The first section of The Sound and the Fury is not hard to read. No, really. I invite you, dear reader, as I once invited my son Nick, to take a crack at it:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. (3)
There isn’t a single complex sentence in that memorable opening paragraph, or in the section as a whole; there are no punctuation marks other than commas and periods (certainly no semicolons or parentheses, as here).1 Neither the syntax nor the vocabulary would strain any reader proficient at the third-grade reading level. So what, precisely, is all the fuss about? Why do college students howl with dismay (as mine have, every time I have dared to assign the novel in an American literature survey) when they are asked to read the section without the help of textual aids? Compare that simple paragraph to this one, which is written in precisely the same mode:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack: the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. (Joyce 37)
This is rough going for a couple of reasons. The word “diaphane,” the allusion to Dante in the original (and how did you know it was Dante? be honest, now), and the (implicit) reference to Aristotle as “he” in the fifth sentence: a reader has to know a great deal in order to make her way through the thicket of Stephen Dedalus’s narrative, and has to learn how to navigate its idiosyncratic syntax, incomplete sentences, and cognitive leaps. As a result, very few and far between are the brave souls who attempt to read Ulysses without the assistance of a good reader’s guide (my own was Harry Blamires’s Bloomsday Book).
It would appear that I’ve stacked the deck at the outset of this chapter, by contrasting the stream of consciousness of an adult with a significant intellectual disability with that of one of the most aggressively hyperintellectual characters in the history of literature. Clearly, the transcription of Benjy Compson’s mental events, as he watches the golfers play in what used to be “his” pasture, is easier to read than Stephen Dedalus’s ruminations on sight because Benjy’s mental capacity is so much more limited than Stephen’s. And yet Benjy’s narrative as a whole is not easy to read, even though, sentence by sentence, it’s a breeze. Why? Is it because Benjy does not know enough to use the words most people familiar with golf would have used, such as green, tee (for “table”), or putting (for “hitting”)? Benjy’s lack of familiarity with golf doesn’t help matters, but the task of figuring out what’s going on in that paragraph isn’t a significant burden compared to the demands made by the section as a whole. The real problem, as is evident to everyone who picks up the book, is that Benjy Compson has a sense of time that does not make sense to us. His narrative thus lacks some of the necessary connective tissue that makes narrative intelligible as narrative.
Benjy’s narrative is not incoherent, it is not unintelligible; after only a few pages, even the most befuddled reader can get the sense that Benjy is relaying a sequence of episodes from his life, though that sequence is far from clear. But his narrative itself is disabled, in the sense I have employed in calling the narrative of the film Memento “disabled” (Bérubé 2005b): some of (what we take to be) the ordinary functions of narrative are here inoperative. In the case of Memento, I argue that there is no way to reconcile fabula and szujet, no way to reconstruct a straightforward narrative progression even after one “compensates” for the fact that the latter is relayed backward in time and focalized through a person with no short-term memory.2 Benjy’s chapter is not quite so radical, inasmuch as it is ultimately possible to piece together a coherent fabula from the unfolding of the szujet—though as we will see, this involves some significant interpretive assumptions along the way (most significantly in the “bluegum chillen” passage). I could say the same, mutatis mutandis, about the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses: it is a tour de force, one of the most extraordinary things written in English, but it is not a narrative. It is what happens, according to Joyce, when narrative falls asleep and some other logic takes over. It does not contain any characters with intellectual disabilities, so the issues raised by its experimental form are not quite what they are in Benjy’s chapter; but when the narrative in question is conveyed by a character with an intellectual disability, then one question becomes paramount: what does his or her disability tell us about the functions of time and narrative in general? That is, what do we learn about the ways narrative time works by reading narratives in which some of the functions of time in narrative do not appear to work as we expect?
There is another question lurking here, but I want to postpone it for the following chapter, when it can be discussed in (what I hope will be) the more fruitful context of textual self-awareness. Because Faulkner’s brilliant formal experiment is attributed to the workings of an individual character’s subjectivity (obviously, it did not need to be framed this way; Joyce’s “Circe” chapter is not tethered in this way), we are implicitly asked to try to determine the extent to which the character with an intellectual disability has the capacity to understand the narrative he or she inhabits. We know, for example, that Benjy does not understand why he has been “gelded,” and that he knows nothing about the administration of disability in his world, in the era of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization. We think we know that Benjy experiences his loss as loss, and that he connects it to other losses, as in this juxtaposition between the scene of Damuddy’s death and the scene in which Benjy sees his castrated body, a juxtaposition enabled by the associations that accompany undressing:
Quentin and Versh came in. Quentin had his face turned away. “What are you crying for.” Caddy said.
“Hush.” Dilsey said. “You all get undressed, now. You can go on home, Versh.”
I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They’re gone. You keep on like this, and we aint going have you no more birthday. He put my gown on. (73–74)
Faulkner’s appendix to the novel, notoriously, will challenge even this minimalist reading of Benjy’s degree of self-awareness, denying that he has any substantial sense of what his losses entail: “He could not remember his sister but only the loss of her” (340), we are told, and “As with his sister, he remembered not the pasture but only its loss” (341). But there are good reasons, both theoretical and practical, to resist Faulkner’s characterization of the character he created.3
To take the theoretical objection first: as Faulkner himself suggested when he declared that his appendix was “the key to the whole book,” the document presents readers with the overwhelming temptation to take it as The Instructor’s Edition, the explanatory device that clarifies all ambiguities and fleshes out all backstories (including those of characters who never appear in the book). The appendix thus invites us to read it as The Fabula Newsletter, smoothing out temporal and hermeneutical impasses and giving us the straight story from start to finish. It is an invitation best resisted, unless we want (and I hope you will not) to invoke the figure of the author in Foucauldian terms, that is, as “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (118), the device that gets hauled out to determine which interpretations can be said to be properly “authorized.” The practical objection leads us back to the text of Benjy’s section in such a way that the question, Mr. Faulkner, did you actually read your book? is not altogether impudent. I do not understand how any reader of the opening scene of the novel can claim that Benjy does not remember his pasture; his moaning and his mourning are occasioned precisely by his proximity to the pasture, and both are intensified by the sound of golfers calling for their caddies. The fact that Luster understands the homophone only in order to torment Benjy further—“‘You want something to beller about. All right, then. Caddy.’ he whispered. ‘Caddy. Beller now. Caddy’” (55)—is surely not to be referred to the limitations associated with Benjy’s form of intellectual disability, but to the other characters’ failures of sympathetic imagination.4
In this respect, the “bluegum chillen” passage is perhaps the most important of the transitions in Benjy’s section, insofar as the logic behind the transition seems more obscure than any other juxtaposition in the novel. The passage reads as follows, and it appears just after the scene in which Benjy intuits that Caddy has lost her virginity:
Versh said, Your name Benjamin now. You know how come your name Benjamin now. They making a bluegum out of you. Mammy say in old time your granpaw changed nigger’s name, and he turn preacher, and when they look at him, he bluegum too. Didn’t use to be bluegum, neither. And when family woman look him in the eye in the full of the moon, chile born bluegum. And one evening, when they was about a dozen them bluegum chillen running around the place, he never come home. Possum hunters found him in the woods, et clean. And you know who et him. Them bluegum chillen did. (69)
Why should this unsettling and difficult piece of folklore, conveyed by Versh, follow the moment in 1909 in which Caddy runs into the house crying? There is a name change involved here, yes, but the rest of the tale is disturbingly unrelated to Benjy, who presumably is not going to become bluegum or join together with other bluegum children to eat any bluegum preachers in the woods. Most of Benjy’s transitions are much more straightforward, involving key words, place associations, or memories of getting snagged on a nail. That is why Benjy is usually considered a passive recorder of scenes and sense impressions; his narrative does not seem to be motivated consciously, and Faulkner makes no attempt to explain how Benjy’s words got onto the page. They are apparently direct transcriptions of mental events, in stream-of-consciousness mode. As Stacy Burton has written, “Benjy narrates, but critics have tended to respond to the challenge of his puzzling discourse by seeing it as Faulkner’s formal experiment rather than as Benjy’s narrative” (214). We need, therefore, to contrast the strategy of this formal experiment with that of Daniel Keyes in Flowers for Algernon or Mark Haddon in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, who are exceptionally careful to explain how their intellectually disabled narrators happen to be writing a book; contrast it also with Quentin and Jason, who seem to be standard first-person narrators aware (acutely aware, in Jason’s case) that they are telling a story (even if, in Quentin’s section, we feel as if we are overhearing someone’s thoughts, whereas Jason, from his opening sentence, has a very vivid sense of his implied reader).
But Richard Godden argues that Benjy does indeed have a plan here, and that, after his fashion, he is consciously plotting:
The complexity of the analogy realizes a childishly simplistic purpose: Benjy wants his small sister for himself, and to that end has engaged in “plotting,” inventing a temporal comparison that allows him to move from an unpleasant event in 1909 to an earlier but less troubling loss. The shift works for him because, as a bluegum, Benjy can control his sister’s sexuality. My attribution of an act of consciousness to Benjy—a character most typically described as “passive and uncomprehending” or “totally devoid of . . . consciousness” at a pattern-making level—stems from a conviction that even those with severe learning disabilities are liable to whatever subterranean stories characterize the culture within which they pass their long childhoods. (101–2)
I wouldn’t put things this way myself; it is not clear, for one thing, why Caddy should be considered “small,” and I don’t think Benjy is merely “liable” to the “subterranean stories” he hears in the course of his “long childhood” (which itself is too close to the infantilizing remark that Benjy “been three years old thirty years” [17]). But Godden is right in principle to entertain the possibility that Benjy is “inventing a temporal comparison that allows him to move from an unpleasant event in 1909 to an earlier but less troubling loss”; the key word here, of course, is “inventing,” and the suggestion is that Benjy not only has some conscious control over the sequence of events in his narrative but also has something we might want to call an unconscious, as well—an unconscious more unruly and elaborate than that of a three-year-old.
I don’t want to make more of this possibility than the text allows; we cannot go so far as to say that Benjy has the capacity to think to himself, “Dang, I wish I weren’t so sad that Caddy has been banned from the house,” or, more elaborately, “I wish my mother and Jason had not banned Caddy from the house—that really seems excessive, especially since her daughter is being raised here.” But there is an important side issue at stake in the claim that Benjy has some idea of what he is doing by associating Caddy’s sexuality with the bluegum story. It is one thing if Quentin and Jason tie themselves into knots about Compson honor and the ideology of Southern white womanhood; this is a key feature of their narratives, whereby they begin to lose the thread and spiral into reverie and/or incoherence whenever Caddy’s (or, in Jason’s case, Caddy’s and her daughter Quentin’s) sexuality is the narrative focus, and we can attribute their obsessions to their conscious and unconscious desires, or, if you prefer (though it comes to much the same thing), their interpellation by the standard old-Southern ideologies of gender and race. But if Benjy, simple innocent Benjy (as readers, beginning with his creator, have cast him), objects to Caddy wearing perfume and kissing boys, one is tempted to think that there really is something wrong about it all, and that Caddy’s sexuality is a problem simply because it is Caddy’s sexuality. One is tempted to naturalize the pathologization of her sexuality, in precisely the way the muddy-drawers scene invites us to do (OMG Caddy’s private parts are dirty and always were, even when she was little), or in the way Caddy herself seems to do when she says, “There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces” (112). But if Benjy’s narrative trajectory is motivated in some way, then he becomes an interested party alongside his brothers, such that we can say, Well, if Benjy is upset by the smell of Caddy’s perfume, that’s just Benjy’s take on things—it’s not like he gives us direct unmediated narrative access to the things themselves.
There are, after all, two salient reasons why Benjy might worry about Caddy wearing perfume, kissing boys, and losing her virginity: one is that he has a version of Quentin’s concern about the family honor, and both brothers’ extreme squickiness about female sexuality in general. The other is that he has a vague but well-grounded sense that if Caddy wears perfume and kisses boys and has sex (I imagine that it is immaterial to him whether it is premarital or sanctioned by church/state union), then eventually she will leave the Compson home and he will lose the only family member who has any substantial notion that he has a subjectivity worth attending to. The point of putting interpretive pressure on the bluegum passage, then, is that it allows us not only to entertain the possibility that Benjy has some kind of sifting and sorting mechanism that explains his temporal leaps as involving something more complicated than mere sensory associations, but also to suggest that Benjy’s relation to time opens out onto questions that go well beyond our determination of the limits of his subjectivity.
For the larger point is that Benjy’s text makes it quite clear that Benjy has a rich interior life, full of acute sensations, vivid associations, and inchoate emotions that are revealed in subtle and achronological ways; his emotions may be more inchoate, perhaps, than yours or mine (or Quentin’s or Jason’s, though this is arguable), but the difference is a matter of degree rather than kind. The question is whether he knows he has a rich interior life, whether he is capable of self-reflection. I will take up the question of textual self-awareness in the following chapter; here, I want to stress one of its implications for Faulkner’s experiment with narrative temporality. The device of Benjy’s section is that there is no device: the assumption, once again, is that the narrative is simply the index and register of the way Benjy perceives the world, just as the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses gives us the index and register of the way Dedalus muses on visuality and Aristotle and the limits of the diaphane. It is a truism of Faulkner criticism that Benjy’s section offers a kind of overture to the novel, a synoptic rendering of its major motifs (inexpressible loss, Caddy’s sexuality and the perils of the femme fatale, the decline of the old Southern aristocracy, Caddy’s sexuality and the ideology of Southern white womanhood, death and order and the sense of an ending, Caddy’s sexuality and Caddy’s sexuality) that provides something like a translation of the Compson narrative into what Joseph Frank brilliantly called “spatial form in modern literature.”5 But what does it mean that Faulkner orchestrates such an overture by rendering it precisely as an artifact of intellectual disability, particularly since there is no intellectual disability known to humankind that would lead someone to perceive the world as Benjy does?
In Benjy’s case, the gambit is something like this: here is a person whose perception of the world does not depend on the ordinary narrative logic of “The king died and then the queen died of grief.” Rather, his perception of the world is something more like “The cows came jumping out of the barn at Caddy’s wedding so loss of Caddy, who will take care of me? Damuddy died and Caddy was in the tree, and the day Caddy wore perfume now there is a guy with a red tie in my yard hitting on Caddy’s daughter Quentin, and another time Caddy smelled like rain.” There are two important theoretical principles at work here. The first involves something I mentioned at the close of the introduction: this is a fictional disability, not only in the sense that it is a disability that is wholly “made up,” that does not exist in the DSM-5 (or any of its precursors), but also (and more important, for readers of The Sound and the Fury and viewers of Memento) in the sense that it is a disability that manifests itself as a relation to the structure of fiction. The second is that there is something we might call, if we arranged a shotgun marriage between the work of Paul Ricoeur and Mikhail Bakhtin, an intellectual disability chronotope at work here, by which narrative marks its relation to intellectual disability precisely by rendering intellectual disability as a productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality.
In volume 1 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur writes, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (52). This is a fundamental insight, properly insisting on the double-helix interweaving of narrative and temporal existence; in retrospect, it is somewhat astonishing how much work Ricoeur had to do to blend Aristotle and Augustine in order to achieve this insight, painstakingly countering structuralism’s indifference to chronology and consequent flattening out of narrative theory. (By contrast, Frank Kermode, less harried by structuralism and its Continental pedigree, simply suggested that traditional narrative takes the form of “tick-tock,” and presto, his narrative theory emphasized temporality.) One reason that narrative experiments with time might involve characters with intellectual disabilities is that in exploring alternative modes of temporal existence, we are exploring not only the variety of humans’ relations to time but also the ways time itself can “become human.” Among the most appalling discoveries of the past century, after all, involves the realization that time, like space, only gets weirder and more unfathomable the more closely one looks at it.6 Perhaps, in this respect, Augustine foresaw the future of human attempts to understand time: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. . . . [W]e cannot rightly say that time is, except by reason of its impending state of not being” (264). I made a version of this observation to Jamie one morning when we were late for something (he was in his mid-teens), remarking that although we are surrounded by clocks and reasonably conscious of the Earth’s rotation and revolution around the sun, we really don’t know what time is or why it only goes forward, to which he promptly replied, “Except in Harry Potter, with Hermione’s Time-Turner,” whereupon I nearly crashed the car in surprise. But of course he is right: fiction is where we can imagine such things as time travel, precognition, and alternate temporal dimensions—and where we (and Jamie) can speculate on the existence of many kinds of disability chronotopes, as well.
Indeed, as we will see in the course of this chapter, the deployment of intellectual disability in narrative can serve to expand (or, if you decide that the experiments in this vein are ultimately unsuccessful, merely to try to expand) the domain of narrative literature beyond the boundaries of human experience altogether. In The Sound and the Fury, there is the possibility that Benjy’s perpetual present allows indirectly for a perception of the sacred, at least for Dilsey; in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Powers’s Echo Maker, and Dick’s Martian Time-Slip (to which I will turn first), the disability chronotope offers an outlet into realms of temporal experience that exceed human perception, bringing animal consciousness and/or geological time into play.
✴ ✴ ✴
I have assumed, so far, a general readerly familiarity with the novels I have discussed, believing there is no reason at this point in the history of professional literary criticism to offer synoptic introductions to The Sound and the Fury, The Woman Warrior, Life and Times of Michael K, or the Harry Potter series. In the case of Philip K. Dick’s little-known and rarely studied Martian Time-Slip, however, I suspect that an introduction is in order, at least for readers who are not level-six PKD fans.
The premise of Martian Time-Slip (1964) sounds like one of Dick’s standard—that is, “standard” in the sense of “inconceivably odd”—variations on postwar American science fiction. It is 1994, and the inhabitants of a polluted, radioactive Earth have colonized Mars under the auspices of the United Nations. The colonization project is complicated by (a) the fact that Mars has humanoid inhabitants who are closely related to early human hominids and constitute a dying race of aboriginal hunter-gatherers (they are black, they are called Bleekmen, and are despised, reviled, and employed as domestic servants); and (b) the expense of shipping heavy machinery to Mars, which means that a great deal of the colonists’ infrastructure is already beginning to decay. Accordingly, repairmen are in such high demand that they have become a prestigious class of professionals (psychiatrists, by contrast, have to eke out a living by trolling for clients), and one of the most important power brokers on the planet is one Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers’ Local, Fourth Planet Branch. Much of the narrative seems to be third-person nonparticipant omniscient, focalized through Kott or through the repairman Jack Bohlen, with liberal use of free indirect discourse; the novel’s early chapters include a narrative focalized through an herbal foods and black market salesman named Norbert Steiner, but after he commits suicide, the novel drops him from the narrative trajectory. Steiner’s son, Manfred, is on the autism spectrum, such as it was understood in 1964. He is housed in the only Martian facility open to him and other “anomalous” children, a school known as Camp Ben-Gurion, run by the Israeli settlement on Mars. Early in the novel, we learn that the United Nations is considering a bill that would close Camp B-G, as it is known, because (in the words of Anne Esterhazy, the mother of an “anomalous” child and the ex-wife of Arnie Kott)
they don’t want to see what they call “defective stock” appearing on the colonial planets. . . . Back Home they see the existence of anomalous children on Mars as a sign that one of Earth’s major problems has been transplanted into the future, because we are the future, to them. (41–42)
Clearly, Dick’s novel foregrounds questions of race and eugenics, colonization, and disability: “Earth’s major problems,” indeed. If that were all there is to say about Martian Time-Slip, then one could plausibly file it under the (capacious) heading of works of speculative fiction that address Real Social Problems in especially fanciful ways, and one could praise it for being on the side of the angels, who know a genocidal, eugenic program when they see one. But the novel is—happily, and vexatiously—far more complex than that. For it appears that Manfred Steiner inhabits a realm of narrative time that not only exceeds that of any character in the novel, but also warps and distorts the narrative fabric of Martian Time-Slip itself. One of Manfred’s supervisors, a Dr. Glaub, tells Manfred’s father, Norbert, of a “new theory about autism” (46) that has recently been developed by Swiss researchers. The theory, in fine, is that people with autism experience a different sense of time than neurotypicals, such that they perceive the world around them moving at a rate too fast for them to process. This then accounts for their “withdrawal,” their inability to socialize or read affective cues. It turns out that the Swiss theory is partly right: Manfred Steiner does indeed live in a different sense of time than the novel’s other characters. But his withdrawal from the world is occasioned only partly by that fact; more immediately, he is haunted by visions of the inevitable decay of everything around him. He can see the far future, in which even Martian structures yet unbuilt have fallen into disrepair and desuetude (“gubbish,” the pervasive term for garbage/rubbish that runs throughout the novel). He is particularly horrified by a recurring vision of himself at the age of two hundred, having been immobilized for decades and kept alive (and thoroughly neglected) in the medical facility of a huge housing complex, even after his limbs have been amputated and most of his internal organs have been removed.
Arnie Kott, upon hearing that people with autism might be “precogs” who have access to the future, hires Jack Bohlen to build a device that can bridge different senses of narrative time and translate Manfred’s visions into a readable form in the present. Kott’s motivation is almost comically petty: he wants access to information about a blockbuster real estate deal involving a nearby Martian mountain range, the remote and barren F.D.R. Mountains. The denouement of that plot occurs when Bohlen has to break the news to Kott that (a) Manfred has drawn a detailed sketch of the decay of the massive AM-WEB housing project housed in the mountains (over a century in the future), and (b) his own father, Leo Bohlen, has already bought the land in question. Kott is an imperious man, and Bohlen is consumed with anxiety at the prospect of telling him that his experiment with time translation does not work (since Manfred is no use for giving insider-trading tips) and that the point of the enterprise is moot anyway.
On the way to that denouement, however, the novel becomes seriously weird. The scene in which Bohlen breaks the news to Kott is narrated four times; the first three are out of sequence (that is, they are effectively a series of flash-forwards), and though each seems to be focalized through Manfred, and is announced by a paragraph that begins, “Inside Mr. Kott’s skin were dead bones, shiny and wet” (157, 167, 178), the three scenes are nevertheless narrated from different spatial perspectives (we follow a character out of the living room in one, but stay in the living room in another) and are marked by subtle differences from episode to episode. The first two episodes appear in chapter 10, but then chapter 11 opens with the third, as if chapter 10 is repeating itself; the subtle differences between the passages read like “glitches,” in the sense that gamers use the term—slight but deliberate deviations from the code.7 Two examples follow; the first compares passages from the second and third flash-forward episodes, and the second compares passages from all three:
Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in an awful fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott was saying. “I’ll put this tape on.” (167)
Jack Bohlen, too, was a dead sack, teeming with gubbish. The outside that fooled almost everyone, it was painted pretty and smelled good, bent down over Miss Anderton, and he saw that; he saw it wanting her in a filthy fashion. It poured its wet, sticky self nearer and nearer to her and the dead bug words popped from its mouth and fell on her. The dead bug words scampered off into the folds of her clothing, and some squeezed into her skin and entered her body. “I love Mozart,” Mr. Kott said. “I’ll put this tape on.” (177)
Both seem to be narrated from Manfred’s perspective, mixing his idiosyncratic vision of his fellow creatures with ordinary dialogue. The second series of examples, however, introduces another level of complexity and perplexity. When Kott puts on the tape, it turns out not to be Mozart but one of his electronically coded messages to his confederates:
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. Mr. Kott shut off the tape transport. (157)
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. He shut off the tape transport. (167)
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from somewhere in the room, and after a time she realized that it was her; she was convulsed from within, all the corpse-things in her were heaving and crawling, struggling out into the light of the room. God, how could she stop them? They emerged from her pores and scuttled off, dropping from strands of gummy web onto the floor, to disappear into the cracks between the boards. (177–78)
Again, the first two accounts of the “Mozart” tape seem to be focalized by way of Manfred; but the third is quite clearly focalized through the character of Doreen Anderton, who now seems to be overwhelmed by something very much like the “dead bug words” that had poured on her from Bohlen’s mouth. Time is not the only thing being warped here; the entire narrative fabric is twisting. Just as, in a later chapter, we are told that “Manfred Steiner’s presence had invaded the structure of the Public School, penetrated its deepest being” (194), thereby deranging all the android teachers in the school, here Steiner’s presence and perspective somehow “leak” into other characters. The result is that it is finally impossible to attribute these passages solely to Steiner. When, for instance, the confrontation with Kott is finally narrated in “real” time (that is, as an event following the other events of the day in proper temporal sequence) and Kott puts on the Mozart tape, we find that the character who likens the screeches to the convulsions of corpses is Kott himself:
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers. Noises like the convulsions of the dead, Arnie thought in horror. He ran to shut off the tape transport. (208; emphasis added)
To whom, then, are we supposed to attribute the thought “noises like the convulsions of the dead” in the three previous versions of this passage? Who or what had access to Arnie’s simile, and how did Doreen Anderton, in the third repetition, manage to “realize” that the noises were coming from her?
As for Bohlen, himself a recovered (or recovering?) schizophrenic, he finds himself increasingly incapacitated in the course of the evening; on one page he feels “the coming apart of every piece of his body” (211), and on the next the confrontation and the crisis have passed and he has no recollection of them: “the next thing he knew he was standing on a black, empty sidewalk” (212). In the following chapter, on the following day, Bohlen stops to reflect on what has happened to him and to the novel:
He had sat, he realized, in Arnie Kott’s living room again and again, experiencing that evening before it arrived; and then, when at last it had taken place in actuality, he had bypassed it. The fundamental disturbance in time-sense, which Dr. Glaub believed was the basis for schizophrenia, was now harassing him. That evening at Arnie’s had taken place, and had existed for him . . . but out of sequence. (219–20)
This is a fair enough summary of what we, as readers, have just experienced. So maybe Jack, rather than Manfred, is “responsible” for these out-of-joint and out-of-sequence time-slips. But this hypothesis doesn’t solve everything, because the perspective from which Jack Bohlen was a dead sack, teeming with “gubbish” and leering at Doreen Anderton, was clearly not Jack Bohlen’s. Manfred’s “autistic” rendering of events becomes the “schizophrenic” break in the text of the novel itself. What Dick has crafted in Martian Time-Slip—and it is no mean feat—is not merely the depiction of a character whose intellectual disability, like Benjy Compson’s, entails a radically different sense of time and narrative; it is also a textualization of that character’s intellectual disability such that the character’s sense of time and narrative so pervades and structures the novel that it can no longer be attributed to that character’s private stream of consciousness.
The other characters’ response to the night of the time-slips makes this clear, inasmuch as we can say that anything about this extended episode can be made clear. It is not merely that Manfred warps Jack’s sense of time; Doreen also reports having her subjectivity invaded and altered. “I really couldn’t stand that child,” she tells Jack. “Last night was a nightmare—I kept feeling awful cold squishy tendrils drifting around the room and in my mind . . . intimations of filth and evil that didn’t seem to be either in me or outside me—just nearby” (221–22). Doreen is no doubt referring to the corpse-things heaving and crawling in her, but it turns out that even Arnie himself has felt the effects, underscoring Doreen’s sense that the phenomenon was neither inside her nor outside her (or, possibly, that her outside was in and her inside was out). In an extended conversation with his Bleekman servant Heliogabalus, in which Heliogabalus not only explains that Manfred’s thoughts “are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him” (226) (thereby revealing that Arnie’s plans for Jack’s translation device were needless) but also conveys the entire content of Manfred’s vision of AM-WEB (to which I will return), Arnie offers yet another theory of what happened on the night of the time-slips:
“You know what I think?” Arnie said. “I think he does more than just see into time. I think he controls time.”
The Bleekman’s eyes became opaque. He shrugged.
“Doesn’t he?” Arnie persisted. “Listen, Heliogabalus, you black bastard, this kid fooled around with last night. I know it. He saw it in advance and he tried to tamper with it. Was he trying to make it not happen? He was trying to halt time.”
“Perhaps,” Helio said. (227)
Perhaps. And perhaps everything will make sense when the novel finally gives us Manfred’s perspective on the evening, since Manfred allegedly controls time. Or perhaps Manfred’s version will turn out to be shockingly, disappointingly ordinary, clearly marked as Manfred’s, with no traces of bug words or decaying women or strange temporal distortions:
Seated on the carpet, snipping pictures from the magazines with his scissors and pasting them into new configurations, Manfred Steiner heard the noise and glanced up. He saw Mr. Kott hurry to the tape machine to shut it off. How blurred Mr. Kott became, Manfred noticed. It was hard to see him when he moved so swiftly; it was as if in some way he had managed to disappear from the room and then reappear in another spot. The boy felt frightened.
The noise, too, frightened him. He looked to the couch where Mr. Bohlen sat, to see if he were upset. But Mr. Bohlen remained where he was with Doreen Anderton, interlinked with her in a fashion that made the boy cringe with concern. How could two people stand being so close? It was, to Manfred, as if their separate identities had flowed together, and the idea that such a muddling could be terrified him. (208–9)
The various motifs of the time-slips are present, to be sure (the horrible noise of the tape machine, Jack’s closeness to Doreen), but it is as if the Manfred whose account we read here has no access to the consciousness of the Manfred who may or may not have been responsible for the awful cold squishy tendrils of subjectivity (conscious or unconscious) to which readers of—and characters in—Martian Time-Slip have just been subjected. This is just a frightened kid, apparently totally unaware that he is capable of warping everyone else’s sense of time and space. But then again, maybe Arnie Kott, or Doreen, or somebody knows something about Manfred that Manfred himself does not and cannot know?
Yet even as Arnie tosses out his ambitious and plausible theory that Manfred controls time and “fooled around with last night” (I do love that phrase, and like to think of it applied to Benjy, who obviously fooled around with April 7, 1928), he sees in it nothing more than the potential to go back in time a couple of weeks and usurp Leo Bohlen’s claim to the F.D.R. Mountains. (He eventually does this with the help of Manfred and an ancient Bleekman, and I will get back to this, too.) The desire is all the more repugnant inasmuch as it persists even after Helio has explained to Arnie the nature of Manfred’s perception of time:
“This boy experiences his own old age, his lying in a dilapidated state, decades from now, in an old persons’ home which is yet to be built here on Mars, a place of decay which he loathes beyond expression. In this future place he passes empty, weary years, bedridden—an object, not a person, kept alive through stupid legalities. When he tries to fix his eyes on the present, he almost at once is smitten by that dread vision of himself once again.”
“Tell me about this old persons’ home,” Arnie said.
“It is to be built soon,” Helio said. “Not for that purpose, but as a vast dormitory for immigrants to Mars.”
“Yeah,” Arnie said, recognizing it. “In the F.D.R. range.”
“The people arrive,” Helio said, “and settle, and live, and drive the wild Bleekmen from their last refuge. In turn, the Bleekmen put a curse on the land, sterile as it is. The Earth settlers fail; their buildings deteriorate year after year. Settlers return to Earth faster than they come here. At last this other use is made of the building: it becomes a home for the aged, for the poor, the senile and infirm.” (226–27)
In other words, even after hearing all this—about the horror of Manfred’s vision, the final dispossession of the Bleekmen, and the fate of the aged, poor, senile, and infirm on Mars—Arnie can still think only, Yeah, yeah, and how can I get that land?
You have probably intuited by now that there is not much to be gained in the critical observation that Arnie is a creep. But there is a more important structural point at stake here. Once one realizes that the time-slips are actually the key feature of the novel, and not just some weird textual juggling stunt that serves as a distraction from the main point (to put this another way, the novel is titled Martian Time-Slip, not Martian Blockbuster Land Deal), the entire novel starts to “leak” in the way Manfred’s (un)consciousness does on that night, backwards and forwards from that sequence. On the most obvious thematic level, the novel reveals that it is primarily about schizophrenia, mental illness, and intellectual disability—situated on Mars, sure, but a serious meditation on such matters nevertheless.8 Diagnoses and discussions of schizophrenia abound in the text; Jack tells an android teacher at the Public School (risibly named Kindly Dad) that schizophrenia is “the most mysterious malady in all medicine” and “it shows up in one out of every six people” (88), whereas his father, Leo, reports that he heard on TV that the figure is “one in every three” (133). During his visit to the Public School, Jack muses that autism is defined as “a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family” (73). At first autism is glossed as “oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over [a] sense of objective reality” (72); one page later we read that “it meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by society” (73); four pages after that, “true autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values” (77).
These definitions are not mutually exclusive, but they are not identical to each other, either; and for my purposes, the most important thing about them is that there are so many of them. In Jack’s many ruminations on and memories of his own schizophrenic break, we learn that Jack is especially (over)invested in the business of diagnosis, convinced as he is that “schizophrenia . . . is one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced” (88), “the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man” (124–25). But he is not alone: the psychiatrist Dr. Glaub reflects, in the course of his attempts to diagnose Arnie Kott, that “often the first sign of the insidious growth of the schizophrenic process in a person was an inability to eat in public” (110). More alarmingly, he reminds himself that “generally, a concern with schizophrenia was a symptom of the person’s own inner struggle in that area” (110).
At this point, possibly, the novel has produced a perfect feedback loop in which the ratio of schizophrenics to the general population is not 1:6 or 1:3 but 1:1.9 For every character in the book seems to have a concern with schizophrenia; even Heliogabalus, the Bleekman, has a theory. Declaring that “entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness” (97), he proceeds to offer Arnie an indigenous Martian version of the 1960s countercultural, anti-psychiatry position on mental illness:
“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.” (98)
Jack, by contrast, is horrified by thoughts like these: “And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death” (154). In his spells, Jack sees “through” people to the hidden cyborgs within, constructed of wire, plastic, and steel; Manfred sees a world of gubbish that degrades not only people and things but language itself, so that eventually the text itself becomes (in one of the time-slips) nothing more than “gubble, gubble gubble gubble, gubble!” (179). But the leakage does not stop here: once we understand the pervasiveness of schizophrenia and intellectual disability in the text, we can reread the novel’s opening sentence as a time-slip take on a form of American suburban ennui that was just percolating to the surface in 1964: “From the depths of phenobarbital slumber, Silvia Bohlen heard something that called” (1). She rouses herself at 9:30, long after her son and husband have gotten up, and decides, “I must not take any more of that”—phenobarbital, one assumes—“better to succumb to the schizophrenic process, join the rest of the world” (1). So now, as we reread the text as a text about intellectual disability, we come to understand that the schizophrenic process isolates one from the rest of the world, inducing an apathy toward public endeavor and an inability to live out the drives implanted in us by society—and that, paradoxically, everybody else is in the same boat.
Leaving aside the pedestrian point that it was silly to imagine in 1964 that humans would have established colonies on Mars within thirty years (a minor point about Dick’s liberties with verisimilitude, I think, in a fictional landscape in which Mars has air, water, arable land, giant insects, and Bleekmen), time seems weird throughout the book. The possibility that “time flowed differently on Earth than Mars” is introduced very early in the novel, and attributed to “an article in a psychology journal” (5). I have already remarked that although Mars is the future (as Anne Esterhazy puts it), it is already crumbling; by the same token, Earth artifacts are spoken of as if they are inconceivably ancient. At one point Arnie tells Heliogabalus that he has “a long-playing record . . . so goddamn old and valuable that I don’t dare play it. . . . Glenn Gould playing. It’s forty years old; my family passed it down to me” (95). The Bleekmen confuse matters still further. Jack imagines—with good reason, it turns out—that Manfred would do better living with them (“possibly their sense of time is close to his” [150]), and toward the end of the novel, as Arnie prepares to go back in time to stake his claim to the F.D.R. Mountains, Heliogabalus informs him that he must go with Manfred to the Bleekmen’s sacred rock, Dirty Knobby, for even though “the rock alone is powerless,” Manfred’s presence will enable Arnie’s time travel because “time is weakest at that spot where Dirty Knobby lies” (236).
On one reading, then, the novel’s real estate plot (to abuse the pun) seems to be supplanted by the formal experiment of the time-slips and their resonance for the rest of the book: the former is merely the vehicle for the latter, just as Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, a book similarly predicated on real estate and plotting, reveals itself ultimately to be a text about the possibility of a network of secret societies communicating by an alternative mail system. I have suggested as much to students, arguing (plausibly, to gauge by their responses) that none of them winds up reading the book for an answer to the question, Will Arnie succeed in staking his claim? And yet the real estate plot and the time-slips are more complexly interwoven, such that the latter do not supplant the former so much as infect it. Arnie does succeed in going back in time, but his time travel is Manfredized, so that even though the book begins to re-narrate its second chapter as Arnie starts his workday, the machinery starts to break down, and even Arnie’s copy of the New York Times begins to read, “gubble gubble” (254).
More alarmingly, the novel then proceeds to replay the scene in which we first met the Bleekmen, back in chapter 2; Jack Bohlen stops his helicopter to offer water to some dying nomads (refusal to do so is a violation of U.N. law), whereas Arnie, traveling in his own helicopter, balks at doing so. In gratitude, the Bleekmen give Jack a charm, a “water witch”; they tell him, “It will bring you water, the source of life, any time you need” (31), and later, conversing with Arnie, Heliogabalus claims that “it may guarantee him safety” if anyone tries to harm Jack. Now, I believe it was Chekhov who once said that if you introduce a mysterious supernatural device into your text in chapter 2, it has to be used in chapter 16. In the time-travel replay of the water witch scene, Arnie tries to kill Jack, and is shot with a poisoned arrow by the Bleekmen. Can Arnie die in the past? Can he already have died? Is it like dying in a dream? And is this his dream, or Manfred’s? As Arnie ponders these questions, he stumbles onto the possibility that the time-slips in the novel began not when Manfred was introduced to the text, but when the Bleekmen brought out the water witch:
How did that young Bleekman catch on so fast? They don’t ordinarily use their arrows on Earth people; it’s a capital crime. It means the end of them.
Maybe, he thought, they were expecting me. They conspired to save Bohlen because he gave them food and water. Arnie thought, I bet they’re the ones who gave him the water witch. Of course. And when they gave it to him they knew. They knew about all this, even back then, at the very beginning. (264; emphasis in original)
There is some serious verb-tense confusion going on here. How can it be that the Bleekmen conspired, in the past, to save Bohlen from Arnie’s murderous attack weeks later? Arnie’s hypothesis is that the Bleekmen, like Manfred, can come unstuck in time, and prophetically see in their first encounter with him the as-yet-unrealized time-travel version of the repetition of their encounter with him. What is the tense in which Arnie’s realization can be expressed? Now I know that in the past, the Bleekmen will have conspired to revisit the moment that was the present at the time I met them, and its repetition in the future, which is now the present from which I have traveled back to this moment in the past (as they knew I would do)?
For the record, Arnie does eventually return to “real” time, whatever that might mean by now, where he is killed by a business rival (though he believes he is still in an altered time-travel state in which he cannot die). And Manfred escapes the fate of AM-WEB, living with the Bleekmen for the remainder of his days and returning in the novel’s enigmatic final scene at the end of this climactic day, now a very old man visiting from the future, to thank Jack for trying to help him long ago. “It wasn’t long ago,” Jack replies. “Have you forgotten? You came back to us; it was just today. This is your distant past, when you were a boy” (277). (Again, the verb tense is inscrutable: one wonders what “have you forgotten” can possibly mean here.) It is not entirely a happy ending; elderly Manfred is very much the tubes-and-wires, “pumps and hoses and dials” (276) cyborg he feared becoming. But he escaped AM-WEB, and that, it turns out, was the point; that, finally, is why he (and the Bleekmen?) fooled around with the temporal fabric of the novel.
The mystical link between Manfred and the Bleekmen is a bit embarrassing, politically; Helio explains that he can communicate with the boy because “we are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land” (226), as if they are speaking by way of a special Subaltern Subchannel. Helio thereby becomes a version of what is known among film critics as the “magic Negro” who, according to Todd Boyd, is given “special powers and underlying mysticism.”10 But the Subaltern Subchannel, for all its orientalizing faults, helps to clarify the link between AM-WEB and Camp Ben-Gurion, which is never made explicit until Helio offers Arnie that extended exposition of Manfred’s deepest fears. Let us now return to Camp Ben-Gurion—or, more precisely, to Norbert Steiner’s visit to see his son, which almost immediately convinces him to kill himself. After shocking the Camp B-G staff by declaring that he believes the facility should be shut down, on the grounds that his son “will never be able to hold a job. . . . He’ll always be a burden on society, like he is now” (44), Norbert stops by the Red Fox restaurant and gets an earful of even more vicious eugenics discourse from the owner:
“Why you looking so glum, Norb?”
Steiner said, “They’re going to close down Camp B-G.”
“Good,” the owner of the Red Fox said. “We don’t need those freaks here on Mars; it’s bad advertising.”
“I agree,” Steiner said, “at least to a certain extent.”
“It’s like those babies with seal flippers back in the ’60s, from them using that German drug. They should have destroyed all of them; there’s plenty of healthy normal children born, why spare those others? If you had a kid with extra arms or no arms, deformed in some way, you wouldn’t want it kept alive, would you?”
“No,” Steiner said. He did not say that his wife’s brother back on Earth was a phocomelus; he had been born without arms and made use of superb artificial ones designed for him by a Canadian firm which specialized in such equipment. (49)
The plot thickens, as if it weren’t already thick enough: writing in the wake of the controversy over Thalidomide (that German drug, first marketed in 1957 by Chemie Grünenthal), Dick suggests that the genocidal impulse toward people with disabilities will survive well into the future, even though Steiner’s brother-in-law appears to have himself some pretty fabulous prostheses (and no intellectual disabilities).
Last but certainly not least, Arnie Kott himself has a child in Camp B-G, a child he fathered with Anne Esterhazy; damaged by exposure to gamma rays in utero, the child is three years old, “small and shriveled, with enormous eyes like a lemur’s . . . [and] peculiar webbed fingers” (40). Arnie’s attitude toward the child is predictable: close the camp and kill the kids.
“I’ve been sorry ever since those Jews opened that camp.”
Anne said, “Bless you, honest blunt Arnie Kott, mankind’s best friend.”
“It tells the entire world we’ve got nuts here on Mars, that if you travel across space to get here you’re apt to damage your sexual organs and give birth to a monster that would make those German flipper-people look like your next-door neighbor.”
“You and the gentleman who runs the Red Fox.”
“I’m just being hard-headedly realistic. We’re in a struggle for our life; we’ve got to keep people emigrating here or we’re dead on the vine, Annie. You know that. If we didn’t have Camp B-G we could advertise that away from Earth’s H-bomb-testing, contaminated atmosphere there are no abnormal births. I hope to see that, but Camp B-G spoils it.”
“Not Camp B-G. The births themselves.”
“No one would be able to check up and show our abnormal births,” Arnie said, “without B-G.” (64–65)
The realm of biopower, apparently, does not quite extend (yet) to Mars, where the sciences of population management are weaker than they are on Earth and no one will know about disability if Camp B-G is shut down—and where Arnie is apparently unaware that back on Earth, some of those German flipper-people are your next-door neighbors, outfitted with superb artificial limbs. And as it happens, the U.N.’s thinking is not very far from Arnie’s; indeed, it is later in this very conversation with his ex-wife (though oddly, this part of the exchange is not narrated directly, but merely recalled by Arnie in the following chapter) that Arnie learns of the U.N.’s plan to develop land in the F.D.R. mountain range. He had already heard that someone was interested in the land; Anne happens to know of various rumors, one of which is that the U.N. “intended to build an enormous supranational park, a sort of Garden of Eden, to lure emigrants out of Earth” (94). The insinuation here, then, is that the building of AM-WEB (the Garden of Eden reimagined as an enormous supranational park on Mars?) and the closing of Camp Ben-Gurion are two facets of the same plan: lure emigrants from Earth, and suppress all official acknowledgment of the existence of people with disabilities on Mars. Manfred’s vision of his cyborg future is thus also a vision of imminent genocide.
Martian Time-Slip represents one of Anglophone literature’s most fascinating attempts to textualize intellectual disability. By this I mean that the novel is not merely about disability; that much should be clear as plastic by now. If The Sound and the Fury is (among other things) a register of the fate of the “feebleminded” in the 1920s, Martian Time-Slip is (among other things) a response to the discourse of eliminationism, in which the United Nations turns out to be the exterminator-in-general and only the Israeli encampment on Mars has learned the lessons of recent history well enough to provide shelter and care for children like Manfred Steiner. But Martian Time-Slip is also very much more than that: it is a stunning example of how, in Quayson’s terms, the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability. Admittedly, for some readers, the radical experimentalism of Martian Time-Slip can be explained away by the very fact that it belongs to the genre of science fiction, where writers are permitted to concoct outlandish things like time travel and extraterrestrial civilizations, and where the dominant protocols of representation tend to defy the dominant protocols of representation in mainstream fiction on a page-by-page basis. But I think the objection only strengthens my point. This convoluted narrative experiment set on a ridiculously implausible Mars nevertheless provides a vehicle for a profound deliberation on time, space, mental illness, and intellectual disability. And as in The Sound and the Fury, it is critical that the disability chronotope is predicated on an unambiguously fictional disability—and yet poses the question, in the starkest of terms, of how to treat the most vulnerable humans among us.
And yet when it comes to vulnerability, humans are not the only creatures worth attending to. I remarked earlier that the disability chronotope can offer an outlet into realms of temporal experience that exceed human perception. In Martian Time-Slip, Manfred’s fictional disability opens onto time scales that (presumably) only the Bleekmen can comprehend; but critically, it also offers a link to the nonhuman. Our very first encounter with Manfred’s free indirect discourse arrives without warning after a brief break in the text, and without any warning that it is Manfred’s free indirect discourse, like so:
High in the sky circled meat-eating birds. At the base of the windowed building lay their excrement. He picked up the wads until he held several. They twisted and turned like dough, and he knew there were living creatures within; he carried them carefully into the open corridor of the building. One wad opened, parted with a split in its woven, hairlike side; it became too large to hold, and he saw it now in the wall. A compartment where it lay on its side, the rent so wide that he perceived the creature within.
Gubbish! A worm, coiled up, made of wet, bony-white pleats, the inside gubbish worm, from a person’s body. If only the high-flying birds could find it and eat it down, like that. He ran down the steps, which gave beneath his feet. Boards missing. He saw down through the sieve of wood to the soil beneath, the cavity, dark, cold, full of wood so rotten that it lay in damp powder, destroyed by gubbish-rot.
Arms lifted up, tossed him to the circling birds; he floated up, falling at the same time. They ate his head off. And then he stood on a bridge over the sea. Sharks showed in the water, their sharp, cutting fins. He caught one on his line and it came sliding up from the water, mouth open, to swallow him. He stepped back, but the bridge caved in and sagged so that the water reached his middle.
It rained gubbish, now; all was gubbish, wherever he looked. A group of those who didn’t like him appeared at the end of the bridge and held up a loop of shark teeth. He was emperor. They crowned him with the loop, and he tried to thank them. But they forced the loop down past his head to his neck, and they began to strangle him. They knotted the loop and the shark teeth cut his head off. Once more he sat in the dark, damp basement with the powdery rot around him, listening to the tidal water lap-lapping everywhere. A world where gubbish ruled, and he had no voice; the shark teeth had cut his voice out.
I am Manfred, he said. (137–38)
Again, this may not seem terribly out of line in a work of science fiction, where the parameters of mimesis are potentially infinite. You might even decide that this is little more than literary gubbish. But then compare it to this passage in a National Book Award-winning work of mainstream fiction, which appears without warning early in a narrative that, up to this point, has faithfully adhered to the dominant protocols of realistic representation:
A flock of birds, each one burning. Stars swoop down to bullets. Hot red specks take flesh, nest there, a body part, part body. Lasts forever: no change to measure. Flock of fiery cinders. When grey pain of them thins, then always water. Flattest width so slow it fails as liquid. Nothing in the end but flow. Nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing. A thing itself the cold and so can’t feel it. (10)
This is from Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker, and the passage might—one cannot say for certain—be focalized through a young man named Mark Schluter, who has sustained a devastating brain injury as the result of a mysterious accident in which his truck careened off an empty road at eighty miles per hour at 2:00 a.m. As Mark gradually regains consciousness, and as he slowly reacquires the ability to speak, we learn that he has suffered a rare neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. People with Capgras syndrome are unable to recognize their loved ones as their loved ones; they recognize the faces of their family members, but they do not recognize them as their family members. (In neurological terms, the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex have somehow become disconnected: the facial recognition systems of the brain are working, but have lost their connection to the emotional-processing centers that would make sense of those recognitions.) In their attempt to make sense of the fact that they recognize deeply familiar faces but have no emotional attachment to them, they come to believe that their family members have been replaced by doubles, androids, or impersonators. It is a devastating disorder, and some people with Capgras have snapped completely: as Powers writes, “a young Capgras sufferer from the British Midlands, to prove that his father was a robot, had cut the man open to expose the wires” (89–90).
It sounds like material for Oliver Sacks, and, indeed, half of the novel is devoted to an Oliver Sacks–like character named Gerald Weber, to whom Mark Schluter’s sister, Karin, writes in despair. Weber’s growing self-doubt and eventual breakdown make up one strand of the plot; another involves water use, ecotourism, real estate development (this time on Earth), and the migration patterns of sandhill cranes, who stop every year in the Schluters’ hometown of Kearney, Nebraska. Most important for our purposes, the novel speculates repeatedly about the mental capacities of birds: “Birds will surprise you,” says Karin’s boyfriend, the conservationist Daniel Riegel. “Blue jays can lie. Ravens punish social cheaters. Crows fashion hooks out of straight wire and use them to lift cups out of holes. Not even chimps can do that” (388). “What does it feel like, to be a bird?” the novel asks (424), renewing Thomas Nagel’s question about bats. Karin Schluter is led to an epiphany about her own species:
The whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors. At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. (348)
That epiphany is central to the novel as a whole; one might even say that it constitutes the message that Powers might have sent via Western Union. These birds are our next of kin. The boondoggle real estate deal (here on Earth, not on Mars) that will create a wildlife habitat preserve in Kearney is nothing more than a scam that will lead to, at most, a way to gaze at the strange spectacle of the cranes from a blind.
It is possible, then, that the “flock of birds, each one burning” passage is narrated from the perspective of the sandhill cranes themselves, and is not Mark Schluter’s postinjury interior monologue. Perhaps “nextless stream, lowest thing above knowing” is what cranes “think” as they soar over the prairie. Yet we are tempted to “humanize” those narrative interludes not only because we continue to believe that humans are the only creatures capable of narrative but also because the interludes seem to “progress” into increasing intelligibility: the second such interlude, for instance, begins,
Rises up in flooded fields. There is a wave, a rocking in the reeds. Pain again, then nothing. When sense returns, he is drowning. Father teaching him to swim. Current in his limbs. Four years old, and his father floating him. Flying, then flailing, then falling. His father grabbing his leg, pulling him under. (18–19)
These seem to be the sense impressions of a human being, a human being who has or had a father teaching him to swim when he was four. But it is many pages before Mark’s narrative interludes can rejoin the fabric of the main narrative. Until then, the plot of The Echo Maker turns on the question of whether Mark Schluter himself will come to understand the plot—not the plot he thinks has been hatched against him, which (he believes) eventually includes his sister, his dog, his house, and the town of Kearney (all of which have been overtaken by impostors), but the plot of the novel we are reading. Narratively, Powers is working with a variation of what we might call the Flowers for Algernon Protocol, whereby shades and degrees of mental impairment are registered on the page by a character’s capacity for narrative.
But perhaps the surprise and disorientation of the first “flock of birds” passage lingers, and the suggestion hovers over the remainder of the novel—that we need to be able to see with birds’ eyes, think with (what we imagine to be) bird brains, in order to understand adequately the ecosystem we are destroying. As in Martian Time-Slip, the experimental narrative technique opens out onto a principle of great breadth: the discourse of “sustainability,” and even the discourse of the Anthropocene, are still all about us. The former foregrounds our needs as a species, asking us to ease off the throttle of postindustrial plunder a bit so that we can sustain our resources and our way of life; the latter puts us firmly in the center of geological change, environmental devastation, and mass extinctions. The discourse of the Anthropocene offers a conceptual advance over the discourse of “sustainability” insofar as it calls for a realization more radical than that which will produce a kinder, gentler form of resource extraction for human consumption; more important for our understanding of temporality in this study, it compels us to look beyond human time scales into the abyss—and into a consciousness that can think, “lasts forever: no change to measure.”11
The question of the grounds for designating an “Anthropocene epoch” and the implications of this designation for the humanities are matters beyond the scope of this book, but I hope I can sketch out an argument for why such things are important to an understanding of intellectual disability and narrative.12 In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks writes that two of the five modes elaborated in Barthes’s S/Z are critical to the temporal structure of plot: “Plot, then, might best be thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic”—that is, the mode of action by the mode of enigma—“the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes, working out their play of meaning and significance” (18). For those of you who are not steeped in narrative theory, let me paraphrase this.13 Barthes’s “proairetic” code covers the events of a narrative: this happened, this happened, this happened. The “hermeneutic” code bestows significance on them: this happened for that reason, this character took away such and such an understanding from that encounter. For Brooks, then, “plot” is an operation by which a narrative presents the question, “What things are we reading about?” and supplements it with, “So why are we reading about them anyway?” This is an elemental operation, to be sure, the kind of thing that might lead one’s children to say, “That’s not a story” when one offers them a series of colors or objects. In Martian Time-Slip, Manfred’s function is to disrupt the overcoding of the proairetic by the hermeneutic, to throw awry and to rewrite the frame by which the actions of the narrative are to be understood.
Ricoeur says something similar about the narrative function of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, suggesting that he becomes a vehicle for shuttling between mortal time and monumental time: “In his madness, Septimus is the bearer of a revelation that grasps in time the obstacle to a vision of cosmic unity and in death the way of reaching this salvific meaning” (1985, 103). Monumental time, for Ricoeur, is still a form of human time, not the time sounded throughout the novel by Big Ben but (from Nietzsche) “the time of authority-figures” (1985, 106). It is what permits Septimus to have a vision of Evans, his dead comrade from the Great War; and it is occasioned, appropriately, by the very word “time,” spoken by his wife. The revelation is only slightly less strange than anything one might find in Martian Time-Slip:
“It is time,” said Rezia.
The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang. Evans answered from behind the tree. The dead were in Thessaly, Evans sang, among the orchids. There they waited till the War was over, and now the dead, now Evans himself—
“For God’s sake don’t come!” Septimus cried out. For he could not look upon the dead.
But the branches parted. A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans! But no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed. I must tell the whole world, Septimus cried, raising his hand (as the dead man in the grey suit came nearer), raising his hand like some colossal figure who has lamented the fate of man for ages in the desert alone with his hands pressed to his forehead, furrows of despair on his cheeks, and now sees light on the desert’s edge which broadens and strikes the iron-black figure. (68)
For Ricoeur, the eerie connection between Septimus and his “double,” Clarissa Dalloway, makes it imperative that “we must . . . never lose sight of the fact that what makes sense is the juxtaposition of Septimus’s and Clarissa’s experience of time” (1985, 109), such that Septimus’s suicide somehow allows Mrs. Dalloway to go on living: “If Septimus’s refusal of monumental time was able to direct Mrs. Dalloway back toward transitory life and its precarious joys, this is because it set her on the path to a mortal time that is fully assumed” (190). The brief passage in Mrs. Dalloway that is centered on the beggar woman, the “rusty pump,” goes still further, giving us access to planetary time on Powers’s scale: “Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise . . . this battered old woman . . . would still be there in ten million years” (79–80). This is “the voice of an ancient spring spouting from the earth” (79), we are told, though because her song consists of “ee um fah um so / fee swee too eem oo,” it is not clear that perception of time on this scale, in Woolf’s radical version of intellectually disabled narrative, is even remotely intelligible to us.
And there is so much that is unintelligible to us, is there not? Time, space, life—and the enduring question of why there is something rather than nothing. (Spoiler alert: this book will not attempt to answer that question.) I want to close by suggesting that The Sound and the Fury offers a different kind of intellectual disability chronotope that opens out onto the unintelligible. This claim is at once less and more risky than my claims about Martian Time-Slip, The Echo Maker, and Mrs. Dalloway. Less, because Faulkner’s form of the unintelligible is mediated by Christianity, and is therefore (to adapt and abuse Donald Rumsfeld’s most oft-cited sentence) an intelligible unintelligible. More, because there is no way for me to argue decisively than Benjy’s narrative is the device that gets us there. The revelation—and I use the word advisedly—is Dilsey’s, and it is induced by the Reverend Shegog’s Easter sermon, not by her metafictional reading of the first section of the book in which she appears. Nevertheless, she attends Easter service with Benjy, fending off Frony’s complaint that “folks talkin” about his presence in the church with the thoroughly Christian rebuttal, “Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright or not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat” (290). And if Benjy is the holy innocent throughout (a big “if,” I grant), then it may be of some moment that Dilsey is his companion throughout the climactic sermon: “In the midst of the voices and the hands Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze. Dilsey sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb” (297).
The revelation is nothing less than Dilsey’s sense of an ending: she has been vouchsafed the insight that Frank Kermode contends is the purpose of narrative. In the middle of the journey of her life—or, to be more precise, somewhere near its final stages—she finds herself in a dark wood, until she sees, at Reverend Shegog’s urging, “de resurrection en de light” (297). Censorious yet again, Frony asks her to stop crying on the way home, because “we be passin white folks soon”; Dilsey responds in such a way as to let us know that she has been given access to the unintelligible.
“I’ve seed de first en de last,” Dilsey said. “Never you mind me.”
“First en last whut?” Frony said.
“Never you mind,” Dilsey said. “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” (297)
This certainly sounds like a vision of sacred time, but we still need to ask Frony’s question: the first and last what, exactly? (And why should it involve Benjy?)14 Dilsey sees the beginning and the ending of the Compsons’ decline, perhaps. The beginning and the ending of her own life. The beginning and the ending of the life of Christ. Perhaps the beginning and ending of it all, from Genesis to Revelation; or, more modestly but no less profoundly, the beginning and the ending of the narrative she inhabits.
Though this may sound ridiculously metafictional to some readers, equating an understanding of the unfolding of God’s plan for salvation with an understanding of the novel in which one is a character, I am not trying to trivialize Dilsey’s moment of illumination. On the contrary, I consider it to be the real “conclusion” to the novel—even as I hedge this “conclusion” in scare quotes, for I am aware that there is another, plasterboard conclusion in the novel’s final pages, whereby Benjy is mollified when Jason violently takes control of the carriage, swings the horse to the right of the monument, and restores Benjy’s sense of order “as each cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place” (321). That plasterboard conclusion, this Potemkin-village understanding of order as Benjy (apparently) perceives it, quite clearly threatens to torpedo any argument that Benjy’s intellectually disabled understanding of the world can become the vehicle for Dilsey’s cosmic sense of revelation. But that is precisely the challenge with which Faulkner has confronted us by offering two endings in his novel about beginnings and endings.15 And I submit that even if Dilsey is merely gifted with a vision of the novel in which she is a character, it is no small accomplishment to comprehend the narrative you inhabit.
For the mechanics of what Kermode called “tick-tock” narratives, fictions with intelligible beginnings and ends, presume that “all such plotting presupposes that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning” (46). And Dilsey emphatically achieves that end; to suggest that The Sound and the Fury does not, to remark that it does not rest content in telling us that we must have the recollection and the blood of the Lamb in order to see the beginning and the ending, is simply to acknowledge that The Sound and the Fury is a modern novel, and that, as Kermode allows, “our skepticism, our changed principles of reality, force us to discard the fictions that are too fully explanatory, too consoling” (161). Dilsey’s sense of divine narrative order is therefore juxtaposed and contrasted with, but not ultimately undermined by, the far weaker and more ephemeral order announced on its final page. Contrast Dilsey’s sense of completion with that of Michael K, where the deployment of intellectual disability works to a drastically different end. I remarked in the previous chapter that Life and Times of Michael K poses substantial problems for narrative theory, insofar as so much of it does not appear to be a story at all. Here I want to focus on the concluding paragraph, in which Michael K is imagining a journey with an old man who is looking at a well destroyed by soldiers and worrying about where he will get water:
He, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live. (183–84)
Whatever one makes of Michael K’s status as Homo sacer supercrip, this is a deliberately anticlimactic ending, appropriate to a novel that, as we have seen, does not have much of a plot. Compared with this radical diminuendo, even the final page of The Sound and the Fury sounds like a rousing climax; if Michael K’s intellectual disability provides Michael K with much of its motive, it also renders his life and times as a narrative of “tick-tick-tick” rather than “tick-tock,”16 producing an ending starkly devoid of any sense of duration or meaning—just a teaspoon of water, and a hypothetical one at that.
Moreover, the point needs to be made (and so I will make it) that The Sound and the Fury offers a model for Dilsey’s vision of totality, and it consists precisely of Benjy’s existence beyond temporality: it sees the first and the last, the beginning and the ending. Granted, Benjy’s section is not a literary version of Augustine’s vision of God’s existence beyond temporality—partly because Benjy is not God, partly because Augustine’s understanding of eternity pointedly excludes temporality (since God created time), and partly because Benjy does not seem to have any way of apprehending and narrating the events of his world after April 7, 1928 (as Augustine notes, any comprehensive sense of time would have to account for the phenomenon of prophecy). But for the purposes of my argument, it does not matter whether Benjy is conscious of his narrative dynamics, or whether Dilsey is aware of them. It does not matter that Benjy’s narrative is structured as tick-tick-tick, opening with golf (and a sense of loss) and closing with the dark flowing in “smooth, bright shapes” (and drifting off to sleep as a young child, held by Caddy, who is thereby restored to Benjy’s side). It matters only that Benjy’s section exists as a synoptic mode of apprehending time in a narrative one of whose characters has a revelation about seeing the beginning and the ending. Only in this sense can we speak of Benjy as the vehicle for Dilsey’s revelation. Manfred Steiner’s leap beyond human time is a more secular version of the intellectual disability chronotope, revealing the evanescence and futility of our getting and spending (which lay waste Arnie Kott’s powers); whereas for Dilsey, nothing matters but the recollection and the blood of the Lamb. And even if we secular modern readers, unconsoled by endings that are too explanatory, are uninterested in the question of what will happen to our immortal souls (particularly if we do not believe we possess them), there yet remains another crucial question, that of how we are to treat the Benjys and the Manfreds and the Septimuses and beggar women among us, regardless of whether we can understand them.
My only caveat about this reading of Dilsey, narrative temporality, and intellectual disability is that it once again gives us a version of the magical Negro who occupies the space (and time) of transition between the intelligible and the unintelligible world. Dilsey and Heliogabalus: quasi-miraculous agents of ambiguous salvation. This is an unfortunately seductive tableau for white American writers, even white American writers so unlike each other as William Faulkner and Philip K. Dick; and it raises the broader question of how we are to understand historical and national variations on the intellectual disability chronotope. For the rendering of characters with intellectual disabilities has significant implications for American literature even though no intellectual disability is specifically American. The United States has the dubious distinction of being the nation that took the premises of late nineteenth-century eugenics, developed in England by Francis Galton, and turned them into an industry whose purpose it was to identify the (often textual) markers of intellectual disability. Likewise, it was a series of American researchers—H. H. Goddard, Lewis Terman, and R. M. Yerkes—who took Alfred Binet’s intelligence test and converted it from a device meant to identify children who might need extra assistance in learning to a device for ranking humans and reifying a narrow and scientifically unsound idea of heritable intelligence (see Gould 176–234). That project was fueled by white Americans’ profound anxieties about race and immigration, and provided pseudoscientific justification for the severe inequities of industrial capitalism; it led not only to the displays of “good” and “bad” families in textbooks and state fairs but also to the practices of institutionalization and involuntary sterilization, which affected people with a wide variety of conditions from Down syndrome to epilepsy. A specter haunted the American century, one might say—the specter of intellectual disability.17 It is all the more urgently important, then—not in spite of these ideological limitations but precisely because of them—to find in fictional modes of intellectual disability a way of imagining other ways of being human that expose and transcend the limitations of our own space and time.