The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  Accordingly, I do not see any great peril to the project of disability studies in using Quayson’s work to interrogate the functions of narrative. On the contrary, acknowledging that certain narratives are not functioning in the way readers expect them to offers two advantages: first, in pursuing Quayson’s suggestion that the final dimension of aesthetic nervousness is that between the reader and the text, we can more adequately account for the readerly experience of trying to navigate texts whose formal experiments are predicated on intellectual disability, such as The Sound and the Fury, Martian Time-Slip, Pale Fire, or Chris Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. Those texts are difficult, as I will explain in more detail, precisely because some features of narrative have been disabled, such that the text prevents, defers, or eludes readerly comprehension—though I will not go so far as to say that these texts disable readers. Second, we can get at the question of how readers expect texts to behave, reanimating one of the central questions of reader-response criticism by way of disability studies and challenging the aggressively normalizing understanding of narrative (and of humans) represented by evocriticism/literary Darwinism. For now, I direct your attention to two literary texts—one clearly fictional, one impossible to classify.

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  The Woman Warrior is impossible to classify insofar as it is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but, rather, a curious hybrid of memoir, folktale, immigrant narrative, and the supernatural, where ghosts are common, rabbits sacrifice themselves, and there are two people made of gold turning the Earth on its axis. Over the decades since its publication in 1976, it has generally been understood both as a landmark in Asian American literature and as a feminist critique of women’s silencing under patriarchy, opening dazzlingly with a fearsome injunction to silence and its transgression: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). There is no question that The Woman Warrior is a landmark in Asian American literature and a feminist critique of women’s silencing under patriarchy. What is astonishing, however—and sadly underremarked—is how many of those women are . . . how to put this politely? crazy.

  I use the term “crazy” advisedly—and I use it because Kingston herself uses it. It is a brutal term (as we are about to see, Kingston does not shy away from brutal terms for intellectual disability), and it underscores the brutality of what happens to the “village crazy lady” in the book’s third section, “Shaman.” Kingston introduces her as “an inappropriate woman whom the people stoned” (92); she appears amid a scene of generalized craziness induced by the generalized madness known as war, as the Chinese villagers are “watching for Japanese airplanes that strafed the mountainsides every day” (93):

  The bombing drove people insane. They rolled on the ground, pushed themselves against it, as if the earth could open a door for them. The ones who could not stop shaking after the danger passed would sleep in the cave. My mother explained airplanes to them as she wiggled their ears. (94)

  Unfortunately, one day “the village crazy lady put on her headdress with small mirrors” and goes to the river, singing and gamboling and behaving eccentrically. The villagers decide that she is signaling the airplanes to strike; when she is confronted and charged with being a spy, she ill-advisedly answers in the affirmative: “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have great powers. I can make the sky rain fire. Me. I did that. Leave me alone or I will do it again’” (95). The villagers respond by battering her head with rocks and stones until she stops breathing.

  The Woman Warrior contains many crazy ladies, from Crazy Mary to Moon Orchid to Pee-A-Nah, most of whom are driven into incoherence and madness by the profound injustices that circumscribe their lives. As the narrator remarks toward the end of the book, “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me” (189). It is a testimony to my own obliviousness to disability issues prior to my introduction to disability studies that I managed to teach The Woman Warrior in four different classes before I realized that it is a text about intellectual disability. Indeed, in the Moon Orchid episode, Kingston explicitly construes intellectual disability as a relation to narrative. The relation is made painfully obvious when Brave Orchid, the narrator’s mother, explains that “the difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over” (159);12 but it is manifest much earlier, when Moon Orchid first begins her painful descent into madness and incoherence. In its initial stages, her disability is marked by her growing inability to understand what constitutes an appropriate narrative—which is also an index of the degree to which she is becoming an inappropriate woman. For under ordinary circumstances, there is no need to follow one’s family members around the house, narrating their every movement and conversation. But Moon Orchid does exactly that, and at one point the text doubles her annoying running commentary:

  The child married to a husband who did not speak Chinese translated for him, “Now she’s saying that I’m taking a machine off the shelf and that I’m attaching two metal spiders to it. And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically. Now she says I’m hunting for something in the refrigerator and—ha!—I’ve found it. I’m taking out butter—‘cow oil.’ ‘They eat a lot of cow oil,’ she is saying.” (141)

  Moon Orchid’s niece is repeating Moon Orchid’s obsessive narrative about how the niece is beating eggs; she even repeats Moon Orchid’s “ha!” upon her discovery of the butter. But the sentence I want to focus on is “And she’s saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically.” Surely this is excessive, is it not? It is far too detailed; it is much simpler, and no less accurate, to say “she is beating the eggs” (or perhaps, in a Freudian vein, “an egg is being beaten”). But precisely in its excess, this sentence offers us a striking illustration of how intellectual disability can provide Shklovskian moments of defamiliarization. What is Moon Orchid doing here, what is Kingston doing, but laying bare the device? If Moon Orchid’s description of spiders spinning with legs intertwined renews our perception and leads us to see an eggbeater with fresh eyes, to make the stone stony (or the eggbeater eggbeater-y), then one may say that Kingston is deploying intellectual disability as the very vehicle of the literary.13

  Such moments are compelling in their own right, and should lead readers to see The Woman Warrior as a fruitful and fascinating text for disability studies. But they do not go to the question of why I am discussing The Woman Warrior under the rubric of “disability as motive.” To understand why we should see Kingston’s unclassifiable text in the terms I set forth for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and A Wrinkle in Time, we need to turn to the book’s final section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” and to its depictions of the silent girl and the “retarded” boy.

  First, our narrator (who seems to bear some passing resemblance to a young Maxine Hong Kingston) writes of a quiet girl in sixth grade, a girl she “hated” (174). In a scene that goes on for an excruciating seven pages, the narrator mercilessly bullies, torments, and physically assaults the girl, trying to force her to talk, calling her “stupid” (177), “dumb,” and “a plant” (180). (We are subsequently invited to surmise that the quiet girl is intellectually disabled herself. In later life, her sister and parents take care of her: “she did not have to leave the house except to go to the movies. She was supported. She was protected by her family” [182].) Not long after this encounter, the narrator gets a look at her own school record to date, and learns that “I flunked kindergarten and in first grade had no IQ—a zero IQ” (182–83). And then, later in the section, we are introduced to “a mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind” (194). He learns where Kingston’s family has its laundry business, and he decides to hang out and haunt the place. At this point, the narrative becomes as brutal as t
he narrator’s treatment of the silent girl. We read that this boy “had an enormous face” and “growled” (194). He gives toys to children: “‘Where do you get the toys?’ I asked. ‘I . . . own . . . stores,’ he roared, one word at a time, thick tongued” (195). “Sometimes,” Kingston writes, “he chased us—his fat arms out to the side; his fat fingers opening and closing; his legs stiff like Frankenstein’s monster, like the mummy dragging its foot” (195). Even his sitting is monstrous, so threatening that it induces the narrator to give up the physical disability—a limp—she had begun to affect:

  Many of the storekeepers invited sitting in their stores, but we did not have sitting because the laundry was hot and because it was outside Chinatown. He sweated; he panted, the stubble rising and falling on his fat neck and chin. He sat on two large cartons that he brought with him and stacked one on top of the other. He said hello to my mother and father, and then, balancing his heavy head, he lowered himself carefully onto his cartons and sat. My parents allowed this. They did not chase him out or comment about how strange he was. I stopped placing orders for toys. I didn’t limp anymore; my parents would only figure that this zombie and I were a match.

  I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect. (195)

  Nor does it help to try to ignore the intruder: “My back felt sick because it was toward the monster who gave away toys. His lumpishness was sending out germs that would lower my IQ. His leechiness was drawing IQ points out of the back of my head” (196).

  Kingston deliberately heightens her narrator’s revulsion, but this is difficult material nonetheless; however over-the-top hyperbolic this revulsion may be, it is grounded in a logic of abjection that will be all too familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the social stigma of intellectual disability. And yet this revulsion is crucial to the narrative of the text, not because this man is made to serve as a figure for something else but precisely because he isn’t. The narrator is disturbed by this man, and disturbed all the more by the belief—unwarranted, as it turns out—that her parents are considering him as a potential son-in-law. Clearly, the writer who fears becoming the crazy woman or the village idiot would be particularly threatened by the mentally retarded man who draws IQ points from the back of her head. Perhaps the mentally retarded man is even more threatening than the crazy ladies. Certain forms of intellectual disability render people incapable of giving an account of themselves (and I will return to this problem in chapter 3, in my discussion of narrative irony and self-awareness); such people will never come back to themselves after their bout of madness has served its narrative function, as does King Lear’s, to such devastating effect. People with significant intellectual disabilities may not even have the capacity to understand what has happened to Lear, just as they do not have the capacity to proclaim that nothing will come of nothing, or to understand the multiple ironies that ripple outward from that utterance. They haunt narrative, as Kingston’s retarded man haunts the laundry and Kingston herself, with the insistence on a form of human embodiment that cannot narrate itself—it can only be narrated. And they haunt all narrators with the possibility that perhaps they too, someday, will be unable to tell a coherent story.

  Mindedness is so obviously a necessary condition for self-representation and narration that it should be no surprise to find narratives in which various forms of damaged mindedness serve neither as moral barometers of individual persons nor as invitations to pity or horror but as meditations on the very possibility of narrative representation. It is no coincidence that Maxine Hong Kingston’s narrator finally explodes at her mother, explaining and justifying herself—“I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I’m not, I’m not retarded” (201)—in response to the “mentally retarded” boy’s very presence in the text. By this point, the text has firmly, insistently established a relation between intellectual disability and speech, as if the fear of the one necessarily produces the other, as if one begins to narrate partly in order to show—to show to others and to oneself—that one is neither crazy nor retarded. Here, then, the aversion to intellectual disability turns out to be the very motive for Kingston’s narrative: this is why Kingston’s narrator is telling us what her mother told her not to tell anyone.

  By contrast, in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, intellectual disability is not only the motive for the narrative but its very predicate: from the novel’s opening pages, it subtends every aspect of the life and times of Michael K. He is born with a harelip, which almost immediately comes to signify a more pervasive and character-defining condition of disability:

  Because of his disfigurement and because his mind was not quick, Michael was taken out of school after a short trial and committed to the protection of Huis Norenius in Faure, where at the expense of the state he spent the rest of his childhood in the company of variously other afflicted and unfortunate children learning the elements of reading, writing, counting, sweeping, scrubbing, bedmaking, dishwashing, basketweaving, woodwork and digging. (4)

  From Huis Norenius to the work camp Jakkalsdrif to the medical facility in which Michael K spends part 2 of the novel, the novel structures the life and times of Michael K in relation to institutionalization: after the death of Michael’s mother early in the book, the plot, if we can call it that, hangs entirely on the question of whether Michael will manage to evade the various state institutions that seem to be all that remains of the fabric of South African society.

  It is very tempting to read Michael K as a kind of Homo sacer supercrip, the minimal man whose story is narratable only because he manages to escape incarceration twice, eking out a bare existence not on his wits—his mind is not quick—but on his skills as a gardener and as a freelance hunger artist. On that reading—which the book encourages explicitly in the person of the doctor who narrates part 2 and implicitly in the trajectory of the book as a whole—the climactic moment of Michael’s narrative appears in this extended passage in the final pages of the novel, in which Michael finally appears capable of a synoptic reading of his own life and times, a vision of the carceral society in toto:

  At least, he thought, at least I have not been clever, and come back to Sea Point full of stories of how they beat me in the camps till I was thin as a rake and simple in the head. I was mute and stupid in the beginning, I will be mute and stupid at the end. There is nothing to be ashamed of in being simple. They were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else. Now they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people with big heads and people with little heads, camps for people with no visible means of support, camps for people chased off the land, camps for people they find living in storm-water drains, camps for street girls, camps for people who can’t add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home, camps for people who live in the mountains and blow up bridges in the night. Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. (182)

  This sounds very much indeed like a summation, a what-it-has-all-meant litany placed emphatically at the end of a narrative in which it has been enough to be out of the camps, to have avoided every form of biopower, and to have abjured one’s humanity altogether in so doing: “What a pity,” Michael thinks earlier, “that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast. . . . A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to” (99). The camps themselves have been predicated on the detection and administration of intellectual disability: they were locking up simpletons before they locked up anyone else.

  There is nothing wrong with such a reading, of course, unless one leaps from it to the conclusion to which Quayson comes in his chapter on Coetzee—that Michael K simply has autism, and his autism is registered in the text by his silence. This, I think, constitutes a needlessly red
uctive understanding of Michael K’s self-description as “mute and stupid,” and a symptom of the pervasive symptomology in disability studies whereby the practice of reading becomes an exercise in finding evidence for the imposition of diagnostic categories. (I will return to this dynamic in my readings of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which invites that kind of diagnostic reading, and Martian Time-Slip, whose text is filled with characters diagnosing themselves and each other.) But there is more to be said about Michael K’s muteness and stupidity. It is not merely a question of whether those characteristics can be read as symptoms of a condition of disability; it is also a question of what they do to the fabric of the narrative as well as the social fabric of a carceral South Africa. To put this another way, Michael K poses something of a problem for plot and something of a problem for the rendering of interiority: there are passages in Life and Times of Michael K that approach the condition of nonnarrative. What is one to do with “a spell of unemployment which he spent lying on his bed looking at his hands” (4), or the “long periods when he sat staring at his hands, his mind blank” (33), or the “spells when he simply stood or knelt before his handiwork, his mind elsewhere” (100)? When Michael leaves Prince Albert and goes off to live in the mountains, his life and times approach the condition of narrative absolute zero: “Now, in front of his cave, he sometimes locked his fingers behind his head, closed his eyes, and emptied his mind, wanting nothing, looking forward to nothing” (69). How does one tell a story that has no temporality and no desire, where disability becomes a motive force that drains the narrative of motive?14