At a critical moment in the eerie “King’s Cross” chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which takes place in a limbo after Voldemort has zapped Harry with the “avada kadavra” killing curse, Albus Dumbledore—who was killed at the end of the previous installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince—tells Harry about the youthful indiscretion that constituted his early (and long-unacknowledged) fascist phase, when he teamed up with the evil genius Gellert Grindelwald to propose a plan for world domination in which Muggles around the globe would be subject to rule by an elite cabal of wizards (led, of course, by Dumbledore and Grindelwald). “You know what happened,” Dumbledore says. “You know. You cannot despise me more than I despise myself.” Harry protests, “But I don’t despise you—” “Then you should,” Dumbledore replies, proceeding to explain why:
“You know the secret of my sister’s ill health, what those Muggles did, what she became. You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana.
Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance.
“I was gifted. I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.
“Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them. I loved my parents, I loved my brother and sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.
“So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness. Trapped and wasted, I thought! And then, of course, he came. . . .”
Dumbledore looked directly into Harry’s eyes again.
“Grindelwald. You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.” (715–16)
Dumbledore’s youthful crisis comes to a head when his brother, Aberforth, returns and throws cold water on Albus’s plan to seek the Deathly Hallows with Grindelwald—“I did not want to hear that I could not set forth to seek Hallows with a fragile and unstable sister in tow”—and precipitates a quarrel between Dumbledore and Grindelwald that ends in his sister Ariana’s apparently accidental death. Grindelwald flees, and Albus Dumbledore comes to his senses, realizing that “I was left to bury my sister, and learn to live with my guilt and my terrible grief, the price of my shame” (717).
In October 2007, in a talk at Carnegie Hall a few months after the release of Deathly Hallows, J. K. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore is gay. The reaction among Rowling’s millions of fans was mostly one of surprise, since there are no textual “clues” to Dumbledore’s sexual orientation. Apparently, Dumbledore’s attraction to Grindelwald was partly ideological, borne of a burning resentment toward Muggles and a self-aggrandizing sense that a person of his brilliance was being wasted in a small wizard village; but it was also sexual, and his alliance with Grindelwald stemmed partly from his love for Grindelwald. But lost in all the commotion and commentary was something obvious, something hidden in plain sight, something explicitly written into the text: Dumbledore’s desire to distinguish himself from his suddenly disreputable family, and most of all from his disabled sister.
Indeed, the first desire cannot be disentangled from the second, because the disabled Ariana is the reason for the decline of the Dumbledore family. At age six, Ariana is assaulted by three Muggle boys when they witness her doing magic. The nature of the assault is not made clear. But as Aberforth explains to Harry and Hermione Granger, “it destroyed her, what they did. She was never right again” (364). She winds up confined to her house for the rest of her life, and the Dumbledore family concocts a cover story—the story of “ill health” Albus mentions to Harry. “She wouldn’t use magic,” Aberforth explains, “but she couldn’t get rid of it; it turned inward and drove her mad, it exploded out of her when she couldn’t control it, and at times she was strange and dangerous.” Her father “went after the bastards that did it,” but does not explain himself to the wizard authorities, “because if the Ministry [of Magic] had known what Ariana had become, she’d have been locked up in St. Mungo’s for good” (364). This, then, is why Dumbledore père is sent to the remote wizard prison, Azkaban. As for Dumbledore mère, she is accidentally killed when Ariana is fourteen and unable to control one of her rages. Albus is therefore compelled to return home upon graduating from Hogwarts, very much against his wishes; but, as Aberforth notes with great bitterness, he wasn’t much of a caretaker:
“He was always up in his bedroom when he was home, reading his books and counting his prizes, keeping up with his correspondence with ‘the most notable magical names of the day’ . . . he didn’t want to be bothered with her. . . . Bit of a comedown for Mr. Brilliant, there’s no prizes for looking after your half-mad sister, stopping her blowing up the house every other day.” (365–66)
This, writes the tabloid journalist Rita Skeeter (with more warrant than usual, for her), was “the best-kept secret of Dumbledore’s life” (355), not the relatively uncontroversial (and, in the world outside the text, widely welcomed) news that Albus Dumbledore is gay.
What Rowling is doing with the tale of Ariana is more than backstory, more than the standard “as you know, Bob” mode of exposition (though the Harry Potter series includes plenty of that, as well). Rowling is installing intellectual disability at the heart of a narrative that includes no direct representation of a character with intellectual disabilities. We never meet Ariana, not even in flashback; the only representation of her is the portrait on Aberforth’s wall, which turns out to be a top-secret magical portal to Hogwarts (all the other secret passages are being watched). Ariana’s only “action” in the plot of Deathly Hallows is to serve as the spectral vehicle for that spectral portal. But her larger thematic function is decisive, and sets her “brilliant” brother’s life on its trajectory: he becomes infatuated with Grindelwald, and the ideal of wizard authoritarianism, partly because he is ashamed of his association with his disabled sister and (justifiably) furious at the Muggles who are the cause of his sister’s condition, his father’s imprisonment, and (indirectly) his mother’s death. Ariana’s death, in turn, becomes the impetus for Dumbledore’s revaluation of values, his emphatic turn against Grindelwaldism, and his lifelong commitment to Muggle rights, tolerance for all magical creatures, and struggles against entrenched hierarchies and unjustifiable inequalities of all kinds.
Intellectual disability, then, serves as the ethical core of a narrative in which it never explicitly appears. “Ethical core” is Ato Quayson’s term, and it is crucial to his groundbreaking concept of “aesthetic nervousness”: “disability,” Quayson writes, “returns the aesthetic domain to an active ethical core that serves to disrupt the surface of representation” (19). Much of my argument here will elaborate and extend this critical insight, and Quayson’s more programmatic statement that “the representation of disability oscillates uneasily between the aesthetic and the ethical domains, in such a way as to force a reading of the aesthetic fields in which the disabled are represented as always having an ethical dimension that cannot be easily subsumed under the aesthetic structure” (19). My readings will try to put pressure on the ideas of “disruption” and “oscillation” at work here; additionally, at times my argument will have less to do with the representation of characters with intellectual disabilities as characters than with the question of these characters’ relation(s) to narrative—the specific narrative they inhabit, and to narrative as such. (As we will see, depending on the nature of the intellectual disability and the parameters of the narrative in which it occurs, the meaning of “narrative as such” can range from “individual stories” to “entire lives” to “unimaginable time scales.”) Finally, following Quayson’s suggestion that “the final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between the reader and the text” (15), I will turn to a number of literary narratives in which, unlike Harry Potter (where Ariana’s disability is a motive force in Dumbledore’s life and in the narrative he creates for himself), intellectual disability warps the very fabric of the text itself, producing “disabling” effects in readers’ comprehension of narrative. This argument will involve narratives in which intellectual disability not only produces what Quayson calls a “hermeneutic impasse” within the text (with regard to content) but also sets the terms for readers’ engagement with the text (with regard to form).
But before I get to these readings, I must pause over two aspects of Quayson’s argument. The first concerns this “ethical core”: whence does it appear? In Aesthetic Nervousness it is presented almost as a fact of nature, an uninterrogated lump, itself an ethical core within Quayson’s text. The example from Harry Potter is straightforward in this respect; after all, Dumbledore père winds up in Azkaban for his retaliation against the Muggle boys, so it does not require much digging to find that questions of justice are at stake. For what is the appropriate moral response to a disabling assault on a young child? What are the obligations of her family members to the larger (wizard) society they inhabit? What, in turn, are the obligations of the larger society to the disabled child? It does not appear that wizard society offers much in the way of “reasonable accommodation”; the reason Ariana is kept at home, with lethal consequences for her mother, is that the only alternative is institutionalization in St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. The question of justice confronts us at every turn, and surely the ethical core proceeds from or is structured by that question in its various forms. And as we will see in the following chapters, there is an ethics of narrative at stake as well, and the animating question will be what the character with an intellectual disability knows—or can know—about the narrative she or he inhabits.
But the ethical core need not be triggered by the presence of, or even by a reference to, a character with an intellectual disability. Intellectual disability can be a textual matter—a matter for the text, and a motive for its characters—even when there are no characters with intellectual disabilities to be found. As I suggested in the introduction, this is what is at stake in A Wrinkle in Time. Fourteen-year-old Meg Murry has been dropped to the lowest section in her grade—one of her frustrated teachers says, “I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student” (11)—partly because she is a discipline problem. Her peers consider her to be a dim-witted troublemaker. And one of the reasons for Meg’s bad behavior is that everyone believes that she has an intellectually disabled sibling:
On the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the boys had said something about her “dumb baby brother.” At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye. (12)
L’Engle’s readers know that Meg’s five-year-old brother, Charles Wallace, is not dumb. Though he is a late-talking child, he is (as he himself knows) a biological sport, a mutation, an anomalously brilliant child who has a grasp of general relativity and possesses some telepathic powers on the side even though he does not yet know how to read. Indeed, he is savvy enough to know that it is probably best if people do not think much of him: “I’m afraid it will make it awfully hard for me in school next year if I already know things. I think it will be better if people go on thinking I’m not very bright. They won’t hate me quite so much” (34).
Both Murry parents have multiple doctorates in the sciences (the father is a physicist, the mother a microbiologist); the family is practically bursting with big brains. But the stigma of intellectual disability haunts Meg and Charles Wallace, whom people think of as “morons”—or, more politely, as being a few cards short of a full deck, especially when compared to the unremarkable ten-year-old twins, Sandy and Dennis: “The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren’t all there” (16). Here, the stigma associated with intellectual disability structures the Murry household, precisely because the Murry household is so defined by and invested in intelligence, with Meg seeking to avoid or contest the stigma (hence the fisticuffs upon hearing a random unkind word) and Charles Wallace seeking to find a shelter in stigma in order to avoid becoming the object of fear and hatred: better to be thought a moron than a freak. The ethical core at the heart of A Wrinkle in Time, then, does not arise from any one character or any one set of attributes, but from the more generalized presence of social stigma.
I want to establish this point early in my argument because (a) it is counterintuitive—who thinks of A Wrinkle in Time in terms of disability?—and (b) it gets at one of the key limitations of Quayson’s otherwise capacious framework, his insistence that “the primary level” of aesthetic nervousness “is in the interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character, where a variety of tensions may be identified” (15). It is notable that Quayson characterizes that interaction in terms of “nervousness”; the term suggests a potentially productive anxiety and unease, and is therefore more supple—and even more hopeful—than terms like “disgust,” “repulsion,” or “horror” (reactions that are far from unthinkable, and in many times and places were the normate norm). No doubt the concept owes much to Erving Goffman’s staging of that encounter: “When normals and stigmatized do in fact enter one another’s immediate presence . . . there occurs one of the primal scenes of sociology” (13). What is most appealing about Quayson’s formulation, in other words, is that it has the potential to reframe that primal scene, recasting the disgust, repulsion, or horror evinced by nondisabled characters in the presence of disability as a matter of aesthetic nervousness. One thinks of the visceral disgust with which Victor Frankenstein first beholds his creature, and then one thinks, with Quayson, of how that encounter “is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structure, and so on” (15). “Aesthetic nervousness” allows even the most horrified (and horrifying) encounters with disability to be transformed into something else, something potentially revelatory, something that raises questions not only with regard to the ethical core of a text but also with regard to its form and texture.1 And yet the theory remains based on the representation of characters with disabilities, rather than on textual tropes, rhetorical devices, and narrative strategies for constructing (and deconstructing) disability.
Likewise, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of “narrative prosthesis” is more a theory about characters with disabilities than a theory about narrative. But because “narrative prosthesis” is the single most influential account of narrative in disability studies, I should explain the differences between Mitchell and Snyder’s work and the kind of inquiry I am pursuing here. Published in 2000, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse is a landmark work, a field-defining theoretical statement that any subsequent account of disability and narrative cannot fail to address (and, indeed, Quayson’s theory of “aesthetic nervousness” does address it, and there are many points of overlap between the two books). Very much like Quayson, Mitchell and Snyder insist that “within literary narratives, disability serves as an interruptive force that confronts cultural truisms” (48), but their account of that interruptive force relies cannily on the claim that disability is always the occasion for interpretation; it always signifies something other than itself, it is always rendered as enigma and challenge:
It is the narrative of disability’s very unknowability that consolidates the need to tell a story about it. Thus, in stories about characters with disabilities, an underlying issue is always whether their disability is the foundation of character itself. The question is not whether disability is cause or symptom of, or distraction from, a disturbing behavioral trait, but whether its mystery can be pierced by the storyteller. (6)
In some cases, however, the representation of disability is not mysterious at all; when Mitchell and Snyder write that “disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device” (47), one thinks of a text like Richard Wright’s Native Son, which renders disability metaphorical in such a way as to suggest that sightless eyes are a window on the soul, as in the unsavory moment in Boris Max’s defense of Bigger Thomas at which he turns to the woman whose daughter Bigger has killed, crying, “And to Mrs. Dalton, I say: ‘Your philanthropy was as tragically blind as your sightless eyes!’” (393). I call the moment “unsavory” because it cannot possibly be a wise defense strategy to blame Mrs. Dalton for the death of her only child, and because Max does so in a narrative that has already made remarkably heavy-handed use of the trope of blindness, as when Bigger thinks, “Jan was blind. Mary had been blind. Mr. Dalton was blind. And Mrs. Dalton was blind; yes, blind in more ways than one” (107).
Native Son deploys disability so as to render disability as a moral failing, and manages, in so doing, to ignore the material detail of the disability itself: it may be crucial to the plot that Mrs. Dalton was not able to see Bigger in Mary’s room that night, but once Mrs. Dalton has performed her function in the plot, her blindness is important to Native Son only in a metaphorical sense. This, surely, is what Mitchell and Snyder mean by an “opportunistic” metaphorical device. But Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis goes well beyond this, opening onto strategies for reading that are inventive and provocative—and yet, as we shall see, potentially reductive as well. Mitchell and Snyder start from the salutary point that disability is often underrecognized by readers, even though “disability has functioned throughout history as one of the most marked and remarked upon differences that originates the act of storytelling” (54). This is a version of the above claim that disability demands a story; for an illustration of this principle I usually turn to my sister-in-law’s business partner, one of whose arms ends at the elbow. Over the years, she has grown weary of people asking her what happened to her arm; noting that the people who were rude enough to ask tended also to be people who were visibly (if subtly) disappointed in the answer that she was born this way, she began to reply, with an affect somewhere between deadpan and insouciant, “shark attack.” For Mitchell and Snyder, however, stories that are inaugurated by disability follow a post-shark-attack trajectory that forms one aspect of their theory of narrative prosthesis, inasmuch as the narrative works to make the disability disappear:
A simple schematic of narrative structure might run thus: first, a deviance or marked difference is exposed to a reader; second, a narrative consolidates the need for its own existence by calling for an explanation of the deviation’s origins and formative consequences; third, the deviance is brought from the periphery of concerns to the center of the story to come; and fourth, the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner. (53)
This simple schematic holds up very well for certain Disney animated films as well as mainstream Hollywood fare like the 1997 James L. Brooks film As Good as It Gets.2 The preferred mode of Disneyfication involves resignifying a character’s disability as a unique and valuable talent, as when Dumbo’s ginormous ears turn out to be the species anomaly that enables him to fly (and to become the circus’s central attraction). Relatedly, a character’s disability can be compensated for by a unique and valuable talent, as in Happy Feet, when Mumble, a penguin who is unable to sing a “heartsong” to attract a mate and who is ostracized by his fellow penguins as a result (and whose disability may have something to do with the fact that his father did not take proper care of the egg during incubation), turns out to be a species-anomalous tap-dancing penguin whose talent eventually helps save his species.3
However, it is not clear that this narrative structure will hold for all, or even most, depictions of disability in narrative (it will not work for Ariana Dumbledore in Harry Potter), let alone fictions like A Wrinkle in Time where the stigma of intellectual disability operates even in the absence of any characters with intellectual disabilities. And even when narratives do work to efface disability, to rehabilitate or fix the deviance that provides the story with its central motive, the theory of narrative prosthesis as advanced by Mitchell and Snyder seems to run in two different directions. The first direction leads to the conclusion that narrative about disability is not merely opportunistic but parasitic: “Our phrase narrative prosthesis is meant to indicate that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). Leaving aside the obvious objection that literary narratives have at their disposal a wide array of devices for generating representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight, the most important aspect of this claim is that narrative thereby does a disservice to actual people with disabilities, insofar as “while stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic figure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (48). A more disturbing corollary of this claim holds that “disability inaugurates narrative, but narrative inevitably punishes its own prurient interests by overseeing the extermination of the object of its fascination” (56–57; emphasis mine), and that corollary follows from the insistence that “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign [sic] in excess” (53; emphasis mine). I will get back to these matters of inevitability and inexorability in a moment, but for now, it should suffice to suggest that this aspect of narrative prosthesis offers a disability-studies version of the hermeneutics of suspicion, in which narrative engages with disability to nefarious, “prurient,” and potentially harmful ends. As Mitchell and Snyder write in their opening pages,
Beyond this elucidation of disability as transgressive of social ideals, this literary strategy also has a visceral effect on the lives of disabled people. While disability’s troubling presence provides literary works with the potency of an unsettling cultural commentary, disabled people have been historically refused a parallel power within their social institutions. In other words, while literature often relies on disability’s transgressive potential, disabled people have been sequestered, excluded, exploited, and obliterated on the very basis of which their literary representation so often rests. Literature serves up disability as a repressed deviation from cultural imperatives of normativity, while disabled populations suffer the consequences of representational association with deviance and recalcitrant corporeal difference. (8)
It is no wonder, then, that Mitchell and Snyder are tempted—though they finally (and wisely) refuse the temptation—to “condemn the literary as bankrupt with regard to disability” (9).
The other direction, however, leads not to the conclusion that narrative inevitably effaces or exterminates disability (and contributes to the immiseration of people with disabilities), but rather that the effort to efface or exterminate disability in some literary texts often fails, and in its failure, offers a disability-studies version of the Russian formalist belief, first enunciated by Viktor Shklovsky, that the function of the literary is to “lay bare the device.” Here, Mitchell and Snyder start by asserting the reparative function of the prosthesis, but turn instead to the argument that the device ultimately serves to lay itself bare:
While an actual prosthesis is always somewhat discomforting, a textual prosthesis alleviates discomfort by removing the unsightly from view. . . . [T]he erasure of disability via a “quick fix” of an impaired physicality or intellect removes an audience’s need for concern or continuing vigilance. . . . The prosthetic function in most of the works that follow, then, is to undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs. In part, this book is about the literary accomplishment of a faulty, or at least imperfect, prosthetic function. The effort is to make the prosthesis show, to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion. The prosthetic relation of body to word is exposed as an artificial contrivance. Disability services an unsettling objective in these literary works by refusing its desired cultural return to the land of the normative. Ironically, the accomplishment of the works under scrutiny here is to expose, rather than conceal, the prosthetic relation. (8; emphasis in original)
I suspect that the word “ironically” is the key to this line of thinking: the prosthesis tries to hide the unsightly from view, as in the argument that narrative serves to rehabilitate or fix deviance, but despite itself, winds up calling attention to itself, thereby exposing rather than concealing the prosthetic relation.
In this schema, the undecidability of disability is most likely related to the phenomenon whereby disability is presented as riddle and enigma, a mystery to be pierced by the storyteller. This aspect of Mitchell and Snyder’s theory has startling implications for the practice of literary criticism, implications that I think have largely gone unremarked to date. Their skepticism about interpretation stems from a well-grounded sense that some bodies are more legible, more marked, than others:
The problem of the representation of disability is not the search for a more “positive” story of disability, as it has often been formulated in disability studies, but rather a thoroughgoing challenge to the undergirding authorization to interpret that disability invites. There is a politics at stake in the fact that disability inaugurates an explanatory need that the unmarked body eludes by virtue of its physical anonymity. (59–60)
Here, one is left with the impression that the disabled body is always already matter for interpretation and the nondisabled body is not. That impression is strengthened at the end of Mitchell and Snyder’s chapter “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” where they write, “If the nondysfunctional body proves too uninteresting to narrate, the disabled body becomes a paramount device of characterization” (64). That is an enormous “if,” asking us to agree that narratives tend to avoid telling the stories of nondysfunctional bodies because those stories are not sufficiently interesting. But even more important, one is left with the impression that interpretation itself does violence to disability—and people with disabilities:
The knee-jerk impulse to interpretation that disability has historically instigated hyperbolically determines its symbolic utility. This subsequent overdetermination of disability’s meanings turns disabled populations into the vehicle of an insatiable cultural fascination. Literature has dipped into the well of disability’s meaning-laden depths throughout the development of the print record. In doing so, literary narratives bolstered the cultural desire to pursue disability’s bottomless interpretive possibilities. The inexhaustibility of this pursuit has led to the reification of disabled people as fathomless mysteries who simultaneously provoke and elude cultural capture. (61)
There is, of course, much in the historical record to justify this skepticism about the hermeneutic enterprise with regard to disability. Not only has disability been taken as a sign of God’s wrath or God’s grace in a variety of religious traditions (bespeaking divine punishment or divine election), but as the administration of disability passed from the religious order to the medical over the course of the past two centuries, the disabled body became the object of biopower, defined by the medical and medicalizing gaze that could determine whether a body was to be institutionalized, sterilized, or (quite often, in the history of the United States) shipped back from Ellis Island to its country of origin. Rarely is the interpretation of disability in the social sphere benign, let alone beneficial, to the people being interpreted. But I want to stress how counterintuitive this injunction against interpretation should be for literary criticism. It is as if disability should not mean but be, as if depictions of disability should involve (say) blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, or achondroplasia with no other semiotic functions or implications.
There are, however, literary texts and traditions in which disability is presented simply as disability, and not as a sign of something other than itself. In an unpublished paper titled “When the Saints Come Crippin’ In,” Alice Sheppard argues that whereas Christian writers of the first millennium typically understood disability as a sign of one’s moral state or as an occasion for charity and/or miraculous cure, Old Norse epics present disability simply as itself—as a war wound with no greater semiotic significance, or as cleft lip and palate signifying nothing other than cleft lip and palate. A more contemporary example can be found in Moby-Dick, which may be of more interest to disability studies insofar as Captain Ahab, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, is often adduced as an example of a character deformed by disability: as Mitchell and Snyder argue, Ahab is led to megalomania and madness by the loss of his leg to the white whale. But as James Berger has pointed out in response to Mitchell and Snyder, Melville’s text contains a countervailing example, that of Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby, who has lost an arm to Moby-Dick and tells Ahab emphatically (and cheerfully) that he wants nothing more to do with the whale: “He’s welcome to the arm he has, since I can’t help it, and didn’t know him then; but not to another one. No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me” (340). For Captain Boomer, then (and, at least in this instance, for Melville), a lost arm is nothing more than a lost arm. Thus, writes Berger, “I agree with [the] description of Ahab as semantic terrorist, but am not convinced by Mitchell and Snyder’s argument that his status is entirely a function of his disability” (170). Sometimes, it appears, the representation of disability involves no metarepresentation of the thing(s) the disability itself is understood to represent. The disabled cigar is just a disabled cigar.
This uncontroversial observation has profound implications for the theory of narrative prosthesis, leading me to want to qualify Mitchell and Snyder’s most sweeping claims about what all narratives inevitably do. But Berger’s argument has profound implications for my own work as well, which I should address at once. The argument that disability does not work toward one determined end, or follow one inescapable trajectory, in Moby-Dick (or, for that matter, in any literary text) is central to this book, even if it imposes severe limits on the range and scope of my analyses. That is, I am committed here not to the project of encyclopedic typology but to the affirmation of radical individuation. It is a truism in the intellectual disability community that when you have met one person with autism, you have met . . . exactly one person with autism. The range of behaviors and possible positions on the autism spectrum are simply too bewilderingly diverse to admit of generalization.4 The same is true, to an extent, with the condition I know best, Down syndrome; though the underlying biochemistry, the chromosomal nondisjunction and its genetic consequences, may be the same (hence the “syndrome” part of Down syndrome), the expression of trisomy-21 throughout the human population spans a wide range of talents, deficits, and proclivities. I am going to insist, therefore, on a radically Heraclitean understanding of disability and narrative, whereby we can never step in the same interpretive river twice. And I want to up the ante on the truism about autism: when you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism . . . once. The next time you meet that person, he or she will be slightly different, and so will you. The same holds true for literary characters: when you meet one Captain Ahab, or Michael K, you have met one Captain Ahab, or Michael K, once. The next time you encounter them, they too will be slightly different, and so will you.
The relation between the literary and the nonliterary (or what is called, by some holdouts in remote outlying precincts of the profession, the real world) is critical to the most important point of intersection between Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis and Quayson’s theory of aesthetic nervousness. In a passage that seems to run athwart the claim that disability invites an “undergirding authorization to interpret,” Mitchell and Snyder write that the presence of disability in a text produces a glitch in the hermeneutic machinery: “Disability recurs . . . as a potent force that challenges cultural ideals of the ‘normal’ or ‘whole’ body. At the same time, disability also operates as the textual obstacle that causes the literary operation of open-endedness to close down or stumble” (50; emphasis in original). Quayson acknowledges that this aspect of Mitchell and Snyder’s work “brings their discussion of narrative prosthesis very close to my own notion of aesthetic nervousness,” but takes his distance from it on the grounds that “they proceed to expound upon this blocking function in what can only be nonaesthetic terms” (25). “This is how they put it,” he writes:
This “closing down” of an otherwise permeable and dynamic narrative form demonstrates the historical conundrum of disability. [Various disabled characters from literature] provide valuable counterpoints to their respective cultures’ normalizing Truths about the construction of deviance in particular, and the fixity of knowledge systems in general. Yet each of these characterizations also evidences that the artifice of disability binds disabled characters to a programmatic (even deterministic) identity. (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 50)
Thus Mitchell and Snyder’s idea of the shutting down or stumbling of the literary operation is extrinsic to the literary field itself and is to be determined by setting the literary representations of disability against the socio-cultural understandings. . . . Also, I would like to disagree with them on their view of the programmatic identity assigned to the disabled, because, as I will try to show by reading the disabled character within the wider discursive structure of relations among different levels of the text, we find that even if programmatic roles were originally assigned, these roles can shift quite suddenly, thus leading to the “stumbling” they speak of. I choose to elaborate the textual “stumbling” in terms of aesthetic nervousness. (25)
This polite disagreement, and the invocation of the extrinsic that precedes it, opens onto questions of enormous scope. What is the nature of “the literary operation of open-endedness,” and how can it be made to close down or stumble? Perhaps the encounter with a character like Ahab, whose quest is not only for the White Whale but for a system of fixed, stable meanings, provides an answer: disability disrupts any regime of signification into which it enters. We are very close here to Quayson’s notion of an active ethical core in the depiction of disability that serves to disrupt the surface of representation. But is it illegitimate to appeal to the extraliterary for justifications concerning representation? What are literary representations representations of, if not of the extraliterary? And who in disability studies—who in any realm of endeavor—would want to pursue an inquiry into the representation of disability in literature that did not have implications and possible consequences for the lives of people with disabilities? One strains to imagine a branch of queer theory that proceeds as an academically sanctioned interpretive enterprise but has no concern for the lives and livelihoods of queer people. What would be the point of the enterprise if it were “academic” in the sense of an “academic” question, a moot point, a question that does not matter?
And yet one does not want to make the case for the study of disability in literary criticism (if “one” is me) solely on the grounds that it is important for reasons that derive from social policy rather than from protocols of reading. There must be something about the reading of disability as reading that changes the way we read, just as there was something about queer theory as a theory of reading that secured queer theory’s role in the contemporary canon of literary criticism and theory. When Carol Poore writes that the critique of representations of disability “is necessary because of the grave consequences these widely accepted negative images had and still have for the lives of people with disabilities” (261), I want to say that the object is unimpeachable—but that it does not tell us why that critique should be part of the apparatus of literary criticism (as opposed to media studies, communication, sociology, or policy studies). What does the study of disability tell us about the practices of reading?
Even though Mitchell and Snyder predicate one aspect of their theory—on the stumbling or shutting-down of the open-endedness of the literary text—on what Quayson rightly calls extraliterary criteria, they, like Quayson, are clearly making claims about what the study of disability in literature brings to the discipline of literary criticism (and particularly to the study of narrative). The limitation of their account is that it has more or less the degree of programmatic determinism they ascribe to narrative prosthesis, whereby narrative always and inevitably does X. My contention is more modest, but more defensible: some narratives do X. Some do not.
In contrast to Mitchell and Snyder, Quayson offers a more varied and supple reading of disability and narrative insofar as his “typology of disability representation” enumerates no fewer than nine possible functions for aesthetic nervousness: disability as null set and/or moral test (as in A Christmas Carol, The Sound and the Fury, or the film There’s Something about Mary); disability as the interface with otherness (race, class, sexuality, and social identity); disability as articulation of disjuncture between thematic and narrative vectors (as in Disney’s Finding Nemo); disability as moral deficit/evil; disability as epiphany (as in To Kill a Mockingbird); disability as signifier of ritual insight (as in the case of Tiresias); disability as inarticulable and enigmatic tragic insight (as in One Hundred Years of Solitude); disability as hermeneutical impasse (as in The English Patient, and, as we shall see, in Coetzee’s Foe and Life and Times of Michael K); and disability as normality.5
The category of disability as normality is of particular interest to me, and not merely because Quayson assigns my own book, Life as We Know It, to that category.6 For Quayson, aesthetic nervousness denotes the process by which “the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability” (15). The category of disability as normality, however, seems to be exempt from the dynamics of aesthetic nervousness—and it seems to be dominated by nonfiction, memoirs, and autobiographies. Discussing Life as We Know It and Robert Murphy’s book The Body Silent, Quayson writes,
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. . . . 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. (51)
The category thus roughly corresponds to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “realistic” mode of visual representation, in which disability is simply itself, and not (in Garland-Thomson’s typology) wondrous, sentimental, or exotic.7 But it is problematic for the same reason that Garland-Thomson’s category is problematic: “the real” is not a self-explanatory realm where things are just what they are. In literature and the visual arts, “realism” is an effect of protocols of representation, devices and techniques that produce the illusion of mimesis; “the real” is what appears when a master artificer has deployed those devices with an art that conceals the art. It is no wonder that Quayson is drawn to nonfiction for this category, and yet nonfiction, like fiction, is made up of language, the same slippery stuff that opens onto deconstructive rabbit holes in the work of Melville or Montaigne. “Realism” cannot stand as an uninterrogated category after Roland Barthes has finished rereading and rewriting Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z; nor can it escape the warping effects of queerness once one comes to terms with the fact that one of the categories in the drag balls documented in Paris Is Burning is that of “realness.”8
For my purposes, then, the “real” and the “normal” should (and will) be considered just as weird as everything else we humans do when we represent people and events to each other in the form of narratives. I do not deny that there are texts, like the one I wrote in my attempt to represent my son at a young age, that try to render disability as ordinary rather than extraordinary. But I insist that the strategies for doing so are as artificial as any other strategies employed by artificers—and, more broadly, that the standards for apprehending a text or a visual representation as “artificial” or “realistic” vary considerably by time and place. One of the more ambitious undertakings of this book is to use the study of intellectual disability in narrative to ask what the “real” and the “normal” consist of, and to lay bare the crafty procedures that go into the cultural production of artifacts we now take to be ordinary, straightforward, unproblematic representations of the world.
One final theoretical point before I turn back to readings of literary texts. In the course of Aesthetic Nervousness, Quayson never quite explains what “short-circuited” means in the proposition that “the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability.” It is possible to read the suggestion casually, whereby “short-circuited” means something akin to “skewed” or just “messed with”: disability will derange your dominant protocols of representation. The casual reading has much to recommend it, because there are any number of instances in which disability will derange your dominant protocols of representation, as this book will show; yet a short circuit is not the same thing as a derangement (or a skewing, or a messing-with), and the term deserves at least as much scrutiny as the multivalent term “prosthesis” in Mitchell and Snyder. It remains to us, in other words, to do more with Quayson’s metaphor than he does. For when electrical current is diverted through an area of lower resistance, some functions that the current is supposed to serve may very well be “disabled,” in the sense one uses when one disables a smoke alarm.9 This residual sense of “disability” carries none of the stigma associated with forms of cognitive or physical disability.10 No one stigmatizes a smoke alarm by removing its batteries, just as no one denigrates or devalues a function on one’s computer by disabling it. “Disabling” an aspect of narrative by way of a short circuit, therefore, implies no normative judgments about what a narrative ought to be.
This may seem to be a banal point. Who would think that the term “disability” is necessarily stigmatizing, or that referring to the disabling of some aspects of narrative necessarily entails a normative view of narrative (or anything else)? The reason for my caution has to do with the general reluctance, in disability studies as in the disability rights movement, to talk about disability in terms of function. Inevitably, it seems, any discussion of functionality with regard to disability will involve some normative ideas about how bodies and minds should function (eyes should see, ears should hear, legs should walk, brains should be able to decode facial expressions and distinguish reality from fantasy), and thus any admission that disability involves a reduction or loss of function threatens not only to return us to the idea of disability as lack, but to give up on the foundational distinction between disability (as a social phenomenon) and impairment (as a somatic phenomenon). All disability thereby becomes impairment, and the idea that disability studies examines disability as the social organization and administration of impairment is lost altogether. This seems too steep a price to pay for a rigorous reading of Quayson’s short circuit.
But there is a way to talk about function without repudiating the key insight into the social character of disability. As John Searle argues in The Construction of Social Reality, the dividing line between the world of “brute fact” (rocks, quarks, planets, electromagnetic radiation) and “social fact” (money, institutions, values, forms of government) is provided precisely by the attribution of function. “Functions are never intrinsic to the physics of any phenomenon,” Searle writes, “but are assigned from outside by conscious observers and users. Functions, in short, are never intrinsic but are always observer relative” (14; emphasis in original).11 Thus, if one were to say “the heart pumps blood” (this is Searle’s example), one would be speaking of brute fact; but if one were to say “the function of the heart is to pump blood,” one is in the realm of social fact, because “we are doing something more than recording these intrinsic facts. We are situating these facts relative to a system of values that we hold” (14). So, for example, when Maria Truchman-Tataryn writes, in “Textual Abuse: Faulkner’s Benjy,” that “interpretations of Benjy perpetuate oppressive stereotypes of disability as diminished in function and therefore in human worth” (515), two points need to be made in response. One is that nothing is gained by denying that some disabilities do entail diminishments in function. The other is that everything is to be gained by disarticulating “degree of function” from “degree of human worth.” The point is not to try to pretend that all disabilities are purely a matter of social stigma; the point, rather, is to insist that “function” can never be a meaningful measure of human worth.
Accordingly, I do not see any great peril to the project of disability studies in using Quayson’s work to interrogate the functions of narrative. On the contrary, acknowledging that certain narratives are not functioning in the way readers expect them to offers two advantages: first, in pursuing Quayson’s suggestion that the final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between the reader and the text, we can more adequately account for the readerly experience of trying to navigate texts whose formal experiments are predicated on intellectual disability, such as The Sound and the Fury, Martian Time-Slip, Pale Fire, or Chris Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. Those texts are difficult, as I will explain in more detail, precisely because some features of narrative have been disabled, such that the text prevents, defers, or eludes readerly comprehension—though I will not go so far as to say that these texts disable readers. Second, we can get at the question of how readers expect texts to behave, reanimating one of the central questions of reader-response criticism by way of disability studies and challenging the aggressively normalizing understanding of narrative (and of humans) represented by evocriticism/literary Darwinism. For now, I direct your attention to two literary texts—one clearly fictional, one impossible to classify.
✴ ✴ ✴
The Woman Warrior is impossible to classify insofar as it is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but, rather, a curious hybrid of memoir, folktale, immigrant narrative, and the supernatural, where ghosts are common, rabbits sacrifice themselves, and there are two people made of gold turning the Earth on its axis. Over the decades since its publication in 1976, it has generally been understood both as a landmark in Asian American literature and as a feminist critique of women’s silencing under patriarchy, opening dazzlingly with a fearsome injunction to silence and its transgression: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). There is no question that The Woman Warrior is a landmark in Asian American literature and a feminist critique of women’s silencing under patriarchy. What is astonishing, however—and sadly underremarked—is how many of those women are . . . how to put this politely? crazy.
I use the term “crazy” advisedly—and I use it because Kingston herself uses it. It is a brutal term (as we are about to see, Kingston does not shy away from brutal terms for intellectual disability), and it underscores the brutality of what happens to the “village crazy lady” in the book’s third section, “Shaman.” Kingston introduces her as “an inappropriate woman whom the people stoned” (92); she appears amid a scene of generalized craziness induced by the generalized madness known as war, as the Chinese villagers are “watching for Japanese airplanes that strafed the mountainsides every day” (93):
The bombing drove people insane. They rolled on the ground, pushed themselves against it, as if the earth could open a door for them. The ones who could not stop shaking after the danger passed would sleep in the cave. My mother explained airplanes to them as she wiggled their ears. (94)
Unfortunately, one day “the village crazy lady put on her headdress with small mirrors” and goes to the river, singing and gamboling and behaving eccentrically. The villagers decide that she is signaling the airplanes to strike; when she is confronted and charged with being a spy, she ill-advisedly answers in the affirmative: “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have great powers. I can make the sky rain fire. Me. I did that. Leave me alone or I will do it again’” (95). The villagers respond by battering her head with rocks and stones until she stops breathing.
The Woman Warrior contains many crazy ladies, from Crazy Mary to Moon Orchid to Pee-A-Nah, most of whom are driven into incoherence and madness by the profound injustices that circumscribe their lives. As the narrator remarks toward the end of the book, “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me” (189). It is a testimony to my own obliviousness to disability issues prior to my introduction to disability studies that I managed to teach The Woman Warrior in four different classes before I realized that it is a text about intellectual disability. Indeed, in the Moon Orchid episode, Kingston explicitly construes intellectual disability as a relation to narrative. The relation is made painfully obvious when Brave Orchid, the narrator’s mother, explains that “the difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over” (159);12 but it is manifest much earlier, when Moon Orchid first begins her painful descent into madness and incoherence. In its initial stages, her disability is marked by her growing inability to understand what constitutes an appropriate narrative—which is also an index of the degree to which she is becoming an inappropriate woman. For under ordinary circumstances, there is no need to follow one’s family members around the house, narrating their every movement and conversation. But Moon Orchid does exactly that, and at one point the text doubles her annoying running commentary:
The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine off the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter—‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she is saying.” (141)
Moon Orchid’s niece is repeating Moon Orchid’s obsessive narrative about how the niece is beating eggs; she even repeats Moon Orchid’s “ha!” upon her discovery of the butter. But the sentence I want to focus on is “And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically.” Surely this is excessive, is it not? It is far too detailed; it is much simpler, and no less accurate, to say “she is beating the eggs” (or perhaps, in a Freudian vein, “an egg is being beaten”). But precisely in its excess, this sentence offers us a striking illustration of how intellectual disability can provide Shklovskian moments of defamiliarization. What is Moon Orchid doing here, what is Kingston doing, but laying bare the device? If Moon Orchid’s description of spiders spinning with legs intertwined renews our perception and leads us to see an eggbeater with fresh eyes, to make the stone stony (or the eggbeater eggbeater-y), then one may say that Kingston is deploying intellectual disability as the very vehicle of the literary.13
Such moments are compelling in their own right, and should lead readers to see The Woman Warrior as a fruitful and fascinating text for disability studies. But they do not go to the question of why I am discussing The Woman Warrior under the rubric of “disability as motive.” To understand why we should see Kingston’s unclassifiable text in the terms I set forth for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and A Wrinkle in Time, we need to turn to the book’s final section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” and to its depictions of the silent girl and the “retarded” boy.
First, our narrator (who seems to bear some passing resemblance to a young Maxine Hong Kingston) writes of a quiet girl in sixth grade, a girl she “hated” (174). In a scene that goes on for an excruciating seven pages, the narrator mercilessly bullies, torments, and physically assaults the girl, trying to force her to talk, calling her “stupid” (177), “dumb,” and “a plant” (180). (We are subsequently invited to surmise that the quiet girl is intellectually disabled herself. In later life, her sister and parents take care of her: “she did not have to leave the house except to go to the movies. She was supported. She was protected by her family” [182].) Not long after this encounter, the narrator gets a look at her own school record to date, and learns that “I flunked kindergarten and in first grade had no IQ—a zero IQ” (182–83). And then, later in the section, we are introduced to “a mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind” (194). He learns where Kingston’s family has its laundry business, and he decides to hang out and haunt the place. At this point, the narrative becomes as brutal as the narrator’s treatment of the silent girl. We read that this boy “had an enormous face” and “growled” (194). He gives toys to children: “‘Where do you get the toys?’ I asked. ‘I . . . own . . . stores,’ he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued” (195). “Sometimes,” Kingston writes, “he chased us—his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein’s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot” (195). Even his sitting is monstrous, so threatening that it induces the narrator to give up the physical disability—a limp—she had begun to affect:
Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said hello to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn’t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.
I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. (195)
Nor does it help to try to ignore the intruder: “My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head” (196).
Kingston deliberately heightens her narrator’s revulsion, but this is difficult material nonetheless; however over-the-top hyperbolic this revulsion may be, it is grounded in a logic of abjection that will be all too familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the social stigma of intellectual disability. And yet this revulsion is crucial to the narrative of the text, not because this man is made to serve as a figure for something else but precisely because he isn’t. The narrator is disturbed by this man, and disturbed all the more by the belief—unwarranted, as it turns out—that her parents are considering him as a potential son-in-law. Clearly, the writer who fears becoming the crazy woman or the village idiot would be particularly threatened by the mentally retarded man who draws IQ points from the back of her head. Perhaps the mentally retarded man is even more threatening than the crazy ladies. Certain forms of intellectual disability render people incapable of giving an account of themselves (and I will return to this problem in chapter 3, in my discussion of narrative irony and self-awareness); such people will never come back to themselves after their bout of madness has served its narrative function, as does King Lear’s, to such devastating effect. People with significant intellectual disabilities may not even have the capacity to understand what has happened to Lear, just as they do not have the capacity to proclaim that nothing will come of nothing, or to understand the multiple ironies that ripple outward from that utterance. They haunt narrative, as Kingston’s retarded man haunts the laundry and Kingston herself, with the insistence on a form of human embodiment that cannot narrate itself—it can only be narrated. And they haunt all narrators with the possibility that perhaps they too, someday, will be unable to tell a coherent story.
Mindedness is so obviously a necessary condition for self-representation and narration that it should be no surprise to find narratives in which various forms of damaged mindedness serve neither as moral barometers of individual persons nor as invitations to pity or horror but as meditations on the very possibility of narrative representation. It is no coincidence that Maxine Hong Kingston’s narrator finally explodes at her mother, explaining and justifying herself—“I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded” (201)—in response to the “mentally retarded” boy’s very presence in the text. By this point, the text has firmly, insistently established a relation between intellectual disability and speech, as if the fear of the one necessarily produces the other, as if one begins to narrate partly in order to show—to show to others and to oneself—that one is neither crazy nor retarded. Here, then, the aversion to intellectual disability turns out to be the very motive for Kingston’s narrative: this is why Kingston’s narrator is telling us what her mother told her not to tell anyone.
By contrast, in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, intellectual disability is not only the motive for the narrative but its very predicate: from the novel’s opening pages, it subtends every aspect of the life and times of Michael K. He is born with a harelip, which almost immediately comes to signify a more pervasive and character-defining condition of disability:
Because of his disfigurement and because his mind was not quick, Michael was taken out of school after a short trial and committed to the protection of Huis Norenius in Faure, where at the expense of the state he spent the rest of his childhood in the company of variously other afflicted and unfortunate children learning the elements of reading, writing, counting, sweeping, scrubbing, bedmaking, dishwashing, basketweaving, woodwork and digging. (4)
From Huis Norenius to the work camp Jakkalsdrif to the medical facility in which Michael K spends part 2 of the novel, the novel structures the life and times of Michael K in relation to institutionalization: after the death of Michael’s mother early in the book, the plot, if we can call it that, hangs entirely on the question of whether Michael will manage to evade the various state institutions that seem to be all that remains of the fabric of South African society.
It is very tempting to read Michael K as a kind of Homo sacer supercrip, the minimal man whose story is narratable only because he manages to escape incarceration twice, eking out a bare existence not on his wits—his mind is not quick—but on his skills as a gardener and as a freelance hunger artist. On that reading—which the book encourages explicitly in the person of the doctor who narrates part 2 and implicitly in the trajectory of the book as a whole—the climactic moment of Michael’s narrative appears in this extended passage in the final pages of the novel, in which Michael finally appears capable of a synoptic reading of his own life and times, a vision of the carceral society in toto:
At least, he thought, at least I have not been clever, and come back to Sea Point full of stories of how they beat me in the camps till I was thin as a rake and simple in the head. I was mute and stupid in the beginning, I will be mute and stupid at the end. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being simple. They were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else. Now they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for people chased off the land, camps for people they find living in storm-water drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can’t add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. (182)
This sounds very much indeed like a summation, a what-it-has-all-meant litany placed emphatically at the end of a narrative in which it has been enough to be out of the camps, to have avoided every form of biopower, and to have abjured one’s humanity altogether in so doing: “What a pity,” Michael thinks earlier, “that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast. . . . A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to” (99). The camps themselves have been predicated on the detection and administration of intellectual disability: they were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else.
There is nothing wrong with such a reading, of course, unless one leaps from it to the conclusion to which Quayson comes in his chapter on Coetzee—that Michael K simply has autism, and his autism is registered in the text by his silence. This, I think, constitutes a needlessly reductive understanding of Michael K’s self-description as “mute and stupid,” and a symptom of the pervasive symptomology in disability studies whereby the practice of reading becomes an exercise in finding evidence for the imposition of diagnostic categories. (I will return to this dynamic in my readings of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which invites that kind of diagnostic reading, and Martian Time-Slip, whose text is filled with characters diagnosing themselves and each other.) But there is more to be said about Michael K’s muteness and stupidity. It is not merely a question of whether those characteristics can be read as symptoms of a condition of disability; it is also a question of what they do to the fabric of the narrative as well as the social fabric of a carceral South Africa. To put this another way, Michael K poses something of a problem for plot and something of a problem for the rendering of interiority: there are passages in Life and Times of Michael K that approach the condition of nonnarrative. What is one to do with “a spell of unemployment which he spent lying on his bed looking at his hands” (4), or the “long periods when he sat staring at his hands, his mind blank” (33), or the “spells when he simply stood or knelt before his handiwork, his mind elsewhere” (100)? When Michael leaves Prince Albert and goes off to live in the mountains, his life and times approach the condition of narrative absolute zero: “Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing” (69). How does one tell a story that has no temporality and no desire, where disability becomes a motive force that drains the narrative of motive?14
This is not merely a technical question, a puzzle for narrative strategy. It informs every aspect of the life and times of Michael K, and Life and Times of Michael K. There are moments when Michael adopts what Blakey Vermeule calls “strategic mindblindness,” hoping that if he looks “very stupid” (40), he will be exempted from scrutiny at the checkpoints; there are moments when his appearance becomes the basis for charity, as when “the Vrouevereniging ladies, perhaps because he was so thin, perhaps because they had decided he was simple, regularly allowed him to clean the soup-bucket: three time a week this made up his meal” (84), and when the doctor in part 2 decides to try to protect him from the worst of what the camps entail. Only when the doctor takes over the narrative do we learn that Michael’s harelip produces a noticeable speech defect, that “he would find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else” (131); until then, we are invited to assume that his appearance alone is the basis for how other characters interact with him. “See if he’s got a tongue,” says one officer (no doubt anticipating the central enigma of Coetzee’s next novel, Foe, which I will discuss in chapter 3); “see if he is such an idiot as he looks” (122). For every other character in the book, Michael K simply is his facial appearance—“how could I forget a face like that?” asks Captain Oosthuizen of Jakkalsdrif—and his facial appearance signifies intellectual disability. There is nothing else one needs to know, and even when the narrative gives us access to what interiority Michael K may be said to possess, we find that his mind is a blank: “There is nothing there, I’m telling you,” says the doctor to Noël, the camp director, “and if you handed him over to the police they would come to the same conclusion: there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people” (142).
It is worth asking, then, why we are bothering to read about the life and times of Michael K in the first place. If indeed his existence is summed up by his disability, then we could have stopped after the first four or five paragraphs: after we learn that his mind is not quick, we proceed to learn that his mind is often a blank. That is not a story. And yet Michael’s storylessness is itself narratable, and that dynamic, too, has implications both for narrative technique and for plot. Michael is a challenge for a novelist who wants to employ free indirect discourse or any other device for revealing a character’s interiority, as the novel openly acknowledges: “Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong” (110). That gap structures the text, beginning with the gap that defines Michael’s facial features and extending to the gap that is part 2, the hole in Michael’s story that is filled by the doctor’s narrative of Michael K.15 But he is also a challenge to the authorities who apprehend him (in at least two senses of “apprehend”): because he cannot tell a coherent story of his own, one will be supplied to him, and (with one exception) this will never be a benevolent exercise. “Tell me your story,” demands the officer who apprehends him in his garden at the Visagie house (122), and this is not an invitation for Michael to sit for a spell and relate his life and times. This is an order, issued by someone who is convinced that Michael K is aiding and abetting an insurrection. At various points in the novel Michael is assigned identities to supplement the baseline assumption that he is an idiot: he is a drunk, he is a vagrant, he is a terrorist. His attempts to evade the camps, then, to evade the authorities, amount to attempts to evade being assigned those narratives, attempts to evade narrative altogether.
Those who cannot represent themselves must be represented: this is an imperative that runs from the political conundrum of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to the ethical demands attendant on any attempt to administer intellectual disability, and it is the key, as well, to Quayson’s sense of disability as hermeneutical impasse. Once we understand that Michael K’s desire is to avoid the camps, we have a story to tell; once we understand that Michael K also desires to avoid being narrated, we have a more problematic story to tell. For one thing, this realization should caution us away from the reading of Michael K as Homo sacer supercrip, the Man Who Escaped the Camps, precisely because this is the reading offered intratextually by the doctor himself, at the close of part 2 when he addresses a hypothetical Michael K, standing in for the Michael who has escaped: “Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away?” (166). It should not escape notice that this utterance, too, constitutes an attempt to pin Michael down after he has slipped away, albeit a meta-attempt to assign him not an identity (drunk, vagrant, terrorist, idiot) but a narrative function, that of a meaning that does not become a term. (And the meta-attempt is admirably opaque: we may be familiar with terms that do not become meanings; but how does a meaning fail to become a term?) Again, it is very tempting to take this passage as the definitive statement of What Michael K Means, just as it is tempting to read the closing “camps” passage as What Michael K Means. And again, there is nothing wrong with such a reading: it is plausible enough, as readings of people (or texts) go, and it is benevolent in a way no other “apprehension” of Michael is, insofar as it is the basis for the doctor’s kindness. But it is still an apprehension, and it is still an apprehension whose condition of possibility is Michael’s incarceration.
This is not to say that whoever “reads” Michael K thereby jails him, or is complicit with people who do. Things are just not that simple—or that allegorical. It is to say that our apprehension of Michael K, and of Michael K, entails interpretive protocols and dilemmas that go well beyond the obvious—intellectual disability as hermeneutical impasse (what does Michael K mean?), intellectual disability as null set and/or moral test (how should Michael K be treated?). Those dynamics are at work in any engagement with Michael K and Michael K, to be sure. But Michael K’s disabled relation to narrative also has implications for narrative itself, as the closing ironic turn of one of the doctor’s readings of Michael suggests:
We have all tumbled over the lip into the cauldron of history: only you, following your idiot light, biding your time in an orphanage (who would have thought of that as a hiding-place?), evading the peace and the war, skulking in the open where no one dreamed of looking, have managed to live in the old way, drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does. We ought to value you and celebrate you, we ought to put your clothes on a maquette in a museum, your clothes and your packet of pumpkin seeds too, with a label; there ought to be a plaque nailed to the racetrack wall commemorating your stay here. But that is not the way it is going to be. The truth is that you are going to perish in obscurity and be buried in a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse, transport to the acres of Woltemade being out of the question nowadays, and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels: yield! (151–52)
This is unquestionably a more benevolent demand for Michael’s story than that of any arresting officer (though the doctor takes the name “Michaels” from the account filed by the arresting officer, who reports that Michael K, whom he calls Michaels, is an “arsonist” [131]). But it is still a demand: no one will remember you unless you open your mouth. And yet what the doctor does not know—cannot know, without breaking the frame of reference of the narrative he inhabits—is that Michael K will not be forgotten, any more than the exploits of Don Quixote will (although, as we will see, Don Quixote establishes a relation between narrative and intellectual disability that does depend on the breaking of the fictional frame): his life and times are being narrated, conveyed in a book called Life and Times of Michael K. In other words, Michael K has managed to elude all forms of representation except for those of the narrative he inhabits, the one in which we read of his elusiveness and unrepresentability. His intellectual disability thus becomes the impetus not only for the narrative of his life, and of every character’s interaction with him, but also for all interpretive procedures brought to bear on him; and Coetzee cannily, disturbingly, insistently suggests that such procedures include those of the novel itself. Life and Times of Michael K thereby stands not merely as a representation or thematization of intellectual disability but rather as a virtuoso examination of intellectual disability as motive, a rendering of intellectual disability as the condition of possibility for the text and its apprehension by readers. In the following chapter, we will see how this narrative strategy becomes a vehicle for literary techniques that open onto radical forms of alterity, by way of radical experiments with the fabric of time.