By Amanda Tink, May 2018 Edition<\/p>\n
Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability\u00a0<\/em>by Clare Barker, Stuart Murray (editors). Cambridge University Press 280pp. Published November, 2017 ISBN 9781107458130<\/p>\n One of the high points of my life was the first time I held my very own book in my very own hands. It felt a little less substantial than the books I was reading, but I knew I\u2019d worked hard on these stories about my brother, and it was gratifying to know that it wasn\u2019t just me who found value in them. It was 1985, and I was seven and in Year Three, my first year \u2013 and the first year in Queensland primary schools \u2013 of what was then called \u2018integration\u2019.<\/p>\n A small group of blind students began attending a \u2018mainstream\u2019 primary school with a \u2018special education unit\u2019 attached, and our time at school was divided between the two in configurations that changed irregularly and without notice in accordance with policy trends we didn\u2019t know about. Even though print was written over my braille, my book wasn\u2019t shown to any other students in my class. It was, however, sent to other blind people at other schools, and I was delighted when they then felt inspired to write their own stories about themselves or their families.<\/p>\n I knew so many blind people who could write, not just children but adults too. Every week or two I received a newsletter from one or other of the state and national blindness organisations, which always included accounts from blind people of events they\u2019d attended, organised, or were planning. I constantly read and enjoyed books too, often three at a time, but there were never any blind people in those; which is to say that blind people didn\u2019t write published books, and sighted people didn\u2019t write blind characters, they wrote sighted characters who couldn\u2019t see.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until I was an adult studying disability studies that I understood the structure of the relationships between these experiences. It\u2019s known as the social model of disability, and was codified in 1975 by a group of disabled activists in the UK. In an effort to address the segregation of disabled people from each other, and from the rest of society, they restructured the language used to describe themselves. Those medical conditions that marked a body as not matching the culture\u2019s standard of \u2018normal\u2019 were labelled by doctors as \u2018a disability\u2019 or, if you had more than one, \u2018disabilities\u2019. With the medical label \u2018disability\u2019 came the branding of deficit, the isolation of being a \u2018case\u2019, and the expectation that you owed it to society to do all you could to become \u2018normal\u2019 (the medical model of disability). Disabled activists renamed those medical conditions impairments, a neutral rather than disempowering term, and used disability to define what they knew from experience to be the real problem \u2013 the social conditions that hindered the participation of impaired people in society. In short, the social model says that impaired people are disabled by society. Or, to make a comparison with gender, impairment is biological while disability is sociological.<\/p>\n Forty years have gone by since then, and the social model continuously evolves to incorporate more nuance, such as the idea that impairment, too, is socially constructed. But the shift from disability being a tool used against us, to sever us from the whole and scatter us to the wind, to being our fertile ground of connection, strength and thriving, is the core belief of this field, and distinguishes those who are doing disability studies from those who are simply studying disability.<\/p>\n A note on language: while academics from the UK are likely to use the terms impairment and disability, American academics often use disability to refer to both the biological and the social, and it is not always easy to know which they mean. This is a result of history and culture. Disability activism in the US goes back to the sixties, and has developed around the word disability. Also along cultural lines, academics from the United States usually refer to the practice of treating people with impairments as inferior to people without impairments as ableism, while academics from the UK are likely to call it disablism. Australian language is a mix of both of these, with a lingering dominance of the medical model. I follow the social model, so that\u2019s what you will read in my writing, but the people I\u2019m quoting might use different words to refer to the same thing or vice versa.<\/p>\n The usual examples of an impaired person being disabled by society include a person who uses a wheelchair being disabled by a building designer choosing to construct stairs rather than a ramp, a deaf person being disabled by a cinema choosing to not turn on the captions for a movie, or a blind person being disabled by a presenter choosing to use Powerpoints without either providing a copy of them beforehand or reading them out in real time.<\/p>\n The barriers of my childhood are the less discussed, more surreptitious kind. The message constantly communicated to us was: \u2018have a good time writing to each other, while we write fictional, nonfictional, and poetic human histories using our versions of you\u2019. The consequences of this barrier existing for many generations of blind people continue to reverberate. How many Australian blind authors can you name? Even as an Australian disability literature researcher I can only name four \u2013 Tilly Aston, Barbara Blackman, Mercy Dickinson, and David Walker. But remember \u2013 even before twelve-year old Louis Braille understood that the methods sighted people had devised for blind people to read and write were slowing us down, and that a much better solution was as simple as six dots \u2013 \u00a0blind people have always been writers. Homer figured it out long ago.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until two months before my thirtieth birthday, in 2007, that I first read published writing by a blind person. Given to me by a blind friend who is now my partner, Stephen Kuusisto\u2019s book, Planet of the Blind<\/em>, resonated with me in a way no other book had. In his 2017 book Every Word Is A Bird We Teach<\/em> To Sing<\/em>, Daniel Tammet, an autistic writer and translator from England, writes of Les Murray that \u2018Without Murray\u2019s poems, I might never have become a writer. At the time, so early in my adulthood, their oddness reassured. I could see myself in them.\u2019 And so it was of me and Kuusisto. Across our different ages, genders, sexualities, and even levels of blindness, I recognised myself. Finally, I had proof that blind people and creative writing weren\u2019t a mismatch. Planet of the Blind<\/em> prompted me to write more than just the facts of my experiences, to write those facts in fresh ways, and to research Australian disability literature.<\/p>\n Literary studies, as an area of disability studies, had taken off only ten years earlier, analysing the ways in which nondisabled writers had written fictionally and poetically about disabled people. My interest came at a time when some scholars were turning to researching the literary practices of disabled writers. People like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Jim Ferris, Robert McRuer, Petra Kuppers, and Michael Davidson, began investigating the writing of disabled Americans, and how their writing was shaped by their embodiment. And so, another decade on, it\u2019s heartening to know our field is consequential enough to warrant a significant reference work.<\/p>\n The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability<\/em> comprises fourteen chapters, as well as an Introduction and an Afterword, and has been compiled with undergraduate literature students in mind. All contributors have at least one book to their name and, with the exception of one Canadian, are academics at British or US universities. The editors, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, have structured the book as two parts: the first aims to \u2018ground the reader in the ways in which disability representation has worked in specific temporal moments and geocultural locations\u2019; the second responds to \u2018the particular directions and parameters of contemporary disability representation.\u2019 As a whole, Barker and Murray state that the book demonstrates \u2018the multiplicities inherent within disability experiences.\u2019<\/p>\n With the exception of Barker\u2019s chapter on postcolonial writing, the writers discussed in this collection are either from the UK, with an occasional bonus European, or from the US, with a Canadian or Mexican writer making an appearance every now and then. That said, in the first half of the book, the representation of disability in UK or US-centric literature is thoroughly outlined from the twelfth century to the present. I imagine most people will only read the chapter relevant to the time period they research or that particularly interests them, but I would encourage a wider approach. I recommend this not only to add context, but because the general method of this half of the book is to use an extended definition of each period. With most chapters thereby overlapping with those on both sides, we get the benefit of multiple perspectives on some significant themes and writers. For example, the trope of disabled people as monsters is discussed in the second chapter on medieval literature, the third chapter on early modern literature, and the fourth chapter on the eighteenth century; while Virginia Woolf\u2019s writing is discussed in the sixth chapter on modern literature, and the seventh chapter on contemporary literature.<\/p>\n While the details change with the times, the representation of disabled people over the centuries remains remarkably constant. In 1997, two of the key writers in literary disability studies, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, named this type of representation \u2018narrative prosthesis\u2019. Their book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse<\/em> (2000) describes in detail what it is and how it operates. As Michael Davidson puts it in his chapter, Mitchell and Snyder argue that disability is a \u2018crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.\u2019<\/p>\n Narrative prosthesis occurs when writers give a character an impairment, which simply functions as a narrative reminder of a personality flaw: blindness represents a person\u2019s refusal to believe information that other characters think is important; atypically shaped bodies represent a person\u2019s duplicitousness, mental illness represents the character\u2019s (usually a female character\u2019s) inability to perform the narrative\u2019s prized social role, such as participating in public life. With this structure in place, the narrative sets out to assure nondisabled readers of their normalcy, either by the disabled character (because there\u2019s rarely more than one) overcoming their impairment, or their impairment overcoming them. Following in Mitchel and Snyder\u2019s, and many other disability studies researchers\u2019 footsteps, I\u2019ll list Richard III<\/em>, and Ahab in Moby Dick<\/em>, as examples, but you have no doubt already thought of plenty of your own and are struggling to think of a counterexample. This book does provide counterexamples but also demonstrates how few there are.<\/p>\n To be clear, Mitchell and Snyder are not saying disabled people shouldn\u2019t use prostheses; they are saying disabled people should not be used as prostheses, since prostheses are objects, and disabled people are people. This means two things: being a disabled person is a valid identity in itself, and therefore writers need to think beyond just curing or killing characters with impairments. Also that writers need to keep in mind that disabled people are constantly having to contend with the material consequences of being prosthesised. I frequently have to explain to sighted people that blind people can in fact read books, use computers, and travel independently \u2013 all assumptions that they most often then attribute to having read it, or not read it, in a novel. These are the kind of assumptions that lead to blind people being denied experiences, responsibilities, and jobs. Similarly, I have many blind friends who are forced by strangers, friends, bureaucrats and employers to explain that their ability to see some things does not mean they are faking being blind. Contrary to the almost universal depiction of blindness in literature, only a tiny percentage of blind people are completely blind. Blindness is, like autism (and all other impairments for that matter), a spectrum.<\/p>\n Mitchell and Snyder are also not saying that beginning with the idea that, say, a character who is a dyslexic writer would make for a great short story, is inherently problematic. They are saying that any literary character should be a real character, not an object; which means constructing disabled characters from understanding disability history, culture, and experience, rather than a collection of stereotypes. Perhaps the most famous example of a nondisabled person writing a disabled character from comprehensive research is Mark Medoff\u2019s play Children of a Lesser God <\/em>(1979). It was a portrayal of communication between deaf and hearing people, whose point, that hearing people rarely listen to deaf people, was conclusively proved by all the critics who insisted on interpreting it as an analogy for communication between men and women. An Australian example is Emma Viskic\u2019s Caleb Zelic crime thriller series. Once Viskic decided her main character would be deaf, she spent five years researching being deaf, including learning Auslan. As she describes<\/a> it: \u2018Caleb was deaf, not hearing, and unless I wrote him that way, I couldn\u2019t write the novel.\u2019<\/p>\n If narrative prosthesis, or reading a whole book about it, sounds too complicated, a quick formula that both simplifies and extends on it is the Fries Test. Invented by Kenny Fries, a disabled writer and academic, the Fries test is modelled on the Bechdel test for the representation of women in movies. When reading a book ask yourself: \u2018Does a work have more than one disabled character? Do the disabled characters have their own narrative purpose other than the education and profit of a nondisabled character? Is the character\u2019s disability not eradicated either by curing or killing?\u2019 Passing the test requires a yes to all three.<\/p>\n The other thing a reader will learn from the first half of the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability <\/em>is the quantity and variety of cultural work disabled characters are co-opted to perform. If a group wants to ostracise another group from society impairment is, and always has been, the key to their strategy. From the twelfth century onwards women, especially if they had what was considered to be too big a sexual appetite, were characterised as monstrous. But then, in the late eighteenth century, from Mary Wollstonecraft on, feminists began using the notion of impairment to assert their strength (relative to what they characterised as the weaknesses of disabled people), and to disparage women who weren\u2019t feminists. In a similar way, and also from the twelfth century, people living in another country from where the author was born are portrayed as either having impairments, or acting in ways that cause their children to be born with impairments, or both. And then, in the twentieth century, colonised people began using impairment both to disparage their colonisers, and to represent the damage inflicted by their colonisers. Impairment is of course also used to ostracise disabled people. Every period includes literature that portrays disabled people as either faking their impairment or faking their skills, and as people who do not deserve to have sex, have children, love, be loved, or even exist.<\/p>\n When nondisabled writers go beyond this propensity to objectify us, they progress into generative terrain that perceives the potential of the nuances of impairment and disability. In their chapter on early modern literature, Allison Hobgood and David Houston cite Thomas Traherne\u2019s \u2018Dumnesse\u2019<\/a> as a poem exemplifying an aesthetic where \u2018impairment is something to be held close, kept integral, and invited to thrive\u2019. Essaka Joshua observes that the picturesque movement in the eighteenth century also values impairment: \u2018Theorists of the picturesque reject symmetry, harmony, proportion, and the ideals of perfection, celebrating instead architectural ruins, irregular landscapes, and people whose appearance does not accord with the usual standards for beauty.\u2019 Joshua also refers to Wordsworth a number of times; the poet explores the complexity of impairment and interactions between disabled and nondisabled people, and gives disabled characters equal status with nondisabled characters in his work.<\/p>\n In his chapter on modern literature, Michael Davidson returns to the question which is central to his book Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body<\/em>, \u2018What would happen if we subjected a poetics of embodiment to the actual bodies and mental conditions of its authors?\u2019 He continues:<\/p>\n Robert Creeley\u2019s lines in \u201cThe Immoral Proposition,\u201d \u201cto look at it is more \/ than it was,\u201d mean something very particular when we know that their author has only one eye. To what extent are Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s numerous references to suffocation and claustrophobia in her poems an outgrowth of a life with severe asthma? Robert Duncan\u2019s phrase \u201cI see always the underside turning\u201d may refer to his interest in theosophy and the occult, but it also derives from the poet\u2019s visual disorder, in which one eye sees the near and the other far. Was William Carlos Williams\u2019s development of the triadic stepped foot in his later career a dimension of his prosody or a typographical response to speech disorders resulting from a series of strokes? It is worth remembering that the signature poem of the era [the 1960s] was not only a poem about the madness of the best minds of the poet\u2019s generation, but about the carceral and therapeutic controls that defined those minds as mad, written by someone who was himself \u201cexpelled from the academies for crazy.\u201d\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A reader might at this point wonder exactly what counts as an impairment and what doesn\u2019t. The answer, like race, gender, and sexuality is that it depends on who\u2019s counting. It is in part culturally and historically decided \u2013 as gay people, who were classified as impaired by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1975, and transgender people, who are currently classified as impaired but, I\u2019m guessing, probably won\u2019t be in a DSM or two, know well. Currently in Australia, for government and other bureaucratic purposes, being declared disabled requires certification from a doctor, as well as being assessed by a set of criteria specific to the program to which one is applying, and that assessment rarely counts for anything else, even between Australian government departments.<\/p>\n