“The island is not a story in itself,” said Foe gently, laying a hand on my knee. “We can bring it to life only by setting it within a larger story. By itself it is no better than a waterlogged boat drifting day after day in an empty ocean till one day, humbly and without commotion, it sinks.” (117)
The boat does sink, just after Susan and Foe sink into sleep at the end of part 3. “Who will dive into the wreck?” Susan asks on that final night, referring to the shipwreck that marooned Cruso and Friday but also to the shipwreck that will constitute the conclusion of Foe in part 4. “On the island I told Cruso it should be Friday, with a rope about his middle for safety. But if Friday cannot tell us what he sees, is Friday in my story any more than a figuring (or pre-figuring) of another diver?” (142).
Yes, Friday cannot tell us what he sees. That much we know. But, like Manfred Steiner, he can draw—and perhaps, like Manfred, he can produce odd textual effects in the narrative that swirls all around him. Foe is festooned with Martian Time-Slip-esque repetitions, hiccups, and glitches, beginning with its opening sentences, which present themselves in quotes, as reported speech:
“At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard” (5).
Presumably these words are addressed to Foe, though this does not become clear until the final page of section 1, on which Foe is finally addressed directly (45). And then a few pages later, we read this, in doubled quotations, as reported speech of reported speech:
“‘Then at last I could row no further. My hands were raw, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard and began to swim towards your island.’” (11)
In the enigmatic fourth and final section of the novel, an unnamed narrator twice enters a house (the second time, it bears a plaque reading Daniel Defoe, Author) in which lie the bodies of “a woman or a girl” on the landing and Foe and Susan in bed; “Friday, in his alcove, has turned to the wall” (155). The narrator finds a manuscript in a box: “Bringing the candle nearer, I read the first words of the tall, looping script: ‘Dear Mr Foe, At last I could row no further’” (155). The text within the text then pulls the narrator under:
With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slip overboard. Gripped by the current, the boat bobs away, drawn south toward the realm of the whales and eternal ice. Around me on the waters are the petals cast by Friday.
I strike out toward the dark cliffs of the island; but something dull and heavy gropes at my leg, something caresses my arm. I am in the great bed of seaweed: the fronds rise and fall with the swell.
With a sigh, with barely a splash, I duck my head under the water. (155–56)
At this point one almost expects Arnie Kott to put on some Mozart—though perhaps Susan, Foe, and Friday would hear only a hideous racket of screeches and shrieks, like the convulsions of corpses.
This is not the only series of glitches in Foe; part 3 opens with Susan Barton making her way into Foe’s quarters, noting that “the staircase was dark and mean” (113), and part 4 opens with the enigmatic narrator making his/her way into a house, noting that “the staircase is dark and mean” (153). In the first house-entering of part 4, the narrator writes, “On the landing I stumble over a body . . . a woman or a girl . . . she weighs no more than a sack of straw” (153); in the second s/he writes, “On the landing I stumble over the body, light as straw, of a woman or a girl” (155). In the first section, Susan and Foe are desiccated corpses, their skin “dry as paper” (153); in the second, they “lie face to face, her head in the crook of his arm” (155) . . . until the narrator (with a sigh, with barely a splash) finds a shipwreck in which lie “Susan Barton and her dead captain, fat as pigs in their white nightclothes, their limbs extending stiffly from their trunks, their hands, puckered from long immersion, held out in blessing” (157). Both sections end, appropriately, with the opening of Friday’s mouth; the second version announces that “this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday” (157).
I submit that J. M. Coetzee could not have done much more to glitch his text, to repeatedly glitch the text of Foe, to signify on his text’s metafictionality by way of repetitions and glitches, or to say nearly the same thing a number of times. More important, this strategy provides an ending (or endings) in which a Nabokovian number of possible novels begins to proliferate at a geometric rate, all of which ultimately establish Friday as the unconscious presiding genius of all the other characters’ toils—as well as the toils of the conjurer who has called all of these beings into the world. Only one question remains, for Foe and for this chapter. Why? Why should there be an intimate, if sometimes elusive, relation between metafictional self-reflexivity and the fictional depiction and deployment of intellectual disability?
Needless to say, the relationship is not a necessary one: many of the narratives in the world of literature, from Harry Potter to Of Mice and Men to The Secret Agent, manage to make thematic or formal use of intellectual disability without entangling themselves in bewildering disability chronotopes or metafictional Möbius strips. And yet when such narratives do entangle themselves in bewildering disability chronotopes, they open onto stunning spatiotemporal vistas that exceed ordinary human comprehension (and can be accessed only by extraordinary human comprehension); when they entangle themselves in metafictional Möbius strips, they open onto profound examinations of the very nature and purpose of self-consciousness.
At this point a literal-minded reader, undeterred by my warnings about literalism, might object that in this chapter the most heterogeneous conditions are yoked by sheer argument together: the autism of Christopher Boone is not the madness of Don Quixote or the feigned madness of Henry IV or the putative madness of Charles Kinbote, and none of the above are equivalent to Friday’s condition, which consists of nothing more than the presumption of intellectual disability. To this charge I happily plead guilty, because (once more with feeling) I am not diagnosing these characters, and therefore not claiming that they exhibit similar symptoms under a general heading of Disabled Self-Reflexivity Syndrome. I am claiming instead that their narratives operate in similar ways, and that their fictional disabilities are the key to those operations. I could say the same about Manfred Steiner, but I think his textual operations are so closely tied to an intellectual disability chronotope, rather than to textual self-awareness, that I decided that Martian Time-Slip would work better in juxtaposition with The Sound and the Fury. But the same principle holds for those novels, as well: I am not speculating about the attributes of literary characters. I am calling attention to the operations of literary texts.
And when the operations of literary texts involve implicit and explicit commentary or meditations on the operations of literary texts, I am tempted to conclude—and therefore I will—that there seems to be a nontrivial relation between the kind of self-consciousness necessary for metarepresentation and the kind of textual self-consciousness, if we can call it that, necessary for metafiction. In other words, the text is reflecting on its own operations in a kind of mimicry of our own self-consciousness. That, in turn, is why some exercises in textual self-reflexivity can be cloying or trivial or merely cute, just as there are actual humans whose self-consciousness is employed in grandstanding or navel-gazing or staring in the bathroom mirror saying their name again and again. But when textual self-awareness implicates or is implicated by intellectual disability, then we are dealing not only with a different kind of formal textual experiment (where the narrative is “warped” and the dominant protocols of representation are “short-circuited” by a character or group of characters) but also with a degree of moral seriousness that is not to be found in ordinary fun-house metafiction. Just as intellectually disabled narrative opens a window onto a reimagining of the parameters of narrative as such, so too does intellect
ually disabled self-consciousness open a window onto a reinterpretation of self-consciousness as such. And when it does, readers should (if they are reading disability as disability) keep in mind the “ethical core” of disability, the omnipresent and overwhelming question of how intellectually disabled literary characters—even the most metafictional ones—compel us to think about our social relations with humans of all varieties and capacities.
I stress this point not because I find myself profoundly moved by Foe or Don Quixote; I do not. Rather, I want to try to counter, at least to some degree, the standard critical response to self-reflexive metafictional texts. Rabinowitz’s reading of Pale Fire is exemplary, because it goes well beyond “I can’t get into the characters,” into “The distance between the actual audience and the narrative audience prevents me from getting into the characters”—and because this reading has a good deal of merit. Pale Fire, Rabinowitz suggests, “makes us more aware of the gap between authorial and narrative audience, and hence of the novel as art, as construct. It is thus difficult to get involved in Pale Fire as narrative audience, and for many readers, including myself, the book is generally unmoving, witty and brilliant as it may be” (139).
I understand this complaint. I have heard it many times, not only from my friends and students but from my wife. (I like to tell people that we met in a twentieth-century literature class in which her favorite writer was D. H. Lawrence and mine was either André Gide or Samuel Beckett. How’s that marriage gonna work, one might wonder.)10 And it is true that it is difficult to care about the fates of characters when one is continually reminded that their own creator is not fully committed to the project of soliciting your belief in their existence even within the frame of the narrative, as when the witty but relentlessly intrusive narrator of Beckett’s Murphy advises his readers that “all the puppets in this book whinge sooner or later, except Murphy, who is not a puppet” (122). It is the rare reader who opens a new novel and says, “I hope this one has lots of playful multilingual puns, obscure literary allusions, and strange concordances—I love tracking those down.” But perhaps there is more than one way to be moved by a piece of literature, and perhaps there are metafictional gambits that do invite emotional responses from readers. Judy Boone’s letters, in Curious Incident, do at least two things: they serve, as I have argued, as the textual device by which Christopher is made aware of (and made capable of narrating) the real conditions of the narrative he inhabits. They also break your heart into little bits, should you have one. Nabokov does not aim for the same effect, though I do think it is worth mentioning that the heart of John Shade’s poem concerns the suicide of his daughter, who is so physically unattractive that she is abandoned on an ill-conceived blind date and decides as a result to take her life. Somewhere in Pale Fire’s hall of mirrors is a grieving father (if he exists, which, as a literary character, he does not) writing,
While children of her age
Were cast as elves and fairies on the stage
That she’d helped paint for the school pantomime,
My gentle girl appeared as Mother Time,
A bent charwoman with slop pail and a broom,
And like a fool I sobbed in the men’s room. (44)
But that’s not where I want to place my chips, finally, on the subject of Pale Fire. I promised, at the conclusion of the previous section, a reading of Pale Fire that obtains for all possible scenarios and goes to the heart of why any writer would explore the infinite terrain of metafiction by way of the deployment of intellectual disability. That reading pivots on Kinbote’s paean to the written word, and is worth contemplating both for itself and for its use as a key to reading even the most frivolous word games in Pale Fire:
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). (289)
This is a close analogue to, or perhaps a Zemblan translation of, Viktor Shklovsky’s treatment of “habitualization”:
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (12)
It is worth spelling out, letter by letter, why this is important, and why it is important to self-reflexive texts that involve intellectual disability.
Some years ago I took a deep breath and taught Pale Fire to undergraduates. I did so with much preparation, titling a senior seminar “Stranger Than Fiction” and warning unsuspecting students repeatedly that they would be reading things like The Confidence-Man and Richard Powers’s Prisoner’s Dilemma. By the time they got to Pale Fire, they were as accustomed to high-tech textual shenanigans as they could be—or so I believed. One day it occurred to me to ask how many of them had read Kinbote’s foreword to the volume. My heart sank: of the fifteen, only two. “We thought it was just an introduction,” said the other thirteen. “We thought the book started with the poem.”
Very well, then. In my sorrow and dismay, I upped the ante. “And how many of you read the index?”
Blank stares. There is an index?
Yes there is, I told them, flipping to it. And it is hilarious. How many you have seen the Airplane! and Naked Gun series? (Almost all.) And you know to stick around for the credits, which are full of gags and in-jokes, right? (Right.) Well, turn to page 311, just at random, and read this:
Odon, pseudonym of Donald O’Donnell, b. 1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret passage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O’Donnell, Sylvia.
The last item about the blubber-lipped cinemactress breaks the frame, serving not as an index item but as a warning to Odon from the misogynist Kinbote himself. And this is not even close to being the silliest item in the index; the entry on Kinbote, Charles, Dr., is full of howlers.
But, but, but, my students cried, how were we to know we were supposed to read the foreword and the index?
Let me put it this way, I explained in a passionate yet (I hope) not terribly loud voice: when you pass over parts of the text, assuming they are of no account, you give in to brutish routine acceptance, you undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. You assume that some of the words are just filler. You fail to be astonished at what written language is, and what it can do. You miss the fine detail of a mirror signed by Sudarg of Bokay, you miss the little variations in the glitches of Foe and Martian Time-Slip . . . all because you are not paying attention. And so life is reckoned as nothing. Your inattention devours works, clothes, furniture, your boyfriends and girlfriends, and the fear of war. Nabokov was testing you to see whether you were reading carefully, and you failed. You let him down. That is why you read every word.
Most people are nearly blind, wrote Mark Haddon in his text-about-texts, and he was right. Pale Fire deploys intellectual disability in
the service of proliferating possible novels, but it also deploys intellectual disability as an invitation to the kind of hyperattentiveness Christopher brings to every personal and textual encounter. Like Kingston’s increasingly intellectually and narratively disabled Moon Orchid saying the spiders are spinning with legs intertwined and beating the eggs electrically, Nabokov’s Kinbote is himself a vehicle for the renewal of perception, an exemplar of the capacity for literature to estrange, to make objects unfamiliar, to render people imaginable, and to displace the “normate” in every aspect of life. When you think about it that way—and you should—perhaps it becomes possible to see the value of, and even to become emotionally invested in, self-reflexive and metafictional renderings of intellectual disability.
Conclusion
Minds
In the spring of 2013, in the middle of a graduate seminar in which my students and I were working out many of the questions I have tried to pose here, suddenly a curious incident happened.
I was discussing chapters 2 and 3 of Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction. I was doing so for two reasons: one, to establish her unfortunate reliance on Simon Baron-Cohen, right down to her acceptance of his description of autism as the “most severe of all childhood psychiatric conditions” (qtd. at 7; emphasis added), a phrase that would not have looked at all out of place in Martian Time-Slip. Two, to establish what I took to be the key opening move in her argument about fiction and Theory of Mind, namely, that where there is Theory of Mind there will be novels, and where there are novels there is Theory of Mind: “The novel, in particular, is implicated with our mind-reading ability to such a degree that I do not think myself in danger of overstating anything when I say that in its currently familiar shape it exists because we are creatures with ToM” (10). (Theory of Mind is badly named, by the way—it proposes no theory of mind. It merely indicates that our minds are aware of other people’s minds, and that therefore we recognize that other people have intentions, including the intention to tell us things that are not true.) Zunshine does not explain why, if we have had Theory of Mind for tens of thousands of years, the novel in its currently familiar shape (whatever that might be, from Austen to Robbe-Grillet) took so long to appear on our biocultural landscape; but she does explain why we have only recently begun to speak of Theory of Mind:
The Secret Life of Stories Page 17
