and Mercury Rising (dir. Harold Becker, 1998) all serve to illustrate some of these features of autism. However, beyond the sentimental and emotionally epiphanic value of the autist to such filmic representation is whether it is possible to discern features of autism that are endemic to the very texture of the various levels of narrative and filmic discourse within which the autistic spectrum is represented (i.e., spanning character, narratorial perspective, and the relationship between narration in general and the representation of the autist).

3. The definition of autism and the list of features are adapted from Simon Baron-Cohen (2000) as well as from numerous personal conversations I have had with him on the subject.

4. The following list, compiled originally by Stuart Murray at the University of Leeds, shows the potential for such a framework of interpretation in helping us to reread certain well-known literary texts:

5. The last point is very persuasively put by James Berger in terms of the implicit social autism of the Swindon of the novel. See his fascinating piece “Alterity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological Spectrum” (2005).

6. The point about Magda’s narrativity is put succinctly by Brian Macaskill in his fine essay “Charting J. M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice: In the Heart of the Country”: “In the Heart of the Country can also be said to constitute—inside and out—an act of agency that seeks to speak between incommensurable imperatives.…Coetzee writes Magda into being both as a ‘real’ person and as paper entity, shaping her—and allowing her to shape her-self—between the demands of the verisimilitude valued by historical materialism and the discursive play practised by poststructural theories of language. The ‘internal’ characteristics of Magda’s voice thus reflect the ‘external’ situation whereby she is made to speak—by a writer conscious of and embroiled by competing notions of appropriate speech” (1998, 73).

7. Coetzee’s Disgrace falls into the category of the truth-and-reconciliation genre of literary writing that has been evident in South Africa since the end of apartheid. Like Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust, Jane Taylor and William Kentridge’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Fugu Eaters,” Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry, Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, it revisits questions of the reconstitution of identities within a postapartheid era that is none the less saturated with claims of the traumatic past. Some of these texts (Slovo, Magona, Nicol, Taylor and Kentridge) reflect either directly or indirectly upon the work of the TRC itself, sometimes thematizing its institutional apparatus as part of the fabric of the works themselves. In Coetzee’s Disgrace, the process of truth and reconciliation resides in the background to the unfolding crises of the lives of the characters. Contrastively, with Dangor’s Bitter Fruit we are left in no doubt that the life crises of the characters are to be directly connected to the presence or absence of truth and reconciliation. Both Bitter Fruit and Disgrace focus on rape events as a means of thematizing political violence, yet they differ dramatically in the status that the event is given for the constitution of present-day senses of the self. Disgrace mutes the effect of the rape while Bitter Fruit intensifies its disruptive qualities. The two thus represent different conceptualizations of trauma and their effect on the constitution of identities after apartheid.

8. It is instructive to contrast Paul Rayment’s “transgressive” and ultimately unrequited desire for a nondisabled woman to what we find in the relationship between the Magistrate and the blind Barbarian Girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). There, the Magistrate cannot consummate his sexual desire for the girl until he has actually restored her to her own people through what can only be described as a discombobulating rite of geographical passage. His efforts had been toward restoring her to a wholeness that lies beyond the traumatic history that has scarified her body and blinded her eyes: “I am with her not for whatever raptures she may promise or yield but for other reasons, which remain as obscure to me as ever. Except that it has not escaped me that in bed in the dark the marks her torturers have left upon her, the twisted feet, the half-blind eyes, are easily forgotten. Is it then the case that is the whole woman I want, that my pleasure in her is spoiled until these marks on her are erased and she is restored to herself; or is it the case (I am not stupid, let me say these things) that it is the marks on her which drew me to her but which, to my disappointment, I find, do not go deep enough? Too much or too little: is it she I want or the traces of a history her body bears?” (64). This then suggests that the disability short-circuits desire, in this case precisely because its genealogy is traceable to the regime of state-sponsored violence and torture to which the Magistrate has inadvertently subscribed by having been such a dutiful servant of the Empire. The point is that in both Waiting for the Barbarians and Slow Man the disability produces a structure of impossibility either for the disabled contemplating an erotic encounter with a nondisabled or a nondisabled contemplating something similar with the disabled.

9. Derek Attridge sets out the main terms of the debate around the interpretation of Michael K. He is either to be taken as a metaphor of an overarching political condition or as a character that precisely refuses metaphorization. The readings that these two viewpoints generate seem in Attridge’s view to be diametrically opposed and sometimes contentiously so. See particularly “Against Allegory” in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004).

10. For more examples of his incapacity to interpret questions and what people say to him, see also 48, 51, 64, and 78, among others.

11. Other examples of this partially realized interlocutor may be found on 79, 89, and 140, among others.

12. Graham Pechey has helpfully pointed out that there may be a very important characterological intertext to Michael K in South African literature and elsewhere. He suggests that the motif of sleep is also found in the opening paragraphs of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and also with reference to her character Waldo, who is also sleepy, earthbound, and a keeper of ostriches, or “birds without flight,” as Pechey points out. He also suggests that Coetzee must almost certainly have been thinking of one of Rilke’s Orpheus sonnets, in which sleep is rescued from its knee-jerk association with death and linked instead to the receptivity of life. Pechey, personal communication.

13. On locusts, see Exodus 10:4, 12–13; Deut. 28:38; 1 Kings 8:37, Psalms 78:46, 105:34, and 109:23, among various others. Manna is most famously associated with the Israelites fleeing from Egypt (Exodus 16), but see also Joshua 5:10–12 and John 6:31, 48–51 for New Testament interpretations. Sparrows and other birds abound in biblical stories, the most pertinent source for the doctor’s views being Christ’s parable in Matt. 10:19–33.

1. I want to say a very special thanks to Harriet Deacon, the foremost historian of Robben Island, who generously shared with me her own insights and indeed some of her own material when I approached her for advice on writing this chapter. The chapter is heavily dependent on a reading of her wide-ranging work on Robben Island, and I want to highlight here how significant this work has been in challenging the current orthodoxy that links the island solely to its more recent political past.

2. This sentiment and others like it are to be found in the collection of Tambo’s speeches, edited by Adelaide Tambo (1987).

3. See Saul Dubow’s Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa (1989) for a good discussion. More specifically in terms of the general theoretical view on embodiment, I take my cue from the insightful work of Elizabeth Grosz, particularly her Volatile Bodies (1994).

4. For disability in Fugard, it would be best to turn to Master Harold and the Boys, where the white Hally’s father is crippled, an alcoholic, and also a racist. The difficult father-son relationship is only partially offset by the positive role that Hally tries to provide for Sam, one of the black characters. With respect to Robben Island, it has inspired mainly protest and prison literature such as that of Dennis Brutus (1968, 1973) as well as several autobiographies, the most well-known ones being those by Govan Mbeki (1991), Nelson Mandela (1994), and Ahmed Kathadra (2005), among various others. As far as I can tell, Fugard’s play is the only one piece of creative writing that actually takes Robben Island itself as the primary setting on which to place the action.

5. The phrase “normal society” is bound to strike a jarring note, given the fact that under the colonial expropriation of land and property normality was strictly speaking abrogated and could only be regained through various forms of struggle. Normality then can only be seen in as far as it was tied to an articulation of freedom. Colonial and apartheid Cape society was in that sense more normal than the culture of Robben Island, but completely abnormal under the impress of colonial domination. And colonial domination itself produced variegated standards of normality for the Europeans and the natives they ruled over.

6. For a further elaboration and expansion of Hegel’s idea of the interrelationship of the social universal to the family as the ground of moral relations, see Honneth (1996).

7. De Villiers’ Robben Island: Out of Reach, Out of Mind (1971) is a blatantly hagiographic account of the first Dutch commander van Riebeeck and the establishment of the early European settlement. The attitude de Villiers expresses toward the locals is sometimes quite shocking, and yet by the same token he gives an unflinching account of some of the brutal conditions existing among the settlers themselves. I try to read between the lines of his account, as it were, to gain a sense of the inescapable shadow that even such a blatantly celebratory account allows us to discern about the nature of early colonialism at the Cape.

8. Autshumato was not the first to be taken away by the English for training. An earlier Khoikhoi man called Coree had been kidnapped by the English in 1613 and taken to England. On his return a year later he was supposed to act as their intermediary and promote their interests. He was not cooperative, and it is reported that he died in 1626 at the hands of Dutch sailors for refusing to give them food. See Penn (1996, 12–13) and Elphick (1985, 78–82).

9. Journal of Van Riebeeck, 1:103. Hereafter, JVR. Many other references were made to Autshumato in the journal and they were all uniformly of a suspicious nature. He was deeply mistrusted by the settlers, not least because he seemed to be undisguisedly in pursuit of his own interests. For further such references, see JVR 1:76, 1:104, 1:119, and 1:183, among various others.

10. There have been various speculations as to why Krotoa was brought to live with the van Riebeecks, but the most persuasive I have found has been that advanced by Julia C. Wells (1998), who argues that it was her uncle Autshumato who gave Krotoa to the van Riebeecks, seeing that she was an “orphan” and that her presence in their household would strengthen his relationship with them. Wells also points out that van Riebeeck had two nieces of a similar age as Krotoa living with him. One of these, Eva Van Opdorp, was years later to take in Krotoa’s children while she was incarcerated on Robben Island. Wells’ account may also explain Krotoa’s strong attachment to Autshumato, whom she often defended against the negative opinions of the settlers.

12. JVR 2:404–405, 3:1.

14. JVR 3:71–78, 3:83–85, 3:91.

15. Wells (1998) provides a more positive spin to the relationship between Pieter and Krotoa, reading in it the first example of a viable if bumpy inter racial relationship in South African history. What she is not quite able to explain is why, despite his marriage to Krotoa, Pieter was able to justify going on slave-hunting expeditions, one of which led to his untimely death.