Cognitive Disability in Contemporary Fiction

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts SURVIVING THE NARRATIVE SELF: COGNITIVE DISABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION A Dissertation in English by Sarah Birge ©2012 Sarah Birge Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 ii The dissertation of Sarah Birge was reviewed and approved* by the following: Susan Squier Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s Studies, English, and Science, Technology, and Society Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Michael Bérubé Paterno Family Professor in Literature and Science, Technology, and Society Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society Chloe Silverman Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Garrett Sullivan Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies, English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii Abstract This dissertation is a study of narrative disruption and non-narrative identity formation in “neurofiction,” or neuroscience-themed novels, by contemporary authors including Umberto Eco, Mark Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, and Richard Powers. Telling stories is often described as part of being human, so much so that a coherent narrative has effectively become a requirement for selfhood. This description of self, however, cannot account for people with cognitive disabilities such as Alzheimer’s disease or autism, which often impair one’s ability to construct and communicate a traditional life narrative. As a result, caregivers, legal authorities, and medical professionals frequently assume an absence of selfhood in these individuals, leading to discriminatory treatment and demeaning stereotypes that diminish their dignity and deprive them of social justice. My project evaluates the narrative components of three central criteria for self—continuity, agency, and integrity—through the lens of contemporary fiction. I argue that although each of these criteria is dependent on narrative according to selfhood theories, characters with cognitive disabilities demonstrate selfhood despite their narrative difficulties. Literature, through its imaginative representations of otherwise inaccessible minds, allows us to capture crucially important aspects of self such as embodied memory and non-cognitive agency. My project furthers literary criticism’s history of attention to issues of consciousness while providing current selfhood theories with a much-needed disability studies perspective. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... v Chapter 1: The Narrative Identity Thesis ............................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: Non-cognitive Continuity: Bodily Memory, Amnesia, and Alzheimer’s Disease ................................................................................................................ 19 Memory, Disability, and The Novel ......................................................................................... 22 Embodied Memory in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ............................................... 28 Self-Continuity through Object Interaction in Out of Mind...................................................... 40 Chapter 3: Intelligible Cognition: The Agency of “Ongoing Response” ................... 57 The Narrative Intelligibility Requirement ................................................................................ 60 Detective Novels and the Search for Self ................................................................................. 65 Spatial Agency in The Curious Incident ................................................................................... 67 The (Un)Intelligibility of Autism.............................................................................................. 70 Motherless Brooklyn and the Assumption of Agency .............................................................. 76 The Agency of Touch ............................................................................................................... 81 Chapter 4: Where is Alice? Extended Cognition as a Model for Selfhood ............... 91 Cognitive Integrity as a Requirement for Self .......................................................................... 93 Extended Mind .......................................................................................................................... 97 The Echo Maker ...................................................................................................................... 102 Surrogacy and the Extended Self ............................................................................................ 109 Still Alice ................................................................................................................................. 114 Conclusion: Narrativity in Medical Care ......................................................................... 129 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 139 v Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the support and encouragement of many people. First and foremost, I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such an inspiring committee. To Susan Squier, Michael Bérubé, Janet Lyon, and Chloe Silverman: I can’t thank you enough. From my decision to study at Penn State to my introduction to disability studies to my completion of the graduate program, your academic and personal guidance have been truly invaluable. I would also like to thank my parents and the rest of my family. They have always stood behind my convoluted career path, which they learned about with interest and occasional skepticism but never tried to direct. This project has been supported by the generosity of a number of programs and individuals. I am grateful for the kindness of Josephine and Barry Weiss, who sponsored the Weiss Fellowship to foster collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. Additional support was contributed by several of the university’s interdisciplinary initiatives, including the Rock Ethics Institute, the Science, Medicine, Technology, and Culture group, and the WPSU-SMTC Public Service Media group. Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation and love for the many friends and mentors who have supported me through the ups and downs of graduate school and dissertation writing. To Dan Threet, Liz Kuhn, Leah Warner, An Trinh, Matt Weiss, Alex Stehn, Shannon Walters, Angela Ward, Todd Penner, Andrew Evans, Dan Haggerty and the many others who helped me along the way: thank you all. This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmothers. 1 Chapter 1: The Narrative Identity Thesis “Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds.” —Daniel Dennett1 In the past three decades, scholars in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology to philosophy have increasingly emphasized what is known as “the narrative identity thesis,” which states that people organize their experience of the world and construct their selfhood2 through narrative. In these theories, narrative does not describe the self; it creates it. Historically, the self of Western culture has not been seen as a norm so much as a natural given: the self is “coherent, bounded, individualized, intentional, the locus of thought, action, and belief, the origin of its own actions, the beneficiary of a unique biography.”3 However, this “unique biography” requires a very particular form in order to count as a narrative of coherent selfhood, and while there are many other theories of self in academic research,4 the theory of the narrative self carries a surprising degree of legal, political, and cultural weight. As I will demonstrate, the narrative requirement that results from this common definition of self dominates our understanding of identity, preventing many people with cognitive disabilities from being afforded the social and legal status accorded to persons. This emphasis on a narratively-constructed self has gone relatively unchallenged across the varied fields that examine and attempt to define selfhood. Narrative psychologists, for example, study how humans construct meaningful identities through narrative. As Sean O’Connell writes, to create identity through narrative is to “engage in 2 the process of integrating the past, present, and future into a coherent whole in both thought and action.”5 In “Life as Narrative,” Jerome Bruner argues that we achieve this coherent whole by constructing ourselves autobiographically, using narrative scripts to both shape and create our experience.6 According to Dan McAdams, although narrative identity is not exclusive to Western society, it is particularly characteristic of it; he argues that the Western emphasis on individuality has created “a veritable cultural imperative” to create coherent, unified selves and make narrative sense of life.7 Other scholars emphasize an inability to distinguish an “authentic” self that pre-exists any narrative formulation. For example, unlike psychologists who seem to see narrative as a framework for retelling the self, Roy Schafer believes that selves do not exist before they are told through narratives; the self is a story. Investigations of the self in philosophy frequently describe a similar process

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