Literature and Disability

Alice Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317537380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Literature and Disability introduces readers to the field of disability studies and the ways in which a focus on issues of impairment and the representation of disability can provide new approaches to reading and writing about literary texts. Disability plays a central role in much of the most celebrated literature, yet it is only in recent years that literary criticism has begun to consider the aesthetic, ethical and literary challenges that this poses.

The author explores:

• key debates and issues in disability studies today
• different forms of impairment, with the aim of showing the diversity and ambiguity of the term "disability"
• the intersection between literary critical approaches to disability and feminist, post-colonial, and autobiographical writing
• genre and representations of disability in relation to literary forms including novels, short stories, poems, plays and life writing

This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of literary critical approaches to disability representation.

1 Disability Studies Now

Disability Demands a Story

This study takes as its starting point an understanding of politics, ethics and aesthetics as fundamentally intertwined, connected through the concept of representation. It argues that it is important to explore disability in terms of character, metaphor and theme in literary narratives, both inside and outside of the traditional literary canon, across the ages. Disability perspectives can transform understandings of structure, genre and narrative form. These perspectives can destabilise established theoretical paradigms in literary criticism and provide a fresh, often provocative approach to analysing all literary texts. Literary representations of disability open up discussions about some of the most pressing issues of our age: about austerity, empathy, minority status, social care and citizenship. They provide creative opportunities for close reading, but they can also initiate a re-imagination and a re-writing of literary and cultural history.

A contemporary example of this process of re-writing and re-imagining can be found in the opening short story of Anne Finger’s collection, Call Me Ahab (2009). It begins with two female icons of disability: Frida Kahlo and Helen Keller. Finger uses the imaginative licence of the short story form to bring together two figures from different backgrounds and to stage a series of conversations between Keller and Kahlo. “Helen and Frida” is creative in aesthetic terms: the sensuous language, shifting timeframes, and mutability of the narrative perspective endow the story with an air of delirium. This aesthetic experimentation is intimately connected to the complex, often transgressive approaches to authorship and the politics of representation explored in the story. Finger uses her narrative to give voice to Kahlo, a figure known predominantly for her silent self-portraits; she focuses on the relationship between speech and silence, on processes of communication, and multisensory experience. Then, at its climax, the flow of the narrative is ruptured by a moment of direct address in which the narrator calls upon readers to try to imagine deafblind experience for themselves: “Try it right now. Finish reading this paragraph and then close your eyes, push the flaps of your ears shut, and sit” (Finger 12).

“Helen and Frida” introduces many of the major concerns of this book. In the story, Frida communicates with Helen through finger spelling. The narrative emphasises the physicality and the idiosyncrasies of this mode of communication: Frida takes particular pleasure in writing the letters “j” and “z” and she searches for a vocabulary that uses these letters as much as possible, often to comic effect. This personal moment in the story suggests questions about textual representation more generally and the ways in which form, content and structure are shifted when considered from a disability perspective. The moment also re-inserts the body as a site of knowledge into the debates about communication and representation that underpin the story. Readers are reminded not only of the physicality of this imagined communication between Helen and Frida, but also of their own bodies which mediate their experience of the text: “Feel the press of hand crossed over hand: without any distraction you feel your body with the same distinctiveness as a lover’s touch makes you feel yourself. You fold into yourself, you know the rhythm of your breathing, the beating of your heart, the odd independent twitch of a muscle…” (Finger 12). In this moment, the story calls for an embodied perspective on disability, a perspective which introduces debates about gender identities, sexuality, expression and materialist aesthetics. Finger seeks to represent in narrative the visual qualities of film with colours and timeframes that fade in and out. The form of the story itself therefore invites readers to think across the boundaries of traditional disciplines and genres as it invokes characters and narrative strategies not only from film, but also from canonical literary texts, and Finger’s own autobiographical experience.

Call Me Ahab, Finger’s short story collection, features Vincent Van Gogh, Velazquez’s dwarf, Shakespeare’s Gloucester, the Biblical Goliath, and Melville’s Ahab. The stories draw attention to the wealth of representations of disability in the history of western literature and culture, but they also adopt an ironic critical distance that allows the author to re-write this history from a twenty-first-century perspective. The impetus is neither towards straightforward historical recuperation of disability nor documentary social realism. Instead, Finger appropriates historical figures and re-imagines them, not as easy metaphors, tragic victims or medical case studies, but as complex, active and embodied author figures inhabiting distinctly everyday settings. Call Me Ahab draws together a web of intertextual threads from a rich literary and cultural history of representation. Nevertheless, Finger insists, through the fragmented structures, transgressive comedy and moments of direct address, that readers confront pressing contemporary issues about disability.

Literature and Disability seeks to introduce readers to the wealth of work done so far in cultural disability studies, with a particular focus on literary theory and fictional representations. It maps out existing debates and recent new directions in the field. Kenzaburō Ōe, a Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer and disability activist, is one of a number of authors whose works are used to anchor some of these debates in key examples and to highlight the international range of contemporary writing about disability. Ōe’s understanding of the relationship between literature and imagination, drawn originally from William Blake, is fundamental to the thinking in this book. For Ōe, who writes about his cognitively impaired son, Hikari, literary forms allow him the freedom to imagine a perspective that is radically different from his own. The imaginative dimensions of fiction offer neither a clear reflection of, nor an escape from, the contemporary world; instead they complicate and intensify his ability to narrate and think critically about his immediate familial, social and political environment. Ōe proposes that: “imagination is at the core of the function of language in fiction and is critical to observing the circumstances of the contemporary world” (127).

Critical disability theorists have frequently suggested that disability sparks imagination and narration. Michael Bérubé states simply: disability “demands a story” (“Disability and Narrative” 570). For David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, it is disability’s “very unknowability that consolidates the need to tell a story about it” (6). This “demand for explanatory narrative” works on a crude level in everyday life: people with disabilities are often expected to describe and even explain their bodies and histories in ways that those perceived as normal are not: “the scar, the limp, the missing limb, or the obvious prosthesis – calls for a story” (Couser 457). This demand for story also inspires literary narratives about disability. For Lennard Davis, narrative reconfigures the relationship between disability and time: “When one speaks of disability…[it] immediately becomes part of a chronotope, a time-sequenced narrative, embedded in a story” (Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body 3–4). The use of disability as a trigger for narrative is evident in stories ranging across literary history from blind Oedipus to the scarred, physically impaired slaves in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. For some scholars, such as Ato Quayson, disability in literature is so common that it can be seen as the defining feature of literary narratives per se: “I want to suggest that we consider the plot of social deformation as it is tied to some form of physical or mental deformation to be relevant for the discussion of all literary texts” (22).

Disability studies is founded on a commitment to challenging the social marginalisation of people with disabilities. Many of the humanities scholars affiliated to this field insist that disability is not a marginal issue in literary and cultural study either: it is a central and transformative critical category for thinking about literature and literary theory. Far from replicating the absences of people with disabilities in social and political life, therefore, literary writing can be seen to obsessively return to the topic of disability. In some cases, representations of disability are used as a metaphorical shortcut, signifying wider societal anxieties and propping up definitions of the norm. Couser points out that “the unmarked case – the ‘normal’ body – can pass without narration” (457). In the same way, one might assume that a character in a literary narrative, like a “normal” American or European citizen, is necessarily white, non-disabled, heterosexual, physically and economically self-supporting, unless it is explicitly stated otherwise. Certain novels, plays, short stories, and poems reinforce oppressive ideas of normalcy, sentimentalise, and solidify stereotypes about disability. Identifying, challenging and exploring examples of these characters, metaphors, themes and discriminatory attitudes is important cultural work, particularly when this work contributes to social and political campaigns for acceptance and equality for people with disabilities. Literary writing has the potential to reach large and diverse populations; it serves a pedagogic function in the sense that it not only documents but also shapes attitudes towards disability. After all, as Snyder and Mitchell suggest, classics such as Of Mice and Men (1937), Catcher in the Rye (1951), To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1960) remind us that citizens often learn about disability “from books more than policies” (“Disability Haunting in American Poetics” 6).

This book also sets out to explore formal and theoretical questions about disability representation in literature and culture. It considers modern literary writing by disabled and non-disabled authors that is innovative and, at times, experimental and resistant to normative representations. These imaginative works and critical approaches invite us to think deeply about complex intersectional identities and to test the boundaries of literary form and the definition of “disability” itself.

Definitions: Disability at a Critical Juncture

Chapter Two of this book charts the history of disability studies and the critical distinction between the “medical” and the “social” models of disability. In addressing the topic of “disability studies now”, this chapter examines another tension between different understandings of disability. Disability theory currently finds itself at an important critical juncture, in its negotiation of the tension between minority identity-based models and highly flexible rights-based definitions of disability.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, cuts to welfare and aid budgets, long-term unemployment and poverty have accentuated the economic disparities and social inequalities that already existed for the majority of people with disabilities. In this context, the definition of “disability”, from a legal-administrative point of view, is highly politicised and hotly contested. In the United Kingdom, for example, the former general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, Brendan Barber, identified an “ideological austerity” in his address to the 2012 Disabled Workers Conference. The narrative framework through which the government and media were choosing to construct disability was not, he suggested, merely a convenient form of rhetoric for justifying financial cuts to disability budgets, but it was, in itself, an act of aggression and violence. Barber pointed to a “dichotomy between rhetoric and reality” in the UK government’s promotion of the “language of fairness” alongside the perpetuation of “demeaning myths about workshy scroungers” (Association). From “bedroom taxes” to disability benefits, the question of whether a person is deemed “disabled” or indeed “disabled enough” to qualify in an official capacity often makes a very direct impact on his or her material living conditions and quality of life.

Yet, despite this recent economic and administrative policing of the boundaries of disability, in the last two decades there has been a rapid expansion in both legal and popular conceptions of what “disabled” might mean. This is, in part, linked to the broad definitions of disability established in legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which was passed in 1990 (and is discussed further in Chapter Two). This landmark act put forward a rights-based model of disability; it recognised the socially constructed dimensions of physical, cognitive and sensory disabilities and extended existing civil rights legislation by declaring that there are certain essential and inalienable rights that people with disabilities share with all other human beings. Disability is understood in the act as an impairment that limits at least one life activity, or is perceived as doing so. The ADA employs a wide-ranging definition of disability in which shared rights between all citizens, rather than distinct minority identities, are emphasised. The more recent 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities seeks to extend this rights-based approach on an international scale.

This widening of the legal definitions of disability is connected to a demographic explosion in the number of people with disabilities, a trend that looks set to be maintained as life expectancies increase. The World Health Organisation’s “World Report on Disability” (2011) estimates the number of people with disabilities around the world at one billion, about 17 per cent of the global population. As the baby boomer generation ages in the west, there is an increasing number of people for whom the idea that everyone is “temporarily able-bodied” (TAB) or not yet disabled, has a powerful personal resonance. Like the rights-based legislation, activist labels such as “temporarily able-bodied” suggest a democratisation of disability: being disabled, or having the potential to become disabled, is an aspect of identity and embodiment that all human beings share. Unlike the categories of race and gender, disability is fluid: a person can become disabled suddenly, temporarily, and at any time in their lives. Disabilities can be invisible and most disabilities are acquired over the course of a lifetime rather than from birth. If we all occupy a position on a multidimensional gradient of ability, some of the linguistic distinctions between “disabled” and “non-disabled” become less certain; the critic Mark Osteen, for example, argues that they are often arbitrary (2). As age-related disabilities become incorporated into the category, the prevalence and perceived relevance of disability issues and identification looks set to expand even further.

These universalising legal and social definitions are also evident in literary and cultural studies of disability. Recent scholarly works, for example, explore scars, obesity, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease under the banner of cultural disability studies criticism. The “neurodiversity” movement provides a striking example of the impact of the changing conceptions and growing public awareness of certain disabilities: this progressive social and political campaign seeks to bring together and represent a variety of atypical cognitive styles and neurological differences, including autism, intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, and schizophrenia (Antonetta; Baker). New conceptions of neurodiversity have, in turn, led to the analysis of diverse texts on these topics, which were traditionally viewed as entirely separate and perhaps not even as about disability at all, alongside each other. Criticism of the so-called “neuro-novel” genre, for example, discusses topics from Asperger Syndrome to post-traumatic stress disorder (Gaedtke).

This flexible view of disability also extends to some recent conceptions of the field itself. Disability theory has been put in dialogue with gender and feminist theories, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonial studies. In asserting the importance of these “intersectional” approaches, scholars argue that disability studies has important insights for better understanding a huge range of identities and different forms of cultural production. For Davis, the person with disabilities has the potential to become “the ultimate example, the universal image, the modality through whose knowing the postmodern subject can theorize and act” (“Introduction” xvii). These examples pose questions about the definition of “disability”, but also of “disability studies” as a discipline. Intersectional, interdisciplinary approaches can cause difficulties in practical, methodological and pedagogical terms: provoking debates about the location of the field in relation to academic institutions and activist movements, who teaches it, and which texts are included in the ever-evolving canon of disability theory and literature. As Bérubé suggests, “it does not seem coincidental that the potential universalization of the field of study should be accompanied by fresh emphases on the potential universalization of disability” (“Afterword: If I Should Live So Long” 338).

For other scholars and activists, this highly malleable view of disability, and the range of the field itself, risks diminishing the power of disability as a political, social, and critical category. If disability is understood in universal terms, as affecting or potentially affecting all bodies, then how can people with disabilities demarcate and celebrate a distinct collective identity? A collective conception of identity is strategically important in terms of disability activism. As Siebers argu...