COGNITIVE DISABILTY and NARRATIVE by EVAN CHALOUPKA Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Docto

Home , Back Benches, Extol, Focal character, Rise to It, The Kallikak Family

COGNITIVE DISABILTY AND NARRATIVE

EVAN CHALOUPKA

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2018

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Evan Chaloupka

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.*

Committee Chair William Marling

Committee Member Kimberly Emmons

Committee Member Athena Vrettos

Committee Member Jonathan Sadowsky

Date of Defense

February 9, 2018

* We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... 4

Acknowledgements ...... 5

Abstract ...... 6

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Possibility and Realization of Cognitive Disability and Narrative ...... 7

Chapter 2

Reader Engagement with Cognitive Disability in American Literary Naturalism…35

Chapter 3

Trying to See Cognitive Disability: The Promise and Problem of Vision ...... 84

Chapter 4

History, Pathology, and Form in Modernist Narratives of Disability ...... 133

Chapter 5

The Cognition of Connection: Narrating Family Experiences of Cognitive Disability

in the 1950s ...... 180

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Coming to Know Cognitive Disability in Narrative ...... 233

Endnotes ...... 253

Works Cited ...... 282

List of Figures

Fig. 1. Character Development in Norris’s Fiction...... 81

Fig. 2. Illustrations in Chapter One and Two of Bly’s Ten Days ...... 94

Fig. 3. Illustration in Chapter Five of Bly’s Ten Days...... 97

Fig. 4. “Quiet Inmates out for a Walk” ...... 100

Fig. 5. First Photograph in The Kallikak Family ...... 109

Fig. 6. Three Kallikak Children ...... 112

Fig. 7. First Hereditary Chart ...... 115

Fig. 8. Later Hereditary Chart ...... 116

Fig. 9. Cumulative Object Chart ...... 147

Fig. 10. Illustration from How Retarded Children Can Be Helped ...... 193

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Kayla, for her love and support, of course, but also for her unwavering commitment to keeping my sights on what makes the study and teaching of English meaningful.

Thanks to William Marling for his mentorship and guidance. Thanks to Kimberly Emmons, Athena Vrettos, and Jonathon Sadowsky for their excellent feedback.

Thanks to my colleagues within and outside of the Case English department, whose insights have shaped what this dissertation says and have clarified why it matters.

Thanks to my students who have allowed me to rediscover these texts as readers first see them.

Thanks to Avery, Jackie, and Steve, for making me a part of their home and cluing me into features of our world that many overlook.

Thanks to my family and friends who have grounded me throughout this dissertation writing journey. Linda, Scott, Adam, Ryan, Maryann, Karen, Randy, Nikki, and Emily – there, your names have been said. 6

Cognitive Disability and Narrative Abstract by

EVAN CHALOUPKA

This dissertation reveals how cognitive disability’s formal and rhetorical potential developed in the U.S. from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, detailing the ways in which writers determined the reader’s engagement with cognitive others. Scientific pathology inspired literary authors to experiment with narrative mechanics. Conversely, literature and popular nonfiction revealed to psychologists unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as narrative’s methodological and political potential. Cognitive disability, never fully assimilable, emerges as a force that can reorganize narrative events and aestheticize their telling. My work challenges theories of disability that prefigure difference as fixed or known in narrative. Great authors redefine disability as a force that is always coming to be known. I introduce a heuristic to help scholars understand this process, specifically how stories introduce tenuous ways of representing and narrating disability, put forth conflicting ontological claims about the mind, and withhold what can be known about disability at key moments. As readers struggle to pin down what exactly disability is, narrative places them in a space where they can reflect not only on the abilities of the disabled subject, but their own. 7

Chapter One

Introduction: The Possibility and Realization of Cognitive Disability in Narrative

“We’ve hit a turning point in our understanding of autism, but I think it comes from literature, not science. Not to downplay the science: the newest studies on amino acid deficiencies, faulty neurotransmitters, and disruptions in the cortex may shine light on the whys of the disorder. But to find out the whats — what it’s like to be autistic, from the inside — there’s now a critical mass of books written by those on the spectrum. They are extraordinary, moving, and jeweled with epiphanies.” – Katharine Whittemore, “Journeys into the Autistic Mind” in The Boston Globe (2014).

What makes for good disability fiction? In Whittemore’s view, the best stories about cognitive disability allow the reader to inhabit the mind of the Other, to witness disability experience “from inside.” Only the present day has availed this possibility, which marks an important moment in literary history. At last the normal reader can access a state that has sat secret for so long. One can easily see how this new space might invigorate existing critical schools like cognitive approaches to literature.1 For other fields, foundational questions become less interesting. When disability studies critic Alice

Hall asks whether literature can “offer the possibility of empathizing or even entering the consciousness” (4) of the disabled other, the response is simple: yes. It can. After all, the opening lines of Daniel Tammet’s autobiography Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Mind of an Autistic Savant (2006), which Whittemore reviews, seem to teleport normal readers to a foreign mind replete with fascinating new ways of seeing the world.2 “I was born

January 31, 1979—a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue, like the number 9 or the sound of loud voices arguing” (1). Who isn’t intrigued by a blue Wednesday, and how cool is it that this storyteller allows us to experience Wednesday – the emblem of workweek drudgery – 8

like this? Prior to the bloom of life writing that Whittemore now revels in, the mind of the autist was a tomb foreclosed. But now the stone that sealed it has been rolled away.

Readers enter a space “jeweled with epiphanies” that had once sat darkened. Its coruscant treasures sit ready to delight and instruct whoever enters.

The “dumb” mind has always been a crusade for authors and scientists. Prior to the new age of accessibility that Whittemore proclaims, representing cognitive disability involved traversing far more difficult terrain. Consider Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899).

When John D. Barry reviewed the book in the Literary World, he noted that many readers were alarmed by the novel’s attention to characters who lived “on the verge of the criminal class” – a location that was intimately tied to cognitive disability in the late 19th century (88).3 Norris faced a problem that today’s autistic life writers do not: the problem of writing in harmony with the disabled mind. How can Norris, an able-minded author, faithfully represent the world as the slow-witted dentist (and eventual murderer) of Polk

Street sees it? At times, Norris succeeds, and Barry praises the book’s “profound insight into character” (88). But at other times, he doesn’t, and Barry highlights Norris’s struggle to rise to this challenge:

Now and then the reader sees the author pulling the strings, so to speak, standing

off and explaining characters in a way that suggests superiority. This is a fault to

which I have already referred in these columns in connection with the work of

nearly all our writers of fiction. Mr. Norris would have gained in power if he had

not only projected his characters and allowed them to explain themselves as much

as possible, but also used, whenever he spoke in his capacity as author, language

wholly in harmony with theirs. (88) 9

For Barry, Norris is at his worst when he acts as an animator, tugging and prodding characters in ways that prompt particular actions and thoughts. Barry neglects that any harmony that might exist between normalcy and disability in narrative involves not two parties, but three: the author, the character, and the reader. What would it mean for readers to see the world through the eyes of the Other? What technical maneuverings on behalf of the author would allow for this? And what would the reader get out of it?

Contemporary life writing seems to allow the reader a way into to the disabled world that seems purer than the path that Norris’s fiction affords. The “superiority” that Barry identifies in the mechanics of McTeague stands ready to undermine any authentic engagement with disability. Sitting high above his disabled subjects, Norris looks down upon them, and this perspective inadvertently creates a textual barrier between the novel’s cognitive Others and the reader. There are no strings to be pulled in autistic life writing. Readers don’t want Norris, Barry implies, they want McTeague, the cognitive other. In life writing, readers get that, without any problem of puppeteering. But how can imaginative literature do the same?

This dissertation studies a set of narratives – from literature, science, and popular nonfiction -- spanning 1877 to 1955, a period during which the disabled mind had yet to stand unveiled and ready for convenient understanding by American readers. For these texts, critics need to explore the whats of disabled cognition: the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the mind of the Other. But the most productive insights into literature and disability have to do with the hows of storytelling and representation. Lacking a reservoir of personal disability experience, how did authors create fictional disabled minds in the 10

first place? The options for what a disabled mind might be were numerous, and this range of possibilities functioned as an artistic potential and dilemma. How did authors move readers into particular relationships with different minds? Once entered, how did these relationships change a reader’s understanding of what it meant to be human?

The texts that I will examine tell stories of coming to know cognitive disability, as opposed to tales of knowing disability from the inside. I will explore this difference in the conclusion, but for now I want to contend that one should not think of narrative just as a means to acquire knowledge, but also as a mode that cultivates different relationships to disability experiences that might be known in a more tentative, conditional sense.

Narratives that tell stories of coming to know the disabled Other are rife with moral missteps, interpersonal frustrations, and unrealized connections between cognitively different parties. Such material makes for good stories. Further, thinking about how stories come to know disability creates room for, but does not excuse, the ethical missteps in fiction. In this way, this dissertation joins the work of recent critics who believe that the potential of disability studies does not simply lie in the diagnoses of literary characters or the efficient policing of cultural stereotypes. Instead, as Michael Bérubé notes, critics should attend to how “deployments of disability” can be “narrative strategies, devices for exploring vast domains of human thought, experience, and action”

(2).

While critics like Bérubé have praised cognitive disability for its narrative potential, no scholar has investigated how these narrative strategies circulated among different discourses, all of which use narrative to explore novel ontological truths, epistemological modes, and ethical orientations. In this dissertation, I explore 11

representational, aesthetic, and narrative exchanges between literature, science writing, and popular nonfiction about cognitive disability. I ground my analysis in three literary time periods: American literary naturalism from 1899 to 1916, modernism from 1919 to

1937, and post-war fiction in the 1950s. In each period, scientific pathology inspired literary authors to reconsider the ways in which stories might be told. For psychologists, literature and popular nonfiction revealed unrecognized features of cognitive identity as well as the methodological potentials of narrative analysis. By reading journalism, fiction, and science separately, critics have overlooked the ways in which authors and readers understood, and often undermined, the boundary between normalcy and cognitive disability – or put more simply, the differences between being smart or dumb, dull or sharp, queer or quick-witted. Drawing on sources from different disciplines, I hope to reveal the mechanisms by which readers came to value intelligence in general, and how these readers depended on narrative to identify, embrace, or reject the mental identities they encountered in America.

I – Disability’s Narrative Effects

I aim to show how the inclusion of cognitive disability in narrative leads to formal innovation, social critique, and a new understanding of the ways in which the world might be known. The first effect has increasingly come into focus for disability studies.

Formal innovation can relate to the parts or the whole of a narrative. Bérubé examines how authors “render intellectual disability in the form of a disabled textuality” (15). For him cognitive disability can provide “Shlovskian moments of defamiliarization” as well as opportunities to rework overarching narrative structures. In The Sound and the Fury, 12

for example, cognitive disability operates as a “productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality” (83). Criticism that precedes Bérubé’s most recent work contends that the innovative potential of disability lies in its demand for and resistance to interpretation. Disabled bodies, by virtue of their difference, must mean something in fiction, but any of the possible readings of a given body always seems limited in some way. Ato Quayson refers to disability as an “aesthetic problematic, sometimes figured in the form of an interpretative difficulty or impasse” (14). David T.

Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder refer to disability as a “stumbling block to cultural definitions and artistic figurations” (2). The grotesque body exists in conflict with the normal one, and tensions between characters are “augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative and dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structures and so on”

(15).4 In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers argues that disability directs readers to the materiality of text itself. Words “stand still, producing a seizure of meaning, interrupting the ordinary transparency of the page” (124). That disability leads to formal innovation has been a bedrock premise of disability studies, one that will only continue to guide the field’s work. Bérubé predicts an “endless series of cascading and overlapping readings” that attend to cognitive disability’s narrative potential (31). This dissertation distinguishes itself within this line of inquiry by attending to formal innovations yet unrecognized in

American literary history and examining how narrative strategies moved within and outside of literature.

Formal innovation often opens up space for social criticism. Mitchell and Snyder contend that in literature “disability recurs… as a potent force that challenges cultural 13

ideals of the ‘normal’ or ‘whole’ body” (50). Quayson argues that the best literary texts are “undergirded… by the dialectical interplay between unacknowledged social assumptions and the reminders of contingency as reflected in the body of the person with a disability” (21). Bérubé notes that cognitive disability allows readers and authors to explore the nature of human sociality in general. For example, the unique narration of

Christopher, the autistic protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nighttime, reveals “how many implicit nonverbal and social cues can reside” in the smallest bits of language (132). The works surveyed here interrogate popular attitudes and beliefs, inviting readers to consider how the political and scientific boundaries delineated between disability and normalcy cut off useful areas of human experience.

In this way, this dissertation separates social critique from what I call epistemological revision. Cognitive disability in narrative not only foregrounds the limitations of societal attitudes towards differently minded individuals, but also calls into question the processes by which “normal” individuals perceive the world. Cognitive disability allows the reader to see these processes in a new light, and the demands of different narratives compel them to be retooled. As Hall notes, Virginia Woolf believed that illness “suggest[ed] new modes of perception and narration” that “open[ed] up new modes of knowing and looking” (9). Siebers gestures towards these when he defines disability as a “critical resource… for thinking about what a human being is” (3). This dissertation suggests that what a human being is seems to be a matter of what a human being does. Humans think, love, and see. The introduction of cognitive disability into any story frustrates these operations. More than just motivating an anxiety within normal characters, the cognitive Other changes the reader’s understanding of the ways in which 14

the world might be made sense of.

As cognitive disability frustrates traditional ways of knowing, epistemological failures accumulate over the course of the story and create ontological doubt about the nature of normal and disabled subjects. This phenomenon exists at odds with more conservative notions of narrative and disability. Take Lennard Davis’s argument that novels “enforce normalcy.” He contends that after the advent of sociology in the mid-19th century, novels began to install “normal” characters at the center of their plots. “Thus we read of the journey of the soul, of the everyman or everywoman, through a trying and corrupting world” (43). Over the course of this adventure, the protagonist’s social station degrades, relocating him or her in spheres that characters with below average minds and bodies inhabit. In Davis’s view, these disabled characters shore up the protagonist’s normal identity. The soft strain of the narrator’s voice gently marks these Others as different. Plot mechanics eventually snuff them out. “Normality has to protect itself by looking into the maw of disability and then recovering from that glance” (48). Davis’s theory depends on stasis: regardless of the normal character’s stake in interactions with disability, the result is always the same. Normalcy is enforced. The protagonist (and reader) are assured of their own identity after looking into the maw. I will dispute this claim, contending that narrative involves more change than Davis presumes. He overlooks the way in which the reader sees normal characters work to recover from their glance. Many writers frame recovery as a fiction, and this dissertation considers what effects a character’s experience or reader’s witnessing of this attempted recovery has on their understanding of disability.

II -- Defining Cognitive Disability

Many related terms for mental difference have emerged over the past century and half: mental defectiveness, mental retardation, developmental disability, cognitive disability, and intellectual disability. Nestled under these labels lie endless subdivisions.

In the early 20th century, professionals split mental defectiveness into idiocy, imbecility, and backwardness. Idiocy itself was a pathological fractal with ever multiplying constituents: genetous idiocy, microcephalic idiocy, ecplasmic idiocy, epileptic idiocy, hydrocephalic idiocy, paralytic idiocy, traumatic idiocy, inflammatory idiocy, and idiocy by deprivation (Ireland xi-xii). According to Snyder and Mitchell, robust taxonomies helped psychiatrists and doctors “consolidate their need for expertise” (76). Today’s terms are “cognitive disability,” “developmental disability,” and “intellectual disability,” the last of which has begun to outpace the first two in academic and professional use. No term is without problems when used in literary criticism.5 For the texts surveyed here,

“cognitive disability” is the most analytically productive. From the late 19th to mid-20th century, “intelligence” operated as a conceptual check that allowed pathological diversity to be managed. Intelligence testing drove the policing and management of individuals with cognitive disabilities.6 “Cognitive disability” frustrates the impulse to quantify mental difference. It does not invite discreet numbers that seem to measure the essence of the mind, nor does it open up individuals to quick and efficient placements on continuums of development or levels of “functioning.” The term pushes critics to think broadly about what work a mind does and to examine the social contexts in which one might recognize or overlook the dignity and value of this work. 16

“Cognition” demands a broader way of conceptualizing how a mind works. The

Oxford English Dictionary defines cognition as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” The definition of “intelligence” is streamlined: “The faculty of understanding; intellect.”

“Intellect” is wed to reason as its definition illustrates: “that faculty, or sum of faculties, of the mind or soul by which a person knows and reasons.” “Cognitive disability” helps critics think about thinking as a process of acquisition through multiple modalities – thought, experience, and senses. “Intellectual disability” surreptitiously invites an intrusive paradigm of rationality in which the disabled subject will always fall short of others.

The differences between these contemporary definitions have historical roots.

Webster’s 1884 dictionary broadly defines “cognition” as “the act of knowing by any means or method” (248). It derives from the Latin “cognito from cognoscere, cognitum, to become acquainted with, to know” (248). The word’s root frames knowledge acquisition as tentative and ongoing. To know is to become acquainted with the world, its objects, and its inhabitants. The notion of acquaintance suggests a version of knowledge that is always becoming, the contours of such knowledge changing overtime as the connection becomes more intimate.

The first entry for “intelligence” seems similar: “the act of knowing; the exercise of understanding” (703). But the next two entries for the word reflect a hierarchy of thought. The second reads “the capacity to know, understand, or comprehend; the intellect as gift or endowment,” and the third reads “the capacity for the higher functions of intellect; the pure intellect” (703). Intelligence is best understood via its endpoint, a 17

bequeathed brilliance. The entry for “intellect” locates this attribute within a hierarchy too. “The part or faculty of the human soul by which it knows, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; -- sometimes the capacity for higher forms of knowledge, as distinguished from the power to perceive and imagine” (703). Read together, the definitions suggest that “intelligence,” as a concept, excludes core mental capacities -- feeling, willing, perceiving, imagining— all of which are central to storytelling.7

Ways of knowing that existed independent and outside of intelligence were central to many cultural articulations of cognitive disability from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. In fact speaking of “intellectual disability” in this time period realizes the eugenic project in subtle ways. Intelligence was a managerial tool for eugenicists, its measurability an essential convenience. Consider Henry Maudsley’s definition of certain idiots who confounded psychiatric understanding:

There are some individuals in whom a general deficiency of intelligence is

accompanied by a singular development of it in a special direction; they manifest,

for instance, a surprising memory for details, such as dates, names, numbers, the

exact particulars of distant events, which they recall and recount with the greatest

ease and accuracy, or display certain remarkable mechanical aptitudes, or exhibit

a degree of cunning which might seem inconsistent with their general mental

feebleness. (67)8

Cognitive quirks undermine the explanatory efficacy of intelligence measurements. They introduce ways of knowing that numerical scores or diagnostic categories cannot account for. These quirks do not just frustrate psychiatrists’ impulse to quantify the mind – they exceed the intellectual capabilities of the normal person. A sea of knowledge seems to 18

exist just outside of the average person’s reach, and a disabled mode of perception

emerges as the only means of access. “Cognitive disability” suggests that mental

differences might signal the dawn of a new way of knowing, not the persistence of some

intellectual deficit.

III -- Cognitive Disability Studies: A Review of the Literature

Cognitive disability has been understudied in disability studies on most accounts.

As the field emerged in the 90s, a significant portion of scholarship centered on physical

difference.9 In Extraordinary Bodies (1995), Rosemarie Garland Thomson identified a

long tradition of the study of the grotesque in American literature: “so taken was

modernist criticism with the grotesque that William Van O’Connor argued in 1962 that it

was the essence of American Literature” (112). This critical outlook followed a well-

trodden path that wove through representations of physical difference. Disability studies

critics could explore familiar terrain with their own novel questions.10 The study of

sensory disability also occupied a fortuitous position during the first disability studies

boom. Senses, after all, were key to identifying disability in the first place. In Enforcing

Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and The Body (1995), Lennard Davis argued that “the

Deaf are perceived as such because one hears a difference in speech inflection or sees sign language. Without those sensory clues, the Deaf are embedded in the sensory grid of the ‘normal’ person” (14). Individuals with sensory disabilities illustrated how disability was socially constructed phenomenon. Davis noted that “to a passerby on the street, the

Deaf person is indistinguishable from anyone else until he or she begins to engage in 19

communication” (14). Physical and sensory disability had the rich history and theoretical potential that an emerging field required.

Mark Osteen’s Autism and Representation (2007) marked the moment in

disability studies when scholars began to consider the theoretical potential that cognitive

difference had for disability studies. Osteen argued that the “conditions the naked eye

cannot detect, have been, in disability studies, truly invisible” (4).11 The field’s

predispositions had arisen because disability studies scholars unwittingly practiced

“cognitive able-ism,” which paired a distinct form of rationality with scholarly value.12

Many scholars in the collection acted on Osteen’s call for empathetic scholarship that

considered how autism might produce novel linguistic, representational, and aesthetic

forms. Kristina Chew, for example, identified an “autistic idiolect” in which metonymy

structures language, “connecting and ordering concepts according to seemingly chance

and arbitrary occurrences” (133). Some authors considered how historical eras created

conditions that gave rise to specific pathological conditions. Patrick McDonagh argued

that modernism fashioned an “individual self” that made autism legible (108). Only after

the advent of the modernist subjectivity could a person be conceived of as being stuck

inside themselves, shut out from the world.

Osteen’s collection heralded a wave of new work that began to explore cognitive

disability’s literary function and value. Much of this work is historicist. Patrick

McDonagh’s Idiocy: A Cultural History (2008) investigates literary representations of

idiocy by Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and Wordsworth. Literature relies on idiocy to do

“ideological and symbolic work” (15). The idiot is a representational figure that can help 20

authors accomplish different narrative ends, most commonly functioning as a “a resilient

contrast group” that is essential to defining the normal, rational person (2).

Intersecting discourse of disability helped authors articulate these contrastive relationships. In Disability and Modern Fiction (2012), Alice Hall locates Faulkner’s representations of cognitive disability in the context “specific medical debates” of his time and “a literary tradition stretching back centuries” (41). She examines the scientific and political debates of 1920s, arguing that Faulkner’s fiction both participates in and interrogates popular beliefs about cognitive disability. He writes in a space that is both timeless and time-bound. This position has a narrative payoff: the “interweaving of impressions, associations and echoes leads to a sense that Benjy’s narrative threatens to spill over boundaries of the body and the frame of the novel itself” (41).

But how did the figure of the idiot persist over time? James Berger’s The

Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (2014) explores how the silent figure of the “dys-/disarticulate,” typically embodied by a character with cognitive disability, emerges across history and the implications this emergence has for narrative. “At each historical moment,” he writes, “representations of some figure outside of language will serve as a point of intersection and conflict for the most powerful discourses of its time – of theology, politics, semantics, ethics, science, and aesthetics” (13). But the most meaningful narratives remind readers that these characters are human, and thus represent disability in ways that allow the disarticulate to “embody ethical challenges that remain unanswered” (13).

I locate my own work in this new wave. I see specific areas where study can be advanced. Unlike McDonagh’s ambitious history of idiocy in Britain, which spans 21

several centuries, I take a more targeted approach, connecting prominent and popular

American narratives that intersected from the 1870s to 1950s. While I limit my scope in

comparison to McDonagh, I aim to broaden Berger’s definition of cognitive disability.

Berger essentializes CD, defining it according to a key trait, disarticulateness, that seems

akin to contemporary diagnostic criteria seen in pathologies of low-functioning autism.

His focus neglects representations of now defunct categories of what one might call

“higher-functioning” mental difference. But these classifications provide important

insight into how writers negotiated the boundary between disability with normalcy. Like

Hall, Berger only sketches complicated pathologies that circulated during the early 20th

century. Further, because he views cognitive disability as a locus of alterity in relation to

modernity, his book figures CD as distinct from normal cognition. I reject this division,

arguing that a well-developed historical frame reveals that authors use narrative techniques to illustrate similarities between normalcy and cognitive disability – indeed the presumed existence of these similarities motivated scientific and literary effort, since

America was concerned about higher “grades” of mental defectives that the normal

individual might not recognize.

In the early twentieth century, there was a joint effort between literature and

science to make sense of cognitive disability. Hall points to Helen MacMurchy’s The

Almosts: A Study of the Feebleminded (1920) as an originary moment for the literary

study of cognitive disability’s scarcely recognized history. MacMurchy’s survey of

popular and classic works from across the world is a project of literary appreciation and

political mobilization. She brought literature to her readers’ focus – often sampling multi-

paged excerpts from various works – so that she might educate them on what 22

feeblemindedness was. Once attained, this knowledge would allow the public to effect policy change.13 Hall rightly notes that over the course of the book, MacMurchy “calls for communication across disciplines but also emphasizes the complexity of literary texts and their potential to deepen our understanding” (7). But Hall underestimates the stake science had in literature by overlooking who MacMurchy was. A student of William

Ossler, MacMurchy was named the chief of the Canadian Department of Health’s child welfare division (Dodd 205). Historian Diane Dodd argues that MacMurchy “reflected a bland but safe consensus among the many groups interested in maternal welfare” (206).

Though best-known in medical history for her “blue books” that provided a range of clear advice on common women’s health issues, she served as a Canadian Inspector of the

Feebleminded early in her career. Her professional history reveals that these two interests were intertwined. Dodd notes that by attacking the issue of unwed feeble-minded mothers, “‘expert’ women like MacMurchy could play a prominent role by preserving and defending… idealized maternity” (210).

Hall overlooks MacMurchy’s position at “the forefront of the eugenics-public health alliance” (Dodd 209). This crucial biographical background sheds light on why

MacMurchy wrote such an ambitious piece of literary criticism. For MacMurchy, the most pressing issue facing the health professions in the early twentieth century was the sheer number of mental defectives who lived unrecognized by and alongside of normal citizens. In her 1917 article “The Care and Treatment of the Mental Defective,” published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, she wrote that “it has been found in Great

Britain, in the United States… that the number of mentally defective persons in the community closely approximates the number of the insane; and in Canada so far, all the 23

facts we have ascertained seem to make it probable that this may be said to hold good here” (893). For MacMurchy, this meant that at least three out of every thousand people were mentally defective. But she quickly noted that a study of elementary schools suggested that about 2% of students were mentally defective (893). One can already see the decimal point hopping to the right – foreshadowing the alarmist claims from some writers in the 30s and 40s that almost half the US population was mentally deficient.14

The medical community was ill-equipped to deal with this growing problem.

Machmurchy asks, “why has little or nothing been done for the care of mental defectives?” She answers her question with a literary response: “Because ‘knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers,” an epigram from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (893). A more generous selection from the poem sheds light on MacMurchy’s meaning.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,

And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,

Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

How was one person to deal with the trials the world presented in the modern age?

Science revealed issues that seemed intractable: where was one to turn? MacMurchy’s deployment of Tennyson suggests that the appropriate social responses to the problem of mental defectiveness could only be determined by drawing on a deep history of ethical and empirical knowledge – something that the reservoirs of literature could make available. After all, the implicit argument of The Almosts was that for the past 400 years literature had been describing the feebleminded, from Shakespeare’s Touchstone in All’s

Well that Ends Well to Hawthorne’s Donatello in The Marble Faun. Great writers had 24

illuminated the habits and traits of defectives that scientists only faintly recognized.

Authors could better identify the mental defectives who escaped the notice of public

health officials. After all, according to MacMurchy, the higher-grade feebleminded composed an astounding 76 percent of “subnormal” people” (894).

Appropriate recognition was the prerequisite for effective social policy.

MacMurchy reflects that “our practical action, our ‘Wisdom’ in dealing with mental defectives is about one hundred years behind our knowledge. We still are dealing with the problem of mental defectives as if we had only the low grade cases to deal with, though we all know that the care of low grade mental defectives is the smallest and easiest part of our problem” (894). Literature had sketched the harder part – and scientists, political decision makers, and the general public could take advantage of their efforts if they could only be persuaded to look.

After traditional training, many doctors were just not as perceptive as they needed to be. Medical professionals required a “knowledge required to recognize diseases and defects and their causes” and the “scientific imagination to see what these defects, if not remedied or prevented, will mean to the community as well as to the individual in after life” (“Medical Inspection of Schools” 112). In the argument that MacMurchy advances in The Almosts, literature could be a guide for imaginative practice and social decision- making. “Great writers have recognized the feebleminded,” she writes. “They know that there are such people. When they painted the great world there was a place on the canvas for the feebleminded” (169). The literary artist saw what the scientist could not and understood the relationship these people had with others in the world. Literature had a much broader appeal than the medical journals she routinely published in. It could diffuse 25

wisdom (and thus ethical responsibility) to non-specialists. MacMurchy hopes for a time when “the mind of the Nation will rise nearer to the level of our great writers, and we shall see somewhat more clearly what is and what is not mean by this National problem of the mentally defective, and see our duty to them and to the Nation – and set ourselves to it” (178).15

This dissertation reveals that such an enlightenment was already happening by the time that MacMurchy published her book. To quote Tennyson, the time period surveyed here was one “of more and more,” full of diverse responses to the “problem” that

MacMurchy hoped might have a straightforward solution. In light of MacMurchy’s understanding of the intersection of literary and scientific methods, part of this dissertation’s argument is that literature did not just do things, but was called upon to do things. Authors were tasked with discovering knowledge about disability and exploring modes of disabled experience, and these tasks could only be accomplished via ambitious narrative efforts. The connection between literature and science was far from tenuous.

Literature operated as a compass with which one could orient herself in a world that would otherwise flood her faculties with waves of seen and unseen disabled experiences.

Great writers had long known about the minds that science was just discovering.

MacMurchy writes that “there can be no doubt that the ‘fool,’ who is so often mentioned by earlier writers and attained his greatest vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was in many cases what we now call a high-grade or middle-grade mental defective” (2).

Perhaps the fool could be in vogue again.

Unsurprisingly, he would be. The literary tradition that MacMurchy outlined only grew from the 1910s to the 1950s. These new blooms of fiction prompted at least two 26

more surveys of cognitive disability in literature that disability studies critics have scarcely acknowledged. In “Treatment of the Mentally Retarded Character in Modern

American Fiction” (1975), Frances King argued that cognitively disabled characters could not only be understood through psychological categories but also in terms of narrative functions. King’s character types include the wise fool; the “touchstone” that indicates moral or intellectual value of other character; the “innocent eye” that objectively perceives events in the story; and the “caricature” of a particular social and moral failing. Patricia Puccinelli relied on King’s classification in Yardsticks: Retarded

Characters and their Roles in Fiction (1995) and concluded that “each era provided new ways of looking at man and his world, and there was a corresponding evolution in the retarded character himself” (95). By examining the relationship between literature, science, and popular writing, I aim to illuminate how different “ways of looking” constituted each other in a manner that allowed mental difference and, more generally, human thought and perception to be recast.

To explore this co-constitutive relationship, I consider the rhetorical character of different narratives. Stories, as James Phelan has noted, are told for “some purposes” and

“on some occasion” (3). I am interested in how particular historical occasions gave rise to narrative strategies that moved across disciplines. I identify four specific historical phenomena:

1. The late 19th and early 20th century eugenic demand for an exhaustive narrative

method that responded to a perceived uptick in liminal cases of cognitive

disability. 27

2. The rise of institutionalization that corresponded with a concordant public

questioning of the efficacy of sight as a way to identify mental difference in the

same time period.

3. The way in which literature and science mediated common concerns about the

proximity of cognitive disability in the 1920s and 30s. Many feared that the

feebleminded might already be living among normal people.

4. The moment in which when families in the 1950s became more comfortable

talking about cognitively disabled children and the possibility of their

institutionalization.

Disability historians like James Trent and Steven Noll have outlined some of these phenomenon.16 An attention to narrative distinguishes my work: I ask how storytelling

made cognitive disability legible and interesting so that the American public could

develop coherent political, social, and ethical responses to it.

One must understand these historical phenomena to recognize the formal

innovations of particular texts and authors. Jay Dolmage writes that the new wave of

disability studies should follow “a mode of critique that can point out ethical problems

but can also locate potential for new meanings wherever signification stumbles or trips”

(238). I take this to mean that while representations of cognitive disability may seem

stereotypical, authors use these representations to engage larger questions about the

definition and social valuation of cognitive disability. To detect stumbling signs, one

needs a developed historical frame.17 How does one determine when a sign stumbles if

not by understanding its historical referent? My frame is composed of three distinct

timelines that narratives of cognitive disability originate from, step out of, and dip into: 1) 28

the evolution of scientific discourses of cognitive disability, 2) the changes in the lay understanding of cognitive disability, and 3) the tradition of cognitive disability representation in American literature. These timelines help outline the narrative and rhetorical history of cognitive disability in American literature and culture. Following

Jennell Johnson’s suggestion to scholars to “hunt[s] for the origins of polysemic tendrils in cultural narratives,” I consider how stories of cognitive disability are made and how they circulate (15). With these timelines in mind, I revisit the thin history of cognitive disability and ask the following questions:

• How has literature represented cognitive disability in light of particular historical

pathologies, political initiatives, and narratives?

• How has science capitalized on literary techniques and narrative strategies to

disseminate particular pathologies, narratives, and political goals?

• What historical and ahistorical processes and conceptualizations govern the

relationship between cognitive disability and normalcy?

IV – Dissertation Overview

In surveying narratives of cognitive disability over a 78-year window, this dissertation fills a longstanding gap. Many recent studies of cognitive disability attend to contemporary life writing and fiction. Scholars like Ralph Savarese have helped critics understand how autists tell stories about themselves and the world. But no project in the field has rigorously attended to the time period surveyed here – particularly in regard to how the narratives of different genres intersect and determine each other. Many readers will be familiar with texts that have routinely attracted the focus of disability studies 29

scholars, like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Henry Goddard’s The Kallikak

Family. But other texts may come as a surprise. To date no disability studies critic has

studied McTeague, “‘Queer’,” or Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. In this

way, I contribute to current efforts to demonstrate the sheer breadth of disability in

literature. “Representations of disability are ubiquitous… even or especially when you

are not looking for them” writes Bérubé (2). This dissertation reveals a lengthy history of

disability in America’s most canonical literature, unveiling characters that heretofore

might not have been thought to be disabled. But like Bérubé, I concern myself with how

cognitive disability might operate outside of character, specifically how it may give way

to grand “narrative strategies.” This narrative tradition is just as rich as any lineage of

disability representation.

In my second chapter, “Reader Engagement with Cognitive Disability in

American Literary Naturalism,” I argue that a cursory understanding of historical

pathologies of cognitive disability has caused scholars to overlook the ways in which

naturalists explored the boundary between disability and normalcy and, relatedly, how

ideas about mental difference influenced their storytelling strategies. Critics like Stephen

Brennan have noted the “common perception that naturalists were concerned primarily

with dim-witted characters” (183). But critics have not recognized that dim-wittedness was once a distinct type of cognitive disability. I examine how Frank Norris and Jack

London took inspiration from the era’s psychological discourse. As 19th century

sociologist Richard Dugdale argued, mental defect could only be understood through “the

minute study of individual lives” (2). Literary naturalists seized on this call for exhaustive

narrative analysis, but their representations of cognitive disability undermined the 30

boundary between normalcy and mental “defect.” To disrupt this boundary, naturalists

created narrators who simulated the point of view of mental difference, focusing on what

the disabled character failed to perceive and cogitate. Nonetheless, these narrators spoke

in ways that sounded sophisticated to an educated reader. This strategy created a new

relationship with mental difference that I refer to as “restricted engagement.” While

naturalists, at the surface, often adhered to eugenic maxims about nature, race, and

intellectual fitness, their formal innovations were geared towards encouraging readers to

indulge in points of view that were off limits. They were directed to the frayed

ideological and methodological edges of the fabric of eugenic thought.

My third chapter, “Trying to See Cognitive Disability: The Promise and Problem

of Vision,” examines how across genres, cognitive disability prompted epistemological dilemmas that necessitated narrative solutions around the turn of the 20th century.

Reading journalist Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse, eugenicist Henry H. Goddard’s

The Kallikak Family, and Sherwood Anderson’s “‘Queer’” from Winesburg, Ohio, I

consider how authors positioned readers in ways that allowed them to not only stare at

the seemingly inscrutable face of mental difference but also at the process of vision itself.

This positioning involved three steps. First, authors recreated the act of staring. Second,

authors used this moment of staring to instantiate popular opinions of the cognitively

disabled person. Finally, authors revised or undermined these popular conceptions via

extended narrative comment that 1) demanded new forensic or representational modes,

and 2) called for the adoption of new political or ontological commitments. Authors

represented the initial stare so that readers could critically examine it. In this way, readers

would work to resist or embrace specific epistemological modes and ideological 31

programs. By focusing on cognitive disability, which resisted being known through vision, authors were able to explore in words what it meant to see and also to show mental identity. Collectively, these different types of authors undermined the efficacy of any single-staged gaze and endorsed a new epistemology of seeing, one predicated on a succession of stares. Narrative operated as a dynamic space in which readers could analyze, revise, or internalize modalities of sight.

In my fourth chapter, “The Legacy of Cognitive Disability and its Formal

Implications for American Modernism,” I examine how scientific pathology inspired formal innovation in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and John Steinbeck’s

Of Mice and Men. To tell the story of Benjy’s loss, Faulkner relied on object obsession, a trait that was discussed at length by eugenicists and continues to be foregrounded in contemporary pathologies of cognitive disability. Object obsession structures Benjy’s narrative, governs his phenomenology, and communicates his social relationships.

Attending to object obsession illuminates the specific ways in which the perspective of cognitive disability aestheticizes and narrates the story of the Compson family.

Steinbeck harnesses pathology in a similar fashion. Cognitive disability seems to exclusively inhere in Lennie; however, attending to its key pathological markers – imitation, routine, and echolalia – reveals the book’s narrative structure, and “disabled aesthetic,” to borrow Tobin Sieber’s phrase. I contend that an inter-subjective echolalia runs throughout the novella: Lennie echoes George; George echoes Lennie; and more broadly, the narrative echoes itself. These works show how literature challenges readers to come to understand the unique modalities by which the world and human experience might be understood. Finally, I consider how the pathological legacy of idiocy, as it is 32

expressed in these works, helps explain why critics so persistently diagnosis characters like Benjy and Lennie as autistic.

My fifth chapter, “The Cognition of Connection: Narrating the Family Experience of Cognitive Disability in the 50s,” turns away from narratives about the cognitively disabled subject and towards stories about his or her family unit. I consider how popular parent memoirs like Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew, provided psychologists the language and narrative templates needed to discuss cognitive disability during an era in which the stigma around “mental defect” was thought to be gradually lessening. In You and Your Retarded Child, psychologist Samuel A. Kirk attributes this cultural shift to the “frank expressions by parents, revealing feelings and anxieties which they experience as they go through stages of adjusting to their new family problem” (1).

Parent memoirs introduced ways of understanding and narrating the family experience of disability, but memoirists exhibited an ideology that subordinated emotional experience to pragmatism. The emotional journey of the parent was secondary to the quest to find a solution to their child’s problem. This ideology substantially affected the duration and arrangement of the scenes that composed different stories. I then turn to

Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, a novel that explored areas of emotional experience that were cordoned off by memoirists and psychologists alike. Though he might seem normal, I argue that Augie is a new type of fool. During a family debate about whether to institutionalize his idiot brother Georgie, Augie comes to face-to-face with the limitations of dominant ideologies of cognitive disability. By telling a story through Augie’s disabled point of view, Bellow undermines dominant narrative strategies related to disability like those present in the parent memoirs: the erasure of 33

disabled subjectivities, the creation of plotlines that work toward a solution for disability, and privileging of certain temporal viewpoints that claim to know the “truth” of disability. The novel puts different ways of making sense of cognitive disability in narrative contest with each other, compelling more traditional ideologies and attitudes to unravel.

In my conclusion, “Coming to Know Cognitive Disability in Narrative,” I question a canonical argument in disability studies: namely, that narrative tends to make disability into something known and manageable. In particular, I take exception to

Lennard Davis’s notion that novels inherently enforce to “enforce normalcy” and to

Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which posits that disability exists in stories as something to be fixed or rehabilitated. I contend that disability in the best fiction is a thing that is always coming to be known. This instability of meaning often causes normal characters and readers to reflect on how qualities their own mental qualities might be far less static than they initially assume. Many critics have noted that the disabled body reminds viewers that their body might one day misbehave, wear down, or break. But no one has explored how when confronted by the presence of cognitive disability can give rise to the concern that imperiled ways of thinking might already be operating within the mind of the normal person. This is not an issue of what will be, or what might be down the road, but what could be in the present moment. To help explore how narratives capitalize on this more uncertain orientation to knowledge, I posit a heuristic that invites critics to consider the dynamics of the reader’s engagement with cognitive disability over the course of a story. Such a framework directs scholars to 34

examine the utility of writing disability into and out of a given text and considerably

amplifies the potential and power of disability studies.

Disability is often spoken of as a “landscape” for scholarly inquiry and literary

adventure. Lennard Davis contends that “one can find in almost any novel… a kind of

surveying of the terrain of the body, and attention to difference – physical, mental, and

national” (48). Alice Hall notes that her primary goal is to “chart a new critical territory”

that maps on to the what Virginia Woolf called the “‘undiscovered country’ of invalid

experience” (18-9). Tracing literary, journalistic, and scientific topographies that have yet

to be delineated, this dissertation does participate in the field’s map-making. However, it also models orienteering strategies that the critic might adopt within this landscape.

Beyond demonstrating these skills, I aim to shift the terms of the adventure metaphor.

How might disability be seen less as a territory to be explored, and more as a tool used to guide one into areas of human experience that might seem impenetrable, intimidating, or far flung? For many authors, disability is less like a maw that readers nervously peer into, and more like a lantern that might begin to cast flashes of light down paths of human experience that readers would otherwise fail to see. Or better yet, cognitive disability is not a tool at all, but a disposition of a person who has been to places that many have not and who might guide others as long as they listen carefully and follow closely. 35

Chapter Two

Reader Engagement with Cognitive Disability in American Literary Naturalism

“Stout and sturdy build. Head rather large. Blue eyes and light hair; sight and

hearing good, but speech imperfect”

So begins Martin Barr’s description of S.G., a middle grade moral imbecile (267).

Barr, a prominent eugenicist and superintendent at the Elwyn Institute, includes a two paragraph description of S.G. as one of many case studies in his influential book Mental

Defectives (1913).1 These first three sentences are terse medical notes, but as description

continues, Barr turns to a mode better suited for detailed investigation: narrative. The

second paragraph transitions from report to detective story. Barr recalls the night of a

barn fire near the institution, a story in which he himself emerges as an agent. “In the

midst of the excitement as I passed S. he gave me a furtive glance and stepped back with an air of concealment which aroused my suspicions” (267). His intuition proves right,

and he extracts a full confession from the boy who reveals “how he had guarded [a

match] for days, and finally watching his opportunity, struck it and threw it in the barn,

fanned the flame and closed the door when the hay began to burn” (267). Dramatic

narrative, not professional notes, offers the clearest window into moral imbecility, a form

of mental defectiveness less perceptible than idiocy. In adopting narrative as a

professional method, Barr and other psychologists inadvertently provided the analytical

templates that literary authors, in their own considerations of mental difference, would

explore and often explode. Literary naturalists saw an opportunity to use their own 36

method to contribute to the cultural understanding about mental difference. But how did

authors distinguish their narrative projects from psychologists, and what was to be gained

with these new literary experiments?

To answer this question, one must first identify the types of cognitive disability that literary naturalists sought to represent in the first place. Barr’s book, in line with so much other eugenic and psychological writing of the time, identified over 25 types of

mental defectiveness. Disability studies scholars rarely consider how naturalist fiction

engages, narrates, and schematizes cognitive disability within this context -- in short,

what it has to offer that enriches our understanding mental difference as it was once

conceptualized.2 Taylor Hagood has observed that “the reality of disability studies in

American Literature is that there is a good deal yet to be done, for while there is work out

there, compared with other fields of study, it is fairly scarce” (392). The shape that

scarcity takes – i.e. the areas that are understudied – results from critics’ ability to

recognize disability as it was once seen. Cursory understandings of late 19th and early

20th century discourses of cognitive disability have limited critical engagement with

American literary naturalism. While scholars are able to spot sensory and physical

impairments in this period, they struggle to do the same with cognitive ones. For present-

day critics, deafness still exists, but slow-wittedness does not.

Scholars of naturalism have often stepped around issues of disability too. Keith

Newlin’s Handbook of American Literary Naturalism (2011) examines prominent

authors through the traditional frameworks of identity politics -- race, class, gender, and sexuality – but neglects to include any disability studies approach. Brennan investigates representations of normal cognition, an ironic move since he acknowledges the “common 37

perception that naturalists were concerned primarily with dim-witted characters struggling against hostile environments” (183, emphasis added). American literary naturalism is ripe for disability studies inquiry since dim-wittedness was a distinct class of mental defect in fin-de-siècle America. That critics inadvertently characterize naturalist protagonists according to an extinct psychological class illustrates how strongly naturalist authors responded to specific scientific and cultural concepts that circulated during the turn of the 20th century. This inadvertent characterization points to a

productive intersection between traditional literary criticism and disability studies. By

examining what it means to be dim-witted, or more broadly, cognitively disabled, a

disability studies approach to naturalist fiction grounds already existing ways of reading

canonical writers.

I want to take on Hagood’s charge to venture into underexplored terrain by

focusing on cognitive disability in the work of Frank Norris and Jack London. I consider

how both these writers rely on formal innovations to allow readers provisional access to

disability experience. Jennifer L. Fleissener’s study of the psychology of compulsion and

narrative structure lays important foundation for my work. In Women, Compulsion, and

Modernity, she argues that “compulsion… can characterize not only the daily stories of

naturalism’s heroines but just as much the narrative mode that portrays them” (10).

Naturalist fiction engages social problems by obsessively presenting “more and more

details, with the result that it remains stuck at the level of description, without moving

forward to the story line for which that description is meant to set the stage” (10). I

contend that compulsion was just one cognitive abnormality from which artists took

inspiration and want to consider how historical pathologies mental defectiveness – slow- 38

wittedness, backwardness, and feeblemindedness – can be drawn upon to reconceptualize

naturalist form.3

My approach differs from Fleissner’s in that I seek to clarify the role of the reader

in appreciating formal structures inspired by disability. Many readers of Norris have been

quick to define the reader as a spectator who observes disability, degeneration, and

criminality without experiencing any serious connection or empathy with the characters

who embody these conditions. The naturalist author is thought to merely reproduce

eugenic schema, creating a space in which readers accept and rely on scientific systems

without complication. Gabrielle Rossetti argues that “by evoking the primitive as

immigrant, Norris offers ways of conceptualizing immigrant characters as sites of

disease, simplicity, or even criminal behavior -- all, in other words, as regressive types”

(52) In this reading, Norris’s various characters gather around the monolith of regression, shoring up the boundaries of the well-mannered, Anglo-Saxon American who reads them. Rebecca Nisetich contends that Norris’s cocktail of stereotype and sensationalism allowed him to carve out a privileged space from which the reader could see degeneration in action. “Norris… exploits white American cultural fears of ... over-exposure to the degenerative stimuli… repelling and intriguing readers at once” (19). I take a cue from

Nisetich’s acknowledgment that Norris’s narratives both repel and intrigue, but I think that she overlooks the value that Norris found in moving readers so close to cognitive disability. In Nisetich’s view, a character like McTeague is appealing insofar as he is grotesque, taboo, and fundamentally different than the reader. In my view, McTeague’s appeal lies in his proximity to normalcy and his function as a focal character that allows the reader provisional access to a way of cognition thought to be inaccessible to normal 39

minds. This provisional access to disability is the technical phenomenon that critics have

yet to explore.

In the case of the work of Norris and London, no unimplicated reader watches

degeneration unfold from on high. Rather as Richard Chase once suggested, the readers is

bound to protagonists like McTeague in a way that compels them to consider their own

connection with primitivism. Exploring just one thread of connection, I want to examine

how Norris reconstructs modes of cognition – specifically the mental “simplicity” that

Rossetti mentions, what his scientific contemporaries would call “slow-wittedness” or

“backwardness.” Norris puts forth quick and slow-wittedness as fixed mental categories

only to destabilize this division via characterization, shifts in point of view, and the voice

of the narrator, who speaks with a level of sophistication that mediates disability

experience for the reader. The reader thus has a restricted engagement with an alternative

way of seeing the world. Restrictive engagement allows the reader to gently wade into

aberrant forms of cognition. However, this experience is a process of coming to an

alternate mode of perception: readers stand on the verge of entering another cognitive,

phenomenological, and narrative land, but they never quite get there.

I focus on “slow-wittedness” because its literary representation directs the reader’s attention to the dividing line between disability and normalcy. Never as obvious as the “idiot,” the slow-witted subject’s disability could remain concealed so long as he or she escaped the medical eye. Norris himself was familiar with these borderlands.

Deana Paoli Gumani has catalogued Norris’s academic struggles as a “special student” at

Harvard. Frustrated with his liminal position, he warned one friend, “Either attend the

University as a regular student, or stay away altogether…. A special student…was neither 40

one thing nor the other” (Hatfield quoted in Gumani 79). I want to begin to consider how

literary naturalists capitalized on cognitive disabilities that were neither one thing nor

another, specifically as they were embodied in characters who stood on the verge of more

definite identities.

Drawing on Brennan’s observation that naturalist fiction ends “on a note of

indicating a need to broaden our understanding a given theory, philosophy, or narrative

method,” I suggest that literary narrative provided a space to test the implications of

psychological theories of cognitive disability. To establish historical context, I begin by examining several popular institutionally authored texts that were written for both a

specialized audience and a broad national one.4 Naturalists like Norris and London

diverted their fictional efforts away from institutions, a move that allowed them to

explore terrain that popular science could not access. Using a corpus of literary texts --

McTeague (1899), “The Wife of Chino” (1903), The Mutiny of Elsinore (1915), and

“Told in the Drooling Ward” (1916) -- that historically aligns with my corpus of popular

science texts, I demonstrate how naturalists pushed key features of the scientific

backdrop to extents that caused these features to unravel. For scientists, a clear scale of

mental defect was contingent on properly placed and classified cognitive disability, and

decisions on placement and classification could only be made with the help of narrative.

Literary naturalists heeded the scientific call for exhaustive narrative analysis, but their

representations of mental identity ironically undermined the boundary between normalcy

and mental difference. Naturalists extended the range of psychological taxonomy to

include humanity writ large, and in the process, established a technically novel way to

catch glimpses into the mind of the cognitive other. 41

I – Narrative as a Scientific Tool

Cases like S.G.’s were at the forefront of America’s consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century, and narratives like Barr’s worked to move them there. These higher functioning cognitively disabled subjects were thought to be able to get by in the world. They could evade, escape, and graduate from state controlled institutions that were the perennial homes of people with more extreme cognitive disabilities. S.G.’s story concludes as follows: “Removed to an insane hospital, he was after several years released, and is now a tramp, capable of perpetrating any act of violence” (267). Barr uses ambiguity – S.G. could be any passerby, be anywhere, and do anything – to illustrate the need for the well-funded institutions he championed at a national level (Trent 142).

Barr recognized that the national conversation about cognitive disability was rapidly expanding beyond medical networks and into cultural, political, and literary ones.

Narrative functioned an interdisciplinary means of exploring the alleged problem of the high-grade mental defective. I want to consider psychology’s reliance on narrative in order to set the stage for the literary interventions of naturalist authors. Norris and

London, I will show, sought to broaden America’s understanding cognitive disability by fleshing out its ontological ambiguity, which Barr and other writers so frequently capitalized on. Literary naturalists narrated cognitive disability as it existed outside of institutional walls, and in this new location, they rendered permeable the boundary between disability and normalcy.

By 1913, the year Mental Defectives was published, narrative was an essential mode for explaining the otherwise inscrutable nature of cognitive disability. But certain 42

prerequisite steps had to be taken before one told a story. In Mental Defectives, for example, Barr first outlined a taxonomy of disability into which individuals with cognitive disability could be sorted. Disability was best located in places conducive to study. The idiot was far easier to understand when represented inside institutional walls than outside of them. Classification and framing were actions concomitant with narrative.

By examining these professional strategies, we can better see how literary authors duplicated, reformulated, and critiqued them.

In Barr’s view, the novelty of his work lay in his synthesis of disconnected definitions of mental defectiveness. The goal of taxonomical synthesis was “to reconcile apparent differences; to weigh carefully scientific and practical values; to arrive at a classification which… shall further the best interests of the work” (86). Barr begins his literature review with idiocy, a class mental defectiveness for which theoretical differences might be most easily reconciled (and consequently less disputed by literary authors). This review does not flow from the reservoir of science, but from various tributaries: cultural, literary, and legal. The Greek “ίδίώτηζ” signified “a person devoid of understanding from birth—incapable of holding communication with another, therefore set apart—alone” (18). Misquoting Shakespeare, Barr notes that the idiot was “one who holds his bauble for his God” and “one who tells a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" (19). For William Blackstone, “an idiot, or natural fool, is one that hath no understanding from his nativity, and therefore is by law presumed never likely to attain any” (19). Barr recalls psychologist Édouard Séguin’s allusion to Chaucer: within the idiot “the will sits, like the lady in Comus, locked up in alabaster" (20). Barr distills these stylized descriptions into a single definition. “The idiot intelligently sees nothing, 43

feels nothing, hears nothing, does nothing, and knows nothing. He simply lives alone—

the solitary one” (18). For Barr idiocy is the most recognizable form of mental defect.

Imbecility is harder to spot. “The imbecile, on the other hand, is able to see, to

understand, and to discriminate in greater or less degree” (18). Though “on the other

hand” suggests an easily seen split between idiocy and imbecility, dualistic stability gives

way as more forms enter Barr’s taxonomy. “Another phase of mental defect has

developed the term ‘Backward-child’—one unable to advance rapidly” (18). Barr elaborates that “this is the dullard of the schools, with power of attention feeble, and of concentration—except under strong incentive—nil” (128). For this class, attentiveness and willpower decline as a result of an enfeebled mental constitution. “Easily fatigued and confused, abstract and artificial signs hold his attention for short periods only.

Independent study is for him, therefore, impossible” (128). Unlike the idiot or the low-

grade imbecile, the inconspicuous dullard can find a home in world. “He is easily

interested in conversation…and in industrial and manual work his energies can be

enlisted in many directions” (128).

How could an independent, if slow-witted, laborer be equated with the solitary

idiot incapable of speech, work, and sense? To make such a connection, Barr extends the

range of his disability taxonomy. “The differences… are of degree not of kind. In reality from the idiot… to the backward and the feebly gifted there is a regular ascending scale

ever-lessening of mental defect” (18). Barr and other psychologists thus advanced the

upper bound of mental defect, fabricating a class of cognitive disability now

unrecognizable. 44

A focus on the upper bound of the “ever-lessening” scale was in the making long

before Barr’s book. It distinguished the American experience of mental defect at the turn

of the 20th century.5 Liminal cases of cognitive disability, in which normal appearance

concealed underlying defect, fascinated American psychologists. The roots of this

American fascination trace back to the origins of the American eugenics movement. In

The Jukes (1877), Richard Dugdale delineates his scale of criminality according to weak-

mindedness.6 On one end lies “the ideal pauper” who “is the idiotic adult unable to help

himself, who may be justly called a living embodiment of death.” On the other end, lies

“the ideal criminal” who “is a courageous man in the prime of life who… skillfully

contrives crime.” Dugdale focuses on the dividing line between quick-witted criminality

and idiotic pauperism. “Between these two extremes there are endless gradations that approximate each other, till at last you reach a class who are too weak to be contrivers of crime, and too strong to be almhouse paupers” (32). In On Idiocy and Imbecility (1877),

William W. Ireland argued that the actions of American professionals illustrated their fascination with this dividing line. American asylums benefitted from the "careful selection" of inmates and a "weeding out of bad cases" (367). As a consequence, "in the state institutions generally the physical and mental condition of the inmates present[ed] a

higher average than that seen in British institutions” (367). Professional agendas dictated

the segments of the ever-lessening scale that were most apparent to the public. The face

of cognitive disability in America was an inconspicuous one. Ireland notes that “the class

of 'feeble-minded children' would indeed appear to preponderate over that of the pure

idiot in American institutions" (367). Dugdale’s theorization and Ireland’s perspective

highlight the key concern that lay at the center of American conversations about 45

cognitive disability: even as the influence of psychology increased, mental defect was ever approximating normalcy.

Such approximation demanded clearer boundaries between the subcategories of

CD taxonomy. Barr figures classification as the foundation of any engagement with idiocy, imbecility, or feeblemindedness. “To the student of mental defect the very first requisite is a classification that shall be at once simple and comprehensive, definite and clear” (78). Such a taxonomy would correct false ideas about feeblemindedness that circulated in the public sphere: “the general public… need[s] a classification that shall be an exponent guiding them away from the fallacy and delusion of cure” (88). For Isaac

Kerlin, Barr’s predecessor at the Pennsylvania State Asylum, sound classification made possible the right professional responses to cognitive disability. Such responses sought to appropriately locate mental difference. Kerlin quotes another superintendent’s description of the asylum matron. “She not only hath a place for everything and everything in its place, but she also insisteth that there shall be a place for every person within her control, and that such persons shall be in their respective places” (46). The idea of a perfect location spilled into pathology. To be within one’s respective place was to be anchored, and institutional anchoring worked against the fundamental drive of the mentally defective. Of moral imbecility, Barr writes:

In the same way an emotional nature is coupled with an utter lack of will-power,

and poor judgment makes him the victim of nerve-storms, alternating between

tenderness and cruelty without logical cause or reason, amounting often to an

utter absence of moral sense—a nature, therefore, anchorless. (324, emphasis

original) 46

Barr’s pathological sketch of the moral imbecile highlights key traits that will be useful in

recognizing and reading cognitive disability in naturalist fiction: emotional flightiness,

the absence of will, nerve storms, and an anchorless nature. For now, what is more

important is the method Barr uses to prove the moral imbecile’s anchorless character:

narrative. To persuade his reader, one must show and not simply tell. The subjects of

Barr’s case studies enact anchorlessness so that his audience might better recognize

mental defect when they come across it.

Barr retells the story of L.G., a high grade moral imbecile who escapes his

institution after unleashing a “brutal attack upon a boy…without provocation” (277).

The story centers on the offender’s experience of displacement. “After fruitless endeavors to obtain work, he returned home, but as before his presence there proved intolerable, and the safety of his family demanded his commitment to an insane hospital” (277). L.G. escapes the hospital, and Barr runs into him on the streets of the city. L.G. touts the fact that he is gainfully employed. But capitalizing on his power as a storyteller, Barr reveals that the claim is not to be trusted. In contrast to his imagined readers, he remains skeptical, and a letter Barr soon receives from the subject validates this skepticism. “To tell the truth, I ran away from the Insane Hospital about a week ago. I'm not stopping at home. Iv [sic] got to hunt my bed up, when night draws on, the way I do I walk out in the country, rather than go to these bug houses where these tramps go” (277). Perhaps to the dismay of the reader that Barr has conjured, L.G. reveals that drifting is a way of life for a large segment of the population: “Last night I was walking along Willow St. to catch a freight. I was attacked by three bums, well I fixed two of them, the other one ran for dear life.” Barr uses narrative to spin a story of institutional power. L.G. ends his plea by 47

asking to return to an appropriate location: “I often feel sorry that I left Elwyn. Will you

please take me back again or give me a job.” Literary naturalists would recognize such

institutional spin, and in crafting their own stories, they would thrust mental difference

outside of the institution. In this new location, mental difference could be examined

without institutional artifices, an action that would destabilize ideas of normalcy.

Just as important as Barr’s definitions of cognitive identities are the narrative

strategies he uses to shape them. Barr’s story shows anchorlessness in character.

Taxonomical description introduces pathologies that narrative validates. L.G.’s story is

one of dozens of “illustrative cases” that correspond to specific classes of Barr’s complex

taxonomy. Earlier illustrative cases that correspond with more obvious forms of mental

defect are more minimalistic in structure and spartan in style. For example, Barr’s

“illustrative” case of a “profound, unimprovable, apathetic” idiot reads: “Male; twenty- one years old. Semi-mute, speaking only a few short words; is helpless and unclean. Born at full term, ordinary labor. Had spasms at birth. Father 36 and mother 31 at time of birth.” The terseness of this description when compared to the developed account of the

L.G. reveals that in order to describe the types of mental difference Americans were interested in, professionals had to narrate disability.

It comes as no surprise then that psychologists and eugenicists were concerned with moments when literature and science intersected. Professionals thought narrative could misinform the public as much as it might educate them. In his discussions of cranial operations once thought to cure idiocy, Barr compares the scientist to the writer:

“while scientists were investigating, experimenting and cautiously rejecting all evidence that failed to verify, quacks and charlatans… took up the cry and stimulated by the daily 48

press and the novelist, all eager for sensation, the cutting open of heads soon became a fad” (186).7 In contrast, Ireland praises literary narrative, elevating Dickens to the same observational field as the scientist: “The imbeciles in Dickens’ stories are obviously the result of real studies from nature… the pictures of Barnaby Rudge, Mr. Dick, Miss

Podsnap… if not all quite true to nature, are evidently done by an artist who has studied the class” (283).8

Ireland’s acknowledgement that the best novelists conduct “real studies of nature” points to channels of exchange between literary and scientific methods.9 Narrative operated as a method that accomplished the primary goal of taxonomy: the exhaustive description of the cognitively disabled subject and his environment. According to

Dugdale, “the minute study of individual lives” must be made “the leading feature” of research before statistical truth could be revealed. The Jukes required “a method of study… of historico-biographical synthesis united to statistical analysis” (12). The method of American literary naturalism – the detailed study of the individual and the world he occupies – would operate in concert with the methodological imperatives put forth by eugenic psychologists. The baton of narrative inquiry was literature’s to take. In

“The Experimental Novel,” Emile Zola clearly outlines this type of collaboration:

And that is what makes the experimental novel: to have the mechanism of

phenomena in men, to show the working of the intellectual and sensory

manifestations as physiology will explain them to us under the influences of

hereditary and surrounding circumstances, then to show man living in the social

milieu which he himself has produced, which he modifies every day, and in the

midst of which he in his turn undergoes continuous modification. Therefore we 49

lean heavily on physiology; we take man in isolation from the hands of the

physiologist in order to carry forward the solution of the problem and resolve

scientifically the question of knowing how men behave themselves once they are

in society. (174)

Read in light of Zola’s theory, the controlled stories of psychologists were inherently limited because of the context of their happening. The institution housed their events, or at least their telling. In this space, the taxonomies stood unshaken. The experimental novel was one place where eugenic logic, psychological conclusions, and cultural theories of idiocy could truly be tested. Norris, for his part, was deeply invested in Zola’s philosophy. Early biographers depicted Zola as a literary father-figure for Norris. “There is scarcely a spare moment when our young author is not thumbing over a yellow-backed

Zola novel in the original French” (Dobie 26). Lars Ahnebrink has noted that like Zola who “studied manuals, scientific works, [Norris] read articles, papers, consulted people well versed in the subject on which he intended to base his book” (17), Norris was

“anxious to get the right atmosphere, the correct terms, the authentic details and setting for his novels” (18). Literary narrative opened up a way to push the era’s science to extents that would challenge its most foundational ideas of how human minds might operate and be divided. But these literary experiments depended on technical innovations, the chief of which was the restyling of the narrator in a way that repositioned the reader in relation to mental difference. In the work of Norris and London, normalcy was routinely subsumed into the scale of mental defect, an action that disrupted the premises on which such a scale ever-lessening mental defect rested.

II – Struck Dumb: The Permeable Boundary between CD and Normalcy in

McTeague

In McTeague, Norris relies on formal innovations to create a path to new discoveries about how humans think, feel, and perceive. He stations the reader in a place where they can see the spectrum or cognitive difference come apart at the threads from a safe distance. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of McTeague, the slow-witted

dentist of Polk Street. Trina Sieppe, whom McTeague’s best friend Marcus Schouler is

courting, comes to the dental parlors with a broken tooth. McTeague embarks on the

weeks-long process of repair, over the course of which a close friendship develops

between the two. But McTeague’s “animal instinct” soon awakens at the sight of an

anesthetized Trina, compelling him to kiss her as she sits unconscious. From there the

stage for the degenerative romance is set. McTeague walks the straight and narrow for a

while. He asks Marcus for permission to pursue Trina despite the previous courtship.

Marcus obliges and McTeague soon marries her. Trina wins the lottery during their

engagement, netting a $5,000 nest egg for the couple. Despite this good fortune,

McTeague and Trina’s relationship deteriorates. She refuses to tap into any of her lottery

winnings, much to the frustration of McTeague who aspires to live a more cultivate life.

Demise follows aspiration. Marcus, his former confidant, becomes his foe, jealous that he

has missed out on Trina and her winnings. Word gets out that McTeague lacks a license

to practice dentistry, and his business goes under. A ruined man, McTeague runs off with

a few hundred dollars only to return after burning through the sum. When Trina refuses to

give him money from the lottery winnings, he kills her in a fit of rage, runs off once

more, and is eventually hunted down by Marcus in Death Valley. McTeague kills 51

Marcus, only to find himself handcuffed to friend’s corpse under the blazing California

sun.

How do readers experience McTeague’s fall, and what stake do they have in it?

Norris presents a dim-witted protagonist who is at once both foreign and familiar to

readers. Richard Chase argues that McTeague “is of the confraternity of the blond beast,

the ‘Nietzchean,’ or ‘Darwinian’ Adam, so much admired by Norris and Jack London”

(191). For Chase, McTeague’s appeal lies in the way it negotiates ostensible reality with

underlying abstract motives and forces. “On the surface, people are domesticated and

conventionalized, whereas underneath they are carnivorous beasts” (189). He elaborates

that “in McTeague the circuit of life between the real and the ideal often ceases to operate

and the two fly wildly asunder” (191). Chase’s interpretation continues to influence

criticism; however, recent scholars often focus on the foreign components of McTeague’s

character and thus gloss over the narrative strategies Norris uses to connect readers with

his protagonist.

For critics like Rosetti, who argues that the novel “rationalizes the destruction of the lower classes based on their inherent contagion” (175), McTeague is appealing insofar as he is grotesque, taboo, and fundamentally different from the reader. This orientation contrasts how Chase interprets the reader’s relationship with McTeague – one that is rooted in connection as much as difference. Chase asserts that “McTeague himself is semi-legendary… In this respect McTeague is the spiritual father of mass-media heroes like Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan” (191). While they project an animal-like appearance,

McTeague and Tarzan are tethered to the reader or viewer by some innate human quality, a dynamic that makes their stories engaging. 52

This effect is the chief benefit of rendering a slow-witted character who stands near the dividing line of disability and normalcy. Such characters have escaped the eye of the critic. Using the designation “mental retardation,” Patricia Puccinelli argues that

McTeague’s “lack of intellectual perceptive abilities does not set him enough apart from the norm for him to be called retarded or to be defined in terms of the convention” (5, emphasis original). By adhering to a late 20th century label, Puccinelli overlooks how mental difference was conceptualized in the past. When Norris wrote, cognitive disability was marked by its resemblance to normalcy. Such resemblance produced anxiety within the scientific community who, in response, sought to create increasingly sharper divisions between mental identities. Literary naturalists capitalized on scientific anxiety. They sought not to set apart mental difference, but to bring it close to normalcy.10 To the chagrin of popular scientists, naturalists figured cognitive disability as a baseline to which all people were tethered. If Norris were to set McTeague “apart enough,” he would fail to take advantage of the cultural and historical occasion of his representation.

The connection that readers develop with McTeague can be best seen when examining how Norris reconstructs modes of cognition – one of which is the mental

“simplicity” Rossetti mentions. Once recognized, this connection compels readers to reconsider the stability of the eugenic hierarchy and their position in it. I consider

Chase’s “circuit” in terms of cognitive ideals and character realities. 11 Norris initially represents quick and slow-wittedness as stable mental categories only to dismantle them via characterization and shifts in point of view. Marcus and McTeague seem to embody positive and pejorative cognitive ideals, but the novel inverts these identities. Playing on

Dugdale’s methodological language, I argue that as Norris attends to the minutest study 53

of the finest cognitive details, he ironically refigures all humans as cognitively disabled.

Hardly complicit with eugenic ideas, Norris’s work, and on a larger level, American

literary naturalism, causes eugenic method to backfire on itself.12 Readers experience this destabilization through the carefully crafted voice of the narrator who mediates disability experience – a technical achievement that creates the reader’s restricted engagement with cognitive disability. I want to focus on a few early scenes that build up to the conversation between McTeague and Marcus, in which Marcus agrees to let

McTeague pursue Trina. These scenes establish the parameters of the reader’s relationship to cognitive disability over the course of the narrative. I begin by considering how McTeague embodies physiological traits of cognitive disability in his initial characterization, and then I turn to how readers come to learn of his interior – his thoughts, his crises, and his feelings. By comparing these internal developments of

McTeague with representations of Marcus, I show how Norris rendered the boundary between normalcy and disability a permeable one that existed as a temporary division between parties with shifting cognitive identities.

Norris’s characterization of McTeague is steeped in 19th century pathologies of

cognitive disability.13 The novel begins by stressing appetite: “It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at

the conductors’ coffee-joint on Polk Street” (263). McTeague’s meal lacks the slightest

sophistication that even the most humble Sunday dinner might aspire to. “He had a thick

gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and

a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar” (263). In sharp contrast to the

reader who likely enjoys more refined Sunday dinners, McTeague feeds on slop, or at 54

least an amalgam of indistinguishable foodstuffs. The reader has no idea of what meat the main entrée actually is. They know only the number, not the type, of vegetables. The pudding can only be hazily described as a “sort” of a type, marked by a buttery sugar taste. The indistinguishability of the meal components is ironically magnified by the series of semicolons which introduce them. Meal constituents are given grammatical space to emerge clearly, yet they fail to emerge as anything other than the gray components of McTeague’s Sunday supper.14 As he finishes his meal, his routine

continues: “he stopped at Joe Frenna’s saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was

his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner” (263). Norris renders cognitive

difference in ways familiar to modern readers: an animalistic McTeague adheres to a

routine that approaches machine-like predictability. Yet the contemporary reader likely misses other tropes of cognitive disability in fin de siècle writing, which both invoke earlier 19th century conceptions of the slow mind and anticipate early 20th century

theories of cognitive disability. His voracious appetite fits both historical and

contemporary stereotypes.15 The stolidity of cognitive slowness emerges as McTeague

ingests his “heavy” and “thick” food. Taking no notice of the “underdone meat, very hot,

on a cold plate,” McTeague reveals his perceptual stoicism (263).16

In characterizing the hulking dentist, Norris weaves the pathology of mental

defect with normal behaviors. He positions McTeague within the upper bound of the

ever-lessening scale of mental defect that eugenicists and psychologists outlined. His

cognitive and perceptual dispositions are rooted in idiocy, but as a figure, he resembles

the normal person. As McTeague returns home, he “lay[s] back in his operating chair…

reading the paper, drinking his beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food 55

digested; crop-full, stupid, and warm” (263). Norris articulates cognitive difference through animal processes of consumption –drinking and digesting – but within these processes, the narrator injects distinctly normal behaviors: smoking and afternoon reading. The narrator connects these processes in a series before summarizing the Sunday state of McTeague. Prefaced by descriptors that refer to physical, animalistic sensations,

“crop-full” and “warm,” “stupid” emerges as the sole description of cognitive identity.

Yet McTeague is not only crop-full of food, but news and tobacco as well. By mixing normal habits with animal processes, clear boundaries between cognitive normalcy and aberrancy blur. The novel establishes a distance between normalcy and cognitive disability via bestial characterization, but it also subtly tethers normalcy to McTeague’s seeming aberrancy.

Norris’s characterization of McTeague turns to his mental abilities. His volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist” suggest that the young protagonist might have learned his craft conventionally via study (263). However, the narrator quickly reveals that these books are a façade. McTeague has been trained not by words but by images. He apprenticed a traveling dentist and learned the craft “after a fashion, mostly by watching the charlatan operate. He had read many of the necessary books, but he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from them” (264). McTeague’s perspective roots itself in the world, and physical description functions as the chief mean of his characterization. The locals connect his professional success with his physical prowess:

“Polk Street called him the ‘Doctor’ and spoke of his enormous strength” (264). Detailed imagery illustrates this strength: 56

For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blonde hair six feet

three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of

muscle, slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a

fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the

hands of an old-time carboy. Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a

refractory tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square cut, angular; the

jaw salient, like that of a carnivora. (264)

Like the ambiguous components of his meal, McTeague’s physical attributes are strung together by semicolons. His body is animalized. The stiff yellow hair textures his body like a horse, though his figure betrays a subtle predatory identity. Webster’s 1884 dictionary defines “Carnivora” as “an order of animals which subsist on the flesh, as the hyena.” McTeague not only subsists on, but is also strictly of the flesh. His fingers take the place of professional tools and instruments, and incapable of mentally processing the books of his profession, McTeague himself emerges as a mechanical body. His ropes of muscles, mallet hands, and forceps-like grip compose him as a conglomerate of simple machines. Cognitive disability is stereotypically embodied by a massive figure. Norris’s representation of embodied disability is typical of the naturalist writers from whom he took inspiration. Ahnebrink notes that “almost all Zola's characters are simple human beings, affected by different kinds of hereditary diseases” and that when he introduces these characters, he “generally gives a detailed description of the person's exterior, observing and emphasizing special characteristics, habits or gestures in the character”

(57). Norris links exterior signs with interior defect, and McTeague’s slow body betrays a slow mind. “McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow-to act sluggish.” Despite 57

his imposing cognitive and bodily weight, “there was nothing vicious about the

man…Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile,

obedient” (264).

McTeague’s cognitive aberrancy can be best described as the “slow-wittedness”

seen in the dullards of school that Barr points out.17 As Barr notes “Unlike the idiot… the

slow of wit can find a home in world” (128). Slow-wittedness, as an identity marker, has stuck in the language of criticism -- critics have referred to the “slow-witted McTeague”

(Young 647) and his “characteristic dull incomprehension” (Larsen 511) – but the label and the implications it has for how we read cognition in Norris’s work have gone unscrutinized. James Trent notes that slow-wittedness became an increasingly popular

cognitive label with the rise of compulsory education: “Beginning in the 1880s and

especially in the 1890s, public schools began to receive among their enlarging pool of

pupils children who were not obviously feebleminded but ‘slow and backward,’ as

defined by school officials” (147). McTeague’s backstory of apprenticing a dentist

instead of pursuing a more traditional secondary education fits Trent’s history. Trent

writes that “in previous times ‘the slow-witted’ had often dropped out of school” or had

“never attended school in the first place” (147). As the novel’s readers were coming into contact with “slow” and “backward” individuals, Norris’s characterization of McTeague would have reminded them of their connection to mental difference. Cognitive disability,

though it might initially seem a fixed quality, proves mobile throughout the novel,

leaving McTeague at times and entering other characters who embody cognitive

normalcy, most notably McTeague’s best friend Marcus Schouler. As psychologists

fabricated increasingly detailed classifications of cognitive disability to identify the most 58

inconspicuous forms of mental defect, Norris extended the range of these taxonomies so

that normalcy would fall under their diagnostic umbrellas.

But before this extension can occur, Norris must first outline the ideal of cognitive

normalcy. Marcus’s mental, linguistic, and physical quickness contrast McTeague’s

slowness. The tension between each disposition emerges in the pair’s dialogue and the narrator’s movement between each character’s limited point of view. When Marcus first appears, he reproaches McTeague for being a “lazy duck” after refusing to come up to

Marcus’s apartment, which sits above the dental parlors. McTeague’s stolidity has won out in a debate over who should visit whom. Once Marcus enters McTeague’s office, he unleashes a flurry of language:

“Been out to the Cliff House on a picnic,” he explained as he sat down on the bed-

lounge. “With my uncle and his people – the Sieppes, you know. By damn! It was

hot,” he suddenly vociferated. “Just look at that!” he cried, dragging at his limp

collar. “That’s the third one this morning; it is—it is for a fact—and you got your

stove going. He began to tell about the picnic, talking very loud and fast,

gesturing furiously, very excited over trivial details. Marcus could not talk

without getting excited. (10)

The energy of Marcus’s speech establishes one end of the cognitive spectrum, which contrasts McTeague’s earlier “muttering” (268). Marcus’s vociferations accelerate as he notices McTeague’s cigarette. The narrative remains within McTeague’s point of view, and readers are only able to catch snippets of the events Marcus quickly retells. They have as much insight into Marcus’s conversation as they do McTeague’s Sunday meal, 59

vaguely detecting the general topics, but struggling to identify the details, which blur into a gray mass.

To best represent slow-wittedness, Norris plays with perspective. As the novel opens, an omniscient narrator details McTeague’s Sunday routine. In this initial conversation with Marcus, omniscience becomes character bound, relaying Marcus’s story and frenzied speech through McTeague’s slow-witted point of view. In the opening paragraphs, slow-wittedness is rendered at an external distance. The closest association between the reader and cognitive difference are several of McTeague’s actions which may resemble the reader’s own. Once the spirited and energetic benchmark of cognitive normalcy is introduced, the point of view shifts into McTeague’s perspective, and the reader sees through the eyes of cognitive difference. Narrative not only describes mental defect, but also draws normalcy into aberrancy. Objective description, in effect, lures the normal reader into a perspectival shift.

McTeague can only drolly affirm Marcus’s story: “‘Yes, yes,’ answered

McTeague, bewildered, trying to follow. ‘Yes, that’s so’” (269). Before McTeague can make sense of the first story, Marcus quickly changes subjects. “In recounting a certain

dispute with an awkward bicyclist, in which it appeared he had become involved, Marcus

quivered with rage” (269). The narrator’s voice is marked by a paradox of content and

style. Viewed from McTeague’s perspective, the content of the story, the newly

introduced “certain dispute,” is ambiguous. Yet, the syntax used to represent the “slow-

witted” perspective maintains a level of sophistication. Two long introductory phrases

preface the short main clause, “Marcus quivered with rage.” The diction of these

introductory phrases is high. The verb tenses are complex: “it appeared he had become 60

involved” strings together two verb phrases (“appeared” and “had become”) and the

larger subordinate clause that encompasses it modifies an exceptionally long

prepositional phrase, “in recounting a certain dispute with an awkward bicyclist.” The

language contrasts McTeague’s spoken dialogue. After Marcus asserts that the

experience was an “outrage,” the dialogue continues, “‘Sure it was,’ McTeague hastened to reply. ‘Sure. Sure.’” Though McTeague strives to get his dialogue up to speed, he can only qualify his simple tensed response with a repetition of a single word.18 The contrast

between narrator’s voice and spoken dialogue allows Norris to preserve a technical distance for readers as they experience the point of view of slow-wittedness.

As suggested by McTeague’s “hastened” response to Marcus, slow-wittedness,

for Norris, slides along a behavioral, verbal, and perceptual scale. Dialogic interaction

between the voices of Marcus, McTeague, and the narrator simultaneously establishes

and undermines clear poles of cognitive identity. At times, McTeague listens to

Marcus’s frenetic speech “awe-struck” (271). In such cases, one end of the cognitive

spectrum illuminates the other: Marcus’s energy highlights McTeague’s stupidity. As

Marcus pontificates on how capitalists “ruin the cause of labor,” McTeague becomes

“stupefied with his clamor” and can only affirm Marcus’s argument: “Yes, that’s it”

(271). The poles of cognitive experience reverse after McTeague kisses Trina when he

puts her under anesthesia. After this event, Marcus detects his friend’s preoccupation.

“For the last hour of their walk Marcus had done nearly all the talking, McTeague merely

answering him by uncertain movements of the head” (299). Marcus’s exhorts McTeague,

“You got a bean about somethun, hey? Spit ut out” (300). McTeague responds with only

the most infantile of language: “‘No, no,’ replied McTeague, looking about on the floor, 61

rolling his eyes; ‘nothing, no, no.’” As Marcus pressures McTeague to break his silence, the point of view shifts to McTeague’s perspective, and the reader sees a more developed level of cognition. Unlike the ambiguous version of reality readers saw in the opening chapter, they now see a lucid description of McTeague’s social dilemma. “The situation was abominable,” the narrator observes, noting, “McTeague could not rise to it. Marcus was his best friend, his only friend. Yet they were now both in love, presumably, with the same girl, and now Marcus would try to force the secret out of him” (300).

McTeague’s secret love gives his previously gray life a new vibrancy. It sensitizes the brute, and McTeague moves close to normal ways of thought and perception. The narrator continues, “McTeague began dimly to feel that lie was too much for him.”

McTeague slides toward the opposite pole of cognitive identity: “feel” represents the energetic ideal instantiated by Marcus, and “dim” signals the phenomenology of slow- witted experience. The introduction of Trina into the narrative prompts this transition.

“A month ago he was perfectly content; he was calm and peaceful, taking his little pleasures as he found them. His life had shaped itself; was, no doubt to continue always along these same lines. A woman had entered his small world and instantly there was discord. The disturbing element had appeared” (300). McTeague’s slow plod through endless routine is disrupted. So too are his limited perspective and dialogue patterns.

McTeague only vaguely comprehends Marcus’s earlier dilemma. Now with a dilemma of his own, McTeague perceives reality with more feeling and precision. Though the passage maintains a gloss of ambiguity, the referent of the ambiguous phrase “the disturbing element” is clear. 62

Eventually McTeague’s outward dialogue catches up with his interior

development. Marcus’s pressure does not relent, and McTeague eases out of his slow-

witted disposition: “it was more than McTeague could bear. The situation had gone

beyond him. Stupidly he spoke, his hands deep in his pockets, his head rolled forward.

“‘It’s – it’s Miss Sieppe,” he said’” (301). Marcus is flabbergasted as McTeague

“stammer[s], hopelessly confounded.” A pivotal shift in cognitive identity occurs:

“You mean,” cried Marcus, suddenly enlightened, “that you are – that you,

too.”

McTeague stirred in his chair, looking at the walls of the room, avoiding

the other’s glance. He nodded his head, then suddenly broke out:

“I can’t help it. It aint my fault, is it?”

Marcus was struck dumb; he dropped back in his chair breathless.

Suddenly McTeague found his tongue. (301)

Each character adopts the other’s way of speech. Marcus’s energetic tone is preserved,

but his cry is parsed into simple linguistic bits that lack clear denotative meaning. He is

“struck dumb.” McTeague breaks out of his lethargy and exclaims with Marcus’s

characteristic suddenness. Following this shift, McTeague enters a long energetic speech

recounting his experience at length. It would be incorrect to assume that McTeague’s

change erases his cognitive identity. Throughout his paragraph of dialogue, McTeague insists, “I can’t explain.” Despite his insistence, he does explain with the speed and energy of Marcus. “Never had McTeague been so excited; never had he made so long a speech… His enormous jaws shut together the sharp click at every pause. It was like some colossal brute trapped in a delicate, invisible mesh, raging, exasperated, powerless 63

to extricate himself” (302). Though McTeague was never eloquent, Norris reverses his

seemingly fixed cognitive identity and in doing so, he indicts the eugenic system of

classification that is used to characterize McTeague earlier.

Just as McTeague’s development is limited, so too is Marcus’s stupefaction.

Marcus “says nothing” in response to McTeague. There is “a long silence,” broken only

when Marcus “mutter[s] under his breath.” The omniscient but character-bound narrator

fills this silence by entering Marcus’s perspective. Once there, the reader sees an eloquent

summary of the dilemma longer than the one presented by McTeague’s speech. “Just now

the simpleness and strength of McTeague’s passion startled him… McTeague would

marry Trina this afternoon if she would have him; but would he—Marcus? No he would

not” (302). Despite the sophistication of the thoughts narrated as internal, Marcus utters minimal dialogue, which resembles McTeague’s earlier speech. After McTeague insists that he does not want anything to come between them, Marcus “vociferates” an affirmation of McTeague’s sentiments: “Well, nothun will, you bet!… No sir; you bet not, Mac” (302). When Marcus finally gives up Trina, a feeling of nobility emerges. The dialogue closes with restricted and repetitive speech. “‘I’m much obliged,’ murmured

McTeague. He could think of nothing better to say. ‘I’m much obliged,’ he repeated;

‘much obliged Mark.’” Marcus reply slowly winnows to stupefied silence: “‘That’s all right, that’s all right,’ returned Marcus Schouler, bravely, and it occurred to him to add,

‘You’ll be happy together. Tell her for me – tell her – tell her --’ Marcus could not go on.

He wrung the dentist’s hand in silence” (303). In this scene, Norris uses tensions between cognitive disability and normalcy for aesthetic ends by compelling the dialogue of normalcy to cede ground to the silence slow-wittedness. Marcus’s normal disposition 64

pushes him to present a sophisticated point of insight. Yet this inclination fails, and for the reader, the speechlessness of mental difference proves more profound. Dialogue disappears. Syntax becomes streamlined. The silent handshake ferries the reader to a space of inarticulacy, one inhabited by characters from neighboring lands.

After his marriage to Trina, McTeague becomes less brutish, notably in terms of his speech. The narrator observes that “in his ‘Parlors’ he was no longer gruff and indifferent to his female patients; he arrived at that stage where he could work and talk to them at the same time” (398). Nonetheless, McTeague “relapse[s] to his wonted stolidity.

He never questioned himself, never looked for motives, never went to the bottom of things… after the novelty of the honeymoon had passed he slipped easily into the new order of things without question” (397). In contrast to McTeague’s passivity, Marcus regains his energy, eventually reporting McTeague to the state for his lack of credentials and tracking him down for Trina’s murder. What then, does the novel suggest about the boundary between the “slow-witted” brute and his quick-witted companion? For Norris, the individual slides between the poles of cognitive identity. While the novel introduces the ideal descriptions of psychological taxonomy, the narrative process undermines these classifications. The ideal of the normal mind vanishes. By foregrounding popular conceptions of cognitive disability and then alternatively embodying these conceptions in

McTeague and Marcus, Norris pushes a comprehensive taxonomy to become all- encompassing, thus destabilizing the boundary between normalcy and cognitive difference. To disrupt this boundary, Norris experiments with modes of characterization and the use of point of view. In McTeague, the voice of the narrator operates as an agent 65

that paradoxically simulates the perspective of mental difference, but this simulation is

always colored by a screen of normalcy.

III -- Normalcy’s Decline in “The Wife of Chino”

In McTeague, readers see the slow-witted McTeague rise towards normalcy. In

“The Wife of Chino,” Norris’s six-part short story from A Deal in Wheat published four

years after McTeague, readers follow Lockwood, an intellectually normal narrator who

pines for Felice, the wife of one of his Mexican workmen. Lockwood tasks Felice’s

husband, Chino, to take the day’s gold into town. Upon hearing of a highwayman

stalking the road, he sets out to save Chino, only to shoot him by mistake. Felice rejoices

at the news, noting that she can now be with Lockwood. But Chino’s wound proves not

to be fatal, and Lockwood repudiates the possible romance.

Working class characters in the story embody a primitive form of intelligence,

and as Lockwood falls for Felice, he cognitively degenerates. The narrator defines

Lockwood’s descent as “madness.” In psychological discourse, insanity and idiocy were

often understood via the notion of developmental trajectory. Ireland writes, “The

intelligence of the dement and of the idiot may be for a time about equal; but the one has

reached it by the process of subtraction; the other by the process of addition” (2).19

Juxtaposed by the primitive slow-wittedness of the Mexican workers, Lockwood’s mad descent illustrates how Norris understood the boundaries and stability of normal cognition. In “The Wife of Chino,” Norris considers two important implications of the early 20th century psychological discourse. First, he explores how once realized, the

dream of eugenic psychology -- a comprehensive (and thus delimited) taxonomy -- might 66

threaten normalcy. Second, he plays out a eugenic fear, exploring how even those with the best genes might degenerate into defect when isolated with subnormal cognitive others outside of any institutional system.

To explore these two themes, Norris again turns to point of view. He begins with the point of view of the narrator, who illuminates Lockwood’s mental state. He then uses lacunae to emphasize what Lockwood fails to know, perceive, or feel. Finally, he grants the reader limited access to Lockwood’s degenerating point of view. After this series of shifts, Norris reinstates the point of view of the narrator, allowing the reader a way out of the simulation of aberrant cognition. In this way, point of view operates in a manner similar to the techniques Fleissner has examined, description and plot. “Ever uncertain that it has genuinely arrived at a completion within a given case, naturalism keeps proliferating more and more details, with the result that it remains stuck at the level of description” (Fleissner 10). Such details often fail to perfectly cohere, and Fleissner contends that “naturalism’s most characteristic plot…. is marked by neither the steep arc of decline nor that of triumph, but rather by an ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion -- back and forth, around and around, on and on -- that has the distinctive effect of seeming also like a stuckness in place” (10). This “stuckness” is at play in “The Wife of Chino.”

Readers move towards the perspective of mental difference, but they never quite get or stay there. The reinstatement of omniscient narrative explanation undercuts the experience of an alternative modality.

The sophistication and technique of this point of view and control of character is a comment on cognitive impairment. Norris creates a narrator who operates as a mouthpiece for eugenic theories of cognitive disability. Narrative abridgements about 67

what Lockwood fails to perceive invite a representation of the perspective of mental difference. For example, if Lockwood fails to hear the words Felice speaks, as the narrator points out midway through the story, what then does he perceive? To answer this question, Norris moves into Lockwood’s point of view. The omniscient narrator who describes cognitive impairment ironically sparks questions that require the cognitively impaired perspective to be represented and seen through. In this way, Norris skillfully produces the technical enactment of degenerating cognition. The story begins with narrative omniscience but slowly “degenerates” into the perspective of mental defect.

As the story begins, an omniscient narrator provides the reader a clear snapshot of

Lockwood’s current thought process: his cool, calm consideration of two subjects. “For the last few moments he had been considering, in that comfortable spirit of attention that comes with after dinner tobacco, two subjects: first, the beauty of the evening; second, the temperament, character, and appearance of Felice Zavalla” (185). Lockwood’s consciousness follows a taxonomic impulse as he divides his field of attention with precision. His consideration of the evening is clear. “As for the evening, there could be no two opinions about that. It was charming” (185). Illustrating the depth of Lockwood’s consideration, the omniscient character-bound narrator vividly describes the sounds that

Lockwood hears. “The millions of pines and redwoods that covered the flanks of the mountains were absolutely still… the chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato, was as incessant as the pounding of the mill” (185).

As Lockwood attends to his second topic, the efficacy of consideration wanes. At first, Lockwood’s consideration of Felice, his second topic, proceeds conventionally, and the reader moves into his perspective. “Lockwood… put back his head to listen. Felice 68

had as good a voice as so pretty a young woman should have… She was Mexican-

Spanish, tall and very slender, black-haired, and lithe as a cat, with a cat’s green eyes and with all of a cat’s purring, ingratiating insinuation” (187). Aesthetically, this description strives to be vivid, but bound up in stereotype, it hints at Lockwood’s naïve understanding of his subject. The description of Felice is much shorter than the paragraphs-long description of the landscape. These small distinctions point to the limitations of Lockwood’s consideration of Felice, a figure less knowable than the landscape. The subject of Felice carries only the most loosely grounded meanings within

Lockwood’s mind.

After illustrating the inefficacy of Lockwood’s consideration, the narrator seeks to explain his cognitive limitations. Omniscient evaluation of Lockwood’s mental state turns him into a subject to be considered by the reader. Following the Felice’s characterization, Norris inserts what seems to be an unremarkable lacuna -- “Lockwood could not have told exactly just how the first familiarity between him and Felice had arisen” (187). 20 In most fiction, this comment would be read as a convenient narrative

abridgment that glosses over details irrelevant to the telling of the story. But Norris’s

narrator goes to great lengths to describe why Lockwood’s failure to tell occurs.

Narrative abridgments do not just speed up the pace of storytelling, nor do they merely

indicate a gap in Lockwood’s knowledge; instead, they prompt a discussion of

Lockwood’s mental state. Following this first mention of what Lockwood does not know,

the narrator explores basic questions – why does this knowledge gap occur? And what

does it suggest about the changes occurring in Lockwood’s cognition? 69

Within this evaluative space, the narrator does several things: he critiques and

endorses eugenic methods and psychological theories, he relays a unique theory of the

mind, and he works to educate the reader on how cognition works. The narrator

illuminates the limitations of Lockwood’s taxonomic impulse to divide subjects and

coolly consider them by highlighting the gap between theoretical categories and reality.21

“At first Felice had been, for Lockwood, a pretty woman, neither more nor less; but by

degrees she emerged from this vague classification: she became a very pretty woman.

Then she became a personality: she occupied a place within the circle which Lockwood

called his world, his life” (188). On one level, the passage’s diction and syntax reveal an

adherence to a scientific way of thinking. “Classification” is an overt reference to the

scientific endeavor of the times. “First” and “then” suggest a narrative of empirical

progress. In the narrator’s view, Lockwood first classified Felice, and then he came to

know the more minute aspects of her identity that classification ignores. To borrow from

Dugdale’s methodological language, the minute study of Felice’s individual life

undermines the efficacy of classification. The narrator then outlines the mind for the

reader, making consciousness spatial. “The invasion of the woman into the sphere of his

existence developed at the end into a thing veritably headlong… To make room for

Felice, he thrust aside, or allowed the idea of Felice to thrust aside, other objects which

had long sat secure” (188).22 These detailed descriptions (of both Lockwood’s mental processes and the spatial make-up of his mind) teach the reader how to interpret

Lockwood’s cognitive failures, which continue to be represented by lacunae throughout

the story. 70

The narrator’s instruction continues. Before the plot can begin, one more question

must be attended to: what are the stakes of this “thing veritably headlong”? Why do these

changes in Lockwood’s cognition matter? In brief, the purity of Lockwood’s character,

class, and most importantly, intelligence are under threat. The narrator emphasizes the

isolated setting and Lockwood’s location in a taxonomy of intelligence. Lockwood “had studied too hard at Columbia to see much of the outside world” (190). His shift from a protected to an unprotected environment represents the situation of many normal young men. “His lot was the common lot of young mining engineers. It might lead one day to great wealth, but meanwhile it was terribly isolated” (190). Lockwood, like McTeague, emerges as an everyman. In a town of hundreds, Lockwood is not isolated from people in general; he is isolated from cognitively normal ones. Only the dull-witted workmen keep him company. Isolation’s effects cut into taxonomies of class and intelligence, and the narrator describes the recent changes to Lockwood’s mental state. “Living thus apart from the world, Lockwood very easily allowed his judgment to get… out of perspective.

Class distinctions lost their sharpness, and one woman—as, for instance, Felice—was very like another—as, for instance, the girls his sisters knew ‘back home’ in New York”

(190). Here, the narrator operates as a mediator. The reader does not experience these destabilizations first hand, they learn of them through the narrator’s omniscient description, which preserves social hierarchies. At the start of the story, Norris can only represent cognitive impairment in the most clinical, conservative, and instructive of ways.

This representational strategy implicates the reader directly. The narrator adopts a didactic tone, distinguishing different types of intelligence. He breaks down the intellects of the key players in the story, correcting even what the reader fails to understand. “It 71

may appear difficult of belief that the men, the crude, simple workmen, knew how to take

Felice Zavalla, while Lockwood, with all his education and superior intelligence, failed in his estimate of her” (190). The subordinate clause of the sentence characterizes players that the reader already knows, but the main clause, “it may appear difficult of belief” reveals that the reader herself is a player in the story. The narrator anticipates skepticism from the reader who might believe in a simple division between rationality and dimwittedness. The narrator responds to obvious questions the reader has: how can the simple-minded workmen “know” how to do what Lockwood doesn’t? And how can the college-educated Lockwood fail to understand, to estimate, Felice? Rather than question the act of dividing mental classes, the narrator suggests more division is necessary:

The explanation lies no doubt in the fact that in these man-and-woman affairs

instinct is a surer guide than education and intelligence, unless, indeed, the

intelligence is preternaturally keen. Lockwood's student life had benumbed the

elemental instinct, which in the miners, the "men," yet remained vigorous and

unblunted, and by means of which they assessed Felice and her harmless

blandishments at their true worth. For all Lockwood's culture, his own chuck-

tenders, unlettered fellows, cumbersome, slow-witted, "knew women"—at least,

women of their own world, like Felice—better than he. On the other hand, his

intelligence was no such perfected instrument as Hicks's, as exact as logarithms,

as penetrating as a scalpel, as uncoloured by emotions as a steel trap. (190)

This passage refines the methods by which one comes to know. “Knowing” grows to include any information derived from instinct, normal intelligence, preternaturally keen intelligence, and perfected intelligence. Normal intelligence, the tool most readily 72

available to Lockwood, is the least suited to deal with the “thing” at hand. Ways of

cognition correspond with classes of people: the “slow-witted, cumbersome” Mexican workmen, the razor-sharp former superintendent Hicks, and the middling Lockwood, who lacks both the instinct of his “chuck-tenders” and the logarithmic, emotionless rationality of his predecessor.

These divisions carry two important implications. First, Norris positions normalcy, as embodied by Lockwood, in the middle of the human intellectual continuum.

Second, Norris uses the narrator to suggest that only the ends of this continuum, the defect and the ideal, can resolve the conflict Lockwood faces. Normalcy becomes a no- man’s land. Yet the narrator restricts the power of these implications. The passage presents a paradox of content and style: descriptions of and divisions between types of intelligence seem clear but the passage’s syntax qualifies them. Dashes set off the subset of “women” that the slow-witted workmen know: the “women of their own world.”

“Unless intelligence is preternaturally keen” qualifies the claim that “instinct” is the surest guide in man-and-woman affairs. The narrator thus provides a way into and way out of ideological disruption, establishing the reader’s restricted engagement with cognitive disability. This dynamic allows the reader to engage with ideological subversion and alternative forms of cognition, but certain narrative techniques install a conservative screen around such transgressive reading practice. Here a paradox of form and content within the narrator’s own voice prevent a total buy-in of ideological subversion. Elsewhere, Norris unique use of point of view restricts the reader’s engagement of cognitive impairment. The narrator’s explanations and narrative abridgments give the reader a sense of how Lockwood’s mind declines. But moments 73

when the reader sees through the perspective of Lockwood’s degeneration are scarce and

are always followed by the narrator’s omniscient explanations. A complete simulated

experience of aberrant consciousness – like the type Faulkner provides – is never

achieved.

In examining how Lockwood’s “thing” pans out, my formal analysis of the story

pursues key questions that explore this idea of restrictive engagement: how does Norris

use point of view to bring the reader closer to or preserve a distance from normalcy?

When does Norris use point of view to represent an “elemental instinct”? When does he

use it to represent logic and taxonomies that are “as penetrating as a scalpel”? How do these moves affect the reader’s relationship with mental difference? And what do these shifts tell us about the degenerating form of the story itself?

The narrator’s point of view provides the most incisive description – in both the relaying of plot events and the explaining of Lockwood’s cognitive devolution. To come to know Felice, Lockwood does not assume a cognitive mode of penetrating rationality.

His wits become dull, and his will becomes passive. He does not rise on the cognitive scale; he descends. The narrator’s point of view instates a theoretical framework by which this descent might be understood. The first step in Lockwood’s “mad” descent is his overt transgression of intellectual taxonomy. The couple drops “pretense, and as often as he met her Lockwood dismounted and walked by her side” (192). Noting that

Lockwood is aware that he transgresses, the narrator provides a snapshot of his resulting mental operation –an embrace of his strength of will. “At length Lockwood made a mighty effort. He knew how very far he had gone beyond the point where between the landmarks called right and wrong a line is drawn. He contrived to keep away from 74

Felice” (192). Lockwood’s resolution reflects the problems that eugenic psychologists outlined and the solutions they proposed. In The Jukes, Dugdale had argued that the primary effect of licentiousness is the disruption of cognitive order: “Excess of the passions prevents mental organization” (55). To remedy his excessive passions,

Lockwood pursues action and industry. He “found reasons to be in the mine itself whole half-days at a time.” In doing so, he adopts a eugenic solution. Dugdale argues that “we find the element conspiring to produce crime is idleness” (52). Lockwood’s contrivance succeeds by means of avoidance. “For three weeks he so managed that he never caught sight of Felice’s black hair and green eyes, never once heard the sound of her singing”

(192). Eugenic prescription provides a template for Lockwood’s action and a language for the narrator by which such action might be understood.

But the narrator provides more than just a reproduction of eugenic discourse.

Norris uses the narrator to explore the phenomenon of cognitive degeneration in an environment that the psychologist cannot access. For eugenicists, mental defect could affect any individual. “Arrest of development takes place in various other forms, at different stages and under widely differing circumstances” (Dugdale 56). Creating the most normal of protagonists, Norris tests the implications of Dugdale’s claim. Dugdale writes that “in the untaught child we get arrest of cerebral development; caused by neglecting to furnish properly organized experience of the right relations of human beings to each other, which gives us a corresponding moral idiot." As the story’s opening suggests, Lockwood’s whole dilemma results from an increasingly disorganized web of human relations. Divisions blur. The poles of right and wrong shift. The narrator sets a stage, the content of which the psychologist can only speculate. The narrator’s 75

description of Lockwood’s mental state sets him within the most extreme of

circumstances. “Madness was upon him none the less… till in his complete loneliness, in

the isolation of that simple primitive life, where no congenial mind relieved the

monotony… morbid, hounded, tortured, the man grew desperate—was ready for anything

that would solve the situation” (192). For Norris, the omniscient narrator operates as a

device that breaks new ground on popular questions of mental difference. What would

complete isolation within a primitive world look like, and how would it affect the normal

person?

A paradox between the content and the style within the narrator’s discussion of

Lockwood’s declining will restricts the reader’s engagement with degeneracy. Norris

creates a narrator who knows much, but not all – a fact that signals the limitations of

eugenic thought. Lockwood’s passivity suggests how close he is to falling into mental defect himself. As his initial strategy to distance himself from Felice fails, his will weakens.23 Given Lockwood’s age and location, his will is under threat.24 Dugdale

identifies the fourth subdivision of the nervous system as the “ideational centres, that

enable us to reason, to think, to will, and with this last, the moral nature” (56). Dugdale

figures development of the will as the direct cause of morality, and Norris represents the

will so that it operates as the primary barometer of Lockwood’s decline. “The moral

nature – which really means the holding of emotions and passions under the dominion of

the judgment by exercise of the will – is the last developed of the elements of character,

and, for this reason, is most modifiable by the nature of the environment” (Dugdale 57).

Lockwood’s transition into passivity signals normalcy’s decline. The reader sees this

decline from above, and the narrator notes that Lockwood waits “ready for anything that 76

would solve the situation” (192). The vagueness of “the situation” functions euphemistically, allowing the reader to know the problem at hand without seeing a clear description of it. Norris stylistically preserves a distance from the threat normalcy faces by fashioning a narrator who attaches ambiguous words – “thing,” “situation”— to the core conflict of the story.

If “The Wife of Chino” provided only description of Lockwood’s mental state, it would have little to offer the disability studies scholar. To return to my earlier claim, how does Norris technically enact degenerating cognition? As the story progresses, the reader gradually sees fewer of the narrator’s comprehensive explanations of Lockwood’s mental state, more lacunae that highlight what Lockwood doesn’t know, and even several impressions that his degenerating mental state makes. Norris’s unusual stress on narrative abridgments compel the story to move into Lockwood’s degenerating point of view, where the reader sees a world full of shadows, glimpses, and insinuations. Lockwood’s decline can be read according to Dugdale’s anatomy: a cognitive devolution occurs after his moral sense and will flounder.25 Norris increases the limitations of Lockwood’s already limited perspective. Devolution occurs primarily in the way reality makes (or doesn’t make) impressions on Lockwood’s consciousness. By presenting more moments where readers see through Lockwood’s point of view and by ramping up perceptual vagueness of these moments, Norris moves the reader into a “mentally defective” mode of cognition. As this happens, omniscient narratorial comments become less pronounced; thus, reader engagement with cognitive aberrancy becomes less restricted.

This shift in point of view is best seen during a key moment of the plot. An opportunity presents itself that might “solve the situation.” Lockwood asks Chino, 77

Felice’s husband, to take a gold brick into town. “On that very day, in spite of all precaution, in spite of all good resolutions,” Lockwood sees Felice. A lacuna begins the scene, and the narrator focuses on the limitations of Lockwood’s consciousness. “What

Lockwood said… he could not now remember; nor for that matter, was any part of the conversation clear to his memory” (195). Lockwood’s inability to remember stems from his slide out of rational verbal communication and into a world of impression that

Felice’s more primitive intelligence inhabits. “Just as he was leaving her, something of more importance than conversation happened. Felice had looked at him” (195). Felice’s look fills the gaps that punctuate conversation, and the narrator still works to educate the reader, pointing out the significance of this new mode of communication. “She had so timed her look, had so insinuated it into the little, brief, significant silences between their words, that its meaning had been very clear” (195). Visual impression, not rational expression, sheds light on the “situation.” The narrator’s voice becomes less pronounced, and the reader sees the phenomenon as Lockwood experienced it. The two clauses that follow this sentence begin with “he knew,” indicating that the reader is seeing the event through Lockwood’s point of view. The meaning behind Felice’s action starkly emerges, and the reader sees this through the eyes of Lockwood: “for now he knew that Felice wanted him to know that she regretted the intolerable circumstance of her marriage to

Chino Zavalla; he knew that she wanted him to know that the situation was as intolerable for her as for him” (196).

Following this brief dip into Lockwood’s point of view, the narrator interrupts the experience of this new mode of knowing, pulling the reader upwards in order to see

Lockwood’s mental operations from on-high. “This new phase of the affair intruded its 78

pregnant suggestion upon his mind, to the exclusion of everything else” (196). As

eugenic psychology stipulates, Lockwood’s diminishing will emerges as the cause of

cognitive decline. After this narratorial comment, Norris pulls the reader back down into

Lockwood’s experience of tumbling down the cognitive scale. A series of “he felt,” “he

knew,” and “he sensed,” clauses rope the reader into Lockwood’s perspective. “He felt

the drift strong around him; he knew that in the end he would resign himself to it. At the

same time he sensed the abyss, felt the nearness of some dreadful, nameless cataclysm, a

thing of black shadow, bottomless, terrifying” (196). This moment marks Lockwood’s transition from the collegiate, hyper-descriptive considerer to the passive sensory receptor, who feels cataclysm but cannot see, describe, or rationalize it. Norris uses nature imagery to highlight this transition. Lockwood’s graceful consideration of the sprawling landscape seen in the opening of the story is replaced by his irrational sense of a location – depthless, swirling, and dark -- that he drifts into. At the moment when

Lockwood knows Felice most, the tools of psychological study – taxonomy, description, rationalism – are the most useless. And the reader sees this fact as it is experienced by

Lockwood.

Metaphor partially obscures this new perspective. To win Felice, Lockwood need do nothing. He receives a telegram that Reno Kid, a bandit who murders his victims, is scouting the trail that Chino is taking town. Lockwood comes to a realization. Norris transitions to Lockwood’s point of view, but the reader catches only glimpses of

Lockwood’s perspective. The reader learns how he sees: “He saw it in a flash.” The narrator’s omniscient comment slices in to the scene before the reader learns what “it” is.

“The knife hung over the knot—even at that moment was falling. Nothing was asked of 79

him – nothing but inertia” (197). Circumstances prompt Lockwood not to act. “For an

instant, alone there in the isolated mining-camp, high above the world, lost and forgotten in the gloom of the redwoods, Lockwood heard the crisis of his life come crashing through the air upon him like the onslaught of a whirlwhind” (197). In this passage, the point of view of the narrator emphasizes Lockwood’s isolation. He sits in the mining camp “high above the world,” but by virtue of the narrator, the reader sees him from an even higher vantage point. Norris then shifts mid-sentence into what Lockwood perceives. He detects his life’s crisis, not via rationalization, but by auditory sensation, and these sensations are couched in metaphor. Crisis comes “like a whirlwind.”

In the short sentence that ends the passage, the narrator describes Lockwood’s cognitive state – his characteristic mental operation, consideration. “For an instant, and no more, he considered” (197). Lockwood considers the morally irrational. In contrast to its use in the story’s opening (in which Lockwood considers dozens of subjects),

“considered” in this passage lacks an object. What Lockwood considers might be easily stated: “he considered doing nothing so that Chino would be murdered and he could have

Felice.” Yet such a statement would be an overt violation of socio-intellectual taxonomy.

In other words, the primary tool of normalcy, rational consideration of the other, would be used to communicate the morally imbecilic act: the murder of Chino. Slicing out the object of “consideration” is a protective strategy that allows Norris’s narrator to gesture towards, but not represent what Lockwood imagines -- an absurdity that would undo the system of moral normalcy. This syntactic decision allows Norris to move the reader closer to Lockwood’s perspective without falling into it. 80

Norris gives Lockwood redemptive dialogue. His exclamation -- “No, No; I can’t

– not this way!” -- marks the beginning of his rise up the cognitive scale (197). The remainder of the story shows Lockwood climbing out of the vague world and into a space of visual and intellectual clarity. Norris only allows the reader to see through the perspective of mental defect as its carrier ascends. With regained will, Lockwood decides to pursue Reno, but this pursuit occurs in a world of vague impression.26

Lockwood strains to distinguish Reno from the visual impressions of the dark forest.

“Lockwood drew his pistol. He stood thick in shadow. Only some twenty yards in front

of him was there any faintest break in the darkness; but at that point the blurred

moonlight made a grayness across the trail, just a tone less deep than the redwoods’

shadows” (199). The right moment of sensory impression comes. Lockwood acts. “A

shadow just darker than the darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood covered

with his pistol” (199). Lockwood shoots, and his decision, made in light of sensory

impression, works: a figure falls on the trail. Yet his intense sensory focus misleads: the

fallen figure is Chino, not Reno. In stark contrast to the rest of the story, the climax

allows the reader to see through degenerating cognition.

Lockwood’s mistake signals the failure of a cognition based too much in

sensation, and not enough in the ideational center. By staying within Lockwood’s point

of view during this climactic scene, the reader experiences a simulation of this failure in

action. However, at the breaking point of failure, the narrator reemerges, distancing the

reader from mental defect so that she might better see the mechanics of such failure.

Lockwood tells Felice about the incident, and the narrator offers another omniscient

description of Lockwood’s mental state: “the nerves that had stood strain already 81

surprisingly long snapped and crisped back upon themselves like broken harp-strings”

(200). A distressed Felice asks Lockwood if he, not Chino, is hurt. Lockwood

exclamation foregrounds reason, “I’ve shot him! Shot him, do you understand?” Felice

responds, “you aisk me-a… eef I do onderstaind. You… you shoot Chino, eh?... You ver’ sharp man, eh? Now we be happi, maybe; now we git married soam day” (201). As

Felice communicates with words, not looks, Lockwood obtains the evidence needed to fully consider her. The narrator relies on simile to simulate Lockwood’s experience. “It was as though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words” (201). Felice’s dialogue validates a racialized taxonomy of intelligence: both rational and moral. Norris shifts to Lockwood’s point of view: “The woman stood revealed” (201). And this fact is explained by narrator. “All the degraded savagery of a degenerate race… that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment.” Finally, we return to

Lockwood. The degraded savagery “in that new light… stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as malevolence itself” (202). Lockwood sees Felice for what she is. Lockwood’s point of view aligns with the narrator’s. The doctor reveals that Chino will heal. He tells Lockwood, “you’ve had a lucky escape my boy,” to which Lockwood replies, “You just don’t know how lucky it was” (202). Lockwood’s luck lies not in the fact that Chino lives, but in the fact that his normalcy has been preserved.

What should we make of Norris’s conservative ending? Fig.1 below shows the way Norris characterizes his protagonists in light of mental defect. McTeague rises, but he is bound to return to a primitive cognitive identity. Lockwood degenerates, but his development as a character lies in his self-determined rise from mental defect. Norris 82

simulates this movement for the reader by shifting into the points of view of each

character and by playing with their limits. However, he uses the narrator as a safety that

prevents the reader from fully falling into the perspective of mental difference. “The Wife

of Chino” uses narrative as a device both to explore alternative ways of cognition and to

rope them off. Narrative suggests conventional taxonomies of mental difference, dismantles them, and then reassembles them. Viewed together, moments of disassembly and reassembly illustrate the broader phenomenon of restricted engagement. The undulations that reader experiences – whether these be undulations of ideological commitment, or undulations between observing and experiencing the perspective mental defect – fit with the most recent critical work on naturalism. Fleissner writes that an

“ongoing, nonlinear, repetitive motion” characterizes naturalist fiction. My reading of

“The Wife of Chino” illustrates this motion, and by identifying how Norris technically produces this motion, it clarifies the ways in which readers experience and assess the cognitive divisions at stake.

McTeague Lockwood Mental Defect

Mode of Cognition of Mode Ideal Cognition

Beginning --> End

Fig. 1. Character Development in Norris’s Fiction 83

Conclusion: Reader Choice in American Literary Naturalism

Fleissner argues that when studying naturalism, nature, largely understood by

critics as a “known quantity entering literature,” should be “reconceived as a subject for

an unprecedented theoretical reflection and reimagination, based on its… location within

historical time” (9, emphasis original). Nature’s determinism as embodied by literature,

especially in the plot arc of degeneration, is a concept that has been overly determined by

critics. In most naturalist novels, characters may rise only to fall, but the mechanics of

these rises and falls were intended to prompt pressing questions about the nature of

humankind for readers. For his part, Norris increasingly cultivated experiences

reimagining by telling the story of mental difference through third-person limited narration. Norris evidences Fleissner’s claim about the way in which naturalism distinguishes itself from realism. “Aspects of life that had been thought to form a more or less unchanging backdrop for larger social-historical events, and thereby able to be taken for granted rather than scrutinized themselves, thus come forward for the first time as significant elements of the storyline” (6). Naturalists brought ideas of intelligence and cognitive disability forward as much as they did questions of race and gender. However, what is key to our understanding of the formal composition of naturalist fiction is not just that literature brought forth cultural ideas, but that authors structured the ways in which readers engaged these ideas. Such ideas not only helped create and develop storylines, but also pushed naturalists to experiment with the narrative techniques by which stories are told. 84

Chapter Three

Trying to See Cognitive Disability: The Promise and Problem of Vision

“A large proportion of those who are considered feebleminded in this study are

persons who would not be recognized as such by the untrained observer. They are

not the imbeciles nor idiots who plainly show in their countenances the extent of

their mental defect” (104) – From The Kallikak Family (1912), Henry H. Goddard

When early 20th century readers accepted Goddard’s argument for the mass institutionalization of feebleminded citizens, they concurrently acknowledged an epistemological dilemma that made such a movement necessary: the limit of vision. An expert in feeblemindedness, Goddard framed his professional way of seeing as the solution to this dilemma. He made visible an unseen network of mental defect that the average eye could not spot, one that had been growing since the American Revolution.

The fact that so many disabled subjects resisted visual observation only prompted a more intense visual scrutiny of these subjects.

This phenomenon persists to the present day. In the 1910s, Goddard trained fieldworkers to detect subtle “stigmata,” the visible signs of underlying defect

(Zenderland 76). Today, science bets on increasingly advanced medical imaging technology to find the gene for autism.1 That cognitive impairment often does not

“plainly show” is more than just a fact, however. It is a trope -- used by authors of all types for specific political and aesthetic purposes. The Goddard epigraph comes from his book’s conclusion, titled “What is to be done?”, the chapter in which he makes an overt 85

turn to state and federal policy. For Goddard, the epistemological problem of vision

provided the foundation for a political path to action.

Late 19th and early 20th century writers put readers not only in a position to stare

at mental difference, but also to reflect on the validity of their visual impressions. But

Disability Studies has yet to fully account for this process. Rosemarie Garland

Thomson’s theorization of the stare has become a canonized way of understanding

vision. Her theory has unfolded in two phases. The first concentrates on the moment of

the stare, and the second looks beyond this moment. In “The Politics of Staring: Visual

Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” (2002), Thomson outlines the four

immediate functions of staring: 1) it “registers the perception of difference and gives

meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant,” 2) it “estranges and discomforts both

the viewer and viewed,” 3) it “creates disability as a state of absolute difference rather

than simply one more variation of human form,” and 4) it “constitutes disability identity

by manifesting power relations between subject positions of disabled and able-bodied”

(57). This framework grows out of Thomson’s study of American freak shows, at which the public would fill tents to gawk at physical “wonders”: bearded women, cretins, amputees, and Siamese twins (Extraordinary Bodies 59). Thomson attends to a period of time during which the viewer never leaves his or her privileged vantage point.2 For

Thomson staring at the disabled subject reinforces the boundaries of normalcy. In this

moment, the spectator’s “peculiarities” are “flattened” in light of the freak’s more obvious aberrancy (Extraordinary Bodies 64).

Thomson’s early theorization skims over the moments that precede and follow the stare as well as the cognitive processes of the viewer. What does the spectator think 86

during these moments? The broader timeframe in which the stare occurs and the viewer’s understanding of disability are intertwined: the viewer comes to know disability through a process of time. Thomson nods toward the viewer’s intellectual efforts, noting that freak shows “were the final opportunity for epistemological speculation available in a lay context,” but she does not elaborate on how this speculation unfolded (70). Her argument simplifies the spectator’s participation in and resistance to the process. Each viewer becomes indistinguishable from any other: a throng of passive onlookers stick to initial impressions, unaware of the rhetorical strategies that covertly structure the experience.

In three important ways, Thomson’s Staring: How We Look (2009) marks the second phase of her theorization of vision: 1) it considers how staring functions outside of the initial moment of viewing; 2) it touches on the benefits of narrative recreations of the stare; and 3) it briefly examines how staring specifically relates to cognitive disability. This is a more robust viewing process. She acknowledges that the past informs the present moment of the stare, a moment which likewise informs future action and understanding. Though staring begins as a physiological response caused by

"disturbances in the visual status quo,” viewers draw on a "sedimented history" that structures the act (13). The social relationship that results does not necessarily subjugate the viewed to the viewer. Instead, staring becomes a "conduit to knowledge,” and

Thomson redefines stares as “urgent efforts to make the unknown known, to render legible something that seems at first glance incomprehensible" (15, emphasis added).

I wish to explore Thomson’s concept of “effort.” I examine staring as it is recreated in narrative and consider how authors represent the intellectual effort of viewers

(and encourage such in readers) during all stages of the staring process. Though Thomson 87

provides a theoretical model for all representations of staring, she primarily draws on visual culture. Unlike the viewer of the image, the reader explores the stare over a deliberate temporal sequence. A photograph is seen in an instant. A book has a beginning, middle, and end. Staring may be represented differently during each period of the process, and this discrepancy affects the way the reader understands the action.

In her early work, Thomson often frames narrative as a conservative tool that perpetuates an ethically suspect goal. Stories highlight deviancy. “Together, the staging, the pitchman’s mediating spiel, the scientific testimony, and the written narrative fixed the mute freak as a figure of otherness upon which the spectators could displace anxieties and uncertainties about their own identities” (Extraordinary Bodies 61). For Thomson, each narrative text is a prod that coaxes the unthinking spectator towards a feeling of absolute difference. There’s no doubt. No complication. Just an uninterrupted march towards the embrace of enfreakment. In Staring, Thomson contends that popular tropes shape what viewers see when they stare. “The sight of living people with unusual bodies invites us to remap fantastic stories of giants, dwarfs, and monsters onto those people”

(166-7). Literary authors, she believes, take advantage of this tendency. She notes that

Cheryl Marie Wade “takes on the monster role that has traditionally thrilled and titillated viewers” in her poetry. Rife with vivid imagery of her hands, Wade’s poems compel readers to stare at difference, and this compulsion prompts a perspectival shift. “By making them stare, she has guided her audience to see her hands as she experiences them” (137). Narrative harnesses “staring’s generative potential,” allowing the viewer to thoughtfully reconcile difference in a way that produces acceptance and appreciation

(10). 88

Let’s extend Thomson’s analysis, comparing the political and aesthetic advantages of narrative recreations of stares directed at cognitive disability across stunt journalism, popular science, and literature. As this chapter’s epigraph suggests, cognitive disability often cannot be seen and confirmed in an instant. The stare cannot circumscribe cognitive disability like it can for physical and sensory disabilities. Viewers can see where the leg was or should be. They can center their gaze on blind eyes. But they cannot delineate the underlying cognitive impairment. Despite this difficulty, American literature and culture has stereotyped the primary visual sign of CD, the blank stare.

Thomson writes:

The visual comportment of people with significant disabilities -- often those with

cognitive, developmental, or perceptual impairments -- catalog them as blank

starers. The supposed dumb look, blind eye and idiotic expression are highly

stigmatized ways of appearing that draw interrogative stares from those who are

properly focused. This type of purportedly empty stare demands no response,

initiates no interchange, and produces no knowledge. Blank stares function, then

as visual impotence. (23)

There are numerous examples in America’s literary history that exemplify the blank stare. When Melville’s Bartleby first notes that he’d “prefer not to,” the narrator takes notice of his employee’s “dimly gray eye,” observing that “not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him” (3). In the midst of a carthartic rant about his father, Sherwood Anderson’s

Elmer Cowley pauses “to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of the half-wit”

Mook (181). These moments draw attention to Thomson’s subtle claim that such stares aren’t empty, but merely “purportedly” empty. The narrator in Bartleby notes that “the 89

scrivener had… seriously affected me in a mental way” (27). While Elmer seems to think

that his conversation “initiates no interchange” (to quote Thomson), he repeats Mook’s

earlier dialogue, “I’ll be washed and ironed. I’ll be washed, ironed, and starched,” in his

climatic confrontation with George Willard (185). In this vein, my analysis examines

how claims about the cognitively disabled stare are purported: What are these claims?

Who makes them? How often are they undone? How might rejection and revision vary

across popular science, journalism, and literature?

In their representations of cognitive disability, authors position readers in ways

that allow them to stare not only at mental difference but at the process of vision itself.

This positioning involves three steps. First, authors recreate the act of staring. Second,

authors use this moment of staring to instantiate popular opinions of the cognitively different or disabled. Finally, the authors revise or undermine these popular conceptions via extended narrative comment that 1) demands new aesthetic or forensic modes and 2) calls for the adoption of new political or ontological commitments. Authors represent the initial stare so that readers can critically examine it. In this way, readers work to resist or embrace specific epistemological and political programs. Such involvement was critical, since institutional reform and eugenic policy generated from the new ways in which the

American public came to see cognitive difference. Authors like Nellie Bly and Henry

Goddard relied on reader engagement, prompting them to become citizens who aspired to be well-informed political agents or students seeking to master new ways of knowing and seeing. Literary authors sought to harness the instability of the stare. In Narratology,

Mieke Bal writes that “whenever events are presented” in stories, “they are always presented from within a certain ‘vision’” (101). By engaging cognitive disability, which 90

resisted being known through vision, authors were able to explore in words what it meant

to see and also to show mental identity. Collectively, these different types of authors

undermined the efficacy of any single-staged gaze and endorsed a new epistemology of seeing, one predicated on a succession of stares. Narrative operated as a dynamic space in which the readers analyzed, revised, rejected, and internalized modalities of sight.

I— Substituted Impressions in Ten Days in a Madhouse

Benjamin Reiss has described 19th century psychiatry as “something of a

spectator sport” (13). He defines the producers of the spectacle as the most sophisticated

rhetorical players. “Promoters and superintendents of asylums encouraged visitors

because they wanted to raise funds, gain approval from legislators, allay public suspicion

about the institutions, and demonstrate the harsh treatments of the past had been replaced

by human kindness” (13). Viewers were far less calculating: “Day trippers brought picnic

lunches” as they “indulge[d] in some of the spectatorial pleasures they might be too ashamed to pursue in public at the popular freak shows of the day” (13). Reiss contrasts the purpose of the freak show with that of the institutional display: “the difference was that the performances of freak shows generally emphasized [the subject’s] aberrance, whereas confined lunatics acted out a script in which they were overcoming their deviant tendencies and mental disturbances and returning to a state of civility” (14). For the freak, potential would always be unrealized. For the lunatic, potential was on the horizon of action, and if the course remained true, it might be attained. At least that was the 91

institutional argument. But how did the viewer react to this argument? Reiss neglects to

consider how the spectator might scrutinize institutionally-authored visual arguments.

Like the attendee of Thomson’s freak show, Reiss’s spectator becomes flattened, failing to become anything more than a passive onlooker.

I contend that by narratively representing institutional display, authors made explicit the otherwise hidden politics and epistemology of staring. For Nellie Bly, narrative brings staring, an unconscious action that underlies the visitor’s experience of the institution, to the center of the reader’s focus. Reiss locates Bly within a “protest tradition” that calls for “more humane treatment” yet “legitimizes the custodial aspects of the asylum” (172). This argument overlooks how Bly undermines the primary epistemological means by which the institution identifies, and thus brings into custody, mental difference: the gaze. Scholars like Jean Marie Lutes have acknowledged that the appeal of Ten Days in a Madhouse lies not just in its critique of institutions, but in its unpacking of how institutions subjugate inmates. Lutes contends that Bly “asserted her role as primary storyteller by narrating the process of her own objectification” (220). I argue that by highlighting moments when she stares and is stared at, Bly establishes staring as the mechanism that drives this objectification process. Ten Days in a Madhouse recreates common ways of viewing mental difference only to dismantle them.3 The

efficacy of the stare – how reliably it can identify mental illness -- changes over time and

in different contexts as the story unfolds. These changes allow Bly to redefine the gaze’s

epistemological value, an act that made possible the political accomplishments that her

exposé achieved. 92

Bly’s work sits within both a rich lineage of asylum exposés that extended into

the latter half of the 20th century and a set of Victorian narratives about sane protagonists being entrapped in the institution. Andrew Scull notes that the early nineteenth century

American reformist Dorothea Dix “bludgeoned male politicians everywhere she went with the horrors the insane faced in confinement” (Scull 197). The sensational images that the asylum offered few occasions to reflect on the process by which they were seen.

The scene of madness, an impetus for political action, also became a space for bourgeois leisure. Mid-nineteenth century readers “developed an insatiable appetite” for stories of the institutionally-entrapped sane subject (239). What distinguishes Bly’s work is not just

sights contained within her story, but the way in which it draws the reader’s attention to

the representational strategies such stories rely on and the epistemological processes by

which madness might be made sense of.

To expose the gaze, Bly must first represent it as it commonly (and idealistically)

understood. She frames the utility of the stare and the accuracy of its conclusions as self-

evident. As the story proceeds, Bly doubles back on these ideas. She substitutes

representations of the trustworthy stare with representations of a less reliable visual

process. This technique recurs throughout Ten Days in a Madhouse and is Bly’s primary

way of compelling the reader to embrace a new mode of viewing, one that functions not

only as an alternative to institutional ways of seeing, but those that readers themselves

would have previously practiced.

In her introduction to Ian L. Monroe’s reprinting of her exposé, Bly frames her

political accomplishments as the direct result of bringing to public view what the

Blackwell institution sought to keep out of sight. “I am happy to be able to state as a 93

result of my visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the City of

New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of

the insane” (3). After foregrounding the sizeable effects of seeing (and showing) mental

difference at the right angle, Bly pithily remarks, “I have at least the satisfaction of

knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work” (3).

Within her trite comment, Bly sets up the subject of the gaze who will be viewed throughout the exposé. “Unfortunate” functions euphemistically, funneling the complex social and biological realities of mental difference into a convenient descriptor. To the naive reader, the term denotes a subject who has a mental disease or defect. To those familiar with Bly’s work, the unfortunate’s misfortune exists because of institutional treatment. The term operates as a semantic Fata Morgana. Different representations of the

“unfortunate” made from multiple viewpoints are substituted throughout the exposé.

Introductory commentary compels the first-time reader to look to the horizon of the text’s political and ontological trajectory. At this point, Bly’s “unfortunate” is a hollow term, and this emptiness encourages the reader to fill in the word’s outline with popular sentiments and stereotypes. However, as Bly’s story unfolds, she moves the reader progressively closer to this image, causing its contours to change. Innate misfortune decouples from the mentally ill subject, becoming something that other parties yoke the subject to. Bly uses the dynamics of vision to propel this shift.

Before causing any paradigmatic shift, Bly must first introduce vision as it is conventionally understood. The first chapter, “A Delicate Mission,” outlines the goal of

Bly’s project: to see mental illness clearly and chronicle its story accurately. Her editor requires that she be critical but not sensational, asking her to present the “unvarnished 94

narrative” of institutional life and treatment (4). The imperative to clearly present the

truth contrasts the means that make such a presentation possible. Bly must simulate

madness so that she can deceive the doctors who will admit her into the institution. She

waxes on the difficulty of the task: “Could I assume the characteristics of insanity to such

a degree that I could pass the doctors, live for a week among the insane without the

authorities finding out that I was only a ‘chiel amang’em taking notes?’” (4). Bly’s

anxiety pits common understanding against professional expertise: can the normal

individual perform mental illness in a way that might trick the expert viewer? She doubts

her odds of success. “I had little belief in my ability to deceive the insanity experts, and I

think my editor had less” (5). By reflecting on her professional approach and corresponding anxieties, Bly brings the concept of vision to the forefront of the reader’s attention. How mental illness is viewed becomes as much a subject of the exposé as mental illness itself.

But Bly does more than reassure readers of the soundness of medical vision: she aligns her point of view with popular perceptions of institutionalization. “That such an

institution could be mismanaged, and that cruelties could exist ‘neath its roof, I did not

deem possible” (5). She repeats the stereotype of the “unfortunate” seen in the

introduction. “I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly – a desire that

the most helpless of God’s creature, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly” (5).

On one level, Bly’s first chapter recreates the thoughts and opinions that readers themselves have. But Bly creates a tension between her thoughts as a protagonist and her knowledge as a narrator. Popular sentiments are things that Bly once had. Bly the author knows more than Bly the character. The disparity between these levels of knowledge 95

introduces seeds of doubt about her valorization of medical vision. Bly exclaims, “What a

difficult task, I thought, to appear before a crowd of people and convince them that I was

insane… And then to be examined by a number of learned physicians who make insanity

a specialty, and who daily come in contact with insane people!” (7). At the surface, this

remark praises the medical gaze, but the parenthetical, “I thought,” subtly undermines the claim that medical vision would be difficult to dupe.

A scene in which Bly practices staring buries this small seed of doubt. Seeking to test whether or not she can pass medical evaluation, she duplicates the trope of the vacant stare in her bedroom mirror. “I remembered all I had read of the doings of crazy people, how first of all they have staring eyes, and so I opened mine as wide as possible and stared unblinkingly at my own reflection. I assure you the sight was not reassuring, even to myself, especially in the dead of night” (7). Bly draws on the cultural experiences – or what Thomson might define as the “sedimented history” – that she shares with readers to move them into direct confrontation with the stare. In this intimate space, the effectiveness of the performed stare is limited. She “succeed[s] only partially” and continues to “practice before the mirror and picturing [her] future as a lunatic” (7).

There are two primary effects of Bly’s practice: first, it sensationalizes the connection between normalcy and madness. Bly hints at the darkest outcomes of her 96

Fig. 2. Illustrations in Chapters One and Two project, asking “who could tell but that the strain of playing crazy, and being shut up with a crowd of mad people, might turn my own brain, and I would never get back” (8). This effect is also seen in book’s illustrations (Fig. 2), which show a composed Bly’s extreme

(and slightly comical) transition into affected madness. Eyes cast down at her desk are replaced by luminous stars that look past a hand outstretched towards the bedroom mirror. But more importantly, the scene extracts the act of vision. The scene and the illustrations allow the reader to stare at Bly as she stares. In this isolated space, Bly validates popular stereotypes of the mad stare by drawing on them. Further, she trumpets professional vision by admitting her limited success. Bly’s stare might trick the average person, but it surely wouldn’t dupe the psychiatrist.

Once Bly sets out on her mission, the narrative progressively undoes the popular sentiments espoused and professional legitimacy established in the opening chapters. Bly thrusts readers into confrontations with several ways of staring all bound by a common thread: misidentification. These switches undermine Bly’s idealistic representation of and belief in vision, transforming staring from an act to be witnessed (as it is in the bedroom scene) into an act that readers can scrutinize.

On her way to the boarding house, Bly continues to draw on popular representations of the stare: “as I walked down the avenue, I tried to assume the look in which maidens wear in pictures entitled ‘Dreaming.’ ‘Far-away’ expressions have a crazy air” (8). The partial failure of her performed stare at home is replaced with the remarkable success of her mad stare in the world. Describing her interactions with her roommate Mrs. Caine, she notes that “I insisted on sitting on the side of the bed and 97

staring blankly at vacancy. My poor companion was put into a wretched state of

unhappiness. Every few moments she would rise up to look at me” (14).4 Mrs. Caine

does more than simply evidence the vacant stare’s surprising success: she represents the

good-hearted reader. Bly notes “how much [she] admired that little woman’s courage and

kindness” (17). Key similarities exist between Mrs. Caine and the reader. Attentive and

kind, she shares the reader’s moral codes that the initial chapters introduce. But more

crucial to Bly’s epistemological project, Mrs. Caine sees the same sights as the reader.

She tells Bly that her “eyes shone terribly brightly” (14), a description that matches the

sensational image of “Nellie Practices Insanity at Home” that readers saw just a few

pages earlier. Mrs. Caine stands in for the reader. She judges Bly’s mental character how

readers would if they did not have the benefit of Bly’s narrative scaffolding. For the

untrained viewer, vision misleads. Of the different modes of viewing established in the

first two chapters, only the foundation of professional vision remains intact.

Bly substitutes the visual judgment of lay viewers with judgments from

professional authorities. Once Judge Brown calls for a doctor to examine her, Bly

reinstates the efficacy of the medical gaze: “the doctor looked clever and I had not one

hope of deceiving him, but I determined to keep up the farce” (25). Like Mrs. Caine and

Bly herself, the doctor approaches the question of mental illness through visible signs.

His investigation centers on Bly’s eyes. He “tried the effect of the light on the pupils of

my eyes. Holding his hand within a half inch of my face, he told me to look at it, then, jerking it hastily away, he would examine my eyes” (26). The methods of medical authority seem to access a reality removed from Bly and the reader. As medical analysis becomes more authoritative, her anxiety grows. She can only draw, once more, on 98

popular stereotype. “I was puzzled to know what insanity was like in the eye, so I thought the best thing under the circumstances was to stare” (26). She duplicates the vacant stare.

“I held my eyes riveted unblinkingly upon his hand, and when he removed it, I exerted all my strength to still keep my eyes from blinking” (26). The chapter’s illustration (Fig. 3) allows the reader to view the visual exchange between Bly and the doctor. Surprisingly,

Bly’s performance passes the test, and her success changes the reader’s understanding of medical authority’s epistemology as well as the ontological territory such methods have access too. Both lay viewer and expert interpret Bly’s interior through exterior significations. The sharp split between medical authority and lay understanding cleaved in the introduction collapses.

Fig. 3. Illustration in Chapter Five, “Pronounced Insane”

The faceless throng that follows Bly as she is transported to Blackwell symbolizes misidentification’s ubiquity. “How they tried to get a glimpse at the supposed crazy girl!

…The children raced after us, yelling all sorts of slang expressions, and trying to get a peep under the curtains” (27). Peeping, glimpsing, gazing – every mode of viewing the public adopts enthusiastically misidentifies its subject. By cycling through different representations of viewing practiced by different types of individuals in different 99

contexts, Bly illustrates that staring drives the process of her objectification. The reality of the visual politics surrounding madness replace the ideology vision stated at the beginning of her journey. This reality is “not reassuring” because of the ease of which madness can be affected and seen, not the difficulty. Upon her admission to Blackwell,

Bly confirms this turn. “I began to have a smaller regard for the ability of doctors than I ever had before, and a greater one for myself. I felt sure now that no doctor could tell whether people were insane or not, so long as the case was not violent” (34).

Bly’s entry into the institution signals a turning point in how readers see staring.

In pre-admission chapters, readers see staring become increasingly defined as an act that misleads. Read according to Thomson’s theory of visual politics, public and professional stares create feelings of absolute difference and minimal connection between the starer and the subject. Narrative exposes the limitations of these politics. The reader knows that

Bly performs madness, proving false any feeling of absolute difference. In post- admission chapters, Bly paradoxically restores the gaze’s efficacy. This restoration occurs because of a change in the subject of the gaze. Readers no longer see Bly as she is stared at; they see the “mentally ill” as Bly stares at them. While Bly’s stares initially prompt feelings of difference, these feelings fade as she experiences institutional life.

The illustrations in the post-admission chapters also contribute to the unravelling of the promise and power of vision. In contrast to the bulk of the illustrations in the pre- admission chapters, only a few post-admission illustrations depict Bly herself. Instead, they depict what Bly sees: clean rooms inside the institution; lines of calm, orderly inmates; placid scenes of asylum life. These images, however, conceal deeper problems 100

that readers only come to understand through Bly’s narrative explanations and

reflections.5

During an afternoon promenade, Bly encounters the one class of lunatics that she

feels doctors might correctly identify. She spies a line of “violent lunatics” marching in

lock step with “a long cable rope fastened to wide leather belts” that “locked around the waists of fifty-two women” (58). The procession’s “vacant eyes and meaningless faces” dominate Bly’s focus:

At the end of the rope was a heavy iron cart, and in it two women–one nursing a

sore foot, another screaming at some nurse, saying: "You beat me and I shall not

forget it. You want to kill me," and then she would sob and cry. The women "on

the rope," as the patients call it, were each busy on their individual freaks. Some

were yelling all the while. One who had blue eyes saw me look at her, and she

turned as far as she could, talking and smiling, with that terrible, horrifying look

of absolute insanity stamped on her. The doctors might safely judge on her case.

The horror of that sight to one who had never been near an insane person before,

was something unspeakable. (58)

This passage represents Bly’s staring process, one in which sensory impression is followed by rationalization. Notably, Bly’s consciousness is based far more in the former than the latter. The violent cases are represented in vivid sensory detail: the reader sees their formation, hears their dialogue, and is struck by their horrifying look. In comparison, Bly’s rationalization that “the doctors might safely judge” these cases is terse. Reflection serves the interest of visual impression. One of Bly’s companions, Miss

Neville, reinstates the popular idea of God’s “unfortunates” established in the 101

introduction. “God help them!” she cries, noting, “It is so dreadful I cannot look” (58).

Indeed, Ten Days in a Madhouse prevents its readers from looking at the sight. The

illustration included in the chapter (Fig. 4) depicts the procession of “quiet inmates” that

Bly herself is a part of. Bly transfers Miss Neville’s dread onto the reader. She directly addresses readers, encouraging them to imagine the sheer size of madness. “On they passed, but for their places to be filled by more. Can you imagine the sight? According to one of the physicians there are 1600 insane women on Blackwell’s island” (58). Narrative becomes the space where extreme (and thus legitimate) cases of madness can be both seen and imagined. Reader speculation and medical judgment work in concert. The reader works to envision the full spread of extreme cases that “the doctors might safely judge.”

Fig. 4. “Quiet Inmates Out for a Walk”

The coordination between lay reader and expert works to cover up the subtle ways

in which Bly destabilizes the divide between the mad subject and the normal viewer. The

scene recalls previous scenes in a way that undercuts the reinstatement of the medical

gaze. The speech of the “lunatics” intimates the violence commonly depicted in other

institutional exposés, the “sensational revelations” that Bly’s editor explicitly cautions her against making in the opening chapter. The promenade scene also recalls the scaling 102

down effect seen in the opening chapters. In the first two chapters, Bly’s focus funnels down to an isolated moment where she examines the reflection of her mad stare. Here,

Bly’s stare funnels down to one mad subject. This leads to an effect that is, to quote the earlier chapter, “not reassuring,” but what disturbs Bly in this scene is the agency of the subject. The blue-eyed woman is not just a subject to be stared at. She stares back.

Seemingly vacant eyes recognize the visual objectification process that is unfolding. The subject becomes an agent who turns “as far as she could” to return Bly’s gaze. Shifts in agency manifest stylistically. The main clause “One who had blue eyes saw me look at her” makes the woman and Bly alternate grammatical subjects and objects. “Me” is the object of “one who had blue eyes,” but “her” is the object of “me.” Put another way,

“One who had blue eyes” is the grammatical subject of the sentence and the antecedent for the pronoun “her” which is the object of Bly’s look. These symmetric switches disturb the traditional positions of the viewer and the viewed. The “horror of the sight” has as much to do with this political reversal as it does the physical impression relayed to readers.

Thus while the promenade scene touts the medical gaze, it fails to recover the traditional politics of the stare. Subsequent narration seizes on the instability the scene creates. In the next scene, Bly encounters Blackwell’s superintendent during a meal.

Though he performs social niceties, Bly notes that “his voice was as cold as the hall, and the patients made no movement to tell him of their sufferings” (60). She begs her fellow non-violent inmates to take advantage of the superintendent’s seeming sociability. The responses she hears echoes those of the violent lunatics: “I asked some of them to tell how they were suffering from the cold and insufficiency of clothing, but they replied that 103

the nurse would beat them if they did” (60). The “mad” dialogue heard during the previous promenade is revealed to abide to an airtight logic. Her tablemates’ commentary demonstrates that the seemingly obvious cases insanity are fundamentally rational. For both the promenade and the meal scene, Bly moves from vivid imagery, to dialogue, to her own reflections as a narrator to make a larger point about the utility of different ways of representation.6 These techniques correspond to different epistemological positions from which the reader explores the truth of mental difference.

Transition between these positions compels the reader to face realities that visual impressions obscures. The truest statements come with reflection, not imagery, as Bly’s meal-time musing shows:

What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here

is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are

condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly

sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 A. M. until 8 P. M.

on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours,

give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her

bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane.

Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck. (60)

Bly debunks the implied innate difference of “unfortunates” introduced at the beginning of the exposé. Her rhetorical question encourages the reader to consider the cause of apparent madness. Such consideration leads to an easy rejection of the idea that the insane are innately defective or diseased. Bly introduces false diagnoses (including her own) and then lists a bevy of treatments that make these diagnoses seem true. Argument, 104

not visual impression, allows madness to be understood, and the remainder of the exposé

follows the course this passage sets, dispelling the misleading conclusions of the stare.

The payoff of Bly’s epistemological critique is political. The court tasks a group

of jurors to examine the merits of her investigation. The institution, however, is on full

display when Bly and the group arrive.7 Blackwell aims to reclaim the juror’s field of vision, which Bly had previously filled up with horrors. The boat the committee takes to the island is new. The halls are “in the finest order” (80). The institution seeks to control not just images, but also narrative explanation. The superintendent denies culpability.

“Dr. Dent confessed that he had no means by which to tell positively if the bath was cold and of the number of women put in the same water… If the nurses were cruel to their patients, had he any positive means of ascertaining it? No, he had not” (79). The voice of medical authority abruptly infiltrates the narrator’s voice, repeating institutional speech:

“Did we need more evidence?” (80). A flurry of images ensues. The kitchen is cleaned.

“Two barrels of salt stood conspicuously open near the door! The bread on exhibition was beautifully white and wholly unlike what was given us to eat” (80). A resigned Bly remarks, “the institution was on exhibition, no fault could be found.” Miss Neville is brought before the jurors. Bly reflects on the conventional visual politics of the interview:

“I went into the hall to meet her, knowing that the sight of so many strange gentlemen would excite her, even if she be sane. It was as I feared. The attendants had told her she was going to be examined by a crowd of men, and she was shaking with fear” (80). The stare produces the phenomenon it wishes to identify. The final chapter thus follows the substitutive structure of the text at large. In light of the persuasive (and calculated) images the institution presents, despair replaces hope for reform. Bly acknowledges that 105

“I hardly expected the grand jury to sustain me, after they saw everything different from

what it had been while I was there” (81). Within this expression of doubt, Bly restores sight as the fundamental way of coming to know truth.

But Bly, as the keen reader suspects, is wrong. Narrative carries more evidential weight than display. Bly’s impression of the slim chance for reform misleads. Miss

Neville manages to overcome the effects of visual staging, and Bly notes that “her story must have convinced all hearers of the truth of my statements” (80). The jurors sustain her, “and their report to the court advises all the changes made that I had proposed” (81).

She notes that the appropriations committee cites the “strength of [her] story” for their unprecedented allocation of funds (81). The committee’s good judgment recognizes that narrative ways of knowing have a greater claim to truth than passing imagery. By the conclusion of Ten Days in a Madhouse, the reader knows this too. By capitalizing on the interchanges between different ways of coming to know mental difference, Bly makes the otherwise transparent process of staring apparent. For the reader, understanding mental difference becomes a recursive process, one that involves seeing images, listening to mad dialogue, and considering the pointed narrative commentary that splices these moments.

Narrating a recursive process of coming to know mental difference becomes the key device for accomplishing progressive political change: a fact that later eugenic writers would recognize.

II – Restricted Viewing Processes in The Kallikak Family

Using narrative to complicate the process of vision did not only serve the purposes of institutional critique. Ironically, eugenic writers would pick up the rhetorical 106

toolset Bly introduced in order to control the reader’s relationship with mental difference.

In their examination of visual politics and technology, critics often focus on the work of

one such writer, Henry H. Goddard. The photographs in The Kallikak Family have anchored scholarly discussions of ideology and science ever since Stephen Jay Gould's

The Mismeasure of Man. Jay Dolmage has recently argued that the adoption of Goddard's

photographic protocols at immigration centers reminds scholars that "the most important

surface of emergence to study when examining any photograph" is "the existence of the

image and its rhetorics in our own thoughts and actions." But how did Goddard instill

these images and rhetorics in his readers? I contend that he taught readers how to practice

eugenic seeing and thinking via a larger recursive pedagogy that invites readers to return

to images, reevaluate them in light of narrative explanation, and test, reject, and explore

popular and scientific theories of cognitive disability. The moment of the stare becomes

the focus of a broader epistemological lesson. Visual and narrative evidence effect a

eugenic education that compels viewers to revise initial impressions. In comparison to

Bly, Goddard scales up the readers’ intellectual participation, prompting them to test and

to apply the claims of the eugenic movement. Participation then functions as the means of

internalization. By exploring and experimenting with eugenic theories of cognitive

disability, Goddard makes his readers seem like they are participating in the discovery of

scientific truth, an effect that deepens their investment in the values, methods, and

conclusions of the discourse.

Reader participation is privileged before the book officially begins. Goddard

dedicates the Kallikak Family "to Mr. Samuel S. Fels, friend and philanthropist, a layman

with the scientist's love of Truth, and the true citizen's love of humanity, who made 107

possible this study and who has followed this work from its incipiency with kindly criticism and advice." This dedication distills a partnership between the expert and the lay reader that not only lies at the heart of The Kallikak Family’s persuasive appeal, but also made possible a national eugenic movement. Goddard's authority becomes more trusted because he invites the reader to play an active role in the discovery of “scientific” truth.

By allowing his readers to participate in his eugenic project, most notably by reinterpreting pictures in light of his narrative comments, Goddard gains their trust when disseminating the essential proof of his argument via other visual means, namely hereditary charts. To see the epidemic of feeblemindedness, the reader must depend on

Goddard's charts, which capture a long view of history, not the misleading moments that pictures do. Shifts between photographs, written commentary, and hereditary charts illustrate how eugenicists re-appropriated narrative strategies that institutional critics popularized.

Photography laid a persuasive veneer of objectivity over scientific argument.

Scholars often depict readers who passively internalize popular eugenic theories in light of visual evidence. Anne Maxwell writes that "at a time when photography was widely perceived as the most objective visual medium, many scientists saw photography not only as a scientific tool, but also as the most effective way to relay their racial theories to the public" (2). Martin A. Elks echoes Maxwell, arguing that "Goddard's first purpose for publishing photographs in The Kallikak Family was to convey the image of objective scientific documentation of the Kallikak family members by using realistic illustrations of his thesis of the hereditability of feeblemindedness" (269). Retouching of the Kallikak photos was done, in Elks's view, to enhance the reader's ability to "see" 108

feeblemindedness. After retouching, Goddard's images "screamed feeblemindedness"

(278). Elks alludes to the fact that the images served as learning aids for an untrained audience. They magnify the salient stigmata of the feebleminded so that the reader can begin to hone his or her own trained vision.

Elks skims over this educational process. But it’s clear that The Kallikak Family frames the act of viewing photographs as part of a program to promote individual and public formations of eugenic theories of cognitive disability. Scientific texts and images often function to build, grow, and legitimize new scientific communities, as shown in "A

Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke's Micrographia." Here Jordynn

Jack argues that Hooke's work develops a "pedagogy of sight," which functions as "a rhetorical framework that instructs readers how to view images in accordance with an ideological or epistemic program" (192). This instruction served a practical purpose.

Newly trained members could help enlarge the Royal Society of London and legitimize the field of natural philosophy. Jack observes that Hooke's pedagogy adheres to popular religious, philosophical, and social conventions, which allowed it to transform readers into "virtual witness[es] for the Royal Society" (205).

Goddard’s book exemplifies this pseudo-professionalization process. While

Goddard instructs his reader, his visual and textual schemas prohibit his reader's full membership into his professional community. At key points in his The Kallikak Family,

Goddard halts his reader's tutelage. This restrictive pedagogy produces a key dynamic of eugenic discourse: the reader becomes informed yet deferential, ready to discard initial impressions for authoritative explanations.8 109

As Leila Zenderland argues, to identify idiocy properly Goddard needed

professionals who could spot subtle physical clues. Though it could be traced to a feebleminded gene, cognitive difference was difficult to immediately recognize. The

threat of feeblemindedness derived from this covert nature. As Goddard presents

photographs of the Kallikaks, he works to correct his reader’s suspect impression of any

subject’s seeming normalcy or reformed character. He uses photographs to evoke popular beliefs about feeblemindedness that he considers misleading. When readers view photographs, they see images of calm and collected feebleminded people in orderly settings. These images invite readers to adopt the seemingly good hearted sensibilities they might be prone to in the early 20th century--namely, that in the right circumstances the feebleminded might be cured or, in less desirable circumstances, harmlessly left alone. Reformists like Bly worked to instill such sentiments in the public. Goddard undermines these inclinations via textual argument, and this tactic repeats throughout the book. Once readers are educated about how to detect mental degeneration, Goddard encourages them to reinterpret the photos and revise their impressions. Newly trained readers recognize the threat that lingers under controlled appearances. Thus, viewing is multi-tiered: there is not just one gaze, but multiple from different angles contingent on

Goddard's narrative lessons. Photographs are rarely framed as representations of plain truth. Cognitive othering is as procedural as it is immediate. Readers make a first glance 110

and are then encouraged to make a second one to test newly endowed eugenic ways of

seeing.

Fig. 5. First Photograph in The Kallikak Family

When the readers first open the book, they see Deborah Kallikak, a 22-year-old

"moron" who would become a national icon of feeblemindedness, at the Vineland

Training School. This image (Fig. 5) displays Deborah as she appears. The scene is peaceful and controlled. A symmetrical triangle could be drawn around the edges of her figure. She sits, undisturbed, caught in the middle of reading a lengthy book with a cat on her lap. The pair is set in front of a painted backdrop. Deborah's hair is done up in a plain, restrained way. The controlled image becomes increasingly domesticized in the two pictures that follow, titled “Deborah at the Sewing Machine” and “Deborah as Waitress.”

In the former she looks up, with a slight smile, from her work. In the latter, her eyes avoid the reader and intently fix on the last plate she must place to achieve an ideal table setting. Viewed together, the photographs construct Deborah as evidence of psychiatric 111

achievement. Deborah's feeble mind has been trained. This construction establishes two

popular sentiments for the reader: first, scientific expertise is able to reform the

cognitively different, and second, once reformed the feebleminded can assume normal

social identities and behaviors to such an extent that their mental defect practically

disappears.

If a disruptive element exists in the first photograph, it's Deborah's gaze. It fixes itself just over the viewer's shoulder, which might seem conventional given early photography norms. However, as viewers read the text that follows, her gaze comes to exemplify the stereotypical vacant stare. Goddard presents field notes that mention her

eyes three times: "Staring Expression . . . Looks steadily . . . Sees and hears well" (2).

This repetition signals the beginning of Goddard's pedagogical process. The field notes

introduce elements central to the pathology of feeblemindedness, the most dangerous of

which is the feebleminded person's ability to copy. The notes state that on her admission

to Vineland, Deborah was a "good imitator" (2). Other important feebleminded traits

emerge: "Excitable but not nervous. Not affectionate and quite noisy. Careless in dress.

Active. Obstinate and Destructive" (2). In the photograph, Deborah's eyes are the only

initial clue to the threat of the feebleminded person's ability to conceal his or her corrupt

nature--a clue that most readers would overlook. Goddard's first lesson teaches the reader

to distrust positive first impressions. On a second viewing, the reader likely reinterprets

the photograph: Deborah merely mimics all the necessary traits of a "good" girl.

Recent criticism of this photograph has overlooked that readers view images in

The Kallikak Family in light of narrative explanation and that this experience is part of a larger recursive process of coming to know cognitive disability. Maxwell describes a 112

single-stage viewing: "Ironically, [Deborah's] controlled manner, serves only to draw attention to what many would see as her overly intense gaze and the presence of the cat on her knee--suggesting an overly passionate nature, an affinity for animals rather than humans, and a barely suppressed craving for physical affection" (133). Maxwell neglects that the appreciation of this irony must be cultivated for the lay reader by textual information. By suggesting that the reader simply recognizes Deborah’s inherent flaws,

Maxwell ignores Goddard's pedagogical premise: recognition is a skill that must be taught and honed.

As the field notes continue, Deborah's story begins to resemble contemporary narratives in which the individual, through hard work and grit, "overcomes" his or her disability. By 1908, Deborah "can write a fairly good story, but spells very few words"

(5). By 1909, she "has made a large 'Skolcroft' chair with only a little help in putting it into clamps. Did her own measuring and carved the wood. She filled the wood herself before staining. This she had never done before" (6). Interestingly, Goddard reveals these field notes are not his own: they belong to Deborah's teachers. Goddard critiques the notes and the well-meaning impression they convey:

The reader will see that Deborah's teachers have worked with her faithfully and

carefully, hoping for progress, even seeing it where at a later date it became

evident that no real advance had been made. Note the oft-repeated "She could if

she would," or "If she would only pay attention," and similar expressions, which

show the unwillingness of the teachers to admit even to themselves that she is

really feeble-minded. (7) 113

By extracting the act of impression, Goddard compels his reader to re-evaluate his or her own impressions and the act of viewing. With the ill-advised sympathies of well-meaning teachers exposed, the reader sees Deborah for who she is: a feebleminded girl with no hope for recovery. Deborah's eyes pierce. Her successes are read as an idiot's imitations.

The reader now knows to focus on Deborah's degenerate nature, not her illusory accomplishments. Goddard's own assessment of Deborah reveals no improvement. He asserts that "if this young woman were to leave the Institution, she . . . would lead a life that would be vicious, immoral, and criminal" because of her bad heredity stock (11). He stresses that Deborah only seems to instantiate the ideal of the reformed resident: "rather good-looking, bright in appearance, with many attractive ways, the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right. Our work with Deborah convinces us that such hopes are delusions" (12).

Fig. 6. Three Kallikak Children

Later photographs require similarly trained eyes to perceive and understand the threat of feeblemindedness. Fig. 6 depicts three Kallikak "defectives." The eyes and 114

mouths have been darkened, signaling the children's underlying defective condition (Elks

269). However, this retouching is hardly the only way of directing attention to underlying defect. By limiting their focus to the act of retouching, scholars like Gould and Elks have ignored the larger ways that Goddard's project seeks to train the untrained eye. At first glance, this photograph might be interpreted by the lay reader in a positive, if slightly cautious, fashion. Despite the retouching, this image conveys a feel of order, even if three sets of sinister eyes peer out from the photo. The residence, though poor and rural, is nonetheless clean and organized. The porch is clear. A table and chair sit in the corner. In contrast to the collapsing hovels shown earlier in the book, the porch is held upright by four pillars. Brush does not overrun the structure. The children are calmly posed. Two boys sit in matching gray trousers while a girl stands in between wearing a bright white dress in front of a black doorway. Given these aesthetic features, the portrait recalls the controlled image of Deborah that begins the book.

However, at this point in their training, readers know that they must scrutinize the potentially misleading impression the image gives. The accompanying narrative accomplishes this task. Goddard writes that "the door opened, revealing a sight to which, alas, the field worker was only too accustomed. She gazed aghast at what appeared to her to be a procession of imbeciles" (90). The narrative fashions unseen textual imagery that allows the reader to reinterpret the photograph. The "sight to which the field worker was already too accustomed" had been previously related to the reader in earlier pages.

Describing a previous home, Goddard writes, "the field worker made her way as best she could, across the heaps of junk that cluttered the room" (87). In the text that follows Fig.

5, a grotesque adult replaces the calm and collected children. Described as a "tall 115

emaciated man . . . [with] a fixed, stupid stare," the feebleminded patriarch grows

agitated because of the visit (90). He cannot comprehend its purpose and worries that the

fieldworker may be there to take his daughter away. Goddard writes, "His eyes suddenly

assumed a wild, desperate look and he burst out, 'No, no! They'll never get her. They

tried it once, but they didn't get her. They took my wife away and she never came back --

they'll never get her!'" (90). The narration that bookends the photograph illustrates that

the reader is engaged in an ongoing process of re-seeing. The controlled scene that the photograph depicts is a ruse for internal chaos and the deeper problem of full-grown feeblemindedness.9

For Goddard, illustrating the spread of feeblemindedness could not be done solely

via pictures or narrative. The task required a visual rhetoric unique to science, namely

genetic charts. Whereas the lay reader can with some training see, explore, and reinterpret

photographs, he or she can only passively accept the implications of Goddard's charts,

which contain a daunting amount of hereditary information. Textual content is reduced

just before the charts. Photograph-centered chapters provide readers with developed

narratives and descriptions. But chart-centered chapters reduce textual argument in order

to present only the most essential evidence needed to prove the threat of feeblemindedness. The charts prompt a straightforward inculcation of eugenic claims, a dynamic that replaces the recursive reading process that images and text invite throughout the book. 116

Fig. 7. First Hereditary Chart

Before the text's first chart (Fig. 7), Goddard devotes several pages to the underlying narrative of the data. In a moment of moral weakness, Martin Kallikak fathered a line of defective descendants with a feebleminded bar maid. The meaning of the first chart can be easily comprehended: marriage to a normal woman leads to normal children; illicit sex with a barmaid leads to feebleminded children. As he introduces successive charts, Goddard's description shrinks and legibility disappears. The increasing lack of textual scaffolding restricts the reader’s ability to judge and reevaluate visual evidence. The next nine charts buffet the reader in rapid succession, and the reader's authority to make meaning out of information wanes. The coherence of the first chart 117

gives way to obtuseness. Though no clear pattern can be deduced, truth can: feeblemindedness is on the rise.

Fig. 8: Later Hereditary Chart

If the sprawling black boxes in the chart shown in Fig. 8 evidence the threat of feeblemindedness, the spread of the condition does not behave orderly, as the first chart might suggest. When viewing photographs, the reader could manage and see the truth

"behind" particular images of feeblemindedness. Now, given the overwhelming scientific data, he or she must depend on the conclusions Goddard draws. He cuts off his reader’s tutelage, embarking of a project known only to himself. The charts establish the limits of the trained vision of his reader. Consequently, they increase the threat of cognitive

"defect" by weakening the reader's hold on the information and evidence needed to comprehend, see, and narrate feeblemindedness.

The Kallikak Family illustrates how eugenic experts teach a particular way of viewing cognitive difference, one that is recursive and multi-staged. The expert invites the reader to play the role of apprentice and to participate in the discovery of eugenic truth. When Goddard presents core eugenic arguments, the reader’s initial empowerment makes his or her transition to a subordinate position more seamless. Jordynn Jack concludes that "pedagogies of sight help us determine not just how visual images operate 118

rhetorically . . . but how it is that audiences learn to see them in accordance with a set of ideological, cultural, and epistemological commitments" (206). Goddard's pedagogy suggests that these commitments are produced and sustained by an ongoing process of reader participation. By engaging his readers at times and silencing them at others,

Goddard is able to guide their epistemological and political commitments. How visuals and text collaboratively produce a pedagogical program has been overlooked. Goddard's program complicates straightforward notions of visual pedagogies. Not all pedagogies require a professional and a soon-to-be professional. Indeed, for The Kallikak Family, a

"lay man with a scientist's love of truth" is the engaged yet deferential reader Goddard seeks and produces.

V – “Trying to see”: Binding Normalcy and CD with Problems of Epistemology

Bly, an institutional critic, and Goddard, an institution superintendent, transformed the problem of identifying mental difference into a rhetorical device that inaugurated new modes seeing and understanding. They had a common goal: to increase the funding for American mental institutions. Before long fiction writers recognized the epistemological value of this rhetorical device and explored the cognitively disabled subject outside of institutional settings. Literary modernists, in particular, realized the eugenic fear of the unidentified carrier of mental defect infiltrating normal society. By representing this “infiltration,” authors undermined some conventional modes of vision and storytelling, moving readers to a new understanding of the epistemological value of the stare. In contrast to their scientific and media contemporaries, modernists used the fact of perceptual limitation to link the normal gaze with the dumb look. 119

Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio has been central to theorizing modernist representations of disability. In Narrative Prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder contend that

Anderson marks the beginning of a modernist tradition that exposes cultural constructions of disability but still manages to stereotype physically disabled characters according to some essential flaw or fate. In their reading of Winesburg’s prologue,

Mitchell and Snyder contend that modernists “link[ed] the visible exterior world with the invisible interior life of the subject” (143). The physical differences of the grotesque signify interior distortions, but the narrator sees these connections as “evidence of his own perverse methodology” (144). Creativity is obsessed with this “formula of the grotesque.” The true writer “resists his own distortionary system by virtue of his mastery over the artistic mechanism himself” (144). In other words, though the writer may gravitate towards stereotype, his representational process allows him to carry out a more meaningful symbolization. By “deploying the visible world as twisted and unidentifiable,” Anderson and other modernists “strategically upended audience expectations” of all features of storytelling: plot, aesthetics, and ideology (145).

Mitchell and Snyder arrive at an important conclusion about modernist representations of disability, but they neglect important evidence to do so. Anderson’s grotesques include not just the physically disabled, but the cognitively disabled as well.

One example is “‘Queer’” the story of Elmer Cowley, the son of the slow-witted merchant Ebenezer Cowley. In line with Mitchell and Snyder’s argument, “‘Queer’” exposes the limitations of stereotypes of cognitive disability, but still draws from the same cultural systems that it critiques. I want to consider the implications of this paradox.

Anderson fashions cognitive disability as an object to be narrated and as a perspective 120

through which to narrate. This contrast prompts readers to think about what it means to

be seen. Reading “‘Queer’” allows scholars to explore how Thomson’s idea of

“epistemological speculation” unfolds over the course of literary narrative. Unlike Bly and Goddard who used problems of epistemology to further political movements,

Anderson represents the problem of seeing and knowing cognitive disability to raise broader ontological questions about mental identity.

Scholars have misread Elmer’s “queerness” as madness. Ralph Ciancio refers to

Elmer as “an outright psychotic” (995). Robert Dunne argues that “Elmer is very much

akin to Foucault's conception of the insane who subject themselves to what they believe

is normalized morality because they think they may -- or may not -- be under society's observation” (56). These readings fail to account for Anderson’s title, “‘Queer,’” a term that denoted a specific type of cognitive identity at the turn of the 20th century. “Queer” did not denote madness, but a liminal mental state between normalcy and mental defect.

The work of Anderson’s contemporaries may help us to see that reading Elmer’s queerness as madness is an inadequate consideration of his mental character.10 In Arnold

Mulder’s Bram of the Five Corners, one of the townspeople informs the narrator that the

father of the feebleminded Hattie Wanhope “ain't really crazy — what you would call

crazy as such — but he's queer, you can't get away from that. He ain't like me an' you”

(107). When Jim Burden encounters the cognitively disabled Marek in My Antonia, he

remarks, “I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me… but he did not dare in the

presence of his elders. Marek was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had

it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies” (52). In Gilman’s The Crux,

Vivian Lane learns that Morton, the idiot child at the boarding house, had a “queer” 121

mother (86). Eugenic sources reveal that the term was well-established in the popular

lexicon. In Mental Defectives, the grandfather of a child who was “slow in developing, in

walking, talking, and in general intelligence” notes that a study of the family “might

place some of us below the average scale of intelligence—not feebleminded or insane but

usually termed queer” (293).11

Read in this context, “‘Queer’” draws the reader’s attention to a scale of intelligence more than to a scale of sanity. At times, Elmer is mad, but this madness is a response to his dissatisfaction with a possible hereditary connection to intellectual defect.

In front of the half-witted Mook, Elmer “talks earnestly and with great freedom” (180).

Dunne argues that Elmer’s newfound articulateness occurs because he speaks to “one

who he knows will not judge him queer” (58). This fact only partially explains Elmer’s

comfort. Elmer and Mook are cut from the same cognitive cloth. Critics have overlooked

the dialogue that concludes Elmer’s cathartic release. “Do you know why I came clear

out here afoot? I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell. I hunted out

another queer one, you see. I ran away, that’s what I did. I couldn’t stand up to someone

like that George Willard. I had to come to you” (181). This dialogue provides readers a

cognitive scale. Elmer occupies a middling position, one illuminated by the benchmarks

of normalcy (George) and defect (Mook) who collectively form an axis of intelligence.

Queerness blossoms from a more general strand of weakmindedness that is the cause of the Cowley’s inability to keep with up with an emerging consumerism. At their old home, the farm, the Cowleys were unremarkable, but in the store they are characterized by the things they fail to know and notice. As Elmer summarizes, “father doesn’t know that his store there in the town is a queer jumble, that he’ll never sell the 122

stuff he buys. He knows nothing about it… he isn’t worried. He’s queer. He doesn’t

know enough to be worried” (181). The failure of the Cowleys is not insanity, but

cognitive inability. Elmer’s insistent act of defining himself against this lack drives the

plot. “He don’t know but I know… I know too well,” he remarks (181). Knowing too

well is one half of Elmer’s hamartia. Though his father cannot keep up with any type of

symbolic exchange – linguistic, financial or otherwise – Elmer can. The narrator reveals

Elmer’s crude symbol system: “George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified

the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town” (178). Like Norris’s narrator in

“The Wife of Chino,” Anderson’s narrator represents Elmer’s consciousness in a way

that allows readers to see the gaps in this way of thinking: “Elmer Cowley could not

believe that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and

secret unnamable desires visited also his mind” (178). This technique works to clue the

reader into Elmer’s tragic flaw: while he knows his family’s queerness “too well,” he

knows little of the town he condemns.

For many of the story’s characters, knowledge is produced by seeing and showing. Nevertheless, “‘Queer’” resists the impulse to connect perceptible physical difference with a character flaw. Elmer’s disability is one that cannot be seen. It is a problem of the interior. Mitchell and Snyder contend that “once set into motion, the story largely disassociates its characters from the physical correlative that initially calls them forth into being in the writer’s imagination” (146). For Elmer, there is no physical correlative. This is not to say that readers know nothing of how the Cowleys look – readers learn of Ebenezer Cowley’s Prince Albert coat that has “become brown with age”

(176) and Elmer’s eyes that had “the colorless blueness of marbles” (179). Rather, what 123

calls Elmer into being are internal differences. This method of characterization allows

Anderson to expose the unreliability of the stare in ways he cannot in other stories. There

is little to see when looking at Elmer.12 Buffeted with the formula of the grotesque in

early stories, the reader sees the promise of sight flounder. Vision makes no headway into

the interior. By using Elmer as a focal character, Anderson draws attention to the reader’s

misplaced epistemological trust in the stare. Character-bound omniscience – the dives

into how Elmer interprets himself and his social status – allow his interior to be

understood and represented.

By representing moments when Elmer stares at George, Anderson reverses

conventional visual politics, and by highlighting moments when Elmer stares at other

“queer” ones, he undermines the traditional roles in the exchange. The stare’s point of

origin distinguishes Anderson from other writers like Bly and Goddard. In The Kallikak

Family, readers see through Goddard’s empowered professional vision as it scrutinizes

mental defect. In “‘Queer,’” readers see the passing glances of the town through Elmer’s

determined gaze. The opening paragraph reveals this contrast: “Elmer Cowley… could

see through a dirty window into the printshop of The Winesburg Eagle…. Looking

quickly up he saw George Willard… standing at the back door of the Eagle printshop and

staring absentmindedly about” (174).The narrator’s description of George’s

“absentminded” stares emphasize the limits of normalcy’s gaze. The normal stare misses the Cowley family drama. The perspective that readers see through is that of the disembodied narrator, who unlike Bly and Goddard, is able to represent the world as both

normalcy and cognitive disability perceive it. 124

Omniscient narrative description illuminates the facts and events that normalcy’s

point of view would miss. The narrator describes Cowley & Son’s location in the town.

The storefront faces Maumee Street, not Main Street. It is braced by a wagon shop and a

“shed for sheltering farmers’ horses,” buildings that harken back to an earlier, rural time.

The store sits on the bank of an emerging stream of commercialism on which it fails to

capitalize: “beside the store an alleyway ran behind the main street stores and all day

drays and delivery wagons intent on bringing in and taking out goods, passed up and

down” (175).13 This setting betrays the Cowley family defect, but the narrator’s

description of the store, a stand-in for the Cowley family, draws attention also to the way

in which the community fails to see its “queer” residents. The public sees only the

inscrutable image of the Cowley storefront, failing to see what might lie behind. “The

store itself was indescribable. Will Henderson once said of it that it sold everything and

nothing” (175). The civic blindness results in stasis. “The honey had stood in the store

window for six months… the coat hangers, patent suspender buttons, cans of roof paint,

bottles of rheumatism cure, and a substitute for coffee that companioned the honey in its

patient willingness to serve the public” (175). This would be comic were Elmer not so

desperately seeking social connection throughout the story. The Cowleys may well be the

“idiots” of Winesburg, “the solitary ones” as Martin Barr defines the term in Mental

Defectives, but their isolation is a product of the setting, specifically the way in which

they are socially and physically positioned in town.

Anderson’s narrator allows the reader to see through the dirty window, past the crowded storefront, and into the queer mind. But more than just providing insight into mental queerness, the narrator represents the world through this perspective. The story’s 125

use of point of view compels the gaze to come under scrutiny of its traditional subject.

Shifting between omniscient, normal, and disabled points of view makes possible

Anderson’s larger project to not just scrutinize how cognitive disability is seen, but to

reconsider the epistemological value of seeing in general. Representations of the stare

unfolds in three phases: first, the Elmer’s dialogue introduces (and replies to) the stare.

Second, the narrator describes particular stares in a way that consistently ends on a note

of the stare’s failure. Finally, over the course of the story, the reader sees stares as they

are made by individuals of different cognitive abilities. What connects these individuals

is a shared experience of vision’s failure to come to know the viewed subject.

After Elmer kicks out the traveling salesman, he outlines what he believes to be

the town’s visual politics: “We’re through being fools here!... We ain’t going to buy any

more stuff until we begin to sell. We ain’t going to keep on being queer and have folks

staring and listening” (177). Elmer’s exclamations characterize him in a way different

than other characters with cognitive disabilities. Far from passive, Elmer is driven. This

determination leads to moments when he is articulate. “The passion that had been the

cause of his outburst in the store began again to find expression. ‘I will not be queer—

one to be looked at and listened to… I’ll be like other people. I’ll show that George

Willard. He’ll find out. I’ll show him!” (178).

These declarations mark a considerable turn in American representations of cognitive disability, a turn made possible by America’s earlier obsession with the upper bound of the ever-lessening scale of mental defect. Elmer duplicates the visual epistemology that normalcy relies on to understand the mental other. His dissatisfaction with being watched and listened to prompts his determination to “show George Willard.” 126

The final two sentences in the outburst streamline the epistemological equation that drives his thinking: in order for George to discover Elmer’s true mental identity, he must be shown. Elmer transforms himself from the subject of the gaze into the agent of future action. Normalcy becomes the object the sentence. Elmer embraces visual politics, acknowledging that “queer” individuals are visually marked and believing that this mark can only be corrected by working in the visual space. Anderson taps into the American anxiety of covert cognitive disability: the “queer” individual not only appears normal, but also realizes and practices normalcy’s codes of appearance.

Though determined to “show,” Elmer’s efforts to "see" meet with little success.

Narrative descriptions of the stare’s failure undercut Elmer’s belief in and single-minded allegiance to visual ways of knowing. Spliced between Elmer’s declarations to “not be queer” is a stylized representation of the failed gaze. “In the store, Elmer Cowley and his father stared at each other” (177). In Elmer’s mind, this intense moment of seeing – in which father stands face to face with son – is poised potentially to be a moment of deep connection. Elmer “waits for some word of understanding” (177). The narrator represents Elmer’s field of vision: “scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare which he had confronted the traveling man. ‘I’ll be starched,’ he said softly. ‘Well, well, I’ll be washed and ironed and starched!” (178). The stare fails. As Elmer comes to his resolution – to not be queer any longer – he looks to his father for solidarity, but all that comes is evidence of his family’s intellectual limitations. The vivid description of the physical world that

Elmer sees draws out an incoherent piece of dialogue that repeats throughout the story as 127

the refrain of cognitive defect, but seeing leads to no new knowledge. It only confirms the Cowleys’ queerness.

This dynamic also occurs in Elmer’s exchange with Mook. As Elmer explains the dilemma of his family’s queerness, he stops “to gaze down into the dumb, unresponsive face of the half-wit” (181). For Elmer, Mook’s face indicates no understanding, and the cognitive limitations of his companion deepen his resolution. As he becomes “maddened by the dull face of the man,” his “gaze” becomes a “glare.” The narrator’s shift in diction highlights the violence and threat of overzealous sight. But more than this, the dictional shift illuminates the error of staring. Mook’s seeming lack of understanding sparks the anger behind Elmer’s glare. After Elmer storms off, the narrator’s focus remains with

Mook. Foreshadowing Elmer’s assault on George, Mook cautions the cows: “You better get behind the stack where he don’t see you. He’ll hurt someone yet, Elmer will” (182).

The premise of Elmer’s glare – that Mook does not understand – proves unsound. Mook has a better understanding of the events than any other character. Anderson uses the shift from the major focal character (Elmer) to a minor one (Mook) to expose the limitations of the stare. While Elmer cannot see what Mook knows, the reader can.

Elmer’s interactions with his father and Mook build up to his confrontation with

George, who represents normal cognition. A proclivity for seeing characterizes George.

When Elmer first confronts George, the young journalist looks at him “inquiringly.” In

George’s mind, his probing stare should inaugurate a deeper understanding of Elmer’s character. The omniscient narrator, who had previously relied on Elmer to focalize most of the story’s events, describes what George sees and feels, noting that he “had long been wanting to make friends with the young merchant and find out what was in his mind. 128

Now he thought he saw the chance and was delighted” (182). This insight speaks directly to Elmer’s two key dilemmas. First, it seems to validate Elmer’s paranoia – George does want to observe Elmer’s queer interior. Second, the description invalidates Elmer’s fear that he was “one condemned to go through life without friends” (179). As the exchange begins, the reader learns nothing more about either point.

Recalling the earlier metaphor of the Cowley & Son storefront, the narrator remarks “Elmer Cowley stopped and stood facing George Willard” (182). The odd young merchant from Maumee Street faces the sharp journalist in the center of Main Street.

Queerness faces normalcy head-on, but the results are limited. At this point in the story, the narrator, while able to move between the perspectives of Elmer and George, can only describe events as they appear before these limited focalizers. The narrator describes

George’s field of view: Elmer “tried to talk and his arms began to pump up and down.

His face worked spasmodically.” This plane of visual impression is unfulfilling, and just as in earlier exchanges, staring, the potential conduit of knowledge, short circuits.

Elmer’s frustrated dialogue is all that the reader hears. “He seemed to shout. ‘Oh, you go on back,’ he cried. Don’t stay here with me. I ain’t got anything to tell you. I don’t want to see you at all” (183). George’s inquiring look “initiates no exchange,” to quote

Thomson, and only reveals stereotypes about Elmer’s queerness that are already known

(Staring 23).

At the close of the story, Elmer finally does “show” George Willard. Dialogue and description position vision as the primary operation in this confrontation. After resolving to leave the town, Elmer visits the New Willard House and tells the night clerk that he “got to see” George (184). Rubbing eyes that are “afire with curiosity,” George 129

meets Elmer. Elmer opens his budding manifesto by unconsciously equating sight with

knowledge: “Well you see,” he begins (185). But George does not see. Elmer’s interior

remains cut off from George, and the young journalist hears only the familiar dialogue

that connects Elmer to mental defectiveness: “‘I’ll be washed and ironed and ironed and

starched,’ he muttered half incoherently” (185). Following this failure, the narrator

describes the events of the story as both George and Elmer focalize them. The reader sees

the inscrutable figure of Elmer that George sees. “Elmer Cowley danced with fury beside

the groaning train in the darkness on the station platform” (185). In the sentence that

follows, the reader sees what Elmer sees: his chance to escape the town with the arrival

of the train care. “Lights leaped into the air and bobbed up and down before his eyes”

(185). By creating a narrator who alternatively relies on competing focalizers, Anderson

positions the reader at the border between normalcy and queerness. Elmer beats George,

and the narrator follows the self-proclaimed victor, pulling the reader into a space where they can see, at last, the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of an uncontested and unworried queerness. The earlier anxieties produced by Elmer’s awareness of his mental identity fall away. “Elmer sprang own to a flat car and lying on his face looked back, trying to see the fallen man in the darkness. Pride surged up in him… ‘I guess I showed him I ain’t so queer’” (185). Yet in this space, free from social scrutiny, Winesburg’s queer resident seems much like its normal ones. Elmer, like George and the rest of townspeople, “tries to see” the subject of his gaze. But despite his best effort, the subject remains unknowable --fallen in darkness.

130

V – Conclusion: A Theory of Trying to See Cognitive Disability

Elmer’s act of “trying to see” sheds light on the modernist engagement with

cognitive disability. It invites broader epistemological questions about what it means to see and come to know the Other. These questions are tied to narrative techniques that are used to tell the story of cognitive disability and adapt as they move across genres. To achieve political ends, writers like Bly and Goddard unpack and critique the reader’s vision in a way that replaces the lay point of view with a duplication of their own.

Readers see mental illness better thanks to Bly’s sharp sighted journalistic eye. They feel they can spot covert mental defect after practicing Goddard’s observational methods.

Fostering this change is the key mechanism that drives political judgment and action.

Both writers reveal a primary way in which stories of cognitive disability are told. Mieke

Bal reminds scholars “that vision is narrated.” For any story, there is “the vision through

which elements are presented… and the identity of the voice that is verbalizing that

vision” (101). For Bly and Goddard, vision and voice are the same. The reader sees the

events through the eyes of the author, who explains these sights for the reader. Literature

decouples this relationship. Anderson’s narrator verbalizes the different phenomenon that

George and Elmer see. These shifts thrust the reader into a more direct confrontation with

the epistemological challenge of “seeing” cognitive disability.

At least for cognitive disability, a theory of “trying to see” more accurately aligns

with the narrative techniques and political goals of writers than a theory of “seeing.”

Cognitive disability is subject to different type of staring. Such stares are guided by a set

of visual politics and representational processes that are different than those outlined for

visible disabilities. Previous theories of staring should thus be redrawn. For example, 131

Thomson’s politics of staring can be revised as a politics of successive staring that does the following:

1. Registers the perception of difference and similarity, creating links between

aberrancy and normalcy leading to sympathy or anxiety.

2. Alternatively estranges and brings together the reader, the subject, and the

narrator.

3. Initially presents cognitive disability as a state of absolute difference or similarity,

only to undermine this presentation with each successive stare.

4. Constitutes disability identity by obscuring power relations between subject

positions of disabled and able-minded.

Such a theory better reflects the various viewpoints that the viewer or the reader adopts during their process of coming to know cognitive disability. Further, these redrawn politics invite the critic to better articulate the “epistemological speculation” that unfolds within the mind of starer (Extraordinary Bodies 70). This speculation proves to be dynamic: viewers engage with stereotypes that are repetitively overturned and reinstated.

By better explaining the nuances of the reader’s process of trying to see and understand cognitive disability, this theory works to correct a critical over-reliance on the idea of the flattened passive spectator – a figure who seems just as stereotyped as the passive idiot.

Because it inherently unfolds over a process of time, narrative often is the most effective way in which cognitive disability can come to be known. In this regard, narrative theory is best suited to help scholars understand the techniques the author uses to prompt the reader’s engagement with cognitive disability. Arguing that any actor in a story carries a certain “truth value,” Bal notes that many characters are “only in 132

appearance what they seem to be; in reality they prove the opposite” – an apt description for characters with cognitive disability (34). The technical means by which writers distinguish appearance from reality allow readers to learn deeper truths about what they perceive and how they perceive it. “Truth,” Bal writes “exists in the coincidence of existence and appearance.” DS scholarship has often interpreted this effect in a reductive way: to the reader and for the writer, the appearance of a physical disability signals an existential flaw. In simple terms, appearance is existence. But narratives of cognitive disability complicate this interpretation, compelling readers to see both the vector of appearance and the vector of existence more clearly. Cognitive disability is not what it appears. Authors technically position readers so that they can see appearance as it comes to overlay existence (or as it is peeled back from existence). Readers see how coincidence comes to be. This effect is made possible by a unique set of narrative techniques that compels readers to not just resee cognitive disability, but vision. 133

Chapter Four

History, Pathology, and Form in Modernist Narratives of Cognitive Disability

The idiot is often thought to have been endowed with innocence and wisdom that persists over the ages. When Quentin refers to Benjy as “the child of mine old age held hostage into Egypt” (108), he does not make a claim about 1928, but one that extends back toward biblical times. In Genesis, Joseph is sold by his brothers into slavery, and the allusion invites readers to think about the ways in which the gains of Quentin might be had at the expense of Benjy. Early in his narrative, Benjy’s bellow brings this story to

Quentin’s mind. “Bellowing. Benjamin the child of mine old age bellowing” (56). Some profound pain lies within Benjy’s cries, one that reverberates throughout different eras.

(An “idiot” brother himself, Georgie from The Adventures of Augie March, who I will discuss next chapter, is said to bear “the older knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges.”) Why do narrators often moor idiocy to centuries past? I want to examine two functions of cognitive disability’s historical character: 1) how its qualities endure overtime and 2) how the narrative possibilities that its deployment opens up, particularly the innovations of American literary modernism, are tightly bound to specific time periods despite any seeming historical endurance. I argue that elements of the pathology of cognitive disability have persisted into our own times, and that these traits help explain why certain modernist characters and stories still resonate with today’s readers.

Attending to how this pathology inspired new techniques for storytelling opens up a way of appreciating literary texts that isn’t bound to “diagnosing” literary characters, 134

but still accounts for how readers and writers work within a shared history of mental difference. Two canonical works, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and John

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, draw on a pathological lineage of cognitive disability that extends from the bygone era in which they were written to the era in which they are read today. Faulkner uses object attention, a trait that readers across eras would recognize, to tell the story of Benjy’s loss. Steinbeck uses echolalia in similar fashion. For both writers, scientific pathology inspires formal innovation, and by examining how historical pathology intersects with present understanding, we can think more productively about why cognitive disability remains central in America’s literary canon.

How did early 20th century eugenicists understand the history of the idiot? In

Mental Defectives: Their History, Treatment, and Training, Martin Barr tells a story that follows the idiot’s oscillations from villain to deity in different centuries. In classical times, the Spartans made a practice of “directly exposing” idiots “to death-peril” (24).

During the middle ages, idiocy became a site of “superstitious reverence” (25). Tycho

Brahe, Barr points out, regarded the speech of a fool who accompanied him as a

“revelation” (25). With the advent of the reformation, “the pendulum again swings backward; persecution follows close upon the steps of superstition, and…we find Martin

Luther and Calvin denouncing them as ‘filled with Satan’” (26). Barr’s history sets up a problem of inconsistency – the idiot, never truly understood by the society that surrounds him, is subject to its fickle whims.

With the dawn of modern psychiatry, the idiot became a figure that could be understood. Barr trumpets the moment when Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, a French

Physician at the National Institute of Deaf Mutes, took custody of the “savage of 135

Averyron,” a boy who was found in the French wilderness unaware and unaccustomed to

human society. By educating the boy, Itard ushered in an age of “beneficence,” one that

the superintendents of American institutions thought themselves to be working within.

Itard, though personally frustrated by his limited success with the boy, demonstrated that

idiots possessed the quality of “educability” (32). The boy stands not only for himself,

but the idiots and imbeciles of previous era:

…the savage of Aveyron might be likened to a guide-post reading two ways.

Standing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a literal symbol of the parting

of ways for his caste, in this uncouth figure is represented all the cruelty of the

past and the beneficent influences of a new era. The last of those of whom history

or tradition speaks as, either through neglect or through willful desertion, driven

from the haunts of men; he is also the first example recorded of an idiot reclaimed

from the life of a mere animal to be trained to a human existence. (30-1)

The 20th century, indebted to the scientific developments of the late 19th century,

provided an occasion for the idiot to break free from the oscillating cultural attitudes of

the past. The idiot would no longer be alternatively regard as cursed or sacred with each

new historical period; instead he would be regarded for what he was: deficient in mind,

morals, and sense, but trainable nonetheless. The haze of inscrutability that clouded

society’s vision of the idiot had cleared.

At least that’s what Barr thought. The eugenics movement ushered in new regimes of oppression and newly tapped currents of revulsion. The age Barr proclaimed never dawned, and cognitive disability still inspires fear and exaltation in viewers today.

In her reading of Francisco X’s young adult novel Marcelo in the Real World (2009), 136

Patricia Dunne has noted that the mildly autistic titular character is “almost too angelic”

(158), citing a Rabbi who claims that Marcelo “walk[s] with God in Eden” (X 119 quoted in Dunne 158). Sally Phillip’s documentary, A World without Down’s Syndrome (2016), challenges viewers to consider the implications of prenatal Down Syndrome screenings, and some viewers may wonder about the extent to which today’s medical technology has roots in Spartan practice. Barr’s mistake lies then not in the first half of his history, which outlines cycles of recurrent attitudes towards idiocy, but in his figuration of the boy of

Averyon as a turning point between two epochs: the world before the psychiatric revolution and the world after. We can and should reject Barr’s claims that his “new era” would provide an escape from the cycle of societal attitudes towards cognitive disability.

However, we should think critically about the broader question of how idiocy – its pathology, its stereotypes, and its accompanying cultural attitudes – persists over time.

To answer this question, I want to briefly consider how disability studies scholars tell their own histories. In his discussion of the historical context of The Sound and the

Fury, Michael Bérubé contends that “a specter haunted the American century, one might say – the specter of intellectual disability” (116). Bérubé explains how the work of eugenicists like Henry H. Goddard and Lewis Terman had implications far beyond their own fields. He notes that the cultural and political caché of eugenics “was fueled by white American’s profound anxieties about race and immigration, and provided pseudoscientific justification for the severe inequities of industrial capitalism” (116). The perspective of cognitive disability as a “fictional mode” (i.e. as a way of telling stories) allowed authors to imagine “other ways of being human that expose and transcend the limitations of… space and time” (116). In simple terms, Benjy sheds light on the 137

limitations of eugenic theory and ideology. He shows that to be human is far different

than what 1920s eugenicists might claim.

I find Bérubé’s assessment to be an accurate, but I want to further explore how

cognitive disability transcends and remains bound to time. To do this, I consider the

contemporary reader’s relationship to the early 20th century. How might the specter of

cognitive disability that hung above so many political and cultural systems in the early

20th century, might still haunt our readings of modernist literature today? What form

might this specter take? We might be better off to call this specter a poltergeist, one that

mobilizes scientific definitions, stereotypes, and popular representations. I want to limit

my analysis to one aspect that roughly defines this poltergeist: the pathology of cognitive

disability. What was the pathology of cognitive disability in the early 20th century and

how do criteria that make-up this pathology reemerge in today’s scientific definitions?1

More importantly, I want to think critically about how these similarities affect the way that we read literature. Diagnosing literary characters with modern psychological labels is anachronistic as many have noted, but it is productive to consider how these labels are rooted in an older history and how a pathology common to both past and present might continue to yield formal payoff over time.

I – Object Attention and Narrative in The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and The Fury is famous for its challenging shifts in point of view, but there is a particularly challenging—and affective—moment of focalization that occurs on

Benjy’s birthday. Benjy has been fascinated by a kitchen fire, which is cyclically

revealed and concealed. In the background Dilsey scolds Luster for eating Benjy’s 138

birthday cake. Then Benjy observes: “The long wire came across my shoulder, and the

fire went away. I began to cry. Dilsey and Luster fought” (38). We readers know that

something important has happened, but what? What has caused Benjy to cry and how

does this affect the way we read him?

As the scene proceeds, what we actually see is a demonstration of what it means

to understand and sympathize with mental difference. Benjy’s emotional reaction

proceeds from the fire’s disappearance. After Benjy burns his hand reaching for the fire,

Dilsey, thinking quickly in a way that readers understand, pours soda water on his

wound. Addressing the burn is only the first stage of treatment. To get Benjy to hush, she

snaps his focus towards the offending object. “Hush now… Here, look at the fire.” (38).

Benjy complies. “I looked at the fire, but my hand didn’t stop and I didn’t stop” (38).

Then she redirects Benjy’s focus to another object. “She gave me the slipper, and I

hushed” (39). Dilsey follows up this success with a prescription. She commands Luster to

take Benjy to the library. The offending object in the kitchen, the fire, gives the library

form. “The fire came behind me and I went to the fire and sat on the floor, holding the

slipper. The fire went higher. It went onto the cushion on Mother’s chair” (39). The fire

illuminates a new “here” for Benjy’s field of attention. Dilsey’s long-term prescription, in this way, is for Benjy to heal in a protected space anchored by objects with social significance. She hands Benjy his sister’s old slipper and tells Luster to take him to the familiar family fireside.

In treating Dilsey as if she were a doctor, I am highlighting one direction of human exchange: Dilsey, as a caretaker, is able to see into Benjy’s reality. She understands the role that objects play in Benjy’s phenomenological and social experience 139

in a way that others do not. Dilsey communicates with Benjy by appealing to his high valuation of objects. The opposite direction of exchange motivates my analysis: how does

Benjy communicate with the reader? Specifically, how does object attention, at first blush, deflect reader understanding, and once recognized, enrich reader understanding?

Focusing on just one of Benjy’s curious traits is a notably different way to read a character who has been framed as a posterchild for cognitive disability’s broadest and most popular labels. Taking a cue from Faulkner, early critics referred to Benjy as an

“idiot.”2 Medical humanists have rejected the label.3 Turning to contemporary psychological criteria, other critics have sought to diagnose Benjy according to the most up-to-date pathologies.4 Those working in disability studies have eschewed labeling, opting instead to consider the way that disability shapes Benjy as a formal and aesthetic device. James Berger proclaims that “the language of Benjy’s section is not at all some supposed inner language of a cognitively impaired person. It is the language of literary modernism” (83). Alice Hall echoes Berger’s sentiment noting that the perspective of cognitive disability allowed Faulkner not only to “explore alternative narrative paces and forms of sensory perception in his fiction but also to explore what literary techniques can achieve” (48). Michael Bérubé argues that Benjy’s narrative illustrates a more general effect of the literary deployment of intellectual disability, one that creates “a productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality” (83). A laser-sighted analysis of Benjy’s object obsession may seem narrow when read among such big claims.

In fact, beginning analysis with a particular trait in mind, rather than a general label, helps explain a critical inability to settle on what type of cognitive disability Benjy 140

has. This predicament generates from Benjy’s location within a particular moment of

America’s cultural history that resonates with today’s understanding of cognitive disability. Benjy is not autistic like some critics today might say, nor was he an idiot like critics of old have claimed. Instead, he has been and continues to be a legacy figure of cognitive disability in America, one that embodied old discourses, yet is still legible when read according to new labels. At a basic level, the resonance between historical and modern conceptualizations occurs when past theories of CD share common criteria with present understandings. In Benjy’s case, one such criterion is object obsession, the behavior of clinging to and being fixated with a specific set of material things.

But how could Faulkner have operated in this conceptual field, one that seems rooted in modern psychology? Contemporary diagnostic criteria grow out of dated theories of cognitive disability. Rhetorical historians of medicine like Jenell Johnson have challenged scholars to “hunt for the origins of polysemic tendrils in cultural narratives”

(13). Within the history of cognitive disability in America, object obsession is one such tendril. It is a criterion of contemporary pathologies of autism as well as early 20th century theorizations of cognitive disability. Critics like Berger and Hall have laid important groundwork in historically situating Faulkner’s fiction in eugenic discourses.

For the burn scene, historicist work tells us about the broader social context of the event: shielded from public view, Benjy has been pushed into isolation, a movement that foreshadows his institutionalization.5 Yet historicists have not yet considered how eugenic theorizations of cognitive disability set the pathological precedent for contemporary diagnoses and how this precedent affects the way in which readers appreciate the novel today. This line of inquiry opens up important formalist questions 141

about the way Faulkner plays with narrative structure as he pulls from scientific pathology: why does Benjy focalize so centrally on the fire, and what are the aesthetic and dramatic effects of this focalization?

Released in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders identifies two sets of diagnostic criteria for autism that resonate with

Benjy’s characterization and perspective: 1) the presence or history of “persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction,” and 2) the presence or history of

“restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities” (50). The second set of criteria’s third sub-criterion is particularly apparent in the novel. Individuals with autism are identified, in part, by “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g. strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or preservative interests)” (50). Benjy’s narrative revolves around particular objects that he covets -- flowers, his sister’s old slipper, his mother’s cushion, the family fire, and the bedroom mirror. As Benjy’s focus continually moves among these objects, they illuminate the social relationships that undergird the novel.

Objects and patterns of restricted interest were central to the definition of cognitive disability during Faulkner’s time. Published 99 years before the DSM-V, Barr’s

Mental Defectives positions objects as the primary stimulus for the development of intelligence. “The senses are the immediate agents of notions, the intelligence the immediate agent of ideas, the process being from external objects by the medium of sensations to notions, and from notions by the medium of the intelligence to ideas” (34).

Psychologists were to use objects as professional tools. Barr advises professionals to structure the training of “lower forms of mental defect” around “the gradual awakening 142

of the senses by the presentation of objects that attract” (134).6 “The abnormal intensity

in focus” on these objects that the DSM-V outlines emerges in Barr’s description of “idiot

savants” who develop “talent in one direction or [are] dominated by one idea, showing a

mental asymmetry or one-sidedness” (128). Benjy does not display a mental asymmetry towards an idea. Instead, his perspective is fixed on particular objects which are communicated to readers by representations of sensation. Outlining this way of cognition clarifies accurate but loosely grounded claims that TSATF explores narrative forms that correspond to alternative perspectives of cognitive disability.

Reading object attention helps map out the new terrain Faulkner explores, allowing contemporary critics to discover overlooked formations within the landscape of

Benjy’s narrative. It makes “exploration” metaphors more concrete: how Benjy focuses on objects functions as one mechanism by which Faulkner explored new technical terrain. Taylor Hagood has articulated the role that readers take on during this exploration, noting that Benjy’s narrative follows the conventions of detective fiction and that Faulkner “forces his readers to be the sleuths” (96). Playing this role becomes imperative for readers if they, as Hagood suggests, embrace “the possibility that Benjy has his own motives” (102) and works “within his own secret machinery of textuality”

(103). Readers can begin to develop schematics for this machinery by considering when, how, and why Benjy focalizes on the objects he covets.

Critics have orbited around object obsession though they have never clearly articulated it as a trans-historical heuristic for understanding cognitive disability that links

Faulkner with contemporary readers. Hall points out the significance of the mirror in

Benjy’s narrative, noting that his section “is full of literal mirror moments, but these 143

serve only to destablise the certainties of realist modes of viewing and to highlight the power that Benjy has as a narrator to determine what is seen by readers” (111). But, to draw on Hagood, how should readers interpret what they see? One way is to attend to how objects organize Benjy’s experience and the social, phenomenological, and narrative valences these objects carry. As April Seventh, 1928 draws to a close, Benjy notes that

“my hands saw the slipper but I couldn’t see myself, but my hands could see the slipper”

(46). This is the moment of Benjy’s loss – a loss of himself and a loss of his sister. Such a moment occurs within the repeated sensation of his hands seeing the slipper, and the sentence reveals one of the main CD-inspired techniques Faulkner uses to represent mental difference: objects contain human experience.

To illustrate these valences in miniature, I turn back to Benjy’s “here.” What enters Benjy’s attentional field, and how do readers come to see the world in this space?

In a scene that follows the burn scene, Caddy pulls Benjy away from the fireside and comfortingly remarks, “Here. Here’s your cushion. See” (41). The deictic marker “here” arrests the attention of Benjy and the reader. For Benjy, Caddy’s “here” redirects his attention away from the absence of the fire to the presence of the cushion, another one of his coveted objects. In this way, “here” stops Benjy’s bellowing. While Caddy’s “here” provides stability for Benjy, it creates instability for the reader. A lag between Benjy’s perspective and the reader’s understanding emerges after Caddy’s redirection. In this bit of dialogue, the first “here” points to an object that the reader cannot see. The second explains what this referenced object is. The imperative “see” has no grammatical object that might clarify what exactly Benjy is seeing. The period that concludes Caddy’s 144

dialogue divorces Benjy’s vision from the reader’s, leaving key questions: Why does

Caddy call attention to a cushion? Is the cushion really all there is to see?

As much as Caddy keys on Benjy’s object obsession, her mother resists it. “Dont,

Candace,” Mrs. Compson scolds her daughter (41). The extent to which the family should

appeal to Benjy’s idiosyncrasy lies at the center of the dispute. Caddy replies, “Let him

look at it and he’ll be quiet… Hold up just a minute while I slip it out. There, Benjy.

Look.” In this passage, Caddy makes two appeals. The first is made to her mother’s

reason and is an argument of cause and effect. If Benjy is permitted to look the cushion,

then his bellowing will stop. The second addresses Benjy’s object attention and begins

with the deictic marker “there.” Caddy’s syntax condenses as she transitions to this

object-oriented appeal. The appeal succeeds, and Benjy notes “I looked at it and I

hushed.” These juxtaposed appeals illustrate how Caddy works within and outside of

normal cognition. She follows the path of object attention to connect to and communicate

with her brother, first arguing for the importance of objects via a language that appeals to

her mother and then directing Benjy to his coveted object via a deictic language that

appeals to his attentional predispositions.

Mrs. Compson lacks Caddy’s rhetorical flexibility. She tries to uproot Benjy from the ontological terrain in which he grounds himself. Mrs. Compson chides Caddy: “you humor him too much” (41). She commands Benjy to look away from the cushion, grabs his face, and turns it to hers. Caddy undermines her mother’s attempt to force Benjy to make eye contact and attend to the seemingly appropriate things in the world, and she holds the cushion in Benjy’s new line of sight. This subversion frustrates Mrs.

Compson’s effort to eradicate the cushion from Benjy’s experience, but more than this, 145

the object becomes the focus of her own dialogue. “‘Take that cushion away, like I told you.’ Mother said. ‘He must learn to mind.’” As the narrative snaps out of dialogue and into Benjy’s perspective, the reader learns that Mrs. Compson’s imperative fails to take root in Benjy’s consciousness. “The cushion went away,” Benjy notes (41).

Mrs. Compson ramps up her efforts, causing Benjy to cry. Yet Benjy’s object wins out in this attentional conflict. “I didn’t stop and Mother caught me in her arms and began to cry, and I cried. Then the cushion came back and Caddy held it above Mother’s head. She drew Mother back in the chair and Mother lay crying against the red and yellow cushion” (41). Three long compound sentences compose this passage and contrast the concise sentences that represent Benjy’s consciousness earlier. The conflict produces a syntactically developed point of view. The cushion becomes interwoven with social relationships. Caddy holds it, and Mrs. Compson’s figure emerges against its red and yellow surface.7 Though Mrs. Compson views the cushion as an impediment to proper socialization, the object operates as the field through which Benjy sees his mother. For the reader, the cushion becomes the aesthetic means by which Benjy communicates his relationship with his mother. In contrast to the ambiguity produced by Caddy’s initial deictic pointing, an imagistic clarity is at work in this passage, one that fully renders the pained relationship between mother and son. The relationship is marked by an exhausted sadness, and this sadness comes squarely into view when the reclining Mrs. Compson weeps on the cushion.

This scene illustrates the narrative, phenomenological, and social functions the cushion performs. Phenomenologically, it exists as the primary object that commands

Benjy’s focus. Narratively, it drives Benjy’s bellowing and sparks the resultant conflict 146

between Mrs. Compson and Caddy. Socially, it is the background against which the

Compson family members emerge. But in addition to these vectors, the scene reveals much about the politics of “minding” throughout the novel. Who minds who becomes a central dilemma early on in Benjy’s section. Initially, minding relates to obedience. After

Mr. Compson suggests that the Compson boys mind their sister for the night.8 “‘Let them mind me, Father.’ ‘I wont.’ Jason said. ‘I wont mind you.’ ‘Hush.’ Father said. ‘You all mind Caddy, then’” (16). The later cushion scene tells the story of learning to mind

Benjy. Hagood writes that Beny’s section is “steeped in modes of cognition, the smells, the sounds, the image that also define his being, understanding, and narrating. Faulkner mobilizes these many details to convey Benjy’s ontology through his epistemology”

(106). What Hagood overlooks is that the reader is able to view characters as they are implicated in the same process of coming to know Benjy. The scene provides a moment for readers to reflect on the way in which they themselves have minded Benjy – have they, like Caddy, recognized and embraced the objects and symbols that enrapture Benjy?

Or have they been frustrated by them? In simplest terms, have they minded Benjy? Are they annoyed by, tolerant of, or actively trying to learn Benjy’s unique epistemology and ontology?

While Caddy points to “here,” critics might ask “where else?” Here, in this instance, the cushion structures the scene. But throughout the whole section, objects structure the narrative. Stacy Burton writes, “That Benjy cannot explicitly differentiate between past and present does not mean that he does not experience time or attempt to order it” (210). Benjy’s section weaves flashback into present experience. As his story drives to a climax, he increasingly relies on object-centered scenes to craft his narrative. 147

Fig. 9 catalogues the total number of times Benjy’s objects are mentioned in his section

according to the pagination of the Norton Critical Edition.

Flower Fire Cushion Slipper Mirror 10

4 Number of of Number Instances

0 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 Page Number

Fig. 9. Cumulative Object Chart

Benjy’s objects make a significant entrance into the novel. The first pronounced

arc in the chart represents early instances of the fire and the flower. In a basic sense,

Benjy’s ordering is conventional.9 He establishes objects that are important to him early on in the narrative. After this establishment, objects are mentioned less. As the section moves to a climax, objects take hold of Benjy’s narrative most tightly. A sharp spike in the graph announces an oncoming flurry of objects. In this final attentional storm, the reader sees Benjy at his most human and dehumanized moments. He looks Caddy and

Quentin straight in the eyes and sees the fire burning. He sits alone outside under the night sky clutching his sister’s slipper. Locating Benjy’s objects allows Benjy’s attentional focus to be represented in the graph, and this representation suggests larger 148

narrative movements. Mapping object attention offers a way to identify and study the form of Benjy’s narrative.

Using different sections of this map, I want to now explore two lines of inquiry.

The first relates to the portion of Benjy’s narrative that leads up to and includes the sharp spike on page 35. Examining Benjy’s interaction with flowers, I consider how Benjy’s object-centered phenomenology affects plot in a way that conforms to the legacy of cognitive disability. Objects command Benjy’s focus in a way that aligns with pathologies seen in both early 20th and present-day psychology. Yet by contrasting

Benjy’s inner cognition with external dialogue, Faulkner transplants modes of aberrant cognition onto normalcy. My second line of inquiry situates itself after the object flurry is already underway. I consider how objects aestheticize and thus communicate Benjy’s social relationships to the reader in a way that resists psychological traditions that constitute the legacy of cognitive disability. Faulkner uses literature to push the reader to

reconsider mental difference and uses mental difference as a subject to revise literary

form. In this way, literature does not merely pull from the legacy of cognitive disability,

it contributes to it.

Benjy’s object oriented phenomenology disrupts conventional imagery, and the

payoff of this disruption, as many critics have noted, is a unique aesthetic mode.10 Critics

have yet to consider how Benjy’s unique phenomenology works to advance the plot,

guide his focalizations, and develop an imagistic aesthetic for the novel. Benjy’s

phenomenology creates ambiguity for readers, frustration for other characters, and,

paradoxically, perspectival advantages within the text. The novel immediately raises the

issue of Benjy’s phenomenology. The first line reads, “Through the fence, between the 149

curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting” (3). Hagood has argued that this line

suggests that Benjy as a narrator “is capable of presenting a somewhat sophisticatedly

modified lexical unit” and that the “the curling flower spaces” is a “strikingly visual” and

“beautifully poetic” image (94). However, this line does not simply fulfill an aesthetic

function – it reveals important operations that guide Benjy’s attentional field. Benjy’s

uses the noun “flower” as an adjective in order to fill in the vacuity of “spaces,” the noun

that functions as the grammatical object of the preposition “between.” At this introductory moment, when the reader does not yet know anything about Benjy, let alone the importance of the his objects, the phrase “flower spaces” is odd, but it hints at how

Benjy’s world takes shape.

This unique style creates a distinct voice that initially distances Benjy from his reader, a distance the reader progressively bridges. In the opening lines of their own sections, the other Compson brothers also create a distance between themselves and the reader. Quentin plays with the normal expression “to be on time” and concludes his opening line by noting “…then I was in time again, hearing the watch” (48). Jason’s voice debuts as one steeped in bigotry and egotism. “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (113). For each character, Faulkner uses the first moment of voice to thrust the reader into a position of speculation. The reader hardly knows what a “flower space” is.

Benjy’s opening sentence builds the ambiguity that “flower spaces” introduces. The main clause, “I could see them hitting,” contains a transitive verb that lacks an object. The reader is left to wonder, “hitting what?” The possibilities are endless – are they hitting each other, someone else? -- and the reality, that they are hitting golf balls, certainly comes as a surprise. Within this first sentence, the visual field through which action is 150

perceived takes precedence over action itself. The “curling flower spaces,” while ambiguous, is a significantly more developed image compared to the action Benjy sees, the “hitting.” As Benjy’s voice makes its entrance, the reader can grasp only an object- centered image – a field of flowers curling behind the fence.11

As the narrative progresses the flower motivates and calms Benjy’s bellows.

These recurrent cries produce drama as his companions misread and ignore his object

fixation. After the opening scene, the narrative flashes back to the moment just before he,

his mother, and Dilsey depart for Damuddy’s funeral. Benjy begins to structure the scene

like a normal narrator would. He identifies his mother as she enters. “Mother came out,

pulling her veil down” (6). After this identification, Benjy veers off the predictable

course of conventional narration. He instantaneously notices one of his favorite objects.

“She had some flowers” (6). His focus snaps from his mother to what his mother is

holding. This effect may seem banal by itself, but it evidences a common pattern: when a

coveted object is present, the narrative snaps to it. Benjy proceeds to catalogue some

dialogue between Dilsey and his mother. Mrs. Compson is anxious about T.P. driving

instead of Roskus. Dilsey tries, best she can, to pacify Mrs. Compson. During their

exchange, an ongoing unarticulated action that the reader is unaware of, generated by the

flower, is occurring. The reader finally learns of this action when his mother remarks,

“Stop Benjamin.” Yet what Benjy is specifically doing remains unknown. Benjy’s

narrative hints at key plot elements that would be more clearly articulated by traditional

narrators. Seasoned readers recognize that Mrs. Compson’s command for Benjy to stop is

motivated by some type of fussing or bellowing on behalf of her son. The impetus for the

many “stops” that pepper the novel is often clear. Bellows prompt the command. Yet the 151

cause of Benjy’s bellowing, especially in this scene, is unclear. The reader knows that

Benjy is fussing, but they don’t know why.

After the flower is introduced, dialogue composes the bulk of the scene.12

Excising the dialogue illuminates the cause of Benjy’s fussing:

She had some flowers.

Dilsey went up the steps.

She reached her hand in.

She gave me a flower and her hand went away.

Benjy’s perspective exclusively centers on the given object, with three of the four sentences focused to the flower. Of the four sentences, the third reminds readers of the problem they face when they first heard Benjy’s voice: key constituents of reality are ambiguous or missing entirely. Here, Benjy does not specify what Dilsey reaches into.

Instead, the narrative assumes that the reader will know the only possible destination for

Dilsey’s hand: the bouquet of flowers. For Benjy, the flower is always there, even if he fails to mention it.

Later in the narrative, at the moment when the object flurry begins, Benjy’s flower fixation comes into conflict with Luster’s obsessive hunt for his lost quarter – an object that will pay for his admission to the show that has stopped in town. Benjy’s focus returns to the sequence of present-day events that begins with the opening “flower space” scene. As fiercely as Luster hunts for the quarter, Benjy’s focus ignores it, chronicling the presence and absence the flower instead. Benjy drops his flower during the hunt, and

Luster chastises him, remarking “whyn’t you hold onto that weed” (35). Benjy heeds

Luster’s warning. He runs to a place where the flower can be kept safe. “Our shadows 152

were on the grass. They got to the trees before we did. Mine got there first. Then we got there, and then the shadows were gone. There was a flower in the bottle. I put the other flower in it” (35). Benjy’s phenomenology stresses the order in which things appear. The shadows reach the trees first. Benjy’s shadow reaches the tree before Luster’s. The emergence of objects in the narrator’s field of view follows an equally clear syntactic order. In the first sentence, the existential “there was” clause relies on an empty grammatical subject that serves to magnify the presence of the grammatical object, the flower. After Benjy transitions to the second sentence, “the bottle” is effaced by the pronoun “it” in the second sentence. 13 The resulting sentence restricts the reader’s focus to “I” and the “flower.” A conflict over holding the flower leads Benjy to move, and movement ends in a stabilization of himself and his object. In this way, flower scenes typically conform to the legacy of cognitive disability. Benjy strongly fixates on the given object, and extreme fixation leads to isolation.

However, Benjy’s idiosyncrasy leads to important social effects. Luster’s dialogue illustrates the predominance of Benjy’s objects in various conflicts throughout the novel. Benjy’s seemingly bizarre ritual causes Luster to lose his patience. “Aint you a grown man, now…Playing with two weeds in a bottle” (35). Parroting popular eugenic sentiments, Luster berates Benjy. “They going to send you to Jackson where you belong.

Mr. Jason say so. Where you can hold the bars all day long with the rest of the looneys and slobber. How you like that.” Berger argues that “anxieties over degeneracy, in both genetic and cultural senses… are central to The Sound and the Fury.” These anxieties reveal the limitations of the “ostensible solution[s]” of the eugenics movement (80). Still,

Berger does not examine how Faulkner turns eugenic pathology against eugenic political 153

sentiment. Luster’s eugenically motivated frustration with Benjy’s pathologically faithful object fixation induces Luster to act. After his action, eugenic discourse is squeezed out of the dialogue:

Luster knocked the flowers over with his hand. “That’s what they’ll do to you at

Jackson when you start bellering.”

I tried to pick up the flowers. Luster picked them up and they went away. I

began to cry.

“Beller.” Luster said. “Beller. You want something to beller about. All right then. Caddy.” he whispered. “Caddy. Beller now. Caddy.”

“Luster.” Dilsey said from the kitchen.

The flowers came back.

“Hush.” Luster said “Here they is. Look. It’s fixed back just like it was at

first. Hush, now.” (35)

Benjy’s “defective” perspective triumphs over the eugenic rhetoric that would seek to contain it. This triumph happens on several levels. Though excoriated for being bizarre, object obsession motivates Lusters’ command since it is the impetus of the imperative

“beller.” Initially, Benjy is to beller because Luster has knocked over his flowers.14 This action backfires when Dilsey catches wind of Benjy’s cries. Luster reverses his critique and appeals to Benjy’s object obsession, “fixing” the flower bottle “just like it was at first.” When Luster’s dialogue is removed from this passage, almost all of the remaining sentences relate to the flower, just as in the carriage scene. “Luster knocked the flowers over with his hand… I tried to pick up the flowers. Luster picked them up and they went away. I began to cry… The flowers came back.” Stripped of dialogue, this section of 154

narrative follows the movement of the flower. The visual presence and absence of the flowers composes a phenomenological plot that produces the tension between Luster and

Benjy. Benjy’s bellows prompt object an object-centered phenomenology to infiltrate

Luster’s dialogue during his last-ditch appeal, undoing the broader political sentiments that critics have argued motivate the novel at large.

Interwoven with this smaller plot is the larger plot of Caddy’s absence. Attention to the material world reveals the tragic loss of family. Luster’s ability to fix the disturbed flower bottle highlights the inability to recover Caddy’s missing presence on April 7th,

1928. Faulkner thus reframes cognitive disability’s pathological legacy: the defective

fixation of the “idiot” produces change outside of himself and can be technically drawn

on to illustrate his social relationships. This reading of the flower bottle scene helps

revise Berger’s understanding of the ethic of care that runs through Benjy’s section. He

writes that “through her care for Benjy, Caddy combats the entire modernist trope of the

radical, symbolically inaccessible other that grounds so much of the narrative working in

the very novel she is in” (86). The flower bottle scene functions to expose the fallacy of

the inaccessible cognitive other. While Luster might insist that Benjy be separated from

humanity and locked in the institution, the scene reveals that he understands how Benjy

perceives the world in the most fundamental ways. Benjy, as Luster’s failure reveals, is

quite knowable. The scene with Luster reveals that Caddy’s ability to care for and

understand Benjy is a natural, simple response to mental difference. It takes more mental

work to overlay this response with eugenic arguments for institutionalization. As pressure

mounts on Luster, these arguments are stripped away revealing that even for him, a 155

foundation of understanding governs his relationship with Benjy, one that makes his

manipulation possible.15

Caddy, the figure who actively works to understand Benjy most, lies at the center

of his object-oriented consciousness. During a flash back to her wedding day, Benjy

notes, “Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind.

Caddy Caddy” (25). Caddy’s figure emerges in light of Benjy’s objects and the images they produce -- a fact reinforced by Benjy’s repetition of her name after his highly stylized description. The object is Benjy’s primary means of experiencing and remembering human relationships. The entire quarter hunt plot can be read as Benjy’s quest to recover Caddy by pursuing the markers of her identity that pop up in his phenomenological experience – from the golfer’s audible cries for their “caddies” to the sight and feel of his flowers. Thus, Benjy’s objects do not only motivate interaction and conflict, they characterize, in sophisticated aesthetic ways, the members of the Compson household. This aesthetic socialization is best illustrated by the respective scenes in which the fire characterizes Mrs. Compson, Quentin, and Caddy. The three scenes take place in the middle of Benjy’s object flurry, and they occur over the span of just six pages.

The first scene occurs when Benjy enters his mother’s bedroom while she is at the height of her sickness:

Versh set me down and we went into Mother’s room. There was a fire. It was

rising and falling on the walls. There was another fire in the mirror. I could smell

the sickness. It was on a cloth folded on Mother’s head. Her hair was on the 156

pillow. The fire didn’t reach it, but it shone on her hand where her rings were

jumping. (40)

Object obsession governs the passage, creating the feel of “poetic immediacy”

that Berger has noted (82). The fire frames the scene. When Benjy enters the room, he

immediately notices the fire and the light it casts on the walls. As the pronoun “it”

signifies, the fire’s light is an ontological extension of the fire, allowing Benjy’s coveted

object to move up and down the wall. This walling-in effect intensifies as Benjy notices the reflection of the fire in the mirror. His perspective tightly circumscribes his mother and him by bracing the pair within the fire. A terse olfactory detail wedges itself between flurries of visual description. “I could smell the sickness. It was on a cloth on Mother’s head.” In this way, Benjy’s object obsession – a manifestation of his “defective” cognition – highlights the sickness that signals his mother’s degeneracy. As much as the passage illuminates Mrs. Compson’s sickness, her figure remains darkened. The fire never reaches Mrs. Compson’s hair, and this lack of connection widens the distance between her and her son. Her material connection with the fire is tenuous. The fire shines only on her rings. In a bright room where fire burns on all sides, no light can reach Mrs.

Compson’s face.

Mrs. Compson’s tenuous relationship with the fire contrasts her granddaughter

Quentin’s strong connection with it. The reader witnesses this difference when Luster

asks Jason for a new quarter. As the scene opens, Quentin and Jason fixate on particular

objects. Jason attends to the newspaper, and Quentin, the fire. Unlike Mrs. Compson, the

fire spills into and onto Quentin. “Quentin looked at the fire. The fire was in her eyes and

on her mouth. Her mouth was red” (43). Benjy’s vivid description of the fire in Quentin’s 157

eyes marks the only clear moment of eye contact in the scene. Staring at the fire, Quentin bears a remarkable resemblance to her uncle Benjy. This surface level similarity reflects a deeper similarity between Quentin and Benjy: both are subject to the will of Jason, the abusive man of the house. At this point in Benjy’s life, Quentin, however much she might dislike her “idiot” uncle, shares not only a common circumstance with him, but a shared response to this circumstance: staring at the fire.

For Quentin and Jason, objects offer an escape from social relationships in a way that allows them to represent the pathological legacy of cognitive disability. When Jason threatens Quentin for “hanging out with that show fellow,” she responds by staring at the fire. Object fixation becomes a defense against Jason’s imposition. This defense frustrates Jason. “‘Did you hear me.’ Jason said.” He quips back and forth with his niece before finally using object fixation as a means to avoid her defiance. “Jason read the paper again” (43). The de facto patriarch is tethered to Benjy and Quentin by means of object fixation.16 By noticing the fire in Quentin’s eyes, Benjy not only relies on object attention to communicate social connection, but also establishes himself as the only

Compson able to look family members in the eyes. He realizes the wish his mother expresses in the cushion scene, but he does so through object attention, the behavior that

Mrs. Compson viewed as a blockade to normal human connection.

Unsurprisingly, of all of Benjy’s family members, Caddy is most illuminated by the fire. Benjy recalls a scene where he sits by the fireside with Caddy, Jason, and Mr.

Compson. As the scene begins, his coveted objects converge in his line of focus. “Caddy gave me the cushion, and I could look at the cushion and the mirror and the fire” (46).

Benjy recalls Mr. Compson’s dialogue which informs the reader that Jason is further 158

from the fire than his family. “‘What are you doing Jason.’ ‘Nothing.’ Jason said.

‘Suppose you come over here and do it, then.’ Father said.” Jason’s figure emerges “out

of the corner,” and he throws some paper he was chewing into the fire. “Jason threw into

the fire. It hissed, uncurled, turning black. Then it was gray. Then it was gone” (46). The

fire produces an image of ugliness when Jason interacts with it. The black uncurled paper

evokes “the curling flower spaces,” the beautiful object centered image that began the

novel (3).

Jason’s black byproduct contrasts Caddy’s illuminated figure:

Caddy and Father and Jason were in Mother’s chair. Jason’s eyes were puffed

shut and his mouth moved like tasting. Caddy’s head was on Father’s shoulder.

Her hair was like fire, and little points of fire were in her eyes, and I went and

Father lifted me into the chair too, and Caddy held me.” (46)

Caddy is identified with the fire, just as her daughter is earlier. However, Caddy’s identification is much stronger. Looking at Quentin, Benjy notes that “the fire was in her eyes and on her mouth” (43). Initially, some readers might disagree that any notable differences exist between Caddy’s and Quentin’s characterizations. However, such a reading ignores Benjy’s more “limited” syntax that produces significant payoff for seemingly slight alterations of diction. In the fire scenes, different prepositions signal three levels of association between person and object. The first level, signaled by “on,” depicts the other person as a body distinct from the fire. The fire is “on” Quentin’s mouth and Mrs. Compson’s hand. The second level signals a permeability between the person and the fire. The fire moves into Quentin’s and Caddy’s eyes. Benjy’s description of each inward movement clues the reader into the difference between the extent of his 159

connection with each character. For Quentin, “the fire was in her eyes.” Benjy’s description is more detailed for Caddy. Benjy develops the fire image, noting how it emerges in “little points.” The third level of association applies exclusively to Caddy and posits a sameness of identity between person and coveted object. Benjy formulates a simile, noting that Caddy’s “hair was like fire.” Person and object are no longer discrete.

Benjy aestheticizes Caddy in light of the fire in order to communicate the unparalleled bond he has with his sister. Faulkner overturns the pathological legacy of cognitive disability. Object attention ceases to isolate the cognitively disabled subject. Instead, object obsession opens up a formal aesthetic that allows social relationships to come into clear view for the reader.

What Benjy attends to not only proves key to understanding what makes him human, but also opens up unconventional ways of being human that are at the root of the book’s appeal. In On Idiocy and Imbecility, William W. Ireland recalls a “not uncommon” story of a young girl’s “astonishing strength of will”:

If denied a thing she wants within her sight, she will rush at it with the most

extreme eagerness in her countenance; the tears start to her eyes; she struggles,

pulls, and kicks, but without ever saying a word, for she is mute. She is very fond

of pencils and an attempt being made to deprive her of one is resisted with her

usual determination. Once, when I had occasion to give her chloroform, on her

becoming unconscious I took away her pencil, which she had still clasped in her

hand; but she noticed the want of it immediately on returning to consciousness,

and looked round about her in search of it, with a distressed and anxious

expression. (269-270) 160

Ireland’s tale pushes critics to consider what things authors put at the forefront of their

character’s consciousness.17 Faulkner puts the flower, the fire, and other objects at the

center of Benjy’s focus. Ireland’s story illustrates that the sound and the fury of the

“idiot’s” perspective is not the result of internal cognitive disorder. Instead, it is a feeling experienced by readers in their early efforts to come to know the way Benjy orders reality. Objects compose a latent pattern that runs throughout the narrative. In order to perceive this pattern, the reader must cast aside loosely grounded interpretive schemas of cognitive disability for more historically accurate frameworks. Ironically, the more the critic historicizes, the more certain pathological criteria of cognitive disability come to resemble contemporary conceptualizations.

The distinction Berger draws between Benjy’s narration as the language of literary modernism and “some supposed inner language” of cognitive impairment is too sharp: Faulkner uses theorizations of the cognitively impaired person’s way of cognition to produce the language of literary modernism. With the pathological tradition of object obsession outlined, readers recognize that Faulkner, through Benjy’s point of view, does seek to imagine and represent at least one thread of intellectual disability’s way of cognition. Faulkner uses pathology as a starting point to explore modernist form and to revise narrow understandings of mental difference. This approach to Faulkner’s novel encourages critics to consider why other characters with cognitive disabilities in

America’s literary history might resonate with contemporary understanding. Borrowing from Johnson’s language, I suggest that the “tendrils” of the legacy of cognitive disability shoot across history. By pinning down these tendrils, critics not only can refine their 161

interpretative frameworks, but also elucidate the technical and aesthetic features of stories that modern readers continue to fixate on.

In his clinical description, Ireland inadvertently describes object obsession as it relates to human emotions of comfort, anxiety, and pain. In contrast, Faulkner recreates object obsession for the express purpose of developing these emotions within narrative.

By using object obsession as an interpretative framework, the reader is able to better understand the key components of Benjy’s story: his familial relationships that are either warmly nourished or coldly neglected; his rapid associative memory that uses objects to recall poignant moments in Compson history; and his phenomenology that uniquely communicates his feelings of stability, happiness, distress, and love. In this way, Benjy’s section adopts a dismodern bent. Dismodernism, Lennard Davis argues, signals a universalism that “react[s] to the localization of identity” (27) and ushers in disability as

“the identity that links with other identities. (14).” The recognition and adoption of disability’s modes of perception binds Benjy with others. As much as other characters might stereotype Benjy as isolated – “the solitary one,” as Martin Barr defines the idiot in

Mental Defectives -- Luster, Dilsey, Quentin, and Caddy, can follow, with varying degrees of effort, the way Benjy organizes his experience (18). Davis writes, “In a dismodern mode, the ideal is not a hypostatization of the normal (that is, dominant) subject, but aims to create a new category based on the partial incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence, but dependency and interdependence”

(30). Object attention, a disabled mode of cognition, is a language that the reader might learn and depend on, providing fundamental clues, to extend Hagood’s detective metaphor, in discovering Benjy’s material and social world. 162

II – Repetition, Imitation, and Narrative in Of Mice and Men

Though central to the American literary canon and the high school classroom,

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men has garnered little sustained attention from disability

studies scholars. The novella is typically invoked as an example of the “kill-or-cure”

myth: Lennie, a seemingly textbook example of narrative prosthesis, must either

overcome his idiocy or die.18 Sally Chivers asserts that this lack of attention stems from

the novella’s “simple moral lesson that leaves little room for complex analysis.” For

Chivers, Steinbeck is culpable for this failure: “disability is deliberately written out of a

representational system leaving a gap that is both social and… aesthetic.” Sonya Freeman

Loftis considers how disability stereotypes are written into Steinbeck’s characterization

of Lennie, illustrating how Steinbeck embellished, emphasized, and added traits to the

ranch hand he had met who inspired his creation of Lennie. The slow-witted bindlestiff who Steinbeck knew had a much more rational motive for his crime: he killed his boss for firing a friend (Chivers 66). Lennie, as Steinbeck renders him, kills a woman without intention, and this characterization draws on stereotypes about the volatile, dangerous, and sexually aggressive idiot.19 How and where does the disability scholar find value in

Steinbeck’s art and process?

Read alongside of Faulkner’s rich representation of Benjy’s consciousness,

Steinbeck’s treatment of Lennie seems to prohibit the reader’s intimate engagement with

cognitive disability and its modalities. Loftis contends that Steinbeck’s method “may

reduce the character’s subjectivity” (66). Loftis’ and Chivers’ readings would have

surprised Steinbeck’s contemporary critics. Ralph Thomson, a writer for the New York 163

Times, found Steinbeck’s interest in the mental difference to be a nuisance. In his review of The Long Valley (1938), Thomson describes “Johnny Bear,” another one of

Stienbeck’s idiots, as “dramatic, but hardly scrupulous” (Fensch 26). He continues: “I pray that Mr. Steinbeck will avoid fools, imbeciles and boneheads in the future. He does better with people who are normal or who can pass for such in a sizeable crowd” (Fensch

26). In response, Steinbeck quipped, “Mr. Thomson sets rather a task. How can I? There aren’t any more in my books than in the scene around me.” (Fensch 26). For the 1930s literary critic, Steinbeck had too much to say about cognitive disability; for the present day DS scholar, he says and does too little.

While I am sensitive to disability studies critiques of the novella, these readings underestimate how the pathology of idiocy influenced Steinbeck’s formal innovation.

Critics cannot fully understand the novel’s “representational system” or plumb its “social and aesthetic gaps” (Chivers) without considering the context of feeblemindedness and idiocy in early 20th century America. While the book may seem simple today, Steinbeck viewed it as a formal “experiment” (Fensch 7). In a 1937 interview with the New York

World Telegram, Steinbeck described the book as “nothing but a trial horse – a copy book exercise. I wrote it simply to develop a form” (Fensch 7).20 Considering the book rhetorically, in light of Steinbeck’s letters, allows the critic to better appreciate the issues of representation and social context that Loftis highlights.

James Phelan defines narrative as a “rhetorical act” that consists of “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (3). As Steinbeck’s response to Thomson reveals, the broadest occasion of the telling of Of Mice and Men was the spread of mental difference -- the many fools, 164

imbeciles, and boneheads that Steinbeck believed surrounded him.21 The collective and

de-particularized nature of cognitive disability produces an important effect in the work

that has gone unrecognized: cognitive disability cannot be safely contained in one

character. For today’s critic, idiocy is only most easily noticed in Lennie; however,

Steinbeck draws on the traits and modes of idiocy in subtler ways as he explores different

narrative techniques. This formal experimentation destabilizes the divisions between

normalcy and abnormalcy, undermining the fantasy that certain mental identities can be

embodied exclusively in a specific person.22

Critics and teachers have condensed the spectrum of cognitive identity that

Thomson and Steinbeck discuss – the fools, the boneheads, the imbeciles, the normal

people, and those who can “pass” for such – into a binary between the fool and the normal person. While the traits of idiocy are most easily recognized in Steinbeck’s description of Lenny, they bleed over into the characterizations of the other ranch hands.

Consider how the narrator introduces Lennie after George: “Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man… with wide sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws” (2). Later in the novel, when the narrator introduces Whit, another ranch hand, the stigmata of CD and their metaphorical representation repeat: “a young laboring man came in. His sloping shoulders were bent forward and he walked heavily on his heels, as though he carried the invisible grain bag”

(46).23 This similarity has two implications that illuminate the role of cognitive disability

in the novel’s aesthetic: 1) the stigmata of cognitive disability are not bounded to one

particular character, and 2) Steinbeck’s narrator focalizes on these stigmata. The novel’s

“representational system” is not devoid of disability, but inflected by it. 165

This inflection suggests that normalcy is a fantasy that Steinbeck invites readers to indulge in throughout the novel. Slim vocalizes this fantasy after his first day on the job with Lennie and George. For Slim the ranch hand is a solitary creature, and the strangeness of Lennie and George is not simply Lennie’s idiocy, but the pair’s companionship. “I hardly never seen two guys travel together. You know how the hands are, they just come in and… work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It just seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you travelin’ together” (39). George quickly rebukes Slim, questioning his hastily applied cognitive labels. “He’s dumb as hell, but he ain’t crazy.

An’ I ain’t so bright neither, or I wouldn’t be bucking barley for my fifty and found. If I was bright, if I was even a little bit smart, I’d have my own little place, an’ I’d be bring in my own crops, ‘stead of doing all the work and not getting what comes up outta the ground” (39). For George, the ranch hand is more dim-witted than the average man.

Importantly, the exchange highlights the problem of reading cognitive disability more broadly: is idiocy inherent or relational? George suggests that he only seems intelligent by virtue of his location next to Lennie. He admits that the jokes he played on Lennie when they were young “made me seem God damn smart alongside of him” (40). The novella is undergirded by a grammar of disability – one in which the “freak” paired with the normal figure in order to not only emphasize character traits but also make them seem innate.24 But George’s reflections allow readers to see this grammar as a grammar, not reality, and Steinbeck lays seeds that complicate the straightforward fantasy of cognitive otherness that readers might indulge in. 166

Steinbeck does more than simply delimit cognitive disability in terms of its

embodiment in particular characters. He reframes cognitive disability, transforming it

from a subject about which stories are told into a source of inspiration that can change the way stories are told. CD pathology inspires formal innovation. Steinbeck draws on a core

trait of CD: the tendency to imitate and repeat. Like Benjy’s object obsession, the

presence of this behavior hints at why the story and its characters continue to resonate

with contemporary readers. Repetition and imitation are part of the legacy of cognitive

disability. Today Lennie seems autistic, as Loftis argues, because of these traits (64).25

Yet for the 1930s reader, such traits signaled his underlying idiocy. A proclivity for

repetition characterized the cognitive other of both time periods: the DSM-V distinguishes

autism by “the presence or history of restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests,

or activities” (50). Loftis cites this tendency in her reading of Lennie as autistic: “He

relies strongly on ritual and routine (especially the ritual of George repeatedly narrating

the story of their imagined farm)” (64). However, the presence of this repetition has more

dramatic effects on Steinbeck’s formal experimentation than Loftis recognizes. Lennie’s

insistence on routine produces an intersubjective echolalia – “the pathological repetition

of what is said by other people as if echoing them” (Meriam Webster) -- throughout the

novella: Lennie echoes George; George echoes Lennie; and more broadly the narrative

echoes itself.26

Echolalia was one of the most exotic markers of cognitive disability in the early

20th century. For Barr, the behavior was fundamentally irrational and signaled that the

subject was trapped in world of sensation. “It sometimes happens that the speech of

patients is entirely limited to a mere imitative repetition of words spoken in their hearing, 167

while they are without the power of volunteering any statement” (235). This powerlessness resulted from a dearth of will power: “their auditory wordcenters respond only to direct sensory inclinations, and not at all to those of an associated or volitional order” (236). Steinbeck’s most faithful representation of echolalia comes in “Johnny

Bear,” in which the titular character is able to “photograph words and voices” (150). The narrator learns that Johnny was once tested “with a long passage in Greek and Johnny did it exactly.” One of the townspeople contends that “he doesn’t know the words he’s saying, he just says them. He hasn’t brains enough to make anything up, so you know that what he says is what he heard” (150).27 In Of Mice and Men, echolalia is more muted and dispersed, but this dispersal allows Steinbeck to graft the behavior onto multiple sites of storytelling: omniscient narration, dialogic fantasy, and plot among others.

The novella is full of imitation, and the omniscient eye of the narrator often separates authentic actions from the inauthentic imitations. In the opening scene, the narrator describes George’s unremarkable movements at the creekside, but carefully notes his companion’s response. George “drew up his knees and embraced them. Lennie, who had been watching, imitated George exactly. He pushed himself back, drew up his knees, embraced them, looked over to George to see whether he had it just right” (4).

Such description illuminates a level of narratorial annotation. The narrator describes

Lennie’s actions as they relate to George.28 In this sentence Lennie’s imitation of George is written in long form: The reader sees George, sees Lennie watch George, sees the resultant imitation, and sees Lennie look to George for verification. In the next sentence, the process of imitation just spelled out for the reader is abbreviated. “He pulled his hat down a little more over his eyes, the way George’s hat was” (4). The reader sees only 168

Lennie’s action, followed by a brief mention of George as the site of inspiration. One way to account for this shift is to suggest the narrator is moving closer to Lennie’s consciousness. The narrator becomes more concerned with what Lennie sees, and less concerned with flagging the resultant actions as imitations. Unlike the first sentence, the second sentence could easily be re-written in first person: “I pulled my hat down a little more over my eyes the way George’s hat was.” The narrator’s focalizations begin to align with what Lennie sees, suggesting a sympathy between the storyteller and the character.29

I want to read this moment of sympathy generously and to consider it as a hint that the narrator might embrace imitation as a mode of storytelling. Of Mice and Men is can be read as a novella of imitations and echoes, and the most memorable of these occur in the novella’s beginning and ending. In these two sections, repetition abounds. Some repetitions relate to Lennie’s interior. Aunt Clara, who George scorns Lennie for not remembering in the first section, “comes from out of Lennie’s head” and excoriates

Lennie in the conclusion (101).

Other repetitions relate to his behavior. Lennie’s “long gulps” during which he

“snort[s] water like a horse” (3) by the river are replaced by more tranquil sips as he

“barely touches his lips to the water” (100). These moments are best read as echoes – the same actions and themes sounding at different frequencies. In one sense, these echoes relay a story of Lennie’s development: he remembers Aunt Clara, and he responds to

George’s suggestion that he drink more carefully.30 But reading these echoes simply as evidence of Lennie’s development tells critics little about Steinbeck’s technical innovation and paints an ableist fantasy of Lennie’s recovery (one that is incongruent with the novella’s ending). 169

I want to consider how Steinbeck harnesses the aesthetic and narrative potential of

imitation and echo for two aspects of the opening and conclusion. First, I consider how

echoing allows Steinbeck to experiment with narrative omniscience specifically as it

relates to time. Second, I examine how echoing helps Steinbeck negotiate the tensions of

the novella in character dialogue in a way that is instrumental to the creating the tragedy

of the story.

For Steinbeck, an echolalic narrator works within and outside of time. Through

imitation, the narrator draws connections between the present moment of the story and

more general collections of moments that represent timeless feelings and phenomena.

These connections invite the reader to compare the specific events of the story with this

timeless background. As the novella opens, the narrator describes a cycle of natural

actions that repeat throughout time. “A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River

drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green” (1). Present tense allows the

narrator to work in the widest possible window of time.31 “Drops” and “runs” refer not to a specific action that occurs and finishes, but an ongoing phenomena of the natural landscape. Similarly, the mountains “curve,” and the tree limbs “arch.” As the narrator focuses on the valley’s wildlife, this treatment of time continues. “Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening.” What the reader sees is no evening in particular, but all evenings. The next paragraph frames the habits of men as timeless. The narrator begins with an existential “there is” clause: “There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys from the ranches to swim in the pool, and beaten hard by the tramps who come wearily down from the highway” (2). 170

A sharp paragraph break signals the narrator’s move from timelessness to a

specific moment. Specific events replace the cycle of recurrence that was so thoroughly

described. Though this movement is gradual, the narrator’s transition to the past tense

signals it. “Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The

shade climbed up the hills” (2). The narrator has moved to an evening, but this evening is

still linked to the natural cycle via vivid imagery. The rabbits resist this temporal shift,

sitting “quietly as little gray, sculptured stones” (2). The entrance of man establishes the

narrator’s new timeline. “The sound of footsteps on crisp sycamore leaves” prompts the exit of the markers of nature’s timelessness (2). “The rabbits hurried noiselessly for cover. A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river” (2). The narrator describes this transition, highlighting a new mode of sequential time and storytelling. “For a moment, the place was lifeless, and then two men emerged from the path and came into the opening by the green pool.” “For a moment” circumscribes “the place,” previously described as a timeless space, into a specific unit of time. The beginning of the second independent clause, “and then,” creates a timeline in which this unit falls. The appearance of men signals the introduction of plot -- during which certain things happen after others. In the first three paragraphs, the narrator gently moves from recurrence to instance, inviting the reader to consider the relationship between these two temporal modes. The connection between these two is muddy: the sharp paragraph breaks suggests they are distinct, yet the repetition of persistent natural imagery suggests that a more permeable barrier exists between them.

Echolalic repetition ensures that the reader’s attention remains fixed on this border when similar imagery repeats during the conclusion. The section begins “the deep 171

green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon.” The use past tense and the prepositional phrase in the predicate illustrate that the narrator is working within a specific moment of time, but this moment echoes the timelessness in the introduction.

The narrator’s description of the land gestures back to the imagery of the introduction: “A far rush of wind sounded and a gust drove through the tops of the trees like a wave. The sycamore leaves turned up their silver sides… And row and row of tiny wind waves flowed up the pools green surface” (99).32 As different actors enter the scene, their actions, though told in the past tense, are cyclical. “A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head” (99). Steinbeck strings together moments expressed in the past tense to create a cycle of recurrence. The particularity of a specific agent is less important than the collective set it belongs to: “another little water snake swam up the pool, turning its periscope head from side to side” (99-100). Indeed, the cyclical drama between the heron and the water takes place in a broader cyclical environment. “As quickly as it had come, the wind died, and the clearing was quiet again” (100).

As in the introduction, Steinbeck has the entrance of man disrupt nature’s repetitions. “Suddenly, Lennie appeared out of the brush… The heron pounded the air with its wings, jacked itself clear of the water and flew off down river. The little snake slid in among the reeds at the pool’s side” (100). Here Steinbeck’s narrator describes the bird’s exit with the same diction used in the novella’s opening. But this is also a repetition of Steinbeck’s omniscient narrator: nature’s recurrence cedes narratorial attention to the plot of man. The beginning of the last chapter repeats key features of the 172

first: natural imagery, the representation of timelessness, and the stark framing of the implications of man’s entrance for this mode of timelessness.

Repetition is thus fundamental to the novella’s aesthetic. The story not only returns to the same place in which it began, but the narrator aspires to return to the mode in which the narration was first spoken. Repetition also operates as a coping mechanism.

Even though the narrator cannot reclaim the timeless present tense, s/he can recreate a feeling of the timeless present by echoing the imagery and structure of the novella’s beginning. The desire to create a world outside of the moment is something that the characters in the novella themselves aspire to, a “world elsewhere” created through style, as Richard Poirier once termed it. The fantasy of the ranch is one told in the future tense and one in which characters consider what they will do on an ongoing basis.

As Lennie enters the scene and readers see into his consciousness more deeply than at any other point in the narrative, it becomes clear that he has moved closer to seeing the world outside of the moment. Lennie’s reiterations of the ideas discussed in the beginning of the novella signal this development:

“I di’n’t forget, you bet, God damn. Hide in the brush an’ wait for George.” He

pulled his hat down low over his eyes. “George gonna give me hell,” he said.

“George gonna wish he was alone an’ not have me botherin’ him.’ He turned his

head and looked at the bright mountaintops. “I can go right off there an’ find a

cave,” he said. And he continued sadly, “an’ never have no ketchup – but I won’t

care. If George don’t want me… I’ll go away. I’ll go away.” (100)

In this moment of isolation, Lennie pulls topics and ideas from the first chapter: the efficacy of his memory, George’s longwinded speech about living alone, his own threat 173

to go live in a cave, and, of course, ketchup. Lennie’s dialogue slides into a repetitive form. Once George is introduced, “George gonna” recurs twice, and as his dialogue closes, Lennie repeats his threat to leave: “I’ll go away. I’ll go away.” By repeating in terms of both content and form, Lennie’s consciousness operates outside of the immediate present, an ironic twist given Lennie’s difficulties to remember that shine so brightly in the introduction.

The figure of Aunt Clara comes “from out of Lennie’s head,” and reminds Lennie of the past: “He’s been doin’ nice things for you alla time. When he got a piece a pie you always got half or mor’n half. An’ if they was any ketchup, why he’d give it all to you”

(101). While Aunt Clara’s response cites distinct examples, Lennie’s reply is repetitive, emphasizing his common response to each problem. “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried and tried.” Lennie’s repetitions intensify when he confronts the rabbit who relays a linear timeline of events to come: “He’s gonna beat the hell outta you and then go away an’ leave you,” the rabbit jabs. Lennie responds, “He ain’t, I tell ya he ain’t…. Oh! George—

George—George!” (101). This exchange highlights three ways of organizing time that exist in tension with each other: Aunt Clara calls upon past moments that lead up to a present truth. The rabbit presents a linear sequence of specific events. Lennie rebukes these modes by repeating an attitude that persists beyond any specific timeline.

When George then enters, he emphasizes the split between temporally linear events and nonlinear, recurrent attitudes and ideas. The narrator’s echolalic descriptions help the reader see these temporal modes as they run parallel to each other. George enters the scene in a way that echoes the way Lennie did. “George came quietly out of the brush” (102). Just a two pages earlier, the narrator describes Lennie’s entrance: 174

“Suddenly Lennie appeared out of the brush, and he came as silently as a creeping bear moves” (100). This repetitive description functions to characterize George, the seemingly normal caregiver, as the imitator. George’s imitations become more magnified as he talks with Lennie. “Ain’t you gonna give me hell?” Lennie asks. “Give ya hell?” George repeats. George’s clearest moment of repetition comes later in the dialogue: “‘For the rabbits,’ Lennie shouted. ‘For the rabbits,’ George repeated” (105). The dynamics detailed at the beginning of the novel, in which Lennie is the imitator, are now reversed.33

George’s recitation becomes a way to evidence his cognitive decline.34 Paradoxically,

Lennie’s encouragement for recitation becomes a way to emphasize his ability to feel and desire human connection. The exchange in the conclusion is a process of mutual imitation, one in which Lennie invites George to adopt the way he perceives time and reality.

Lennie responds that he might give Lennie hell, pointing to the recurrent behaviors that characterize their relationship and insisting that George participate in them. “Sure, like you always done before. Like ‘If I di’n’t have you I’d take my fifty bucks.’” The dialogue Lennie quotes is a recitation of George’s long speech in the introduction, during which he noted that without Lennie, “I could take my fifty bucks and go into town and take whatever I want” (11). George articulates the surprising tensions that emerge in light of Lennie’s echolalia: “Jesus Christ, Lennie! You can’t remember nothing that happens, but you remember every word I say” (103). George’s exclamation emphasizes the two types of time the reader experiences in the conclusion. The first is the recurrent mode, which conjures ritual and routine. The second is the linear mode, which is concerned with what “happens,” the novel’s plots that Lennie fails to recognize. The 175

most pressing of these plots is the roaming ranch hands and their drive to execute him.

George and the narrator straddle these modes. George’s recitations seem hollow because

of his awareness of events unfolding in linear time. As the narrator illuminates his

struggle, the reader come to share his anxiety: should the reader pay attention to Lennie’s

recitations or the shouts that march closer? Is the exchange a moment of connection or

separation?

In form, the dialogue seems like a realized intersubjectivity. “But not us,” Lennie

cried happily. ‘Tell about us now.’ George was quite for a moment. ‘But not us he said.’

‘Because—’ ‘Because I got you an’—’ ‘An I got you. We got each other, that’s what,

that gives a hoot in hell about us,’ Lennie cried in triumph.” Steinbeck’s use of dashes

and repetition emphasize this intersubjectivity. Thoughts are filled in by the pair, and

George and Lennie, though they rehearse a speech told in the earlier in the introduction,

alternate lines at a quicker pace than the earlier version. In the introduction, the dialogue

is often told by one speaker in longer more developed sentences. “Lennie broke in. ‘But

not us! An’ why? Because…Because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look

after you, and that’s why.’ He laughed delightedly.” (14).

But repetition only produces the appearance of inter-subjectivity. During the

dialogue, the voice of the narrator interjects, describing the natural setting that echoes

earlier imagery suggestive of recurrence as well as the oncoming shouts that signal the

resolution of the linear plot. After Lennie’s triumphant cry, the narrator notes that “the little evening breeze blew over the clearing and the wind waves flowed up the green pool.

And the shouts of men sound again, this time much closer than before” (104). Like the narrator, George is privy to both recurrence and the linear timeline that the plot follows. 176

While he repeats Lennie’s fantasy, his hollow, wooden speech results from his knowledge of the oncoming men.

As the dialogue progresses, the narrator becomes more sympathetic towards linear time, attending to the specific events with the same level of detail as in earlier descriptions of natural recurrence. “He reached in his side pocket and brought out

Carlson’s Luger; he snapped off the safety, and the hand and gun lay on the ground behind Lennie’s back. He looked at the back of Lennie’s head, at the place where the spine and skull were joined” (105). The next paragraph, a sentence long, weds this unit of time with the accelerating chain of events that will lead to Lennie’s death: “A man’s voice called from up the river, and another man answered” (104).

That sentence is much more than a poetic finale. At the moment when George and

Lennie’s dialogue seems the most intersubjective in form, a moment in which George participates in a mutual, echolalic exchange, the reader follows a concurrent, straightforward death plot. In his definition Barr quotes one psychologist who describes echolalia as a “sudden explosion of speech” during which “the patient with a grimace, contortion, or violent movement of some kind suddenly bursts into an obscene, profane, or absurd expression. This expression may be the echo of something overheard—hence the name, echolalia—or it may be a spontaneous outcry” (236). Lennie’s explosions are italicized in both the introduction and conclusion. As we near the end of the dialogue between Lennie and George, they are speaking in what looks like perfect concert.

“Lennie begged, ‘Le’s do it now. Le’s get that place now.’ ‘Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta.” The plot punctuates this moment of communion. “And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head. The hand 177

shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again” (106). In this moment, the inevitable conclusion of the plot becomes the absurd and profane explosion. It is spontaneous, an echo of no previous pattern. A final answer that punctuates the fantasy of intersubjective echolalic dialogue. The “crash” shoots up and down the valley, this is the last vision of natural imagery that the reader is privy to, one spoiled by the concluding event of the linear timeline.

The inevitably of this moment can only be reinforced by repetition. Slim consoles

George: “You hadda, George, I swear you hadda” (107). The benchmark of normalcy justifies the murder plot by repeating Lennie’s way of speech. Lennie copes with Aunt

Clara’s rebuke that he never minded George by repeating, “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried and tried” (101). Formally, these two pieces of dialogue resemble each other: subjects are tightly paired with verbs. The listener’s name is invoked in the middle of the utterance. Normalcy can only reconcile the tragedy via a language that is not its own. The final tragedy of the novel is that normalcy’s coming to terms with mental difference goes unrecognized. The once echolalic narrator ignores the timeless natural landscape and anything else that might suggest repetition and recurrence. Carlson’s ignorance fills the valley: “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”

III – Conclusion: A Resonant Formal History

Bérubé contends that “Disability Studies need not and should not predicate its existence as a practice of criticism by reading a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other” (20). To a degree, the readings of Faulkner and Steinbeck presented here confirm Bérubé’s argument, but more importantly, they illustrate the reasons behind the 178

impulse to grab the DSM in the first place. In fact, these readings suggest that such an

impulse is indicative of an important phenomenon of readerly experience that critics have

undersold. Readers reach for the DSM because it’s exciting that a character from long

ago seems to align so much with our present understanding of cognitive disability. In

ignoring this resonance, we divorce ourselves from the pathological and cultural lineage

of cognitive disability – propping up a fiction that contemporary diagnostic labels have

no connection with the past.

For critics, the DSM is a clean, up-to-date tool that carries little risk and produces little reward. But as this analysis demonstrates, the scholar must consider the historical roots of the science they work with in order to best understand why canonical fiction continues to fascinate today’s readers. The newest definitions of autism, Down

Syndrome, etc. are hardly novel. The diagnostic criteria of these labels are grounded in older traits and behaviors with which literary authors would have been familiar, as my readings of object attention and echolalia suggest. There is not much discovery in the diagnostic act. Benjy or Lennie may be called autistic or idiotic, but what really mattered to Faulkner and Steinbeck, and what still matters to readers, are the traits of this identity.

While the contours of disability change over time, some of its traits persist, with authors in each era reapplying them for novel formal effects. Thus, though diagnosis cannot

“solve” texts as Berube notes (20), attending to these more enduring traits of cognitive disability can offer new ways of understanding the formal experimentation. Thinking about how these traits influence literary innovation is critical to determining how authors collapse divisions between mental difference and idiocy. The idiot will continue to serve 179

as a narrative resource for thinking about how one thinks, feels, and perceives. Readers would be smart to acknowledge and scrutinize their connection to this long history. 180

Chapter Five

The Cognition of Connection: Narrating Family Experiences of Cognitive Disability in the 1950s

In this chapter, I am less concerned with disabled cognition and more with the reactions that this cognition elicits, particularly by family members. “Reactions” can include emotional responses, ideological formations, or pragmatic rationalizations. If one concedes that there might be different ways to react to cognitive disability in a family, how might narrative represent these complex processes? Representation followed different rhetorics. To illustrate these, I begin by briefly examining You and Your

Retarded Child: A Manual for Parents of Retarded Children (1955) by Samuel A. Kirk,

Merle B. Karnes, and Winifred D. Kirk. Published in the middle of the decade, the book elucidates a particular way of making sense of cognitive disability. Mental retardation emerged as a problem to be solved by level-headed, practical thinking. Then reading two parent memoirs, Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never Grew (1950) and John P. Frank’s

My Son’s Story (1951), against Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953), I consider three questions:

1. How did authors represent the consciousness and cognition of family members

whose attention focused on a cognitively disabled relative?

2. How did literature repurpose the narrative techniques of more “realistic” texts like

memoirs and parent handbooks, and what were the formal and ethical

implications of this repurposing?

3. What do these stories reveal about how cognitive disability was valued and

understood in America? 181

Critical discussions of disability and family often center on the role of the family

in the development of the disabled person. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp note that

some scholars view families “as the site of nurturance, narrative, and theory building for

those with disabilities.” Others consider families to be “potential sites of repression,

rejection, and infantilization” (81). To better understand the relationship between

disability and family, Faye and Rapp introduce the term “kinship imaginary,” a phrase

intended to remind scholars that “families are both flesh-and-blood collaborations and always acts of cultural imagination” (82). A disabled person has a biological family, but that family’s understanding of what it means to be a “good” family – in terms of its composition, its distribution of caretaking labor, and its approach or attitude towards disability – vary in different social and historical contexts.

Reactions to disability are not instantaneous. Ginsburg and Rapp highlight a

“process of incorporating disability” in which “family members often find themselves transforming seemingly stable notions of kinship that they themselves may have taken for granted” (82, emphasis added). “Incorporation” and “transformation” are ongoing actions. Since they are on-going processes, they are packed with narrative potential: surprises, epiphanies, repudiations, etc. The most engaging stories of disability often center on the way in which normal characters come to make sense of disability as it implicates them via a family member.1 My chapter seeks to explore how the “process of

incorporating disability” structures and is represented by narrative. How do authors

represent characters making sense of a disability in the family? What narrative

techniques endorse or critique the different ways of making sense of disability? 182

During the 1950s, many families would have come to understand their children through a rhetoric of institutionalization. Ginsburg and Rapp note that “more mundane forms of bias against disability persisted well after World War II, as families were regularly encouraged to institutionalize their children” (82). Decisions to institutionalize children were motivated by beliefs about what disability was, how one should respond to it, and how it should be valued. Families would not have encountered a single way to understand disability. They would have engaged competing rhetorics – social, religious, and scientific -- as they sought to incorporate disability into the family. A range of different types of writing – popular science, memoir, and literature – reveal multiple ways of narrating (or more generally, making sense of) cognitive disability. Rather than profiling each particular rhetoric, I want to consider how a rhetoric of institutionalization circulated across genres and how narrative operated as a way to endorse, interrogate, or reject this rhetoric. In comparing memoirists like Buck and Frank with literary authors like Bellow, I hope to open up important questions about realism and disability. Michael

Bérubé has criticized scholars like Ato Quayson and Rosmarie Garland Thomson for being too quick to praise so-called “realistic” representations of disability in which

“disability is simply itself, and not wondrous, sentimental, or exotic” (54). He challenges scholars to “ask what the ‘real’ and the ‘normal’ consist of, and to lay bare the crafty procedures that go into the cultural production of artifacts we now take to be ordinary, straightforward, unproblematic representations of the world” (55).

Reading Buck, Frank, and Bellow together allows me to take on Bérubé’s challenge. Each author has a claim to “realism.” The stories of Buck and Frank are drawn from lived experiences of disability. Their memoirs may have seemed like “ordinary, 183

straightforward, and unproblematic” representations of disability to the 1950s reader, but

they do not seem that way today. These memoirists subordinated emotional experience to

a pragmatism inspired by medical approaches to disability. The emotional journey of the

parent was secondary to the quest to find a solution to their child’s problem. Attention to certain narrative features allows one to see the complex ways in which such an attitude was made to seem straightforward and normal.

On the other hand, The Adventures of Augie March, though not inspired by real

experiences with disability, explores what it means to represent disability “realistically.”

As biographer James Atlas notes, Bellow studied anthropology as an undergraduate and

won a graduate fellowship to the University of Wisconsin (55). For Bellow, anthropology

got to the core of the human condition. He admired anthropologists because, he noted,

“they seemed to be preparing to criticize society from its roots” (50). But Bellow himself

struggled to write objective research on human culture. Reflecting on his brief graduate

career, he noted, “every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story” (57).

Anthropological ways of representing and understanding reality – from thick description

to evolutionary theory -- are on subtle display in The Adventures of Augie March. In a

review for The New York Times, Berryman wrote of the book, “it looks like a naturalistic

novel, undoubtedly.” If Bellow was attracted to naturalism, it was because it amplified

the images and motives of characters who seemed to be drawn from real life. Atlas notes

that “Dreiser was ‘a revelation’ for Bellow” since, in Bellow’s words, “you saw what

could be done with people like those you know, people completely familiar—neighbors,

relatives, working people, shopkeepers. You saw them, with astonishment, as characters”

(58). 184

Reading Bellow against the parent memoirists also helps to illuminate fiction’s

ethical and aesthetic uses. Literature offered readers an alternative to pragmatic approaches to disability and also functioned as a space in which realistic codes of representation could be explored. In The Adventures of Augie March, an ostensible reality of disability – that it might be separated from a family and contained in an institution – is revealed to be the scheme of crafty artificers. The novel builds up these fantasies only to tear them down. It does so by relying on a complex bi-natured rhetoric of disability that parallels the straightforward rhetoric of the parent memoirs.

A Note on Terms

I draw on James Phelan’s definition of narrative as a rhetorical act. Narrative consists of “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (3). Phelan’s definition, specifically his idea that stories are always told “for some purposes,” helps to clarify why certain trends emerged in these texts. For example, though memoirists adopted a literary style, they had practical aspirations: they sought to help parents come to terms with their child’s disability and better understand the journey they now found themselves on.

When I compare these authors’ different treatments of narrative time and space, I use Gérard Genette’s theory of duration. One way to think about time in fiction, Genette says, is to consider “the variable duration of… events or story sections and the pseudo- duration (in fact, length of text) of their telling in the narrative” (35).2 In other words, it is

worth noting the extent to which authors devote significant textual space, and thus

increased reading time, to different events or time periods.3 For example, a summer 185

might take up a few sentences, while a conversation takes a page. This simple difference

has significant implications for narrative. This is significant beyond its obviousness. I

attend to when authors increase or decrease textual space for events, images, and ideas.

As Genette notes in Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, there is a “gradual slowing down of the narrative, through the growing importance of very long scenes covering a very short time of story; and on the other hand, in a sense compensating for this slowing down, a more and more massive presence of ellipses” (93). Why do narrators slow down during certain moments of telling stories of disability? What events do authors skim over or omit? And how does the reader come to see cognitive disability because of these authorial choices?

Narratological distinctions between fabula and sjuzhet are also useful when reading Buck, Frank, and Bellow. Mieke Bal defines fabula as a “series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors” (5). For Bal, the sjuzhet encompasses the “ordering of events” and more broadly, “a fabula that is presented in a certain manner (79).4 If one were to catalogue the core narrative events of

Buck’s and Frank’s stories for example, they would list various doctors’ examinations,

interactions between parents and children, and visits to different institutions. But, the

sjuzhet would be the precise selection and arrangement of these materials into the

meaningful structure that readers see. Phelan defines the fabula/sjuzhet relationship as

“the distinction between the chronological sequence of events and the order and

representation of those events in the narrative text” (17). The fabula underlying

Cinderella can be retold in different sjuzhets that vary across time and culture. 186

For Buck, Frank, and Bellow, the form of the sjuzhet is largely a matter of

focalization. Although originally focalization was a synonymous with “character type,” it

has come to mean “a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the

experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters, or other more hypothetical

entities in the story world.” Burkhard Niederhoff, author of this definition, categorizes

focalization into three types: zero focalization, internal focalization, and external

focalization.5 In the case of both parent memoirs and The Adventures of Augie March, authors seem to rely on internal focalization. Since each text has a first person narrator,

the texts are internally focalized, and the narrator says “only what a given character

knows.”

While focalization involves issues of “narrative information” (i.e. the

representation of what a focalizer senses or thinks), it also involves time, which can be

understood in light of Genette’s theory of duration. The narrators of parent memoirs retell

their life stories, and I argue parent memoirists often marshal evidence from their present

reference point to frame and annotate past events. In one sense, this feature is obvious:

the stories are remembrances. Yet, one can attend to when, to what extent, and for what

purposes narrators interject their present understandings: the way a reference point

frames narrative durations. In The Adventures of Augie March, there is no deliberate

subordination of the past to present or future. Still, one can attend to Augie’s fluid

temporal positioning as narrator. He seems to see disability best in a timeless moment,

but as Georgie’s institutionalization plays out, he begins to adopt a narratorial position

that allows him to consider disability outside of the immediate present. 187

To describe narratorial position in relation to time, I draw on grammar. These narrators generally speak in the simple past. However, at key moments in each narrative, they adopt, one might say, the perfect aspect, which clarifies how an action exists over time. Anita K. Barry notes that the perfect aspect “serves to associate an action with a later action” (Barry 62). Buck and Frank, for example, associate past actions with future understandings of these actions. They often refer to temporal positioning that is not just limited to a past-present-future timeline. As Buck retells a conversation with a particularly insightful doctor, she observes, “now came the moment for which I shall be grateful as long as I live” (22). Buck’s comment also demonstrates that narrators move outside of the discrete chunks of time via modal language: would, could, should. The past event can offer a bridge to a more speculative consideration about what cognitive disability might or could be. I refer to moments when narrators move outside of a simple chronological retelling of events as instances of aspectual repositioning (i.e. connecting past events to present understanding) and modal repositioning (i.e. using a past event as inspiration for a more speculative engagement with disability).

I - “Face to face with the inevitable”: Pearl S. Buck, John P. Frank, and Solving the

Problem of Cognitive Disability through Narrative

How does one raise a child with a cognitive disability? This question would have been pressing for parents in the 1950s. James Trent notes that “the years between 1945 and 1955 marked a period of irony in the care and control of retarded people” (236).

Different attitudes toward institutionalization were reflected in texts. On the one hand, the

U.S. saw a boon of institutional exposés that “drew the nation’s attention to the run-down 188

conditions of institutions” (236). Yet parents would have learned about institutionalization (and thus cognitive disability) through two other types of texts that were less graphic and more practical: 1) guides that provided parents medical, psychological, and educational advice and 2) memoirs of parents who retold their experiences of raising children with disabilities, a genre that Trent terms the “parent confessional.” Delineating a reference point by which parents formulated and justified decisions regarding their child’s disability, Trent outlines the cultural moment of these texts: “there should be no shame in placing a retarded child in a public facility, parents were telling each other. Coming to terms with the institution became an important, if tacit function of the confessional literature” (238).

Parent guides and memoirs relied on particular rhetorical and narrative strategies to tell stories of cognitively disability and the familial experience of it. These strategies derived from an ideological belief about what cognitive disability was and an imperative about what should be done. One could crudely articulate this stance as follows: cognitive disability was a problem that should be solved by level-headed thinking. By managing narrative space and time, authors in both genres subordinated emotional experience to a more rational and methodical response to disability.

In “The Parent’s Problem,” the introduction of You and Your Retarded Child: A

Manual for Parents of Retarded Children (1955), Samuel Kirk, Merle B. Karnes, and

Winifred Kirk outline the appropriate response to learning that one’s child is retarded:

Whether the parents are informed that their child is handicapped at birth or

whether they discover it at a later age, the “blow” is hard. It is not easy to face

such a critical situation. Few parents can adjust immediately, but it is important 189

that they face the facts realistically as soon as possible. Usually they experience a

series of reactions before they reach a workable solution. Interviews with many

parents have revealed a tendency to progress through stages of shock, disbelief,

fear and frustration before they finally arrive at the level of intelligent inquiry.

Parents do not have to go through each of these stages—through years of doubt

and torment—but many of them do. The sooner they can recognize the nature of

their problems, can face handicap squarely, and make plans intelligently and with

insight into their own emotions and the child’s needs, the happier both parents and

the child will be. (2)

The handbook’s opening remarks reveal a shift in the way that cognitive disability was

understood in America during the mid-20th century. No longer a black mark on a family’s

hereditary integrity, cognitive disability was becoming a fact of life. Kirk et al. note that

“in the last few years the retarded child has had a new lease on life. Parents no longer

need to hide their retarded child. They do not feel the necessity of keeping the problem to

themselves” (1). Acceptance, as the above passage suggests, came with a condition:

families were to tackle cognitive disability as a problem that could be solved with quick response, cool determination, and far-sighted planning. To persuade their audience to accept this imperative, the authors take pains to acknowledge the parents’ point of view.

Before contending that mental retardation must be approached rationally (i.e. a “workable

solution” must be found for it), they acknowledge the emotional difficulty of facing “such

a critical situation.” This is a courteous euphemism that avoids explicit mention of

retardation but still creates a sense of urgency. A pattern of emphasizing the practical

while making concessions to the impractical continues in the next sentences. Just before 190

noting the importance of dealing with CD “as soon as possible,” they concede that many parents need time to process their child’s disability. The passage evokes two competing ways of understanding and responding to retardation, and the authors mediate these ways for their readers.

Rhetorically, the authors appeal to a sense of pathos, validating the family’s experience while insisting on the power of medicine -- specifically its theory of disability, its prescriptions, and its expectations of the psychologist and the patient (or in this case, the parent of the patient). Readers may have been comforted by the language that communicated this approach. The passage begins in the idiom of the audience, overtly signaled by the decision to place “blow” in quotation marks.

A 1955 review praises the book’s conciliatory style, noting the use of

“nontechnical terms” (Dolphin 37). According to professionals, straight talk was the book’s primary virtue. In his review, G. Orville Johnson, a Professor of Special

Education at Syracuse University, wrote:

The authors attack a most difficult problem in a very realistic, forthright manner.

The book is fairly easy to read, and even the layman should not have too much

difficulty in comprehending it. The problem of the severely retarded child is one

that has come to the forefront in the past seven or eight years with a great deal of

publicity, emotionalism, and information both true and false. The information

contained in You and Your Retarded Child is very pertinent, accurate, and makes

no attempt to gloss over or explain away the problems involved, but rather attacks

them in a very realistic manner providing the reader some necessary background

information to arrive at some rather realistic solutions. (339) 191

A grounded, practicable way to solve the given problem – that is what parents could find

in You and Your Retarded Child. Returning to the book’s opening remarks, it becomes

clear that the authors did not deny emotional experience, but provided a way out of

emotionalism as Johnson notes. They write that “Few parents can adjust immediately, but

it is important that they face the facts realistically as soon as possible.” The first independent clause posits an unrealized ideal, the second, a pragmatic response. The conjunction joins the parent’s emotional experience with the rational imperative. The concluding sentence of the passage inverts this order. It presents a to-do list for parents, one that, for all its straight-talk is followed by a simple emotional note of happiness. If these prescriptions are followed, “the happier both parents and the child will be” (2).

There are limitations to the Kirk approach of course. While they (and their reviewers) privilege clarity, they show perhaps too much tact when discussing mental retardation. The word “retarded” makes no appearance. In the first and last sentences of the passage, “handicap” does, but in between them cognitive disability is referred to as a

“critical situation” and “the facts.” In contrast emotional experiences seem too well- defined, and the authors hurry their readers along a pre-determined sequence of feelings.

Parents are led to read their own history through defined stages of “shock, disbelief, fear and frustration.” This schematic emerges clearly in the pages that follow, which describe each emotional stage at length. But emotion is confined to a small amount of textual space. The authors concisely manage what Genette calls the “pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text)” (35) of emotional experience. “Parents do not have to go through each of these stages – through years of doubt and torment – but many of them do.” Five words contain years of experience. As narrators, the authors allow readers to see this period of 192

time from a seemingly omniscient point of view, inviting them to make their present day

decisions in light of what possibilities the future might hold. The psychologists look

backwards onto all time. Their future point of reference both clarifies and magnifies past

suffering. Dashes bracket off the possibility of this future lost time, and for parents who

may already find themselves in such a cycle, the syntax creates a sense of regret: much of

this pain is unnecessary, and now the reader must look forward. This period of pain will

soon be out of sight and mind, so long as parents act appropriately in the here and now.

You and Your Retarded Child was one of several care-taking manuals that parents could find in the 1950s.6 The nexus of emotional response and rationality was well- trodden ground for the genre. Sometimes authors dove deeply into the emotional consciousness of parents. An unnamed mother listens to a doctor as he diagnoses her child as mentally retarded at the beginning of How Retarded Children Can be Helped

(1959) by Evelyn Hart:

How would she tell her husband? Whose fault was it? His? Hers? What a

shameful thing! Of all the children in the neighborhood—why hers? She could

never let those other mothers know… She’d persuade her husband to move away,

out of the neighborhood, out of the city, some place where no one would find out.

They’d put the child in an institution… but how would she give him up? He

belonged to them! What had gone wrong! Was it something she did – or didn’t do

– during pregnancy that had brought this on? (1)

Ellipses, dashes, single-word questions, and exclamatory fragments signify the mother’s

increased speed of thought. The author intends the reader’s heart to race along with hers.

The illustration that accompanies the passage (Fig. 10) reflects orientations to cognitive 193

disability that are similar to those seen in You and Your Retarded Child. The doctor is

able to face and see the child head-on. The mother sits with eyes closed as her mind races through the typical emotional reactions that Kirk et al. outline. The child stares blankly at

nothing in particular.

Fig. 10. Image from How Retarded Children can be Helped

This new era of forthrightness about cognitive disability was ushered in not by

doctors, but by memoirists who chronicled their experiences of raising children with

cognitive disabilities. The rhetorical and narrative strategies seen here can be traced to

memoirists. In fact, Kirk et al. acknowledge that “the recent change in attitude toward

mental retardation is the result of frank expressions by parents, revealing feelings and

anxieties which they experience as they go through stages of adjusting to their new

family problem.” (1). Since handbook authors take inspiration from memoirist, I want to

consider the extent to which writers like Buck and Frank introduced ways of valuing,

understanding, and narrating cognitive disability and the familial experience of it. How

and why did parents “reveal” their “feelings and anxieties” in narrative?

Several historians have looked at parent memoirs to uncover the material and

social realities of raising a child with a cognitive disability in the 1950s. James Trent has 194

stressed the popularity of the genre, noting that writers like Pearl S. Buck and John P.

Frank were the most visible examples of “a phenomenon that had begun after World War

II and that continued to grow throughout the 1950s” (236). Parents admitted “the

existence of mentally defective children in their families” to the American public (236).

Janice Brockley has noted that given sheer number of 1950s parent memoirs, no two

confessions were exactly alike, and that collectively the genre opened up different

ideologies and modes of care that families might emulate. Often these approaches were

class contingent. Brockley notes that Lucille Stout, author of I Reclaimed My Child: The

Story of a Family into Which a Retarded Child Was Born, complained that Dale Evans

Rogers, the famed Western and variety show star, depicted a world that was out of reach

for most parents in her popular Angel Unaware.

Despite these differences, scholars have noted that memoirs do reveal common facts of life for families. Allison C. Carey notes a pattern of negotiation, in which parents cultivated relationships with professionals who held the keys to care-taking and educational resources. “Parents did not simply comply with or reject medical expertise or institutional care. Rather, they tried their best to negotiate the medical, institutional, and community service systems to meet the needs of their disabled offspring in a context of limited options” (63).

But the historical work of Carey, Brockley, and Trent also leaves important questions unanswered. I want to consider the memoir as a genre that does not just relay historical facts, but also reveals something about storytelling. Cynthia G. Franklin notes that “critics distinguish memoir from autobiography for its attention, through a historically situated account of the author’s perceptions and experiences, to a social 195

environment, one peopled by individuals with whom the author interacts” (16). In a search to recover the lived experience of disability, scholars have focused predominately on the social environment that parents inhabited. But Franklin also notes that “even granting these definitions that emphasize memoir’s social situatedness and outward gaze, it is nonetheless a genre that highlights the feelings, impressions, and experiences of a singular narrator, and as such, it remains an individualist genre as well as an established and traditionally literary one” (17). In this way, parent memoirs can tell scholars far more than just the facts of the disability experience in bygone times. By studying them, we can unearth storytelling features and, more broadly, discover how parents made sense of cognitive disability for themselves and their audience.

While literary in their style, memoirists had practical aspirations. In the preface of

My Son’s Story, John P. Frank describes his primary motive: “Our experience is so many other people’s experience that perhaps our account of groping our way through may help the next fellow along the same path” (viii). This search was trying, but the lessons learned from reading an account of it could help mitigate pain and produce clarity. Buck and Frank tell stories of “groping our way through,” but how? How did parents represent and narrate their own cognition? How did they arrange and stress particular events of their long journeys? What was the advantage, for authors and readers, of the memoir as a literary space?

Let me focus on the scenes of diagnosis in Pearl S. Buck’s The Child Who Never

Grew (1950) and My Son’s Story (1951). In both stories, diagnosis scenes subordinate emotional experience to the pursuit of the “truth” of cognitive disability. “Truth” may seem an ambiguous construction as it appears in these parent memoirs, but it has to do 196

with “facing the facts” of cognitive disability, as Kirk et al. stressed.7 These facts include the biology of cognitive impairment, its implications for the child and the family, and the rational imperative: cognitive disability is a problem that must be solved, often through medical means. Memoirists subordinate other ways of experiencing and understanding disability to this approach by playing with narrative duration. Certain periods of time during their journeys are condensed in terms of textual space. Other are expanded. In general, memoirists abridge the representation of emotional experience so that more

“direct” ways of understanding disability take precedence.

Subordination plays out in terms of time as well, and we can see this most clearly in Buck’s memoir. The narrator’s present, retrospective point of view colors the events of the past, organizing what would have been at the time disorienting emotional experiences for parents and occluding what would be a much less straightforward relationship to cognitive disability. The book’s diagnosis scene demonstrate how cognitive disability demanded a specific sort of narrative time in parent memoirs. Buck rearranges time in a way that works towards a conservative end: she marshals a present understanding of her child’s disability to annotate the anxieties and events of the past. This may be an example of what Bérubé has called an “intellectual disability chronotope… by which narrative marks its relation to intellectual disability precisely by rendering intellectual disability as a productive and illuminating derangement of ordinary protocols of narrative temporality” (83). Benjy, for example, arranges events and experiences in an associative way that is not chronological. Memoirs like The Child who Never Grew and My Son’s

Story may seem unremarkable compared to the most innovative literary treatments of time inspired by cognitive disability, but they still play with narrative temporality to 197

achieve particular developments in the reader’s understanding of and relation to cognitive disability.

The Child Who Never Grew inaugurated a wave of 50s parent memoirs. A portion of Buck’s book was initially published in The Ladies Home Journal and reprinted in the

May 1950 edition of Reader’s Digest. The Reader’s Digest reprinting included a note encouraging readers to buy the full text of the book for $1. All sales went to “the children at Training School at Vineland New Jersey” (25). At the time of publication, Buck was a member of Vineland’s Board of Directors (Trent 232). The memoir begins in rural China, where Buck worked as a Presbyterian missionary. Her daughter, Carol, looks normal when she is first introduced. A few clues suggest an underlying cognitive disability. Her speech is delayed, but Buck’s fears are calmed by friends who remind her that “children talked at different ages” (13). A few pages prior to the scene of her Carol’s diagnosis,

Buck’s belief that her daughter is normal unravels. As the pair walks through the streets of Shanghai, two American women pass by and mutter, “the kid is nuts.” “From that day,” Buck notes, “I began to shield my child” (19). Buck takes Carol to see a battery of specialists in America, eventually arriving at the Mayo clinic, where Carol is diagnosed as severely retarded. Then the story follows a new trajectory. She struggles to educate

Carol and soon decides to institutionalize her. After several tours, Buck chooses The

Training School at Vineland.8

The scene of Carol’s diagnosis is included in the Reader’s Digest and Ladies

Home Journal selections, suggesting that this moment, which I will now turn to, was critical to the telling of the story. The scene would have provided lessons to parents about managing emotional experience and facing the truth of mental retardation. Two opposing 198

rhetorics, hope and truth, govern Buck’s attention, creating the internal conflict of the book.9 To hope for a cure is to ignore the truth of cognitive disability’s permanence. Just before the scene, Buck reduces the amount of textual space that she devotes to her pursuit of hope, which emerges as a desperate quest told in brief after it has finished:

There is no use in giving the details of the long, sorrowful journey. We crossed

the sea and we went everywhere, to child clinics, to gland specialists, to

psychologists. I know now that it was all no use. There was no hope from the

first—there had never been any. I do not blame those men and women for not

telling me so—not altogether. I suppose some of them knew, but perhaps they

didn’t. At any rate, the end of each conference was to send us to someone else,

perhaps a thousand miles away. (20)

Buck erases her emotional experience from this journey. Different professional resources are condensed into terse elements. The individuals she met along the way are nondescript, referred to only as “those men and women,” “them,” and “they.” More important is Buck’s point of view. She sees her journey in retrospect. Past events matter insofar as they move her (and the reader) to a better understanding of Carol’s condition.

Buck’s orientation to the past prohibits the reader from experiencing her emotional journey as it happened. Consider the short third sentence, which reveals the aspectual repositioning of the narrator: “I know now it was all no use.” The past journey -- which possesses enough scenes, moments, and characters, to be a story -- is condensed into a single pronoun “it.” “It” begins a clause that is subordinated to the main clause that reflects Buck’s present point of view: “I know now.” The next sentence strengthens the dominance of present understanding. Dashes emphasize this effect. The sentence begins 199

by suggesting a specific moment of time via the simple past tense, but after the dash, this

moment grows into a far broader window of time. “There was no hope from the first—

there had never been any.”

Buck’s summary of her journey reminds scholars that authors must make choices

about what experiences to attend to. How much space in the narrative should be given to

a particular event or series of events? Further, the passage reveals that authors make

technical choices about the point of view from which these events are seen. Point of view

involves not just who narrates, but also the point in time from which this speaker narrates.

For Buck, any past feelings of hope are subordinated to a clearer, current understanding

of the truths of cognitive disability. After the short summary of her long journey, Buck

accelerates to its end, the moment of Carol’s diagnosis (20). In this scene, the reader

experiences the way in which parents make sense of the facts of mental retardation. The

diagnosis scene raises important questions about how parents process their child’s

disability and how stories of cognitive disability should be told – at least stories that are

told for the practical purpose of helping “the next fellow” as Frank writes. Which facts deserve attention – from both the reader and the narrator? How do parents manage an array of facts (all of which seem potentially relevant) about their children?

At the very beginning of the diagnosis scene, Buck highlights the bond she has with her child. Her unique syntax allows this bond to overshadow the doctor’s evaluation, the occasion of the scene. “My little girl was very tired and I remember she leaned her head against me and began to cry silently, and I took her upon my lap and held her close as I listened” (21). At this point, the reader likely assumes that Buck listens to her daughter, but the figure and voice of medicine make their entrance: “I can see him still, a 200

tall, rather young man, his eyes gentle and his manner slow as though he did not want

anyone to be hurried or anxious” (21).

The doctor begins to make his diagnosis. Buck emulates his short, factual notes in

her own narration. “All the physical parts were excellent. My child had been born with a

fine body… She had certain remarkable abilities, especially in music. There were signs of

an unusual personality struggling against some sort of handicap. But—the mind was

severely retarded” (210). What readers read is not a medical report, but Buck’s understanding of the facts that the doctor utters from his report. Buck organizes these facts via a process of subordination – a process signaled by the capitalized “But” that begins the final sentence. All other facts rest on this final fact. Severe retardation – that is the truest fact, stealing Buck’s focus from her daughter’s sobs.

Buck becomes dissatisfied with the doctor because he fails to acknowledge the implications of this fact – in her view, the broader truth of her daughter’s disability. “‘Is it hopeless?’ I asked him. Kind man, he could not bear to say that it was. Perhaps he was not really sure. At least he would not say he was sure. ‘I think I would not give up trying,’ was what he finally said” (21).

Buck’s retrospective point of view allows her to evaluate the doctor’s behavior.

Readers can recognize the doctor’s advice as bad advice because Buck subordinates past events to her present understanding of these events. Though communicated in only a few sentences, the doctor’s sidestepping and his perpetuation of wishful thinking rise to the reader’s attention. Buck’s use of modal language – “could,” “perhaps,” “would” – magnify the doctor’s reticence to admit the truth. 201

The next narrative event operates as a corrective to the doctor’s obliqueness. As a narrator, Buck repositions herself in order to cast the past event in the light of present understanding. “Now came the moment for which I shall be grateful as long as I live” she writes (22). A “small, inconspicuous person” with a German accent motions her over.

His voice is “almost harsh” and his eyes, Buck notes, “were sternly upon mine” (22). The

German doctor’s entrance is an extreme narrative intrusion. No details foreshadow his arrival. Lacking any trace of the earlier circuitousness, the German doctor begins a frank conversation with Buck. “‘Did he tell you the child might be cured?’ he demanded.

“‘He—he didn’t say she could not,’ I stammered.” The man launches into a long lecture:

“I tell you madame, the child can never be normal. Do not deceive yourself. You

will wear out your life and beggar your family unless you give up hope and face

the truth. She will never be well—do you hear me? I know – I have seen these

children. Americans are all too soft. I am not soft. It is better to be hard, so that

you can know what to do. This child will be a burden on you all your life. Get

ready to bear that burden. She will never be able to speak properly. She will never

be able to read or write, she will never be more than about four years old, at best.

Prepare yourself, madame! Above all, do not let her absorb you” (22-3).

The German man possibly represents the traditional American respect for German tough, unflinching science; he articulates the “appropriate” response to mental retardation.

Foreseeing Buck’s future struggle and Carol’s delayed developmental trajectory, his message aligns with Buck’s point of view as a narrator. The sharp dashes emphasize the most salient facts about Buck’s situation as well as his own authority to judge it. His command that Buck not deceive herself intimates that parents go through a complex 202

mental process while coming to terms with their child’s disability. His concluding note,

that he speaks the truth, contrasts with the truth-averse, non-committal speech of the

previous doctor.

I am most interested in the way Buck represents her cognition after the doctor’s

commanding statement. Buck’s representation of her response is an act of self-insulation.

The reader does not see her reaction in narration or dialogue. It exists as an aporia. “I don’t know what I said or even if I said anything” (23). This confrontation with truth is an experience that lies beyond language, a void that sucks in whatever readerly response has been elicited. Buck makes a few efforts to communicate with her audience, inviting readers to draw on similar experiences they might have: “I cannot describe my feelings.

Anyone who has been through such moments will know, and those who have not cannot know, whatever words I might use” (23). She offers, almost grudgingly, a metaphor.

“Perhaps the best way to put it is that I felt as though I were bleeding inwardly and desperately” (23). Her condition justifies her decision to institutionalize her child. After these failed attempts at representation, Buck illustrates the value of her exchange with the

German man by gesturing to the totality of both the narrative and her life. She frames this scene as one that sheds light on the myriad events she has chosen to tell and not tell over the course of the memoir. This moment has governed and continues to govern the rest of her lived experience. “It was all a long time ago and yet it will never be over as long as I live. That hour is still with me still.” The potency of this hour lies in its connection with truth. In her exchange with the German man, she “was brought at once face to face with the inevitable” (23). The truth is so profound that even its failed representation allows the narrative to gesture outside of itself. 203

By the end of the memoir, Buck resurrects hope by pointing to scientific achievement. In this sense, hope is reborn not as a thing that ignores reality, but as one that remains faithful to it. Hope lies in the possibility that mental deficiency might be erased: as Buck writes, “it is inevitable that, as young parents in their time experience again the old agony and despair when their children are among those who can never grow, they demand some cause for hope” (59). Citing the cures found for seemingly incurable illnesses, she notes that no one should be “mentally deficient if it can be prevented” (59). Finally she concludes, “hope brings comfort. What has been need not continue to be so. It is too late for some of our children, but if their plight can make people realize how unnecessary much of the tragedy is, their lives, thwarted as they are, will not have been meaningless” (62). Hope lies not with the individual, but with society, and it depends on the advances of medicine.10

The patterns introduced in The Child Who Never Grew – specifically the abridgment of emotional experience, the privileging of “truth,” and the subjugation of the past to the present via point of view —reoccur in other popular parent memoirs published after Buck’s. John P. Frank’s My Son’s Story, for example, follows his family’s journey as they try to solve the mystery of their son Petey’s seizures and delayed development.

Eventually, Petey receives an encephalogram, which reveals that portions of his brain that are dead. Seeking a second opinion, Frank travels to a national specialist who confirms that Petey has cortical atrophy. The second half of the memoir follows the family’s struggle to institutionalize Petey, along with their fight to keep up their own emotional and mental health. A rhetoric of hope organizes the novel. Its second, third, and fourth chapters are respectively titled: “Hope: Flickering,” “Hope: Dying,” “Hope: Dead.” 204

Frank, then a young law professor, strives for clarity in his prose. Midway

through the book, he enumerates a list of the reasons for his decision to institutionalize

Petey. Frank then reflects, “as I put these words down, it sounded pretty cold and

emotionless. It wasn’t. It was a desperate judgment made with a sense that every hope of

life was falling about my ears, and that somehow I had to salvage as much as I could

from the wreckage” (98). His comment reveals an important dynamic about the memoir:

rationality overlays emotion. This dynamic generates from Frank’s ethical imperative to

acknowledge the “truth” of cognitive disability. Characterizing himself as a problem-

solver, he retells his family’s story in a way that demonstrates how the parent might come

to a solution for disability.

Petey’s diagnosis comes in “Hope: Dead.” The diagnosis begins with hesitation.

Dr. Hill “had a hard time getting started on what he wanted to say. ‘Ah Mr. Frank—ah.

Mr. Frank, sometimes in these cases Dr. Graham likes me to make a preliminary

statement for him. It is ah—very difficult” (56). The doctor’s hesitation does little to advance the themes and plot of the novel. Dialogue begins with a stutter, and Dr. Hill’s acknowledgement of “difficulty” is of little use to Frank, who drolly simply affirms the doctor’s acknowledgement, “I said: ‘Yes’” (57). Just like Buck and the German doctor, this pair struggles to find words for cognitive disability. Only after Dr. Hill approaches the issue via medical means does Frank ask meaningful questions about his son. Dr. Hill notes,

“We have read the pictures. There is no doubt about them. A large area of the

brain is dead.”

“What does that mean in terms of his future?” 205

“It means that he has no future. He will continue to have convulsions. He will

never develop fully” (57).

Medicine invites its audience to think in pictures. Images gain a predictive value in this scene, and the events of the novel yet to come become subordinated to medical judgment. The results of the encephalogram, initially viewed as a way to uncover of the truth of the past – John Peter’s fevers, seizures, and slow development – now reveal the unshakeable truth of the future. Certainty lies in images that the reader cannot see but is invited to imagine. This gifted glimpse of the truth – i.e. that John Petey will continue to suffer and remain an inarticulate child – structures the readers’ relationship to him for the remainder of the novel. John Petey sits like a stone. His weight is behind every action that the Franks take, but his interior remains a thing unseen. One might think of the black boxes of Goddard’s hereditary charts. Even though cognitive disability seems impenetrably dense, Frank’s interaction with the doctor transforms it into something that is known and can be dealt with. Conversation outlines the next practical steps Frank should take.

Medical omniscience underscores a key parameter of Petey’s identity: he is ignorant of time. “I looked at John Peter. He seemed to smile back at me. He didn’t know he had no future at all” (57). As a first person narrator, Frank provides little insight into the subjectivities and points of view of other characters, especially Petey. Rather than representing how Petey might perceive the world, Frank provides neutral descriptions of events that advance a plot aimed at finding a practical solution. Dialogue accomplishes this aim. “Doctor what can we do? Isn’t there someone who can do something?” Frank 206

lauds the Doctor’s response: “Dr. Hill thought for a moment. Then he gave me the best advice that could be given to a parent in my position” (58).

This comment signals two changes in the scene that I will refer to as

“displacements.” First, there is a displacement of time. In evaluating Dr. Hill’s advice,

Frank aspectually repositions himself and betrays the fact that he has assumed a long view of time. As narrator, he has access to the future, just as he has the images of the encephalogram. The main verb “gave” is simple past. The doctor’s dialogue is a thing gone-by. But the verb phrase toward the end of the sentence, “could be given,” is conditional, but in a narrative sense, it adopts the perfect aspect “which serves to associate an action with a later action” (Barry 62). The verb phrase derives from Frank’s knowledge of events after they have happened. Though not the main verb phrase, “could be given” is the most important one. It esteems a past action yet to be represented in the narrative, Dr. Hill’s dialogue.

The second displacement is that of voice. Dr. Hill’s dialogue comes to fill the page, squeezing out the narrator’s voice. Dr. Hill’s initial hesitation has vanished, and he speaks directly, without pause. He focuses squarely on the next practical steps that the

Frank family should take. The three large paragraphs of Dr. Hill’s dialogue relay words of warning that are almost identical to those spoken by the German in The Child Who

Never Grew:

Mr. Frank, your impulse is going to be the normal one. You will slowly

absorb what I have told you, and when you have completely absorbed it, you

won’t believe it. You will look at this attractive youngster, and you won’t believe 207

that anything is seriously wrong. More than that, you will suppose that whatever

is the trouble can be cured.

At that point, you may start shopping from doctor to doctor, in hopes of

medical miracle. Don’t. You shouldn’t take the word of Dr. Graham or me on

your son’s case. You should go to some other doctor for confirmation. I don’t

think that we are wrong, but conceivably we might be. What I recommend to you

is that you go to one other doctor, the best you can find. Get him to study the case

thoroughly.

If he agrees with us, then stop. I have seen tragedy after tragedy with

parents who would not believe the truth… I know a family that has a child who is

a Mongolian idiot. They have travelled over the United States and Europe looking

for a cure. They have spent far over ten thousand dollars on medical bills. The

child is a Mongolian idiot still. (58)

The voice of medicine assumes a powerful aspectual and modal position. Dr. Hill foresees the Frank’s disbelief and denial that will soon follow. He outlines a possible ill- advised reactions that Frank may have: “you may start shopping form doctor to doctor.”

And he details the best approach to Frank’s dilemma: he should consult just one more opinion. For Frank, this constellation of future and modal language creates a persuasive type of logic. After Dr. Hill’s monologue, Frank tersely notes that “Dr. Hill made sense”

(59).

Frank does not just praise Dr. Hill’s clear plan, but also erases his own complex cognitive and emotional response to it. This is a result of the first type of displacement in the scene: past experience displaced by Frank’s present understanding of the past. This 208

positioning, in which the author is privy to events of the future, undercuts the emotions

Frank would have experienced in the moment. Frank the narrator hollows out Frank the character. Things that do not relate to the practical plan Dr. Hill has outlined are not worth including in the story. “Because this is Petey’s story, what his father thought and felt in that ten minutes doesn’t really matter. What his father said was: ‘Peter, I don’t know if it’s possible to get you out of this. If it is, we will.’” (60). Petey is not a subjectivity to be explored; he is a problem to be solved. Before making an argument that such a representation is unethical, one must remember that the reader has minimal access to the Frank’s subjectivity. The interior of the father seems like that of the son: impenetrable. This restriction can be seen in the duration of the scene. The “ten minutes’ in which Frank responds to the doctor’s diagnosis are not described in any detail. As a window of time, they merit only a sentence.

A special type of insistence marks Frank’s memoir. He seeks to relay only the most relevant facts in his family’s quest to save Petey. He minimizes the representation of disruptive experiences that do not contribute to his straightforward pursuit of truth.

Distracting elements – various imaginings and impulses -- haunt the narrative even though Frank works to suppress them. After he receives a second opinion about Petey’s condition, Frank admits that his “own nerves... were about shot” (87). He reveals that

“what plagued me most in that time was hallucinations. As I worked at my office in the quiet of the law building late at night, I heard sounds. They would always be the sounds of a baby, crying. At times the sounds would be distant and soft, at times real and close.”

This opens up alternative ways of experiencing cognitive disability, which are stressed by his description of the sounds as “real and close.” But what these hallucinations might 209

mean is unanswered. They are debunked in the middle of the narrative: “This was sheerest fantasy, and no mental telepathy. Once or twice, I called Wisconsin to see how

John Peter was. On both occasions he was sound asleep” (88).11

The authors of both handbooks and memoirs appear to realistically represent the experience of living with and caring for a family member with a cognitive disability, but their stories are shaped by pragmatism. My readings of Kirk et. al, Buck, and Frank, suggest that there are, as Bérubé claims, “crafty procedures that go into cultural representations of artifacts we now take to be ordinary, straightforward, unproblematic representations of the world” (55). If there are limitations to texts that would have seemed “realistic” to readers in the 1950s, then one must ask if fictional texts, which made no claim to represent the lives of real people, provide more insight into disability and storytelling than texts that did.

II - Disabled Storytelling in Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March

Disability is everywhere in The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Wilson Kaiser notes that “Augie meets characters who contrastively interpose some element of sickness, inability, ugliness, or social deviance into Augie’s insouciant adventures” (322).

Disabilities vary in visibility in Bellow’s novel. The reader can spot Einhorn’s disability easily, but others only emerge over time.12 Thea’s disabled “element,” for example, an obsession with taming and capturing wildlife, only emerges as the plot progresses. The major disabilities of Augie’s family – his brother’s idiocy, his mother’s simplemindedness, and his grandmother’s eventual dementia -- are obvious. For Kaiser, the presence of disability has dramatic narrative implications: they make Augie’s social 210

journey clear and interesting. Disability produces an “Einhorn effect” that “acts as a

narrative unconscious that complicates Augie’s endless good fortune, developing plot

tensions where there would otherwise be a dull catalog of the protagonist’s successes”

(322).

Interactions between normalcy and disability structure the novel. “Augie’s fluid movement through society is paralleled and inverted by the disabilities of those closest to

him. These physical and mental impairments put important limits on his adventures”

(322). Augie’s adventures and process of self-discovery are made possible by characters

“who body forth the concrete fact of limitation and function as narrative ballasts to his almost inchoate mobility and flexibility” (323). In this way, the novel only seems to extol the virtue of mobility, fitness, and the American dream.

Kaiser conceptualizes disability in a traditional way. Lennard Davis writes, “The term ‘disability’ as it is commonly and professionally used, is an absolute category without a level or threshold. One is either disabled or not. One cannot be a little disabled any more than one can be a little pregnant” (1). But it seems that most characters in the novel are a little disabled.13 Or better yet, Bellow creates characters above whom hang

“ideas about disability,” to use Bérubé’s phrase. One might say Augie’s narration is

unique because he shuttles back and forth between weakness and fitness.14 He reflects this when he discusses the people who surround him: “In one direction, a few who read whopping books in German or French and knew their physics and botany manuals backwards, readers of Nietzsche and Spengler. In another direction, criminal… I touched all sides and nobody knew where I belonged. I had no good idea of that myself” (113).15

While I find Kaiser’s insights about how disability affects the structure of Bellow’s 211

picaresque to be valuable, I want to put pressure on the fact that Kaiser so neatly cleaves

Augie from other disabled characters. In Kaiser’s reading, he is a character “for whom mobility and social acceptance are essential,” one with “apparently boundless energy” and a “miraculous capacity to move through different social milieus” (322). I will advance a contrary reading: that Bellow does not depict Augie as normal, but as a character whose cognitive normalcy is always in question.16

This issue would have been apparent to certain readers in the 1950s, who saw

Augie’s slow-witted mother and brother as a genetically suggestive comment on his own mental identity. Orville Prescott, for example, began his review of the book by introducing Augie via a description of his family:

He was born in the slums of Chicago and never knew whether his father, who had

deserted his mother, had bothered to marry her. His mother was a weak and

kindly simpleton. His elder brother was a ruthless egoist, and obnoxious

vulgarian. His younger brother was an idiot. And Augie March himself, what was

he? People are going to be arguing about that question for some time to come.

(21)

Orville’s description points to the stigma attached to Augie.17 The March family resembles a eugenic parable: poverty and stupidity lead to infidelity that produces yet more stupidity. Augie finds himself between two egoists, his father and older brother, and two dependents, his mother and younger brother. How does this position bear on Augie’s character? As critics old and new have noted, Augie is “intelligent.” But in the context of a questionable family, which hangs over him throughout the novel. What is he? Are there defects in his cognition too, and thus in the narration? Bérubé writes, “disability in the 212

relation between text and reader need not involve any character with disabilities at all. It can involve ideas about disability, and ideas about the stigma associated with disability,

regardless, of whether any specific character can be pegged with a specific diagnosis”

(19). In other words, one need not say that Augie is an idiot, but only that his family

introduces a stigma that affects him in multiple ways: how he is viewed by other characters in the novel, how he tells his story, and how readers make sense of him.

At least in semantic terms, the lexicon of idiocy is attached to Augie. When he fails to keep count of his register at the newsstand, Simon calls him a “dumbhead” and notes that it is “as if you didn’t have any more brains than Georgie!” (36). Clem calls him

“dim-witted” (47). Later in the novel, after Augie falls from his horse in Mexico, he notes, “in the bandages I seemed to myself to resemble my mother and at times my brother Georgie” (363). He falls for women who are described as “bean-brained” (48) and “deadheads” (145). When Augie enlists in the Merchant Marine, Simon waxes that his brother was “too dumb to make it” to his middle age. He exasperatedly exclaims,

“what a hell of a deal for Ma it is to have only one normal son! And me? It leaves me alone in the world. The idea of making a buck is my intelligent companion, my brother not” (465). It should come as no surprise that Thomas Pughe has written of Augie resembling a literary fool. For Pughe, Augie is “not a ‘pure’ fool,” but a ‘passive resistor’ of civilization” (65). Pughe contends that Bellow uses Augie’s “‘natural’ foolishness as a means of revealing folly in civilized society” (65).

Augie is, then, a new kind of fool: not an idiot per se, but one who sympathizes with disabled characters. The Adventures of Augie March presents competing ways of viewing cognitive disability and intelligence in general. One way is inspired by eugenic 213

thought and suggests that there are great men and weak men.18 The great succeed. The weak do not. This point of view is held by many characters: Grandma Lausch, Einhorn, and Simon. Near the end of the novel, when Bateshaw invites Augie to evade rescue at sea, find an isolated island, and conduct biochemistry experiments, he exclaims: “I say this is a great chance for you, not simply to rise to eminence, not just to give your intellectual powers to the very highest development, but to assist in making a historic contribution to the happiness of mankind” (509). In his view, ability belongs to the strong, the dedicated, and the fortunate. But Augie routinely rejects this worldview. He projects a point of view that gravitates towards the weak and finds value in their images and modes of experience.

The Adventures of Augie March is not the story of the encounter between the normal and the abnormal; it is the story of the abnormal, or thought-to-be abnormal, struggling to free itself from narrative modes that normalcy imposes. This struggle is best seen in the March family’s debate to institutionalize Georgie. Grandma Lausch views

Georgie as an object to be institutionalized. Augie views him as something else. These different perspectives derive from each character’s relation to normalcy. Grandma

Lausch, the calculating, and outspoken head of the March household, projects a conventional attitude towards disability. By contrast, Augie makes sense of disability in unusual ways. His grandmother complains that “his thoughts are about as steady as the way a drunkard pees” (52). Bellow allows these different ways of understanding disability to compete with one another for the reader’s attention. By telling a story through Augie’s disabled point of view, Bellow undermines dominant narrative strategies related to disability like those present in the parent memoirs: the erasure of disabled 214

subjectivities, the creation of plot lines that work toward a solution for disability, and privileging of certain temporal viewpoints that know the “truth” of disability. He introduces new ones in their place: a meandering pattern of focalization that refuses to march in lock step with rationalism, a novel way of managing duration that provides narrative space to events and thoughts other authors would neglect, and a more affective and sympathetic orientation to disability.

As the novel begins, readers learn that Augie takes chances. He knocks on all doors. And this attitude allows him to see reality more clearly. “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining” (3). What Augie might suppress, but does not, is his family’s identity, which is characterized by cognitive disability:

My own parents were not much to me, though I cared for my mother. She was

simple-minded, and what I learned from her was not what she taught, but on the

order of object lessons. She didn’t have much to teach, poor woman. My brothers

and I loved her. I speak for them both; for the elder is safe enough; for the

younger one, Georgie, I have to answer – he was born an idiot – but I’m in no

need to guess for he had a song he sang as he ran dragfooted with his stiff idiot’s

trot, up and down along the curl-wired fence in the backyard:

Georgie, Mahchy, Augie, Simey

Winnie Mahchy, evwy, evwy love Mama.

The amount of textual space devoted to each immediate family member inversely relates to the cognitive ability of each. Simon, the normal brother who rises up the economic and social ladder, is given minimal attention. Excluding Georgie’s song at the end of passage, 215

Simon isn’t even named, but simply referred to as “the elder.” Augie’s description of his mother begins with a three word independent clause: “she was simple-minded.” This clause is conjoined with a slightly more complex clause that communicates the value of

Augie’s mother to him, a fact reinforced by the terse sentence that follows. “She didn’t have much to teach, poor woman.” It is Georgie, not Simon or Mama, who dominates

Augie’s attention as a narrator. Augie establishes his voice as he describes Georgie. “For the younger one, Georgie, I have to answer – he was born an idiot – but I’m in no need to guess, for he had a song as he ran dragfooted with his stiff idiot’s trot, up and down along the curl-wired fence in the backyard.” Augie’s syntax is complex. Four independent clauses, “I have to answer,” “he was born an idiot,” “I’m in no need to guess,” “he had a song” compose the sentence that introduces Georgie. The first and last clauses are connected to dependent elements. A disability aesthetic is at work even in the sentence.

Bellow weaves Augie and Georgie together: “I” and “he” alternate as the subjects of the independent clauses. To return to Augie’s earlier dictum, he cannot “hold down”

Georgie, a marker of his family’s disability, without holding down “the adjoining,” namely, himself.

Bellow mirrors some strategies of the parent memoirists. He magnifies Georgie’s mental retardation by putting a simple sentence in dashes: “he was born an idiot.” The fact of impairment becomes pronounced. But the imagery that follows this claim directs the reader’s attention to lived experience. Augie’s consideration of Georgie allows readers to taste his material world. The long sentence that ends the passage sets up a power relationship between Augie and his idiot brother. At first the reader thinks that

Augie must speak for Georgie, but this idea is cut down by the second half of the 216

sentence. The reader learns that Augie does not intend to fictionalize Georgie’s

perspective, but to repeat what he has sung – a song that expresses the ties that bind the

family.

The passage presents a lesson. The greater degree of mental difference, the more

attention Augie pays. And Augie’s invigorated attention affects the way readers come to

see and understand disability. This perspective contrasts with how disability was seen and

understood in the diagnosis scenes of the parent memoirs. The fact of idiocy –

specifically the fact that Georgie is, diagnostically speaking, an idiot – is overshadowed

by the more captivating details that overshadow and complicate this “fact.” The reader is

moved less by the description that Georgie “was born an idiot” and more by the image of

Georgie in Augie’s mind. In light of this feature, I want to ask three questions: to what

details does Augie’s point of view gravitate? How does Augie’s point of view accommodate other ways of making sense of Georgie? Finally, how do these formal dynamics open up a new understanding of and relationship to disability for readers?

The tension between competing ways of making sense of disability can be seen in

Augie’s narration of the family debate about Georgie’s institutionalization. Just before it,

Augie focuses on a wide window of time and a broad group of people. “It was a bad

winter for everyone–not just for notables but for people oblivious of anything except their

own ups and downs and busy with the limited traffic of their hearts and minds. Kreindl,

say, or Eleanor Klein, or my mother” (50). The weak provide better evidence for the

harshness of winter than the strong, who Augie mentions as “the notables.” Augie’s focus

turns to minds with “limited traffic.” He discusses Kreindl and then provides detailed

description of his mother, which allows readers to see the signs of winter most clearly: 217

Mama was also very nervous; it was something you had to know how to detect

since she didn’t give any of the usual signs. I noticed it from the grimness that

showed through her docility, and the longer rest of her weak green eyes on things

around her, and sometimes the high breasted breathing that didn’t arise from any

exertion or work. She had a dizzying watchfulness from the buzzing of some

omen or other. (50)

It is through these signs of weakness that readers come to see “reality.” While the first independent clause is short, declarative, and utters a fact of reality, the second clause complicates this claim. Readers wouldn’t recognize the fact of Mama’s nervousness if not for Augie’s unique point of view, which can illuminate otherwise invisible clues. His focus, which Grandma Lausch might describe as unsteady, centers on details that become increasingly stylized and vivid, so that readers come to see the material reality of cognitive disability, not the abstract fact.

Augie’s point of view is soon interrupted. The next paragraph begins, “Presently we all knew what was up; the old woman was ready to deliver her stroke… the old woman hit out in her abrupt way and declared it was time we did something about

Georgie, who was growing up” (50). Augie must now manage two ways of understanding disability: 1) his way, which is a respect for and intrigue with cognitive disability that produces vivid imagery and wonders with enthusiasm about what his brother and mother might know, and 2) Grandma Lausch’s way, which ignores embodied cognitive disability, transforming it into an abstract problem to be solved. Grand Lausch’s approach resembles those seen in parent memoirs. Though Augie notes that she “hit out in her abrupt way,” he is slow to present her argument. A normal narrator might immediately 218

turn to it. Indeed, a frank conversation about institutionalization is something that many doctors would want families to have in the 1950s. Augie should attend to his

Grandmother without delay. Instead, his attention veers to the context of the argument, not the content:

There was beef stew on the table, and everybody, the kid included, continued to

eat and wipe up gravy. But I never assumed, like the old woman, that he was an

unwitting topic; not even the poodle was entirely that but knew even when she

became deaf before her death that she was being spoken of. And sometimes

Georgie had Gioconda’s own look and smile when he was being discussed, I

declared he did, a subtle look that passed down his white lashes and cheeks, a sort

of reflex from wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity, something full of comment on

the life of all of us. (50)

An image of Georgie interrupts any summary of Grandma Lausch’s argument. Augie’s thoughts trend to the face of disability, allowing the reader to see an embodied version of the otherwise abstract subject of Grandma Lausch’s speech. The reader comes to see

Georgie in a different way because of Augie’s disabled narrative tendencies. On one level, Georgie comes to be known through physical description: the reader sees his

“white lashes and cheeks.” On another level, he comes to be known through the network of literature, art, and ideas in Augie’s mind. He compares Georgie to the figure of the sublime, the Gioconda (i.e. The Mona Lisa). Doing so allows him to bring the issues of seeing and making sense of what one sees to the forefront. Like the Gioconda, Georgie is viewed by other people. Both are figures to be interpreted, and no one interpretation seems to tell whole story – if there is a story to be told at all. His smile, like the Mona 219

Lisa’s, betrays a “wisdom kept prisoner by incapacity.” His subjectivity cannot be

known, but it nonetheless manages to intrigue the viewer because of the knowledge it

conceals.

But Grandma Lausch considers Georgie’s incapacity and unknowability to be

reasons for disregarding him. Augie views these traits as markers of value. Georgie is not

a simple variable in an equation whose solution is institutionalization, but a figure of

great depth which Augie struggles to know and understand. Like Benjy, Georgie knows

more than most folks think. This transformation of Georgie from dull object to source of

fascination can only be effected via Augie’s disabled narration, a mode in which

disability demands more and more textual space and narratorial attention.19

This moment of attention to Georgie is followed by to Grandma Lausch’s

argument about Georgie. Her view echoes, in exaggerated ways, the pragmatic

approaches to disability seen in the parent memoirs. Similarities are both thematic and

technical. “Sooner or later something had to be done about him, said the old woman. He

was hard to manage, now he was growing so tall and beginning to look like a man. What

would we do if he got it in his head to take hold of some girl, she said, and we had to deal

with the police?” (50). For Grandma Lausch, Georgie is a problem that can only be

solved through institutionalization.

Grandma Lausch comes to occupy a privileged narrative space, one that doctors occupied in The Child who Never Grew and My Son’s Story. She operates in a world of imperative and prediction. Indirect discourse, embedded in Augie’s first person point of view, communicates her vision of Georgie’s past and future. Augie valorizes her long view of time in his own indirect discourse: “This was her rebuke for all our difficulty, 220

disobedience, waywardness, and unmindfulness of our actual condition, and I was the

main cause of it, as I realized very well” (51). The contrast between these views reveals a

key disparity, Augie is stuck in a moment that Grandma Lausch can see beyond. Her

ability to squarely face the facts of cognitive disability justifies her stance. “Not making

her distaste to fine, she said he had reached his development as a man. As something

lewd that had, however, to be faced.” (51). Augie, however, despite his earlier attention

to him, sees Georgie only in the present. The reality of mental difference is most clearly

understood by Grandma Lausch.

Augie hints that her understanding of Georgie is not as objective as she thinks. He

describes her view as “her mixture of reality” (51). Still, she is victorious over Augie in a

narrative sense. Consider the levels of focalization. Augie focalizes Grandma Lausch

who focalizes Georgie (and eventually the two other March boys). Because of Bellow’s

use of free indirect discourse, the reader is often closer to Grandma Lausch’s point of

view of Georgie, than to Augie’s view of Grandma Lausch. In fact, Augie himself the

subject of Grandma Lausch’s focalization. “She breathed that tense “Aha!” to herself

with which she closed a trap in chess. It was always this same thing; we refused to see

where our mistakes were leading, and then the terrible consequences came on… She was

happy when she could act in behalf of this inexorability she was all the time warning us

about” (51). This is technically extraordinary. Augie says that Grandma Lausch has

always been a few moves ahead of the March boys, and her judgment of them displaces

their judgment of each other, specifically Augie’s judgement of Georgie.

As Grandma Lausch and her lengthy arguments about Georgie’s future require more textual space, Georgie himself takes up less. Augie’s meandering, but evocative, 221

way of describing his brother begins to flag. “Georgie sat there with one foot stepping on

the other and ate the gravy in that unconscious, mind-crippled seraph’s way of his by

contrast to this worldly reasoning” (51).20 “Contrast” underscores Bellow’s intentional

development of competing rhetorics of disability. He is concerned with how narrative

elements adjoin, whether they be characters or ways of understanding disability.21 In this instance, the dominance of Grandma Lausch’s focalization of Georgie magnifies his impairment; however, this dominance also limits Augie’s disabled narrative mode, affecting the extent to which he can focus on cognitive disability.

Familial politics become increasingly clear. “Georgie stopped eating and began to moan. ‘You! Quiet!’ said the old woman” (52). Following this exclamation, Augie summarizes his argument. “I spoke up on his side and Mama’s. I said that George hadn’t done wrong yet and that we wanted to keep him with us” (52). Read according to

Gennette, the passage reflects a disparity between the duration of the event and the pseudo-duration of its textual representation. Augie would have said more words than the summary of his speech contains. His retort is an event condensed. Grandma Lausch’s voice receives the opposite treatment. Her position is no longer filtered through indirect discourse, but represented directly in dialogue. Her long monologue takes up the next two paragraphs, composed of 22 sentences. She speculates about the future, pointing to the hypothetical to justify her pragmatic approach to the family’s dilemma.22 She attributes

Augie’s failure to acknowledge her argument to his weakmindedness. At this point, the

reader is closest to Grandma Lausch’s focalization, the way in which she rationalizes

disability. By making this embedded focalization more pronounced, Bellow causes 222

readers lose touch with how Augie makes sense of the world, the initial primary level of

focalization.

Disparities of duration such as this continue after the dinner table scene. Augie

meets with Simon in their bedroom where “he let me make all my accusations and

arguments” (52). Readers learn only that Augie said something, in fact lots of things, as

signified by “all.” But whatever case he makes is not detailed. “Tell it to the marines

kid,” his brother says (52). Simon, for his part, accepts the fact of mental retardation. He

justifies Grandma Lausch’s direct approach by noting that their mother “might as well get

it all at once as in installments.” Simon appears to be the figure of eugenic fitness:

“Simon lay there on the dark iron bedstead brawny and blond. He spoke out strongly.” A

resigned Augie admits, “so there wasn’t much I could do after that” (53). In sum, Georgie

will be institutionalized. Bellow permits defeat by allowing the voice of normalcy to

displace Augie’s viewpoint over the course of the scene.

Up to this point, the family power dynamics have been simple, and events played out in a predictable way. Grandma Lausch suggests that Georgie be institutionalized.

Augie resists. Grandma Lausch overpowers him. These power dynamics are also expressed formally. Grandma Lausch’s embedded focalization, with its particular way of

conceptualizing disability and marshalling time, displaces Augie’s primary level of

focalization. But after the debate is finished, his disabled point of view becomes

pronounced again, and Grandma Lausch’s understanding of disability proves to be false.

If what followed the family debate was a straightforward story of Georgie’s

institutionalization, The Adventures of Augie March would be only of passing interest to

disability studies. Augie would be a distracted narrator who subverts dominant ways of 223

understanding disability to a nominal extent. However, the second half of Georgie’s

institutionalization story is remarkable for the way in which it reverses the narrative and

social dynamics seen in the first half. By the end, Georgie is institutionalized, but the

primary advocate for his institutionalization, Grandma Lausch, becomes crippled. The

second half undoes the meaning-making system that justifies Georgie’s

institutionalization.

Near the end of his conversation with Augie, Simon tersely advises his brother to

“let [Grandma Lausch] think,” because she’s the “boss” of the house. Augie recognizes

Simon’s challenge to the existing family power dynamics, noting that “I couldn’t any longer acknowledge Grandma to be the head of the family, and it was to Simon that some of the old authority became attached” (54). After the first hint of Grandma Lausch’s loss of authority, Augie’s temporal capabilities as a narrator grow. Readers return to Augie’s

focalization of his family. Whereas Grandma Lausch seemed to see outside of the present

moment, Augie now manages to narrate in a speculative space:

I stayed in the room with him rather than go out and face Mama, who, when the

dishes were done and the crumbs shaken off the cloth, would be more lying than

sitting in her chair with the Prussian-spiked bulb emitting its glossy villain light

through the head on the squashlike wens and bubbles and hard-grained paint of

the wall. When she had a grief she didn’t play it with any arts; she took straight

off from her spirit. She made no fuss or noise when she was seen weeping, but in

an extreme and terrible way seemed to be watching out the kitchen window, until

you came close and saw the tear-strengthened color of her green eyes and of her 224

pink face, her gapped mouth; she laid her hair on the wing of the chair sideways,

never direct.” (54)

This description continues for three more sentences. Augie does not marshal the future

like his grandmother has previously done. But his focalization allows readers to see

outside of the simple present. He modally repositions himself as a narrator. In his vision

of what his mother “would” be doing, concrete imagery balances hyperbole. She watches

out the window “in an extreme and terrible” way. This language is stereotypical and

abstract: the cognitively disabled character sees profound truth that others do not. But

Augie is aware of this representational strategy. He notes that as you “came closer,” a

nod to the different levels of focalization of cognitive disability, you “saw the tear-

strengthened color of her green eyes and of her pink face, her gapped mouth.” The best

evidence of his mother’s grief can be seen through this grief as it is embodied.

One can say this representation of Mama is too sentimental. For example, while

the physical details of Mama’s face humanize her, operating as counterweight to her

“extreme and terrible” gaze, the passage still ends in a way that makes disability

superhuman. Mama, Augie notes, “had some original view on doom or recovery” (54).

But this attention to representation obscures the larger narrative function of the scene.

Remember that Augie’s vision of his mother follows a family debate in which his own mental integrity was questioned. Augie’s point of view, over which the shadow of

disability is cast, illuminates cognitive disability more than Grandma Lausch’s did. This

can be seen in the duration of the scenes. More time is spent on (and more textual space

is devoted to) his mother’s gaze out the window. Augie’s narration illustrates that the 225

contours of disability are a matter of focalization. As one “moves closer” to disability, its

image changes.

Grandma Lausch’s ideology of ability is progressively undone.23 When she goes to “carry out her project,” she slips and twists her ankle in the snow (54). The advocate of fitness, she becomes defective. Augie spots her at the bottom of the staircase: “I saw her on one knee in the snowy passage way. Fallen. It was hurtful to see her. She never before had gone out without protection… Once on her feet, though, she wanted no support from me, either because of a big swollen consciousness of sacrifice or maybe a superstitious thought of retribution” (54). Her fall occurs in the physical world, in which Augie has so vividly seen and attended to the weaker members of the March family. So Grandma

Lausch comes to be represented in the same way as Georgie and Mama were. He attends at length to her disability as it is embodied. Grandma Lausch resembles her daughter.

“She wore her everyday clothes and shawl again, so that everything was to be presumed back to normal or almost so; whereas it was actually nerve-silent, and her face, attempting to be steady and calm, was blenched as if she really lost blood, or at least her longtime female composure at the sight of blood” (55). Grandma Lausch ceases to be a disembodied voice, who pushed abstract arguments about what should be done with the weakest, and becomes human.

The extended duration of Augie’s physical description of Grandma Lausch is not the only inversion. The right to use certain temporal evidence is also transferred. In the case of Georgie, Grandma Lausch depended on future possibilities to justify her present decision. Here, Augie gestures to the future in order to suggest the present shift in household power. Augie takes note of Whinney, the family “whose white wool had gone 226

brown around her eyes, took a slow walk with clickety claws, as if she sensed that new

days were pushing out the last of an old regime, the time when counselors and ministers

see the finish of their glory, and Switzers and Praetorian Guards get restless” (55).

Grandma Lausch no longer has a monopoly on the future. Like the minister of the old

regime, her day of glory has finally arrived. Georgie is soon to be institutionalized, but

this victory functions as the force that will entomb her project and herself within the past.

When Grandma Lausch becomes disabled, her earlier “omniscience” is revealed

to be her primal attempt to ensure that she remained at the top of the household hierarchy.

Though Augie accepted her argument, he doubted her motivation:

Everything considered, it was, no matter how sad, wiser to commit the kid. As

Simon said, we would later have had to do it ourselves. But the old lady made of

it something it didn’t necessarily have to be, a test of strength, tactless, a piece of

sultanism; it originated in this we little understood: disappointment, angry

giddiness from self-imposed prideful struggle, weak nearness to death that

impaired her judgement, maybe a sharp utterance of stubborn animal spirit, or

bubble from human enterprise, sinking and discharging blindly from a depth. (58)

Augie’s lengthy reflection on Grandma Lausch’s argument reveals that she has been

something duller, weaker, and more animal than she appeared during the dinner-table debate. Weakness is where reality lies, not in the veneer of power, objectivity, and rationality. The members of the March family are far more similar than readers might have first assumed.

When Georgie is committed, institutionalization seems to be a defeat rather than a victory. Grandma Lausch’s view cognitive disability having failed, she refuses to see 227

Georgie off. “She didn’t have the strength to go and look at the results she had worked

hard to get and then still keep on trying to hold power in her hands. And how was I

supposed to interpret this refusal if not as feebleness and a cracking of organization?”

The normal understanding of cognitive disability CD, which said that the reality of

cognitive disability must addressed directly, cannot “look at the results” that it has

produced. The only way the reader comes to see these results is through Augie’s point of view. At the institution, Georgie

now realized that we would leave him and began to do with his soul, that is, to let

out his moan, worse for us than tears, though many grades below the pitch of

weeping. Then mama slumped down and gave in utterly. It was when she had the

bristles of his special head between her hands and was kissing him that she began

to cry. When I started after a while to draw her away, he tried to follow. I cried

also.” (57).

The March family members are bound by sadness and pain. Georgie bellows with a realization of what’s to come, what “would” happen. This is not a speculative “would” that suggests some alternate possibility. This “would” will happen. Grandma Lausch’s omniscience is absent, but also unneeded. Georgie, Mama, and Augie are able to mourn not just the present moment, but the future. But this new temporal capacity does not dominate the scene. As the paragraph closes, all of the future sadness funnels into the present moment: Georgie “tried to follow,” and Augie admits that he “cried also.”

Augie’s unique narrative capacities – his relentless focalizations on the physical details of his mother and brother and his attention to the present -- have built up to a climax that is 228

poignant and legible. His disabled narrative mode pays off in ways that normal modes would not have.

Four paragraphs of diminishing size close the chapter. The first presents one last vision of Grandma Lausch’s hope for the family. The second represents the reality that has come instead. The third describes the deterioration of the house, and the fourth is one sentence that describes Winnie’s death. These paragraphs divide the modal future speculation from present reality. In the first, Georgie’s centrality to the household appears in the first sentence: “After that we had a diminished family life, as though it were care of

Georgie that had been the main basis of household union and now everything was disturbed. We looked in different directions, and the old woman had outsmarted herself”

(58). Augie mentions Grandma Lausch’s fantasy one last time. Her dream is a eugenic fantasy that reinforces a social Darwinist vision:

Maybe she had started out by dreaming she might have a prodigy in one of us to

manage to fame. Perhaps. The force that directs these things in us higher beings

and brings together lovers to bear the genius that will lead the world a step or two

of the slow march toward its perfection, or find the note that will reach the ear of

the banded multitude and encourage it to take that step, had come across with a

Georgie instead, and with us. (58)

This passage introduces the stuff of eugenic dreams as real. 24 The 54 word nominal phrase that functions as the subject of the last sentence in the passage articulates the glorious vision of eugenic hope. Then a ten word predicate undercuts this dream. Augie’s narration moves back, for one final time, to fantasy and possibility – simulating the point of view of Grandma Lausch. “Nonetheless we could be trained to be decent and 229

gentlemanly, to wear white collars and have clean nails, brushed teeth, table manners, be

brought up to fairly good pattern no matter what office we worked in, store we clerked in,

teller’s cage we reliably counted in—courteous in an elevator, prefatory in asking

directions, courtly to ladies, grim and unanswering to streetwalkers, considerate in

conveyances, and walking in the paths of a grayer, dimmer Castiglione” (58). This is an

indulgent sentence, as a syntactic breakdown would reveal. But it is the last indulgence in

Grandma’s vision.

The next paragraph rips the reader from a vision of a reality that could have been.

“Instead we were getting to be more common and rude, deeper-voiced, hairy.” (58)

Readers see the present. Augie’s narration serves as a corrective to Grandma Lausch’s

speculation. If any Darwinist idea has been realized, it has been degeneration. The boys

March boys have become “hairy and rude.” The force of nature has pulled them

downward, not upward. Grandma Lausch emerges as the Georgie-like avatar. “Passing then into the hall to wash, there, often, we saw the old woman’s small figure and her eyes whitely contemptuous, with a terrible little naked yawn of her gums, suck-cheeked with unspoken comment.” This description recalls the earlier description of Georgie’s appearance, behind which was “something full of comment on the life of all of us.”

Grandma Lausch has become inarticulate, and her ways of making meaning of Georgie’s disability have collapsed. She has become the figure fit for the institution, a potential that is realized later. She has lost her power in the family. Her ideology has backfired.

Detailed description, not abstractions, communicates the fall of the March family. “The house was changed for us; dinkier, darker, smaller, once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance” (58). 230

Augie is not Simon, who sees his path in the world as straight up social and economic hierarchies. Nor is Augie a Georgie or Mama, who seem to see more profound truths (despite their routine objectification). This analysis provides a preliminary answer to Orville’s question, “And Augie March himself, what was he?” It seems that Augie straddles the normal and the abnormal, and this indeterminacy allows Bellow to break from the narrative patterns of popular texts like the parent memoirs. His point of view allows the reader to see different ways of understanding disability in conflict. By the end of the chapter, the reader cannot say exactly what cognitive disability is, what it knows, and how it perceives. But this inability to make perfect sense of cognitive disability is something more real than the false certainty offered by other schemes.

III – Conclusion: The Ethics of Form

As Georgie runs along “the curl-wired fence,” readers remember Benjy running along another fence, gazing through it to the “curling flower spaces” (3). Some similarities and differences are obvious. Georgie and Benjy are idiots. Their names are diminutives. The Sound and the Fury is set in the South, The Adventures of Augie March in the Midwest. In Bellow’s novel, Grandma Lausch fears that Georgie “might take hold of some girl” (50). In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy does exactly that. But there is one huge contrast. Benjy is a narrator. Georgie is not.

Benjy is often thought to mark a high point in the literary treatment of cognitive disability because he is a site of imagination about what idiocy might be, and how cognitive disability, as a human condition, might restructure narrative. As Bérubé notes,

Benjy’s disability is “a fictional disability, not only in the sense that it is a disability that 231

is wholly ‘made up,’ that does not exist in the DSM-5… but also… in the sense that it is a disability that manifests itself as a relation to the structure of fiction” (83). But while The

Adventures of Augie March does not as ambitiously envision what cognitive disability might be, it demonstrates how disability comes to be valued. In “A Chicago of a Novel,”

Martin Amis writes:

Style, of course, is not something grappled to regular prose; it is intrinsic to

perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis,

and so on) but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is

morality. Style judges. No other writer and no other novel make you feel surer about

this. It is as if Bellow were turning himself inside out and letting the observable world

poke and prod him nerve by nerve. Things are not merely described, but registered,

measured, and assessed for the weight with which they bear on your soul. (126)

As this chapter shows, the narrative choices that structure stories of disability in the

1950s are motivated by ideological beliefs about what cognitive disability is. Amis overlooks the ways in which Augie, as a narrator, showcases different ways of registering, measuring, and describing things. The novel sees visions of the world in a sequence. And often these visions come from different viewers. As readers progress from representation to representation, they encounters moral dilemmas and ideological contradictions. Bellow’s narrative creates an ethical experience through these tensions.

So too do parent memoirs, even if their texts work towards seemingly conservative ends. Buck and Frank, it is safe to assume, hope that the reader changes due to reading their memoirs. But endorsing institutionalization and its incumbent ideology of disability is a complex task. It relies on introducing tensions between ways in which 232

cognitive disability might be seen. Buck and Frank and Frank juxtapose their

perspectives as parents with the perspectives of doctors, but more importantly, as they

aspectually and modally reposition themselves, they structure narrative time in ways that

allow their current understanding of disability to take precedence in the text.

As The Adventures of Augie March moves to its conclusion, Augie reflects that

“nobody anyhow can show what he is without a sense of exposure and shame, and can’t

care while preoccupied with this but must appear better and stronger than anyone else,

mad! And meantime feels no real strength in himself, cheats and gets cheated, relies on

cheating but believes abnormally in the strength of the strong. All this time nothing

genuine is allowed to appear and nobody knows what’s real. And that’s disfigured,

degenerate, dark mankind – mere humanity” (401). Stylistically this passage mimics the note of what man is: disfigured, degenerate, and dark. A disability studies critic might be drawn to this final claim, since it claims that at our core, we are all disabled. However,

Augie is just as concerned with the methods by which this ontological truth is obscured: the showing, the appearing, the cheating, the believing. In fact, these methods of obfuscation prevent knowledge of what is: “nobody knows what’s real.” The critic must consider how these processes manifest in narrative just as much as they consider the deepest interior truths of disability that a text might profess to reveal. 233

Chapter Six

Conclusion: Coming to Know Cognitive Disability in Narrative

This dissertation confirms two foundational truths about disability and narrative.

First, the disability narrative is a source of broad formal inspiration for writers. “Different bodies,” Siebers notes, “create new modes of representation” (54). So too do different minds. Cognitively disabled characters project a point of view that attends to the world in unexpected ways. The effect of these innovations constitutes a second, bifurcated truth about disability and narrative: disability illuminates new aspects of human identity and society. Mitchell and Snyder argue that disability is “a potent force that challenges cultural ideals of the ‘normal’ or ‘whole’ body” (50) and thus serves as a “barometer of just how far the social fabric has unraveled” (168). Cognitively disabled characters, by virtue of their inclusion in narrative, can indicate the deepest and least acknowledged flaws of particular ideologies, policies, and attitudes. Bérubé even contends that intellectual disability operates as “a device for exploring the phenomenon of human sociality as such” (21). Its deployment ushers forth a new understanding of social processes in general, not just specific systems or attitudes tied to a given historical moment.

But these confirmations are general. Siebers argues that the study of the social construction of disability must “map as many details about the construction as possible and… track its political, epistemological, and real effects in the world of human beings”

(32). Focusing on written stories of disability, this dissertation’s most explicit claims relate to the epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical effects of cognitive disability as it is 234

constructed in written narrative. Siebers calls for scholars to take the metaphor of construction seriously (33). He contends that beyond simply arguing that disability is a constructed identity, one must delineate blueprints for this process of construction. This dissertation has taken up that challenge, seeking to concretize general truths about disability and narrative. It has illuminated the questions that critics might ask as they map out a blueprint for any construction of disability. What parts (from general cultural attitudes to specific pathological markers) make up the construct? What are their functions? How are they connected? Who installs these features? Which components bear load? Which are the finishes that mask the gaps, spaces, and inner workings of the construct?

More particularly, I have been concerned with the interlocking parts of cognitive disability as representational and narrative constructs deployed frequently in America. I have asked how cognitive disability’s formal potential manifested itself over a particular window of time –from American literary naturalism to early postwar fiction -- a task that had yet to be taken up by American literary criticism. Disability studies critics have opted previously to attend to the to the most obvious examples of innovation, overlooking preceding and succeeding works in which cognitive disability helped to open new formal ground with potent subtlety. This oversight encompassed particular works – like The

Adventures of Augie March – and specific features within works – like the narrator in Of

Mice and Men. The overlooked works were rife with formal innovations that directly related to cognitive disability’s potential as a device for social criticism. Cognitive disability checks conceptions of the “normal” mind and the body, but it also puts the epistemological processes of the normal mind – rationalization, vision, and love -- on 235

display. These extracted processes function as the bedrock for social critique, allowing readers and authors to scrutinize not just what one knows, but how.1

In outlining a spectrum of the ways in which authors use cognitive disability in narrative, this dissertation reminds scholars that the critical view of mental difference in literature and culture has telescoped in recent decades. Cognitive disability need not be compacted into the figure of the idiot or autist. From the late 19th to mid-20th century, cognitive disability functioned as a trope of sweeping characterization. Disability studies has noted the prevalence of physical disability in the canon. Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Ato Quayson both point to Peter L. Hays’s The Limping Hero: Grotesques in

Literature (1971) as a preliminary (albeit ethically imperiled) roadmap of physical disability in American literature.

But Frances King’s “Treatment of the Mentally Retarded Character in Modern

American Fiction” (1970) might be an equally useful vestige of new criticism that could guide the contemporary critic through the dense literary history of cognitive disability.

Hays’s book includes 308 entries for physically disabled characters in world literature since classical times. King’s article includes 177 entries for cognitively disabled characters in American fiction from 1900-1970 alone. Hays classifies these characters according to four types. The cognitively disabled character

falls into levels of competence called in the old vocabulary (now variously

translated by the discipline): the idiot, the lowest level, unable to care for himself

somewhere below two or three years of age; the imbecile, ranging up to an

intellectual level of about six; the moron, now called ‘educable’ because he is, in 236

a very limited way; and the dull normal, who can cope acceptably if the life

situation is not too complicated. (106)

While this dissertation suggests new ways to read the most obviously cognitively

disabled characters, who would fall into the lowest branches of King’s taxonomy, it has

also revealed cognitively disabled characters who were hiding in plain sight. McTeague

and Elmer Cowley, for example, resemble the “dull-normal.” Attending to this upper bound of cognitive disability is critical, since it is just as intimately related to conceptions of intelligence and normalcy as is the more frequently attended to lower bound.

“The old vocabulary” to which King refers is the language and classification system of eugenics. In Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis describes Francis Galton’s creation of statistical “norms” that eugenicists, policy makers, and society used to comprehend and regulate physical, mental, and social deviancy. The notion of the

“average” replaced the older concept of the ideal. Before the emergence of statistical norms, one would aspire to ideals that were not of the world and thus could never be attained. After their advent, one felt a pressure to be on the right side of the bell curve.

Davis notes that Galton’s sociological innovation was intimately connected with ideas of intelligence:

If a trait, say intelligence, is considered by its average, then the majority of people

would determine what intelligence should be – and intelligence would be defined

by the mediocre middle. Galton, wanting to avoid the middling of desired traits,

would prefer to think of intelligence in ranked order. Although high intelligence

in a normal distribution would simply be an extreme, under a ranked system it

would become the highest ranked trait. Galton divided his curve into quartiles, so 237

that he would be able to emphasize a ranked orders of intelligence, as we would

say that someone was in the first quartile of intelligence (low intelligence) or the

fourth quartile (high intelligence). (33)

Galton’s conception of ranked intelligence quartiles left the impression that it was possible to move up an intellectual hierarchy, or at least remain vigilant in protecting a superior location. While this dissertation confirms that American authors and readers were fascinated with the lowest end of the intelligence spectrum, it also reveals that any narrative engagement with hierarchies of cognitive ranking was sophisticated. Authors often wrote around the dividing line between smart and “dumb,” creating characters who could pass as normal.

The idea of “passing as normal” – which I take from Ralph Thomson’s contemporary review of Steinbeck’s fiction (37) -- helps explain a range of characters and narrators who do not seem disabled at first blush. The sharp, seemingly socially mobile Augie March has his own mental quirks. His mind lingers on his brother’s disability in a way that contrasts with his grandmother’s “normal” point of view of disability. But characters need not be the only ones who pass as normal. The omniscient, unassuming voice of the narrator in Of Mice and Men subtly indulges in the representational, narrative, and perceptual habits of cognitive disability. Frank Norris’s narrators dip into the perspectives of cognitive disability, but these dips are skinned with a language of sophistication. Normalcy and disability function as agents that score or smooth textual surfaces so that the reader might feel these surfaces in new ways that are appropriately familiar or unfamiliar. 238

This engagement with disability – which might be described as a restricted, guided, or accommodated engagement – works against Davis’s contention that all novels betray a “hegemony of normalcy” (44). Davis argues that “normalcy must constantly be enforced in public venues (like the novel), must always be creating and bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing, deconstructing images of normalcy and the abnormal” (45). He notes how the language of disability checkers the novel, contending that such “references are almost like tics, appearing at regular intervals” (45).

These references, however, operate as counterweights that esteem normalcy in the reader’s worldview. Any indulgence in a richer understanding of disability is second to the entrenchment of normalcy. He concludes, “normality has to protect itself by looking into the maw of disability and then recovering from its glance” (48).

But as this dissertation suggests, any “recovery” of normalcy that fiction seems to make is enfeebled. Once one acknowledges a broad spectrum of mental difference, the aesthetics and structures of fiction that engage cognitive disability become sites contested by normalcy and disability. In many works only the most basic plot events and tinny thematic notes “resolve” the tensions that disability introduces. These trite resolutions can even be seen in popular writing. Consider the final paragraph of Buck’s The Child Who

Never Grew:

Hope brings comfort. What has been need not forever continue to be so. It is too

late for some of our children, but if their plight can make people realize how

unnecessary much of the tragedy is, their lives, thwarted as they are, will not have

been meaningless.

Again, I speak as one who knows. 239

Buck’s closing claims come after a brisk review of the recent scientific discoveries about

cognitive impairment. “We know, too, some of the reasons for injury to the brain, both

prenatal and postnatal, but we do not known enough” (61). A decreased blood supply to

the brain, she notes, might be responsible for certain cognitive disabilities. Her focus then

turns to sociological truths regarding the amount of educable “mentally deficient

children,” and she points to “dangerously overcrowded institutions.” But readers would

be remiss to think that such facts are the sum total that Buck claims to possess in the

book’s final sentence. Her review of positivistic knowledge is an ancillary moment in the

narrative, gesturing toward a biological and social cure for disability. The Child Who

Never Grew, at its core, aims to represent and narrate the way in which one can make

sense of cognitive disability in more comprehensive ways.

Buck’s final sentence directs the reader’s attention back to more significant

moments of knowledge making. It invites readers to ask how Buck has become the “one

who knows.” This question has as much to do with epistemology as with ontology. For

Buck, coming to know disability is a process of accommodation.2 Room must be made

for disability within one’s worldview. Buck highlights the inability of two fathers to

make such room just before her closing review of scientific and social developments. The

well-known and well-off father refuses to visit his son in the institution. Imitating his disbelief, Buck exclaims, “his son is an imbecile—his son!” (58). But this reaction is an epistemological lesson, which Buck thoroughly describes in the lines that follow:

So what I would say to parents is something I have learned through the years and

it took me long to learn it, and I am still learning. When your little child is born to

you not whole and sound as you had hoped, but warped and defective in body or 240

mind or perhaps both, remember that this is your child. Remember, too, that the

child has his right to life, whatever that life may be, and he has the right to

happiness, which you must find for him. Be proud of your child, accept him as he

is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child

has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now

suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him. Lift up your head and go your

appointed way.

I speak as one who knows. (59)

Buck insists that the ontological certainty and epistemological efficacy of normalcy, embodied by the speakers and viewers who “know no better,” can never be recovered after coming to terms with disability. The child “has meaning” for the normal parent, and this meaning accrues, contradicts, and evolves – a fact represented in the series of clauses and modifiers that compose the sentences in the passage. The parent’s approach to this meaning is marked by a tension between paternalism and a relationship that is less hierarchal, rooted in a mode of co-exploration. Parents will not only find joy in fulfilling the life for the disabled child, but also with him. The parent should not aspire to fully explain or resolve disability. To speak as “one who knows” is to be one who “is still learning.”3 One must treat knowledge as tenuous rather than circumscribe it within a temporal boundary. Truth is always in the process of coming to be known. Buck bestows this atemporal attitude on readers as she encourages them to “lift your head and go your appointed way.” This way, of course, is a way forward into a future that burgeons with discoveries and insights. Normalcy, even in Buck’s otherwise conservative text, cannot recover from its glance. Recovery exists only as an ideal exposed. 241

In this sense, this dissertation sheds light on the components, ambitions, and

delusions of normalcy – as any study of disability ought to do. Most importantly, it

reveals the anxieties of that motivated the enforcing of normalcy. Many critics have noted

that disability, in person or in writing, reminds the normal viewer of the finitudes of the

body. “For better or worse, disability often comes to stand for the precariousness of the

human condition, for the fact that individual human beings are susceptible to change,

decline over time, and die” (Siebers 5). Siebers’ formulation relies on a chronological

understanding of the human condition. All matter decays and decay occurs over time.

However, cognitive disability disrupts the temporal parameters of this formula. While

cognitive disability often brings to light anxieties of the future state of an individual’s

mind – that it might dull, snap, or forget – it also conjures anxieties about the present

state of what a normal individual’s mental constitution might be. The cognitively

disabled person’s presence, especially its skillful representation in narrative, does more

than suggest that some lapse in cognitive or bodily function might be on the horizon: it

suggests that such problems might already exist in the so-called normal person, and it casts the doubt that dysfunction can be sufficiently detected.

Negative traits, like inarticulacy and or a lack of intelligence, and positive traits, like sensory sharpness, might already be lurking underneath the seemingly normal person. At the broadest level, the cognitively disabled subject reveals a quality or mode of being that may have undergirded human experience all along. The evidence of this possibility can be obvious. Georgie and Benjy share the same blood as their siblings after all. But the evidence can also be less obvious. Literature transforms the qualities of cognitive disability into formal structures that overlay traditional narrative modes. The 242

narrator’s repetitions in Of Mice and Men, Augie’s distracted focus, Bly’s stares that seem so authentically mad: all of these signal strong, though perhaps under recognized, connections between cognitive disability and normalcy.

Consider the final paragraph of Benjy’s section of The Sound and the Fury during which readers come to vividly see how cognitive disability might perceive the world.

Benjy connects memory to present experience via a sense of smell. His narration then catapults into synesthetic experience where senses perceive what they shouldn’t.

She smelled like trees. In the corner it was dark, but I could see the window. I

squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn’t see it, but my hands saw it, and I

could hear it getting night, and my hands saw the slipper but I couldn’t see

myself, but my hands could see the slipper, and I squatted there, hearing it get

dark. (46)

Touch sees. Darkness is heard. Repetition reinforces synesthesia, and this unique sensory experience instantiates social relationships.4 Caddy smelled like trees. This sensation preserves Caddy’s presence despite her absence. Benjy’s sees her slipper with his hands.

Beyond its phenomenological intrigue, the passage uncoils, in a stylistic sense, the notion of simplicity. Synesthetic imagery is structured according to a syntax that appears simple. The first sentence is simple-tensed and short. The second sentence is a compound one and introduces a modal verb, “could.” The third sentence uses a simple tensed verb before introducing a notion of continuity by virtue of the present participle “holding.”

And the final sentence unspools Benjy’s sensory experience. It is composed of seven independent clauses that collectively reinforce what Benjy can and cannot see. The seeming simplicity of the first sentence gives way to a complex phenomenological and 243

affective experience expressed in the third. For Benjy, sensory impression snowballs

before culminating in an intense moment marked by a tension between connection and

loss: his synesthetic experience instantiates the lost connection with his sister. It refutes

his isolation. One might call this structure a serial synesthetic-social syntax, or simply serial syntax.

How might this way of ordering the world formally reemerge in the narration of the sharpest Compson boy? Quentin has a lot more words to say than his brother, but

Benjy’s synesthesia will bleed into the elder brother’s narrative, and this sensory blurring, expressed in an increasingly sophisticated syntax, leads up to an intense moment of social connection. Near the end of his section, as he travels towards the spot of his suicide,

Quentin observes:

This was where I saw the river for the last time this morning, about here. I could

feel the water beyond the twilight, smell. When it bloomed in the spring and it

rained the smell was everywhere you didn’t notice it so much at other times but

when it rained the smell began to come into the house at twilight either it would

rain more at twilight or there was something in the light itself but it always

smelled strongest then until I would lie in bed thinking when will it stop when

will it stop. The draft in the door smelled of water, a damp steady breath.

Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the

honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolize night and

unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor

of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I

had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse 244

mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance

they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

(107-8)

Benjy’s synesthesia migrates into his brother’s point of view. The time of this passage,

twilight, matches the time of the final event in Benjy’s narrative. For Quentin, twilight ushers in a new way of sensory experience. The river becomes the primary sensory object. It is first experienced conventionally, via sight. However, this stimulus induces overlapping sensory experiences, exemplified by the sentence, “I could feel the water beyond the twilight, smell.” Then the narrative introduces a serialized synesthetic social syntax. Synesthetic perception swells as sensory modes of perception reconstitute each other – Quentin suggests that “there might have been something in the light itself” that made the water “smell strongest.” Quentin adopts Benjy’s synesthetic way of experience, and the totality of his social and emotional life, all he has done and all he has felt, takes

“visible form.” Unlike Benjy who looks outward, Quentin looks inward, and here he uses the subject “I” eight times with increasing frequency towards the end of the passage. The passage concludes with a thought that dives into his interior – “I was I was not who was not was not who.” Whereas Benjy affirms a social existence, Quentin negates an individual one. This isolation is redressed in the closing sentences of the next paragraph.

Sensory imagery connects the brothers through the motif of the mirror. “I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon the tideflats like pieces of broken mirror then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.” Quentin at last states the connection that has been building in the aesthetic offing. “Benjamin the child of. How he 245

used to sit before that mirror. Refuge unfailing in which conflict tempered silenced reconciled. Benjamin the child of mine old age held hostage into Egypt. O Benjamin”

(108).

Moments of connection like this challenge the way that some disability studies critics might order, read, and privilege different parts of narratives. For example, Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis posits that the conclusion of a story of disability “rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some way” via “obliteration of the difference through a ‘cure,’ the rescue of the despised object from social censure, the extermination of the deviant as a purification of the social body, or the revaluation of an alternative mode of being” (53-4). However, this theorization has two limitations. First is its linearity, which extinguishes a recursive, retrospective reading and/or storytelling experience. Second is the ambiguity of the alluded actants. The endings that Mitchell and

Snyder outline are common to be sure, but their description of narrative structure devotes minimal attention to what or who is doing the “obliterating, exterminating, reevaluating.”

Mitchell and Snyder might contend that narrative is doing these things since in their view, “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess” (53). But this argument does not hold when applied to some of the most widely read narratives of cognitive disability in American literature.

Few would argue that The Adventures of Augie March attempts to reign in the excess of ideas, details, sensations that might destabilize narrative order. It’s a text that accommodates competing understandings of mental difference and seeks expose the limitations of narratives that might seek to order, explain, or obliterate Georgie’s cognitive disability. Yes, Georgie is institutionalized. But this is an event deliberated by 246

multiple parties, and the narrator’s representation of these deliberations expose normalcy’s desire to contain the disabled subject. Plot itself can be structured to introduce a doubt regarding the responsible party for a particular event. For example, George kills

Lennie, but he does so because of the pressure exerted by the other dull ranch hands. The issue of who is responsible for Lennie’s death is the novella’s core ethical issue. Does narrative itself then exterminate? Such a belief would be at odds with its most striking technical strategies, specifically the way in which echolalia and repetition take on a formal life in the voice and focalization of the narrator. Perhaps Steinbeck is culpable for extermination? This argument only succeeds if one ignores Steinbeck’s attention to mental difference and takes Lennie to be the only disabled character in the story. To say that the novella culminates in the “reevaluation of a new way of being,” Mitchell and

Snyder’s most generous description of the narrative ends for disability, seems an understatement. The novella implements and embeds an alternative way of being in its aesthetic and narrative practices.

One needs to be careful about generalizing from the examples surveyed in this dissertation. Michael Bérubé notes that his recent book puts forth not an “encyclopedic typology” but offers an “affirmation of radical individuation” (49). Just as no two people with a particular cognitive disability are the same, no two cognitively disabled characters serve the same narrative function or have the same aesthetic effect.5 Bérubé offers scholars a safety net that protects them from falling into essentialism. Critics need not feel pressure to proclaim what disability generally is. While scholars may find relief in this stance (which allows disability to be multifarious, polysemous, and liberated), such a 247

position runs the risk of only communicating tautological truths: no disabled characters are the same because all disabled characters are different.

I have advanced a more specific heuristic that does not seek to capture universal forms or functions of disabled characters, but rather seeks to explain the ways in which narrative determines the reader’s understanding of and engagement with these characters and disability more generally. Such a heuristic encourages the critic to subordinate claims about the identity of the character or reader to claims about the relationship between these two parties. To fully understand the narrative, aesthetic, and ethical value of cognitive disability in writing, critics should consider three specific questions that are elaborated below:

• How certain is the reader of cognitive disability? Can the reader easily identify a

particular characteristic disables the character? Do such characteristics emerge

embossed and emboldened in the text? Or do they sit subscripted and shadowed?

Is the certainty or uncertainty of this characteristic determined by the reader’s

own historical context? Does this trait seem unduly foregrounded or

marginalized, and what are the implications of this positioning? Goddard’s black

boxes and the children in Buck’s and Frank’s memoirs do a fantastic job

identifying disability, but they fail to clarify what disability is or might be. Other

narratives of disability imperil the certainty of any identification. They introduce

ways of seeing and narrating disability that are tenuous, that produce conflicting

ontological insights, and that withhold what might or can be known about

disability from readers. 248

• Where does the reader see cognitive disability? In whom does this disability seem

to inhere? This can be a question of character. A disabled characteristic might

exist simultaneously within characters or move between them. But the question,

as suggested throughout this dissertation, might also be rephrased as, “In what

does disability inhere?” Do the habits, traits, and modes of disability move outside

of character and into other storytelling features like narration, setting, etc.? Such

moves seem to be the primary technical way for authors to undermine the

hegemony of normalcy in fiction.

• How does the reader’s engagement with cognitive disability change over time?

Does the reader come to experience cognitive disability in a more intimate way as

the narrative progresses? Benjy’s object attention, for example, builds up to a

flurry of signs towards the end of his section, creating a challenging but important

interpretive moment for the reader. Other narrators, like the narrator in Norris’s

“The Wife of Chino,” ease readers into how a cognitively disabled mind might

see the world only to pull them away from this potentiality and reinstate normal

modes of perception by the narrative’s end.

The value of this interpretive framework lies in its attention to the effects that disability representation has on readers. It better privileges what Ato Quayson calls “the final dimension of aesthetic nervousness,” namely the relationship between “the reader and the text” (15). For Quayson, aesthetic nervousness “is seen when the dominant protocols of representation within the literary text are short-circuited in relation to disability.” The

“primary level” of this short-circuiting is the “interaction between a disabled and nondisabled character” (15). The second level involves “tensions refracted across other 249

levels of the text” including symbolism, narrative structure, and plot. The final level of aesthetic nervousness is that which exists between the reader and the text, involving the reader’s identification and alignment with the character, narrator, and other narrative features. The framework that I propose inverts Quayson’s structure, making the reader’s engagement and understanding of cognitive disability in narrative the primary concern of the critic. The framework relies on the notion that tensions between characters, for example, are a thing perceived and thus it attends to how readers come to know disability. It directs the critic’s attention to the limitations of the reader, and encourages him or her to consider how readers might need to be accommodated, stimulated, and treated as they explore mental difference. Further, the framework pushes critics to consider how the narrative text, as a formal space, constructs and responds to these readerly limitations. Such an approach helps critics come to terms with the “shutting down” or “closing off” of narratives of disability. The goal of the framework is not to exonerate or redeem problematic representations of disability, but to direct critics to the possible productive effects of strategic authorial efforts to write in and write out disability in a given text.

This framework also helps explains the persistence of diagnostic approaches to literature. Bérubé argues that disability studies “limits itself unnecessarily, as a new branch of criticism, whenever it confines itself to determining the disability status of individual characters” (20). In a basic sense, Bérubé is right. Critics should not read “a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other” (20). But critics should attend to how and why narratives and representations of disability invite the act of scientific or popular diagnosis. Literary works structure the reader’s process of determining the 250

disability status of their characters, and this is a feature of narrative that merits inquiry.

Bérubé argues that “the realization that character X has Y disability” often “stands in

place of the more productive realization that character X does Y because of Z” (21). For

Bérubé this latter analytical frame corresponds more directly to literary form and

function. The equation has a protagonist who does something for some particular reason.

But it notably erases the reader’s relationship to the character, and it ignores how authors

might frame particular notions of disability as explanatory screens through which the

reader understands plot, character, and form.

The fact that many critics seem to have read literary texts hand in hand with

psychological diagnostic manuals evidences that there is a diagnostic frame at play in the

rendering of any character. This frame may be derived in detail from psychological

discourses, or it may simply derived from popular conceptions of disability. There are

several good reasons to pay attention to this frame. First, illuminating how a screen of

diagnostic language emerges within a particular text clarifies the ideologies at stake and

the ways in which a text conjures beliefs about what disability is. But more importantly,

detailing a frame allows the critic to then consider why the author might have conjured

this frame in the first place. This dissertation suggests that authors have disparate reasons

for creating characters that might seem slow-witted, backward, imbecilic, idiotic, epileptic, mentally retarded, or autistic. For many authors, there is aesthetic and narrative utility in being felicitous to the popular or scientific understanding of a particular diagnosis or diagnostic criteria. An author might lure readers into adopting definitions of disability so to facilitate a moment later on when these definitions are overturned. Critics should not just seek to identify what disability a character has. They should seek to 251

explore the mechanics, efficacy, and implications of the historical and contemporary

reader’s identification of and with disability.

Diagnosing characters with present disabilities can be better understood in light of the interpretive framework I propose. Particular characteristics of cognitive disability

have remained more certain over time – object obsession, psychomotor stimming,

echolalia, etc. Autism is not so divorced from idiocy in terms of these pathological

criteria. Each diagnostic category reveals a similar constellation of common traits. The

same taxonomic impulses – the gradation of functionality, the presence of some atypical

trait, or a general inexplicability – undergird both. One should not be too quick to dismiss

these “anachronistic” readings, if only because of their frequency in criticism, the

classroom, and more popular forums. In trying to diagnose characters, we would be better

off making the lineage of the label transparent and asking why some particular trait,

behavior, or frustration has resonated. Examining how and why texts invite contemporary

labels is a task worth taking on.

Though necessarily limited in scope, this dissertation should push readers to

consider a few simple things. There is a rich tradition in American literary history that

exposes the anxieties surrounding mental difference and draws on what cognitive

disability is thought to be for narrative innovation. It should cause readers to wonder how

they managed to inhabit, enjoy, understand, or be frustrated by so many disabled

narratives – the narrators and focal characters of which may have initially seemed

normal. It should also push readers who may feel removed from disability experience to

consider the allure and effect of subtle textual movements in disabled ways of seeing the

world. It should push all readers to wonder why cognitive disability still is so often 252

understood as a problem of knowledge – when the most salient features of “intellectual” disabilities seem to have to do with perception, socialization, energy, and volition. It should help readers come to terms with and appreciate the ways in which cognitive disability undermines the certainty of the ontological claims made about it. Any good reader should remain “dumb” on the subject of what cognitive disability precisely is.

Instead they should think about what mental difference might be, what it can do for narrative, and what it suggests about being human. Such potentialities make for compelling stories.

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Endnotes

Introduction

1 Readers have new pleasures and challenges that might gratify their mind-reading

abilities. For a detailed analysis of how disability poses problems for Theory of Mind and

cognitive approaches to literature, see Melanie Yergeau’s article “Clinically Significant

Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind.”

2 The back cover of Tammet’s book informs readers, “fascinating and inspiring, Born on

a Blue Day explores what it’s like to be special and gives us insight into what makes us

all human – our minds.” Because of its cognitive novelty, the autistic mind seems to be

the holy grail of the different minds we might encounter in literature. (I use “we” tongue-

in-cheek here in order to emulate the pronouns of the dust jacket that carve an us/them

divide between the normal and the disabled).

3 This concern persisted well into the 20th century. Steven Noll notes that eugenicists in

the South cited the deterrence of crime and general immorality as one of the primary

reasons for investing in institutions for mental defectives (8).

4 Quayson largely concerns himself with these back and forth movements in literary texts.

For example, in the case of Toni Morrison’s fiction, he argues that “disability takes on the role of a polyvalent fulcrum within a larger discursive configuration, allowing a number of shifts and transformations in the very texture of the writing itself” (87).

5 See Bérubé’s The Secret Life of Stories (28-9).

6 See Leila Zenderland’s Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of

American Intelligence Testing.

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7 In this regard, I have ethical motivations for my choice. In Disability Theory, Siebers

asks, “if respect depends on the possession of rationality, is there a minimal rationality

below which no respect for human beings should be given?” (90). A static scale of

rationality is a problem for Siebers, and to remedy this, he contends that “the concept of the human, then, does not involve a fixed definition but must be a work in progress, just as human beings should always be works in progress” (90). In using the term “cognitive disability,” this dissertation embraces a more fluid understanding of the human mind and how it makes knowledge. Further, by adopting the term, I recognize that writers of all types wrestled and took inspiration from more unruly conceptions of the mind.

8 Like Ireland, Maudsley, a British psychologist, is liberally quoted and cited in American

Martin Barr’s Mental Defectives.

9 Texts that sought to introduce disability studies to the academy largely focused on

physical and sensory disability. In Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and

Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities no article

focuses on cognitive disability.

10 The projects of new criticism yielded certain topographical advantages for Disability

Studies critics. Quayson’s typology of disability representations labels Peter L. Hays’s

The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature (1971) as its ambitious, but ethically

fraught, predecessor. Hays, as Quayson notes, sought “to provide a model by which a

vast range of literary texts might be read as illustrating recurrent tropes across history”

(33).

11 Earlier foundational theorists mention the field’s bias, though these authors’ critiques are not as pointed as Osteen’s. In Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and Dependencies of

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Discourse (2000), David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder admit that “there have also been hierarchies within our own communities… individuals with physical disabilities have historically disassociated themselves from those who have intellectual disabilities”

(3).

12 Cynthia Lewicki-Wilson contends that such a bias undergirded not only disability studies, but scholarly inquiry writ-large. “Each assumption of liberal subjectivity – autonomy, intention… intelligence… language -- is brought to crisis when mentally disabled people have moved from having little or no language toward communicating complexly using collaborative practices” (160).

13 In her final chapter, she notes that great writers “Great writers discovered… that we must reckon with the mental defective as one of those many things in heaven and earth that are not dealt with by some philosophers, and yet that make a great difference to the community and to social progress” (169).

14 In The Case for Sterilization, Leon F. Whitney contends that “half of our adult population is below the mental age of 13.2 —i.e., the age of a normal bright boy of thirteen. It was a distressing revelation, and its bearing on our present interest is that, if we put our lower limit of desirability at thirteen mental age, we should be considering the sterilization of half our fellow-countrymen!” (146).

15 In “The Care and Treatment of Mental Defectives” MacMurchy outlines nine response strategies for the medical community, the second of which is “Help to educate the general public, especially judges, lawyers, clergymen, teachers, and other leaders of public opinion about this question” (895). Literature seems to be one of the best pedagogical devices to accomplish this task.

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16 Steven Noll has observed how distinctions between classes of disability (and even

between disability and normalcy) were constantly blurred as the early 20th century

psychiatrists sought to identify high-performing mental defectives like “morons” and

“borderline normals” (2). James Trent has noted how writers in the 1950s unabashedly

“confessed to the existence” of their mentally retarded children, an action that contrasted the tight-lipped silence of parents in decades past (238).

17 It’s worth making a note on the language I use to describe this historical referent. In

this dissertation, I have chosen to limit my use of quotation marks when discussing the

idiot as a figure in literary, scientific, and cultural history. The lack of quotation marks is

not meant to authorize the ethical problems inherent within the term. “Idiot” and its

related labels are not just words, but concepts, images, and devices. When I use quotation

marks around these words, I mean to draw attention to them as historically situated

labels.

Chapter One

1 James Trent notes that Barr was one of the first institution superintendents to call for

total-institutionalization. He led political campaigns to fund these initiatives, promising

the American public self-sustaining and “productive” communities of mental defectives

(143).

2 Often DS criticism skips the period or steps very lightly into it. David T. Mitchell and

Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis jumps from Melville to modernism. In

Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson only briefly analyzes Rebecca

Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills. Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness limits its

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discussion of American literature to Toni Morrison before exploring international authors like J.M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka.

3 DS scholars have reconceptualized other literary periods in light of cognitive disability: why not this one? In “Autism and Modernism: A Genealogical Exploration,” Patrick

McDonagh argues that modernist conceptions of the self made the creation and recognition of autism possible. While authors explored stream of consciousness narration, psychologists wrote foundational texts about patients who could not see or interact with the world outside of themselves. Literature set the stage for a new, isolated “form of being” -- a form of being that psychologists like Kanner and Asperger quickly pathologized.

4 Barr stresses that his book “address[es] itself primarily to anxious parents and to earnest teachers, rather than to the scientist” (vii). For scientists and laymen alike, institutions provided answers to questions of mental difference. Barr reflects that the Adenberg, a private German institution for idiots and imbeciles founded in the mid-nineteenth century was “truly a beacon-light set upon a hill” (37).

5 Creating a more detailed, and thus more accurate, classification system was an international initiative. William W. Ireland, a Scot, outlines ten classes of cognitive disability in Idiocy and Imbecility. In his discussion of the etymology of idiocy, Barr notes the exotic classes of mental difference that have emerged throughout the world.

Scotland had its “daft bairns,” its innocent, and its “feckless”; France had its idiotes, imbeciles, les enfants du bon Dieu, les enfants arrieres, and demence innee (17).

6 Mental defect causes the pauperism of a young, female, idiotic Juke. “Disease in one generation” produces “cerebral atrophy in the next” (32). This disease manifests within

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her elder sister who “is tainted so deeply with constitutional syphilis that she is weak-

minded and blind” (32).

7 Barr’s critique reaches a fever pitch when he describes one such sensational story, “A

Wonderful Surgical Operation," published in Harper’s: “A very pretty romance, but

absolutely misleading, worthless, and untrue!” (186).

8 For Ireland, Dicken’s realistic representations marked a turning point in British literary

history, “In most other novelists, the idiot seems to play the part of the jester in the

middle ages, saying droll things, and repeating scraps of poetry” (283).

9 When describing “idiocy by deprivation,” Ireland uses passages from Dickens to

establish the pathos of cognitive disability. “It was really awful,” an excerpted Dickens’

begins, “to see how the sensation of the music fluttered and stirred the locked-up soul

within her” (232).

10 In this way, cognitive disability functions as a space in which normalcy changes and

operates in similar fashion as mental illnesses thought to affect intelligent and normal

people. In American Nervousness, Tom Lutz writes that one such illness, neurasthenia,

“can provide a model... for the way such an overdetermined discourse functions in the management of cultural change in a pluralistic society, the way it functions as a 'cultural space' in which individuals negotiate their personal relations to change, and at times their relations to stability” (20).

11 This move departs from recent discussions of circuitry in McTeague that differ from

Chase’s circuit considerably. In his 2015 article, “Entropy in the Circuits: McTeague’s

Apocalyptic Posthumanism” Erik Larsen argues that the novel’s conclusion signals

Norris’s posthuman commitment: McTeague’s death in the desert is the culmination of

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events that as a whole “challenge human exceptionalism and autonomy” (510). Entropy,

the driving force of McTeague’s destruction, “operates through and upon something

resembling a circuit – an organization meant productively to diversify and sustain an

order of forces through a codified system of channels” (515). As the novel progress key

social relationships “short circuit” (516). In Larsen’s reading, such short circuiting point

to a looming degenerative fate. In my reading, these short circuits point to limitations of

codified hierarchies of cognition and thus human identity.

12 In this way, McTeague exemplifies Lennard Davis’s ethic of dismodernism:

“Impairment is the rule, and normalcy is the fantasy” (31).

13 In my reading of McTeague, I rely on Ireland’s On Idiocy and Imbecility (1877). James

Trent writes that Ireland, a British superintendent, “stressed the pathology of idiocy,” and

his work gave the superintendents of American institutions “an even firmer medical basis

upon which to carry on their work” (37).

14 Ireland writes, “A large number of idiots are deficient in taste; some of them seem to

want the sense altogether… It is only the more intelligent class of idiots who notice any

difference in the flavor of articles of food. They generally eat what is put in front of

them” (259).

15 Ireland writes that for certain idiots, “the desire for food is very keen and difficult to

satisfy” (258).

16 Ireland elaborates on the unique sensory dispositions and limitations of cognitive

disability: “The sense of touch is often imperfect, but, from mental dullness, it is difficult

to ascertain the nature and degree of its imperfection” (254). He notes that “it is certain that idiots often endure with indifference blows and other injuries which would be very

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painful to an ordinary person” (255). Insensitivity to temperature is a key marker of stalled cognitive development: “We read of idiots sleeping without cover in the open air, as if they were insensible to cold; others appear to be indifferent to warmth, not drawing near the fire in cold weather” (255).

17 Ireland’s pathology anticipates this label, framing the speed of development and thought in its initial definitions of idiocy and imbecility: “Idiocy bears much resemblance to the ordinary condition of infancy. In idiots the mental state may be said to be fixed in the infantile state, or very slowly to move towards the efficiency and maturity of the motor or reasoning powers which characterize the normal adult” (1-2).

18 Ireland writes that “In the first degree of imbecility, speech is free and easy; in the second degree, it is less easy, and the vocabulary smaller. In the first degree of idiocy proper, the idiot can only use short words and phrases; the idiots of the second grade only utter monosyllables or cries; in the third grade, they neither use speech, nor phrases, nor words, nor monosyllables” (262-3).Though closer to an imbecile than an idiot according to Ireland’s pathology, McTeague’s dialogue gestures towards the severely restricted speech of cognitive aberrancy.

19 Norris’s figuration of the relationship between madness and idiocy is not surprising.

Ireland suggests how the two might be easily confused. “Sometimes, in asylums, where the history is lost, the chronic dement who has begun to stagger in his gait might be confounded with the grown-up idiot, who, with his proneness to imitation, may simulate the appearance of the insane with who he has been long shut up, but the downward progress of dementia would soon distinguish its victim” (2). In bureaucratic terms, madness and idiocy were indistinguishable. Ireland chides England’s Lunacy Laws:

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“when [idiots] became to be treated as lunatics, they began to suffer from the

thoughtlessness or ignorance of or legislators” (340). For Norris, fiction provides a space

tease out the relationship between these two types of mental difference.

20 In this passage, Lockwood seems more idiot than madman. Lockwood can only detect

the immediately present phenomenon (i.e. his familiarity with Felice) and fails to

consider rational cause and effect (i.e. how this familiarity happened). Ireland quotes Dr.

Abercrombie who argues that in contrast to the maniac, "the idiot… does not reason at

all; that is, though he may remember the facts, he does not trace their relations” (262).

21 This taxonomy recalls eugenic ways of knowing. Though scarce, scholarship on the

“Wife of Chino” has noted the story’s tendency to undermine the ideological systems the

story introduces. Thomas K. Dean frames the story as a response to conventional western

tales in which “ideologies are present in the text… are validated” (49). By contrast,

Norris “begins with a prefabricated genre--a dominant text with its singular language--

sets his characters loose in it, and then introduces a non-heterogeneous subtext into the

tale, rupturing the dominant text… creating an unstable narrative that casts doubt on the

viability of the genre itself” (50).

22 Here, while Norris illustrates the narrator’s omniscience – the narrator clearly spots

Felice’s invasion –he casts doubt on the narrator’s omnipotence. The narrator’s careful

consideration of Lockwood’s mentation leads Felice’s “invasion” to be only vaguely

articulated as a “thing.” The narrator authoritatively describes the operations of

Lockwood’s mind, but even these descriptions are limited. Such limited description is important to remember when determining whether or not Norris endorses eugenic method and hierarchies.

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23 This failure is an example of the way fiction tests (and illustrates the failure of) eugenic

psychology. Dugdale argues that “men do not become moral by intuition, but by patient

organization and training.” But, Lockwood’s dedicated efforts to train himself do not

succeed.

24 Dugdale writes “This all important will does not usually reach its full growth till

between the thirtieth to the thirty-third years” (56).

25 Dugdale’s anatomy of the nervous system is divided into four subdivisions. “1. The

ganglionic nervous centers which connect the heart, lungs and internal viscera with each

other and with the brain, bringing them into sympathetic action. 2. The spinal cord, which

chiefly presides over the movements of the limbs and body. 3. The sensational centres,

which register impressions gathered by the sense. 4. The ideational centers…” The fact

that Lockwood’s “sensational centres” show evidence of decline comes as no surprise

given the way that Dugdale believes each subsection is subordinate to the proceeding

one. “The ganglionic centres are, in a certain sense, subordinate to the spinal nerve

centres; these, in their turn, are subordinate to the sensory centres, and the last are subordinate to the controlling action of the hemisphere of the brain, and, especially to the action of the will, which properly fashioned, represents the governing power of voluntary

actions” (56).

26 This is a back and forth endeavor. While the moment Lockwood thinks he sees Reno

emerging from darkness is vague, other moments of sensory impression are clear. “The

night’s silence was broken by a multitude of sounds – the labored breathing of the spent

broncos, the saddle creaking as the dripping flanks rose and fell, the touch of wind in the

tree-tops and the chorusing of the myriad tree toads.”

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1 Geneticist Daniel Geschwind describes this search in the most visual of metaphors: “It

is as if you are looking for a needle in a haystack but you’re in a field of a thousand

haystacks. Here, we’ve found the haystack, and now we have to find that needle within

the haystack, and we are moving in fairly rapidly now because genetic technology allows

us to do this very rapidly. This particular region is on chromosome 17q, that is the long

arm of chromosome 17.”

2 This restriction is unsurprising given her theoretical predecessors. In Stigma, Erving

Goffman, Thomson’s philosophical predecessor, focuses on the “the moments when

stigmatized and normal are in the same 'social situation,' that is, in one another's

immediate physical presence” (12). He notes that he focuses on these moments at the

expense of “the responses of the normal and of the stigmatized… which can occur over

protracted periods of time and in isolation from current contact between normals and

stigmatized” (12).

3 By scrutinizing the gaze, Bly highlights the problem of identifying who was mentally ill. Bly presents madness as category that subsumes mental illness, cognitive disability, and, in her case, normalcy. This aggregation works against 19th century psychology

which, as noted in the previous chapter, sought to pinpoint the dividing line between

mental illness and cognitive disability. In theory, the distinction was clear. In practice, the

distinction was lost, and Ireland admits that “Sometimes, in asylums, where the history is

lost, the chronic dement who has begun to stagger in his gait might be confounded with

the grown-up idiot, who, with his proneness to imitation, may simulate the appearance of

the insane with who he has been long shut up” (2). Ten Days in a Madhouse interrogates

the institutional catch-all application of “madness,” exposing the practical uselessness of

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Ireland’s clear cut definitions. Far from being innate lunatics, those mentally ill, cognitively disabled, and otherwise normal inmates can “simulate the appearance” of madness because of the constraints of the institution. Narrative, in this way, foregrounds the inability of the gaze to distinguish neurological reality from simulation.

4 Bly’s affected mad stare works not only to convince her fellow boarders of her cognitive difference, but also to allow her to engage deeper truths about herself. She reflects, “fearing that sleep would coax me into its grasp, I commenced to review my life… The turned-down pages of my life were turned up, and the past was present.” She exclaims, “that was the greatest night of my existence. For a few hours I stood face to face with ‘self’!” Thus, Bly acknowledges the effects of her boarder’s initial impression, effects which resemble those that Thomson outlines. However, Bly’s narrative allow the politics of staring to be inverted. The normal stare takes the illusion of performance as reality. Bly’s mad stare, even if it is performed, allows her to “know positively” the truth of her own identity.

5 This marks a shift from earlier illustrations. For example, Fig. 2, which depicts Bly being stared at, projects a feeling of discomfort that Bly’s textual representation of the incident communicates. This similarity disappears for later images and their narrative representations.

6 For its part, the meal scene begins with vivid imagery: “The bowls in which we had had our tea were now filled with soup, and on a plate was one cold boiled potato and a chunk of beef, which on investigation, proved to be slightly spoiled. There were no knives or forks, and the patients looked fairly savage as they took the tough beef in their fingers and pulled in opposition to their teeth.”

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7 Bly’s story presages Goffman’s theory of institutional display during which the outsider sees a “small fraction of institutional life” as institutional staff project only the best images and impressions for viewers to see (105).

8 In many ways, this dynamic mirrors the dynamic in Bly. Readers of both texts learn about the cognitively different subject in a way that “corrects” the assumptions they have.

Readers become more engaged with the complex subject of mental difference, but in this engagement, they defer to the expertise, journalistic or scientific. The difference lies within the political ends of the given text.

9 In this way, the dynamic between photograph and dynamics of the illustration and narrative in Bly’s “An Afternoon Promenade.” Bly’s illustration depicts a line of peaceful inmates, whereas in the text, she describes a violent procession, and pushes her reader to imagine the sheer size of the group.

10 Anderson introduces this misreading into the story. The traveling salesman does when he exclaims that Elmer is “crazy,” as does Mook the half-wit.

11 Sources written by lay readers themselves illustrate the terms use. In private correspondence with Goddard, one woman, concerned about the possibility of giving birth to a feebleminded child, describes her feeble-minded brother-in-law: “He stands in a stoop shouldered manner and walks in a queer shuffle from side to side.”

12 What readers do see of Elmer straddles the line between ideals of normalcy and defect.

He is “extraordinarily tall and his arms were long and powerful.” Yet, his beard is “pale almost to whiteness” (179).

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13 This location is unsurprising. Mark Whalan has argued that ideas of racial

“primitivism… sits at the center of [Anderson’s] preoccupations of commercial exchange” (81).

Chapter Three

1 Barr himself hints that certain characteristic have been central to cognitive disability

(CD) throughout time in his first chapter “Synonyms and Definitions.” “Through all ages, in many climes, we may trace the close analogy in many tongues, of the various titles of mental defect” (17).

2 A long tradition of literary scholarship evidences the risks of calling Benjy an “idiot.” In his detailed 1970 bibliography of “mentally retarded” characters in American fiction,

Frances King plucked Benjy out from his fictional counterparts, highlighting TSATF as

“the most powerful representation of the idiot mind” (109). For many critics, a mystical quality inheres in this representation. James M. Mellard contends that Benjy lives in a timeless world composed of vivid imagery, existing as a “chthonic figure” tied to the earth who seeks “to fulfill certain primitive, child-like desires” (245). This mysticism inadvertently ushers a range of cultural stereotypes into the interpretations of critics:

Benjy is a transparent window into reality; he is an ancestral connection between man and animal; he is an eternal child; his world is disorganized chaos; he is free from the oppressive meaning making systems of rationality. Jaqui Griffiths collapses two of these tropes arguing that “He is at once canine, infant, and adult, with each of these categories bleeding into the others” (171). Lynn Berk argues that in contrast to his brother Quentin

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for whom “the word has become reality,” Benjy is “capable of responding to the reality

behind words” (338).

3 Maria Truchan-Tataryn censures the “unquestioning acceptance of [Benjy] as a

successful representation of intellectual disability,” pointing out that the trend “reveals an

underlying ableism in the literary critical endeavor and an academic acquiescence to the dated socio-cultural constructions of disability” (160). Ted Roggenbuck argues that by taking Faulkner’s “idiot” description at face value, critics obscure the distinctly human features of Benjy’s narrative. “Comparing Benjy’s mind to a phonograph on which he possesses the ability to play the record of his life without the ability to choose, discriminate, or interpret diminishes the tragedy of what he has lost and the relative emptiness of his current existence” (586). Stacy Burton argues that “critical commonplaces seriously distort both the nature of Benjy’s discourse and its significance to the text” (208). Refusing to frame Benjy’s narrative as the outré and isolated perspective of an “idiot,” she contends that the Compson brothers collectively “shape their languages, chronotopes, and histories in constant interaction with each other’s voices” (218).

4 In their article “In The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson Most Likely Suffers from

Autism,” Patrick Samway and Gentry Silver survey the novel for textual evidence of the

diagnostic criteria for autism. Anticipating the counterargument that their approach

might be too anachronistic, they argue that Faulkner “wrote a number of para-historical

texts about this novel in which he steps forward not as literary author but as historical

guide whose own knowledge of the actual world about him provides valuable

commentary” (3). Samway and Silver acknowledge the fact that Faulkner lived a few

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blocks away from Edwin Chandler, a man who “could speak and play simple games but whose mind would never grow to adulthood as his body had done years before” (Blotner

210). Working within the vein of diagnosis, Samway and Silver position the actual world as a field in which both scholars and Faulkner can operate. Samway and Silver’s diagnosis is not without precedent. In 1987, Sara McLauglin argued that Faulkner

“unknowingly presented one of the earliest pictures in American literature of the devastating effects autism can have on a human being” (38). Yet, as empirically alluring as “person with autism” might be, its usage still engenders ethical problems – not much is gained by characterizing Benjy as suffering from devastating autism.

5 In Narrative Prosthesis, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that by contrasting perspectives of characters who are cruel or sympathetic towards Benjy, the novel “provides a scathing critique of [the] dehumanizing environment in which disabled people function.” They continue, “the novel holds out Benjy’s experience not as a sign of wider cultural collapse, but as the barometer for just how far the social fabric has unraveled around him” (168).

6 Faulkner talks about the attractive capacity of objects in his interview with Jean Stein

Van Heuvel. “The narcissus was give to Benjy to distract his attention” (234).

7 The phenomenological importance of objects is not limited to the cushion scene. Benjy sees human figures emerge against the backdrop of his object obsession throughout the narrative. When Benjy looks towards T.P.’s house, he observes, “Quentin and Luster were playing in the dirt in the front of T.P.’s house. There was a fire in the house, rising and falling, with Roskus sitting black against it” (20). Like any good narrator, Benjy describes the setting of the scene. Yet unlike a “normal” narrator, object obsession

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dictates Benjy’s description. The first defining characteristic of the house is the fire inside. The presence of Roskus is related to the reader after this central detail. “Black against the firelight” is a sophisticated, yet concise, phrase appeals to conventional literary aesthetic and also amplifies social discourses of race. Like Mrs. Compson,

Roskus is located “against” the flame, and object phenomenology ushers in sociality.

8 While there might be debate about who should mind who among the other Compson siblings, there is no question that Benjy must be minded for him to remain a brother and son. Minding Benjy becomes an imperative, and the scenes of his section illustrate how different characters respond to this command. Ignoring the slices of reality that Benjy attends to produces one result: a denial of his membership to the Compson family, ultimately seen in Jason’s decision to send him to Jackson, where he is sterilized – his family history and future destroyed.

9 This should come as no surprise to readers familiar with the most recent scholarship on the novel. Hagood argues that the novel, “so long celebrated as a radical experiment, is actually surprising conservative in its essential form” (90).

10 I am aware of resemblance of between “object oriented phenomenology” and “object oriented ontology.” While the latter is not a core constituent of my analysis, interested readers should consult Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s Thought in the Act for an elaborated discussion of OOO and cognitive disability. Manning and Massumi summarize what it means for people with autism to attend to everything “the same way.”

This attentional attitude resembles Benjy’s. “To attend to everything ‘the same way’ is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierachized commitment to the way in which the organic and inorganic,

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color, smell, sound, and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely interweave with the

‘aroundness’ of a textured world” (4).

11 This reading exemplifies, in extreme, narratological theorizations of space. In

Narratology, Mieke Bal writes, “The filling in of a space is determined by the objects

that can be found in that space. Objects have spatial status. They determine the spatial

effect of the room by their shape, measurements, and colours” (95). The objects Benjy

covets entirely determine the spatial effect of the library and Mrs. Compson’s sickroom,

discussed earlier, and the field, discussed here.

12 Considered as a person with autism, Benjy’s attention to dialogue comes as no surprise.

People with autism frequently quote dialogue they have heard, though they may struggle

to produce their own socially acceptable language. This phenomenon, echolalia, is the first characteristic that Samway and Silver cite for Benjy’s autism. Like object obsession, echolalia is a trait found in early 20th century conceptualizations of cognitive disability.

Barr defines echolalia as “a speech affection characterized by a tendency to repeat words or phrases spoken by others” (233).

13Storing objects seems odd, but the habit is a common manifestation of autism

(Loveland and Tunali-Kotoski 266).

14 This scene recalls Faulkner’s earlier short story “A Kingdom of God.” As the story

begins, the narrator of the story describes the cognitively disabled brother of the

protagonist as the story begins: “Always in his slobbering, vacuous face were his two

eyes of a heart shaking blue, and gripped tightly in one first was a narcissus” (55). When

the protagonist is arrested and the brother’s narcissus snaps, the community

collaboratively restores the object. The police officer commands the brother to “fix” the

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flower. “The idiot still clutched his broken narcissus, weeping bitterly; and while the officer held his wrist the brother hunted about and found a small sliver of wood. String was volunteered by a spectator, who fetched it from a nearby shot; and under the interested eyes of the two policemen and the gathering crowd, the flower stalk was splinted” (60).

15 This reading marks an important departure from even the most recent disability studies criticisms that locks Benjy into a subordinate role. Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that

“because Faulkner presents Benjy as a being without feeling, all that can matter about

Benjy is what he represents for other people, as they project their own meanings and interpretations onto him." My reading illustrates that how Benjy’s idiosyncratic system of meaning is projected and understood by characters thought to be in purely dominate care- taking positions.

16 In the earlier cushion scene, As Caddy points to the cushion, Mrs. Compson chides

Caddy. “You humor him too much…Damuddy spoiled Jason that way and it took him two years to outgrow it” (41).

17 Though a British psychologist, Ireland great influenced America’s understanding of cognitive disability. James Trent writes that Ireland, a British superintendent, “stressed the pathology of idiocy,” and his work gave the superintendents of American institutions

“an even firmer medical basis upon which to carry on their work” (37)

18 See Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric for more detailed taxonomy of other disability myths popular in fiction.

19 Lennie and his real-life inspiration meet different ends as well. The latter is sent to asylum, while the formed is killed (Loftis 66).

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20 As Steinbeck noted, he sought to develop the “form of a play.” Cognitive disability

was wedded to dramatic effect, as Thomson critiques “Johnny Bear” as too “dramatic.”

21 In The Case For Sterilization (1934), Leon F. Whitney highlights the astounding

number of mentally suspect citizens by citing intelligence tests conducted by the U.S.

Army during World War I. According to Whitney, the numbers revealed that “half of our

adult population is below the mental age of 13.2 i.e., the age of a normal bright boy of

thirteen. It was a distressing revelation, and its bearing on our present interest is that, if

we put our lower limit of desirability at thirteen mental age, we should be considering the

sterilization of half our fellow-countrymen!” (145-6).

22 This reading thus does not reject Loftis’s reading of the novella. Lennie’s subjectivity

is somewhat inaccessible to the reader. However, Steinbeck is not concerned with a

subjective form of cognitive disability, but an intersubjective one that weaves character

identities together.

23 “Stigmata,” a term popularized by Henry H. Goddard, were the visible signs of

underlying mental defect (Zenderland 76).

24 Eugenicists reinforced this type grammars. Jay Dolmage has argued that that such a

grammar was essential in defining America’s national identity. Examining the visual

rhetoric Ellis Islands’ Manual of the Mental Examination of Aliens (1918), Dolmage

examines the rhetorical utility of pairing disabled figures together and with normal

figures. The photographs in Manual, were “a means of highlighting [disabled people’s]

Otherness—hydrocephalic beside microcephalic, “dwarf” standing beside another sitting subject, and so on.” Such techniques allowed authors to communicate “a clear eugenic

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message: these foreign others, clearly and starkly unlike the white men who surround them, come from different and possibly dangerous genetic stock.”

25 She writes, “No literary critic has ever suggested that Lennie may be on the autism spectrum; it is clear, however, that autistic traits are key to Lennie’s character” (64).

26 Echolalia is often associated with autism. Repetitive language has characterized austim throughout the 20th and 21st century. The DSM-IV-TR describes autistic speech:

“Grammatical structures are often immature and include repetitive use of language (e.g. repetition of words and phrases regardless of meaning; repeating jingles or commercials).

27 Steinbeck’s inclusion of the Greek language reveals how felicitous his representation was with scientific understanding. Barr describes his evaluation of one of his residents with a propensity for echolalia: “One afternoon I gave him, in rapid succession, words and sentences in nine different languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian,

Japanese, Latin, Greek and Norwegian, and each time, I found that although the words were unfamiliar and would have been difficult for an ordinary person, certainly for a normal child, Kirtie took the pronunciation with facility, his voice keeping pace with mine as I repeated” (239).

28 No more than three pages later the narrator describes the pair, and readers see Lennie’s attempt to synchronize their mannerisms. “George lay back on the sand and crossed his hands under his head, and Lennie imitated him, raising his head to see if he were doing it right” (7).

29 Importantly, imitation is not simply Lennie’s way of being. As George mocks how

Lennie grabbed the girl’s dress, the narrator notes that he “took on the elaborate manner of little girls when they are mimicking each other” (11). For George imitation increases

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isolation, and at the close of his mimicry, “he look across the fire at Lennie’s anguished

face, and then he looked ashamedly at the flames” (11).

30 Further, as the conclusion echoes the opening, much of the narratorial annotation that labels Lennie an imitator and thus idiot drop out. Consider the narrator’s description of his posture, which is so thoroughly described in the introduction: “He embraced his knees and laid his chin on his knees.” Without George in the scene, Lennie’s behavior seems quite normal.

31 Anita K. Barry writes, “The present, despite its name, does not refer to activities going

on at the moment. Rather it refers to general facts and activities that include right now but

cover a wider range of time” (59).

32 The pool’s surface here echoes itself in the beginning. After Lennie dips his hand in the

water: “rings widened across the pool to the other side and came back again (3).

33 Consider when George tells him they are going to work at a ranch: “were gonna work

on a ranch like the one come from up north.” “Up north?” “In weed.” “Oh, sure. I

remember. In weed” (6).

34 George’s tone has also changed: “George shook himself. He said woodenly, “If I was

alone I could live so easy.” George appears to be the stereotypical idiot, who recites

speech heard before automatically. In the introduction, George’s speech is more

energized. The earlier markers of George’s energetic speech -- “George demanded” (10),

“George exploded” (11), “George snapped (13) -- fade in the conclusion. Gone too is the

narratorial description that made George’s repetition seem far more human. “George’s

voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them

many times before” (13). In the conclusion, George’s voice has hollowed out. Imitation

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is automatic, a sensory experience devoid of human experience. Such a representation

reminds readers of Barr’s definition of the idiot’s echolalia: “their auditory wordcenters

respond only to direct sensory inclinations, and not at all to those of an associated or volitional order.” When George talks to Lennie, his tone is an inversion of his tone in the first chapter.

Chapter Four

1 For example, see Michael Bérubé’s reading of Albus Dumbledore in J.K. Rowling’s

Harry Potter series. Bérubé argues that Dumbledore is driven by a desire to “distinguish

himself from his suddenly disreputable family, and most of all from his disabled sister”

(35).

2 In a narratological sense, I am interested in the “relations between the time of the story

and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative” (Gennette 35). Gennette notes that this

relationship can be explored according to three types of connections: order, duration, and

frequency. For this analysis, I concern myself most with the first two types. Connections

of order involve “the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the

pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative” (35).

3 Genette writes that “The temporality of written narrative is to some extent conditional

or instrumental; produced in time, like everything else, written narrative exists in space

and as space, and the time needed for "consuming" it is the time needed for crossing or

traversing it, like a road or a field. The narrative text, like every other text, has no other

temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading” (34). A novel is

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composed of printed words, and to read it, one must move through this print. Certain

chapters might be longer than others.

4 Similarly, M.H. Abrams defines “fabula” as “the elemental materials of a story” and the

“sjuzhet” as “the concrete representation used to convey the story” (173).

5 Niederhoff notes that in in the instance of “zero focalization,” “the narrator knows more

than the character, or more exactly, says more than any of the characters know.” He

defines “internal focalization” as the instance of when “the narrator says only what a

given character knows,” and “external focalization” as the instance of when “the narrator

says less than the character knows.”

6 These texts were influential and continued to be cited in the following decades. You and

Your Retarded Child is listed, along with similar texts, in the “Additional Source

Materials” section of “A Helpful Guide in the Training of the Mentally Retarded Child”

(1963) by Virginia State Department of Health Bureau of Crippled Children, which was

distributed by the National Association for Retarded Children.

7 Seeing impairment as fact has been a traditional way of conceiving disability. Lennard

Davis highlights that for many people, beliefs about disability often rest on “the

presumption that disability is simply a biological fact, a universal plight of humanity

throughout the ages” (3).

8 The same school at which Henry H. Goddard, discussed in previous chapters, served as

the Director of Research (Trent 157).

9 I am thinking of rhetoric in terms of how Paul De Man defines it, the “tropes and of figures” of a given text that cultivate multiple meanings (28).

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10 This narrative, that weds hope with progress, emerges in the Reader’s Digest version of

Buck’s story. At the end of the selection, the editors tease a story from the next issue about medical cures for cognitive disability: “There is new hope for the mentally retarded child. Scientists have developed and physicians have extensively test a new drug – more correctly described as ‘brain food’ – which gives promise that will often light up dull minds, lift IQ’s, set backward youngsters on the road out of the shadows into bright and happy childhood. The story will be told in the October issue of The Reader’s Digest”

(25).

11 Frank’s wife, Lorraine, authors her own chapter near the end of My Son’s Story that relays her experience of the story, and she too hallucinates (163).

12 And so too can they clearly see how Augie is inducted into Einhorn’s disabled life.

Augie notes, “I became essential to him, not just metaphorical right hand but virtually arms and legs. Einhorn was a cripple who didn’t have use of either, not even partial; only his hands still functioned, and they weren’t strong enough to use a wheelchair” (Bellow

60).

13 One does not have to look very hard to see that often normalcy is a façade that stands in front of deeper levels of characterization. Augie’s journey up the social ladder reveals that the individuals who are better able to make a buck are not as sharp as his brother

Simon takes them to be. Thinking that Augie will be surrounded by sharper company,

Grandma Lausch views living with the Coblins as her grandson’s “chance to learn culture and refinement” (24). But the folks are less sophisticated than she supposes, and Augie describes Coblin as “a solid man of relatively low current in his thoughts” (22). Even at the highest levels of society, no character seems all that sharp. When Simon introduces

278

Augie to the Magnuses, he praises them for their loyalty, not their smarts. “They may

seem a little slow-witted to you… but they have something you’ll have to learn to

appreciate, and that’s their kindness and the way they stick by their own” (217).

14 David Mikics argues that by the end of the novel, Augie has fallen towards weakness.

“Augie sides with the weak of the world, people like his poor brother Georgie, over the

victorious schemers like Grandma Lausch. Augie himself is a drifter, passive and lucky.

His interest in the powerful is tender and curious, but he can’t quite see their point” (35).

15 Bellow draws on a tradition that identifies criminality as a sign of cognitive disability.

This tradition can be traced back to Richard Dugdale’s The Jukes: A study in Crime,

Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (1877), but Einhorn draws the connection himself after

he finds out about the robbery Augie committed: “I won’t have you doing this, Augie.

Even Dingbat, and he’s no mental giant, knows better than to get into robbery” (116).

16 Augie’s passivity lends the credence to this argument. Mental defectiveness, as I

discuss in earlier chapters, was marked the failure of will. Leonard Kriegel praises Augie

for his passivity: “his greatest profession is his immense receptivity to experience” (28).

Kriegel has a more nuanced understanding of Augie’s energy. “Augie isn’t passive, but

he is quietly audacious” (29). Kriegel discusses how his own physical disability has

affected the way he reads Bellow’s novel. He comes to identify more with Einhorn than

Augie, and by the end of his essay, he creates a binary between disability and normalcy.

“Would Augie, I wonder, empathize with my growing fascination with the crippled god

Hephaestus? Like Einhorn and me, Hephaestus can’t stand the thought of what being crippled has down to him” (32). This reading ignores the cognitive ability of both

279

Einhorn and Augie. Einhorn, while physically disabled, is mentally able. Augie, while physically able, has a suspect mental identity.

17 It is fair to ask, “which readers?” In a critique of the book reviewer, published in

Esquire, Gore Vidal provides insight into Prescott’s imagined audience: “My own objection to Orville Prescott is… his identification with what he thinks to be his audience: the middle-aged, middle-class, moderately affluent American woman who lives in Darien, New Canaan, Scarsdale, a region bounded on the south by the Theatre Guild, on the north by Womrath, on the west by Barry Goldwater and on the eats by…oh, well, you name it. Prescott knows these ladies are interested in sex; he also knows that they stand firmly united in condemning all sexual activity not associated with marriage.”

18 I use this gendered phrasing intentionally since it reflects the gender biases of eugenics and social Darwinism.

19 The syntax of the passage reveals suggests that Augie pays increasing attention to his younger brother. Georgie is first mentioned parenthetically, “everybody, the kid included, continued to eat.” In the next sentence, he becomes the subject of an independent clause that is the direct object of the main clause. “I never assumed, like the old woman, that he was an unwitting topic.” By the third and longest sentence, Georgie has become the subject of the main clause. Two long appositives that modify Georgie’s (and the

Giaconda’s) look and smile. By the end of the passage, the March family is denoted by

“us,” the object of a preposition. Thus, by the passage’s end, not only does Georgie change from an element in a parenthetical phrase to a subject of a long sentence, the

March family changes from the subject of the first sentence to the object of Georgie’s gaze.

280

20 Mama fares no better than Georgie: “Mamma in her hurt high voice tried to answer,

but spoke only confusion. She was anyway incapable of saying much that was clear, and

when she was excited or in pain you couldn’t understand her at all” (51).

21 See Jay Dolmage’s “Framing Disability, Developing Race: Photography as Eugenic

Technology” for an elaborated discussion of the grammar of disability.

22 “Maybe you’d enjoy being uncle to a bastard by your brother from a Polish girl with

white hair and explain to her stockyards father that he would be a fine son-in-law to him?

He’d murder you with a sledgehammer, like an ox, and burn down the house” (52).

23 I borrow this phrasing from Tobin Siebers who notes: "the ideology of ability is at its

simplest the preference for able-bodiedness. At its most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of the body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons” (8). Of course, my reading suggests that

Bellow is less concerned with the body and more with the mind.

24 See James Trent’s discussion of Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, and Social

Darwinism in Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United

States (86).

Conclusion

1 Identity, in Siebers’ view, is much more related with epistemology than ontology.

“Identity is not the structure that creates a person’s pristine individuality or inner essence

but the structure by which that person identifies and become identified with a set of social

narratives, ideas, myths, values, and types of knowledge by varying reliability,

usefulness, and verifiability” (15).

281

2 Buck explicitly states this when she elaborates on her own process of adjusting to her child’s disability. “At any rate, the process of accommodation began” (31).

3 While the limitations of Buck’s conception of disability are detailed in the previous chapter, here she seems to be realizing the ethical insight that Siebers would articulate 58 years later. In his call for a theory or rational human agency to fully accommodate disability, he argues that “the concept of the human, then, does not involve a fixed definition but must be a work in progress, just as human beings should always be a work in progress” (92).

4 “Synesthesia signifies the experience of two or more kinds of sensation when only one sense is being stimulated. In literature the term is applied to descriptions of one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on” (Abrams 315).

5 Typologies for the narrative function of disability have been put forth by Quayson,

Puncinelli, and King.

282

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