The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  Thus began his—and my—adventures with Rowling’s plots, and Jamie’s fascination with the intricacies of plotting. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets posed a challenge to him, because, as we learn during Harry’s confrontation with Voldemort’s younger self, Tom Riddle, most of the action in the novel is attributable to the fact that Voldemort has placed Harry’s schoolmate Ginny Weasley under the “Imperius Curse,” thereby forcing her to act as his puppet. The plot of the third installment, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is still more demanding, because its denouement depends on a dizzying series of reversals in which we learn that the wizard suspected of numerous murders (as well as the betrayal of Harry’s parents to Voldemort), Sirius Black, is entirely innocent, whereas the pet rat of Harry’s close friend Ron Weasley, “Scabbers,” is in fact the wizard Peter Pettigrew, who has been hiding out for thirteen years to evade capture for the crimes for which he had framed Black. Number four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, introduces us to the internal machinations of the Ministry of Magic; we learn that there are rival factions within the ministry, and that a senior official’s son was one of Voldemort’s acolytes. Voldemort reappears in human form at the end of that narrative, thanks to the ministrations of ministry apparatchiks and the fugitive Peter Pettigrew, and thereby sets the stage for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is devoted to the beginnings of a renewed civil war within the wizarding world. In the penultimate installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Hogwarts’s sage headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, serves as Rowling’s narratorial double as he walks Harry through his investigations into Tom Riddle’s childhood, Riddle’s obsession with genealogical purity, and his eventual transformation into Lord Voldemort.

  It was astonishing to me that the vast legions of Rowling’s readers now included my intellectually disabled child, a child who wasn’t expected to be capable of following a plot more complicated than that of Chicken Little. And here’s what was really stunning: Jamie remembered plot details over thousands of pages even though I read the books to him at night, just before he went to bed, six or seven pages at a time. Narrative has been a memory-enhancing device for some time now, ever since bards made a living by chanting family genealogies and cataloguing the ships that laid siege to Troy. But it took Jamie and me eight years to finish all seven novels of this young-adult Proust sequence, and Jamie retained plot details over all that time. This, I remember thinking, is just ridiculous.

  As for me, I was charmed by Rowling’s insistence that the world of magic is also a world of petty bureaucracy and qualifying exams, a world administered by a school in which brilliant professors are hounded from their jobs merely because they are werewolves, and a world in which students experience the ineffable and the inexplicable while they engage in the routine business of scratching out essays—on parchment, with quills, no less—on the History of Magic and the intricacies of Herbology, Potions, Transfiguration, Charms, and the “soft” elective, Muggle Studies (which presents nonmagical peoples, “Muggles,” from the Muggle point of view). Jamie was charmed by all of this, too, even if he didn’t understand all the ironies involved in depicting the world of magic as a world like our own, in which witches and wizards are more likely to cite the statutes of the Department of International Magical Cooperation or the proper standards for cauldron thickness than a passage from The Tempest. But time after time after time, he bolted upright in bed, exclaiming, “So that’s why Ginny Weasley was opening the Chamber of Secrets!” and “Wait a minute, Sirius Black is innocent!” And every time Jamie had an epiphany about Rowling’s plots, I knew that he’d had an epiphany about narrative.

  Sirius Black’s innocence is no trivial matter. As his story unfolds and as later volumes make increasingly explicit, we learn an Important Life Lesson—namely, that the people in charge are often capricious, clueless, and cruel. Jamie could have been horrified by this, but he wasn’t. Instead, he began to ask about things like “innocence” and “justice.” So Martha Nussbaum, in Poetic Justice, gets at this critical question by way of Charles Dickens, and Jamie Bérubé gets at it by way of J. K. Rowling—so what? One’s a prolific novelist who writes triple-deckers packed with plot twists and idiosyncratic characters, and the other is a pop-cultural phenomenon with an enthusiastic American readership and a line of products—A Christmas Carol chief among them—that has spawned all manner of spin-offs and tie-ins. Both are seductive tale-tellers, and both have had their snooty detractors.

  One aspect of Rowling’s work has led Jamie to wonder just what it means to be autonomous, though he doesn’t use that word. The Imperius Curse is bad enough, but when you’re faced with dark wizards who falsely claim that they followed Voldemort only because they were under the Imperius spell, you’ve got a conundrum on your hands. The comic version of this conundrum (Rowling tends to explore justice and autonomy by way of comic subplots as well) is provided by the compulsive overachiever Hermione Granger, who takes it into her head to form the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) in order to free the house-elves from their lives of ceaseless service to wealthy wizard families. Hermione refuses to acknowledge, however, that the house-elves believe that their lives of ceaseless service are right and just, and that Hermione’s attempts to “free” them are a profound insult. The house-elves thereby pose substantial questions: What does it mean to be acting under one’s own power? How is one to know when one is not acting in one’s best interest? Is “happiness” a sufficient criterion for determining an individual’s quality of life (here as in Brave New World, with its endless supply of soma), or should something less subjective, like “flourishing,” be preferred instead?

  A critical index of Jamie’s increasing sophistication as a reader was that he became increasingly capable of (and delighted by) making thematic connections that enrich his understanding of his other favorite narratives. In the course of our reading of Half-Blood Prince, we came upon an extended flashback/exposition in which the young Professor Dumbledore visits eleven-year-old Tom Riddle in the orphanage in order to inform him that he is a wizard and extend him an invitation to Hogwarts. Jamie gasped at Tom’s arrogant reaction to Dumbledore’s invitation, and, despite his fatigue, stayed awake for another couple of pages. But before we got to that point, I read the following passage: “The orphans, Harry saw, were all wearing the same kind of grayish tunic. They looked reasonably well-cared for, but there was no denying that this was a grim place in which to grow up” (268). I decided to say a few words about the orphanage, and about Harry’s odd, complex moment of sympathy for the friendless boy who grows up to become Voldemort. “Did Harry have a happy childhood when he was growing up?” I asked. Jamie shook his head no. “He had the Dursleys,” he said. I pointed out that Harry and Voldemort are similar in that they grow up without parents, and that the kids in the orphanages are there because they have no parents either. I added that Jamie might remember the orphanage in the film Like Mike, which was in the “heavy rotation” section of Jamie’s DVD collection for a while.

  “Or Free Willy,” Jamie suggested. “Yes, that’s right,” I said with some surprise. “Free Willy is also about a kid who is growing up without parents, and who has foster parents, and he has trouble getting used to his new home.”

  “Or Rookie of the Year,” Jamie said. “Not exactly,” I replied. “In Rookie of the Year Henry has his mother, but his mother’s boyfriend is a creep, and we don’t know where his father went before he was born.”

  “Star Wars too. There’s Luke,” Jamie said. “Good one! Great example!” I cried. Perfect, in fact. Star Wars is like a class reunion of the West’s major mythological motifs.

  “Mrs. Doubtfire,” Jamie offered. “Nope, that’s about parents who are divorced and live in different houses,” I said. “But still, in Mrs. Doubtfire the father misses his kids and wants to see them, so he dresses up as a nanny.”

  “What about Babe?” Jamie asked.

  “Oh yes, that’s a very good example,�
�� I told him. “Babe has no parents, and that’s why he is so happy when Fly agrees to be like his mother.”

  “And Rex is like his father,” Jamie added. “And Ferdinand the duck is like his brother.”

  Why, yes, Ferdinand is like his brother. This had never occurred to me before. But who knew that Jamie was thinking, all this time, about the family configurations in these movies? And who knew that Jamie knew that so many unhappy families, human and pig, are alike?

  Jamie and I have revisited Babe many times since: he now understands the plot, and we’ve talked often about whether it is right and just to eat animals, indispensable or otherwise. Jamie isn’t giving up his sausage and bacon, by any means, but he now asks where all his food comes from and how it is made. Thus does the analysis of one narrative produce an endless series of cascading and overlapping narratives. Of course, Jamie is not the first person to remark that many compelling narratives, from Moses to Romulus and Remus to Great Expectations, from Harry Potter to Luke Skywalker to Bruce Wayne, involve the stories of abject yet powerful orphans. But I’m simply glad that he’s in on the conversation. For our species’ long-running obsession with narratives about orphans is, in part, the sign of our inability to stop wondering about our beginnings, and about the narrative problem of how to begin; likewise, as Frank Kermode argued in The Sense of an Ending, we tell stories partly because we know we are going to die. So it makes every kind of sense that in reading and rereading the saga of Harry Potter, Jamie has become more articulate about his own origins (as a “baby,” a “toddler,” and a “kid,” matching each of these terms to specific eras, like 1993–1995 for “toddler”) and more capable of understanding death—the deaths of characters, of family friends, and of his grandparents. The difference between Jamie’s mute bewilderment at the death of his maternal grandfather in 2004 and his somber acceptance of my mother’s death in 2013 (when he was emotionally mature enough to visit her in her final days, banter with her, and feed her some “smashed” potatoes) is not simply a function of time; it is also a function of narrative, and of Jamie’s understanding of the parameters of narrative.

  ✴ ✴ ✴

  But my children, adept narrative theorists though they be, are not my only inspiration for this book. This project is also informed by years of conversations with colleagues in disability studies, my 2013 seminar on narrative and intellectual disability at the School for Criticism and Theory, and two wholly unexpected encounters that subtly but decisively widened the parameters of this study.

  The first encounter happened at the 2011 Modern Language Association convention in Los Angeles, and in retrospect is merely amusing—though at the time it seemed like the stuff of professors’ anxiety dreams. I was on a panel titled “Narrative and Intellectual Disability,” chaired by Rachel Adams. Since that was the working title of this project as of 2011, I thought it would make sense to try to spell out my ideas for this book, and return to matters I had not taken up since the 2004 MLA conference on disability studies hosted by Emory University. Additionally, I was horribly overdue on my contribution to the Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies, and was hoping that writing the MLA paper would get me jump-started on the article. I titled my paper “Disabled Narrative,” and traces of it survive in this book. I was trying to get at the question of how narrative irony works when it involves a character with an intellectual disability, a character who is rendered explicitly as someone who is incapable of understanding the story he or she inhabits. I noted that Steinbeck marks Lennie in this way from Of Mice and Men’s opening scene:

  Lennie looked timidly over to him. “George?”

  “Yeah, what ya want?”

  “Where we goin’, George?”

  The little man jerked down the brim of his hat and scowled over at Lennie. “So you forgot that awready, did you? I gotta tell you again, do I? Jesus Christ, you’re a crazy bastard.”

  “I forgot,” Lennie said softly. “I tried not to forget. Honest to God I did, George.” (4)

  And just as Lennie does not understand where he is going or why, so too will he not understand what is going to happen to him in the book’s final pages; in that sense, his intellectual disability provides the structure for the narrative irony, and the narrative irony defines the novel. Lennie knows not what he does, and we know he knows not what he does. But I mentioned Of Mice and Men only in passing, opening instead with Benjy Compson of The Sound and the Fury and proceeding to a comparison between Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark and Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (this was one reason I was having trouble framing this argument for a volume on American literature), because—as I will show in chapter 3—Haddon provides an ingenious (and quite moving) solution to the problem of writing a novel in the voice of a character who (initially) does not understand the narrative he is in, whereas Moon has to skirt that problem by giving us a second level of narrative focalized through characters who do not have autism and who can explain what is at stake in the unfolding of the narrative told by the character who does have autism.

  At the last minute, one of my fellow panelists had to pull out of the convention, and Rachel Adams informed us that Rob Spirko would substitute instead, with a paper titled “The Human Spectrum: Human Fiction and Autism.” Rob preceded me on the program—and proceeded to deliver a paper about The Speed of Dark and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, making many of the points and citing many of the passages I had hoped to highlight in my paper. As I listened to Rob, I toyed with the idea of taking the podium and saying simply, “My paper is what Rob said,” but just then, he made an offhand reference to the “Rashomon-like” narrative sequence in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. I snapped to attention: this seemed to me to be something worth discussing. I had not written anything about Martian Time-Slip in my paper, but I had recently read it and was still trying to figure out what to make of its extraordinary strangeness. And I was thrilled to be able to discuss it at a conference with Rob Spirko, who has worked on disability and science fiction for some time.

  I did wind up delivering most of my original paper; Rob’s arguments and mine did not overlap completely. But I threw in some extemporaneous remarks about how the narrative sequences in chapters 10 and 11 of Martian Time-Slip are not, in fact, Rashomon-like. If they were, they would involve four characters telling the same story from drastically different perspectives, narrating significantly different sequences of events, such that the very idea of “the same story” becomes untenable. But they don’t. Instead, as I will show in detail in chapter 2, they open by telling the same story almost word for word, and then proceed into disturbing fantasias that cannot be attributed to any one character, even though each character, the following day, feels the aftereffects of the sequence as a whole. The sequence is not merely “about” the perspective of a character with an intellectual disability; it renders intellectual disability in the form of a disabled textuality that cannot be attributed simply to any one character’s mental operations.

  And when I realized that, thanks to the casual remark of a last-minute-replacement speaker giving a fifteen-minute paper at the MLA convention, I realized that I had a critical piece of my argument, a way of talking about intellectual disability and narrative that did not begin and end with the discussion of whether X character has Y disability. I have often remarked, in the intervening years, that I am writing this book simply as a way of getting more people to read Martian Time-Slip. It would be a worthy goal in itself.

  As for the second encounter: to say that it was “wholly unexpected,” as I have done, is actually an understatement. It was pretty much the last thing in the world I might have imagined. It involved a whimsical decision to join Facebook (after years of steadfast, principled resistance) and, relatedly, to go to the fortieth anniversary reunion of my sixth-grade class (not a happy place for me when I was ten, but I thought that the details of tween angst of 1972 were not worth recalling in 2012). My former classmates, it turn
s out, have a Facebook page “dedicated to all the members of that class who endured and survived the 6th grade at the hands of the mercurial Mrs. Policastro.” Etta Policastro was legendary, not just in the school but in the entire district. She was fierce; she was a martinet; she wore the standard-issue Permanent Hair Bun; and she stopped just this side of corporal punishment. And I was one of her two favorite students.

  Within a few days of joining Facebook, I was hailed by Mrs. Policastro’s other favorite student, one Phyllis Anderson, née Phyllis Eisenson—someone I had not thought about in almost forty years. It was quite clear who Mrs. P’s favorites were: she kept a chart on the wall of all the books we had read (Phyllis led, I was second), and late in the year, after our citywide reading and math scores came back, she announced to the class that Phyllis and I had scored at the twelfth-grade reading level. This surely endeared us to our peers, as did Mrs. P’s decision to cast me and Phyllis as the leads in the French play. (One of my male classmates resented this arrangement so much that he kept a tally of how many mistakes I made in each rehearsal, and over the months of rehearsals never failed to share this information with me. Another passed a note to Phyllis and signed my name to it. Moloch only knows what it said. Such were the details of tween angst in 1972.) For all that, Phyllis and I never spoke a word to each other, at least not in English. I simply assumed that she had her own circle of friends, and I was astonished to learn, forty years later, that her only friend in the class moved away that year, and that she had made a list of New Year’s resolutions for 1972 that included the determination to ignore the class teasers.

  OK, I thought, so that’s what sixth grade was like: you’ve got two shy, bookish kids who feel ostracized by their peers, who then become the very visible favorites of the teacher everyone fears and despises. That’s not merely the basis for a friendship. That’s the basis for an entire after-school TV movie. And in the course of striking up a conversation with this person forty years after graduation from PS 32 Queens, I happened to mention Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, about which I had just been reading; 2012 was the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, and in 1972 at least half of our cohort had read it. Phyllis was of course (or so I imagined) Meg Murry, the very smart girl with the long hair and prominent glasses. This rudimentary identification was complicated a bit by the fact that I identified more with Meg—with her sense of isolation, helplessness, and vulnerability above all—than with any male character in the book, and by the fact that I did not stop to think that I might be inadvertently saying to my former classmate, “I remember you—you were the girl with glasses and what’s more, everybody thought you were a weirdo.” Which is kind of a rude thing to say to someone you’ve never spoken to, especially after forty years.