The focus of this book is on literary representations of people with cognitive and linguistic impairments – or as Berger calls them, ‘the disarticulate.’ (He also uses the combined term ‘Dys/Disarticulate’ to highlight its instability and complex social/theoretical location; for the sake of brevity, I will use ‘disarticulate’ in this review). Disarticulate figures are present from prehistory – Berger highlights their presence in the Hebrew Bible (for instance, as symbols of religious redemption), but they remain consistent tropes from modernist to postmodern, apocalyptic, and even neurological literature.
The disarticulate figure is one upon which a range of social fantasies are projected – they are often sites of fantasy, where themes of the utopian, apocalyptic, eugenic, traumatic, or healing futures are projected. But they also raise questions about embodiment, communication, social connectedness, interdependence, and human ethics. This is therefore a broad, and expansive, coverage of the disarticulate trope. Most of Berger’s focus is on novels (including such authors as Melville, Faulkner, and Conrad, but also engaging with texts from Paul Auster, Jerzi Kosinski, and Don DeLillo). However, he also discusses the work of Oliver Sacks, and commends the work of some disability scholars including Tobin Siebers, Tom Shakespeare, Robert McRuer, and Michael Davidson.
In engaging with disability studies literature, Berger identifies three areas where The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity can make a significant impact on disability studies scholarship: the examination of metaphor, a fuller engagement with trauma (and trauma theory), and a more sophisticated notion of care than is usually deployed. Berger suggests that some disability scholars reject the metaphorical deployment of disability outright, and he criticizes such a stance on the grounds that literary analysis suggests it is simply impossible to avoid tropes altogether, including tropes of disability. In this regard, he is critical of the work of North American scholars such as Mitchell and Snyder, Davis, and Garland-Thomson for their dismissal of disability metaphors. Berger argues that metaphor ‘does not work by means of simple substitutions’ but instead operates more like catachresis (149). Rather than dismissing disability metaphors outright, he suggests that scholars should be critical of particular kinds of reductive and stereotypical metaphors.
The social context in which authors wrote their texts is an important backdrop to their novels, and Berger incorporates such contexts into his analysis. For instance, throughout Chapter Two, when he discussing the work of Faulkner, Conrad, and Djuna Barnes, he highlights the domination of eugenic thought at the time, and the widespread nature of instutionalization, sterilization, and the deployment of brutal names such as ‘degenerate,’ ‘idiot,’ and ‘feeble minded.’ At this time, their potential for reproduction was often represented as an omnipresent threat to the social order. Yet, interestingly, the characters in these novels are still represented as deserving ‘care’ – a contradiction that Berger suggests highlights the ways in which disabled people sit at the boundaries of the social-symbolic world in such texts. Disability is often used to represent a radical embodied alterity within literature.
In his exploration of postmodern novels by Paul Auster, Jerzi Kosinski, and Don DeLillo (in Chapter Three), Berger highlights the re-emergence of tropes of ‘the wild child’ and eugenic themes of degeneration, albeit within a context where the disabled characters are portrayed as having redemptive powers. These texts explicitly engage the trope of the wild child in order to develop a fantasy of innocent, unspoiled, and unmediated life. They are then compared with the work of Oliver Sacks, who is presented as finding ‘a deeper humanity’ within the alterity of his subjects (130). (Personally, I am less fond of Sacks’ work, having been influenced by the disability studies critiques that position it more along the lines of a modern-day equivalent of the freak show.)
One of the most interesting aspects of Berger’s work, for me, is his engagement with trauma theory. This is a theoretical framework that has been vastly under-explored in disability studies, and Berger has led the way in such engagement for a long time. He suggests that in order to understand the full impact of trauma – in all its forms, not just the trauma experienced by disabled people as a result of social barriers – it is necessary to expand discussions beyond autonomy and independence, and to include issues of interdependence, vulnerability, the need for care, and corporeality. Additionally, Berger argues that the issue of mourning must be included – and addressed in a more sophisticated manner. He points to a fascinating paradox in the literature – disability studies has found it difficult to conceptually engage with mourning, and trauma theory has found it difficult to move beyond mourning.
In recent years, neuroscience has assumed a dominant place in discussions of cognitive impairments. Berger analyzes ‘neuronovels’ in such a context, where details of a person’s clinical, neurological condition are often discussed at length. These texts include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, and Saturday by Ian McEwan. Berger positions neuroscience both as an ideology (resembling the totalizing ideologies of modernity) as well as a science that reveals a great deal about cognition, emotion, symbolization, and culture.
The position of disarticulate subjects, relative to the wider social order, is explored through his narrative analysis of many texts. They are often deployed to represent an alternative to the social order, including a (contested) symbol of eugenic themes of degeneracy, a symbol of subversion, a symbol of unexpressed sexual desire or, alternatively, a symbol of sexual innocence. In terms of sexuality, however, it is rare to see disarticulate subjects presented as adults – they are usually represented in their youth. Perhaps this is a sign of the failure of authors to conceptualize the link between disability and sexuality in a more sophisticated manner, and hopefully such representations will emerge in the future, in part because of the work of scholars such as Berger in pushing the limits.
I can imagine that North American literary scholars will use this book a great deal, particularly in their teaching of the canonical work of Faulkner, Conrad, and so on. In some ways, it is a model that teachers can use to engage their students, asking them to both read the original texts, and the ways in which Berger has analyzed their representation of disarticulate figures. This would be an incredibly valuable learning experience for students – learning not just the thematic content of the material, but also how to read a text at a dense and sophisticated theoretical level.
My only real criticism of The Disarticulate is that I would have liked to have seen an intersectional analysis, particularly including the deployment of race, employed in more detail. Berger does engage with themes of disability and sexuality, but I wondered how (for instance) the whiteness of some of these literary characters also played out in the construction of disability, care, sexuality, and other forms of power. But this was not the purpose of the book – it really broke new ground in exploring all of the meanings attributed to disarticulate subjects in the literature. Perhaps it will inspire some students, in the future, to engage in follow-up work that engages with such intersectional analyses. I can certainly see The Disarticulate being an incredibly informative text for classes on North American literature.
University of Toledo, OH, USA
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© 2014, Mark Sherry
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.964510