Disability, Race, and the American Literary
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RESOURCES OF FORM: DISABILITY, RACE, AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY IMAGINATION, 1952–2012 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY MARGARET LOUISE FINK CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................................. v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction, Resources of Form: Disability, Race, and the American Literary Imagination, 1952– 2012 ...................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One, The Lower Frequencies: Cripistemologies of Race in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man .... 22 Chapter Two, The Time is Out of Joint: Deafness and Injury in Toni Morrison’s Beloved .................. 63 Chapter Three, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Care, and Racialized Misfitting .......................... 101 Chapter Four, The Graphic Ordinary: Composing Visual Experiences of Disability and Race in Chris Ware’s Building Stories ........................................................................................................................... 136 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................................... 184 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Building Stories box and its 14 pieces in varying formats. ……………………………...137 Figure 2. Panel cropped to show the protagonist’s lower body. ………………………………….140 Figure 3. Protagonist at an art school critique. …………………………………………………...147 Figure 4. The protagonist jogs past tourists at the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. ………149 Figure 5. Panel of the protagonist approaching the tourist group. ……………………………….149 Figure 6. “That Girl,” a narrative of an emotional woman at an airport. ………………………...150 Figure 7. Winter blind date segment (overview). ………………………………………………...154 Figure 8. Inset showing a drafted personal ad. …………………………………………………..155 Figure 9. Inset of the protagonist applying toenail polish. ……………………………………….156 Figure 10. Final row of the Winter Blind Date segment. ………………………………………....159 Figure 11. Inset of the protagonist discovering nude portraits of her body. ……………………...160 Figure 12. “Every day,” a clothed anatomy page layout (overview). ……………………………...161 Figure 13. Interior anatomy page layout (overview). ……………………………………………..162 Figure 14. “Her Leg,” a narrative in which the protagonist shaves her legs. ……………………...164 Figure 15. Inset from “My Life” as the protagonist observes a couple on a CTA train. ………….166 Figure 16. Cartooning as rooted in racial caricature. ……………………………………………..167 Figure 17. Panels depicting a police sketch and mug-shot photograph of a black man. ………….168 Figure 18. Comparison of feature placement in the police sketch and drawn photograph. ………170 Figure 19. Panels depicting the new girl’s arrival. ………………………………………………...174 Figure 20. Flashback panels depicting the aftermath of a sleepover. ……………………………..175 Figure 21. Panel depicting the protagonist jogging past another jogger, a black woman. ………...177 Figure 22. Memories of standing by when the new girl is harassed. ……………………………...177 iii Figure 23. Panels depicting the protagonist as she bumps into an old friend. ……………………180 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many people, across many times and places, who offered many kinds of support as I undertook this dissertation project. First, I’d like to thank my committee, Lauren Berlant, Hillary Chute, and Ken Warren, for thoughtful feedback, enduring encouragement, and practical advice. I am also grateful for the opportunities to discuss my chapters in progress with the Disability Studies Reading Group, the Gender & Sexuality Studies Workshop, and the 20th/21st Century Workshop. A number of communities have welcomed and sustained me, bolstering my general happiness and these intellectual efforts: the disability studies community (in particular as generated by SDS conferences and 2013’s Disability and Disclosure conference); the graduate students in UIC’s Disability Studies program, who have kindly treated me like an honorary member of their cohort; the Chicago Deaf/signing community; and my colleagues at the University of Chicago Writing Program, where I’ve had the great fortune of working for the past four years. Above all, I am grateful for the direct and indirect support I’ve enjoyed from my closest friends, colleagues, and collaborators--your thoughtful, collegial engagement; good cheer; banh mi sandwiches and cat videos have been a real boon: Stephanie Anderson, Cynthia Barounis, Liat Ben Moshe, Kate Caldwell, Jessica Cooley, Amanda Davis, Ally Day, Renee Fohl, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Petra Kuppers, Alexandra Leone, Corrine Lettier, Maren Linett, Clare Mullaney, Adam Newman, Caryn O’Connell, Meghann O’Leary, Jeanelle Olson, Kelly Parrey- Munger, Ryan Parrey-Munger, Peter Pascatore, Anna Piepmeyer, Aleks Prigozhin, Joe Ridgway, Margaret Ridgway, Carrie Sandahl, Linda Smith-Brecheisen, Sara Vogt, Chalcey Wilding, Daniel Wuellner, and Sandie Yi. My parents, Dave and Vicki Fink, were a source of constant and unwavering support. My partner, Andrew Yale, came onto the scene for the final leg. Whether offering distraction or making me dinner so I could write without thinking about such necessities, his patience, interest, and care have been incredible. To all of you, all my love. v ABSTRACT Resources of Form offers four readings of four American novels that are grappling with the ongoing, powerful effects of American racism, and traces how each stages a challenge to dominant accounts of disability as individual brokenness, unlivable incapacity, or radical alterity. Each text finds and explores an object named by disability, and does so in a scene organized by multiple racial narratives: disability and race are put into relation to one another via metaphor; as a relationship of cause and effect; one as reprieve from another; or as prompting analogous visual events. In tracking and describing these imaginative moves, Resources of Form responds to disability studies’ desire to revise its understandings of disability as a distinct category, something that can be critically isolated from racialized experience. It also addresses a potentially limiting overattachment to disability’s referential stability as a category that has filtered into literary disability studies scholarship: in its major texts, disability is understood to refer to some real difference such that disability is always extraordinariness. Each of the novels under consideration here engage with dominant understandings of disability, what we might call individual/medical model disability projects, but each is also committed to representing everyday realities. By tracking these novels’ descriptive accounts of American ordinaries, I argue that literary form committed to everyday realities has long represented disabled embodiment as a set of practices and a mode of operating rather than incapacity or lack. Alongside and in the same scene as processes of racial formation, these descriptive accounts of disabled embodiment figure it as engaged in practices of making do and living on in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described as a reparative mode. Chapter One, “The Lower Frequencies: Cripistemologies of Race in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” attends to how Ellison’s novel moves beyond its initial, titular equation of blindness with racist misrecognition, deeply flawed knowing. This chapter gives an account—one that is as yet still vi missing in the literature on Ellison’s novel—of how blindness is not just the absence of vision or a deeply flawed vision, but also a disabled, crip way of moving through the world and accessing knowledge. For an epistemological project centered on how to discern “what is really happening when your eyes were looking through,” a blindness metaphor articulates the problem of American racism, but nonsightedness is also narrated as a way of operating imbued with intense experiences of belonging, it’s a predicate of the oppressed as well as the oppressor, and it’s the sound- and touch- attuned mode for operating and making a life under such conditions. Chapter Two, “The Time is Out of Joint: Deafness and Injury in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” takes up another novel from the African American canon that rewrites the historical Margaret Garner case, in which a woman escaped from slavery and committed infanticide under the threat of being remanded to her owner as property. Toni Morrison’s Beloved imagines Margaret Garner as a woman named Sethe years after the infanticide, whose home has been haunted by the spirit of the baby ghost; when a man from Sethe’s past arrives and kicks the ghost out, Sethe’s murdered daughter appears in her yard as a fully grown, embodied revenant. Beloved is full of disability, most commonly as acquired via physical or psychic injury under slavery. But Beloved, the revenant, and her sister Denver have non-normative embodiments that are not as