Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland

Elizabeth Grubgeld

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030372453
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030372460
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first to examine life writing and disability in the context of Irish culture. It will be valuable to readers interested in Disability Studies, Irish Studies, autobiography and life writing, working-class literature, popular culture, and new media. Ranging from Sean O'Casey's 1939 childhood memoir to contemporary blogging practices, Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland analyzes a century of autobiographical writing about the social, psychological, economic, and physical dimensions of living with disabilities. The book examines memoirs of sight loss with reference to class and labor conditions, the harrowing stories of residential institutions and the advent of the independent living movement, and the autobiographical fiction of such acknowledged literary figures as Christy Brown and playwright Stewart Parker. Extending the discussion to the contemporary moment, popular genres such as the sports and celebrity autobiography are explored, as well as such newer phenomena as blogging and self-referential performance art.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. GrubgeldDisability and Life Writing in Post-Independence IrelandLiterary Disability Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37246-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Disability and Irish Life Writing: An Overview

Elizabeth Grubgeld¹

(1)

Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA

Elizabeth Grubgeld

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Researchers in the social sciences and health professions have provided impressive work concerning the sociology and politics of disability in Ireland, yet the life writing of disabled people remains for the most part uncharted and unexplored.¹ In the wake of autobiography’s emergence as a major genre, the concurrent development of an Irish disability rights movement, a vastly enlarged reading public, and greater access to modes of publication than ever before, there is no shortage of material to consider: to date, at least twenty full-length prose memoirs in addition to numerous short essays, oral histories, web writings, and performance pieces. Disability life writing in Ireland has with few exceptions underscored the relation between disablement and economic and social inequities, as well as calling into question the individualist sentiment of much public discourse involving disability and the pressure to repress rather than articulate difference. In doing so, these texts engage in dialogue with the formative rhetorics of numerous genres, from the bildungsroman and fiction of social realism to celebrity and sports memoirs, survivor testimony, oral histories, and the diaristic modes of blogging and social media.

This book will argue that disability life writing, particularly from the post-independence period, constitutes a culturally specific narrative emphasizing the relationship between disability and class, the shaping forces of social and geographical insularity, and the domination of private life by institutional structures. Such self-representations necessarily reflect how a society imagines and enacts stories of embodied selfhood and community. By considering how Irish memoirists frame their personal narratives within the context of the colonial and postcolonial state, I hope to join with the emergent field of intersectional and global disability studies in answering the challenge of Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, who in 2010 identified the failure of disability studies to move beyond a middle-class and primarily Anglo-American model limited by “a singular lack of specificity as to…the nature of cultures shaped by colonization and its consequences” (Barker and Murray 2010, 223) .

Histories and Metaphors

Despite its discussion of matters of class and nationality, this work is not a sociology of disability in Ireland nor a history of the nation’s disability rights movement, although aspects of both offer important contextualization for individual works of life writing. Neither does it focus upon disabled bodies as metaphor. Other scholars have examined Irish literary representations of disability as indictments of the failed promises of the nation and analyzed the disabling metaphors by which British apologists for colonialization justified their arguments against Irish self-rule.² This is valuable work, but it is not the project of this book. I am less concerned with metaphors by which disabilities describe some other phenomenon than in the ways disabled people understand and articulate their own experience.

That is not to say that literary language has no place. Susan Sontag’s famous denunciation of metaphor clears a path for the elucidation rather than the elimination of literary language altogether. She writes in the preface to Illness as Metaphor:

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is the one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphorical thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry. (Sontag 1978, 3–4)

Disability life writing frequently finds its language in received metaphors and patterns of narrative but often uses embodied experience to create new figurations as well. Martha Stoddard Holmes’ critique of Sontag’s polemic against metaphors of illness makes a case for the creation of fresh metaphors. She explains that

metaphors function as verbal tongs, tools for holding our own or another’s embodiment away from us until a better time comes for right engagement…Thus metaphor has a prosthetic function, with all the nuances of prosthesis: it extends our sense of touch, getting us closer to those things we cannot palpate ourselves or see without technology—but also covers up what can’t be handled, as some prosthetic limbs function to accommodate the needs of nondisabled lookers rather than those of the person who wears them. Prosthesis can be enabling or deeply problematic, depending on who directs its use. (Holmes 2011, 270)

When poetic language departs from conventional terms and moves instead toward new ways of articulating the body’s experience, the results can be much more precise and communicative. Holmes calls for “training to read metaphors critically” as well as “the generation of a more varied palette of bodily metaphors (and particularly a more balanced storehouse: verbal metaphors that appeal to tactility and other senses beyond the visual; metaphors made in visual and plastic media rather than solely those made of words)” (273).

There are numerous ways in which this might be accomplished without resorting to what Amy Vidali condemns as mere policing and removal of metaphors of disability. Writers can, as she suggests, “work critically, ethically, transgressively, and creatively at the edges of disability metaphor” (Vidali 2010, 51). In the writing of activist and poet Des Kenny, former director of the National Council for the Blind Ireland (NCBI), the hands and fingertips replace the visual as metaphoric sites of exploration and knowledge. The contact of hands in “The Egg Basket,” for example, invokes a history shared by people with sight loss. “Between classes and chores more relevant,” the young speaker learns the basket weaving that for generations was one of the few employments available for people with impaired vision; when the boy’s soft hands touch the palms of the partially sighted instructor, “rough in taming cane,” the contact calls to his mind the bleak communal past of “damp sheds where blind men hunched and crouched/To sustain with their toil The Asylum.” Although for the boy making baskets is simply a handicraft, he knows that for the instructor it was “a trade—a life/Maybe not so long ago” and reflects, not without reason, that “this was his and still might be my lot” (Kenny 2013, 11). In the moment of touch, the speaker imagines the story of his future as one of two variants of a shared narrative: the education and social mobility promised by his schooling, and the poverty and tedium of life constrained within a mat factory, where the labor would coarsen the very fingertips needed for reading. Hands and fingers metaphorically function as conduits of knowledge in other ways as well: “Touch my hand to give me light,” the speaker calls out at the end of each quatrain of “Take the Palette and Leave Me Black,” and in “Fingersight” the speaker celebrates the “tactile cataracts, these fingers,” the “eternal voyagers” that trace shapes and fling out questions “from a blistered touch that peals and heals” (55; 16). The fingertip extends itself in search of knowledge, sings out in writing the knowledge it finds, and in turn, solaces. Reimagining the metaphor of light as knowledge by positioning the “tactile cataracts” as the receptors of knowledge, “Fingersight” thus articulates an epistemology of blindness that shapes and reflects a distinct world .

Life Writing

This brief foray into lyric poetry prompts me to define what this book is, instead of what it is not. Addressed to those interested in disability studies, Irish cultural history, and the genre of life writing, it will attempt to bridge the gaps among the three fields, partly by a clarification of terms and assumptions here in the introductory chapter. Readers with expertise in one of these fields may not be familiar with another, and the general reader may be unacquainted with concepts that are part of the ongoing conversations in all three areas. Although I will not return to poetry per se, I will trace those metaphors, figures, and narrative patterns by which disabled people in Ireland have written or performed their lives. Following common practice in the field, I use the terms autobiography and memoir for the most part interchangeably, while life writing acts as an umbrella term encompassing many forms of self-representation, including the literary autobiography, personal essays, testimony, letters, diaries, lyric poems, blogs, and a wide variety of popular memoir genres. Life writing has come to be understood as much more than an unreliable source of biographical data appearing between the hardcovers of a book. It is read and studied in modes ranging from cookbooks to performance art and practiced by people who are neither celebrities nor professional writers. Thomas Couser has proposed that this shift in the subject, form, and reception of autobiography originates in civil movements for equality, postcolonial resistance to dominant cultural narratives, and the growth of accessible media for self-representation of many kinds. He observes that of the hundreds of contemporary life writings produced by those whom a reviewer in Washington Monthly termed “nobodies,” most involve “some body”: the embodied experience of gender, sexual identity, race, or disability. “The nobody memoir,” Couser adds, “is often about what it’s like to have or to be, to live in or as, a particular body—indeed, a body that is usually odd or anomalous” (Couser 2009, 1–2). Judgments have altered as to not only what constitutes autobiography but, as Susan Cahill has observed in relation to Ireland, “which bodies matter…which types of corporality are granted material presences in hegemonic narratives and which are rendered invisible” (Cahill 2011, 2).

Life writing occupies a place between fiction and non-fiction, and between literature and history. No critical reader of autobiography can assume the facticity of every detail, and I proceed on the assumption that characters may be conflated, chronologies altered, omissions made for the sake of the narrative, dialogue invented (as it can seldom be remembered verbatim), and scenarios adjusted to dramatize the underlying emotion of an event. As Paul John Eakin argues, “the allegiance to truth that is the central, defining characteristic of memoir is less an allegiance to a factual record that biographers and historians could check than an allegiance to remembered consciousness and its unending succession of identity states, an allegiance to the history of one’s self” (Eakin 2008, 64). Memory itself is as inventive as it is reconstructive, and events change each time we look back because we have altered in time. James Olney demonstrates at length in Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing how Western representations of the act of remembering have shifted from Augustine’s palace of memory wherein specific images and stories lie intact awaiting the visitor to the perpetually revised reel-to-reel recordings of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (Olney 1998). Questions of fact return with nagging importance when life writing functions as a form of testimony, and memoirs that turn out to be entirely fictitious, whether cynically intended to pass as autobiographical for marketing purposes or whether the product of delusion, can be admitted as nonfiction only in the sense that they reproduce the state of mind—again, cynical or delusional—of their autho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Disability and Irish Life Writing: An Overview
• 2. Disability and Class: Blindness and Labor in Post-independence Ireland
• 3. Disability and Testimony: Survival and Activism
• 4. Literary Disability: Autobiography and Novel at Mid-Century
• 5. Disability and Constrained Genres: The Sports and Celebrity Narrative and the Limits of Oral History
• 6. New Media, New Lives: Self-Publication, Blogging, Performance Art
• Back Matter