Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of "Loss" (Literary Disability Studies) [1st ed. 2021] 3030743764, 9783030743765

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LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES

Amputation in Literature and Film Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” Edited by Erik Grayson · Maren Scheurer

Literary Disability Studies Series Editors David Bolt Liverpool Hope University Liverpool, UK Elizabeth J. Donaldson New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury, NY, USA Julia Miele Rodas Bronx Community College City University of New York Bronx, NY, USA

Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-­ recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies: Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, USA Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Cynthia Lewiecki-­Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio, USA. For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt ([email protected]), Elizabeth J.  Donaldson ([email protected]), and/or Julia Miele Rodas ([email protected]). More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14821

Erik Grayson  •  Maren Scheurer Editors

Amputation in Literature and Film Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss”

Editors Erik Grayson Department of English Northampton Community College Tannersville, PA, USA

Maren Scheurer Department of Comparative Literature Goethe University Frankfurt Frankfurt, Germany

Literary Disability Studies ISBN 978-3-030-74376-5    ISBN 978-3-030-74377-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Maryam and Nick

Preface

The origins of this volume date back to April 2012, when Erik attended the first annual Embodiments conference hosted by the University of Liverpool called “Paranoia and Pain: Embodied in Psychology, Literature, and Bioscience.” The conference, which spanned three gray, drizzly days, brought literary scholars, medical professionals, psychologists, and academics from a variety of other disciplines together to discuss the myriad ways in which humans seek to understand physical and psychological pain as well as the ways in which the experience of pain enables the individual to better understand the human condition. Despite—or, perhaps, as a consequence of—the somber content at the heart of the conference, those in attendance quickly congealed into a friendly community of like-minded scholars. In conversations over coffee in the morning or over drinks at the Rose of Mossley in the evenings, attendees would marvel over how a conference dedicated to some of the least pleasant aspects of human experience could have generated such a warm and convivial atmosphere. One popular theory that emerged out of those conversations is that a subject such as pain attracts individuals who, as a result of having experienced pain themselves, either directly or indirectly, tend to be empathetic and expressive of compassion. Put differently, one consequence of the lived experience of pain is the desire to connect with and understand others who have experienced pain, too. Erik returned to Liverpool the following summer to attend the second annual conference, “Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies,” where, as chance would have it, he appeared on a panel alongside Maren. Like the previous year, those of us in attendance bonded over discussions of vii

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physical and psychological suffering that continued long after we left the Rendall Building to take in the sights at the Royal Albert Dock or share a meal at The Pumphouse. It was during one of those conversations that Erik and Maren hit upon a subject that seemed well suited for the next year’s conference, which would focus on grief: the mourning an amputee often experiences following the removal of a limb. While our initial foray into the subject of amputation in literature was no more ambitious a project than putting together a panel for a conference, we quickly discovered that our choice of topic offered the potential for a far more substantial endeavor. Often, when we would discuss our work with colleagues, we would be met first with a bemused inquiry about why we would have chosen to focus on amputation, and subsequently with an enthusiastic suggestion to look at another text in which a character loses a limb. Two things immediately emerge from such encounters. First, the fact that the subject of amputation strikes so many of our fellow academics as an unusual or even bizarre focus for literary scholarship highlights the marginalization of the topic even among those committed to inclusive discourse in the humanities. Second, the flood of suggested texts for us to consider indicates that, despite its seeming relegation to the periphery of academic inquiry into literature and film, amputation nevertheless figures prominently in many of the cultural artifacts we study. By the time we presented our research on amputation and grief in J.M.  Coetzee and Philip Roth at the 2014 Embodiments conference, then, we suspected that our papers marked not the conclusion of our work on the subject but the beginning of something larger. The enthusiasm with which our panel was received confirmed our sense that a deliberate study of amputation in literature and film would appeal to literary scholars and the conversations we enjoyed with our fellow conference goers hammered home the notion that any such study should be discursive in nature. As it happened, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, David Bolt, mentioned his work as an editor with Palgrave Macmillan for their Literary Disability Studies series. After listening to Dr. Bolt and sharing our still-­ nascent ideas for a book with him, we decided that the series would be a good fit for our project and we set about soliciting the chapters you will encounter in the following pages with the goal of producing the book you now hold in your hands. As we see it, Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” is a focused continuation of

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the many conversations we enjoyed at the Embodiments conferences. In fact, several of the chapters in this volume are direct descendants of those discussions, written by fellow attendees. While we have included commentaries throughout the book to highlight some of the themes we find most interesting, we envision them as the start of a conversation rather than the definitive word on the subject. As with any conversation, some voices in this book are more pronounced than others, some topics are covered when others are not. It is our hope that readers find inspiration to build upon the discourse we begin here, to address the lacunae, and to keep the conversation going. Tannersville, PA, USA Frankfurt, Germany

Erik Grayson Maren Scheurer

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of the many people who have supported us over the years. In particular, we would like to thank our parents, Linda and Vincent Grayson and Sigrun and Joachim Scheurer; our partners, Whitney and Martin; and Peter Grayson. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Maryam Farahani, Dr. Nick Davis, and the Embodiments Research Group at the University of Liverpool for bringing us together.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics of “Loss”  1 Maren Scheurer and Erik Grayson Part I The Politics of Amputation  19 2 “Lame Doings”: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London 21 Rachel Ellen Clark 3 Complicating the Semiotics of Loss: Gender, Power, and Amputation Narratives 43 Lena Wånggren 4 Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet Literature 61 Oxane Leingang Discussion: The Politics of Amputation85

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Part II Amputation’s Intersections  89 5 “She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps”: Amputation and Embodiment in “The Girl Without Hands” 91 Miranda Corcoran 6 Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment: Benito Pérez Galdós’s and Luis Buñuel’s Tristana113 Andrea Gremels 7 “Even at This Late Juncture”: Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man137 Erik Grayson Discussion: Amputation’s Intersections155 Part III Grief and Prosthetic Relations 159 8 The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the Vengeful Amputee161 Susan Kerns 9 “The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole”: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America185 Maren Scheurer 10 “But the Damage … Lasted”: Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser211 Juliane Prade-Weiss Discussion: Grief and Prosthetic Relations233

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Part IV Philosophy, Language, Disability 237 11 Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de)239 Danesh Singh 12 Speech—Amputation—Writing: Philomela’s Notalogy257 Thomas Emmrich 13 (In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot289 Monika Loewy Discussion: Philosophy, Language, Disability311 Further Reading315 Index321

Notes on Contributors

Rachel Ellen Clark  has taught British literature at Wartburg since 2011 and has directed the Scholars Program since 2018. Her research focuses on early modern English literature—Shakespeare and his contemporaries—with special interests in disability studies and the history of the book. In 2018, she was selected as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar and participated in the summer institute “Global Histories of Disability” at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. She presents regularly at the annual conferences of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Sixteenth Century Society. Her recent book project, Witchcraft and Disability in Early Modern England, examines witchcraft in the contexts of early modern disability and medicine to help us understand the phenomenon of witch persecution in new ways. Miranda  Corcoran  is Lecturer in Twenty-First-Century Literature at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research interests include Cold War literature, genre fiction, popular fiction, sci-fi, horror, and the gothic. She is writing a monograph on adolescence and witchcraft in American popular culture. She is also the co-editor (with Steve Gronert Ellerhoff) of Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family (2020). Thomas  Emmrich is a lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University, Frankfurt. He has taught at the Seminar for Classical Philology at Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg, the University of Bern, and the University of Luxemburg. He is the author of Ästhetische Monsterpolitiken: Das Monströse als Figuration des eingeschlossxvii

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enen Ausgeschlossenen (2020). His research interests include literary theory, literature and philosophy, ancient literature and its reception, poetry and prose in German, English, and French from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and the aesthetics of monstrosity and infamy. Erik  Grayson is Associate Professor of English at Northampton Community College. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Wartburg College and visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College. He has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Don DeLillo, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Andrea Gremels  is a research associate and lecturer at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Her main research interests are Francophone and Hispanic literature and culture of the twentieth century, international surrealism, transcultural studies as well as inter- and transmedial approaches. Her first monograph deals with exile and transculturality in contemporary Cuban literature in Paris (Kubanische Gegenwartsliteratur in Paris zwischen Exil und Transkulturalität, 2014). Her second monograph (in preparation) focuses on the transnational exchanges of surrealism between Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century. To pursue this research in Mexico City, Havana, and Paris, she has received several travel grants and an Alexander von Humboldt-Scholarship. In May 2019, she was elected into the executive board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS). Susan  Kerns  is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College, Chicago. Her scholarship on conjoined twins has appeared in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Comunicazioni Sociali, and Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets Under Your Skin. She also writes about feminism, film festivals, and popular culture in the Journal of Film and Video, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies. She produced the documentary Manlife, has produced or directed numerous short films, and holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Oxane  Leingang  is a senior researcher and lecturer at TU Dortmund University. She studied German and East-Slavonic philology and ­psychology at the Universities of Frankfurt and Exeter. Her PhD thesis

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dealt with the discursive arrangement of childhood memories in the “Great Patriotic War.” She taught children’s literature at Frankfurt and at the University of Cologne. Her academic fields of interest and her publications cover children’s literature of Enlightenment, Holocaust, GermanRussian cultural transfers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fairy tales, and popular culture. Monika  Loewy received her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she has taught psychoanalysis and film and undergraduate modules in literature. She is the author of Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder: Literary and Psychoanalytic Reflections (2019). Juliane  Prade-Weiss  is Professor of Comparative Literature at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. In 2019–2020 she was a European Union Marie-Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Vienna University with the project Complicity: A Crisis of Participation in Testimonies of Totalitarianism in Contemporary Literatures. In 2017–2019 she was a DFG research fellow at Yale University to complete her habilitation, published as Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining (2020). Previously, she was an assistant professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University, Frankfurt, where she also obtained her Dr. Phil. in Comparative Literature, with a thesis on the infantile within the human-animal distinction in philosophical and literary texts from antiquity to modernity, published as Sprachoffenheit: Mensch, Tier und Kind in der Autobiographie (2013). Maren  Scheurer is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests include psychoanalytic aesthetics in contemporary literature, theater, and television; late nineteenth-century realism; transmediality and transdisciplinarity; and gender and disability studies. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship and co-editor, with Susan Bainbrigge, of Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice. With Aimee Pozorski, she serves as executive co-editor of Philip Roth Studies. Danesh Singh  teaches at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and is an assistant professor at the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics. He mainly teaches Critical Thinking classes. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 2013 from Binghamton University (SUNY) and has published several articles on Zhuangzi and ethics.

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Lena Wånggren  is a researcher and teacher of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She works in the fields of nineteenth-century literature, gender studies, and the medical humanities. Her publications include the books Gender, Technology and the New Woman and the edited collection Corporeality and Culture, and shorter works on literature and medicine, gender, intersectionality, education, and social justice.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Amputation and the Semiotics of “Loss” Maren Scheurer and Erik Grayson

“Forget what you know about disability”: the opening line of Viktoria Modesta’s 2014 music video “Prototype” promises us nothing less than a realignment of our mental categories, and, in this respect, it offers us images of amputated and prosthetic limbs that we are seldom allowed to see. The video is framed by an abstract dance performance in which Modesta, an amputee who decided to have her left lower leg removed after a long history of illness, wears a pointed, black lacquer prosthetic spike that seems to enable rather than hinder her in executing powerful yet graceful and strangely spider-like dance movements. The music video itself portrays Modesta as a desirable star who is also a symbol against a politically oppressive regime. Her artificial leg appears as a bone-shaped tube

M. Scheurer (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany E. Grayson Department of English, Northampton Community College, Tannersville, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_1

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light attracting insects or as an elaborate piece of crystal jewelry, and once, we get a glimpse of the naked stump. In “Prototype,” impaired limbs and prostheses are visibly staged and re-coded as sexually alluring, fashionable, and enabling objects as well as symbols of power and resistance. Modesta’s leg was damaged during birth, and she spent much of her childhood in Latvia in hospitals. At about the age of fifteen, after the family had relocated to London, Modesta “started thinking that her damaged leg didn’t fit her identity. Worse, it was a reminder of years of pain and operations done against her will. […] Five years later, armed with research about how removing the lower part of her leg and using a prosthetic would improve her life, a surgeon finally agreed to do it” (Saner). Modesta became an alternative model and a performance artist in the London club scene. In 2012, she was invited to perform as the “Snow Queen” at the closing ceremony of the Paralympics with her “diamond-encrusted prosthetic” (“About”), which led to her involvement in Channel 4’s #BornRisky project. The channel funded her video “Prototype” and had it aired during the X Factor final, after which it garnered millions of views online and has been featured in museum exhibitions from Boston to Berlin. Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø observes that the video is notable not only for its “awareness-raising message: that being born (or becoming) disabled can be negotiated in creative ways of taking risks or that bodily diversity should be considered as a location of originality,” but also for its natural inscription of “the particularity of Modesta’s body” into “mainstream visual tropes of pop culture” (69). What makes Modesta’s video an intriguing example with which to open this volume is the challenge her story and her work provides to our conventional understanding of disability, and, more particularly, to the way we perceive limb loss, artificial limbs, and amputation. The word “amputation,” as we understand it today, as the surgical “operation of cutting off a limb or other projecting part of the body” (OED), entered the English language in the seventeenth century, at about the same time that the introduction of gunpowder into warfare had led to a critical increase in limb removals over the previous century (Kirkup 1, 4). The Latin “amputare,” or “putare,” originally referred to pruning, and it does not appear in Roman texts to describe a surgical procedure—except for non-­ medical, punitive amputations (Kirkup 1). From its etymological origins, we can infer that amputation has a long and complex history that is closely tied to the history of medical progress.

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Although there is evidence that amputations have occurred for natural and accidental reasons since prehistoric times (Kirkup 21, 33)—as a last resort for trapped individuals, for instance, or as a consequence of injury, disease, or frostbite—elective medical procedures were extremely rare before the seventeenth century (Kirkup 50). Meanwhile, the removal of limbs for ritual, punitive, or legal reasons—as a form of punishment or torture, ritual sacrifice or mourning—has taken place in numerous societies throughout history and up until the present time (Kirkup 35). In his History of Limb Amputation, John Kirkup argues that, despite medical descriptions of the procedure in antiquity, amputation was truly precipitated by the advent of gunpowder and the printing press. In the case of the former, its increasing use on the battlefield created complex wounds prone to infection that required radical treatment. At the same time, the latter allowed for a scientific exchange over the best procedures for treating such injuries. The year 1517 saw the first book illustration of a medical amputation (7, 58), and many improvements of surgeons’ techniques and instruments followed. The real breakthrough in treating severely injured limbs, however, did not arrive until the discovery of general anesthesia in 1846 (68) and better means of controlling infection in the 1860s and 1870s, which, against strong resistance from fellow physicians, were instigated by Joseph Lister’s implementation of carbolic acid solution and Louis Pasteur’s recommendation to sterilize surgical instruments (89–90). While these discoveries radically reduced the mortality rates during surgery, the use of increasingly destructive weaponry in wars, disease, and industrial and traffic accidents augmented the numbers of individuals in need of amputation at the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century (92). While medical difficulties have not been solved by any means,1 health considerations are hardly the only factors that influence how we perceive amputation. Lifesaving as it often may be, amputation remains an invasive procedure that many individuals and communities around the world resist because of its radical impact on physical integrity (4). As a surgical intervention, amputation produces “a severe, sudden impairment,” which, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted of all such sudden impairments, “is almost always experienced as a greater loss than is a congenital or gradual disability” (14). Almost invariably coded as “loss,” amputation is mostly seen as a tragic life event producing disability that must be responded to with grief and readjustment. As Modesta’s example makes clear, however, there are other ways to think about

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amputation. For her, amputation meant “[b]uilding an identity that [she] was more comfortable with,” “a literal severing of the thing that was holding her back,” “upgrad[ing] [her] opportunities, [her] comfort, [her] body” (Saner). Amputation may arrive suddenly, but one may also progress toward it gradually or even anticipate it; in other words, the temporality of amputation, through chronic illness or prolonged medical treatment before and after the surgery, and the array of meanings produced by it are not completely contained in narratives of sudden, unforeseen loss. Our word “prosthesis” is also borrowed from Latin, via Greek, where it denoted an “addition,” particularly in a linguistic sense. “Prosthesis” refers both to the “replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes,” that is, the “branch of surgery” concerned with it, and to the “artificial replacement for a part of the body” itself (OED). The eldest surviving historical prostheses have been found in mummies, where they were probably added as part of a ritual to ensure all their limbs would be returned in the afterlife (Kirkup 157). Prostheses of all shapes and functions have been worn following the loss of a limb throughout history, but as the most elaborate or advanced models were often expensive and difficult to obtain, many individuals went without, or, where impossible, resorted to sticks, crutches, or the comparatively inexpensive peg-leg (156). Once again, wars stimulated social acceptance and technical progress in the replacement of amputated limbs. After the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and—most decisively—World War I, impaired veterans returned from the battlefield and desired to reenter society and employment, increasing the need for reliable and affordable artificial limbs (163). The concept of rehabilitation, in “the sense of a positive programme to assist patients recovering from an injury or a major operation,” did not, in fact, emerge until the twentieth century (168) when prostheses became widely available and so specified and sophisticated that participation in competitive sports, robotized support, or osseointegration are now routine considerations of prosthetic technology (166–67). Nevertheless, potential connotations to prostheses are overwhelmingly negative; from a foundation in defectiveness and absence to their function as mere “substitutes” and “replacements,” prostheses remain signifiers for loss and pain. In David Wills’s observation that prosthesis is about “nothing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing” (9), associations of stability are overcrowded with those of loss, disorientation, and substitution. Prosthetics are seemingly related to the “artificial,” as opposed to the

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more positively connoted “natural” (10), and may at first appear as a mere metonym for that which is now gone. Through her artful prosthetic limbs, Modesta defies such notions as well. Not only do her prostheses generate meanings of their own, reminding us there is “as much of metaphor as metonymy in prosthesis” (Wills 14), but they also question the artificial limb’s function as a mere replacement limb. Modesta’s prosthetic limbs were made by the Alternative Limb Project, which produces artful prosthetics for amputees. Company founder Sophie de Oliveira Barata first sought to make prostheses “as realistic-looking as possible,” but after a while, she started thinking that “there might be other ways of addressing the space, rather than going for the obvious replacement. Why not turn it on its head and see the limb as a medium to express oneself?” (Saner). Modesta recalls that “regard[ing] the leg as a fashion item and an art project” was “fun and exciting” but proved very challenging to others: “Some had never stood next to a person with a prosthetic limb and the ideas they might have of what an amputee might look or act like is, in most cases, negative. […] [W]hen the limb is attached and I’m walking with it in my full composure it has a power that is beyond something that can be described” (altlimbpro). We certainly do not want to suggest that Modesta’s statements and performance represent typical experiences of people with disabilities, but they do shed light on the great diversity of experiences and meanings allocated to and produced by amputation and prosthetics. Amputation does create sites of loss and grief, but it is also a multifaceted relational experience that cannot be contained in a single narrative, just as prosthetics are not mere functional replacements but generate a variety of physical sensations, emotional responses, and interpretations of their own, in  people with and without disabilities. The aim of this volume is to explore this multitude of narratives and meanings through a wide variety of canonical as well as lesser-known literary texts and films from different historical, cultural, and linguistic traditions. When we first embarked upon this project of investigating amputation in the arts, we were surprised how rarely the subject was tackled in critical writing and assumed we had hit upon a potentially rich, but marginal topic within literary and filmic history. When we told colleagues about our idea, however, their reactions almost invariably transitioned from initial astonishment and dismissal to excitement and an acknowledgment of the importance of the topic after a few moments of deliberation. Upon broaching the subject, nearly everyone found themselves reminded of yet

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another text that dealt with amputation and prosthetic devices. In their landmark study Narrative Prosthesis, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder describe a similar experience when they started to talk about their research. While images of disabled people are pervasive throughout many national literatures, we tend to “screen them out of our minds” (51). In just this way, we quickly realized that the subject of amputation is not just not marginal, but pervasive through some of our most canonical literary texts—Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace among them. To provide a glimpse— but certainly not a comprehensive overview—of the wealth of literary and filmic works that address amputation, we have included a “Further Reading” list in this volume that will hopefully prove surprising and inspiring in the pursuit of further research into the much-neglected field of amputation narratives. In these and many other texts, the procedure of amputation as well as its consequences often function as multifaceted “narrative prosthes[e]s” (Mitchell and Snyder 47), mobilizing and stabilizing narrative plots and serving as metaphors for a variety of individual, political, and social issues. It seems patently true that “the scar, the limp, the missing limb, or the obvious prosthesis—calls for a story” (Couser 457). The politics of such storytelling are fraught with complications, however. While social encounters with a person with an impairment, as David Bolt highlights, do indeed call for a story in which the person without an impairment often “assumes a kind of authorship, indeed authority”—by assigning a disability story to the impaired that “bolsters the normate subject position” (291)—academic encounters are still determined by what Bolt has called “critical avoidance”: “it is often the case that the topic of disability is avoided, and generally so that any engagements are not informed by disability studies” (294). It is indeed striking that for most of the texts studied in this volume it is difficult to find critical readings that engage with amputation other than as an abstract signifier, and that—despite many individual insightful readings of amputees in literature and film and medical or cultural histories of amputation and prosthetics2—no monograph or edited collection has so far focused on amputation as a specific experience of impairment and disability in literature and film. This critical gap is particularly striking when we take account of the prominent role that the idea of “prosthesis” has long played in the humanities within and outside disability discourse (Hall 64). From Sigmund Freud’s impression that humankind’s attempt to become “a kind of

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prosthetic God” (42) through scientific and technological advance to Marshall McLuhan’s “Extensions of Man,” media and technology have long been conceptualized as prosthetic devices—notions that now proliferate in posthumanist theory and science fiction. Within disability studies, pervasive and useful concepts like Mitchell and Snyder’s “narrative prosthesis” also make use of the metaphorical underpinnings of prosthetics to develop a literary and cultural theory. But such figurative employments of prosthetics may be problematic, as Kathleen Tolan’s “We Are Not a Metaphor” makes clear. Metaphors may reinforce fetishization and alienate “discussions from embodied, material experiences” (Hall 65). Vivian Sobchack, for instance, points out that the literal and material ground of the metaphor has been largely forgotten, if not disavowed. That is, the primary context in which “the prosthetic” functions literally rather than figuratively has been left behind—as has the experience and agency of those who, like myself, actually use prostheses without feeling “posthuman” and who, moreover, are often startled to read about the hidden powers that their prostheses apparently exercise both in the world and in the imaginations of cultural theorists. (20)

Sobchack does not dismiss metaphor in general, but she dismisses a metaphorical and metonymical reading of prosthetics that forgets about or silences its material grounding and uses prostheses as signifiers for disruption and an opposition between body and technology, when amputees’ actual (and quite mundane) experiences are often different and more ambiguous than that (23–27). If they allow for a thorough engagement with amputation and artificial limbs, narrative and metaphorical thinking, for all their potential pitfalls, may not only be unavoidable but also produce creative responses to the challenges of disability (Hall 38). Precisely because prostheses have become such prominent metaphors, we believe it is important to study their underpinnings—and return to the “dynamic,” “situated,” “ambiguous” and “graded” experiences of amputation (Sobchack 27) that often (though not always and not exclusively) create the necessity for a prosthetic device. A more detailed analysis of amputation in literature and film might deepen our understanding not only of the material experience of impairment and disability but also of the critical practices in the humanities that rely on the prosthetic metaphor. In this volume, we are therefore opting for a variety of different and interdisciplinary approaches to disability that engage critically with the

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historical, political, material, relational, and metaphorical texts and subtexts created by amputation. Through critical dialogue, rather than critical avoidance, we hope to explore a range of questions that are raised by amputation as a specific form of disability experience. The dialectics of “loss” and “gain,” disability and ability, are particularly highlighted through the surgical practice of amputation and prosthetic rehabilitation, where loss and gain, acquired dis/abilities and other transformations, are “written on the body,” to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s phrase. Recent voices in disability theory have often criticized the field’s tendency to promote a mind-body-dualism, in highlighting disability over impairment, social constructs and abstract theory over the material realities of the body (Hall 26, 67). Tobin Siebers, for instance, has taken critics to task who “mythologize disability as an advantage”: “Frequently, the objects that people with disabilities live with—prostheses, wheelchairs, braces, and other devices—are viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvellous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment” (63). Clearly, the challenge is to attain an integrated understanding of dis/ability, in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are no longer pitted against each other but understood as interrelated and interacting aspects of our embodied experience of the world. The four thematic parts of this volume represent four different, yet interconnected, forays into these questions. The first, “The Politics of Amputation,” considers the socio-political implications of amputation and the (dis)empowerment of the amputee. The second, “Amputation’s Intersections,” brings together chapters examining the intersection of amputation with sexuality, gender, and age. The third part, “Grief and Prosthetic Relations,” explores the ways in which the processes of mourning over and grieving for an amputated limb affect interpersonal relationships for amputees and those close to them. Finally, the fourth part, “Philosophy, Language, Disability,” offers interdisciplinary engagements with concepts like bodily integrity, Otherness, and authenticity that plague discourses around amputation and prosthetic limbs. In light of our dialogic approach, we close each part with a brief essay discussing common threads, points of debate, and open questions that connect the chapters and may provide the ground for further comparative research into the problems highlighted by the scholarship collected here. Modesta’s “Prototype” can be read productively along these four critical avenues, and we will briefly sketch such a reading to expand upon

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the ideas that drive our thematic parts and demonstrate how they, too, are necessarily interconnected. Historical and political implications enter Modesta’s video from the start. The narrative sequence begins with a young girl watching television in what seems to be a 1940s setting. On the television screen, a superhero cartoon version of Modesta chases a menacing shadow, which she defeats with a kick of her prosthetic spike. The girl, inspired, rips out the leg of one of her dolls and reenacts Modesta’s defiant moves, only to be stopped by her worried mother. We soon understand that, in the world we are shown, people invest Modesta with the power of resistance and diversity. Modesta herself is eventually arrested by the fictional regime, whose officials are reminiscent of early twentieth-century fascist orderlies, but she remains defiant even through interrogation, using her crystal prosthesis to redirect and weaponize the laser beams that are supposed to restrain her. In this way, the video apparently partakes in a tradition that Mitchell and Snyder have highlighted: the use of disability as “a metaphorical signifier of social […] collapse” (47). Modesta, however, reverses such metaphorical structures in that her video does not figure disability as a marker of the effects of an oppressive regime, but, instead, as a metaphor of resistance. And while such metaphorical readings have usually been seen to detract from a political reading of disability itself (Garland-Thomson 9–10), Modesta’s metaphor returns us to disability: it is ultimately a message about the right to be different within a broadly normate culture. In other words, Modesta is not using disability as a metaphor for historical or political developments, but (fictional) history as a metaphor for disability politics. “The Politics of Amputation” addresses these entanglements between historical, political, and metaphorical interpretation by situating the semiotics of loss in their historical contexts. The chapters in this part are not seeking to address amputation as a signifier for history, but look instead at disabled literary characters in history, and how their very embeddedness in a historical and political moment inevitably creates new meanings and new power relations within established structures of class, gender, race or ethnicity, and disability. Rachel Ellen Clark, in “‘Lame Doings’: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London” takes us to sixteenth-century England and its emerging discourse of disability. Rather than figuring disability merely as “monstrosity” or a sign of moral degeneracy, the plays Clark discusses turn to disability as a signifier of middle-class powerlessness in the context of wartime experience and male community. Lena Wånggren’s “Complicating the Semiotics

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of Loss: Gender, Power, and Amputation Narratives” presents another explicitly politicized and historical reading of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film, arguing that power, control, race, and gender are intricately linked in amputation narratives—shedding light on the cultural and political significance of amputation that has often been overlooked in readings that understand it primarily as a symbolic expression of castration. In “Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet Literature,” Oxane Leingang chronicles the treatment of invalid war veterans in the Soviet Union through a reading of three select (auto)biographical writings, highlighting the paradoxical role of the amputee veteran in Soviet commemoration politics between hero cult and stigmatization. Inevitably, these historical readings have also paid attention to the intersections of disability with other categories such as gender and age. It is by now common critical fare that “disability as a category is entangled with aging” (Gallop 5), and that the individual experiences and cultural meanings of disability are radically different depending on class, race, ethnic and cultural background, gender, and sexuality. The paradoxes created by these entanglements, however, still need unpacking. Amputation, in particular, has been symbolically linked to castration and genital mutilation, which suggests that the trajectory of the amputee is easily readable: amputation, like aging, signals a loss of social and sexual capital and, like womanhood, suggests effeminization. Hulga of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” for instance, who has lost her leg due to a hunting accident, is viewed by her mother as someone without any prospects in life and love, and what appears to be an attempt at seduction by the young Bible salesman who visits their house turns out to be a ploy to steal her prosthetic leg and assert his superiority (194). This formula, however, disguises a number of other meanings created by amputation related to care, desire, and empowerment that cannot be easily mapped onto a straightforward narrative of decline. Garland-Thomson, moreover, has highlighted how disability is a paradoxical part of how Western culture defines femininity: “Seen as the opposite of the masculine figure, but also imagined as the antithesis of the normal woman, the figure of the disabled female is thus ambiguously positioned both inside and outside the category of woman” (29). The disabled woman is thus a recurrent symbol of womanhood per se, but still often presented as unwomanly and desexualized, a pattern against which Modesta’s video launches another strategic attack. Modesta appears highly sexualized and even “hyper-feminiz[ed]”

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(Christensen-Strynø 70), not despite, but because of her prosthesis, and the video shows her in intimate acts with a man and a woman. It is perhaps significant that it is during this moment of intimacy that the audience is allowed a glance at her naked stump, to counter a fetishization of the prosthesis and confront the reality of her amputated limb at the very same time that her femininity and sexuality are performed for us. Modesta rejects the idea “that people with a disability can’t be alluring” and explains that this is why in the video she “made every point of pushing [her] sexuality to the level that [she’s] comfortable with” (Saner). As a result of the paradoxical entanglements between disability, sexuality, and gender, however, it appears that “[a]t one and the same time, disability and gender seem to be stabilized and destabilized through the stylized staging of bodily particularity” (Christensen-Strynø 70), and that, as an audience, it is difficult for us to decide whether Modesta’s portrayal escapes objectification or participates in confirming stereotypical assumptions about gender and sexuality. In “‘She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps’: Amputation and Embodiment in ‘The Girl Without Hands,’” Miranda Corcoran turns to fairy tales to unravel some of those contradictions. The removal of the hands of the female protagonist in the fairy tale “The Girl Without Hands” serves to reflect anxieties about womanhood as lack, about women’s abject, leaky bodies, and their purported animal nature. In Corcoran’s reading, amputation appears as neither liberating nor constraining, but as a vehicle to navigate the complexities of embodied womanhood, especially for female storytellers and listeners. Andrea Gremels’s “Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment” looks at Benito Pérez Galdós’s Tristana and Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation of the novel to contrast their differing approaches to the representation of amputation and its links to femininity. In nineteenth-century Spanish society, disability confirms rather than creates “defective femininity,” and despite Galdós’s and Buñuel’s efforts to stage a critique of contemporaneous gender politics through Tristana’s response to the loss of her leg, their views of potential empowerment remain bleak. Erik Grayson, in “‘Even at This Late Juncture’: Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man,” focuses on the gerontological implications of amputation and their influence on self-understanding. Paul’s sudden and intense desire for fatherhood in the aftermath of his surgery highlights the complex entanglements of age, masculinity, and the need for human connection.

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These deliberations also raise questions about the relatedness and relationality of disability more generally. Can we think about disability outside of human relationships? How does disability change these relationships? And does art allow us to develop empathy with the disabled, through “imaginative identification” (Hall 35), as some have claimed? Modesta’s “Prototype” provides an ironic reflection on these questions, given that it reverses a long history of negative responses to disability in many cultures through the portrayal of a widely revered and imitated amputee. Amputation may offer a particularly useful entry point into these questions because it links embodied with relational experience: many amputees describe their experience of grieving for a lost limb as similar to grieving for a lost loved one. In Guy de Maupassant’s “En mer,” the amputated hand is even given its own ritual burial (744). Grief and mourning may thus be key emotions to think through the embodied pain and suffering amputation may entail without necessarily reducing them to dismissals of a more wide-ranging and enabling experience of disability. They may also offer new ways of thinking about the audience’s relationship to disabled characters in literature and film, to take into account not just the allure of the grotesque and the exotic, but also more complex emotional and ambivalent entanglements like empathy, abjection, and shared mourning. Susan Kerns’s “The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the Vengeful Amputee” tackles those questions in examining how the process of adaptation of Gouverneur Morris’s 1913 pulp novel into a Wallace Worsley film starring Lon Chaney works to increase the audience’s empathy and allows for shared grieving with a character that might otherwise fulfill the stereotype of the “monstrous amputee.” In “‘The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole’: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,” Maren Scheurer explores the ways in which the two texts use the point of view of the non-disabled character to address the emotions disability arouses in others, present their reflection on audience response, and develop new imaginaries for prosthetic relations through mourning and love. Juliane Prade-Weiss, in “‘But the Damage … Lasted’: Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser,” engages with a curious case of an averted amputation with painful consequences. Prade-Weiss uses this occurrence in Karl Philipp Moritz’s autobiographical novel as a starting point to investigate the relationality of the self in autofiction, the roles of pain and wounds in self-formation, and the ways in which unacknowledged

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mourning translates into the psyche-soma. All three chapters thus draw new and surprising links between disability, relationality, mourning, and embodiment. Where do such “assaults” on our notions of the body, our relationships, and our capacity for empathy leave us in terms of disability politics? How may we rethink our concepts of disability in light of the experiences literature and film offer us through images and language? Amputation narratives may offer particularly potent sites to negotiate these questions because, as we have seen, they bring two crucial anxieties that pervade disability discourse sharply into focus. On the one hand, amputation does not allow us to relegate disability to Otherness: it may befall anyone, at any time, through accident or disease. The idea that disability can be separated from, or does not affect, healthy individuals that ableist discourse depends on is difficult to uphold in the face of amputation. On the other hand, amputation questions the notion of bodily integrity most radically: where do our bodies end, when are they complete, and can they be whole and perfect even when something is missing? If amputation produces bodies that are incomplete, from one perspective, how do we need to change the way we think about our bodies to accommodate the experiences of amputees in a concept of bodily integrity that is more open for diversity? Modesta’s video is an explicit attempt to change public perception on disability, and while it participates in such well-known stereotypes as the “supercrip” and the cyborg, Modesta’s performance does raise questions about the visibility of amputation and prostheses in the public, the potential to read physical difference in terms of variety, self-expression, and ability, and to offer the potential for positive identification for non-disabled people. By presenting her own body as desirable, Modesta also “challenges cultural ideals of the ‘normal’ or ‘whole’ body” (Mitchell and Snyder 50), in that she exposes our notions of physical perfection as culturally shaped and changeable. Our final part offers such opportunities for rethinking disability and realigning our assumptions about ability and disabled experience through interdisciplinary points of view that focus on language and difference. The chapters in this part approach amputation from unexpected tangents or metaphorical abstractions, but in doing so, they offer new ways of thinking about as well as surprising insights into the concerns and questions highlighted by amputation and demonstrate their central relevance to structures and concepts that pervade our cultural imaginaries. In other words, it is important to address these figurative abstractions because they

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have shaped how we think about disability. Danesh Singh, in “Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de),” offers a new perspective on bodily integrity through ancient Chinese philosophy. Through a reading of stories about amputees in the Daoist text Zhuangzi, Singh shows how Daoism, in contrast to Confucianism, refused to view the disabled as social outcasts and, by modifying its view of integrity, presents amputees as exemplars of Daoist virtue. Thomas Emmrich’s chapter “Speech—Amputation— Writing: Philomela’s Notalogy” focuses on the myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in order to grapple with the implications of the loss of Philomela’s tongue for a theory of communication. Linking the myth to a Derridean critique of phonocentrism, Emmrich exposes the unreliability of what has long been thought of as primary ability—speech—and the potential of what is often seen as a mere “prosthesis”—writing. In “(In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot,” Monika Loewy reads the desire of individuals diagnosed with BIID (body integrity identity disorder) to amputate themselves against Maurice Blanchot’s theory of language and literature, exposing buried links between everyday experiences and experiences labelled as pathological and offering new ways of thinking about BIID and disability more generally. We hope that this volume will help to expand and perhaps explode the semiotics of “loss” that surround amputation. We need to confront the embodied experiences of pain, anguish, and loss related to lost and artificial limbs, but we should also take account of the ways in which limb loss and prosthetics are not limited to narratives of bereavement and replacement or translatable into predictable categories and metaphorical formations. They relate to wider ranges of experiences and meanings that are closely intertwined with the historical, political, and social realities in which they are embedded and complicated by the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and age that traverse disability. We need to engage with the ways in which disability acts upon and is affected by relationships, and how, as readers, viewers, or critics, we are repulsed by and pulled into narratives of amputation and its complicated aftermath. And we need to recognize how the categories that are called into question by amputation and prosthetics cannot be relegated to the margins but have determined how we think about the self, the body, language, and culture.

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Notes 1. Degenerative arterial disease and diabetes are now among the most common indications for amputation beyond traumatic injury and warfare (Kirkup 92), and drug-resistant microbes continue to pose problems during treatment (89). More recently, the rate of major amputations has decreased in many Western countries, but the numbers of minor amputations are often on the rise (Kröger et al. 130). In the Global South, limb amputation is still considered to be a major health problem with profound “economic, social and psychological effects,” particularly because “prosthetic services are poor” (Chalya et  al.). The non-profit organization LIMBS International reports that “[o]nly 5% of the approximate 30–40 million amputees in the developing world have access to prosthetic devices or assistance.” 2. See, for example, John Kirkup’s A History of Limb Amputation or Mareike Heide’s Holzbein und Eisenhand for historical studies of limb amputation and the use of prosthetics. Studies of the role of amputation in the works of individual writers or corpuses include Akhtar Jaleel’s study on Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison and Ernest Cole’s Theorizing the Disfigured Body: Mutilation, Amputation, and Disability in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone. Most book-length studies of the topic, however, are focused on prosthetics in the posthumanist sense and pay little attention to amputation. See, for instance, Harrasser or Straub and Métraux.

References “About.” Viktoria Modesta, 2020. www.viktoriamodesta.com. Akhtar, Jaleel. Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Alternative Limb Project (altlimbpro). “Viktoria Modesta.” http://www.thealternativelimbproject.com/viktoria-­modesta/. “Amputation, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP, Sept. 2020. www.oed.com/view/ Entry/6768. Bolt, David. “Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas, Routledge, 2013, pp. 287–97. Chalya, Phillipo L., et  al. “Major Limb Amputations: A Tertiary Hospital Experience in Northwestern Tanzania.” Journal of Orthopedic Surgery and Research, vol. 7, no. 18, 2012. https://josr-­online.biomedcentral.com/ articles/10.1186/1749-­799X-­7-­18. Christensen-Strynø, Maria Bee. “Mainstreaming and Misfitting: Exploring Disability and Its Intersections with Gender in Online Disability

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­Awareness-­Raising Videos.” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, vol. 61, 2016, pp. 58–75. Cole, Ernest. Theorizing the Disfigured Body: Mutilation, Amputation, and Disability in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone. Africa World P, 2014. Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2013, pp. 456–59. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton, 2010. Gallop, Jane. Sexuality, Disability and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus. Duke UP, 2019. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. Routledge, 2016. Harrasser, Karin. Körper 2.0: Über die technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen. Transcript, 2013. Heide, Mareike. Holzbein und Eisenhand: Prothesen in der Frühen Neuzeit. Campus, 2019. Kirkup, John. A History of Limb Amputation. Springer, 2007. Kröger, Knut, et al. “Lower Limb Amputation in Germany: An Analysis of Data from the German Federal Statistical Office between 2005 and 2014.” Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, vol. 114, 2017, pp. 130–36. LIMBS International. “Why Limbs.” Limbsinternational.org, 2020. https:// www.limbsinternational.org/why-­limbs.html. Maupassant, Guy de. “En mer.” Contes et nouvelles: I, edited by Louis Forestier, Gallimard, 1974, pp. 739–44. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, 2006. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Modesta, Viktoria. “Prototype.” Channel 4 on YouTube, 12 Dec. 2014. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8inmHhx8c. O’Connor, Flannery. “Good Country People.” A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Harcourt Brace, 1983, pp. 167–95. “Prosthesis, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP, Sept. 2020. www.oed.com/view/ Entry/153069. Saner, Emine. “Interview: Viktoria Modesta, the World’s First Amputee Pop Star: ‘If You Don’t Fit In, Then Don’t Fit In.’” The Guardian, 20 Dec. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/20/-­sp-­amputee-­pop-­star­viktoria-­modesta. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. U of Michigan P, 2008.

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Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, MIT Press, 2006, pp. 17–41. Straub, Jürgen, and Alexandre Métraux, editors. Prothetische Transformationen des Menschen: Ersatz, Ergänzung, Erweiterung, Ersetzung. Westdeutscher Universitätsverlag, 2018. Tolan, Kathleen. “We Are Not a Metaphor: A Conversation About Representation.” American Theatre, 2001, pp. 17–21, 57–59. Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford UP, 1995. Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Vintage, 2014.

PART I

The Politics of Amputation

CHAPTER 2

“Lame Doings”: Amputation, Impotence, and Community in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London Rachel Ellen Clark

Early modern England was a land of monsters. Monstrous fish washed up on English beaches or appeared mysteriously inland, monstrous pigs were born with no face, and impairments turned people into monstrous exempla.1 Scholars have often framed monstrosity as a, if not the, dominant mode of understanding and interacting with non-standard bodies in early modern England.2 Elizabeth Bearden’s recent and superb book Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability has shown that “as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, monstrosity portends, shows, and teaches us much about our tendency to ascribe disability with meaning” (6). Yet not all early modern impairments fall into the category of monstrosity. Amputation, in particular, does not seem to have necessarily been associated with the monstrous in all cases.3 In what follows, I examine Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and

R. E. Clark (*) Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies, Wartburg College, Waverly, IA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_2

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the anonymous A Larum for London, two plays from 1599 in which disability is not conflated with monstrosity but instead depicted in a way that emphasizes what Kevin Stagg calls “personal and social reality” (35): in these plays, disability intensifies ordinary masculine struggles with impotence and exclusion. Early modernists have only recently begun to embrace disability studies. The first major efforts to establish the subfield of early modern disability studies were spearheaded by David Houston Wood and Allison P. Hobgood, who co-edited a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly in 2009 and an essay collection in 2013, and who contributed an essay defining theoretical approaches to early modern disability for the 2018 Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Several other important books have been published in the past few years: Sujata Iyengar’s edited collection Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015), Lindsey Row-Heyveld’s Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2018), Bearden’s Monstrous Kinds (2019), and Genevieve Love’s Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability (2019).4 Bearden’s work provides especially important historical frameworks for understanding early modern disability. While many scholars of disability, including Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, have argued that neither the word nor the concept of “normalcy” existed before the nineteenth century, Bearden shows how concepts of the “ideal” and the “natural” did indeed have what she calls a “norming effect.” Moreover, she points out, “Both the ideal and the natural have enabling and disabling interpretations, allowing for variety in discriminatory and in compensatory or elevating concepts of the biodiversity of human beings” (34). Throughout her work, she demonstrates that if deviation from a norm is necessary in order to conceptualize disability, then the early modern period did indeed have concepts of normalcy against which to define outliers—even if they did not yet have either those specific words to use or the statistical methods that (as Davis has so aptly shown) define modern conceptions of disability. Thus, applying the framework of disability studies to early modern plays not only calls attention to the social constructions of disability in the period but also highlights the continuities between early modern perceptions of disability and those of the present day. In his examination of the genre of “monstrous birth” pamphlets, Stagg concludes that “physical difference is generally handled as representational and in so doing its personal and social reality is avoided” (34–35). In contrast, The Shoemaker’s

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Holiday and A Larum for London both feature characters who are disabled but not deformed, whose staged impairments do not signify moral degeneracy but rather grapple with the lived realities of amputation, impotence, and the complicated dynamics of male communities during a time of war. Hence, these plays both rely on and reach beyond what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called “narrative prosthesis”: the use of disability “as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (206). In the early modern period, the monstrous birth pamphlets that Stagg examines fit in with, for example, Richard III’s hunchback as examples of legible disabilities that have transparent metaphorical meanings.5 What is especially interesting about the amputees in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London is that their disabilities do not serve as metaphors in the same sense as Richard’s does. Rafe in The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Stump in A Larum for London both suffer war wounds that require amputation of the leg.6 While Rafe and Stump’s disabilities do “inaugurate[] an explanatory need that the unmarked body eludes by virtue of its physical anonymity,” as Mitchell and Snyder explain, the lost limbs actually foreground (rather than suppress) “the malleability of bodies” (212). The plays thus not only deploy the lost limbs as narrative prosthesis but also, in concrete ways, “take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (205), a move that Mitchell and Snyder argue is rare—and they do so by addressing genuine problems faced by disabled veterans.

Soldiers and Veterans in Elizabethan England Both The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London appear to have been written and performed in 1599, a tumultuous and theatrically exciting year.7 It was the year of Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. It was the year the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—who performed A Larum for London—built the Globe.8 It was the year that Thomas Dekker had two plays performed at the queen’s Christmas festivities: Old Fortunatus and, in an honored slot on New Year’s night, The Shoemaker’s Holiday. And it was also a year of war. Over the course of the 1590s, ongoing wars in Ireland and the Low Countries pressed thousands of English, Scots, and Welsh into service. Although England’s primary military foe was Spain, the wars in Ireland claimed lives and resources as well. English attempts to subjugate Ireland faced serious resistance in the sixteenth century, but the uprising led by

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Hugh O’Neill, the earl of Tyrone, came the closest to overthrowing English rule. This rebellion, now known as the Nine Years’ War, began in 1593 with the revolt of Cormac O’Neill (Tyrone’s brother). Over the next near-decade, Elizabeth I sent thousands of troops to Ireland. In 1599 Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex and Elizabeth’s last great favorite, had just been made Lord Deputy of Ireland—a position that did not suit his reckless nature. Also in 1599, England’s worst fears were nearly realized when Spain sent a fleet with the intention of using Ireland as a staging-­ ground for invading England. As with the more famous armada in 1588, bad weather saved the country from Spanish attack. Nevertheless, the war in Ireland was unpopular and difficult to support; men had to be pressed into service, mostly from the West Country, though London contributed over 2000 men as well (McGurk 73). Moreover, as Patricia Cahill points out, during the same years “an army of more than 5,000 English soldiers was regularly maintained” in the Low Countries (174). In fact, Charles Carlton calculates that at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, approximately 55% of men aged 18–39 had served in the military, whether domestic or foreign (54–55). Such widespread military service suggests that the experiences of Rafe and Stump—from conscription to wounding, amputation, and return—would have resonated with many early modern audience members. Even those who did not have family who served in the military would have known the challenges faced by disabled veterans, who often had to turn to begging in order to survive. Veteran care in the Elizabethan era came only slowly into existence; in fact, the 1593 Act for the Relief of the Poor was the first to provide for disabled soldiers and mariners. John McGurk frames Elizabeth’s support of this act as an act of ableism, though he does not use this term: The date 1593 coincided with the beginnings of the war in Ireland, but what was probably instrumental in the passing of the Act was the queen’s annoyance at the appearance of wandering soldiers in London. It was said in 1593 that “the Queen is troubled whenever she takes the air with these miserable creatures.” (251)

The queen’s “troubles” need not have been annoyance, or not annoyance alone: pity and compassion might also be suggested by the phrase “miserable creatures.” In any case, the London of this passage teems with disabled veterans who have no means of supporting themselves other than

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begging on the streets. McGurk also points out that the historical record shows only two hospitals that gave preference to disabled soldiers, one in Buckinghamshire and one in Northamptonshire, that between them housed a maximum of a mere forty-nine men. The thousands of other surviving veterans mostly had to fend for themselves, though sometimes town almshouses provided rooms for disabled soldiers (McGurk 252). Men like Rafe and Stump often had difficulty rejoining their communities, making the treatment of these two characters all the more intriguing.

The Shoemaker’s Holiday When we first meet Rafe in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, shoemaker Simon Eyre—a near-legendary figure among the artisans of London—is pleading with Hugh Lacy, earl of Lincoln, and his cousin Askew to allow Rafe, who works for Eyre, to stay home from the war. “[A]l we come to be suters for this honest Rafe,” Eyre says. “[K]eepe him at home, and as I am a true shoomaker, and a gentleman of the Gentle Craft, buy spurs yourself and Ile find ye bootes these seuen yeeres” (sig. B3r). Eyre claims a paradoxical class status—both a gentleman and a tradesman—as he pleads for Rafe’s fate, attempting to bridge the gap between artisan and aristocrat. In this, he embodies what David Scott Kastan identifies as an imaginative erasure of social tension: “If this is a fantasy it knows itself as such, and therefore cannot help reveal the contradictions it apparently would repress, transforming its discontinuities into a fiction of social and economic harmony” (327). Unfortunately, even the lure of seven years’ supply of boots cannot persuade Lincoln to intervene on Rafe’s behalf. From the beginning, then, Rafe’s membership in the company of shoemakers provides him with working-class allies and protectors, though not aristocratic ones. The social powerlessness of the shoemakers comes almost immediately into tension with their sexual vigor when Eyre’s man Firk joins the conversation: [Y]ou shal do God good seruice to let Rafe and his wife stay together, shee’s a yong new married woman, if you take her husband away from her a night, you undoo her, she may beg in the day time, for hees as good a workman at a pricke & an awle, as any is in our trade. (sig. B3r)

From the insinuation that in her husband’s absence Jane would resort to beggary or sex work to the obvious bawdy joke about Rafe’s skill with a

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“prick,” Firk makes it clear that Rafe’s virility makes him necessary at home. Jane, too, picks up the theme, repeating in response to Firk, “O let him stay, else I shal be undone.” Firk then adds, “I truly, she shal be laid at one side like a paire of old shooes else, and be occupied for no use” (sig. B3r). The link between Jane and shoes that Firk forges, however misogynistic, remains crucial throughout the play as an emblem of close masculine community ties as well as the intimate relationship between husband and wife.9 Key to the plot is a pair of heavily pinked (or “pricked”) shoes that Rafe makes for Jane. Alanna Skuse has argued persuasively that Rafe’s storyline, emblematized by these shoes, provides a strategy for identity formation that relies on “the bonds of matrimony and fraternity, and the enduring value of artisanal skill” (162). The unity and camaraderie fostered in Eyre’s workshop uphold Rafe’s marriage, the community of shoemakers, and the artisan economy in which they function. Yet this sense of community is not strong enough to prevent Rafe from having to go to war, to keep him unwounded when he fights, or to avert his separation from Jane when he returns. The deep irony of using Jane’s shoes to memorialize their marriage—“Weare them my deere Jane, for thy husbands sake,” Rafe tells her, “And euerie morning, when thou pull’st them on, / Remember me, and pray for my returne” (sig. B4v)—lies, of course, in the fact that while Jane puts on her shoes every morning in London, Rafe in France loses a leg and will never need another pair of shoes again. And while Jane does remember Rafe, by the time they meet again he is so altered by his experiences that she does not recognize him. Meanwhile, the supposedly solid community of shoemakers does not watch over Jane in Rafe’s absence, as he asks them to do; their carelessness leads directly to Jane’s nearly being separated from Rafe forever. Throughout the play, the emphasis on war and the powerlessness of the working classes ratchets the conflict higher while simultaneously undermining the celebration of community that otherwise characterizes the text. At the end, the King (apparently Henry V) comes to Simon Eyre’s feast and authorizes him to found the Leaden Hall (which would become the Royal Exchange). This moment, then, commemorates a historic event in the development of London’s proto-capitalist economy. But the last lines of the play dash the feel-good developments. “When all our sports, and banquetings are done,” says the King, “Warres must right wrongs which Frenchmen haue begun” (sig. K4v). In other words, the wars in France still continue; men like Rafe must still risk their lives and limbs in

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service of the King’s cause. Eat, drink, and be merry, shoemakers, for tomorrow you die. However, compared with so many Elizabethan veterans, Rafe is lucky. He can still ply his trade without a leg, as Hodge points out: “[T]hou shalt neuer see a shoomaker want bread, though he haue but three fingers on a hand” (sig. E4r). And Rafe enjoys the support of his colleagues in the workshop, a level of social safety that cements the play’s status as nostalgic fantasy. This support gives Rafe an advantage over other disabled soldiers (including Stump in A Larum for London), especially those from rural areas where the economy provided fewer opportunities to men who had lost a leg. In fact, even survival makes Rafe fortunate. Amputation was still a difficult and little-understood procedure. The revolutionary sixteenth-­ century French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré had only recently begun treating patients in a way that minimized pain. Paré’s discoveries included the realization that using ligatures to bind off blood vessels during amputations was far more effective than pouring boiling oil over the stump to cauterize the wound (Drucker 200–01). But if we accept the fifteenth-­ century setting that Dekker provides, Rafe could not have benefited from these recent developments in medical practice, even if he were French like Paré. Rafe, like other surviving amputees in Elizabethan England, has not only been wounded badly enough to have a limb removed, but also survived the subsequent pain of cauterization, fought off infection, and managed to return home anyway. And, notably, his amputation is never depicted as the just consequences of moral corruption; unlike in, say, Titus Andronicus, Rafe’s lost limb does not punish him for misplacing his loyalties or signify a loss of virginity. In this sense, his disabled body does not become the same sort of legible text as other literary disabilities do. Instead of exemplifying a character flaw within Rafe himself, the loss of his leg is associated with impotence. This impotence is only in part sexual (as I shall discuss later). In the Elizabethan era, as Lindsey Row-Heyveld notes, “virtually every discussion of early modern poor relief insists on the need for provisions for the ‘impotent poor,’” and the need to determine what qualified as “impotence” led to the first legal distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor (English Drama 7). In Row-Heyveld’s explanation of the transformation from “almsgiving-as-aid to government-controlled social assistance,” we see the first steps in translating impairment from an individual experience into a legal status based on the ability or disability to work (English Drama

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6–9). But the play rejects the notion that a lost limb necessarily entails catastrophe. Rafe can trust in his community to help him—because, as a shoemaker, he can still work: “Since I want lims and lands,” he says, “Ile to God, my good friends, and to these my hands” (sig. E4v). Although he lacks his leg and might therefore be perceived as impotent, in fact he is not. For the largest part of what makes him impotent—the fact that he can’t find his wife—is a problem that gets solved by the end of the play. While socially not powerful enough to escape going to war, while martially not powerful enough to escape being wounded, Rafe is powerful enough to claim his wife back from a new marriage to the wealthy Hammon. Furthermore, as Skuse observes, “Ralph’s10 restoration to the community of shoemakers and to the arms of his loving wife appears to confirm the value of interpersonal relationships over and above material goods. […] [T]he pair even get to keep the money and clothes offered to Jane by Hammon” (174). Considering that a journeyman shoemaker in London in 1588 could expect to make four pounds per year “with meat and drink” (Aughterson 201), Hammon’s gift to Rafe of twenty pounds represents life-changing prosperity. Now assured of opportunity and rescued from the “impotence” of poverty, Rafe seems to be on the verge of full reintegration into the masculine community. However, both Skuse and Row-Heyveld have shown that this fantasy of reintegration remains incomplete. Row-Heyveld reads the male community of shoemakers as a hollow one, disrupted by Rafe’s disabled body. “[T]he idealized male friendships, which are featured in the play’s fantasy of brotherhood and facilitate its conventionally happy conclusion, collapse under closer inspection,” she argues, “demonstrating the unresolved problems disability posed to the working world valorized by the play” (Row-Heyveld, Performances 138). For her, the charity that the shoemakers offer to Rafe ultimately not only fails to incorporate him into the proto-capitalist labor market; it actively excludes him. She points to the ending of the play, when Rafe and Jane are reunited but Rafe remains silent: This is a critical moment for Ralph, when his reassertion of his marriage should affirm his sexual and economic viability and when his communal work with his fellow artisans should assert his inclusion within their community. Instead, Hodge’s hijacking of the action demonstrates the way Ralph’s disability reconfigures his position within the economics of the play. Ralph still has a place within the “Gentle Craft,” but only as a subordinate. (Row-Heyveld, Peformances 153)

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From one perspective, a subordinate place lacks sufficient power to be considered part of the fantasy ending. After all, Rafe clearly does not occupy an equal place to the other shoemakers; as Row-Heyveld also points out, by the end of the play he is consistently called “lame Rafe” and told to “run” (Performances 158). Skuse asks similar questions: “Why does Dekker not follow his ‘wish-fulfilling logic’ [pace Kastan] to secure an unequivocally warm reception for Ralph? Why also allow Ralph to be insulted […]?” (174). But I want to suggest that by early modern standards, Rafe’s inclusion in the feast at the end of the play actually is sufficient for the fantasy. Sixteenth-century English society mostly treated social inequality as the natural result of a divinely ordained hierarchy; furthermore, as a journeyman and not yet a master, Rafe would have expected a certain degree of subordination among the shoemakers even if he had not suffered such a traumatic injury. Row-Heyveld raises important points about Rafe’s inclusion and the insensitivity of expecting him to be able to “march” to the Lord Mayor’s house for the feast. Yet I contend that the repeated commands for “lame Rafe” to march and run actually represent a fantasy in which Rafe can continue to participate in the same activities he always could. Such language echoes the miraculous commands that Jesus uses to heal the lame; here, though Simon Eyre cannot perform healing miracles, the power of his vital proto-capitalist festive community enables the ableist fantasy that Rafe’s disability is not so very disabling after all. This interpretation runs the risk of sounding callous, but I think the text bears it out through the repeated accusations of sexual impotence that Rafe ultimately defies. Margery and Firk both suggest that Rafe’s amputation has made him sexually impotent. When Hodge asks after one Mistress Priscilla’s shoes, Rafe replies, “I am in hand with them, she gaue charge that none but I should doe them for her” (sig. G1v–G2r). Firk immediately picks up the dirty joke: “Thou do for her? then ’twill be but a lame doing, and that she loves not: Rafe, thou might’st have sent her to me, in faith I would have yearkt and firkt your Precilla.”11 This passage shows Rafe doing his job successfully (indeed, Mistress Priscilla esteems his services above the others’); he is, therefore, not operationally impotent. But Firk cannot resist the temptation to figure Rafe as impotent anyway. In this context, it is significant that just a few lines later, in the next scene, Rafe shows himself capable once more. A servingman brings Rafe the distinctive shoe that Rafe and his colleagues had made for Jane before he went to war, asking for a new pair for his mistress’s wedding the next morning. This information about Jane’s whereabouts enables Rafe to find her and

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be reunited with her. He plans to “prouide / A lustie crue of honest shoomakers” to go with him to the church so that he can “take her” back (sig. G3v). This moment marks a turning point for Rafe. As he exits, Firk seizes the chance to mock him: “Thou lie with a woman to builde nothing but Cripple-­gates!” he says, as if Rafe’s amputation will prove to be congenital (sig. G3v). Yet even this nonsensical insult restores Rafe’s virility. Firk’s insult in this scene represents the last time Rafe is mocked in the play. He carries through with his plan, mustering a gang of cudgel-­wielding shoemakers to waylay Hammon and Jane on their way to church to be married. In this scene of confrontation, as Row-Heyveld notes, Hodge usurps Rafe’s place. When Rafe moves to take the lead—“Stand toot [i.e., to it] my hearts, Firke, let me speake first”—Hodge jumps in: “No Rafe, let me: Hammon, whither away so earely?” (sig. H4v). Row-Heyveld notes, “This swift transferral of power is surprisingly absolute: after Hodge assumes Ralph’s position of power at the beginning of the scene, he commands control of the entire confrontation. [… Ralph’s] silence is especially resonant given how often characters speak directly to Ralph but never receive answers from him” (Performances 153). For her, Hodge’s actions suggest that Rafe has been demoted, as it were; his colleagues’ efforts to help him only arrogate his power, leaving him mostly voiceless for the rest of the play. However, Rafe does have one more moment of defiance: his refusal when Hammon offers him twenty pounds if he will let Jane go. Jane has already freely declared her love for Rafe, so he knows that the exchange would not please her. Rafe’s response, though, claims his place in the community of shoemakers: “Sirra Hammon, dost thou thinke a Shooe-maker is so base, to bee a bawde to his owne wife for commoditie, take thy golde, choake with it, were I not lame, I would make thee eate thy words” (sig. I1v–I2r). While Row-Heyveld points out that Rafe’s fellow shoemakers continually talk over him, I read their intrusions into the scene as expressions of support for a shoemaker who has managed to defy a social superior and win. Note that Rafe, like the other shoemakers, uses “thou” with Hammon, a wealthy stranger. This use of the familiar pronoun implicitly claims equal social standing at the least, and in Rafe’s speech, the use shades into contempt for an inferior. Rafe scorns Hammon for thinking he could be so easily bought. Even the last line of this speech, in which Rafe acknowledges the limitations of his disability—“were I not lame, I would make thee eate thy words”—proves irrelevant. Rafe has won; his firm rejection of Hammon’s offer has such a powerful effect that Hammon

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backpedals and offers them the twenty pounds in recompense for, as he says, “that great wrong I offered thy Jane” (sig. I2r). Nor is this Rafe’s last victory: immediately following this interchange, the earl of Lincoln and the Lord Mayor enter, trying to interrupt the marriage of Lincoln’s nephew Lacy to the Lord Mayor’s daughter Rose. Jane is “masked” for her wedding, and when the newcomers see her alongside Rafe, they think that she is Rose and that Lacy “counterfeits him lame” (sig. I2v). Faced with these clear social superiors, Rafe uses not “thou” but “you,” but he has apparently reached the end of his rope when they try to separate him and Jane. No longer using his lameness as a reason not to fight, and not understanding why these men have come between him and his wife, he says, “[T]he prowdest of you that laies hands on her first, Ile lay my crutch crosse his pate” (sig. I2v). His crutch thus becomes a weapon. He never needs to use it as such, since the misunderstanding is cleared up quickly, but this moment indicates nevertheless that Rafe, too, is living out a fantasy of reunion, independence, and the power of the artisan class to stand up to superiors. It is true that Rafe’s silence and the actions of his fellow shoemakers might prevent him from being a fully and equally integrated member of the community, as Row-Heyveld so powerfully argues. However, Skuse suggests that these tensions make a metadramatic point about how disability functions on the early modern stage: “[T]he ambiguity which remains around Ralph’s reintegration works as tacit acknowledgment of the junction between Dekker’s use of disability on stage as a tool for thinking about identity, and the fact of disability as it was lived by members of the audience” (174). In this sense, even the imperfect reintegration gives Rafe power. Indeed, from the moment when he decides to take action to win Jane back through to the end of the play, he is never again linked with impotence; he is never again mocked by his fellow shoemakers; he has the continued support of his colleagues, even when such support overzealously takes away his voice. This experience of silencing mirrors the experiences of disabled people through the centuries, into the present day. Many people with disabilities must continually fight to have their own voices heard, while their nondisabled supporters, trying to speak on their behalf, end up speaking over them.12 From one perspective, Rafe’s story moves through tragedy to reintegration into a nostalgic fantasy world. He wins Jane back, and his final line of the play celebrates the shoemakers’ community: “O the crew of good fellows that wil dine at my lord Maiors cost to day!” (sig. I3v). As

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Skuse notes, The Shoemaker’s Holiday “heralds with optimism the possibility of creating genuine relationships based on empathy and personality, but acknowledges the difficulties encountered by those living with an anomalous body” (179). For all the problems with Rafe’s role in the play, the festive restoration of order in the final scene emphasizes both his impairment and his inclusion, showing how the removal of social and communal barriers allows for acceptance.

A Larum for London The amputee in A Larum for London is likewise active, even heroic, and his disability—like Rafe’s—both functions as a legible extratext and raises real problems faced by disabled veterans. The play’s title page advertises “the ventrous acts and valorous deeds of the lame Soldier,” who throughout the play is given the speech prefix “Stump,” even though his name as used in the last minutes of the play is “Lieutenant Vaughan.”13 He is a walking, or halting, synecdoche: his amputated leg becomes his identity on a metatextual level, subsuming both his name and his identity outside of his injury—for modern readers, at least, if not for early modern audiences, who never would have heard “Stump” used as his name. Unlike Rafe, who comes home from the war wounded and faces the problems of any disabled veteran in trying to reclaim his old life, Stump is a soldier who remains a soldier, even after his injury. He is reluctant to fight, but the Spanish attack on Antwerp forces him to battle for human decency against the ravages of the Spanish forces. The “larum” of the title sounds a call to arms for the audience, lest the same fate that befell Antwerp in 1576 befall London in 1599. The play is, frankly, horrific. It stages a series of vignettes that all focus on the inhuman barbarity of Spanish forces during the sack of Antwerp in 1576. This attack marked a turning point in Spain’s European dominance by unifying the Low Countries against Spanish rule. In 1576, Antwerp was not actually rebelling against Spain; it was a prosperous port town and international financial center, with strong ties to England due to the many English merchants who operated from Antwerp. But while fighting in nearby Zeeland, Spanish troops ran out of supplies, and rich, complacent Antwerp looked ripe for the picking. Their pillaging destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed 8000 people (Cahill 169). The play positively revels in the bloodthirstiness of the Spanish, presenting what Cahill calls “a sensationalized, indeed visceral, staging of history” in order to “enact[]

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unsettling encounters with a past that ‘haunts’ the present” (176). Such a ghastly slaughter solidified the “Black Legend” that characterized English propaganda against Spain, and A Larum for London plays that propagandistic role to the hilt. Yet, as Cahill argues, the play is not purely didactic; its focus on Stump, she maintains, makes the “traumatic” impact of the play far more significant than the “prescriptive” elements (197). Indeed, even in Stump’s first speech, when he derides the complacency of the citizens of Antwerp, he does so by raising the specter of traumatic wounds: Be still perswaded you are safe enough? Vntill the verie instant, you do feele Their naked swoords glide through your weasond-pipes [i.e., windpipes]? Or doe you thinke with belching puffes, that flye From your full paunches, you can blow them backe? (sig. C2r)

Stump warns the residents of Antwerp that they are too soft, too drunk, too well-fed, too reliant on wealth—and therefore too vulnerable to the sexually suggestive trauma of the “naked swords” of the Spanish. Rapacious soldiers will not be bought off, Stump warns, and the rest of the play demonstrates just how correct he is. At one point, the governor pleads for Stump to fight against the Spanish, but Stump refuses. His eloquence this time takes on the plight of the veteran amputee, arguing at length against the poverty and disempowerment they face after losing a limb. First, he mocks the governor for the ridiculously low wages that soldiers earn: You haue another groate to giue me then, I know your liberall mindes will scorne t’impose, The sweat of bloudie daunger on the brow Of any man, but you’l reward him for it. He shall at least (when he hath lost his limmes) Be sent for harbour to a spittle-house. (sig. C2v)

The sarcasm drips off the page in those first four lines. Because Elizabeth had no real standing army, and because soldiers were stationed so far away from the capital, they often struggled to get paid at all (something that Elizabeth herself addresses in the famous Tilbury speech). Furthermore, the notion that veterans recovering from amputations could expect to be sent even to a spittle-house, as deplorable as conditions there would have

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been, reflected ideals more than reality. As we have already seen, resources for disabled veterans fell deplorably short of needs. Many, if not most, would have to resort to begging; a spittle-house would be a better option than was available to many veterans. Stump then takes up the social exclusion that disabled soldiers faced. Unlike Rafe, who returns to an idealized (if not perfect) community who urge him to take up his trade again and eagerly agree to help him reunite with his wife, Stump faces rampant distrust and disregard: A swettie Cobler, whose best industrie Is but to cloute a Shoe, shall haue his fee; But let a Soldier, that hath spent his bloud, Is lame, diseas’d, or any way distrest, Appeale for succor, then you looke asconce As if you knew him not; respecting more An Ostler or some drudge that rakes your kennels, Than one that fighteth for the common wealth. (sig. C2v)

Stump’s refusal to rejoin the fight at the governor’s behest takes its root not in cowardice or moral insufficiency but a consciousness of the loneliness and lack of resources that he already faces. He argues that his fighting and resultant lameness have not been valued highly enough. Even those working the jobs of lowest prestige—cobblers, ostlers, those who muck out kennels—get more respect than a disabled soldier does. Nor does he stop at respect; Stump returns to the matter of compensation and links it with the sacrifice of fighting and the exclusion after: “Bindes me my country with no greater bondes, / Than for a groate to fight? Then for a groate, / To be infeebled, or to loose a limme?” (sig. C3r). Stump thus makes an impassioned case for the need to compensate soldiers commensurate with the risk they take and to care for disabled veterans. They are not drains on society, he argues in word and deed throughout the rest of the play, nor are they capable only of begging. He fights and wins skirmishes against Spanish soldiers throughout the play, even though his amputation appears not to have been as successful as Rafe’s—he makes reference to his “olde rotten stump” (sig. C4v). The loss of his leg does not mirror a loss of power; unlike Rafe, no one calls him impotent. He serves a vital role in the fighting, a role that is actually enabled by his disability in ways that align him with the modern concept of the “supercrip,” a figure who “overcomes” disability to emphasize “heroism, inspiration,

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and the extraordinary” and direct our attention to “individual attitude, work, and perseverance rather than […] social barriers” (Schalk 73). However, not every scholar interprets Stump as a hero. In fact, otherwise insightful work has tended to read him as uncanny, sinister, and vicious. Cahill, for example, claims that Stump “is the embodiment of the uncanny” and repeatedly refers to him as “sinister,” largely due to his prosthesis and perceptions of his body as gangrenous.14 This claim seems to project modern ableist coding back into the world of the play, dismissing too easily the title page’s praise for his “ventrous acts and valorous deeds.” As Naomi Baker suggests about Stump and the character similarly named Cripple in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, in both plays it is the ostensibly crooked character who sets the other characters straight, the apparently disabled figure who is the one best able to get things done. Partly because of their uncanny powers of persuasion, Stump and Cripple have been regarded by some critics as sinister figures. Within the terms of the plays, however, they possess moral authority. (1310)

Stump is continually saving women from being raped and men from being killed, though he cannot single-handedly prevent Spanish atrocities. He is not present, for example, to save an entire family—including two children—from being brutally murdered onstage. And the staging does indeed seem to show violence taking place in the background while Stump soliloquizes to the audience. Yet these moments need not be read as sinister: the former surely serves as part of the warning that not everyone can be saved from Spanish depredations, and the latter also suggests a formal experiment with  which to communicate Stump’s thoughts before he charges in to help. His heroism can be read as all the more poignant because he does not always succeed. In success or failure, though, Stump’s prosthesis and his amputated limb define his experiences and identity. In one scene, the governor’s wife is accosted by two Spanish soldiers. Stump intervenes, and one of the soldiers questions how a rogue like him dares to speak to a Spaniard. Stump replies, “No roague Sir, but a Soldier as you are, / And haue had one leg more then I haue now.” Then, with the stage direction “Pointing to his leg,” he continues: “Sir, heer’s my Pasport, I haue knowne the warres, / And haue had the vantage of as faire a spoile as you haue heere” (sig. D1r). As Nick de Somogyi notes, all Elizabethan veterans were required to carry a passport (38–39). Stump’s amputated leg is his passport; it has become

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a text to be read and understood, a letter vouching for his identity. Vin Nardizzi and Genevieve Love have both pointed out the “ambivalent relation” that Stump has “to his prosthesis” (Nardizzi 123). Nardizzi observes that the name Stump refers to both the wooden prosthesis and “the portion of the limb that has healed after amputation,” tracing contextual uses for this meaning of “stump” in Titus Andronicus and Helkiah Crooke’s translation of Paré (123). He then goes on to argue, The elaboration of the double valence of “stump” at the site of prosthesis scrambles the idea that the figure of synecdoche presides over Stump’s naming in a straightforward way. We could say that no single part supplies him with a textual identity. Rather, it seems that two parts sharing tight quarters around the knee joint work in “a play of adjunction” to name him. (125)

In other words, Stump’s identity as signaled by his name signifies not loss but augmentation: the prosthesis enables a doubled and wooden hybridity that, as Nardizzi argues, “discloses the woodenness common to all bodies” (121). While Nardizzi’s focus in the article turns to an ecocritical analysis of the adjunction between wooden matter and human matter, here I want to draw attention to his emphasis on the “common[ness]” of prosthesis. If, as Nardizzi argues, all flesh shares a common wooden matter, then the prosthesis also signifies Stump’s belonging in that community. Paradoxically, it sets him apart even while it makes visible his fundamental connection with all humanity. Though more directly legible than Rafe’s lost limb, Stump’s also defies easy interpretation as evidence of moral failing. His disability signifies not what the soldiers immediately assume—that he is a rogue, a vagabond and beggar—but rather that he is an experienced fighter. Furthermore, in spite of his complaint about fighting for a groat, he refuses to accept an expensive jewel from the governor’s wife when she wants to give it to him in thanks. Riches are not his motivation; he really does fight for “the common wealth,” continuing to protect her even from a whole company of “rascall Soldiers” (sig. D1v). Over the course of the play, he goes from fighting one or two Spanish soldiers to leading the Dutch opposition, and he dies a tragic but noble death, joined by his captain. And this death brings us back to the importance of community in these plays. As Rafe belongs to the community of shoemakers, however uneasily, so Stump belongs to a community of soldiers. It is only at the end, when he has been reunited with his captain and the community of his company,

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that he gets named as Lieutenant Vaughan, as if to reinforce that his identity derives from his membership in this masculine community. He takes charge during the last stand against the Spanish, even though he is outranked, and remains the most rhetorically skilled character onstage. Most importantly, his death links him with the captain; they die together, bonded as soldiers who fight for the commonwealth. The anonymous author returns to the metaphor of wound as passport in the death scene; this time, it is the Captain who makes the comparison, referring to his bloody wounds as his “pasport” to death (sig. F4v). They die in each other’s arms, first the Captain and then Stump. At the last, Stump declares his willingness to be done with life. “For though my sword / Was neuer drawne but in a rightfull cause,” he says, “Yet much misprision hath attended it” (sig. G1r). The bleakness of war wins out: the heroes die, the Spanish win, and Antwerp is sacked. Yet even then, Stump’s nobility lives on. The Spanish commander, Danila, refuses to let his soldiers drag Stump and the Captain’s corpses around the country because, he says, “Their pride was honourable, deseruing loue / Rather than hate” (sig. G1v). Whereas Danila will leave “ten thousand others” unburied, he recognizes the worthiness of Stump and the Captain and declares that not only will he ensure that they are buried properly, but he himself will attend the interment. Their wounds and reputations ensure their recognition, even in death; their passports continue to earn them certain privileges in the community of soldiers. Stump’s missing leg, like Rafe’s, ultimately invites interpretation as narrative prosthesis, but unusually, in both of these texts, the malleability of their bodies provokes not only verbal mockery but also communal action that demonstrates a level of compassionate care (in Rafe’s case) or unwavering loyalty (in Stump’s), thus modeling appropriate responses to disabled veterans.

Conclusion The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London both feature disabled veterans who participate actively in their communities, whether at home or abroad. In both cases, disability highlights social problems related to exclusion and “the impotent poor.” And in both plays, amputated limbs become legible signs of loss—not loss of individual moral standing, not a fall from grace, not monstrosity of character, but the loss that attends common soldiers and the working classes during times of war. In this sense, each character’s prosthesis serves as a  metaphorical,

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metatheatrical,  and concrete reminder of the lived experiences of early modern amputees. Rafe and Stump may face different fates, but their existence in both plays advocates for the inclusion of amputees, albeit in somewhat limited ways. In contrast with assumptions today that people in early modern England characterized disability as monstrosity, or that disability exists primarily in individualistic terms of selfhood, these plays highlight the fundamental commonness of human experiences of prosthesis. They therefore remind us that the past does not exist as a totalized time of backwardness but instead allows for a range of depictions of and conversations about disability. These texts show us that the “lame doings” of disabled veterans include more than dirty jokes and begging on the streets. Rather, the depictions of Rafe and Stump open up new conversations about early modern prosthesis and attitudes toward war and disability in late Elizabethan England. And in doing so, they also complicate our often too-simplistic attitudes toward disability today.

Notes 1. See, for example, The discription of a rare or rather most monstrous fishe taken on the east cost of Holland, which depicts what is recognizably a squid. There is also a ballad about a monstrous fish: A description of a strange (and miraculous) fish cast upon the sands in the meads, in the hundred of Worwell, in the county Palatine of Chester. Like the fish broadsides, The description of a monstrous pig uses the image of the monstrous animal as both an attention-­getting device and an illustration of God’s judgment. 2. See also Bearden, Benedict, Burnett, Daston and Park, Godden and Mittman, and Knoppers and Landes. 3. For medieval examples in which amputation is represented as monstrous, see Godden and Mittman 8–18. 4. As this volume goes to press, Katherine Schaap Williams’s Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater has just come out. Chapter 2, “Citizen Transformed: Being the Lame Soldier,” also analyzes both The Shoemaker’s Holiday and A Larum for London. I regret that there is insufficient time to engage more thoroughly with Williams’s excellent argument. 5. On disability in Richard III, see Moulton, Burnett, and Williams. 6. Williams points out that Rafe’s “lameness” is never explicitly attributed to amputation. For me, the allusions to his injury strongly imply the loss of his left leg, even if they leave the precise nature of the wound open to interpretation.

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7. On the dating of A Larum for London to 1599, see Knutson. 8. The Shoemaker’s Holiday was performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men. 9. On the importance of the shoes to the play, see especially Korda. 10. Skuse, like Row-Heyveld below, uses the modernized spelling “Ralph” throughout. I have chosen to retain the spelling “Rafe” because it is the one consistently used in the 1600 first edition. 11. In the Early English Books Online copy of the 1600 quarto from Harvard, leaf G2 appears to be partially torn away. To supplement the missing text, I have consulted the 1657 edition: Thomas Dekker, The Shoomakers Holiday, or the Gentle Craft. With the humorous life of Simon Eyre, Shooemaker, and Lord Maior of London. As it was Acted before the Queens most excellent Majesty on New-years-day at night, by the right Honorable Earl of Nottingham, Lord high Admiral of England, his Servants (William Gilbertson, 1657, Wing D863), Early English Books Online, sig. E4v. 12. See, for just one example, the open letter criticizing Autism Speaks, jointly signed by over two dozen disability rights organizations and published by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). 13. I have wrestled with the question of which name to use for him: the name reinforced in reading the play, or the only name audiences ever hear? In the end, I chose to use the name in the speech prefixes, since the transformation from “Stump” to “Vaughan” does seem to be an important element of the end of the play. 14. See Cahill 197, 204, and passim, and Knutson 70–71.

References Anonymous. A description of a strange (and miraculous) fish cast upon the sands in the meads, in the hundred of Worwell, in the county Palatine of Chester, (or Chesshiere. The certainty whereof is here related concerning the said most monstrous fish. To the tune of Bragandary. Thomas Lambert, 1635. STC 19226. Early English Books Online. ———. A Larum for London, or the siedge of Antwerpe. With the ventrous actes and valorous deeds of the lame Soldier. As it hath been playde by the right Honorable the Lord Charberlaine [sic] his Seruants. William Ferbrand, 1602. STC 16754. Early English Books Online. ———. The description of a monstrous pig the which was farrowed at Hamsted besyde London, the. xvi. day of October this present yeare of our Lord God. M.D.LXII. Alexander Lacy for Garat Dewes, 1562. STC 6768. Early English Books Online. ———. The discription of a rare or rather most monstrous fishe taken on the east cost of Holland the. xvii. of Nouember, anno 1566 The workes of God how great and

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straunge they be a picture plaine behold heare may you see. Thomas Purfoote, 1566. STC 6769. Early English Books Online. ASAN. “2014 Joint Letter to the Sponsors of Autism Speaks.” Autistic Self Advocacy Network, 6 Jan. 2014. https://autisticadvocacy.org/2014/01/ 2013-­joint-­letter-­to-­the-­sponsors-­of-­autism-­speaks/. Aughterson, Kate, editor. The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Routledge, 2002. Bearden, Elizabeth B. Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability. U of Michigan P, 2019. Benedict, Barbara M. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. U of Chicago P, 2001. Burnett, Mark Thornton. Constructing “Monsters” in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture. Palgrave, 2002. Cahill, Patricia. Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage. Oxford UP, 2008. Carlton, Charles. This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles, 1485–1746. Yale UP, 2011. Crawford, Julie. Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. Zone, 2001. Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. Dekker, Thomas. The Shomakers Holiday or The Gentle Craft. With the humorous life of Simon Eyre, shoomaker, and Lord Maior of London. As it was acted before the Queenes most excellent Maiestie on New-yeares day at night last, by the right honourable the Earle of Notingham, Lord high Admirall of England, his seruants. Valentine Simmes, 1600. STC 6523. Early English Books Online. Drucker, Charles B. “Ambroise Paré and the Birth of the Gentle Art of Surgery.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, vol. 81, no. 4, 2008, pp.  199–202. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2605308/. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Godden, Richard H., and Asa Simon Mittman, editors. Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hobgood, Allison P., and David Houston Wood, editors. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. Ohio State UP, 2013. Iyengar, Sujata, editor. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Routledge, 2015. Love, Genevieve. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. The Arden Shakespeare, 2019.

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Kastan, David Scott. “Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Studies in Philology, vol. 84, no. 3, 1987, pp. 324–37. Knoppers, Laura Lunger, and Joan B. Landes, editors. Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Cornell UP, 2004. Knutson, Rosalyn L. “Filling Fare: The Appetite for Current Issues and Traditional Forms in the Repertory of the Chamberlain’s Men.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 15, 2003, pp. 57–76. Korda, Natasha. “‘The Sign of the Last’: Gender, Material Culture, and Artisanal Nostalgia in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 573–97. McGurk, John. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis. Manchester UP, 1997. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J.  Davis, Routledge, 2006, pp. 205–16. Moulton, Ian Frederick. “‘A Monster Great Deformed’: The Unruly Masculinity of Richard III.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1996, pp. 251–68. Nardizzi, Vin. “The Wooden Matter of Human Bodies: Prosthesis and Stump in A Larum for London.” The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 119–36. Row-Heyveld, Lindsey. Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. ———. Dissembling Disability: Performances of the Non-Standard Body in Early Modern England. PhD dissertation, U of Iowa, 2011. Schalk, Sami. “Reevaluating the Supercrip.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 71–86. Skuse, Alanna. “Missing Parts in The Shoemaker’s Holiday.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 161–79. Somogyi, Nick de. Shakespeare’s Theatre of War. Ashgate, 1998. Stagg, Kevin. “Representing Physical Difference: The Materiality of the Monstrous.” Social Histories of Disability and Deformity: Bodies, Images, and Experiences, edited by David M.  Turner and Kevin Stagg, Routledge, 2006, pp. 19–38. Williams, Katherine Schaap. “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, 2009. http://dsq-­ sds.org/article/view/997/1181. ———. Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Cornell UP, 2021. Wood, David Houston. “Shakespeare and Disability Studies.” Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 5, 2011, pp. 280–90.

CHAPTER 3

Complicating the Semiotics of Loss: Gender, Power, and Amputation Narratives Lena Wånggren

Introduction One of the most well-known literary examples of bodily severance being used to exert power and gendered control is William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), often considered his most graphically violent play. It features rape and repeated bodily mutilation such as the cutting off of Lavinia’s hands and tongue, as described in the stage directions: “Enter the empress’ sons, with LAVINIA, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish’d” (2.4). However, like many instances of literary amputation, this most famous political dismemberment has been read through a psychoanalytic lens that tends to overlook the cultural and political significance of the act. Janet Adelman, among other critics, associates wounds, blinding, and limb loss (especially beheading) in Shakespeare “with castration and hence effeminisation” (327, 216). From Shakespeare onward, literary and cinematic critics have taken their cue from Sigmund Freud’s logic in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which Freud argues that the dream-work

L. Wånggren (*) Department of English, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_3

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frequently transposes the upper and lower portions of the body so that bodily severances—such as cutting hair or pulling teeth—become symbols of castration, of a specifically gendered deficiency: “To represent castration symbolically, the dream-work makes use of baldness, hair-cutting, falling out of teeth, and decapitation” (357). According to Freud, actions such as extracting a tooth or blinding (as in the Oedipus legend) thus become substitutes for castration. In this way, the cultural and political significance of amputation and other forms of dismemberment has been overlooked, overshadowed by the semiotics of “loss.” Complicating this notion of amputation as loss, this chapter explores cases of bodily dismemberment that take place not due to medical causes but due to cultural or political concerns. Focusing not on Shakespearean but on  late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century accounts of non-medical amputation in literary and cinematic narratives, this chapter explores the cultural and political—often gendered—signification of corporeal dismemberment. Distancing itself from a psychoanalytic reading of amputation, the chapter moves instead toward a politicized and historical reading, examining amputation as an expression and contestation of social values and hierarchies. In amputation narratives such as William Chamber Morrow’s “His Unconquerable Enemy” (1889), where a servant has his limbs amputated as punishment, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Case of Lady Sannox” (1894), in which a jealous husband arranges to have his wife mutilated, and the silent feature The Unknown (1927), in which a circus artist amputates his arms for love, concerns of power, control, and gender are intricately linked. These texts could be grouped under the category of the “medical gothic,” denoting medical narratives with elements of the gothic genre—or gothic narratives where the medical element itself comes to function as an instrument of horror, where modes of the gothic and the medical intersect.1 In the medical gothic texts explored in this chapter, bodily severance works not only as a way of controlling unruly sexual desires or improper gender behavior but also as an act of affection, bound up with controlling discourses of love; it functions both as a way of exerting power and as voluntary or involuntary acts of love or subordination.

Power, Control, and Embodied Resistance Within the ahistorical and universalist framework set up by the Freudian castration complex (Kastrationskomplex), in which Freud claims that all human beings attribute “to everyone, including females, the possession of a

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penis” (“Sexual” 215), any loss of limbs becomes symbolic of the threat of losing one’s genitalia. While psychoanalysis thus insists on amputation as a single-defined and gendered type of loss, mutilation of the body might more fruitfully be read through its place within power relations and situated within specific historical contexts. While amputation, medical or non-­ medical, physically clearly involves a removal (loss) of a limb, inferring also a mental or psychological side, the signification of this act will likely differ in different spatial and temporal contexts, since human bodies and different body parts often take on varying cultural significations. There must furthermore exist a major difference between the act of imposing limb loss on a person, for whichever reason, and suffering limb loss oneself. As Michel Foucault argues, the body is always “directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it” (Discipline 25). In a Foucauldian reading, the human body is both part of and at the center of power relations, and in constant negotiation with these. Importantly, while the body is “moulded” by social norms and institutions, it also “constructs resistances” (“Nietzsche” 87). While in a psychoanalytic framework the body is often seen as the outlet of the workings of the mind, mental ill health demonstrating itself physically through psychosomatic conditions, in a Foucauldian framework the body is an agent in itself. The power exercised on the body, Foucault writes, is conceived “not as a property, but as a strategy,” to be deciphered through “a network of relations, constantly in tension”; as “a perpetual battle” rather than the conquest of a territory (Discipline 26). Certain “disorderly” bodies, such as those at the center of amputation narratives, might even further “multiply, distort, and overflow […] meanings, definitions, and classifications,” in this way forming points of resistance (Oksala 112). While amputation often denotes physical and/or mental loss, at the same time the “disorderly” body insists on being read in multiple ways. The body not only is enacted upon by external forces but responds to and resists these forces— also when under a controlling surgeon’s knife. This conflict between domination and embodied resistance is seen in William Chambers Morrow’s short story “His Unconquerable Enemy,” published first in 1889 (in the US periodical The Argonaut) and then collected in The Ape, the Idiot and Other People (1897). In this story, a surgeon’s ethics are compromised as he is forced to amputate the limbs of a rajah’s insubordinate servant. Set in “the heart of India,” the text highlights not only an instance of embodied resistance to medical control but also colonial and imperialist discourses of the late nineteenth century. The

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narrator is an unnamed surgeon stationed in British colonial India, a medical man who at the outset of the story has just been summoned from Calcutta to assist at a great rajah’s household. There had been a British medical presence in India since the early 1600s (through the British East India Company), from 1857 organized in the military Indian Medical Service, of which some surgeons also took private patients. While at this point there existed civil surgeons and graduates from Indian medical schools, IMS surgeons in particular were popular with the Indian aristocracy, for whom the high fees and expertise brought a mark of social status (Harrison 12). The narrator notes later on in the story that there are also “some British soldiers” quartered in the rajah’s palace. The surgeon in Morrow’s story notes in the palace a particular servant named Neranya, who seems to be of a particularly malicious nature. As nineteenth-century culture was marked by a “xenophobic impulse” (Tromp, Bachman, and Kaufman 22) that branded “foreigners” or racialized persons as suspicious and fearful, the surgeon (in line with late nineteenth-­century “scientific” racism) characterizes Neranya’s character by his genetics: “there must have been a large proportion of Malay blood in his veins, for, unlike the Indians (from whom he differed also in complexion), he was extremely alert, active, nervous, and sensitive” (48). Medical “science” and narration are thus conflated through the late nineteenth-­century white supremacist language of imperialism. Neranya stands out because of his “marvellous capacity of malice” (48). The surgeon similarly finds the rajah, although “a man of a noble character,” possessed “of a sense of cruelty purely Oriental” (48). When Neranya stabs another servant, the rajah orders that Neranya’s right arm (the offending one) be severed from his body as a punishment: “The sentence was executed in a bungling fashion by a stupid fellow armed with an axe, and I, being a surgeon, was compelled, in order to save Neranya’s life, to perform an amputation of the stump, leaving not a vestige of the limb remaining” (49). After this punishment Neranya becomes even more fiendish, and after attacking the rajah with a knife, the rajah orders for his remaining arm to be amputated as well, and the verdict is carried out as in the former instance. Armless after this second operation, Neranya turns his attention to the cultivating of an enlarged usefulness of his legs, feet, and toes, enabling him to “perform wonderful feats” with those members (50). Additionally armed with an unconquerable will, Neranya’s capability for destructive mischief is considerably restored. Despite his master’s attempts to control

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him, Neranya kills the rajah’s only son, mutilating the body and removing the young prince’s arms. The rajah decides that while Neranya’s life should be spared, “both of his legs should be broken with hammers, and that then [the surgeon] should amputate the limbs at the trunk,” after which Neranya “should be kept and tortured at regular intervals” (51–52). As suggested by Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014) and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (2016), power relations and surrounding discourses of embodiment are crucial to understanding narratives of bodily severance and mutilation; there are “real-life horrors lying beneath the fictional terror and horror” in such narratives (Mulvey-Roberts 1). We see this in Morrow’s story, as the rajah’s cruel treatment of his servant is posited by the surgeon as a marker of the “Oriental” or “foreign” setting of the story. The surgeon, a learned Westerner and by all signs a British colonial stationed there, is dismayed by the “horrible sentence” facing Neranya (51–52) and confesses to feeling sympathy for the maimed servant. Morrow’s story thus— in line with the colonial and racist discourses of the time—posits the forced dismemberment as racially and culturally “Other,” while at the same time reinforcing a specific notion of cultural superiority on behalf of the British national. However, despite being “[s]ickened to the heart” by the “awful duty” facing him (52), the surgeon nevertheless goes ahead with the operation. He thus moves from being the self-designated guiltless observer, who is dismayed by such torture, to taking the position of perpetrator of this same crime. With four limbs amputated, the surgeon considers Neranya a “hideous, shapeless thing” (54) with an “unbridled but impotent ferocity” (55). As noted earlier, with the body at the center of power relations, disorderly bodies such as that of Neranya’s might work to disturb categories of identity, system, and order—forming points of resistance through contesting the established order of things (Oksala 112). Seemingly incapacitated and thus subordinated, Neranya enacts his revenge by miraculously escaping from the cage in which he is kept, jumping twenty feet down on his master and tearing his throat open with his teeth. The person previously described as a powerless “poor wretch […] helpless and silent” (55) now in the surgeon’s eyes becomes a “superhuman monster” capable of performing “impossible” “miracle[s]” (63, 62). Morrow spends several pages describing the disobedient servant’s surprising “ability,” which he has acquired in spite of his loss. The embodied control enacted upon Neranya seems to have had the opposite effect of the one intended: perhaps because of his treatment, Neranya seems stronger and more capable than ever, as he has

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perfected the use of his teeth and torso to carry out his revenge. Neranya himself dies alongside the rajah, his back broken by the fall. The surgeon describes the sense of triumph exhibited by the servant, even in death: “Murder, and not escape, had been his intentions from the beginning; and he had employed the only method by which there was ever a possibility of accomplishing it. […] He smiled sweetly into my face, and a triumphant look of accomplished revenge sat upon his face even in death” (66). In Morrow’s story, dismemberment does not carry the castratory significance ascribed to it by psychoanalytic theories. Instead, amputation is used as punishment, as a way of controlling a servant who threatens the status quo of power. In a psychoanalytic framework the “amputatory” act of penile castration is also often tied to punishment for one’s acts, such as a boy’s fear of castration as punishment for desiring his mother—Oedipus’s supposedly castratory blinding is the classic example of this. According to Freud’s theory of the castration complex, the phallus stands at the center of human identity; girls’ genitalia are already posited as “mutilated” (“Sexual” 217), so they have supposedly already been punished. However, while psychoanalysis, despite its cultural specificity of male European heterosexuality, imposes this supposedly ahistorical reading to all bodily mutilations independent of context, a Foucauldian framework allows for a consideration of the historical and temporal specificity of the practice. Amputation in Morrow’s story is not only used as form of control, but it is furthermore formulated as a particularly racialized practice, wherein this specifically “Oriental” punishment stands against another nation’s perceived cultural superiority. The bodily mutilations described in the story thus come to play into imperial projects of the time. But power relations are mobile, and where there is power there is resistance: despite his seemingly “impotent” position after the multiple mutilations, the “unconquerable” Neranya resists his master’s tyranny.

Medical Ethics and Gendered Control While Morrow’s story explores medical ethics and embodied resistance to domination and control, Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Case of Lady Sannox” highlights a particular gendered aspect of the relation between doctor and patient. First published in The Idler in 1894, with 11 illustrations by “The Misses Hammond,” the story later became part of the collection Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life2 from the same year. While Morrow’s story is set in the context of

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India, in Conan Doyle’s story the “foreign” element is placed in Britain. As the esteemed surgeon Douglas Stone is preparing to meet with his mistress, the married Lady Sannox, he is suddenly called away to treat a specific and urgent case. Stone is visited by “a Turk” calling himself “Hamil Ali,” a merchant from Smyrna with a “swarthy” face, a black beard and a turban (162). The patient in question is the Turk’s wife, who has cut her lower lip on a poisoned “Eastern dagger” (163), an injury which will cause “[d]eep sleep, and death in thirty hours” (164). According to the Turk, there is no cure for saving the woman’s life other than excision of the wound, in other words cutting her lip off. While the “Turk’s” callous anticipation of the impending operation may seem brutal to twenty-first-­ century readers, as it does to the surgeon, nineteenth-century British readers would not have been strangers to such images. As Patrick Brantlinger notes, while Orientalist and exoticizing imagery of the “terrible Turk” had been a “staple of British literature” from the Elizabethan period onward (227), alongside other “Oriental” or “Arabian” figures, such racist stereotypes became more common in the last few decades of the nineteenth century as a result of British foreign policy and reactions to Ottoman militancy. Stone finds the patient on a couch in the corner of the Turk’s apartment, which is “piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons.” She lies dressed and veiled “in the Turkish fashion, with yashmak and veil”: “The lower part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zigzagged along the border of the under lip” (169). The surgeon can thus only see two dark eyes gazing at him, and the exposed lower lip. While Stone questions the necessity of the operation, remarking that “[t]he disfigurement [of the patient] will be frightful” (170), he is finally convinced by the one hundred pounds offered for the operation. William Hughes notes that the “powerlessness of the patient is a consistent feature of medical Gothic” (197), and that is certainly the case in Conan Doyle’s story. As the patient has been given a heavy dose of opium by her husband before the operation, she can make no resistance to the surgeon’s cut. The narrator describes the procedure: “He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. […] In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew” (171). The veiled woman is Lady

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Sannox, his mistress, while the man posing as a Turk turns out to be her vengeful husband Lord Sannox, having dressed up for the part. The bodily severance here becomes a specifically gendered punishment for Lady Sannox’s unruly desires and love affairs. As a silently laughing Lord Sannox, having now taken off the false hair and beard, explains: “‘It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,’ said he, ‘not physically, but morally, you know, morally’” (172). Lord Sannox had known about his wife’s affair (one of several), and through this forced mutilation he means, as he says, “to make a little example” (172). While Lord Sannox has earlier seemed unable to address his wife’s repeated romantic affairs, the forced mutilation becomes his final way of exerting a specifically gendered control. Elaine Showalter has suggested that the operation works as a “displaced clitoridectomy” (136), that is to say as a kind of female genital mutilation or “cutting,” in order to control Lady Sannox’s independence and specifically her sexuality. Indeed, as noted by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, surgical treatment was at the time used (and to an extent still is today) “to ‘correct’ women who had strayed from their traditional gender role” (8). As Andrew Smith notes, for women diagnosed as “hysterics”—among them potentially “loose” women such as Lady Sannox— doctors could become perceived as “Gothic figures, inflicting pain and distress either through neglect or through a misplaced sense of surgical bravado” (8). Bodily severance here becomes a way of exercising gendered control, by both husband and doctor. And indeed, Lady Sannox after the operation is announced to have “absolutely and for ever taken the veil, and that the world would see her no more” (156), that is to say she has committed herself to a life outside of the public sphere (and in celibacy) through becoming a nun. While the “Turk’s” “foreignness” is emphasized through the strange objects and “grotesque weapons” in his abode, through his refusal of alcohol, and through his own and his wife’s Turkish clothing (“‘You will forgive the yashmak,’ said the Turk. ‘You know our views about woman in the East’” [169]), the terrible nature of the husband turns out to belong to an English rather than Turkish man. The positing of gendered control as being specifically foreign, gestured at through the strangeness of the female patient being veiled because of the Turks’ and his countrymen’s “views about woman,” and through the allusions to genital cutting as a “foreign” practice, is thus questioned. While the surgeon Stone earlier might have excused his foreign client’s “brutal” speech when declaring that his wife’s mouth “will not be a pretty one to kiss” after the operation,

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with the argument that “the Turk has his own fashion of talk and thought” (170), he cannot explain away the actions and deeds of the English gentleman hiding under the disguise. Conan Doyle’s short story thus asserts that patriarchal control does not belong merely to “foreign” cultures but just as much to British ones: the husband punishing his wife is just as English as the malpracticing surgeon himself. Both Morrow’s and Conan Doyle’s stories highlight the abhorrence that two surgeons feel at their malpractice and explain the horror of the medical acts by an exoticizing or racializing of the patient and their surroundings—both doctors seem to agree to the operations because the patients are foreign or “Other.” While control or power in many societies, due to their patriarchal structures, traditionally have been characterized as masculine in opposition to uncontrolled or “powerless” femininity, reading power as a productive rather than repressive force allows a complication of such binary logic. Indeed, the viewpoint of the surgeon in both stories could be seen as shifting the emphasis away from the patient’s perspective of powerless loss, to focus instead on the employer’s (in Morrow’s story) or the husband’s (in Conan Doyle’s story) perspective of productive control. Morrow’s detailed descriptions of Neranya’s spectacular ability, rather than of his physically impaired condition, and the narrators’ focus on the doctors’ medical prowess as well as on the exoticized “foreignness” of their cases, similarly suggest a focus on productive rather than merely repressive forces; the patient’s Otherness is produced by the doctor in charge. Both Morrow’s and Conan Doyle’s stories highlight the multiplicity of force relations and the ways in which they might take on racialized or gendered meanings. Reading these stories within a historical context, we may discern concerns over the growing British Empire and its supposed “Others,” and potentially over the growing women’s movement in Britain and across the Atlantic. In both these stories, the dismemberment carried out does not merely signify a phallic loss of masculinity, as psychoanalytic readings would have it, but instead works to highlight gendered and racialized structures of control as well as unethical medical practices.

War Bodies and Amputatory Affection While previous examples reveal the ways in which racialized and/or gendered “disorderly bodies” may highlight instances of domination and resistance in amputation narratives, Marie Mulvey-Roberts suggests that the “most threatening collective of dangerous bodies is undoubtedly that

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generated by war” (8). Indeed, it can be argued that narratives of horror or trauma, including those detailing bodily mutilation, especially capture a society’s fears and are thus embedded in a historical and social context. As Martin Tropp argues, such narratives “construct a fictional edifice of fear and deconstruct it simultaneously, dissipating terror in the act of creating it” (5). They give the reader or viewer the tools to engage with experiences “that would otherwise, like nightmares, be incommunicable”: “In this way, the inexpressible and private becomes understandable and communal, shared and safe” (Tropp 5). Noting the collective cultural suffering of post-World War I communities in Europe and the United States having witnessed or living as or with persons whose body parts may have been blown apart, if possible sewn up or replaced, Jasie Stokes argues that the injured war body “carries within it the record of the conflict’s outcome and it further acts as a political, social and cultural symbol of the state before and during combat” (121). While the injured soldier returning from war was not a new sight, the nineteenth century having seen its fair share of war, due to improved medical care more soldiers were able to return home after battle, as the risk of infection from amputation or other injuries was by now significantly lower. The genre of war poetry emerging during and after the war exemplifies the new concern with the injured war body. In Siegfried Sassoon’s “They” (1916), the “boys” returning from the war explain that none of them are now “the same”: “George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind; / Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die” (57). Other poems by Sassoon feature one-legged men (48) and other “Disabled heroes” who after the war are looking for “arms and legs […] / Elbow or shoulder, hip or knee, / Two arms, two legs, though all were lost” (59). Similarly, in Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” (1917–18), a young man sits in his wheeled chair, shivering in a “ghastly suit of grey, / Legless, sewn short at elbow” (175). Remembrances of “the old times, before he threw away his knees” are cut short by the realization that girls now “touch him like some queer disease” and pass from him to “the strong men that were whole” (177). By the end of the First World War, narratives of trauma or horror may be the only way to make sense of the horrifying experiences of the war and the injuries it had brought. It is not strange, then, that in addition to war poetry such as that noted above, many amputation narratives emerged in the period following the First World War, echoing in the cultural imagination the dismembered war bodies that became commonplace during and after years of trench warfare

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and its many casualties. Films such as The Penalty (1920, dir. Wallace Worsley) and Hands of Orlac (1924, dir. Robert Wiene) present amputation narratives in which amputated, prosthetic and transplanted limbs take center stage, emphasizing such common sights in the period after the First World War. In the US production The Penalty, based on the 1913 (pre-­ war) pulp novel of the same name by Gouverneur Morris, Lon Chaney plays the character “Blizzard” who has both his legs amputated as a child by a misinformed doctor. As a result of the social hardship he experiences, Blizzard grows up to be a criminal mastermind—referred to by his rivals as “that cripple from hell”—desperate to take revenge on the doctor who performed the operation. The childhood amputation thus becomes the main plot of the film, with Blizzard’s impairment posited as a marker of evil; the disabling of his body by the erring doctor causes a criminal career, and the urge for revenge for what Blizzard calls his “mangled years” drives the narrative. The justice sought by Blizzard is a grim one: he wants his childhood doctor to amputate the legs of the doctor’s daughter’s fiancé to then attach them to his own body. The Austrian film Hands of Orlac (orig. Orlacs Hände), based on the book Les Mains d’Orlac (1920) by Maurice Renard, similarly displays fears around severed limbs and especially around the subject of surgical transplants, before such procedures were possible.3 Conrad Veidt plays the titular character, concert pianist Paul Orlac, who after losing both hands in a railway accident has the hands of a recently executed murderer transplanted onto his arms, with disastrous consequences. Obsessed with the idea that he has inherited the murderer’s criminal mind along with the hands, Orlac suspects that his hands act with a will of their own. While the above films show examples of medical malpractice and the potential trauma of amputation, the extraordinary US film The Unknown (1927, dir. Tod Browning) provides a different perspective. Tod Browning is perhaps most known today for the 1932 Freaks, which features actors who were also freak show performers, not “performing” disabilities but rather persons who themselves worked as “real” freaks (Angela Smith 94). In the lesser known The Unknown, circus artist Alonzo the Armless (played by Lon Chaney), while supposedly one such “corporeal wonder,” ends up willingly amputating his arms for the woman he loves only to be rejected by her. In the few instances of critical examination of it, the film has generally been read as an allegory of traumatized masculinity or lost manhood (see Randell and Worland), often through a psychoanalytic lens. Rick Worland, for example, calls the film a “fantastic work of psychosexual

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grotesquerie,” its amputatory plot presenting a “fever dream of phallic symbolism, castration anxiety, and sexual terror” (144), while Karen Randell sees Alonzo’s act as a “symbolic castration” through which the potent whole male “renders himself voluntarily ‘impotent’” for love’s sake (219–20). Moving away from such psychoanalytic readings of the film, to focusing instead on the historical specificity of amputation narratives, highlighting embodiment and touch as cultural markers, might reveal further cultural significances of dismemberment. The Unknown is set in “old Madrid” at an unspecified point in time, at Antonio Zanzi’s “gypsy circus.” The film centers around the bizarre love triangle of performers “Alonzo the Armless” (Lon Chaney), Nanon Zanzi (Joan Crawford), and the circus strongman “Malabar the Mighty” (Norman Kerry). Like Neranya in Morrow’s story, Alonzo’s armlessness has led him to cultivate and perform extraordinary accomplishments with his legs, feet, and toes. Described by the circus owner as “the sensation of sensations!”—the “wonder of wonders!”—Alonzo as part of his circus act fires a gun, and throws knives, using only his feet. As in Morrow’s narrative, also in The Unknown the focus lies on the disabled person’s ability rather than their disability or loss. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes in Staring: How We Look, so-called “Armless Wonders” were among the most spectacular and well-paid performers in turn-of-the-century American freak shows (133). These performers would never simply display themselves but instead performed various tricks with their feet and toes (writing calligraphy scripts, cutting out intricate paper dolls, and much more) (133). An 1888 article from the UK periodical Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts describes some of the suchlike “feats which have been performed by persons born without hands and arms,” among women ranging from portrait-painting to sewing and knitting, or among men including farming and other outdoor work “requiring both strength and skill” (“Some Armless” 106). The article presents a few famous examples of such “Armless Wonders” who have attracted the attention of kings, peers, and “other notable people”: among these is a German who performed “marvellous” feats with his toes and feet, including “playing at cards and dice; shaving himself; […] seated on a stool and writing with his toes; seated in a stool, taking a pistol, and firing it with his right toes” and many more (106). In The Unknown, Alonzo’s feet in fact in many scenes (strumming a guitar, smoking a cigarette, pouring wine, for example) belonged to an actual armless man named Paul Desmuke, whose head and torso were concealed off-camera while his legs and toes

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performed the stunts in these collaborative scenes—in frame with Chaney’s upper body and face. Assisting Alonzo in his “death-defying act” is Nanon, the daughter of the circus owner, and the secret object of Alonzo’s affections. Nanon has a strange phobia of hands, a fear of being held, and tells Alonzo in confidence that she has “grown so that [she] shrink[s] with fear when any man even touches [her]” with their “beastly hands.” Nanon’s fear becomes especially apparent when she is courted by the circus weightlifter or “strongman” Malabar. In one such scene, the camera explicitly focuses on arms, hands, and manual strength, zooming in on Malabar’s arms and cutting between images of his flexed muscles and Nanon’s horrified facial expressions. Terrified and disgusted by Malabar’s aggressive touching feeling hands, Nanon declares her abhorrence for hands, specifically men’s hands (“Hands! Men’s Hands! How I hate them!”), wishing that “God would […] [take] the hands from all of them.” She seeks refuge with her friend Alonzo—since he is armless and thus can do her no harm. The narrative seems to present an inversion of the scenario of Owen’s above quoted war poem, in which the returned soldier is passed by in favor of “the strong men that were whole.” In The Unknown, instead, it is the “strong man” Malabar from whom Nanon shies away. And while the injured young man in Owen’s poem sits helpless waiting for someone to help him to bed, the “Armless Wonder” Alonzo is known for his extraordinary abilities rather than disability. This strange inverted scenario seems almost a reimagining of the bodily horror of the war, a kind of wishful thinking of an alternative narrative about the embodied Otherness of the returning soldier. While, as noted previously, amputation narratives were common after the First World War, Nanon’s strange fear of hands specifically, and of being held, seem more difficult to account for. While it may seem easy to read Nanon’s fear of male hands as a symbolic displacement, in this case sexualized, the significance of hands and touch in this historical and cultural context might propose further meanings. Arguably, the hands are our most active tools of touching, as they explore surfaces as well as help us to express emotion in dialogue with others. Human hands might thus best embody the affective or cultural character of touch. Garland-Thomson notes the particularity of the hands in our culture: Hands make us human, or so we are told. […] We grasp tools, partners, enemies, and food with more accuracy and grace than our hoofed, pawed,

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or finned fellow creatures. […] Poised for action at the ends of generous and flexible arms, our hands are implements of our wills. […] Hands do things. […] As such, hands are witnesses to human endeavor and desire. We look to the physiology of hands for meaning. (119)

Embodiment and touch are inextricably connected in the cultural imagination, and human hands might best embody the affective or cultural character of touch. Jean-Luc Nancy states in The Birth to Presence that “[t]ouching one another […] is what makes [bodies,] properly speaking, bodies” (204). As Constance Classen argues, touch is “not just a private act” but a fundamental medium for the expression and contestation of social values and hierarchies; indeed, “tactile actions and symbols” are integral to social life (1). In this context, the expressed horror of manual touch as well as the amorous amputation in The Unknown must bear a specific importance, as hands become prime markers of affective connections and negotiations between the three main characters. Only Alonzo’s assistant Cojo (played by John George) knows that Alonzo in fact is not armless but has two functional arms. When in public, Alonzo’s arms are bound to his chest with a tight corset and covered with a shirt and jacket. Given Nanon’s fear of men’s arms and hands, Alonzo comes up with the fantastic plot of blackmailing a surgeon to amputate his arms, in order to win Nanon’s love. Like the surgeons in Morrow’s and Conan Doyle’s stories, the surgeon in The Unknown is abhorred by his task but is forced to succumb. Alonzo has his arms amputated not for medical reasons; his amputation is an act of love, an attempt at reworking the amorous dynamics within the circus trio. When Alonzo is truly without arms, surely Nanon will love him? Alonzo’s extraordinary action—the self-imposed and voluntary amputation of his arms—might be read as an affective act, generating a more open-ended reading of the film than previous psychoanalytic approaches. When Alonzo comes back after his surgery, both arms amputated, Nanon unexpectedly has come to terms with the touching feeling of human hands; she is engaged to Malabar the circus strongman and now performs with him. Driven half-mad by this twist, Alonzo sabotages Nanon’s and Malabar’s new act, desperately attempting to have Malabar’s arms torn off from his body by horses, in order to rebalance the shift in amorous power that has taken place. However, Alonzo ends up himself being trampled to death, without getting any kind of revenge such as Neranya’s in Morrow’s story or that enacted by Lord Sannox upon his

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wife in Conan Doyle’s narrative. This unresolved conflict might echo experiences or fears of those war bodies returning home from the front, finding loved ones gone or in new relationships. Rather than being seen as merely signifying a loss of control or power coded as masculine, The Unknown may be seen to represent wider cultural trauma and collective experiences of war, the amputation here signifying a more general loss of humanity.

Conclusion While psychoanalytic readings largely insist on considering amputation solely as loss or as trauma specifically linked to masculinity, this chapter has suggested another way of reading this particular act of dismemberment. Considering the sociocultural, political, and affective aspect of the act of non-medical amputation may open up more fruitful readings of amputation narratives and similar fictions of the medical gothic, complicating readings of such stories of domination and resistance, mutilation and bodily horror, and medical ethics. In Morrow’s and Conan Doyle’s stories, the dismemberment carried out does not signify a phallic loss of masculinity, as psychoanalytic readings would have it, but instead work to highlight unethical medical practices within dynamics of gendered or other kinds of control. While Neranya in Morrow’s story manages to revolt, momentarily subverting the power relations he inhabits, Lady Sannox under the surgeon’s knife is less fortunate: incapacitated by opium, her husband’s control and the doctor’s medical gaze merge as she is punished for her insubordination. In The Unknown, Alonzo’s extraordinary choice to amputate his arms may be read as an act of love, bearing more cultural significance than a simple castratory plot, and complicating readings of amputation merely through a semiotics of gendered loss. In all these narratives, medicine, ethics, gender, domination, and resistance play into embodied relations, formulating not only the field of medicine but also human bodies as part of larger structures of power.

Notes 1. Cases of non-medical amputation often come to work as such “medical gothic” narratives, and could also be subsumed under the category of “body horror” or “body gothic” in which the horror is mostly derived from (often graphic) destruction of the body (see e.g. Aldana Reyes, Mulvey-Roberts).

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2. As Conan Doyle explains in the preface, the red lamp of the collection’s title was the usual sign of the general practitioner in England. Conan Doyle, a medical doctor by education and early profession, in these medical writings presents us with an invaluable insight into late nineteenth-century medicine and the medical debates of the time. 3. Hand and arm transplants became possible first toward the end of the twentieth century, leg transplants in the early twenty-first century, both being exceptionally problematic and thus very uncommon (Hewitt and Lee).

References Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. Routledge, 1992. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. U of Wales P, 2014. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Terrible Turks: Victorian Xenophobia and the Ottoman Empire.” Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, edited by Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman, Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 208–30. Browning, Tod, director. Freaks. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932. ———. The Unknown. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1927. Classen, Constance, editor. The Book of Touch. Berg, 2005. Conan Doyle, Arthur. Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life. Methuen & Co., 1894. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Penguin, 1991. ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon, 1984, pp. 76–100. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5, translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1953. ———. “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, translated by James Strachey, Hogarth, 1953, pp. 207–26. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Harrison, Mark. Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventative Medicine 1859–1914. Cambridge UP, 1994. Hewitt Charles W., and W. P. Andrew Lee, editors. Transplantation of Composite Tissue Allografts. Springer, 2008. Hughes, William. “Victorian Medicine and the Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Edinburgh UP, 2012, pp. 186–201. Morrow, W. C. The Ape, the Idiot & Other People. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1897.

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Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal. Manchester UP, 2016. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence. Translated by B.  Holmes et  al., Stanford UP, 1993. Oksala, Johanna. “Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience.” Hypatia, vol. 19, no. 4, 2004, pp. 97–119. Owen, Wilfred. The Complete Poems and Fragments. Volume I: The Poems. Edited by Jon Stallworthy, Chatto & Windus / Hogarth / Oxford UP, 1983. Randell, Karen. “Masking the Horror of Trauma: The Hysterical Body of Lon Chaney.” Screen, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 216–21. Sassoon, Siegfried. The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Edited by Rupert Hart-­ Davis, Faber and Faber, 1983. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by J. C. Maxwell, Methuen, 1985. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Penguin, 1990. Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle. Manchester UP, 2004. Smith, Angela M. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia UP, 2011. “Some Armless Wonders.” Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, 18 Feb. 1888, pp. 106–08. Stokes, Jasie. “Fragments of a Great Confusion: Abjection, Subjectivity, and the Body in Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone.” Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement, edited by Karin Sellberg, Lena Wånggren, and Kamillea Aghtan, Routledge, 2015, pp. 115–26. Ticineto Clough, Patricia, editor. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke UP, 2007. Tromp, Marlene, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman. “Introduction: Coming to Terms with Xenophobia.” Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia, edited by Marlene Tromp, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman, Ohio State UP, 2013, pp. 1–24. Tropp, Martin. Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818–1918). McFarland & Co., 1999. Wiene, Robert, director. Hands of Orlac [Orlacs Hände]. Pan Film, 1924. Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2007. Worsley, Wallace, director. The Penalty. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1920.

CHAPTER 4

Stalin’s Samovars: Disabled Veterans in (Post-)Soviet Literature Oxane Leingang

The Second World War cost the lives of over twenty-five million Soviet people. It also left behind an army of demobilized, disabled veterans: the so-called trunks (“obrubki”), carts (“tachki”), and crutches (“kostyli”) descended upon the destroyed Soviet cities. At the end of 1946, 248,000 invalids of the second and third category, which means those who had lost one or more limbs, were considered unemployed (Jahn 139). Heavily traumatized, they had lost their bearings in civilian life and could not even count on the help of the state they had served in the war. “What are we— discarded in a corner, a useless prop of a historical drama that is continued without us? A nothing? The impression of a tremendous ingratitude solidifies,” invalid Oleg Rossiyanov laments in his autobiography (306).1 According to the wishes of the Soviet government, the people, especially the disabled veterans of the Red Army, were to forget their war traumata and invest their entire energy into the rebuilding of the heavily destroyed country (Fieseler 173). In general, it can be said that in the

O. Leingang (*) Department of Cultural Studies, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_4

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twentieth century any disability was defined via the parameter of “fitness for work” (see Möhring 189). Thus, it is not surprising that in the postwar period the mobilization of the work force in the Soviet Union led to a watering-down of the categories of invalidity, as what used to be a concept based on health was now changed into a concept oriented toward production. Adolescent invalids were particularly affected: despite their age, they were forced into social exclusion because the amount of their pension depended on their previous wage, their military rank, and their level of invalidity. Precisely because of their extremely low disability pension, war invalids had to make ends meet with begging, bartering, or street music. Apparently, it was comparatively easy for them to receive alms, mostly because their bodily injuries, as “signs of honor,” made their patriotic heroism visible to everyone. Thanks to two assumptions—the exogenic causation of their infirmity and their innocence—war invalids, in contrast to most of the other disabled and sick, were momentarily privileged. But this privilege evaporated quickly because their war-impaired bodies corresponded neither to statuesque beauty nor to the model of the healthy bodily machine (Möhring 191) and were therefore perceived as abnormal. In 1947, Stalin eventually had the begging “war cripples,” who had until then caused discomfort and anguish to the unimpaired and healthy, removed from the streets (Merridale 305). Penned up in railway wagons, they were dispatched to remote regions, “so that the particularly appalling sights, the graphic and vivid reproaches were hidden as far away as possible” (Rossiyanov 323). In this way, the unimpaired were to be spared the drastic confrontation with disability and war trauma. The invalids did not only disappear from public life but also from public discourse, which was symptomatic for the practical management of the consequences of the war. For decades they were banned from literature, commemorative culture, and official historiography (Fieseler 167). In the monumental memorial architecture, only vigorous and valiant titans—who at most displayed minor head injuries—were set into stone. Up until De-Stalinization in 1956, even organizations for veterans and war invalids were forbidden (Fieseler 176). In what follows, the individual and collective discourse surrounding the war-wounded body as well as commemorative re-inscriptions will be analyzed through a close reading of selected works. Oleg Rossiyanov, who has already been mentioned, lost his left leg at the age of twenty-two because the penicillin that could have saved it was not intended for a buck private. With his autobiography “The War Was Long Ago…” (The Second Life)

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(“Vojna-to von kogda byla” (Zhizn’ vtoraya), 2007) he becomes a mouthpiece for young invalids. Two episodes from Eduard Kochergin’s fragmentary childhood autobiography Angel’s Puppet (Angelova kukla, 2003), which has not yet been translated into English, tell exemplary tales about the shadowy existence of those war-impaired who were popularly called “samovars” because of their physical shape. The canonical work The Story of a Real Man (other titles include The Story About a Real Man or, literally, Tale of a Real Person) (Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke, 1946) of the author Boris Polevoi (actually Boris Kampov), who belonged to the most productive and successful men of letters of the Soviet Union, serves as a contrast and a reference to the other two texts. The first English translation by E. Manning appeared as early as 1946 in Soviet Literature, a multilingual monthly journal of the Soviet writer’s guild with a propagandistic mandate. The second translation into English, produced in 1949 by Joe Fineberg, a prominent translator and chief ideologist of Comintern, was first published in the Soviet Union as well. While Polevoi’s narrative patriotically idealizes the welfare for and social reintegration of invalids, the recent works drastically portray the social and emotional misery of war invalids and thus, so the preliminary thesis, dismantle the military hero discourse to which Soviet war literature was bound.

The War Invalid as Hero and Legend: Boris Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man (1946) The semi-documentary story The Story of a Real Man is based on the experiences of the Soviet fighter pilot and war hero Aleksei Maresev (1916–2001). In this way, Polevoi actualizes “the myth of the aviator,” for “in the 1930s aviators were public celebrities in Soviet Russia. They symbolized the extraordinary talent, courage and audacity of the Soviet people, and easily became a perfect object of identification and national pride” (Sartorti 180). Polevoi interviewed Maresev in the summer of 1943 during the Battle of Kursk. The atmospheric details of the long nightly conversation in a dugout next to the front is recollected in the postscript. Like Ilya Ehrenburg, the renowned author worked as a war correspondent for the daily newspaper Pravda. His longer articles often appeared on the second page in the format of “pre-invasion feuilletons” (Brooks 15). In Nuremberg, where Polevoi reported about the war crime tribunal for Pravda, the story about the leg-less pilot, which he had carried with him

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during the entire war, suddenly broke free (Polevoi qtd. in Zhelesnova 522). As the author revealed in an interview, the interrogation of Hermann Goering served as an impulse to writing. The latter admitted that the NS regime had underestimated the mass heroism and the resilience of the “mysterious Russian human being”—the “true military potential” of the Red Army (Polevoi, Sobranie 514). Polevoi needed only eighteen days to write down a story that was almost ready for printing (Polevoi qtd. in Zhelesnova 522). The Story of a Real Man first appeared in 1946 as a serial in five installments in the journal Oktyabr and was published as a book one year later. It was translated into more than forty languages, including Bengali, Urdu, and Hindi. The work, which immediately became mandatory reading for many generations, is a prominent example of Socialist realism, the official artistic doctrine for literature, the visual arts, and music designed for ideological purposes in the sense of Historical Materialism. Socialist realism is by no means realist but represents reality from an ideological perspective and transfigures it into utopia. Partisanship, easy readability, and the idealization of Socialism belonged to its key features (see Fast). The heroic deeds of positive characters were politically motivated and instrumentalized: “Their ability to commit heroic deeds was indiscriminately attributed to the fact, that ‘they were brought up by the Bolshevik Party, that they knew in whose name they entered battle, und in whose name they gave their own lives without regret,’ and to their supposedly ‘Bolshevik qualities: intrepidity, daring, and fearlessness in battle […] brought out in them by the Soviet Motherland’” (Sartorti 179). According to Polevoi himself, he transferred the emphasis of his most important pretext—the story “Love of Life” (1905) by Jack London, who was an immensely popular author in the Soviet Union—from the instinct of self-preservation to an intention to fight for the community (Polevoi qtd. in Zhelesnova 526). The name of the pilot was changed from “Maresev” to “Meresev” because his experiences had to be fictionalized in all details (Polevoi, Sobranie 515). In addition, in a Socialist realist manner, the large ensemble of characters was created by adding stereotypical party functionaries—only four characters have authentic models (Ozerov 11). With knowledge of the biography of the pilot, the tension between fictionality and authenticity can be recognized on the extra-literary level. Aside from the patriotic-pathetic atmosphere of the work the epically elongated descriptions of airplanes, tactical troop movements, and air battles carry particular emphasis.

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At the outset, the airplane of Aleksei Meresev crashes behind enemy lines. For two-and-a-half weeks he hauls himself through the woods with shattered and frozen legs to get to the Soviet troops—first hobbling, but upright, then crawling on all fours, finally just mechanically skidding ahead in deadly exhaustion. With great difficulty, he keeps himself alive with cranberries, ants, tree bark, and pine nuts. As a particular delicacy, he gets hold of a sleeping hedgehog, which he swallows raw. The pilot escapes not only a German patrol unit but also a famished bear, whose hibernation is disturbed by the war going on around them. After peasants have found the half-dead Meresev, he is brought to Moscow by order of the highest army command, and into the best military hospital of the country. With parquet flooring, high Italian windows, and shiny white walls, this “temple of medicine” (Polevoi, Story 102) is a Socialist realist pipe dream, in which highly decorated officers receive the best medical care from the leading physicians of the country while beautiful nurses in starched uniforms serve outstanding meals (111). Aleksei is put into a ward that is reserved for the heroes of the Soviet Union. The subtext here testifies not just to the hero cult but also to the administrative privileging of party members in a state that propagated egalitarian justice. When his physical condition drastically deteriorates because of gangrene, the amputation of both lower legs seems inevitable. The “cold, frightful word ‘amputate!’ sounds like a dagger thrust and haunts his nightmares, in the shape of a great steel spider, tearing at his flesh with sharped, crooked claws” (Polevoi, Story 114). Aleksei would rather be dead and has a tearful nervous breakdown, which endows his character with psychological depth. Because of a cardiac insufficiency, Meresev is operated by the senior consultant, a professor, with local anesthetics, so that he hears not only the extremely painful sawing of his bones but also the dull impact of the amputated limbs in an enameled bucket. The depiction of the amputation is also coded heroically and staged with much detail: “During the operation he uttered neither a groan nor a cry” (120). His stoical reaction and the supposed resistance to pain turn Aleksei into a Socialist martyr. Still, Meresev’s prospects aren’t good: “An airman without feet was like a bird without wings, which could still live and pick its food, but fly— never!” (Polevoi, Story 136). After the amputation, he falls into a deep depression, until Comrade Colonel Commissar Semyon Petrovich, a highranking party functionary, hands him an article about a pilot from World War I, who learned to fly despite a foot prosthesis. All concerns are swept

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away with the incantation, “But you are a Soviet airman” (140). The senior consultant also knows how to tell stories about the (posthumous) mass heroism of the Soviet people. This refers back to the topos of the “Land of Heroes” (“strana geroev”), which was established in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s and instrumentalized only too much by war propaganda (see Sartorti 176–80). Semyon Petrovich takes this up: “In this war, my boy, men with an arm torn off lead companies in attacks, mortally wounded men fire machine-guns, men block enemy machine-­ guns with their bodies… Only the dead ones are not fighting… But even the dead are fighting… with their glory” (Story 190). At this point, the reformed Meresev promptly regains his patriotic ardor and the will to live. Under great efforts and violent pain, he follows his self-prescribed workout routine. His recovery makes rapid strides. In an idyllic sanatorium close to Moscow, Meresev continues his tough rehabilitation program and even takes dancing lessons. The dramatic climax of the novel and later the film is the scene in which the pilot performs barynya, a buoyant Russian folk dance, in front of a medical commission. The most important choreographic element, the so-called prisyadka, a squad-and-kick move, demands inhuman feats from Meresev. Repeatedly he has to withdraw so as not to faint out of pain (Polevoi, Story 230). His “trunks” are so grinded by the prostheses that bloody blisters and boils have developed on his skin. In this strategy of overcompensation by the stigmatized person, which is oriented toward mastery of activities that are usually considered barred to them because of their physical deformity, Meresev, with utmost effort, lives through “tortured learning” as well as “the torture performance” (Goffman 10). Phantom pain and night visions of the past—thematic dominants of amputation narratives—pervade Aleksei’s subconscious and actualize the irretrievable loss of his legs: “Sometimes, when lost in thoughts, he felt a pain in the feet and shifted the position of his legs, and only then did he remember that he had no feet […]. How disappointing to wake up and find that he had no feet” (Polevoi, Story 157). After his release Meresev gets lost in the bureaucratic jumble of certification. Until his greatest wish comes true, he has to convince innumerable party functionaries of his suitability for the front and increase his training to extremes. Eventually he returns to the fighter plane squadron and promptly advances to one of the most successful aces of the Red Army. He doesn’t need to wait long for recognition from above: in August 1943, he is awarded with the highest title of honor, “hero of the Soviet Union.” To

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increase morale, in war time several million medals of honor were awarded, which seemed to confirm the Soviet panheroism, the capacity of every individual, postulated by Maksim Gorky, to become a hero. Despite his affected self-assurance, the tactless and even offensive questions he is asked by street urchins at first cause tears to well in Meresev’s eyes because they touch upon the neuralgic point of his physical consciousness: “Comrade Senior Lieutenant, what kind of feet have you got, real ones or wooden? Are you an invalid?” (Polevoi, Story 208). Meresev compensates his deficient status as war invalid with his patriotic fighter spirit and his achievements. He always attempts to keep his injuries and his resulting status as a medical curiosity a secret. His return to society succeeds not just because of his iron discipline and the public knowledge of his heroism but mainly because his prostheses remain invisible to the uninitiated: he can conceal them with his clothes, and all that remains is a slight sway in his gait. The invisibility of Meresev’s injuries and the ignorance of his physical deviance—a question of “information control” and “stigma management” (Goffman 51)—can be put in context with Erving Goffman’s distinction between the “discredited,” a “stigmatized individual” whose “differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot” (4), and the “discreditable.” The relevance of the visual in processes of stigmatization that Goffman has highlighted pertains to deviances from the norm of physical shape as well as functionality. As a discreditable whose war invalidity is neither known nor perceptible, Meresev decides not to disclose his deviance, which can be interpreted as conscious deception. As the programmatic title signals, Polevoi’s story designs the ideal figure of the positive hero, the homo novus of Soviet society. Meresev is a post-figuratio of another famous pre-war protagonist and Soviet martyr, Pavka Korchagin from Nikolai Ostrovsky’s semi-autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–34), who “withstands injury, disease, cold, hunger, pain, and finally  blindness and paralysis, each time […] continuing to fight for the ‘great cause’  of Soviet  socialism” (Kaganovsky  20–21). The depiction of the pilot corresponds to the Bolshevist conception of man, according to which the Red soldier is supposed to be not only a patriotic warrior but also a personification of toughness, agility, strength, endurance, and defiance of death (Baberowski 98). His continually emphasized average appearance manifests the topos of the Soviet human being: a common worker does not go “from rags to riches” but is praised as a “Hero of the Soviet Union” because of his extraordinary achievements. Precisely because Maresev was one of the

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few to whom this title of honor was awarded during his lifetime (Sartorti 180), nothing stood in the way of his rapid social ascent. Striking is not just the hypermasculinization of the protagonist, who, despite his “trunks” is repeatedly described as muscular and sun-tanned, which minimizes his pain, but also his excessive preoccupation with hygiene, readable not just as a symbol of purity but also a reference to the Soviet body cult, a facet of the Bolshevist vision of the “New” Human, which exalted a healthy, groomed, and athletic body. Visible war injuries undermine these aesthetic norms and have to be concealed. The repeatedly emphasized youthful charm of Meresev also seems to confirm the systematically propagated image of the (eternally) youthful hero, who is denied development through perpetuated immaturity. The narrative is obliged to the pathos of the official hero narrative and Socialist realism. Be it medical or material support of invalids or their possibilities for rehabilitation: the glossy appearance of the Socialist system takes effect in every area of life. Polevoi’s narrative glorifies not just the heroic deeds of the amputated fighter pilot but also the illusory care of the state. Although the blatant absence of functional prostheses and wheelchairs was the most severe weak spot of Soviet social welfare (Fieseler 177), a Czarist technician produces prostheses from leather and aluminum specifically for Meresev. The subtext is clearly connotated differently, for these artificial limbs serve as proof for the missing expertise and innovative force of Soviet prosthetics. For his pathetically patriotic work, which was promptly adapted as a radio and theater play, Boris Polevoi received the Stalin prize in 1948, which was deemed to be the most important indicator of canonicity. Sergei Prokofiev’s opera of the same name is also based on this narrative. The composer fell into disrepute due to accusations of “formalism” and he composed this work as a concession to the regime on the recommendation of the Ministry of Culture. The immense popularity of director Aleksandr Stolper’s filmic adaptation, which drew over thirty-four million people into the cinemas (Youngblood 92), was spurred by the immensely attractive and self-evidently not disabled actor Pavel Kadochnikov. The narrative, which was read in schools for decades, is still one of the most popular works about the “Great Patriotic War.” Aleksei Maresev, the prototype for the literary character, whom Polevoi designated as “material evidence” (8), was demobilized as a highly decorated captain for health reasons in 1946. He studied history and quickly ascended on a political career. In order to be recognized as a full member

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of society he hid his invalidity throughout his life and kept his war trauma a secret. Deliberately, he went without a cane, refused to move to a ground floor apartment or to install automatic transmission in his car (Oberemko 46). Maresev thus employs the strategy that Goffman has called “normification” (Goffman 31): as one of the stigmatized and despite his physical defect, he presents himself as an “ordinary person.” Vehemently, he also rejected his status as an idealized war hero: “What have they done with me? What kind of a legend am I? Was I the only one who defended the homeland?” (Maresev qtd. in Oberemko 46). And yet, he couldn’t ward off his Socialist canonization: many schools and streets and even a small planet carry his name. Since his Story of a Real Man became compulsory reading in schools, it is not surprising that Maresev was a welcome guest at innumerable events with children and adolescents. Even though his heroic deeds had already become known during the war, he is “a typical example of successful postwar-heroization” (Sartorti 181). The operating mode of idealization or heroization can be observed here, which is accompanied by public appropriation and the creation of legends and is uncoupled from the actual person; the heroic deeds of many are blanked out in favor of a single person. Another paradox is revealed by the fact that Maresev is promoted to the status of war hero because of—of all things—his amputation. Despite his invalidity, he fights at the front line. This sacrificial overcompensation of an exogenically caused bodily defect most impressively symbolizes uncompromising patriotism. The pain that he takes on for his military reintegration turns him into a Soviet martyr. “It was his heroic recovery, the enormous willpower with which he surmounted obstacles hitherto considered insurmountable, that most impressed the people. What was pictured as typically Soviet was merely the embodiment of universal and timeless qualities such as perseverance, strong will, and strong sense of purpose,” Rosalinde Sartorti reports (180). In postwar society, in which reconstruction above all things was pushed, this amputated, only limitedly performing body—the sign of honor and memory of the war—becomes a deficiency and must be hidden. The transition period of the 1990s saw an erosion of the heroic and a demystification of the Soviet epoch, which also temporarily affected Maresev, one of the symbolic representatives of the Soviet system. At the moment, however, a revitalization of the hero cult of the “Great Patriotic War” can be observed. To honor Maresev, an eponymous organization was founded, which initiated the badge “For the Will to Live” in 2011—an arched silver star with multiply refracted rays on a red

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brace. At the center of the medal the golden likeness of the pilot and his signature are placed. The Muscovite artist Evgeny Gusev once again conjures up the images of patriotic heroism with his comic strips. On the occasion of the hundredth birthday of the pilot, a special stamp with a print run of 300,000 stamps was issued. Busts and commemorative plaques were installed to honor Maresev. The most symptomatic fact is that the granite statue in his hometown Kamyshin near Volgograd (installed 2006), which shows him in the uniform of the pilots, and the monument on his tomb on Moscow’s celebrity graveyard Novodevicie hide his leg injuries. The representation of physical deformities still remains a taboo. Be it as school reading, film classic, or architectural memory signature—Maresev/ Meresev, the war hero and his literary counterpart, have long passed into the collective, patriotic national memory as a symbol of bravery and heroism.

The War Invalid as Soviet Job: Oleg Rossiyanov’s Autobiography “The War Was Long Ago” (2007) “The War Was Long Ago…” (The Second Life) is the title of the autobiography of literary scholar and translator Oleg Rossiyanov (1921–2016), which was written as early as 1947–48. He let it rest for twenty years before he revised it for another two decades, from 1969 to 1989. The autobiography was published in Moscow in 2007 with a relatively high print run of 3000 copies. From the trenches, from the truck, or from the sickbed, Rossiyanov describes the war of the “little man.” The subtitle announces the theme of the work, his “second life” as a young soldier. The caesura happens when the majority of school graduates are called to military service. Drafted from the school bench, less than five percent returned home (Merridale 273). This conscription and not the disastrous date of the beginning of the war marks the onset of the second life for Rossiyanov. With a narrative style that sometimes swerves into the lyrical, first-­ person narrator Oleg unsparingly depicts the physical and psychological horrors of the war. While physical experiences like fear, hunger, coldness, and pain serve as a memento mori, identity problems, moral conflicts, and disillusionments lead to existential perturbation. The novel is structured episodically. Along three steps—training barracks, front line, military hospital—the psychological turning points are connected to political events. The war odyssey brings the narrator from the armored regiment to the

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artillery to the infantry. In the overall chaos of the summer of 1941, he loses his company and strays behind enemy lines. Demoralized, he decides to get rid of his weapons and uniform. Two times he is imprisoned. After the liberation, he is not, like the overwhelming majority of Soviet war prisoners, sent to a punishment battalion but remains in a reserve unit in the hinterland. Near Charkiw, his leg is damaged badly by shrapnel. Due to the catastrophic hygienic conditions in the field hospital, gangrene develops after an emergency operation because penicillin is reserved for officers only. Until his demobilization, which is protracted unnecessarily by having to wait for his prosthesis, the first-person narrator spends nine months in total in different field hospitals, which have none of the medical grandeur Polevoi seeks to evoke in so much detail. The long time spent there allows the narrator to capture the misery with precision: lots of blood, the smell of festering wounds in which insects have lain their eggs, hunger, cold, and the agonies of the patients determine everyday life. Thus, it is not surprising that infections inflate the mortality rates in the field and military hospitals. After the amputation, gangrene brings the convalescents to the brink of death. Shortly before their passing, the patients become euphoric: in the state of prefinal confusion, they sing and talk confusedly. Witnessing such death throes inscribes itself into the memory of the narrator in a particularly traumatic manner: I saw not just the nameless bodies in the field, in the trenches and funnels, but also this heartbreaking passing on the neighboring stretchers, from which, after everyone has gone to sleep, the outsuffered and fallen silent are dragged and carried away under a bed sheet into the unfaithful fall dusk, ghost-lit by wind and rain. (Rossiyanov 309)

In the chapter “With One Leg in the Grave,” the amputation of the narrator’s own injured leg is put into focus. It is traversed by staccato sentences and blanks, which typographically indicate the breakdown of language. The scars on the soldier’s body physically retain the memory of the battle, as the somatic memory is more reliable than the mental one. Even decades later, the idiosyncratic smell of ether still haunts him. The injury of his left leg is also burned forever into his physical memory: The half-bent leg does not obey, can neither be flexed nor extended. As if it were lifeless. The leg remains half-bent until the evening, up to the first-aid

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division, where it is straightened with force. And later, even cut off, it will feel exactly like this. And for the whole life the shocked memory of the body solidifies the leg in this half-bent position. (Rossiyanov 291)

The twenty-two-year-old recognizes the fatality of an inescapable destiny. In his thoughts, he bids farewell to sports like ice-skating and bicycling, to mountain hikes and geological expeditions, and provisionally also to love: Particularly ruthlessly, this impression of the baneful termination of a life and of the beginning of a completely different, impaired life, poured out right after the amputation. A strange and oppressive feeling. As if I had died and had been reborn at the same time as a cripple… Something disappeared irrevocably and something not very pleasant approached me, to which one had to adapt anew. A certain cardinal change of being, a passage from a relatively happy past into a cramped, dependent, sorrowful future. (Rossiyanov 295)

For three days Oleg is in mortal agony. The surgical tent of the field hospital resembles an amputation factory, in which limbs are severed as if the doctors were working at an assembly line. The operation table is separated from his stretcher just by a paravent. Regularly he observes how a paramedic throws the separate body parts into a ditch: “We were buried there, but not entirely, just partially: an eighth of some, a quarter of others, or a third. And when someone is without legs or additionally without an arm— you only count for half” (Rossiyanov 295). This “dropping site” for amputates demonstrates the brutalism of the war on the one hand, the colossal losses of the Red Army and the inhuman, technocratic, and utilitarian handling of the disused soldier’s body that has been fragmented by the war. On the other hand, the loss of a (proportionally small) fracture of their body signifies a cardinal change in the patients’ existence: thus, the impious pars pro toto funeral becomes the symbol of (self-)diminishment as well as social degradation and stigmatization. Several thousand maimed soldiers fell onto the “garbage heaps” of the totalitarian state because of their physical infirmities. This drastic fragmentation of the soldier’s body is mirrored in the medical jargon, which carries out the first inhuman categorization of physical deviances via the register of the visual: Here there are “skull-lings,” those with head injuries, the most numerous category of the “crutch-lings” with their injured lower extremities, to whom the narrator also belongs, as well

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as the “back-lings” with injured spinal cords and the “sex-lings” (Rossiyanov 297). In the field hospital, a badly injured officer becomes an example for all patients. Out of motorcycle tires, he builds himself kneepads for his amputated legs: “Don’t expect any charity from anyone,” Oleg interprets the officer’s silent appeal for himself. “Accept everything as it is, if it has happened like this, and act … As time passes crawl out of this pus-filled dung heap, pull yourself out of this misery. If you can walk in any way—walk, and whining, hope in God, and external help are not for us” (324). For fear of pity, Oleg keeps his amputation a secret from those he has left at home for months. Like Meresev, whom he encrypts intertextually as “the lieutenant with the little star” (by which he means the star-shaped medal “Hero of the Soviet Union”) (Rossiyanov 324), he experiences his artificial legs as “shock” (321). While learning to walk again—another thematic constant of amputation narratives—is coded heroically for Meresev, here it is turned into a grotesque promenade, which ignites the critique of the medical care for war invalids and also cements the victimization of the amputees. Once again, the performative relevance of the visual in stigmatization is put into focus: after waiting for his hip prosthesis for months, Oleg puts on a shin prosthesis out of protest and limps in the hallway for the amusement of his fellow patients. He imagines his future as a “hobbling fool on some homemade posts, ugly as sin” (324). “The war was long ago …”: with a shortened quotation the title repeats the quintessence of the text—the inhuman treatment of war invalids in Soviet society. When the narrator alights from the tramway on his crutches, a female passenger heavily loaded with shopping bags wishes him that he would “speedily kick the bucket”: “The war was long ago, but they [are] all ‘in-va-lids’” (Rossiyanov 348), he often gets to hear. The stretched vowels, which are marked typographically by hyphenation, turn the neutral word “invalid” into a hateful insult. This statement indicates, on the one hand, that the era of the Second World War is a period in history that is seen as past and completed in the public opinion. The presence of maimed witnesses of the “embodied past” thwarts this attempt at historical distancing. On the other hand, this insult is symptomatic, for it is not a singular reaction but reflects a general attitude within Soviet society, which doesn’t differentiate between endogenic and exogenic causes of physical impairment and where disabled people per se had a very low standing (Phillips). On May 9  in particular, the so-called Victory Day, young passersby shoot the narrator indifferent or even defensive looks that

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register his disability as a “silent reproach” because he “strives after their future” (Rossiyanov 348). Precisely because the narrator has been drafted from the school bench and was demobilized as a buck private, he receives only a low blanket amount of recompensation, which is neither enough to live nor enough to die. The authorities put up an exercise in obstruction: like many others, the narrator regularly has to submit to vexatious medical examinations. The obligation to work, the central theme of postwar propaganda, also changes the mentality. The majority of the population attributes parasitic properties to war invalids, the narrator bitterly concludes: Without noticing, we have transformed into bugaboos, into some boarders, free-eaters, impertinent extortionists. We rob the people, live happily on someone else’s account—and on top of that, we dare to protest, to “speculate” on these rights, to raise a voice. (348)

The acronym “IOV,” the initials for the invalids of the “Patriotic War,” is read by the reminiscing narrator as a homonym for Iov, as Job, the symbol for Judeo-Christian stoicism, is called in Russian: “Here with us, the doctors don’t heal, the prostheses are bad, the benefits are measly, the state stingy. We are naked and in wounds. True Soviet Jobs” (307). The suffering of the innocent and just has been burned into them. In its new meaning, the sociopolitical abbreviation points to the entire tragedy of invalidity and is directed against the official narrative. The narrator refers explicitly to the biblical frame narrative of the Job episode, in which the Lord claims that Satan instigated him to ruin the pious and sinless Job without reason (Job 2,3). The narrator replaces god with the anonymity of a power that he interprets as Kafkaesque. As with Job, the sense of justice comes through. It grows into hopelessness, rage, and a critique of ideology. The laments that are interspersed into the text are linked back to the biblical original and are used in the triple sense of grief, commemoration (of the dead), and accusation. In analogy with Job, the narrator presents himself as an anti-hero who does not correspond to the common ideas of the victory of the Soviet hero myth. Without the outcome of divine compensation, and thus ignoring the biblical ending, the figure of Job is turned into a symbol of all Soviet invalids in the mode of intertextual correction. Whereas Boris Polevoi’s work propagates stoic forbearance, the minimization of one’s own suffering, and the unconditional service of war invalids, in the work of Rossiyanov the tendency of Russian contemporary

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literature to de-glorify the war becomes apparent. The latently chauvinistic topos of the brave defender of the fatherland and the rebellious partisans is up against the maltreated (people’s) body with the pariah caste of the young war invalids, the “innumerable human sand of the war,” its “half-­ trodden victims” (349).

The War Invalid as Pariah: Eduard Kochergin’s Angel’s Puppet (2003) The well-known stage designer, painter, and bestselling author Eduard Kochergin (*1937) is the son of “enemies of the people”: his father, a cyberneticist, was shot because of supposedly being in cahoots with forces from abroad. His Polish mother was sentenced to forced labor because of kin liability. Ten years in total Kochergin spent in various special homes of the NKVD and, until 1953, strayed through the Soviet Union. His fragmentary autobiography Angel’s Puppet (2003), which consists of kaleidoscopic episodes, presents a gallery of characters whom he met on his union-wide odyssey during the war and in the immediate postwar era. The protagonists are former clerics and aristocrats, beggars, artists, mentally disabled, invalids—all the people who became the flotsam of the Socialist reorganization and/or victims of war and terror. Now they lead a sorry existence off the beaten track of society. Through the destiny of two exemplary invalids, Kochergin addresses the tribulations of those who “were written off by the state and became superfluous in times of peace” because of the obtrusive visibility of their war injuries (Kochergin 105). Medical care, housing space, financial security, or occupational reintegration: vividly and in part drastically, the social misery of maimed war participants and with them the failure of the state is portrayed. Kochergin’s study of this milieu shows the survival strategies and the subculture of war invalids, which is characterized by front-line comradeship and solidarity. These mindsets have been transported from war into peacetime, and they are, in part, responsible for the much-debated phenomenon of front-line nostalgia: “The nostalgia for war, for comradeship, anticipated journey, and the pleasure of talk, damp tobacco” (Merridale 308) determine the gatherings of veterans. For many, the days of war were “the brightest of their lives” (Kochergin 105) because of the merits they earned, the promotion and the mission of liberation that founded their mythic collective identity. The exceptional neural

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circumstances and the borderline experiences in battle, the heightened consciousness of self-worth and one’s own existence were often perceived as intoxication, trance, and ecstasy by soldiers at the front (see Kemper 73), and they were destroyed by experiences of powerlessness after demobilization (see Tumarkin 204–05). Three coping strategies with which demobilized soldiers tried to conceal these experiences of powerlessness—alcoholism, jointly produced music, and the commemoration of the dead—play a central role in creating commonality. During wartime in particular, the musicality that belongs to the Russian autostereotype was instrumentalized by the government to lift battle morale and to condition the masses via suggestive sounds: “The power of sentimental songs was something that the Communist Party recognised at once,” the British historian Catherine Merridale writes. “In the teeth of the first and most devastating German advance, with the bombs already falling on Moscow, a directive from its Agitation Department called for free harmonicas to be distributed among the troops” (276). Although the production of spirits decreased drastically during the war— the distilleries were now producing Molotov cocktails—by Stalin’s order, every member of the Red Army received 100 g Vodka a day as front ration. Intoxication was often the only distraction from killing, dying, and suffering. Particularly because the craving for alcohol as a supporting substance in stressful situations increased with the length of the hostilities, it is not surprising that it is still hotly debated whether the Red Army contributed considerably to alcoholism in Russia (Trommelen 231), as many kept up the drinking routine after victory. The injured young soldiers, in particular, who found themselves in social seclusion, gave up and numbed themselves with alcohol (Fieseler 175). In this time, when PTSD was not yet recognized as an official psychiatric diagnosis and least of all fit the soldier’s ideal of masculinity, alcohol with its calming effect served as an important means to cope with everyday life, especially for returnees with psychological problems (Kemper 78). Precisely because the majority of soldiers could not or would not be reintegrated into the world of work, their meeting places are necessarily put into focus in Kochergin’s book—the innumerable drinking halls of various sizes that shaped the cityscape of Leningrad, the present-day St. Petersburg, right after the war. This is where the war participants indulged in escapist front nostalgia. The majority of the regular guests is disabled: “When you look under the table, you would find there seven or eight pairs of legs or less for ten heads that loomed over the counter” (Kochergin 106).

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The hero of the first episode “Vasily from Petrograd and Goritsy” is a sturdy seaman of the Baltic Fleet, who lost both legs “up to his buttocks” (Kochergin 129) and belongs to the pariah caste of “carts” (“tachki”). During the summer, Vasily sleeps under the main staircase of a former private palais at the bank of the Neva. Two female procurers care affectionally for him: they feed him, cut his hair, and take him to the public steam bath. In his striped sailor’s shirt, a remnant of his military uniform, with his accordion on his back, and on a wooden box that has been converted into a cart, he frequents all drinking establishments of the quarter every day. He is quickly promoted to a local celebrity. No drunken festivity could spare the “troubadour, accordion player, lead singer, and conductor” (130). With the beginning of the “mass expulsion of the war-invalid-cripples” (Kochergin 136), “total amputees, that is people who had lost their arms and legs and were popularly called ‘samovars,’ are brought from the entire Northwest of the country into the former nunnery” (137). Vasily is also banished. As a parting gift, the “union of the river prostitutes” (137) gives him a new, signed accordion and three bottles of his favorite liquor, the triple Eau de Cologne. In banishment, of all places, he finds his true calling as a choir director: The perfectly astonishing and surprising thing was that our Vasily Ivanovich, after he had arrived in Goritsy, was by no means lost but, on the contrary, surfaced completely. With his passion for song and his abilities, Vasily created a choir out of these human remnants—the choir of the “samovars”— and found the meaning of his life in it. (137–38)

As a tool of regulating mood and emotion, song here also seems to sublimate the satisfaction of sexual desire: “The head of the ‘cloister’ and her senior consultants welcomed Vasily Ivanovich’s initiative enthusiastically and turned a blind eye on his drinking of Eau de Cologne. The nurse-­ paramedics with the nerve-doctor at the top idolized him because he saved them from the passionate attacks of the unhappy, young male torsos” (138). With numerous allusions to the sexual frustration of the persons affected Kochergin also touches on another taboo subject—the sexuality of the “samovars.” In the summer months, choir practice takes place every day in the open air outside the walls of the cloister. The men are brought to the shore and arranged according to voice register: “Vasily jumped between the

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horizontal torsos on his ‘leather behind,’ […] taught and corrected everyone and left nobody in peace” (Kochergin 139). Under his guidance, the “wondrous, cloistral samovar-choir” gives a concert every evening (139). Since music as an affective system of communication can establish a link between emotional experiences and mental activities, music psychologist Günther Kleinen argues that it can have a stimulating effect (61). The emotional power of the overwhelming music, which triggers memories of the war, dissolves the individual I into the mythical soldier-we, for collective singing can by itself create ecstatic or trance-like states of consciousness. As accidental listeners the passengers of a passing river cruise ship succumb to the affective power of song: The well-dressed, satiated three-deck passengers froze out of surprise and shock over the power and enthusiasm of the singing. They came up on their toes and climbed on the upper decks of their steamer to see who performed this wonder of sound. But in the high Vologdan grass and in the riverside vegetation one couldn’t see the trunks of human bodies that sang out of the earth. Sometimes the hand of our compatriot who had created the only choir of living torsos in the world appeared over the tops of the bushes. The hand leapt up and disappeared, dissolving in the foliage. (Kochergin 139–40)

The invisibility of the “trunks” (“obrubki”) and “samovars” (“samovary”) by Stalin’s order, which forces the collective forgetting of the shadow side of the war, becomes a reality. The voices are rendered anonymous; their sound is seemingly separated from their source so that the grotesque, even repulsive component of invalidity remains hidden. The “chthonic,” enigmatic singing not only anticipates the premature death of the disabled veterans but also refers back to the earth cult of the memorial sites and underscores the spiritual connection of the “little man” to the Russian soil and nature and, at the same time, his powerlessness. With it, the motif of the voice that sounds beyond the grave is also taken up. The ephemeral directing of Vasily also hints at his coming disappearance. Mindful of the musicality that was instrumentalized during the war, it is not surprising that the “samovars” sing the songs of the front and thus reestablish their ritual war community. Their patriotic repertoire can be read as a subtextual accusation of the inhuman regime, to which the exiled soldiers remain loyal despite their desolate situation. Musicality as well as forbearance and resignation as core components of the Russian national character find confirmation here.

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In the episode “The Captain: An Island Story,” first published in the journal Znamya in 1997, Kochergin minutely describes the funeral of an anonymous invalid, an artillery soldier with the nickname “Captain.” Thus, he puts the anthropological primal urge for the commemoration of the dead into focus. A severe injury, which disfigured his neck and chin, robbed the Captain of his voice. Thus, he becomes an emblem not just for unspeakability but also for the imposed silence on war traumata. Like his fellow sufferer Vasily, he vegetates under catastrophic conditions in the ruins of a bombed market. With a trained hen, the Captain becomes an exotic curiosity, an “attraction,” the “pride of the drinking halls,” and through his silent reproach he turns into the “conscience” of the pub visitors (Kochergin 108). When the Captain dies of tuberculosis, his drinking companions organize a funeral procession on their own, which equals a dignified military state funeral but at the same time resembles a grotesque, theatrical monstrosity show. Once again, the maimed physicality of the veterans as a mass phenomenon of the postwar period becomes the focus of attention. The funeral rites of the Russian-Orthodox church are kept during the ablution and interment—proof that more religiosity furtively survived than the decade-long atheistic agitation suggests. A passage from Polevoi’s The Story of a Real Man may serve as a foil here. The party functionary Comrade Colonel Commissar Semyon Petrovich, Meresev’s friend and advisor, a “real man” (Polevoi, Story 171), receives a military funeral that follows the Bolshevist rites and is described in much detail. On a carriage that is drawn by artillery horses, an open red casket, decorated with flowers and plants, is laid out. The commissar’s eight medals are carried on pillows. A brass band, an obligatory part of the funeral procession at large public funerals, intones the funeral march (170). In Kochergin’s text, three invalids also carry the badges and medals on raspberry-colored velvet cushions behind the catafalque that is drawn by two white horses—which can again be read as a critique of a regime that limited itself to ritual gestures during the war. More and more maimed companions from the front join the funeral procession and temporarily bring the street traffic to a halt, so that a huge crowd eventually hobbles behind the coffin. In contrast to Polevoi’s grave cortège, which consists of generals, soldiers fit for service, and a nurse, the lover of the deceased, this “mass exodus of war invalids” forms a “sad genre painting” (Kochergin 110), a cabinet of mutilated curiosities. This procession is also ordered according to military hierarchy, so that the highest-ranking invalids march at the top:

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Among them one could see all types of human mutilation, which the last Patriotic War gave to the people. Here were “trunks”—total, half, or combined; “crutches” of all types—right, left, three quarters; “carts,” completely without legs, with behinds sowed with leather; those that were “baked” in tanks and airplanes, with encrusted faces, hands; those who were just burned, shot through with shrapnel and those with the rest, a souvenir—in head, breast, stomach, injured by shrapnel at all possible places; those who were branded by brain confusions of all kinds, with twitchy heads, hands, leaping up and squealing. There was even a long one with the nickname “Nail,” who struck himself periodically on the head. In short, a pair of all the creation. (110)

The irregular rhythm of the horseshoes and the crutches, the buzzing and squeezing of the “carts” replace the obligatory march of the military orchestra; the short pauses are filled with the metallic clang of scores of medals, which demonstrates the mass heroism of the Soviet people. The procession becomes a grotesque defilée, which in contrast to a military parade represents neither the strength of the army nor the war machinery but shows plainly the high price that the country had to pay to the war with the deformed soldiers’ bodies. In contrast to Polevoi, the amputated body is not idealized for the hero cult. Turned into a grotesque, it serves as an outlet for Kochergin’s critique of the regime. In the subtext, the archaic understanding of war is denounced, in which the ruling powers have always estimated material assets higher than human beings and have to take responsibility for colossal losses: It was the last march of the “trunks”—the victors of the past Patriotic and World War massacre, who accompanied their own sign, their symbol, their talisman on his final way, on one of the last catafalques of the city. The brotherhood that has been hacked through the war bid farewell to itself along with the captain.—A year later, one began to purge the city from the homeless, heavy drinkers who weren’t needed by anyone anymore by exiling them to the cloisters that were quickly converted into homes for invalids, right into our Nordic sad landscapes. (Kochergin 113)

Every one of the numerous attendants throws a handful of dirt on the grave, so that there is no need for the service of an undertaker. After the military order “At ease,” the simple grave is transformed into a banquet with a frugal funeral feast of vodka and gherkins. It quickly turns into an escapist drinking orgy, which allows the guests to forget their war

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traumata, their impaired bodies, and their impending death. Such graveside ceremonies that mutate into picnics belong to old Russian funeral customs (Merridale 48). Precisely because the Soviet Union did not create a culture of mourning, the catafalque was later replaced by a bus, so that the passersby would no longer be distracted “from their everyday work and worries” (Kochergin 113). In this way, collective oblivion was enforced; the public was not to take notice of the death of deformed witnesses to the war. The use of a funeral culture lies in the ritual actions of leave-taking. With the referential figure of a heroic but unnamed captain, the community of suffering that unites the living with the dead is here celebrated according to military rites. The commemoration of the war invalids provides an alternative to the Soviet culture of memory: it includes the glorious remembrance of the front and the memory of the social misery of the surviving witnesses. With his lamentation of the dead, Kochergin puts up a literary monument to the war invalids.

Conclusion Boris Polevoi’s classic has long been inscribed into the national memory culture of Russia, be it as canonical schoolbook or as a popular film. The real hero who has advanced to a “legend” as well as his semi-real, literary equivalent keep their leg amputations a secret and with them also their materialized war traumata. During the war, the amputated body, the honor badge per se, became not only an expression of sacrifice but also, as in Polevoi, a propagandist tool of patriotism. In the critical works of Rossiyanov and Kochergin, in contrast, the ostentatious display of the war-maimed soldier’s body as the people’s body leads to a de-sacralization, de-tabooization, and de-heroization of the “Great Patriotic War.” The war invalids correspond neither to the aesthetic ideals of anatomic normality nor to the physiological and motoric norms or expectations of performance in Soviet society. The aesthetic and functional inadequacy of Soviet prostheses or even the complete lack of such prostheses definitively prevented reintegration into working life and thus cemented the discrimination of war invalids. Because of the striking absence of functional prostheses and wheelchairs, the Soviet war invalids become discredited—stigmatized people whose physical defects are immediately evident. Kochergin emphasizes the relevance of the visual in processes of stigmatization by turning to the grotesque and the theatrical, while Rossiyanov explains the tragic

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existence of amputees in social seclusion with the tradition of Christian stoicism. The new terminology of victimhood in the records of Kochergin and Rossiyanov—no longer the active, painful sacrificium during the glorious fighting (on) for the fatherland in Polevoi, but the purely passive, suffering variant victimus—undermines the official topos of heroism and contributes to a postheroic paradigm change. In this way, the ideologically overloaded image of the war in Soviet times shows significant cracks. Vehemently, these memory texts denounce the inhuman Stalinist regime. Sharply formulated is also the critique of the normalist body doctrine, which intensified the disrespect for the war invalids, as well as of Soviet memory culture, which dissected the war trauma—embodied in the amputated, grotesquely deformed soldier’s body, in all these “obrubki,” “tachki,” “kostyli”—out of the official narrative. Translated by Maren Scheurer

Note 1. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.

References Baberowski, Jörg. Der rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2003. Brooks, Jeffrey. “Pravda Goes to War.” Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, edited by Richard Sites, Indiana UP, 1995, pp. 9–27. Fast, Piotr. Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History: Social Realism and Its Others. Lang, 1999. Fieseler, Beate. “Die Invaliden des ‘Großen Vaterländischen Krieges’ der Sowjetunion, 1941–1991.” Erinnerung an Diktatur und Krieg: Brennpunkte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses zwischen Russland und Deutschland seit 1945, edited by Andreas Wirsching et al., De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015, pp. 165–79. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Penguin, 1986. Jahn, F.  Hubertus. Armes Russland: Bettler und Notleidende in der russischen Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis in die Gegenwart. Schöningh, 2010. Kaganovsky, Lilya. How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin. U of Pittsburgh P, 2008.

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Kemper, Wolf-Reinhard. “Rausch und Konsum psychotroper Substanzen in Kriegssituationen: Eine fragmentarische Bestandsaufnahme aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Sicht.” Rausch—Trance—Ekstase: Zur Kultur psychischer Ausnahmezustände, edited by Michael Schetschke et  al., Transcript, 2016, pp. 73–92. Kleinen, Günter. “Musikalische Sozialisation.” Musikpsychologie: Das neue Handbuch, edited by Herbert Bruhn et al., Rowohlt, 2008, pp. 37–66. Kochergin, Eduard. Angelova kukla. Vita Nova, 2013. Maresev, Aleksei: “About the Author by the Hero of the Soviet Union.” A Story About a Real Man, by Boris Polevoi, translated by Joe Fineberg, edited by David Skvirsky, 5th ed., Progress Publishers, 1973, pp. 7–9. Merridale, Catherine. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. Viking, 2000. Möhring, Maren. “Kriegsversehrte Körper: Zur Bedeutung der Sichtbarkeit von Behinderungen.” Disability Studies: Kultursoziologie und Soziologie der Behinderung: Erkundungen in einem neuen Forschungsfeld, edited by Anne Waldschmidt, Transcript, 2007, pp. 175–97. Oberemko, Valentina. “Sel i poletel!” Argumenty i fakty, no. 20, 18 May 2011, p. 46. Ozerov, Vitalij. “S veroy v nastojashchego cheloveka.” Sobranie sochineniy, tom pervyj: Goryachiy tsekh: Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke, by Boris Polevoi, Chudozhestvennaja literatura, 1981, pp. 5–26. Phillips, Sarah D. “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!’ A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, 2009. https://dsq-­sds.org/article/view/936/1111. Polevoi, Boris. Sobranie sochineniy, tom pervyj: Goryachiy tsekh: Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke. Chudozhestvennaja literature, 1981. Polevoj, Boris [Polevoi, Boris]. A Story About a Real Man. Translated by Joe Fineberg, edited by David Skvirsky, 5th ed., Progress Publishers, 1973. Rossiyanov, Oleg. “Vojna-to von kogda byla.” (Zhizn’ vtoraya). Izdatelstvo “MIK,” 2007. Sartorti, Rosalinde. “On the Making of Heroes, Heroines, and Saints.” Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, edited by Richard Sites, Indiana UP, 1995, pp. 176–93. Trommelen, Edwin. Dawai! The Russians and their Vodka! Translated by David Stephenson, Russian Information Services, 2012. Tumarkin, Nina. The Living & The Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. BasicBooks, 1994. Youngblood, Denise J. Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. Kansas UP, 2007. Zhelesnova, N. “Kommentarii.” Sobranie sochineniy, tom pervyj: Goryachiy tsekh: Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke, by Boris Polevoi, Chudozhestvennaja literatura, 1981, pp. 517–26.

Discussion: The Politics of Amputation

As we have seen in the preceding part of the volume, literary texts can enrich our understanding of amputation as a practice with historically changeable cultural ramifications. Rachel Clark, Lena Wånggren, and Oxane Leingang delve into the lived reality of individuals who have lost one or several limbs and unfold the historical, social, and political meanings disability attains in various constellations of power and disenfranchisement. Given the close relationship between the historical development of amputative surgery and warfare, it is perhaps not surprising that most texts discussed in this part revolve around war, colonial enterprise, and their aftermaths, but it is notable that throughout the chapters, amputees do not only emerge as victims of military, colonial, or patriarchal power. Surely, what we see is a close overlap between sociopolitical stratification and disability: while class, social status, racial or gender discrimination are often factors in making an individual vulnerable to amputation in the first place or negatively influence access to medical resources or rehabilitation, relative power allows individuals to better cope with impairments, avoid amputation altogether, or impose punishment on others. Nevertheless, the chapters do not focus exclusively on the negative impacts of amputation. Living with amputation involves finding the means to cope, (re)building communities and bonds of affection, and the ambivalent benefits that a helpful community, hero worship, and a transformed body may bestow on the individual.

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In each chapter, we see how bodies are affected and ultimately shaped by power. Wars leave their marks on the bodies of veterans, which may be further shaped by rehabilitation and prosthetics, if provided by the authorities, and affect the amputee’s reintegration into the community. Punitive amputation turns the body into a site of punishment and assertion of authority in the private as well as the public sphere. The texts discussed by Clark, Wånggren, and Leingang are concerned with the ways bodies are used to create narratives of the struggles of war (where injuries might vouch for a soldier’s identity), of the supposed superiority over colonial subjects and women, or of a new physiological ethos that parades the strong and displaces the weak. Ultimately, however, these narratives are unstable. The wounds of war and punishment create too many contradictory messages to contain in a single, unified narrative. Paradoxically, then, once the signs of power, authority, and war have been inscribed upon their bodies, the amputees we learn about in this part are made to disappear. Clark discusses a passage of the 1593 Act for the Relief of the Poor, which was, at least in part, motivated by Queen Elizabeth’s “annoyance” upon seeing disabled soldiers wandering around London; Wånggren tells of Neranya’s and Alonzo’s deaths or Lady Sannox’s retreat into the convent; and Leingang uncovers the Soviet propagandistic practice that the amputee may only be celebrated as a hero when his injuries are perfectly concealed. Once an amputation has taken place, the amputee is threatened with further erasure: of their place in society, their voice, or even their posthumous commemoration. At the same time, as much as it appears as a tool in the assertion of authority, amputation is also a threat to that authority. As a consequence of war, it exposes a failure to protect one’s citizens from harm; as a consequence of punishment, it reveals weaknesses in the structures of power that felt compelled to resort to such drastic measures in the first place. The politics of amputation are driven by a vast array of double meanings that refuse to submit completely to narrative and symbolic control: amputation builds and destroys communities, may be an act of power or weakness, an attempt at control or an act of love, may result out of and reinforce disadvantagement or awaken unexpected abilities. At least in part, these double meanings seem to be related to semiotic structures that determine the social and cultural discourses around the amputee: a society that rests on an ideology of health and (masculine) strength is less likely to create conditions in which people with disabilities are granted a space in public life and in memory. Their lived reality is thus intimately intertwined

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with the symbolic arrays of meaning that surround amputation, but it is meaning that is generated in the historically specific interplay of medical, social, and psychological realities of disability, political action, and the symbolic structures available to understand disability. The early modern plays, the late nineteenth-century stories and early twentieth-century film, and the Soviet (auto)biographical narratives discussed here provide testimonies of these historical interconnections, and, through projections of fantasy, naturalistic documentation, commemoration, or social critique, they take positions on disability politics. The cross-cultural history of amputation—as a political, social and cultural phenomenon related to, but also going beyond, the development of medical procedures—still needs to be written.

PART II

Amputation’s Intersections

CHAPTER 5

“She Had Wept So Long and So Much on the Stumps”: Amputation and Embodiment in “The Girl Without Hands” Miranda Corcoran

In fiction, amputated or dismembered hands are often a source of fear, disgust, or, at best, dark comedy. In Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), a concert pianist (Conrad Veidt) whose crushed hands are replaced with those of a recently executed murderer begins to suspect that the newly transplanted extremities are imbued with a homicidal sentience. In Karl Freund’s 1935 remake of the same film, Mad Love, crazed surgeon Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre) replaces the mutilated hands of a pianist (Colin Clive) with those of a deceased, knife-throwing murderer. The Crawling Hand (dir. Herbert L.  Strock), a 1963 science fiction film, features the disembodied hand of a dead astronaut strangling the inhabitants of a small town. The following year, a more benign set of ambulatory digits, The Addams Family’s (1964–66) “Thing” lent himself to a series of darkly

M. Corcoran (*) Department of English, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_5

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comic hand-related puns. In a similar, blackly humorous, vein, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 (1987) sees hapless protagonist Ash (Bruce Campbell) forced to cut off his own hand after it becomes possessed by a demonic force and tries to strangle him; he then traps it under a bucket weighed down by a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Echoing Sigmund Freud’s assertion that hands cut off at the wrist, and especially those that retain a degree of post-severance vitality, are a potent incarnation of the uncanny (Uncanny 150), these texts present dismembered hands as eerie inhabitants of the ill-defined border between life and death, animate and inanimate, subject and object. Yet, beyond their disturbing indeterminacy, severed hands also embody the splitting off of agency, intellect, and independence. In their study of the gothic body and its components, Ian Conrich and Laura Sedgwick argue that hands “physically express the body’s intelligence and creativity, enacting the wishes of the mind” (131). For them, the hand is what enables us to transmute the mind’s desires into tangible, physical reality. Without hands, we are rendered helpless, deprived of the power to act freely and meaningfully in the world. Texts centered around women, in particular, tend to figure the loss of hands or other appendages as a violent loss of agency. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (circa 1588–93), the protagonist’s daughter Lavinia has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off so that she can neither speak nor write the names of her rapists. Here, the loss of hands (and of the tongue) is intimately bound up with misogynistic violence and with a loss of power. In Jennifer Lynch’s notorious 1993 film Boxing Helena, an obsessive surgeon, Nick (Julian Sands), kidnaps the object of his desire, Helena (Sherilyn Fenn). Following a car accident, Nick amputates Helena’s legs in order to force her to stay with him, and later amputates her arms in hopes of rendering her fully compliant. “Aschenputtel,” a variant on the “Cinderella” tale that was recorded by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century, features an infamous sequence in which the heroine’s cruel stepsisters cut off their heels and toes in order to both fit the mythic golden slipper and conform to normative modes of femininity by rendering their feet artificially small and dainty. In each of these works, amputation serves to silence women, to make them smaller or more obedient. Violence perpetrated on women’s bodies thus functions to guarantee their adherence to patriarchally inscribed cultural roles. This chapter explores themes of amputation and abjection in a folktale1 entitled “The Girl Without Hands,” a work equally preoccupied with the relationship between embodied femininity, violence, and agency. The tale

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is categorized, according to the index commonly used in folklore studies, as Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 706. It has alternately been referred to as “The Maiden Without Hands” and “The Handless Maiden.” The most well-known version, and the version I will refer to most frequently throughout this chapter, was published in the Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812–57). Versions of this story appear in numerous cultures across the continent. The Russian variation of the tale is called “The Armless Maiden” (in Russian the title of this story is “Bezruchka”; literally, “Armless,” which functions as both a descriptor and the heroine’s ostensible name). There are also permutations of the story to be found in South Africa, Latin America (“A mulher e sa filha bonita” in Brazil and “La Zunquita” in Chile), and the tale has also made its way to the United States, where it is told as “La niña perseguida” in New Mexico (Knedler 315–16) and “Rising Water, Talking Bird, Weeping Tree” in Louisiana (Frankel 97). Versions can even be found among the Xhosa tribe of South Africa and in Japan, where it has been recorded as “The Handless Woman” (Frankel 97). Each version of the tale is different, as the essential narrative structure molds itself to fit with the unique cultural concerns of the community in which it is told. Although the different iterations of the story each contain different narrative tropes and fantastical occurrences, they are generally united in their focus on a young girl whose hands are removed—sometimes by a sadistic relative, sometimes by the devil or other supernatural entity. Foregrounding concerns about femininity, the gendered body, and personal agency, this chapter argues that the amputations described in these stories are deeply symbolic in nature, taking place just as the young protagonist is on the cusp of puberty. As such, the removal of her hands—and by extension her ability to act independently in the world—symbolizes the loss of power and agency that is seen to accompany entry into womanhood. At the same time, this chapter emphasizes the multivalence of both the tale itself and the act of amputation at its heart. Although the story initially appears to suggest that the girl’s entry into womanhood is simultaneously an entry into objecthood, it also explores potent, complex anxieties about embodied femininity. Framing the body as an entity that is experienced both physically, as material reality, and discursively, as culturally contingent construct, the following pages will also interrogate how “The Girl Without Hands” expresses a deep-seated ambivalence about the mature female body, its functions and its social position. This chapter also draws upon the theories of the abject body coined by Julia Kristeva and

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developed by Barbara Creed and explores how, within these formulations of abjection, femininity is often presented as a source of terror because of how it straddles the line between subject and object, evoking notions of monstrosity, effluvia, and contagion. The amputation of the heroine’s hands in these folktales thus constructs a symbolically potent image of a young woman defined by wounds, gaps, or voids. Ultimately, as I will demonstrate, this tale can be understood as an imaginative playground in which the women who told it, listened to it, and modified it could explore complex and often contradictory conceptions of female agency, embodied femininity, and pervasive discourses about womanhood. Dismemberment, disfigurement, and amputation are surprisingly common occurrences within the fantastic realm of the fairy tale. In many stories, bodily mutilations serve to inspire heroes, punish villains, and resolve plots. Marina Warner observes that in the world of the fairy tale bodies can be disassembled and reconstituted as though they were mere toys. Indeed, in such tales, where shapeshifting abounds, not only are dead children miraculously restored to life and mundane household objects transformed into aerial conveyances for haggard witches, but so too are hands regularly “cut off, found and reattached” (Warner, Beast xv). One story, “Good Bowling and Card Playing,” collected by the Brothers Grimm, sees a young man confront a series of horrific sights in order to win the hand of a fair princess. In one particularly disturbing sequence the young man finds himself playing nine-pins with nine severed legs and two skulls (Grimm, “Good Bowling” 56). Another unsettling tale, also collected by the Grimms and entitled “The Juniper Tree,” features a small boy who is cut into pieces and cooked in a stew, only to return whole and healthy at the end of the story. The destruction and recreation of bodies, it seems, is just as much a part of the fairy tale’s store of plot devices as the slumbering princess, the glimmer of gold, or the cursed prince. In her study of disability in the fairy tale, Anne Schmiesing further expounds on the centrality of bodily destruction and disintegration within these stories. Schmiesing observes that throughout its seven editions, the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales included numerous stories that portrayed disability, deformity, and disease (1). Often, these tales employ, somewhat problematically, ability and disability as markers of morality. Thus, in many fairy tales, beauty and physical health reflect an inner virtuousness, while deformity or ugliness underscores the Otherness of evil characters (Schmiesing 1). In some tales, however, deformities and disabilities serve to further disenfranchise characters who are already marginalized (Schmiesing 1), providing

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an impetus for a heroic quest or magical transformation. Consequently, the liquidation of the hero’s initial misfortune or lack that Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp identifies as a key narrative pattern of the folktale (53) often takes the form of an injury, illness, or deformity that is healed in the closing moments of the tale (Schmiesing 2). Alongside its narrative function, the prevalence of disease and disability in fairy tales can be understood as a necessary progeniture of the socio-­ historical reality that produced them. Warner notes that beneath their enchanting, shimmering surfaces, the reader of any fairy tale can ascertain a distant history of poverty, oppression, and hunger (Once 76). Orphans, foundlings, and lost children abound in fairy tales, with maternal mortality or the loss of family serving to propel an incalculable number of plots (Warner, Once 76). In other stories, hunger is the motivating force. In “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, the eponymous siblings are abandoned in a forest so that their parents will no longer have to provide for them and so might avoid starving to death. Early versions of the tale find the children happening across a house made, not of gingerbread and sweets, but simply of bread (Purkiss 281). Their eagerness to devour the walls of this house is not a sign of childish gluttony but rather a response to starvation. Transmuting the pain of hunger and hopeless oppression into wondrous tales in which suffering is refracted through a prism of enchantment, these stories contain within them the dreams, fears, and desires of ordinary people who lived prior to industrialization or the rise of mass literacy (Warner, Once 76). For Warner, fairy tales are unique because of the manner in which they engage with “direct and shared experiences of material circumstances” (Once 76). The ubiquity of stepmothers, wicked or otherwise, echoes the painful reality of high maternal mortality rates in the cultures where these tales were told and recorded. Likewise, enchanted foodstuffs and the “pot of porridge that is never empty speaks volumes about a world where hunger and want and dreadful toil are the lot of the majority, whose expectations are rather modest by contemporary standards” (Warner, Once 77). Starvation, disease, and deformity were everyday experiences. Bodies were worn down and mutilated from work, accident, or misadventure. That fairy tales repeatedly depict the mutilation and miraculous repair of the human body suggests a cultural reality in which such healing could only be achieved through supernatural means. Yet, for as much as folktales might reflect broader cultural concerns or circumstances, they have also had a unique historical relationship to women. Embroiled in repetitive labor, often located in or around a

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particular household, women had ample opportunity to tell stories or fables that reflected their experiences, articulated their anxieties, or educated their daughters and granddaughters. In the introduction to her own comprehensive collection of fairy tales, Angela Carter characterizes the telling of folktales as a domestic art, akin to rolling meatballs or cooking potato soup (para. 5). A highly personal act wherein the bare bones of the folkloric recipe are fleshed out by the individual storyteller, fairy tales are often enfolded within wider notions of domesticity. As Carter notes, “there exists a European convention of an archetypal female storyteller, ‘Mother Goose’ in English, ‘Ma Mère l’Oie’ in French, an old woman sitting by the fireside, spinning—literally ‘spinning a yarn’ as she is pictured in one of the first self-conscious collections of European fairy tales” (para. 7). This collection Contes du temps passé was published by Charles Perrault in 1697 bearing a subtitle, Tales of Mother Goose, that alluded to a proverbial phrase for “old wives’ tales” (Warner, Once 45). Women were also intimately connected to the Grimms’ compilation of their iconic fairy-tale anthology. Although the brothers framed the stories they recorded as originating in rural, peasant communities, many of their tales were collected from educated middle-class women like Dorothea Viehmann2 or Marie Hassenpflug. Like gossip, fairy tales were viewed as the language of women. It is for this that the telling of tales was an act that took place in loom sheds and by firesides, by the spinning wheel and in kitchens (Warner, Introduction 73). These stories represent what Maria Tatar describes as a “buried narrative tradition, one that flowed largely through oral tributaries as women’s speech until it was appropriated by male editors and collectors who channeled it into a print culture” (Secrets 108). Fairy tales flourished in those places where people, most often women, congregated to perform dull, repetitive labor. The stories they told were a means of passing on their experience and teaching the young about the harsh realities of life in a preindustrial culture. Dallas J. Baker observes that many fairy tales served to inculcate young children with specific social and cultural values (2). Often highly gendered in their nature, stories aimed at socializing boys, such as “The Golden Goose” or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” taught prudence, courage, and initiative (Baker 80). Conversely, those tales directed at girls acclimatized their young listeners to the future responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, as well as teaching them to perform a culturally appropriate version of femininity (Baker 80). However, in as much as fairy tales could be didactic, they were also expressive, giving form to fears and anxieties that could not always be expressed in a more

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explicit manner. Little Red Riding Hood in her crimson cap has often been identified with puberty and menstruation, her acquisition of the hood or cap signifying anxieties about the “premature transfer of sexual attractiveness” (Bettelheim qtd. in Warner 123). Likewise, in “Bluebeard” and other tales categorized as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 312 and 311, the heroine’s bloodthirsty suitor embodies concerns about marriage, sexuality, and potentially abusive husbands.3 Tales designated Aarne-­ Thompson-­ Uther 706, including “The Armless Maiden,” “The Girl Without Hands,” and “Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands,” are equally indicative of anxieties surrounding womanhood. As one of the most widespread European folktales (Knedler 314), “The Girl Without Hands,” in all of its many forms, appears to have been uniquely resonant in its power to capture specific cultural concerns about femininity. Laden with images suggestive of puberty, maturation, biological transformation, and physical violation, “The Girl Without Hands” enacts a host of anxieties concerning womanhood not only as it is constructed culturally but as a biological experience. Figuring the girl’s entry into womanhood as an abject dissolution of the borders between inside and outside, subject and object, “The Girl Without Hands” imagines maturation as a fundamentally grotesque metamorphosis. However, like other tales centered on young women, this story also “dramatizes an early phase in the establishment of adolescent autonomy” (Warner, Beast xxi), suggesting an ambivalence about ideals of womanhood grounded in passivity. Translated alternately as “The Girl Without Hands” or “The Maiden Without Hands,” this particular tale has appeared across all seven editions of the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales. As noted above, variations appear all across the world, but the tale varies, even across different editions of Children’s and Household Tales. However, as it appears in the Grimms’ collection, the story generally begins with a miller who has fallen “little by little” into poverty (113). One day, while he is out gathering wood, the miller encounters an old man who promises him vast riches in exchange for whatever happens to be standing behind his mill. Assuming that the elderly man is referring to an apple tree, the miller gladly agrees. It is only upon returning home and conversing with his wife that the miller learns that the man who promised him such great wealth was the devil and the prize standing behind the mill is his own daughter. The pious girl washes herself and draws a circle around her body in chalk so that the devil cannot approach. When the devil sees this, he orders the miller to take away the water the girl has used to cleanse herself, for he will be unable to

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claim her if she is pure. The next morning, the devil returns and is horrified to discover that even without water, the girl has remained clean. By crying into her own hands, she has purified herself with tears. Furious, the devil orders the miller to chop off his daughter’s hands, and while he is initially hesitant to do so, his daughter is compliant, telling her father, “Dear father, do with me what you will, I am your child” (Grimm, “Girl” 114).4 When the devil returns for a third time, he is once again angered to discover that the miller’s daughter has continued to purify herself with tears. This time, she “had wept so long and so much on the stumps, that they were quite clean” (114). The devil loses all claim to the pious girl and ceases his attempts to carry her away. Rejecting her father’s offer to care for her in her mutilated state, the girl sets off on her own. As she travels through the countryside with her arms tied behind her back, she comes across a garden filled with luscious fruit. An angel helps her to enter the garden, and she eats heartily from a pear tree. The garden, it transpires, is the property of a king, who, upon seeing the handless girl, falls in love with her. The king marries the unfortunate maiden and has a pair of silver hands5 crafted for her to replace those she has lost. When the king leaves to fight in a distant battle, the girl, now queen of the kingdom, gives birth to a beautiful son. However, the devil, still wishing to harm the young queen, intercepts the letters she sends to her husband informing him of the birth. The devil replaces the letter with another claiming that the queen had given birth to a monster. The king, being a kind and loving man, sends a reply instructing his mother to care for the queen nevertheless. Yet, once again, the devil intercepts the letter and swaps it with instructions to execute the queen and the child. On seeing this, the king’s mother is horrified, and she urges the queen to flee the kingdom with her baby. Wandering in the forest, the queen is cared for by a “snow-white maiden” (Grimm, “Girl” 115) and an angel of the Lord, who help her find a small house among the trees. When the king returns from war and discovers the devil’s deception, he sets off to locate his wife and child. After seven long years, he is successful. Finding his wife and child sequestered in their woodland home, he is also pleased to learn that the grace of God has enabled the queen’s hands to grow back. The tale ends happily with the girl’s mutilated body restored to health and the family reunited. “The Girl Without Hands” is a convoluted tale. It is a story suffused not only with improbable events but also with improbable persons. Beyond the familiar fairy-tale stable of beautiful maidens and valiant kings, the story also features an angel, the devil, a white maiden, and the direct

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intercession of God. Yet, in many of its early oral incarnations, the dramatis personae were less crowded as these versions of the story do not always include the devil. Instead, the oral permutations of the tale see the maiden lose her hands and flee her family home as a result of her father’s incestuous advances. While the incest narrative appears in many other versions of the story, the Brothers Grimm were eager to expunge some of the tale’s more disturbing elements by excising explicit references to incest. Schmiesing details how when the Grimms were revising “The Girl Without Hands” for the second edition of Children’s and Household Tales (KHM 2), they mixed the first version of the story with an oral source, which they felt possessed a greater completeness or artistic unity (85). As much as the brothers admired the artistry of this new permutation, they were nevertheless greatly disturbed by its opening, which saw the father cut off his own daughter’s hands and breasts when she refused to marry him (Schmiesing 85). Although the presence of incest aligns “The Girl Without Hands” with other tales such as “Allerleirauh” (also collected by the Grimms) or “Donkeyskin” wherein the heroine must leave home and make her own way in the world in order to escape her father’s amorous advances, the bowdlerization of this particular folktale fits in with the Grimms’ general unease about matters related to sexuality. Maria Tatar also alludes to the Grimms’ discomfort with sexuality when she notes that although the pair would generally expand on depictions of violent punishments doled out for moral transgressions, they carefully and diligently erased all references to what they termed “certain conditions and relationships” (Hard Facts 7). Judiciously removing allusions to sex and pregnancy, the Grimms were also inclined to expunge explicit descriptions of incestuous desire (Tatar, Hard Facts 8). As such, in the version of “The Girl Without Hands” included in Children’s and Household Tales, the devil replaces the father’s incestuous desires, embodying abstract notions of spiritual evil as opposed to the more insidious and traumatic evil of sexual abuse. Like many fairy tales, “The Girl Without Hands” is an essentially metamorphic entity, its narrative composition and characterizations shifting over time to reflect evolving mores and cultural values. Yet, whether with or without explicit representations of incest, sexuality, or abuse, the tale is steeped in a rich symbolism reflective of anxieties about femininity, maturation, and the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Most incarnations of the tale define the eponymous protagonist as a “girl” or a “maiden,” and over the course of the story she is transformed from a

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childlike daughter into a wife and mother. Her status as maiden or girl therefore underscores her liminal position between girlhood and womanhood. Although contemporary notions of adolescence were not assimilated into popular discourse until around the turn of the twentieth century, with G.  Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) providing an early and influential articulation of the concept, representations of the threshold between childhood and adulthood have formed a crucial component of earlier narratives, both written and oral. In fairy tales, maturation and the crossing of the boundary into the adult world is often a key concern, and this seems logical if we understand these stories as tools of socialization or education. In tales centered on girls, this maturation is intimately bound up with marriage and reproduction, but some fairy tales also deal in images suggestive of menarche or the loss of virginity. Little Red Riding Hood’s cape can easily be read as symbolizing menstruation, while Sleeping Beauty’s calamitous pricking of her finger on the spindle can be understood as gesturing towards penetration and the loss of virginity. “The Girl Without Hands” likewise centers around the protagonist’s transition from girl to woman, framing this metamorphosis as both social or familial (her marriage and motherhood) and physiological (the loss of her hands suggesting uncontrollable physicality, leakiness, and a loss of autonomy). Moreover, the story appears to explicitly address anxieties born out of common cultural constructions of femininity as defined by lack, an animalistic closeness to nature, and the evisceration of the biological boundaries that separate the complete, integrated subject from the partially formed, viscous object. One obvious interpretation of “The Girl Without Hands” is that it dramatizes the passivity and loss of autonomy that is woman’s fate in a preindustrial society that views her value as intimately linked to her marriageability. Elisabeth Panttaja comments that this story is bound up in the fact of female commodification both by society and by the heroine’s father, who views the girl as capital (169). However, I would argue that the protagonist’s mutilation also functions as a literalization of those cultural discourses that construct femininity as closer to nature and less fully human than masculinity. The story’s central character is, after all, a girl on the cusp of womanhood who is mutilated—losing her agency—and sent out into the wilds alone. This conflation of amputation and femininity is not unique to “The Girl Without Hands.” Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes, for instance, how

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[m]any parallels exist between the social meaning attributed to female bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies. Both the female and the disabled body are cast as deviant and inferior; both are excluded from full participation in public as well as economic life; both are defined in opposition to a norm that is presumed to possess natural physical superiority. (19)

That the maiden’s amputated limbs signify her loss of agency, her entry into the abject, deformed Otherness that is womanhood, is rendered even more explicit through the symbolic significance of the appendages she loses. In their study of amputated and lost hands, Conrich and Sedgwick frame hands as signifiers of autonomy that act as conduits between the mind’s desires and the external world in which the mind must exist (131). Significantly, Conrich and Sedgwick not only draw attention to hands as embodied agency, but also highlight how the presence or absence of hands is what separates humans from non-human animals. They note, for instance, how Aristotle describes the hands as that aspect of humanity that separates man from beast, with hands enabling man to become an intelligent animal (Conrich and Sedgwick 132). According to this schema, when the protagonist in “The Girl Without Hands” loses her hands, she is thus propelled across the dividing line between human and animal, and firmly deposited on the animal side of that binary. Significantly, the handless maiden is described as having her stumps tied behind her back before she leaves home; she is forced to eat and drink using only her mouth, in a manner which recalls the feeding of animals. Unlike Titus Andronicus’s Lavinia, the anonymous heroine of this tale cannot even employ her stumps to help her navigate the hostile wilderness into which she flees. Instead, she willingly has her arms bound behind her back, thus losing even the opportunity to approximate the use of her hands through the manipulation of her stumps. Consequently, the maiden’s closeness to the animal world is not necessarily a product of her mutilation. While the narrative logic of the story may require that she compensate for the loss of her hands by using only her mouth to pick up food or nibble from trees, the symbolism of this loss equates the amputation of her hands with her entrance into womanhood, a gendered state commonly constructed as more animalistic and closer to nature than manhood. Writing on the perceived permeability or fluidity of the female body, the philosopher Margrit Shildrick observes that “the body, as we know it, is a fabrication, organised not according to a historically progressive discovery of the real, but as an always insecure and inconsistent artefact,

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which merely mimics material fixity” (Leaky Bodies 13). In this way, how we experience our bodies is often less the result of its material reality and more the product of an endlessly shifting, culturally contingent discourse. The discursive nature of bodily experience is also heavily gendered. Women’s bodies are often understood, philosophically and in popular culture, as more corporeal, more animal, and more closely intertwined with the inscrutable maneuverings of the natural world. Shildrick delineates how the brand of mind-body dualism, the division and hierarchization of mind and body, that has defined Western philosophy for much of its history tends to associate the mind, rationality, and intellect with man while simultaneously conflating woman with all that is bodily, irrational, and physical (Leaky Bodies 15). Man may thus strive for intellectual or spiritual transcendence, while woman, like non-human animals, is always tethered to her physicality. In a similar vein, Sherry B. Ortner, in her highly influential essay “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” observes that “woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture identifies as being at a lower order of existence than itself” (72). Ortner, echoing ideas also explored by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949), observes how biological processes such as menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth connect women more intimately to the reproductive life of the species, and, as such, her “animality is more manifest” (Beauvoir qtd. in Ortner 74). This notion of femininity as tantamount to animality is rendered explicit in “The Girl Without Hands” as the heroine’s loss of her hands forces her not only to graze like a non-human animal, but also to have her child strapped to her back so that she may carry it out into the wilderness when she flees her home. Ortner explains that the conceptual conflation of womanhood and animal life arises out of the belief that while the “woman’s body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male in contrast, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, ‘artistically,’ through the medium of technology or symbols” (75). Although Ortner acknowledges that woman cannot be fully consigned to the category of nature (75), she is imaginatively linked with the biological body and cut off from notions of spiritual or intellectual transcendence in a way that men are not. In “The Girl Without Hands,” and in many of its diverse variants, the loss of the heroine’s hands often coincides with an exile into the forest, a locational manifestation of her animal nature. Significantly, in “The Girl Without Hands,” her return from the natural realm into the cultural arena

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is facilitated by male intervention, an intervention that requires her to suppress her physicality. The first time she is brought back into the realm of culture, she is given the title of queen and her stumps are sealed with two silver hands, given to her by her new husband. His burgeoning love for her arises out of the discovery that she has been eating pears from his garden with the assistance of an angel. Thus, for the king, she is an essentially spiritual being. Indeed, when the palace gardener first sees her, he mistakes her for a spirit. Her return to the cultural arena is therefore facilitated by the perception that she is a spiritual rather than physical being, and it follows that her biological nature is denied and repressed. The silver hands that are made for her by the king further help to deny her physicality. She becomes a beautiful object whose hands, although magnificent in appearance, are purely decorative. Equally telling is the fact that her second exile, her expulsion from the palace and escape to the forest, comes almost immediately after the birth of her baby when her association with the natural, animal activities of reproduction and childbirth is at its most apparent. The king’s mother fabricates the young queen’s death, in typical fairy-tale fashion, by ordering that a doe be killed and its eyes and tongue cut out. Exchanged for those of the queen, the doe’s eyes and tongue not only provide false evidence of the maiden’s death, but also highlight her closeness to the animal: her organs are interchangeable with those of a wild beast. When the king once again claims his bride, and his young child, after seven years of searching, he facilitates her movement from the animal world of the forest to the cultural realm of his palace. Again, the maiden’s return to civilization is enabled by her husband’s belief that she is less a physical being and more a spiritual entity. She is, in the denouement of the story, divorced from her physicality. Her survival is ensured by an angel who protects her, and the king finds her with the aid of a “snow-­ white maiden.” The rejuvenation of her hands is also framed not as a biological or physical phenomenon, but rather as a spiritual one; she tells her husband: “The good God has caused my natural hands to grow again” (Grimm, “Girl” 116). The loss of the maiden’s hands thus calls attention to the manner in which femininity, by virtue of its association with biological and reproductive processes, is invariably confined to the physical side of the mind/body divide, associated with nature and animality. Conversely, the miraculous restoration of her hands suggests that femininity can only be integrated into the cultural realm once it is dissociated from physicality, rendered clean and pure through its elevation to some intangible spirituality.

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The narrative trajectory of “The Girl Without Hands” certainly suggests an anxiety born of those cultural discourses that conflate femininity with the biological, the physical, or the animal. At the same time, however, the tale’s central image, the mutilated stumps of its heroine, also symbolically gestures towards an unease with the female body, which is itself often constructed in terms of wounds, voids, absences, and lack. Indeed, for as much as womanhood is aligned with the natural and the physical, in opposition to the cultural or intellectual, so too is it also enfolded within a language of seepage and uncontainable fluidity. If femininity is inextricably linked to the body, then it is linked to a body that is viscous and porous. Notions of incompleteness and instability cluster around our cultural representations of womanhood. Aristotle employed the term “monstrosity” to explicate “corporeal excess, deficiency or displacement, not just in those bodies which were malformed by disease, accident, or birth, but more widely to depict all beings that are a deviation from the common course of nature” (Shildrick, Embodying 11). In the hierarchical taxonomies contained in the fourth book of The Generation of Animals, Aristotle thus figures that which deviates from a generic type that is male and able-­ bodied as monstrous or abhorrent (Garland-Thomson 20). The second book of The Generation of Animals further stresses the relationship between femininity and monstrosity through Aristotle’s claim that “the female is as it were a deformed male” (Garland-Thomson 20) as well as his pronouncement that the birth of a girl child represents the most common type of deformity (Shildrick, Embodying 12). For Aristotle, as for later thinkers, womanhood is defined by absence. Woman is a deviation from normative masculinity, an inversion of the male or an imperfectly replicated man. According to Sigmund Freud’s 1933 essay “Femininity,” the little girl becomes a woman once she becomes aware of and mortified by her own lack, the absence of a phallus that creates in her a powerful “envy for the penis” (110). The severing of the maiden’s hands seems reflective of this notion of lack, she is deprived of the appendages that might afford her the autonomy and the power to act independently in the world. Her entry into womanhood is therefore linked to a symbolic castration that nullifies her agency. At the same time, however, the maiden’s experience of amputation draws attention to the fragile border between inside and outside, subject and object. Losing her hands, she is left with stumps, a gaping wound that fails to mediate the boundary between her body and the world around her.

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“The Girl Without Hands” thus constructs womanhood and the adolescent process of entering womanhood in terms of the abject. Characterized by Julia Kristeva as “the jettisoned object,” the abject is that which is “radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (2). The abject is that which focuses our attention on the infinitely permeable border between inside and outside, self and other, subject and object. Consequently, bodily fluids exemplify the abject: “A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay” is the apotheosis of the abject, not because it signifies illness or death but because it calls attention to the fragile sheath of skin that separates us from the external world (Kristeva 3). The abject reminds us that we are violable, pregnable, vulnerable: These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. (Kristeva 3)

The abject encompasses those wastes (blood, urine, vomit, excrement) that our body must cast aside in order to survive. We regard this refuse with revulsion and horror because it reminds us not only of what we must discard, but of our own body’s position as a permeable border. Abject materials, the blood and excrement we expel, unsettle us because they disturb “identity, system, order”; they are amorphous, in-between, composite (Kristeva 4). Elizabeth Grosz expands on this when she observes that the abject repels us because it is fundamentally “irreducible to the subject/object and inside/outside oppositions” (192). In fiction and film, we often associate horror and Otherness with that which violates borders and collapses key existential oppositions. Barbara Creed, expanding on Kristeva’s thesis, delineates how the monsters that inhabit popular horror films often reside in the interstitial spaces between human and inhuman, natural and supernatural, good and evil, male and female (11). Creed also constructs a vision of female monstrosity based on the notion that the female body, because of its maternal and reproductive functions, bears an explicit debt to nature and so cannot be understood as a proper body, fully integrated into the social or symbolic realm of human culture (11). Reproductive and maternal functions, from menstruation and childbirth

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all the way up to breast-feeding, also signify abjection because of the explicit manner in which they annihilate the boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other. It is for this reason, then, that the “monstrous feminine,” as Creed terms it, is intimately bound up with unstable surfaces, treacherous wounds, and all-consuming orifices. The female monster is she who eviscerates existential and conceptual categories, seeping out into the world or, conversely, drawing what is outside back into her boundless caverns. Elizabeth Grosz likewise observes a common representation of “female sexuality as an uncontainable flow, as seepage associated with what is unclean, coupled with the idea of female sexuality as a vessel, a container, a home empty or lacking in itself but fillable from the outside” (206). In Western culture, from mythology to religion, from medical discourse to fiction, the female is figured as excessive and out of control: Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-­containment— not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? (Grosz 203)

Womanhood therefore presents an anxiety, both at the social level and on the personal, psychic level. The female body, as discursive construct, is represented as porous and uncontainable. Culturally, it is presented as monstrously excessive, and this also impacts how women experience their bodies. Corporeality is, after all, not simply a material reality, but an ideological and culturally contingent construct. Jane M. Ussher, in her study of female embodiment, notes that such discourses shape how women experience their bodies, often compelling them to view their own physicality as formless, endlessly seeping. Writing on how young women on the point of menarche define and live their corporeality in the shadow of such rhetoric, Ussher maintains: Their bodies are experienced as a wound, blood a sign of serious illness; and when they realise that this is a wound that will appear once a month for the rest of their reproductive lives, with no framework other than that of disgust or pathology to explain it, objectification of the body, positioned as separate from the self may result. (23)

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In “The Girl Without Hands,” mature femininity is also experienced as a wound, and the heroine’s experience of amputation serves as a literal rendition of the equivalence drawn between puberty, or menstruation, and wounding. The protagonist is described as a “beautiful, pious girl” (Grimm, “Girl” 113). When she is first introduced, she is defined only relationally, as “the miller’s daughter.” She has, it appears, not yet reached maturity. She is subject to the will of her parents and resides in their home, contributing to the family’s livelihood. Her purity is absolute. It is not until the moment that her hands are severed and she thwarts the devil’s third and final attempt to take her that the maiden sets out on her own. The loss of her hands therefore seems to signal her entry into adult femininity, an entry marked by an open wound. The amputation of these appendages parallels the onset of menstruation, the free-flowing fluidity of blood and the awareness of a body defined by its wounds. In versions of the tale where her departure is hastened not by the devil’s machinations but by her father’s incestuous desires, this traversal of the boundary between childhood and mature femininity becomes more explicit, and infinitely more disturbing. In any case, her womanhood is marked by mutilation and the opening up of the body, an obliteration of corporeal parameters. Quoting Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “the obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open,’” Shildrick delineates a cultural framework in which the female body is defined by an “indeterminacy of body” that “challenges that most fundamental dichotomy between self and other, unsettling ontological certainty and threatening to undermine the basis on which the knowing self establishes control” (Leaky Bodies 34). “The Girl Without Hands” inhabits precisely this discursive arena. The heroine’s loss of her hands and the “stumps,” the wounds that replace them, evoke a disturbing “indeterminacy of body,” a boundlessness that cannot be contained. When she marries, this wound is sealed by the silver hands commissioned by her husband. Schmiesing notes that “silver and gold are frequently related to purity and religious piety in fairy tales” (85), and as such, the maiden’s prosthetic appendages not only redefine the previously porous boundaries of her body, but also render her body clean and contained. She no longer seeps out into the world beyond herself, and because her hands are silver and artificial, she is also cleansed of her affinity with nature. It is also worth acknowledging that when her hands are restored through the intervention of “the good God” at the end of the story (Grimm, “Girl” 116), the appendages that close off her

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wounds are not natural, but spiritual and pure. Because this story is a fairy tale, it is easy to imagine that the tale merely replicates the social norms and gender roles familiar to the storyteller or to the Brothers Grimm, who so carefully edited the tale. However, this story does not simply and unproblematically reflect the patriarchal perspective of the Grimms; it also retains echoes of the female storytellers who told the tale in its oral form. Thus, this story reflects anxieties and ambivalences about womanhood and maturation. If, as Maria Tatar has argued, folklore and oral traditions existed primarily as “women’s speech until it was appropriated by male editors and collectors” (Secrets 108), fairy tales may also have served as an imaginative space in which female storytellers and their audiences could play out certain fears and attempt to reconcile contradictory emotions. “The Girl Without Hands” therefore possesses a complex relationship to the female body, embodied experience, and masculine power. In some ways, the tale valorizes passivity. The heroine’s mutilation literalizes the compliant attitude she displays when she tells her father that he may do as he pleases with her, and over the course of the story, she is rendered submissive both by her silver hands and by the obedience to religious dogma that facilitates the restoration of her hands. At the same time, the level of agency or passivity accorded to the heroine varies across different versions of the story and, indeed, across different editions of Children’s and Household Tales. In the first edition, when the maiden is told to flee the palace to escape execution, she boldly tells her mother-in-law, “I did not come here to become queen […]. I have no luck, and I demand none. Just tie my child and my hands onto my back, and I will set forth into the world” (Grimm, “Girl 1812”).6 In other national variations on the story, the maiden can be more or less autonomous. Schmiesing cites an Italian version of the tale, entitled “Penta with the Chopped-Off Hands,” in which the “unprostheticized Penta uses her feet to sew, starch collars, and brush hair as a lady-in-waiting to the queen” (96). The maiden’s attitude to her maturation is equally as multifaceted and prone to shifting as the varying representations of her passivity. In “The Girl Without Hands,” the unfortunate girl weeps first into her hands and then into her stumps, an expression of sorrow that cleanses and purifies her so that the devil cannot claim her. According to both Julia Kristeva and the anthropologist Mary Douglas, tears—despite their ability to traverse the boundary between interior and exterior—do not arouse revulsion or signal the abject. For Douglas, it is the “excessiveness of tears, their superfluity to the species and cultural requirements of biological preservation

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and reproduction, that leaves them free to represent elements of the social order” (Grosz 196). Unlike urine or menstrual blood, tears are “pre-­ empted by the symbolism of washing” (Douglas 216). Tears do not reflect notions of contamination or seepage; rather, “[t]hey purify, cleanse, bathe the eyes,” and so they cannot pollute (Douglas 216). Moreover, because tears bear no relation to the bodily fluids of procreation or digestion, they are purified and purifying (Douglas 216). The flow of the maiden’s tears onto her stumps thus signifies purification, and it reflects a desire to cleanse or contain her seeping wounds. The act of crying onto her hands suggests a desire to halt, to wash away, the abject fluids associated with puberty and menstruation. The appearance of the snow-white maiden who leads first the queen and her child, and later the king, to safety also indicates a desire to embody a mode of femininity that is defined by purity and cleanliness, to suppress the biological reality of the body or to escape the cultural construction of womanhood as abject. Fairy tales are not static entities. They are ephemeral narrative streams, their meanings shifting over time and across cultures. Individual storytellers add or subtract plots and characters, shaping the tale to suit their perspective and reflect their own concerns. In the case of tales that have been recorded or anthologized, the educated, bourgeois values of the collector often impinge on and modify earlier, oral versions of the story. “The Girl Without Hands” is not a definitive text. It lacks fixity, having been assembled from numerous existent oral texts and then later edited to fit the agenda of the Grimms. Nevertheless, despite the palimpsestuous traces of diverse editors and storytellers that linger on the surface of the tale, it is still possible to uncover hints of a complex narrative whose iconography of mutilation and woundedness indicates an ambivalent relationship with embodied femininity. The heroine’s experiences of amputation, lack, and restoration possess a multivalence, which gestures towards an at times contradictory attitude towards cultural constructions of femininity. The loss of the heroine’s hands propels her towards an animality that echoes the binarism that places womanhood, nature, and the animal in eternal opposition to masculinity, culture, and the intellectual. The central symbols of amputated hands and mutilated stumps recall the discursive paradigm that figures femininity as characterized by physical lack, fluid corporeal boundaries, and a restless interiority that nullifies anatomical borders. Likewise, the heroine’s reassimilation into the cultural realm is presented as both a denial of her physicality, particularly on the part of her husband, and a product of her own desire to purify her abject body. “The Girl Without Hands” therefore displays an anxiety towards

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patriarchal power, but it also evinces a fear of the uncontainable female body and yearns to transcend the grotesque animality associated with the feminine. An inextricable tangle of complexities and contradictions, “The Girl Without Hands” reflects a nuanced and occasionally contradictory engagement with cultural constructions of womanhood. Above all, the heroine’s experience of amputation is a deeply ambivalent one. In as much as the loss of her hands stands for her entry into womanhood, it is a loss that at once imprisons and frees the girl. The amputation both tethers the girl to her body and facilitates her escape from the diabolical forces (whether satanic or incestuous) that seek to catch hold of her. Consequently, we can say that the heroine’s amputation is neither liberating nor constraining, rather it allows her to navigate—alongside the storyteller, listener, or reader—the complexities of embodied femininity as well as the unstable vicissitudes of the cultural discourses that imbue this embodiment with meaning.

Notes 1. Although scholars generally distinguish between popular oral folktales (Märchen) and more artistic fairy tales (Kunstmärchen) (Warner xix), this chapter uses the terms interchangeably. The primary reason for this is that “The Girl Without Hands” is both a folktale—a product of the oral storytelling tradition—and a fairy tale—edited and embellished artistically by the Grimms. 2. Schmiesing notes that Viehmann’s status as a rural peasant is debated. The Grimms describe her as “a Bäuerin” (farmer’s wife or peasant woman), but they do not explain that she was the wife of a tailor and the daughter of an innkeeper. However, while some interpreters claim that Viehmann belonged more to the middle than the peasant class, others have argued that her family were comparatively poor, and as such, she could be considered a “peasant” (28). 3. See Maria Tatar’s Secrets Beyond the Door for a more complete discussion of “Bluebeard” and its variations. 4. The version of the tale I am using for this chapter comes from the seventh and final edition of Children’s and Household Tales. 5. Schmiesing points out that in the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales, the maiden is not gifted with a silver prosthesis. This is apparently an innovation of the second and subsequent editions (2–3). 6. See Schmiesing’s Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales for more information on the variations between “The Girl Without Hands” as it appears in different editions of Children’s and Household Tales.

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References Baker, J.  Dallas. “Monstrous Fairytales: Towards an Ecriture Queer.” Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, vol. 20, 2010, pp. 79–103. Carter, Angela. Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. Virago, 2005. Conrich, Ian, and Laura Sedgwick. Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts. Palgrave, 2017. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1966. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey through Myth and Legend. McFarland, 2014. Freud, Sigmund. “Femininity.” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, edited and translated by James Strachey, Norton, 1965. ———. The Uncanny. Translated by David McClintock, Penguin, 2003. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. “The Girl Without Hands.” The Complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Chartwell Books, 2013, pp. 113–16. ———. “The Girl Without Hands.” (1812 Version) The Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, translated by DL Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh, pitt. edu/~dash/grimm031.html. ———. “Good Bowling and Card Playing.” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, edited and translated by Jack Zipes, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 55–58. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana UP, 1994. Knedler, J.W., Jr. “The Girl Without Hands: Latin American Variants.” Hispanic Review, vol. 10, no. 4, 1942, pp. 314–24. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1984. Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, Stanford UP, 1974, pp. 68–87. Panttaja, Elisabeth. “Making Reality Evident: Feminine Disempowerment and Reempowerment in Two Grimms Fairy Tales.” Folklore Forum, vol. 21, no. 2, 1988, pp. 166–80. Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott, U of Texas P, 1968. Purkiss, Diane. The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. Routledge, 2013.

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Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. Sage, 2002. ———. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. Routledge, 1997. Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton UP, 1987. ———. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton UP, 2004. Ussher, Jane M. Managing the Monstrous Feminine: Regulating the Reproductive Body. Routledge, 2006. Warner, Marina. Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2018. ———. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Vintage, 1995. ———. Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. Oxford UP, 2014.

CHAPTER 6

Defective Femininity and (Sur)Realist Empowerment: Benito Pérez Galdós’s and Luis Buñuel’s Tristana Andrea Gremels

Literally translated, the Spanish proverb “Mujer honrada, pierna quebrada y en casa” reads: “An honest woman has a broken leg and stays at home” (Pfeiffer 223). While this is hardly an expression of a desire for physically maimed women, it is well understood that they are not supposed to make great strides. Nobody took the subject of the woman tied to the house by a “broken”—or, more specifically, cut-off—leg more literally than the Spanish realist writer Benito Pérez Galdós in his 1892 novel Tristana, which was adapted to the screen by Luis Buñuel in 1970  in a French-­ Spanish-­Italian coproduction. In the novel, Tristana is fully orphaned at sixteen. Don Lope Garrido Gallardo, a member of the impoverished aristocracy and a liberal, anti-­ clerical contrarian, is a friend of her deceased parents and takes charge of the girl. The aging, philandering Don Juan soon abuses his duty of care

A. Gremels (*) Department of Romance Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_6

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and turns Tristana into his mistress, thus robbing her of her honor and chaining her to his home, where she takes care of his household with the help of the maid Saturna, hovering ambivalently between the roles of Don Lope’s daughter and illegitimate wife. An opportunity to escape the situation arises when Tristana falls in love with the young artist Horacio, firing up her passion and her creativity. However, the dream of overcoming the mésalliance with Don Lope through the love of Horacio cannot be fulfilled because Tristana comes down with a tumor in her right knee, which leads to the amputation of her leg. With the loss of her leg, her love for Horacio and the creative powers it awakened wither. Devoted to spiritualist piety, she finally marries the aged Don Lope and dedicates herself to the culinary arts, in particular the baking of pasteles. This miserable destiny to which Galdós delivers his heroine with merciless cynicism has often been held against him by his readers. First and foremost, the writer Emilia Pardo Bazán complained about the negative, gloomy conclusion of the novel in her 1892 review with the statement “the plot […] is no good” (“la trama […] es nula”) and reproaches the author (and, moreover, her longstanding lover) for not expanding horizons with regard to the emancipation of women in Spanish society (135). Bazán’s assessment has shaped the reception of the novel for a long time, so that it has not been ranked very highly within Galdós’s oeuvre. It is not until the success of Luis Buñuel’s 1970 screen adaptation that the original novel attracts more attention and commentary by literary scholars.1 In this chapter, I will approach Tristana’s amputation in both the novel and its screen adaptation from the vantage point of disability studies. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have argued that literary texts have a potential semiotic openness when it comes to reflecting on deviance and social normalcy (48). In specific works of literature and film, they observe an “objective of destabilizing sedimented cultural meanings that accrue around ideas of bodily ‘deviance’” (48). In this context, it is compelling that for Galdós and Buñuel disability is not the primary sujet of storytelling, yet the novel and the film both deal with the question of deviance. Tristana’s amputation is not precipitated until the final part of the plot, where it represents a turning point through which social normalcy—marriage, church attendance, and culinary skill—may be produced. Through the grotesque constellation of the senescent Don Lope and the one-legged Tristana, however, this normalcy is also radically interrogated. In comparison with the adaptation, which updates Galdós’s themes for the twentieth century, the ambivalent emancipatory impetus of the novel continues to

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raise discussions, as the amputated leg has been read as a symbol for the curtailed freedom of women in traditional Spanish society (Sackett 82). With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s feminist approach to disability studies, in which she parallels femininity and disability in how they have both been understood “as defective departures from a valued standard” (6), I will move the debate forward. Through this perspective I want to show that, in Galdós’s novel, Tristana’s freedom is not curtailed by the amputation, but on the contrary, the amputation embodies—as a materialized metaphor in Snyder’s and Mitchell’s sense (48)—the young woman’s incapacity to live an independent life from the start. Her “disabled” identity of being a woman in her society (Garland-Thomson 2) becomes manifest in her physical incapacitation, which reflects her inability to realize her ideals of emancipation in a society that remains immune to any changes of its traditional beliefs. Furthermore, I will consider the motif of amputation through intermediality, that is, focusing on the question of how Buñuel re-envisions Tristana and transforms it into a filmic mise-en-scène. The stroke of fate that is dealt to Tristana with her illness and physical impairment is portrayed in the novel with much detail, and great attention is paid to how the characters relate to the dysfunctional leg and how the amputation changes their relationships with each other. This can also be observed in Buñuel’s cinematic interpretation of Tristana, which may be seen as a loose or free adaptation. The surrealist filmmaker is driven by an interest in visualizing the truncated leg and the tangible consequences of the amputation: with a voyeuristic curiosity in the wicked and grotesque, he stages Catherine Deneuve as a one-legged Tristana with a particular focus on her amputated stump, prosthesis, crutches, and wheelchair. In Buñuel’s version, a hidden and yet uninhibited eroticism, triggered by his surrealist vision, is embodied in the effects of the amputation.2 In contrast to Galdós’s fugitive Tristana, who evades reality because she cannot cope with it, Buñuel turns his female character into a demonic femme fatale who, after her amputation, sadistically unsettles her former oppressor Don Lope, now senile and mellowed by age. By way of an intermedial comparison, I will explore not only the particular narrative and visual forms of representing Tristana’s amputation but also the different poles of realism and surrealism. After all, Galdós is considered one of the main representatives of Spanish realism or naturalism while Buñuel is the author of the first film of surrealist automatism, Un chien andalou (1929), which he produced together with Salvador

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Dalí. Buñuel has always been drawn to rewriting Galdós’s realist novels, which also served as references for his films Nazarín (1959) and Viridiana (1961). By opening a dialogue between Galdós’s realist perspective on Tristana and Buñuel’s surrealist adaptation I will compare their representations of illness, amputation, and “bodily deviance” (Snyder and Michell 47). Taking into account “the figural and the material presence of disability” (Hall 38), I will further consider their different visions of the female character’s gender-related incapacity.

Benito Pérez Galdós’s Don Juan and His Paper Doll Alan Smith emphasizes the importance of Don Quixote for Galdós’s novelistic work (164). With the character of Don Lope, Galdós draws on Cervantes’s knightly antihero and brings the Quixotic caricature to a head. In late nineteenth-century Spanish society, with the rise of the bourgeoisie, Don Lope is an unadapted contrarian: he despises the state, the clergy, and the tax authorities and is instead committed to the honor code of knighthood, with its “altruistic fervor” (Galdós 11) but also with a clear tendency toward anarchy (17).3 In short, Don Lope moves within a “pseudo-knightly system” (10), whose greatest defect is its less than chivalrous treatment of women. For in contrast to the ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote and his idealist veneration of Dulcinea of Toboso, Don Lope is carrying the features of a Don Juan: his adventures as a philanderer have devastating consequences for the ladies whom he has conquered and robbed of their honor. As soon as he deals with “skirts,” Don Lope throws all morals overboard. In the novel, Galdós writes: “The problem was that the good gentleman’s moral sense lacked a vital component, and like some terribly mutilated organ, it functioned only partially and suffered frequent deplorable breakdowns” (17). In this description of Don Lope’s moral sense, the topic of disability is already anticipated, for the lack of morals is described by the omniscient narrator in language that suggests a biological defect. It appears as a missing limb, an impaired organ reduced in its functions. In this passage, it also becomes more than evident that Galdós uses a narrator who is far from following the realist maxims of Flaubert, impassibilité and impartialité. Instead, the narrator is deeply concerned about his characters and does not hold back with judgments or ironic commentary. In this passage, he bemoans Don Lope’s moral condition as “deplorable.” However, the caricatured chivalrous hero seems most pathetic because of the relentless passage of time, which has made him worse for

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wear. The brilliant “warrior of love” (17) has become Tristana’s “mature suitor” (19). Though the narrator presents a deplorable character to us readers, he also emphasizes the despotic and tyrannical regiment that he exercises over his employee Saturna and his ward Tristana. The relationship between Don Lope and Tristana is continually presented as one between tyrant and victim, master and slave. The defenseless innocence of Tristana, paired with her “doll-like passivity” (Galdós 20), is broached as early as the first chapter, in which she is compared with “an item of furniture, or an article of clothing” (7) that remain in Don Lope’s possession like other objects of everyday use. In another passage, her physical appearance, her face, her clothing, and her hands are described as papery in order to emphasize once more the lifeless objectness of the girl. At the same time, the narrator raises the question: “what else?—given that she seemed entirely made out of paper, the same warm, flexible, living paper on which those inspired Oriental artists painted the divine and the human, the seriously comical and the comically serious” (6). Here it is given away that behind the papery façade exists a malleable liveliness that is yet to be molded and delineated. Tristana’s name does not only anticipate her destiny by cushioning the adjective “triste,” “sad,” but also, and mostly, through its origin in the legends around King Arthur (Pfeiffer 224), signals that she would have to live through chivalrous adventures in the name of passion.4 But this turns her into a tragicomic character: as a female Tristan she can only fail because the conquering attitude of the adventurer is not designated for her in the gender norms of nineteenth-­ century Spanish society. At the same time, this tragic setup mirrors the basic conflict that, according to Friedrich Wolfzettel, is laid out in the literary oeuvre of Galdós, namely “the ambivalence between realism and idealism, a claim to reality and the dream, integration/adjustment and maladjustment” (221, my trans.). Ironically, Tristana embodies a figure who strives for an ideal society and thus bumps up against “our own crude, vulgar realities” (Galdós 15). Galdós thus attributes this idealism to his character, which is typically used as a contrasting foil for his realistic program.

Tristana’s Aspirations of Honest Liberty and Love Even in her imprisonment under Don Lope, Tristana begins to develop the dream of an autonomous, independent life. Although she is aware of the difficulty of obtaining such a life, to “be free—and honest” (Galdós

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23) thus becomes a maxim that pervades the whole novel, as Tristana repeatedly reflects her position as a woman in her discussions with the housemaid. According to Saturna, there are three predetermined paths through life for “those who wear skirts” (23): marriage, the theater, or the dishonorable path of prostitution. Tristana’s visions, however, go in a different direction: If they’d let us be doctors, lawyers, even pharmacists, or scribes, if not government ministers or senators, then we would be able to manage, but sewing? […] When I think what will become of me, I feel like crying. If I could be a nun, I’d be applying for a place right now, but I couldn’t stand being shut up for the rest of my life. I want to live, to see the world and find out why we’re here. Yes, I want to live and be free. (23)

In a nineteenth-century context, her visions of a professional life as doctor, lawyer, secretary, or even politician, independent of marriage, seem as exuberant as they are bold. Jörg Neuschäfer stresses the emancipatory claim of her concept of “libertad honrada.” Galdós uses it to polemicize against Spanish society, which reserves the ideals of the Enlightenment exclusively for one sex (Neuschäfer 225). However, on a diegetic level,  Tristana’s emancipatory vision appears questionable as well. Though she may emphasize her ineptitude and inability to perform domestic work, which does indeed seem to make her unsuitable for the traditional role of housewife and mother, she is also not trained in the skills she would need to lead a free and independent life, or even pursue a professional career, which is demonstrated by the fact that she does not dare leave the house on her own. Moreover, in the course of the novel, the narrator repeatedly emphasizes that her critical perspective on marriage is not a genuine idea of her own but traces back to Don Lope’s influence, who considers marriage to be the devilish enslavement of one person to another (Sackett 77). This shows the dubious relationship of Tristana to her fatherly lover, whom she despises but of whose independent life style she also approves. Since the libertarian bachelor has her in his grasp, she cannot develop independence under his dominion. It is only through the affair with the painter Horacio that she manages temporarily to escape the tyranny of Don Lope during the afternoon visits to her lover. In their passionate liaison, Tristana’s dreamy idealism, her creativity, and her desire for freedom erupt. With Horacio, she envisions herself becoming an actress, a writer, an artist, or a musician. Her love for

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the artist intensifies into an ecstatic and exalted state. The novel speaks of a “wild spiritualism” (38), of a “tempestuous intoxication of the senses” (72), of “ardent emotions” (88), and “unfettered, epileptic joy” (95). Both lovers fire up their idealistic passion with letters, which are commented upon ironically by the narrator. With regard to Tristana’s sentence, “Kill me a thousand times over rather than stop loving me,” he notes: “And after all these things had been written, the world did not fall apart. On the contrary, everything remained the same on earth and in heaven” (39). In reality, everything stays the same, but in the letters, the lovers create an idealistic amatory universe that feeds on references to Caldéron, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Dante, bringing forth ever new words and appellations in an intertextual pastiche. In this exalted linguistic cosmos, she calls him “Señó Juan” (94) and he addresses her as Beatrice, Francesca, or Paquita de Rimini.5 In this amorous exaltation, Tristana’s dreams of an independent life become ever more vehement. She describes the idea of a symbiotic unity, in which the lovers merge into one another, in Don Lope’s manner as “bobadas” (Galdós 1583), nonsense: “What nonsense our egotism invents!” (103). She wants to be married only to herself and not to a partner, and she resists the notion of cohabitation and starting a family: everyone should have their own place and pursue their own activities from there. Only in absolute freedom does loving seem possible to her: “Leave me untethered, don’t tie me up” (103). Horacio, at first besotted by the imaginative power of his beloved, starts to get tired at her effervescent passions and aspirations. He uses the opportunity to retire to the country with his sick aunt, begins to enjoy the life as a campesino and nurtures the hope that his mistress will follow him to the idyll of country life and will let herself be domesticated. As fate would have it, however, Tristana develops a cancer in her leg.

Coping with Bodily Disease According to Jeremy Treglown, the interpretation of Tristana’s “disabling misfortune” contributes largely to how the novel is read and estimated (viii). For Emilia Pardo Bazán, the fact that a “fortuitous event” of all things, “a physical fatality,” thwarts Tristana’s visions of a life in freedom, is the essential false message of the novel, which turns it into an “inexpressive story” (141, my trans.). Much has been said about the symbolism of this amputation: it has been read as national allegory of the failure of

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liberalism in Spanish society at the fin de siècle, or as a premonition of Spain’s global loss of power through the independence of its last colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (Pfeiffer 232). Erna Pfeiffer speaks of an “anticipated Freudian castration theory,” as Tristana loses the male part of her psyche, which represents “rationality, activity, and energy” almost as if through magic (224, 228–29, my trans.). This is confirmed by Antonio Monegal (178)6 and Ulrich Prill, whose Lacanian analysis equates Tristana’s amputation with the loss of the “membrum virile” and thus of symbolic language (209, 214). To many readers, it appears as if Galdós inflicts an act of vengeance upon his heroine for her overly emancipatory ambitions (Treglown viii; Neuschäfer 230). All of these symbolic interpretations are valid readings, although it has to be noted that Tristana’s efforts at emancipation are never realized but remain enthusiastic fantasies throughout. In the novel’s plot, the amputation serves as a reality shock with which the characters have to cope. This raises the question of how Tristana’s idealism collides with the “reality” of illness and disability. Even before her illness, her exalted imagination is hampered due to Don Lope’s rheumatic complaints, which make her aware of the transitory nature of life. The letters to Horacio may continue to effervesce, but they are also full of complaints: “Since yesterday I have done nothing but imagine misfortunes and disasters” (Galdós 95); “Such sorrow, such anxiety, such fear! I think only of dreadful things” (102); “Now […] I’m rather ill and sad” (106). Finally, she tells her lover that Don Lope has infected her with his rheumatism, as she feels severe pain in her leg: “Don Lope has given me his rheumatism. […] When I got out of bed two days ago, I felt such a sharp pain, so very sharp. […] My leg hurts” (107–08). At once, she reads the illness as sent by God to punish her for her sins, or even as the Devil’s act of vengeance upon her (108). She is embarrassed in front of her lover because of her limp and wonders whether he would joke about it: “Your Restituta, your Curra de Rimini is lame. […] You won’t make fun of me?” (108). Simultaneously, she showers the limp with self-­ ironic allusions to her philosophical ambitions: “Will you still love me as a cripple? […] [T]ell me that this lameness won’t last. […] [W]hen you arrive, your prodigy—or freak—will no longer be lame” (108). In the original text, she also uses exaggerations like “cojitranca” and diminutives as in “cojerilla” (1585) to talk about her limping in a coquettish way. She rejoices at Horacio’s consoling, humorous commentary that her illness must have been the result of a “dislocation” she suffered from her “attempts to clamber onto the high seat of immortality” (109) and, in the

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hope of recovery, gets lost in the idea that she is destined to become an actress. These dreams once again suggest how unrealistic her ambitions are. “She wraps herself in the imagined armor of the superiority of her talent,” Theodore Sackett reckons (77). At the end of the week, the pain increases and Tristana becomes desperate—at having to bare her leg for the examination of Doctor Miquis and at having to get disfiguring poultices. She rails against the unmerited punishment of fate, the idea of having to walk on crutches, the hatred that she feels for her entire surroundings—her English teacher Doña Malvina, Saturna, and Don Lope, whom she would gladly see burn alive (Galdós 112)—and against the loss of the “beautiful ideal” of once being celebrated as a dancer or actress. Tristana develops a frantic and mournful fury at her leg, this wayward body part that won’t function: I would never have thought that such an insignificant thing like a leg could have such influence over a person’s destiny, after all, a leg is just for walking on. I always thought it was the brain or the heart that was in charge, but now a stupid knee has turned despot, and those noble organs obey it. Or rather, they don’t obey it, they pay it no heed at all, but nevertheless suffer under an absurd despotism, which I trust will be only temporary. It’s as if the soldiery had suddenly risen up in revolt, but in the end, the rabble will have to submit. (121)

While Tristana is thus fully thrown back on her physicality, Horacio’s physiognomy becomes increasingly blurred in her memories. Eventually, she transforms him into an ideal image, an illusory, mystical fantasy, a product of her imagination, which she herself “fabricate[s],” “compose[s],” and “reconstruct[s]” (121). Into Lope, she seems to have a more realistic insight. She has Horacio consider that, deep down, Don Lope does not desire her recovery because her limp acts as a shackle that chains her to him. Lope’s paternalistic affection toward the invalid does indeed not override his perverted moralism. On the one hand, the suffering of Tristana is unbearable for him and his sympathy makes him more likeable for readers. On the other hand, with his encouragement and his consoling words, he tries perfidiously to eliminate his rival Horacio by manipulating Tristana with her own ideals, persuading her that fate has great things in store for her and that marriage would simply deter her from achieving them. His crude egotism is mirrored therein, as he knows that she is wholly in his possession through her illness and yet tries to convince her

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that it is worth insisting on her freedom. For Don Lope, the diseased Tristana, “this bewitching child,” is the final triumph of his conquests, his “last and, therefore, dearest trophy” (116).

The Semiotics of Amputation and Defectiveness The clinical history that follows in the novel makes it clear that Galdós is concerned with the “physical fatality” (Pardo Bazán 141, my trans.) of the illness itself and with exploring the phenomenon of amputation, thus pursuing a naturalist character study. The dualism of body and mind plays an important role here: the transcendent and limitless ideals of the mind are opposed to the limitations of physical reality and the materiality of the body (Mitchell and Snyder 49). The more Tristana struggles with her body, the more her mind pushes toward the ideal: “Devil take this leg of mine. They can cut it off for all I care. I don’t need it. I will love as spiritually with one leg as with two… or none at all” (Galdós 124). This passage mirrors her inner conflict between the powerlessness of her body and the will to mental empowerment. With regard to the operation, Galdós emerges as a follower of the belief in medical progress that characterizes the end of the nineteenth century. With empirical attention to detail he describes the anesthesia, the delusions as an effect of the chloroform before Tristana loses consciousness, the application of the Esmarch bandage that prevents hemorrhages during the amputation, the cut, positioning the skin flap, which later forms the stump, and the subsequent ligation of the arteries, the suturing of the wound, and the application of an antiseptic (136). The narrator concludes his description of the operation with a religious metaphor that foreshadows Tristana’s spiritual transformation after the amputation while at the same time revealing Galdós’s irony: like Christ, Tristana walks through death in order to be resurrected to “new life” with “one foot and two thirds of her leg” remaining in the tomb (136). Tristana’s new life requires her to deal with the resulting emptiness, which she attempts to fill with her fantasies, imagining that “she still had both her legs” (137). Upon this, she falls into a mental stupor, which causes Saturna to convince Don Lope to let Horacio visit his home. The reencounter between the two lovers is disillusioning. Although Horacio tries to flatter Tristana, as he “was scouring his mind for all the flowers one can throw at a woman who now has only one leg” (152), she senses that his real feeling toward her is compassion and no longer the passionate love

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that she has always demanded for herself. Horacio thus reacts to Tristana’s bodily deviance according to what Leonard Kriegel has observed in literary representations of disability, which depict it “either as source of pity or a threat” (7). Similarly, the narrator—although he deeply sympathizes with her—betrays a condescending attitude of pity by speaking of her as the “poor invalid” (149). Don Lope, in contrast, rejoices that the passion between the young lovers has died. Her disability satisfies his possessive egotism: “How could he [Horacio] keep his promise to a woman who is going to have to walk on crutches? Nature will out” (153). Nature has defeated love, and Lope emerges victorious from this natural disaster—the illness. Taking into account Garland-Thomson’s approach, the irruption of Tristana’s amputation has to be reflected in a cultural sense as well, as “disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body,” especially if it is gendered (5). A closer look at the novel’s characters reveals that not only Tristana, but almost all of them have bodily deficiencies, from Saturna’s deaf son to Horacio’s mother who has a malfunctioning eyelid. Are these “natural” defects—including Tristana’s amputation—indicators for a generally dysfunctional society? For Horacio, the disabled Tristana does not correspond anymore to “the twin ideologies of normalcy and beauty” (Garland-Thomson 11). However, let us be reminded that Horacio had already withdrawn from Tristana because he felt overpowered by her “abnormal” emancipatory ideals. What her beautiful appearance had concealed before her illness now becomes apparent: for him, her bodily deviance confirms the anomaly of her ideals that had already diminished his love for her. In turn, Tristana’s need for help, the disfiguring use of crutches, and her dependence on a wheelchair desexualize her as a woman (Neuschäfer 224) since her debilitated body does not “conform to cultural standards” of beauty anymore and is thus devalued within an “ability/disability” system (Garland-­ Thompson 5). From this point of view, the amputation can be considered as a metaphor reflecting the interconnectivity of normalcy and femininity as it is preconfigured by Spanish patriarchal society. Not only is the amputation the answer to Tristana’s unwillingness to correspond to the category of normal womanhood that is expected from her, but her physical defectiveness also embodies her disempowerment as a woman within the ability/disability system of her society, which is already inscribed on her body. In Galdós’s novel the amputation thus has the metaphorical

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potential to investigate the cultural correlation of physical disability and female defectiveness. Galdós also shows the reader that there is hardly any way to disrupt this correlation. The physically disabled Tristana withdraws from the pressure of conforming to an idea of womanhood connected to the ideology of beauty and normalcy. She does so through metaphysical escapism: her physical disempowerment makes her leave all bodily concerns behind as she delves into the mystical and her new devotion to religion, which further promotes her disembodiment and desexualization. In the course of her “disdain” for “all earthly things” (168), she finally agrees in the last chapter to marry Don Lope, who is already senile and doddery. Both arrange themselves in this new bourgeois life and Tristana, cynically enough, develops one final passion: the culinary arts, more precisely the preparation of pastries, which taste particularly good to Don Lope, who delights in his own chicken farm. “Were they happy, the two of them?” the narrator asks in closing, leaving us with a simple: “Perhaps” (169). What sort of tragicomic and at the same time dissatisfying ending does Galdós offer his readers here? In light of the social norms in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century, Tristana’s illness appears to be a “‘natural,’ that is, somatic solution of a social and moral problem, which has become an unbearable burden because of Tristana’s obstinate emancipatory mind” (Neuschäfer 224–25, my trans.). In conversation, the two men make a joke of Tristana’s pursuit of something great. Horacio says to Don Lope: “[Tristana] loathes [marriage]. Perhaps she sees more keenly than we do; perhaps her perspicacious gaze or perhaps a certain instinct for divination given only to superior women, can see the way society is going more clearly than we can” (155–56). Belittling Tristana’s ambitions, the latter answers: “These spoiled, capricious girls do tend to be farsighted” (156). Horacio was not up to Tristana’s visionary ambitions, and Don Lope was indifferent to them, as long as she remained in his possession. The resolution in amputation may restore the patriarchal order in the novel, but it does so with the unsettling motion of a grotesque marriage between an impaired woman and a senile old man. Marriage as one of many “cultural truisms” (Mitchell and Snyder 48) is thus represented by Galdós as a defective ménage that finally establishes a kind of normalcy but creates great unease in the reader. This way Galdós does not only radically question the cultural standards that were considered normal in late nineteenth-century Spanish society, but also

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destabilizes the category of normalcy by asserting that it inevitably goes along with defectiveness. This does not only apply to the cultural standard of marriage, but also to that of womanhood, which, in the way it is conceived of in Galdós’s novel, seems to be defective from the very beginning. Considering the metaphorical interconnectivity between the normalcy and deviancy of womanhood implied in the amputation, it becomes clear that Tristana was “disabled” from the start. Her emancipatory visions have no effect on her reality. The illness appears almost logical in this context, as the amputation displays what was already clear before: the dream of living a free and independent life is out of reach for Tristana. Her inability to cope with reality even after the amputation not only is connected to her idealistic character, which the narrator identifies in her exalted longing for love, but also characterizes her religious devotion to God, and her amputation is not just a symbolic gesture with which Galdós reminds his idealistic character of the ruthless rules of reality. Her physical incapacity appears instead as an embodiment of the incapacitated role she maintains as a woman in her society. This reading takes up what Snyder and Mitchell have termed the “materiality of metaphor” (48): the “weighty materiality” (49) of Tristana’s disabled body reflects her inability to turn her emancipatory ideas into a reality. As long as society regards femininity as defective (Garland-Thompson 6), she will never have the means to empower herself. Galdós’s novel thus suggests that the real deficiency resides in Spanish society of the late nineteenth century, which is incapable of opening itself up to the idea of women becoming agents of their own fate and instead clings to outdated “cultural truisms” (Mitchell and Snyder 48). Galdós’s “deterministic plot line” (Wolfzettel 185, my trans.) indicates that the cultural normalcy that is finally established at the end of the novel can only be deficient and grotesque because the ideals it is based on are defective in the first place.

Buñuel’s Version of Tristana’s Revenge In critical discussions, Galdós’s Tristana is now mostly read from the vantage point of Buñuel’s film adaptation, and not so much as an independent original. Thus, the reception history reflects actual trends in adaptation studies that ask about the influence of the adaptation on the original and thus question the previously predominant approach of evaluating the adaptation’s fidelity to the original (Bruhn et al. 9).

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Buñuel’s infidelity to Galdós’s version of Tristana makes the comparison between the novel and its adaptation particularly compelling. This is why it is necessary to approach both versions at the same time, as it makes clear how Buñuel re-envisions Tristana through the lens of his surrealist aesthetics. The surrealist filmmaker’s interest in her differs from the writer’s realist and naturalist concerns. However, corresponding to the abovementioned tendency in adaptation studies, I will not only consider how Buñuel was influenced by Galdós’s novel, but also how the film has had repercussions for the original. Almost no Galdós critic today forgoes the chance of rereading the novel with the more popular adaptation. However, their conclusions are affected by normative assumptions: somehow, many critics agree, the film is “better” than the book because it creates a stronger Tristana, a character that overcomes oppression by empowerment. In this context, Neuschäfer characterizes Buñuel’s version of Tristana as a “counterstatement” and links this mostly to her character’s mutation after the amputation (226). Whereas in the novel, she remains trapped in her idealistic passivity, the film manifests an “emancipatory intention,” which is not hamstrung by the amputation but reinforced and leads to a role reversal (226–27): with all possible perfidiousness, Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) begins to dominate Don Lope (Fernando Rey). Sonia Muñoz-Muriana also reads this “radical enactment of feminine freedom” as empowerment (492–93). Taking the novel “back” into account, my approach questions this assumption, especially if we consider the film’s conclusion. When Don Lope suffers from breathing difficulties one night, Tristana only pretends to call a doctor, fails to render much needed assistance, and thus kills her previously tyrannical husband. Surely this ending renders her empowerment more ambiguous. Is murder really the “enactment of feminine freedom” that we should celebrate as feminist agency? Just like Galdós, Buñuel seems to be concerned with a character study, which is fueled by the relationship of the principle characters before and after the amputation. It seems downright inevitable that Galdós’s novelistic themes would inspire the Spanish director: a portrait of repressive Spanish society with its religious and moral taboos (Sackett 83), an anticlerical attitude, such as the one we find in Don Lope, an old man’s grotesque amour fou to a young woman, and not least an obsession with women’s legs and their phallic erotic subtext are themes and motifs that repeatedly appear in Buñuel’s films. In conversations with the producer Eduardo Ducay, Buñuel remarked that he did not like the literary tone in Galdós’s Tristana, especially the exalted love story. What really fascinated

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him was the concrete situation: the amputation of the leg (qtd. in Monegal 173). With great curiosity, Buñuel’s filmic visualizations explore the phenomenon of the absent leg and its compensations: prosthesis, crutches, and wheelchair. In doing so, the director plays with his typical aesthetics of demonstrating and hiding, of irritating show and ambiguous tell. According to Scarlett Winter, however, Buñuel remains true, even in his post-surrealist works among which Tristana ranks, to an “intermedial écriture with a dream aesthetics,” which “repeatedly break[s] open the filmic discourse” and thus challenges “realistic” vision (113, my trans.).7 This rupture with reality within a realistic mode of narration is confirmed right at the beginning of the film. In the opening scene, Tristana climbs up to the bell tower of a church with Saturno—the deaf-mute son of the housemaid Saturna, who is accorded a much bigger role in the film than in the novel—as they engage in a childlike game of playing tag. The whole scene contains an erotic subtext (Mongeal 139): first the attempt of Saturno’s friend to touch Tristana under her skirt, then her joyful activation of the clapper, which suddenly turns into horror: for instead of the clapper, she suddenly sees Don Lope’s severed head swing back and forth within the bell. After a cut, the audience sees Tristana wake up with a start from a nightmare. It remains ambivalent at which point exactly the realistic sequence turns into a dream sequence, if the erotically charged play belongs to the dream or if it is just its prelude. At the same time, the severed body part—Don Lope’s head, in this case—anticipates the theme of amputation as well as the murderous finale of the film. With its semiotics of a beheaded tyrant under the holy roof of a church bell tower, the imagery is particularly drastic and typically blasphemous. Finally, the image frames the entire film: right before Don Lope’s death due to Tristana’s refusal to help him, the sequence is shown once again, as a bitter premonition of the film’s conclusion. There is another instance when someone wakes up from a nightmare: Don Lope, shortly after the first kissing scene between the two lovers. The relationship between Tristana and Horacio—who couldn’t have been constructed as a flatter character—plays a surprisingly insignificant role in the film. What is more, Buñuel replaces the exalted letter exchange with the absence of the pair of lovers, who, in stark contrast to the novel, move to the country together, while the filmic narrative concentrates on depicting Don Lope’s grief over Tristana’s loss. The aging Don Juan hears from Saturna that Tristana has taken ill and has convinced Horacio to let her return because she wants to be cared for “at home.” Triumphantly, he

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takes her back—and this rings in the softening of his character. Fernando Rey succeeds brilliantly at depicting Don Lope’s transformation from Don Juan to dotard: he begins as still an elegant rake, who dedicates himself devotedly to styling his beard, follows the ladies with his eyes, and tells his compañeros at the coffee house about his amorous adventures and gallant ideals. Later in the film, turning grey, he changes into the paternalistic and compassionate friend of Tristana, who tries everything to alleviate the pain of living with a disability. But as Buñuel seduces his audience to sympathize with Don Lope, just as drastically does he represent the hardening of Tristana after the amputation. In the film, we learn very little about the relationship she has to her diseased leg. Even the operation is treated with hardly any attention at all. Once again, Buñuel concentrates on Don Lope, who offers his own legs empathically for amputation in a conversation with Doctor Miquis, in order to spare Tristana the suffering: “Poor thing! Mutilate her horribly! […] Doctor Miquis, find another solution! If you need to cut off both of my legs, here they are!”8 Tristana’s alteration is staged quite brusquely. The camera shows her sitting at the piano and playing Chopin’s “Revolutionary Étude,” pedaling with one leg. Catherine Deneuve, who embodies the youthful innocence and the vivid charm of Tristana in the first half of the film, appears aged and austere. In this way, she is by no means reminiscent of the “celestial beauty” of the one-legged pianist that Galdós presents to us readers in his novel (160). The “Revolutionary Étude” played by Tristana is the only music that is ever heard in the film. Buñuel has it resound in front of the house first, where Don Lope is just stepping out of a confectionary in which he has ordered candied chestnuts for Tristana. Inside the house, Horacio pays his first visit to the musician. She accuses him of leaving her during her illness, and he, in turn, charges her with injustice: “I am listening to you, but I cannot believe you! You are someone else!” The camera then pans down to the stump of her leg, and Tristana’s voice announces off-screen: “Of course, I am someone else! Do you think I can be the same with this?” Thereupon, she directs him to leave, the camera returns behind the piano, and she continues her playing with even more fury and force. The filmic narrative chooses not to arouse compassion for the impaired Otherness of its female protagonist. By doing so, the film moves beyond the threatening or pitying representation of the disabled body, as observed by Kriegel (7). Or does it rather ambiguously intertwine both affects, threat and pity, by its mise-en-scène of a bitter, sadistic Tristana? In any case, the audience’s

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sympathy is reserved for Don Lope, who is delivered to Tristana’s hatred scene after scene. With an almost evil voyeurism, Buñuel demonizes Tristana, who sits imperiously in her wheelchair like a dominatrix, who rejects Don Lope in the wedding night and holds him up to ridicule, and who limps ominously up and down the hallway on her crutches while Don Lope drinks hot chocolate in the company of the local priests.

The Phallic Imagery of the Prosthesis The nadir of Tristana’s sadism is contained in the famous balcony scene. Saturno enters her room and approaches her with gestures that have clear erotic connotations, but she rejects him. In the next scene, the deaf-mute stands under the balcony and tries to attract her attention. She undresses, dons a dressing gown, steps on the balcony, and opens the gown, as requested by Saturno. Startled, Saturno disappears into the bushes. In this scene, Buñuel plays with but does not satisfy the voyeurism of the audience. During Tristana’s divestiture, the camera is directed solely at Tristana’s sadistic facial expression, with which she challenges Saturno. The actual object of visual curiosity is her leg, or rather the orthopedic prosthesis, which Tristana drops on the bed and covers with her underwear, piece by piece. The view of the erotically charged artificial leg still refuses the audience a voyeuristic glance at Tristana’s body and her missing leg. The image is reminiscent of a scene in Un chien andalou in which the female protagonist, while waiting for her lover, reproduces his body on her bed by knotting together one of his ties with a garment of hers. In one of the following scenes, her lover’s hand is shown lying cut off in the street while a crowd gathers around it to examine it. Another young woman with an androgynous appearance puts the hand in a mysterious box, which has figured before as part of the arrangement on the lover’s bed. Significantly, the scene of the severed hand in Un chien andalou precedes the erotic clash between the two lovers, in which he touches her breasts and buttocks against her will. Not only does the lover’s hand seem to have a life of its own, as its severed existence suggests, but it also symbolizes sexual desire just as Tristana’s prosthesis—or perhaps her missing leg— does. Tristana’s artificial leg covered with undergarments can be associated with André Breton’s notion of the hazard objectif (objective chance), which describes the materialization of subjective desire in any kind of object of everyday life (684). But it also reminds us of the surrealist obsession with the representation of fragmented and severed limbs as, for

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example, Hans Bellmer’s photomontages of puppet legs that undermine the beauty of the mannequin by inversely resexualizing their deformed body parts. These ambiguous sexualized representations of deformed female bodies have been critically approached by surrealist women artists such as Dorothea Tanning or Meret Oppenheim, who react with their own aesthetics of deformation against the appropriation of the female body by the male gaze (see Beckmann). From a surrealist viewpoint, it becomes clear that Buñuel eroticizes Tristana’s amputation by collaging her leg with her undergarments. His representation stands in contrast to Galdós’s, who desexualizes Tristana completely after her amputation. The filmmaker thus confronts the audience with a beguiling and disturbing desire to see what the camera keeps from them: the exposed body of the one-legged Tristana. Surely this desire suggests a certain kind of symbolic reading, in which the loss of the leg is understood as a castration, which curtails Tristana’s aspirations for freedom and independence (Monegal 174), and in which her dominating behavior in this scene compensates for that loss. But does this form of sexual exposure really create empowerment? Is Buñuel’s Tristana, who sadistically uncovers her disabled body to the male gaze, a more emancipated woman than Galdós’s escapist idealist? Doesn’t it seem that Galdós is even more concerned with the question of woman’s emancipation than Buñuel, who turns Tristana into a bitter, sadistic, and murderous femme fatale who seeks revenge for a male desire that first usurped her youth and now turns her diseased body into an object of desire? According to Monegal, the entire course of the film is marked by erotic allusions (178). As phallic symbols, objects like columns, bell clappers, and the leg prosthesis point to a ubiquitous eroticism, which never makes that sexuality explicit and thus always stirs up the fantasy of the audience. Saturno spends hours in the bathroom, and it can only be assumed that he masturbates. Don Lope closes the bedroom door and thus obstructs the audience’s view on his sexual appropriation of Tristana; with the exception of two kisses, the love story with Horacio takes place outside the filmic emplotment; and in the balcony scene, the camera shows us the artificial leg instead of the denuded body. Through phallic imagery and the ambiguous play with showing and hiding, the film continually triggers its viewers’ instincts of sexual desire. This is especially prominent in the film’s most famous scene, in which Tristana leans over a statue of a bishop in a Catholic church almost as if she wanted to kiss it. Tristana’s eroticism in this scene overwhelms Don Lope, who after their visit to the church

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succumbs to his desire and seduces/abuses Tristana. Buñuel relates religion with eroticism. This transgression confronts the audience with their abysmal desires that may come to light at any moment. Whereas Galdós pities Tristana for her amputation, there is a certain cruelty in the way Buñuel stages his central figure, because the liberation of sexual drives— constantly insinuated to the audience—does not in any way concern her own possibility of sexual liberation. Even if Buñuel’s surrealist aesthetics open up the audience’s perception for the eroticism of Tristana’s “embodied otherness” in Garland-­ Thomson’s sense (9), his main character remains deeply disempowered. Consequently, the filmmaker’s version of Tristana offers no positive outlook on emancipated gender relations. Buñuel’s Tristana is a driven woman, for whom there is no liberty, not even a transcendental subterfuge—only the unsettling limp up and down the hallway while Don Lope makes himself at home in the cozy reality of his living room: “After all, Gentlemen, life is not as bad as many people think… It’s snowing outside, but we are nice and warm in here.”

Conclusion With regard to the amputation, both novel and film display a marked interest in narrating the calamity of Tristana’s illness and the consequences of her disability. As the embodiment of her incapacitation, the lost leg conveys a powerful symbolism. However, Galdós’s realist narrative questions Tristana’s possibility of living an emancipated life in accordance with her ideals from the start. In Snyder and Mitchell’s sense, her amputation is a “materialization of metaphor” (48) that reveals her incapacity for being free from the very beginning—an incapacity that makes her disability seem like a predetermined consequence of her lack of empowerment. Her idealism has to clash with reality because she does not have any instruments to realize her independence within a society that considers femaleness as defective. With the novel’s ending, in which Tristana turns to marriage, religion, and cooking, while Don Lope enjoys gardening in the countryside, Galdós thoroughly questions the obsolete set of cultural standards to which the incapacitated woman and her senile husband finally conform. By offering this “normal” marriage, grotesque as it may appear, as an outcome to the reader, he also examines the relationship between normalcy and deviancy. In this context, he criticizes the outdated gender relations of his society in which men’s chivalrous ideals of liberty and

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independence have turned into libertinage and abusive paternalism while women’s longing for independence is always already cut off from reality. Galdós’s “crude” realism thus conveys a deeply pessimistic outlook on women’s possibilities to challenge the paternalistic power relations in late nineteenth-century Spain, as long as the country remains uncompromising toward the idea of female emancipation. In Catherine Deneuve, Buñuel’s “cruel” surrealism creates a merciless version of the diseased Tristana, which stands in contrast to Galdós’s desexualized one-legged woman who appears almost like a mystic angel at the end of the novel. After the amputation,  the innocence of Buñuel’s Tristana is turned into bitterness, contempt, and even sadism. From the beginning, the filmmaker’s blasphemous and erotic allusions stir up the sexual desires of the audience members, who are first disturbed by Don Lope’s sexual transgression toward the innocent girl and then by the diseased Tristana’s sexual inhibition. Buñuel eroticizes his heroine not only before her amputation by inscribing a phallic imagery into his mis-en-scène but also afterward, when the camera obsessively focuses on Tristana’s stump, crutches, and prosthesis that lie on the bed covered with undergarments while she steps on the balcony. This scene of sexual inhibition, however, can hardly be read as female empowerment. Buñuel’s version of the amputated Tristana also tells the story of a prisoner who remains shackled to Don Lope’s house. Her agency consists, if at all, in the murderous act of declining to help her husband, by which she divests herself of him. If we read Tristana’s amputation not only through the media but also through the eras, we find in both, the author and the filmmaker alike, a pessimistic attitude when it comes to social and human hopes for emancipation. Buñuel, who through his surrealist point of view confronts his audience with its craving for transgression, eroticism, and immorality, stages human nature as unchangeably atavistic and driven by sexual desire. In contrast, the social determinism of Galdós’s novel, which is inspired by the ideas of naturalism, culminates in such a grotesque ending that it almost seems like a plea to his society to finally change its outdated ideals. This social claim is the biggest difference between the novel and the film, as the latter naturalizes the cruelty of human nature and thus does not offer much hope in any change of gendered power relations as long as male desire will subjugate the female body. After all, both versions of Tristana deeply engage with destabilizing notions of normalcy through

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the semiotics of amputation: Galdós with a responsive solidarity for his main character’s incapacitation, Buñuel with the surrealist incitement of transgression. Translated by Maren Scheurer

Notes 1. Up until 1970, the novel has been discussed in less than ten monographs; from 1970 to 1976, however, it is mentioned in sixteen monographs and twenty-five articles (Prill 196). 2. From the 1950s onward, Buñuel is increasingly committed to a more realist narrative technique, although he never abandons surrealism. The radical automatism of his early films such as Un chien andalou gives way to a more “consistent” storytelling that has led critics to call his late work “post-­ surrealist” (Winter 113). This label implies that Buñuel keeps on using surrealist elements that question the “reality principle” of his narratives. The surrealist claim of dissolving dream and reality, in particular, gains terrain in the last phase of his filmic work, with Belle de jour (1967) or Cette obscure objet du désir (1977). 3. The English version of Galdós’s Tristana follows the translation by Margaret Jull Costa. 4. According to Theodore  Sackett, Tristana  is the feminine version of the archetypical lover (75). Pfeiffer maintains that as a “female Tristan” she wants to “be like men” (224, my trans.). 5. These epistolary passages, which in part contain transcriptions of love letters that the author exchanged with his lover Concha-Ruth Morell, have been held against Galdós as a narrative weakness because they fray the course of action (Prill 4). Ulrich Prill asserts that, at the same time, they highlight the literariness of the novel (198). 6. Antonio Monegal states: “If the amputation is read as a symbolic castration, the severed limb would be the equivalent of the phallus, and the artificial leg would be the object in which this equivalence is updated” (178, my trans.). 7. Sackett surprisingly finds that Buñuel’s script is much more rooted in a specific historic and social context than Galdós’s novel, specifically in the ­beginning of the 1930s, just before the failure of the Second Republic and the subsequent Spanish civil war, which begins in 1936 (81–82). 8. This passage is faithful to the novel’s: “Poor child! […] Mutilate her horribly… […] Please, Don Augusto, for your own soul’s sake, think of some other remedy! […] If I could make her better by having myself cut in half, I would do it—right now” (Galdós 129). All translations from the film are mine.

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References Beckmann, Marie-Sophie. “Not Your Doll.” SCHIRN Magazin, 3 Mar. 2020. www.schirn.de/magazin/kontext/2020/fantastische_frauen/not_ your_doll/. Breton, André. “Crise de l’objet.” Œuvres complètes IV: Écrits sur l’art et autres textes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet et al., Gallimard, 2008, pp. 680–88. Bruhn, Jørgen, et  al. “‘There and Back Again’: New Challenges and New Directions in Adaptation Studies.” Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn et al., Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pp. 1–16. Buñuel, Luis, director. L’âge d’or. Studio des Ursulines, 1930. ———. Nazarín. G.C.T.H.V., 1959. ———. Tristana. Propaganda, 1970. ———. Viridiana. Estudios CEA C. Lineal, 1961. Buñuel, Luis, and Salvador Dalí. Un chien andalou. Studio des Ursulines, 1929. Galdós, Benito Pérez. “Tristana.” Obras completas V, Aguilar Ediciones, 1950, pp. 1541–1612. ———. Tristana. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New York Review of Books Classics, 2014. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–32. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. Routledge, 2016. Kriegel, Leonard. “Disability as a Metaphor in Literature.” Kaleidoscope, vol. 17, 1988, pp. 6–14. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Monegal, Antonio. Luis Buñuel de la literatura al cine: Una poética del objeto. Anthropos, 1993. Muñoz-Muriana, Sara. “‘¡Pobre Pierna Que Sólo Sirve Para Andar!’ Female (Dis)Empowerments, (Dis)Ability, and Space in Literary and Filmic Tristana.” Hispania, vol. 98, no. 3, 2015, pp. 485–98. Neuschäfer, Hans-Jörg. Macht und Ohnmacht der Zensur: Literatur, Theater und Film in Spanien (1933–1976). Metzler, 1991. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. “Tristana.” La mujer española y otros artículos feministas, Editora Nacional, 1976, pp. 135–42. Pfeiffer, Erna. “Nachwort.” Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated by Erna Pfeiffer, Suhrkamp, 1989, pp. 223–33. Prill, Ulrich. La evanescencia del mito: Benito Pérez Galdós como mitoclasta y mitógrafo. Peter Lang, 2014. Sackett, Theodore. “Creation and Destruction of Personality in ‘Tristana’: Galdós and Buñuel.” Anales Galdosianas, vol. 71, 1976, pp. 71–90.

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Smith, Alan E. “La imaginación galdosiana y la cervantina.” Textos y contextos de Galdós: Actas del simposio centenario de Fortunata y Jacinta, edited by Harriet Turner and John W. Kronik, Castalia, 1994, pp. 163–68. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=1373633. Treglown, Jeremy. “Introduction.” Tristana, by Benito Perez Galdós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New York Review of Books Classics, 2014, pp. vii-xi. Winter, Scarlett. “Das surrealistische Auge: Inszenierungen der Schaulust bei Buñuel, Dalí und Almodóvar.” Spielformen der Intermedialität im spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Surrealismus, edited by Uta Felten and Volker Roloff, Transcript, 2004, pp. 101–24. Wolfzettel, Friedrich. Der spanische Roman von der Aufklärung bis zur frühen Moderne: Nation und Identität. Francke, 1999.

CHAPTER 7

“Even at This Late Juncture”: Amputation, Old Age, and Paul Rayment’s Prosthetic Family in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man Erik Grayson

When J.M. Coetzee published Slow Man in 2005, the novel was met with a mixed response among critics,1 many of whom appear to agree with Zoë Wicomb, who characterized the book as “a novel that makes extraordinary demands on the reader” (7). To be sure, much of the dissatisfaction permeating early reviews of Slow Man seems to stem from what Peter Vermeulen terms the “weary abstractness of Coetzee’s late fiction,” a tendency for the author to explore philosophical concepts at the expense of developing a work with “credible psychological development, a significant setting, or a compelling plot” (656, 665). Indeed, while the novel opens compellingly enough with an automobile striking the elderly Paul Rayment as he cycles home from a shopping excursion, a “physical event that violently displaces Rayment” and immediately engages the reader’s interest,

E. Grayson (*) Department of English, Northampton Community College, Tannersville, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_7

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it also leads to what one commentator calls “a radical contraction of his horizons” (Powers 459). This contraction into Paul’s “new, dogged, reduced existence” is so complete that, save for a handful of comparatively uneventful outings to a nearby park or pub, the majority of the novel unfolds in Paul’s sparsely decorated flat, where he does little more than pass his time developing and dwelling on an unrequited romantic longing for his day nurse, Marijana (López 93). Thus, while the first few chapters of the novel appear to set the reader up for a realistic story in the vein of the 1999 Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, Paul’s almost complete lack of character development alienates readers anticipating a more engaging figure. To further complicate matters for readers expecting an easily comprehendible page-turner, once Paul reveals his feelings for his caretaker to her, the hitherto realistic novel veers into postmodern abstraction as Coetzee introduces the eponymous central character from his previous novel, Elizabeth Costello (2003), into the book. Costello, a novelist in her own right and a figure Coetzee has often deployed as a stand-in for himself both in public readings and on the page, immediately suggests to Paul that he is, in fact, a character about whom she is writing in one of her novels. As Tonje Vold rather provocatively observes, “[f]rom then on in the story, the realistic plot is amputated in favor of a meta-perspective” on the writing process (46). Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the harshest criticism of Slow Man focuses on the confusion and frustration wrought by Coetzee’s decision to disrupt a seemingly realistic story with such a jarring metafictional intrusion. In one early review of the novel, Adam Kirsch dismisses the book’s metatextual turn, insisting that “all Mr. Coetzee finally accomplishes in Slow Man is to run a promising novel off the rails.” In another review, Yvonne Zipp cites the book’s failure to “take [readers] on a journey” and Coetzee’s decision “to remain static and analyze the situation ad nauseam” as the reasons “Slow Man has the distinction of being the worst novel [she’s] read by a Nobel winner.” As Slow Man began to draw more deliberate—and sympathetic—scholarly attention in the years following its publication, the novel’s structure and metafictional qualities remained the foci of a disproportionate amount of that scholarship. Although several critics have engaged with the story at the heart of Coetzee’s novel—Paul’s injury and its consequences—the concrete plot of the book is less central to those readings than the abstract concepts suggested by the plot in more cases than not.2

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Thus, while many critics mention the road accident precipitating the amputation of Paul’s leg and the man’s subsequent attempts to live without that limb in their discussions of the book, comparatively few have devoted significant attention to or provided a sustained analysis of this central aspect of Slow Man. In the chapter that follows, I will address this critical lacuna by demonstrating how the amputation of Paul Rayment’s leg not only initiates the novel’s action but remains central to grasping the ways in which Paul eventually makes peace with a life he feels he has wasted. Before proceeding with my reading of the novel, however, I would like to briefly situate my analysis of the book within the context of the handful of scholars who have previously touched upon Paul Rayment’s corporeality in Slow Man. The critical consensus among this group of scholars is that, as a direct result of Paul’s amputation at the novel’s outset, Slow Man engages with several interconnected themes that Coetzee has explored over the course of his career: physical suffering, inappropriate or otherwise impossible desire, and alterity. In Peter Vermeulen’s estimation, the ligament that binds Coetzee’s novels together is the author’s “ambition to convey an affective response to suffering” through writing (655). Elsewhere, in his discussion of desire in Coetzee’s fiction, Eugene de Klerk asserts that “in much of his work desire is shown to be a subjective window into inassimilable alterity, loss, weakness and repressed or suffering aspects of being” (78). In this same vein, Sheeba Anjum and Nupur Tandon argue that Paul’s amputation precipitates an “experience of self-­ difference” in which “his disabled body is an object of shame” that establishes him as an outsider among the people with whom he interacts and, perhaps most importantly, convinces him that he will be unable to share intimacy with the women he desires (55). The “experience of self-difference” highlighted by Anjum and Nupur is perhaps most poignantly on display in Slow Man when an old lover of Paul’s broaches the subject of sex with him, an idea he finds so unsettling that he rejects her overtures outright and insists that he does not “care to expose to the gaze of an outsider […] this unlovely new body of his” (38). Here, we see that, for Paul, his “new body” alienates him from people with whom he has previously been intimate. Thus, while sexual activity is possible for Paul because “[h]is spine is unharmed, as are the relevant nerve connections,” he hesitates to pursue any such activity because he worries that “embarrassment and shame might outweigh pleasure” (37). In my own previous writing on the subject of shame in J.M.  Coetzee’s fiction, I identify “the realization of one’s innermost anxieties in the

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presence of ‘the Other,’ the ‘state of being’ one enters when the presence of ‘the Other’ forces him or her to acknowledge the physical facticity of an undesired or feared aspect of his/her being” as central to understanding the suffering imposed by alterity in Coetzee’s novels (49). In Slow Man, I will argue, the sense of shame Paul experiences following the amputation of his leg sparks an existential crisis that forces him first to acknowledge such an undesired aspect of his being—namely his status as an elderly amputee, then to confront his anxieties about not leaving a legacy that he had previously been able to ignore. It is only once the inescapable physical facticity of Paul’s amputation “displaces Rayment from […] the groove of his accustomed life,” as Donald Powers writes, that the man begins to sense that the life he lived up until that moment had been “frivolous” (Powers 459; Coetzee 19). The amputation of Paul’s leg, then, places him in what he himself terms a “zone of humiliation” in which his increased concern over how he must appear in the gaze of the Other not only alienates him from the friends and neighbors who wish to participate in his life but also convinces him that his desire to leave a legacy will be impossible now that he has a “new body” (61). Literally and figuratively, Slow Man is a novel of cuttings-off. It is, as Jae Eun Yoo observes, “the first novel published by J.M.  Coetzee after he changed his nationality from South African to Australian” (234). The novel’s eponymous slow man, the French-born Paul Rayment, like the book’s author, is an immigrant to Australia, though one of considerably longer residence. Nevertheless the “remnants of a French childhood” cut short by his immigrant parents continue to mark his memories, social comportment, language, and surname, factors which combine to establish him as apart from rather than a part of the Australian culture in which he lives (129).3 Furthermore, as a retired divorcé without any living relatives, Paul is cut off from those social units to which he once did belong. The emotional voids left by these figurative severances are intensified when, at the opening on the novel, Paul Rayment suffers a literal severance—the amputation of his right leg above the knee—following a cycling accident. Although Paul’s doctors inform him that he can continue living a normal life following the surgery and assure him that “[he] will be walking again” and even “[r]iding his bicycle” around town “[i]n no time at all,” Paul’s “spirit is unstrung” by the event, sparking an existential crisis in the man (7–8). Convinced that “[i]n the larger perspective, losing a leg is […] a rehearsal for losing everything,” he refuses a prosthesis. Paul’s uncompromising refusal to be fitted with a prosthetic limb, which baffles his

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friends and frustrates his caretakers, is one of his most notable behaviors in Slow Man. I would suggest that it may be understood by considering what Hal Foster describes as “the double logic of the prosthesis” in Prosthetic Gods: “the prosthesis cannot undo its reason for being; it might even underscore that the subject requires this crutch, that he is defined in lack” (124). As Philipp Wolf asserts, “[f]or Rayment a prosthesis means counterfeiting and dishonesty. The ethos of authenticity thus becomes a matter of the bodily entity as a subject that cannot be supplemented or replaced or completed: it is what it is. One violates the dignity of the (mutilated) body if one feigns a completeness which it is not” (456). The presence of a prosthetic limb, in Paul’s mind, then, would emphasize the absence of his leg, drawing even more attention to his feelings of shame by violating what dignity remains following the amputation. Following his surgery, Paul retreats into himself, looking back over the life he lived prior to the amputation and perceiving little more than failure (13). The most prominent of his post-amputation musings is the thought that, as a self-described “maimed and solitary old man,” Paul “is full of regrets” that the loss of his leg will prevent him from ever remedying. “Chief among them,” Paul realizes, “is the regret that he does not have a son. […] [A] proper son, a son and heir, a younger, stronger, better version of himself” to care for him in his twilight years and to carry on after his death (44–45). Thus, the amputation of his leg prompts Paul Rayment to sense that “all his life he has been missing himself” (237). As he begins to grieve over this and the other “voids” in his life, Paul attempts to remedy his sadness by turning his caretaker’s family into a sort of prosthetic family through which he may compensate for the lost opportunities of his younger years. Medical literature suggests that Paul’s response to his amputation is largely consistent with those observed in studies of the psychological impact of a lost limb among elderly individuals. While researchers generally avoid designating “amputees” as a demographic in their own right, most studies of the psychological impact of amputation on an individual agree with L. Furst and M. Humphrey’s matter-of-fact statement that the “loss of a leg is typically a geriatric problem” (152). As Rachel Atherton and Noelle Robertson point out, the “[i]ncidence [of amputation] rises steeply with age, with around two-thirds of amputations occurring in patients over 60 years” (1201). This fact is particularly significant to note because, as Bruce Rybarczyk, Robert Edwards, and Jay Behel point out, “aging involves an ongoing process of balancing independence and safety,

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but for the individual undergoing an amputation, the change is swift and often requires marked, permanent reductions in the level of independence” (949). Thus, as Fen Liu observes, although it is common for an amputee “to re-evaluate the meaning and value of their life” as part of their recovery, the process is especially challenging for elderly individuals whose circumscribed social situations often isolate them from the care, “comfort and encouragement [of] family and friends” so important to navigating the grieving process (2156–57). With these considerations in mind, it may come as no surprise that it is Paul’s age—he is a man of sixty—that facilitates the surgeons’ decision to perform the amputation: In a younger person they might perhaps have gone for a reconstruction, but a reconstruction of the required order would entail a whole series of operations, one after another, extending over a year, even two years, with a success rate of less than fifty per cent, so all in all, considering his age, it was thought best to take the leg off. (7)

Significantly, the surgery forces Paul to see himself as others do, namely as an elderly man. We see the beginnings of this recognition in the following exchange between Paul and his caretaker, Marijana Jokić, who expresses her agreement with his doctors’ assessment of age-related surgical risk: “Reconstruction,” she says, “very difficult surgery, very difficult. For years, in and out hospital. For, you know, old patients they don’t like it to make reconstruction. Only for young. What’s the point, eh? What’s the point?” She puts him among the old, those whom there is no point in saving— saving the knee-joint, saving his life. (29)

Here, Paul is confronted with an external view of himself: someone too old for reconstructive surgery, someone for whom the time and cost of multiple hospital visits would not be worth the effort. The tendency for elderly individuals to encounter their senescence for the first time through the eyes of someone else features prominently in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age, in which she observes that because “[o]ld age is more apparent to others than to the subject himself,” the realization that one is, in fact, old can be deeply alienating (284). As de Beauvoir explains, “for the outsider it is a dialectic relationship between my being as he defines it objectively and the awareness of myself that I acquire by means of him. Within me it is the Other—that is to say the

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person I am for the outsider—who is old: and that Other is myself” (284). Thus, “we are often astonished when the common fate [of growing old] becomes our own—when we are struck by sickness, a shattered relationship, or bereavement” (283). In the passage cited above, Paul’s injury is both the moment when he is “struck by […] bereavement” and the instance in which he first encounters the reality that others perceive him as elderly. Although Paul had previously used the term “old” to describe his chronological relationship to others, this exchange with Marijana marks one of the first times he accepts it in an ontological sense, as a term that describes his increasingly frail and vulnerable being.4 Paul soon sinks into despair, attributing his ontological senescence to the accident and subsequent amputation of his leg: Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired for the job, too over-burdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the heart, the lungs, the muscles, the brain. They did what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest. (53)

It is at this point that Paul begins the process of “re-evaluat[ing] the meaning and value of [his] life” that Fen Liu identifies as a crucial part of post-amputation recovery, a process that, in Paul’s case, leads to an even more depressed condition: It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before, only grayer and drearier. (54)

Significantly, while Paul’s use of the adjective “grayer” in this passage may be read as another allusion to the elderly individual into which he claims the accident has transformed him, it is actually “the same old self”—which is to say the self he has always been—that he finds so unappealing. In other words, the “calamity” Paul identifies is not that the accident has aged him, per se, but rather that his amputation has “shrunk his world” in such a way

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that his aged self is little more than a prison into which an unfulfilled younger self has been irretrievably locked. The latent dissatisfaction Paul feels towards his life suggested by his words here recollects an earlier passage in the novel, in which Paul expresses regret for having lived what he terms a “frivolous” existence: “frivolous is not a bad word to sum him up, as he was before the event and may still be. If in the course of a lifetime he has done no significant harm, he has done no good either. He will leave no trace behind, not even an heir to carry on his name. […] If none is left who will pronounce judgement on such a life […] then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance” (19). Here, we must pay particular attention to two details in this passage, both of which are crucial to understanding Coetzee’s novel: first, Paul reveals that much of his present dissatisfaction stems from his having never fathered a son, which, given the fact that surnames are traditionally patrilineal in Australian society, may be inferred from his regretting having not produced “an heir to carry on his name.” Second, the finality in Paul’s assessment of his life as “a wasted chance” is significant because it implies that, in Paul’s eyes, he is forever cut off from the possibility of fatherhood. From this point forward, as Brian Macaskill explains, the amputation is “malignantly linked to Paul’s childlessness” (403). The pain caused by this second, unseen severance—of Paul from subsequent generations of humanity—is intensified by the complete absence of what the social worker assigned to his case describes as “someone to be there for you, to give you a hand” in his life (16). Paul is first struck by the implications of this social void as he fills out paperwork relating to his surgery in the hospital: the papers prove surprisingly difficult. […] Who and where are his family, the papers ask, and how should they be informed? […] Who are his family? What is the right answer? He has a sister. She passed on twelve years ago […]. [H]e has neither wife nor offspring. He was married once, certainly; but the partner in that enterprise is no longer part of him […]. For all practical purposes, therefore, and certainly for the purposes of the form, he is unmarried: unmarried, single, solitary, alone. (8–9)

Paul’s status as a single, childless man becomes increasingly important in the aftermath of his amputation as the void left by his lost limb exposes the lack of a network of compassionate care a family ideally provides, and it is ultimately this perceived absence in his life that motivates Paul’s actions

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throughout the remainder of the novel, during which he simultaneously rejects the comparatively attainable life made possible by a physical prosthesis while futilely seeking out what we might call a metaphysical prosthesis in the form of a family to which he aims to attach himself.5 In the course of what he describes as an “impersonal personal” discussion between himself and Marijana, the latter asks a question that “echoes in his mind” long after the conversation: without children, “who is going to take care of [him]?” (43). Not surprisingly, given his earlier musings on fatherhood, Paul acknowledges to himself that what he “misses” most in life is “the son he does not have” (44). Interestingly, this thought is followed by a daydream in which a perfectly ambulatory Paul goes “out for a stroll” with “his imaginary but imagined son” and “let[s] fall a remark, one of those oblique remarks that people make at moments when the real words are too difficult to bring out, about it being time to pass on” (44). His son, as Paul envisions him, “would understand at once: pass on the burden, pass on the succession, call it a day. ‘Mm,’ his son would say […], meaning Yes, I accept. You have done your duty, taken care of me, now it is my turn. I will take care of you” (44–45). Interestingly, both of Paul’s absences—that of his limb and that of his family—have been filled in his daydream, but, in the real world, it is the loss of his leg that forces Paul to rely on the sort of care in the present day that he imagines he would only have required in the abstract future as an even older man. Paul’s subsequent musings on the subject are particularly interesting, in that the language he deploys to describe obtaining a male child contains faint echoes of the language one might use in the selection of a prosthesis: It is not beyond the bounds of the possible to acquire a son, even at this late juncture. He could, for instance, locate (but how?) some wayward orphan […] and put in an offer to adopt him, and hope to be accepted; through the chances that the welfare system […] would ever consign a child to the care of a maimed and solitary old man would be zero, less than zero. Or he could locate (but how?) some fertile young woman, and marry her or pay her or otherwise induce her to permit him to engender, or try to engender, a male child in her womb. But it is not a baby he wants. What he wants is a son, a proper son, a son and heir, a younger, stronger, better version of himself. (45)

Here, it is worthwhile to note that Paul expressly rejects the idea of engendering a baby—which would be a product of his own flesh—in favor of

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adoption, a process through which he could “acquire” or “locate” an already-grown son originating entirely outside of himself—one that is both “stronger” and “better”—to complete the less-than-whole vision of his future circumstances, not unlike how a prosthesis might “complete” his physical body. Since, as Paul himself acknowledges, the chances that the modern welfare system “would ever consign a child to” him “would be zero, less than zero” and because his age and physical condition would likely prevent him from enticing “a fertile young woman” to carry his child, Paul gives up all hopes of becoming a father. That is, of course, until he meets Marijana. Paul takes an immediate liking to Marijana, who quickly becomes the antidote to “the cloud of gloom descending” on him each evening (30). Physically, however, Paul initially describes Marijana in the most lukewarm of terms: “Objectively she is not unattractive” (30). Tellingly, it is only after Marijana casually mentions her sixteen-year-old son, Drago, that Paul begins to find her attractive: “Her son and first-born, she informs him, just turned sixteen. Sixteen: she must have married young. He is in the process of revising his estimate of her. More than not unattractive, she is on occasion a positively handsome woman, well built” (30).6 Not long after this reassessment, during one of Marijana’s routine massage sessions, Paul mentally compares the level of intimacy he feels with Marijana to that experienced during “a sex act” and his thoughts return to fatherhood: first, castigating himself for “fail[ing] to perform what man is brought into the world to perform: seek out his other half, cleave to her, and bless her with his seed,” then deciding that—in terms evoking his physical condition—he is “not wholly a man” but “a half-man,” and “look[s] back in regret at time not well used” (33–34).7 Finally, he concludes that Marijana would have set him right, had he only met her in time […]. From the loins of two, Marijana and her spouse, there have issued three—three souls for heaven. A woman built for motherhood. Marijana would have helped him out of childlessness. Marijana could mother six, ten, twelve, and still have love left over, mother-love. (34)

Given the decidedly gushing timbre of his description of Marijana, it is perhaps not surprising that Paul soon develops what he believes to be romantic feelings towards the woman, the subsequent revelation of which brings about exactly the sort of awkwardness one would expect to arise following such an unexpected comment from an elderly patient to his

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much younger, happily married nurse. However, when Paul reflects on his emotional state, we see that the love he claims to feel towards Marijana is something less than the romantic love he professes to her: What does he want of the woman? […] He wants to win a place in her heart, however tiny. Does he want to become her lover too? Yes, he does, in a sense, fervently. He wants to love and cherish her and her children, Drago and Ljuba and the third one, the one whom he has yet to clap eyes on. (72)

Here, the equivocal phrase “in a sense” is particularly revealing. Paul cannot even convince himself that he desires Marijana romantically. Rather, the words set the stage for a frank admission of his actual desires: he will give anything to be father to these excellent, beautiful children and husband to Marijana—co-father if need be, co-husband if need be, platonic, if need be. He wants to take care of them, all of them, protect them and save them. […] Drago above all he wants to save. […] He is like a woman who, having never borne a child, having grown too old for it, now hungers suddenly and urgently for motherhood. (72–73)

It is worth noting, too, that when Paul finally does reveal his purported feelings of love to Marijana, he does so as a form of justification for offering to pay for Drago’s education at an expensive private school. The conversation starts benignly enough with Marijana thanking Paul for discussing road safety with Drago, whose father has recently purchased the boy a motorcycle. After referring to his advice as “[j]ust a few fatherly words,” Paul is excited when Marijana replies that “he don’t get enough fatherly words, like you say, that’s his problem” (74). Perceiving Marijana’s words to be a criticism of her husband, Paul expresses a desire to step into Drago’s life as what he eventually terms “a godfather” by offering to pay for the boy’s tuition fees (92). In terms recollecting his earlier dismay at having failed to connect himself to subsequent generations through fatherhood, Paul tells Marijana that the offer is “an investment in the future. In the future of all of us” (76). It is only after Marijana expresses her continued inability to understand why he would make such an offer that Paul tells her that he loves her. Interestingly, at the very moment Paul seeks to attach himself to the Jokić family as a sort of prosthetic parent, Paul feels compelled to hug Marijana to seal the deal and realizes that, for “the first time he sees the sense in an artificial leg, a leg with a mechanism that locks

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the knee and frees the arms” (77). Unfortunately, for a man who instinctively “dislikes all fakes” and considers prostheses to be “repulsive” and “[dis]honest,” he soon learns that the role of godfather to which he aspires feels as unnatural to the Jokić family as a prosthetic limb would feel for him (58, 255). In the days and weeks that follow Paul’s financial offer and declaration of love, a fight erupts in the Jokić household—a fight, it should be noted, sparked by disagreement over Paul’s offer—and both Marijana and Drago move out in the aftermath, the mother seeking refuge at a relative’s home and Drago, significantly, moves in with Paul. This situation thrusts Paul into “an uncertainty brought on by the encounter with the other who personifies futurity—that is, the child” (Amir 75). Suddenly finding himself quite literally in loco parentis, Paul grows anxious: He wants to make himself interesting to Drago […], but it is not easy. What has he to offer? A broken bicycle. A truncated limb, probably more repellent than attractive. And a cabinet full of old pictures. In sum, not much. Not much with which to attach a boy to him as a mystical godson. (175)

It is difficult to overlook the resonant phrase “attach a boy to him,” which echoes Paul’s description of a prosthesis as “an apparatus that you strap to yourself” (58). In both instances, it is worth noting, the object of attachment is the passive figure. Just as a prosthetic limb may be said to support a physical amputee, a prosthetic son may be expected to be the “stay and support” Paul associates with the son he does not have (43). But Drago is anything but a passive figure. He is, as Paul initially observes, “a handsome youth, bursting with good health” who is unlikely “to spend his evenings at home curled up with a book” (69). Thus, while Paul “is fond of Drago with a measured, an appropriate fondness,” Drago’s active lifestyle leads the old man to lament that “[n]one of the quiet growth in intimacy that he had looked forward to has come about” (180). Instead, there is “[a]lways tension, always unease” between them (205). Rather than the series of quiet “companionable evenings together” Paul envisions, “Drago brings in friends” and Paul’s “flat [becomes] as noisy and confused as a railway station” (180). In fact, when Drago moves out, Paul finds it a tremendous “relief to be by himself again” (205). Still, Paul clings obstinately to the idea of attaching Drago to himself as a “mystical godson.” This dream finally disintegrates when, following the boy’s departure, Paul is upset to discover that Drago has replaced one of the old man’s rare

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photographs of early Australian settlers with a doctored version in which a miner’s face has been substituted with that of Drago’s grandfather.8 Paul is distraught by what he calls the “desecration” of his collection by a “cocky, irreverent youth” (218) and is devastated to realize that, despite his efforts, Drago has not developed any real emotional bond with him: “No affection. Is it as plain as that, plain for all to see? It is as though the heart in his breast has suddenly grown too tired to beat. Tears come to his eyes again, but with no force behind them, just a watery exudation” (220). In a last-ditch effort to retrieve his original photograph and to reassert his nearly dead dream of becoming Drago’s godfather, Paul makes an unannounced visit to the Jokić household, where he meets with a defiant Marijana, who staunchly defends her son’s actions as a work of art in its own right. When she realizes that Paul does not understand the digital manipulation and distribution of images, she leads him to Drago’s room, where Paul sees the boy’s workstation and begins to perceive that, while Drago may have accidentally misplaced Paul’s original photograph, it is unlikely that he stole it out of any malice. Not knowing what else to say, Paul comments on how “neat” the room is because “Drago was never so neat when he stayed with me” (248). Revealingly, Marijana replies, “I say to him, Mr Rayment lets you make mess […], but here you don’t make mess, is not necessary, is your home here” (248). As it begins to dawn on Paul that neither Marijana nor Drago ever accepted him as a father figure, the woman interjects, as if she is reading his mind, that he should “[f]orget godfather too. Is no-good idea, godfather, is not realistic like,” before escorting him to the garage to show him something (251). When Paul arrives at the garage, Marijana and her husband reveal a gift Drago and his father have been working on for Paul: a recumbent bicycle with a hand crank, which would enable him to cycle around town again. Although Paul “dislikes recumbents instinctively, as he dislikes prostheses, as he dislikes all fakes,” he is genuinely moved by the gesture and takes a test ride (255). As Jae Eun Yoo concludes, “[w]hen Paul agrees to ride” the bicycle, “it is the first instance in the novel that he voluntarily accepts his handicapped reality” (248). As “a blush creep[s] over him” (255), Yoo notes, “Paul finally sees what he is to the Jokić family—not a generous patriarchal guardian but one who needs and accepts help” (248). Indeed, as Paul gives up on his dream of attaching a prosthetic son to himself, he thinks “perhaps, in a larger perspective, that is exactly what the Jokićs mean to teach him: that he should give up on his solemn airs and become what he rightly is, a figure of fun, an old gent with one leg who when he

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is not hopping around on his crutches roams the streets on his home-­ made tricycle” (256). It would seem, then, that Paul only accepts the reality of his lost limb once he realizes—and accepts—that he, and not his amputation, is responsible for other voids in his life. Although he may have been slow in grasping these truths, Paul’s amputation ultimately enables him to reassess his life, let go of the overly serious self-image upon which he had built his existence, and finally embrace who he is—and who he is not.

Notes 1. For a more detailed look at the initial critical hostility aimed at Slow Man, see Hahn 179–80. 2. David Attwell, for instance, suggests that “[t]he events of the novel, the accident and the amputation of [Paul’s] leg […] could actually be taken as metaphoric because they strike him in the midst of a life he is already living as post-historical” (11–12). For Jae Eun Yoo, Paul’s struggle to make sense of his life following the automobile accident on Magill Road is presented as at least as much of a linguistic problem as it is a physical experience: “In an attempt to reconcile his newly handicapped, aging body, Paul […] replaces original words with semantic equivalents, and this technique aggravates Paul’s moral predicaments by concealing the friction within his own language—the language he mobilizes in his attempt to reimagine and represent his body as a fertile, masculine one” (234). Even Peter Vermeulen, whose essay engages more consciously with Paul Rayment’s physical condition than most critics, considers the elderly man’s experience with amputation in Slow Man to be “a ‘biologico-literary experiment’ that tests and explores the forms of life that are produced when the elements that traditionally make up the world of the novel have ceased to function, and now confront the characters with their contingency and obsolescence” (657). 3. For a more comprehensive discussion of the impact of emigration and language on Paul’s existence in Slow Man, see Tonje Vold, Jae Eun Yoo, and Donald Powers. 4. Peter Vermeulen takes a deep look at this variety of exposed existence in “Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel form in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man.” Embedded in his analysis is a passage from Eric Santer’s The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, which provides a concise description of this ontological frailty: “We could say that the precariousness, the fragility—the ‘nudity’—of biological life becomes potentiated, amplified, by way of exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which

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human life unfolds, and that it is only through such ‘potentiation’ that we take on the flesh of creaturely life. Creatureliness is thus a dimension not so much of biological as of ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that permeates human being as that being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life that are, in turn, contingent, fragile, susceptible to breakdown” (5–6). 5. For an in-depth analysis of Coetzee’s treatment of care in Slow Man, see Arne De Boever’s Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel, which devotes a full chapter to the novel’s rejection of dispassionate care provided by the modern welfare state in favor of caritas, the Christian concept of personal care for which Paul explicitly longs. 6. Interestingly, it is worth noting that when Paul does begin to find Marijana physically attractive, it is her legs that stand out to him first: “It is on the day of the book-dusting that what had been a mild interest in Marijana, an interest that had not amounted to much more than curiosity, turns into something else. In her he begins to find if not beauty then at least the perfection of a certain feminine type. Sturdy as a horse, he thinks, eyeing the sturdy calves and well-knit haunches that ripple as she reaches for the upper shelves” (50). Suggestively, it is her calves—precisely the part of his own leg that has been amputated—that he mentions before her “well-knit haunches.” Indeed, Paul’s attraction to Marijana’s calves reappears throughout the text and even becomes something about which Elizabeth Costello teases him. 7. While some readers will likely see his declaration that he is “not wholly a man” as indicative of Paul’s understanding of his own masculinity following the accident on Magill Road, I would argue that the language is also suggestive of the ontological struggle the elderly individual experiences upon retiring from active, vocational life. In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir argues that “one of the elderly man’s greatest difficulties [upon retiring] is the retention of his feeling of identity […] he has lost both his ‘label’ and his role in society—there is no longer anything by which he can identify himself, and he no longer knows who he is” (493). In retirement, “he is a mere embodiment of powerlessness” that “stops living. The void of the present makes him the slave of his own past being; and he suffers its inevitable consequences” (495–96). No longer able to work, Paul is thrust into what de Beauvoir describes as the “devastated world” of retirement “where nothing either concerns or moves [the retiree] any more” (496). For Paul, his own past being emerges as a wasted opportunity to build a legacy and its consequences include his acute desire to father a son and establish the family he never had. Ultimately, Paul appears to experience what de Beauvoir terms “the real problem of old age”: the state in which the elderly individual wonders how “in his last years a man might still be a man” (542). 8. It is important to note that Paul’s collection of photographs is, in a very real way, another of the man’s attempts at securing a legacy for himself that, like

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a child, will survive his death. As Donald Powers observes, Paul’s hobby, far from being a mere pastime, places “a characteristic Coetzeean emphasis on being remembered” (466). This emphasis is made clear when, in an exchange with Marijana, Paul responds to her question of whether his collection will bear his name when he bequeaths it to the State Library in Adelaide by asserting that “[t]hey will put my name on the collection indeed. The Rayment Bequest. So that in future days children will whisper to each other, ‘who was he, Rayment of the Rayment Bequest? Was he someone famous?’” (49).

References Amir, Ayala. “‘What Used to Lie Outside the Frame’: Boundaries of Photography, Subjectivity and Fiction in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee.” JLS/TLW, vol. 29, no. 4, 2013, pp. 58–79. Anjum, Sheeba, and Nupur Tandon. “Mapping the Boundaries: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Slow Man as Modern Cosmopolitan Fiction.” Shanlax International Journal of English, vol. 7, no. 4, 2019, pp. 51–56. Atherton, Rachel, and Noelle Robertson. “Psychological Adjustment to Lower Limb Amputation Amongst Prosthesis Users.” Disability and Rehabilitation, vol. 28, no. 19, 2006, pp. 1201–09. Attwell, David. “Coetzee’s Postcolonial Diaspora.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 57, no. 1, 2011, pp. 9–19. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. Translated by Patrick O’Brian, W. W. Norton, 1996. Boever, Arne de. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. Bloomsbury, 2013. Coetzee, J.M. Slow Man. Viking, 2005. Foster, Hal. Prosthetic Gods. MIT P, 2004. Furst, L., and M. Humphrey. “Coping with the Loss of a Leg.” Prosthetics and Orthotics International, vol. 7, 1983, pp. 152–56. Grayson, Erik. “Paranoia, Pain, and the Hidden Etymology of Coetzee’s Disgrace.” International Journal of Literature and Psychology, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 42–53. Hahn, Robert. “Arias in the Prison of Opinion: Coetzee’s Late Novels.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2012, pp. 176–96. Kirsch, Adam. “Laureate’s Lament.” Review of Slow Man, by J.M. Coetzee. The New  York Sun, 14 Sept. 2005. https://www.nysun.com/arts/ laureates-­lament/19971/. Klerk, Eugene de. “The Poverty of Desire: Spivak, Coetzee, Lacan, and Postcolonial Eros.” JLS/TLW, vol. 26, no. 3, 2010, pp. 65–83. Liu, Fen, et  al. “The Lived Experience of Persons with Lower Body Extremity Amputation.” Journal of Clinical Nursing, vol. 19, 2010, pp. 2152–61.

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López, Maria J. “Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity.” JLS/TLW, vol. 29, no. 4, 2013, pp. 80–97. Macaskill, Brian. “I Am Not Me: The Horse is Not Mine, William Kentridge & J.M. Coetzee; or: Machines, Death, and Performance as Prelude to Reading Slow Man.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 58, no. 4, 2016, pp. 392–421. Powers, Donald. “Emigration and Photography in J.M.  Coetzee’s Slow Man.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 49, no. 4, 2013, pp. 458–69. Rybarczyk, Bruce, Robert Edwards, and Jay Behel. “Diversity in Adjustment to a Leg Amputation: Case Illustrations of Common Themes.” Disability and Rehabilitation, vol. 26, no. 14/15, 2004, pp. 944–53. Santer, Eric. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. U of Chicago P, 2011. Vermeulen, Peter. “Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J.M.  Coetzee’s Slow Man.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 45, no. 4, 2013, pp. 655–74. Vold, Tonje. “How to ‘Rise Above Mere Nationality’: Coetzee’s Novels Youth and Slow Man in the World Republic of Letters.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 57, no. 1, 2011, pp. 34–53. Wolf, Philipp. “Waywardness: J.M.  Coetzee and the Ethos of Authenticity.” Anglia, vol. 134, no. 3, 2016, pp. 444–66. Wicomb, Zoë. “Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing.” JLS/ TLW, vol. 25, no. 4, 2009, pp. 7–24. Yoo, Jae Eun. “Broken Tongues in Dialogue: Translation and the Body in Slow Man.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 55, no. 2, 2013, pp. 234–51. Zipp, Yvonne. “He’s Slow to Win Our Affection.” Review of Slow Man, by J.M.  Coetzee. The Christian Science Monitor, 27 Sept. 2005. https://www. csmonitor.com/2005/0927/p14s02-­bogn.html.

Discussion: Amputation’s Intersections

The semiotics of “loss” suggest that, when we approach amputation via gender, sexuality, and aging, the narratives we encounter will inevitably be narratives of decline (Gallop 39): of loss of masculinity and femininity, of desire and desirability, and of health and social standing. As the critical readings in this part of the book make clear, however, the intersections of disability with gender, sexuality, and aging do not actually follow such neat patterns and pathways. In all three chapters, amputation complicates, rather than simply reduces, the principal characters’ association with traditional gender roles. While Paul Rayment’s masculinity seems to be impaired by his relegation to early retirement within the four walls of his home, what he seeks after his injury is not merely reconfirmation of his masculinity but a new form of relatedness that is often associated with womanhood: caritas. And while Tristana’s illness and subsequent surgery appear to solidify her submissive position in Don Lope’s home, seemingly condemning the woman to the domestic sphere she so desperately wishes to escape, in “The Girl Without Hands,” for instance, the young woman, presumably no longer able to contribute to the maintenance of her family home following her dismemberment, rejects her father’s offer of care and sets out to survive in the wilderness. But even in Tristana, the amputation opens, as well as closes, roads to emancipation and complicates notions of deviance and normalcy. While men and women are clearly affected by disability in different ways, and while the characters in these texts clearly

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encounter assumptions that amputation emasculates men and confirms the home as “a woman’s place,” if anything, their sudden confrontation with disability destabilizes solidified gender roles for a moment and allows or even forces the characters to renegotiate their place in the world. In a related vein, each of the three chapters in this part also highlights the fraught relationship between amputation and the sexual realm. In these texts, amputation divests some individuals of and endows others with sexual power. In Erik Grayson’s reading of Slow Man, we learn that Paul views his amputation as the definitive end of his sexual life. Despite an awkward encounter with a woman that seems to suggest, at the very least, that Paul can still participate in and enjoy sex, he chooses to retreat into a blandly desexualized existence of misguided paternalism. Similarly, in Galdós’s novel, Tristana’s amputation effectively terminates Horacio’s desire for her while condemning the young woman to a life under Don Lope’s oppressive will. In Buñuel’s film adaptation, however, Andrea Gremels detects how Tristana’s truncated limb (as well as her prosthesis) becomes the site of a voyeuristic eroticism approaching outright fetishization. The young maiden in “The Girl Without Hands,” too, becomes more closely associated with sexuality following her dismemberment. As Miranda Corcoran maintains, the maiden’s amputation may be interpreted as signifying the onset of menarche and, as such, marks the child’s transition from girlhood to sexually potent womanhood. Whether amplifying or dampening sexuality, emphasizing or challenging traditional gender roles, amputation emerges as a powerful influence upon the lives of the men and women at the center of the texts discussed here, and this influence is not reducible to the images of castration that are often associated with it: amputation may also uncover new sites of potency, and the characters’ “desires” are not exclusively related to phallic power. What Tristana, the young maiden, and Paul crave is not (just) romance but human relatedness, through care, understanding, and non-traditional family bonds. In each of the three chapters in the preceding part of the volume, amputation serves as the catalyst for an individual’s moving from one stage of life to another. In each case, the physical severing of a limb is closely aligned with the expulsion of the individual from the comparative security of youth or middle age into the decidedly more vulnerable territory of adult womanhood or old age. Corcoran illustrates how the removal of the young maiden’s hands in the fairy tale simultaneously reduces the

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protagonist to the status of a powerless and dehumanized subaltern as well as thrusts her into womanhood. In Slow Man, Grayson maintains, the deciding factor in Paul’s medical treatment is his age. For a sexagenarian like him, his doctors reason, the time and effort it would take to reconstruct and rehabilitate a crushed leg is simply not worth it. As a result, Paul finds himself cut off from the younger generations around whom the world appears to revolve and cast out among the elderly at the margins of Australian society. In Galdós’s Tristana, Gremels shows how the amputation of the eponymous protagonist’s lower leg effectively severs her from the romantic possibilities a young woman might expect to enjoy and attaches her to an elderly man while in Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of the novel, Tristana visibly and dramatically ages in the immediate aftermath of her amputation. In all four texts, the intersection of disability and age amplifies the social exclusion associated with both conditions. Reading Corcoran’s, Gremels’s, and Grayson’s chapters together suggests that we cannot properly disentangle the meanings produced in the interplay of gender, sexuality, age, and disability. Throughout history, humans have developed different narratives for the lifespan of men and women, with different expectations for how and when they navigate the public and the domestic spheres, sexual awakening and decline, physical and mental maturation and deterioration. As Corcoran points out, these narratives are not just products of patriarchal, ableist, or ageist discourse but also tools with which we confront the changes our bodies inevitably, and often uncontrollably, undergo and understand the consequences these changes bring to our social lives. The abovementioned texts call on these narratives and show how disability disrupts them, as it calls for transformations and adjustments beyond the linear progression of established expectations. Amputation’s paradoxical double role may very well be related to this disruptive force: social exclusion is intensified for individuals who suddenly find themselves outside the conventional mold, and the pressures to conform to established roles may be even stronger; at the same time, the disruption of “normality” may open up new avenues for action and self-understanding. Ultimately, it is here, in their consideration of the marginalization of amputees, that each of these texts leads readers to a vantage point from which they may reflect on social norms while confronting their own needs and anxieties. In reflecting on the ways in which amputees are both excluded from and uniquely positioned to comment upon the cultures in

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which they live, these texts highlight the complex interplay of identity formation, social inclusion or exclusion, the pressure to conform, the desire to belong, and the anxiety that often accompanies all of these concerns. Future scholars of amputation in literature and film will undoubtedly have plenty of sociocultural material with which to work for some time to come.

Reference Gallop, Jane. Sexuality, Disability and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus. Duke UP, 2019.

PART III

Grief and Prosthetic Relations

CHAPTER 8

The Penalty in Novel and Film: Grieving with the Vengeful Amputee Susan Kerns

In 1920, the silent film The Penalty, directed by Wallace Worsley, was released as an adaptation of Gouverneur Morris’s 1913 pulp crime novel of the same name. The Penalty is an American crime drama starring Lon Chaney as Blizzard, a legless man who becomes a criminal mastermind. As a child, an accident damaged Blizzard’s legs, leading a young Dr. Ferris to hastily amputate them. Just after the operation, Blizzard overhears an elder doctor tell Dr. Ferris the amputation was unnecessary, but when Blizzard tries to explain this to his parents, the doctors cover up the mistake, lying to Blizzard’s parents and setting the young boy on a path of vengeance. Blizzard watches the Ferris family throughout his life, and years later, he befriends Dr. Ferris’s adult daughter, an artist named Barbara, while posing as Satan for one of her sculptures. This launches a string of events (kidnapping, surgery, and murder, among them) resulting in different outcomes in the novel and film. The Penalty was produced

S. Kerns (*) Department of Cinema and Television Arts, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_8

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during a transitional time at the then Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. Facing financial troubles and a lack of exceptional novels to adapt, Samuel Goldwyn hired a group of popular magazine authors—the Eminent Authors, as they are remembered—including Gouverneur Morris (Lewis and Lewis 133–37). Although the experiment did not stabilize the studio as hoped, The Penalty capitalized on actor Lon Chaney’s physical adeptness to embody characters and helped solidify his status as an emerging talent. Chaney was not yet at the height of his career, but coming off his success as the Frog, a man pretending to be disabled, in the 1919 film The Miracle Man, he was earning a reputation for being something of a shape-­ shifter—a reputation that would make him the number 1 male box-office attraction in Hollywood by the late 1920s and world-famous for roles like Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, also directed by Worsley in 1923, and The Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. The Penalty now stands as a monument to Chaney’s talent and established him as a star, “his fame enhanced immeasurably by the martyr-like spectacle of his punishing disguises” (Skal 65). At the time of the film’s release, Variety wrote, “It is needless to say that the picture is Chaney more than anyone else” (qtd. in Blake 80). Studying The Penalty as a literary-to-film adaptation necessarily involves considering Chaney’s presence and the emotional intensity he brings to the Blizzard character as more than just a man on a revenge quest or in need of redemption. Chaney’s performance brings emotional nuance to the character, enlarging the story’s depth in part because the revenge plot is not simply about the amputation but is also about how the doctors’ cover-up affected Blizzard’s social mobility: he literally had his legs cut out from under him. This results in an amputation narrative that initially focuses on Blizzard’s lack of legs while also considering how one’s body affects social stratification—disabled, gendered, or otherwise—and the way other normate main characters, namely Barbara and Dr. Ferris, address the situation. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson defines “normate” as “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). “Disability,” then, is a cultural construct: disability is not about what bodies can and cannot do, or should or should not look like, but rather the product of “cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (6). In The Penalty, the Ferrises feel guilty about the amputation itself but not the cover-up, which indicts upper-class notions of self-preservation at all costs. Blizzard’s revenge becomes only partially

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based on the unnecessary amputation of his two legs, which he seems content to live or die without at the end of the film after Dr. Ferris successfully operates on Blizzard’s brain injury, the real source of his killer instinct. This suggests that throughout the narrative, Blizzard is not acting in response simply to amputation as a loss, but rather to a brain malfunction that, depending on how one views it, either prevented him from accepting his place as a disabled citizen or led him to becoming an Obsessive Avenger. The unnecessary amputation, therefore, acts as the inciting incident in the film that sets the narrative in motion but becomes a way to illustrate bodily mastery due to amputation, an amputation that, ultimately, did not cause Blizzard’s vengeful mentality. Story structure alterations from the novel to the film coupled with The Penalty’s cinematography are key to creating a character who defies easy categorization and a story that complicates how audiences read Blizzard, the disabled character Chaney plays. By shifting the novel’s focus from Barbara Ferris’s romances to Blizzard’s tragedy, Worsley’s film creates a world where the double-amputee Blizzard is set up initially as a victim who later becomes a revenge-seeking villain. Blizzard elicits audience sympathy, if not empathy, because spectators first see him as an innocent child being wronged by normate adults, which allows for a more complex relationship between the disabled, murderous adult Blizzard and the audience that watches him. In his book The Cinema of Isolation, Martin F. Norden categorizes The Penalty as an early Obsessive Avenger movie (82), and certainly Blizzard’s obsession with avenging the removal of his legs drives the film’s narrative. Blizzard also fits into the “criminal genius” character type who “wants revenge on the world, presumably the able-bodied world” often used in cinematic representations of disability (Longmore 133). However, changes made during the adaptation process normalize Blizzard, who is both protagonist and gangster, and his body in the cinematic space. Blizzard’s visual framing standardizes his body and stature onscreen, affecting how audiences read and interact with his disabled physique. The film also implicates the doctors involved, thus obfuscating deference to people in privileged positions and the notion of villainy itself. These changes illustrate Blizzard’s perspective and compulsion for revenge, because the film makes clear that the doctors wronged him as a child. Furthermore, connecting Blizzard to the women in the film via their allegiances through art creation and general agency destabilizes normate patriarchy. Combining each of these elements results in a rich text ripe for close reading that showcases how the adaptation process can broaden

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possible interpretations of a story and character that subvert easy categorization. Written early in Morris’s career, the novel The Penalty follows the intertwining lives of socialite-sculptor Barbara Ferris, her father Dr. Ferris, her financially troubled lover Wilmot Allen, and her unexpected muse, Blizzard, a double amputee. Blizzard “was but half a man, who stood upon the six-inch stubs of what had once been a pair of legs. But what nature could do for what was left of him nature had done. He had the neck, the arms, and the torso of a Hercules” (chap. 6). Throughout the novel, he is also described as devilish or animalistic, “a gutter-dog, a gargoyle” (chap. 13), as reflected in the bust of Satan that Barbara makes in his likeness. Unlike the film, the book situates the reader to see Blizzard as a grotesque con artist. Blizzard is described as “a legless man who sat in the sun by a hand-organ on which were displayed for sale a few pairs of shoe-laces and, to excite charity, a battered (and empty) tin cup” (chap. 1). These accouterments accompany Blizzard throughout the book when he is in public, although they do not provide him with a primary source of income. He is a beggar for appearances only, which undermines his integrity. Blizzard was not born this way, however. As a child, an accident crushed his legs, and an exhausted doctor, the young Dr. Ferris, amputated them unnecessarily in haste. Although another doctor discovered the error, a conversation Blizzard overhears, the doctors lie to Blizzard’s parents to save Dr. Ferris’s burgeoning career. Blizzard’s life subsequently becomes one of underworld dealings, murder, robberies, and revenge plots not only to reclaim legs but also to avenge the lie. The plot of the book is nevertheless set up to be something of a love triangle between Barbara, Allen, and Blizzard, who are all introduced within the first chapter. The novel focuses on Barbara’s inability, or lack of desire, to commit to a man, and her artistic ambitions are often criticized, as they hinder her settling down with Allen, a financially troubled socialite who occasionally works for Blizzard. Tension between Barbara, her father, and Allen increases when she decides to create a bust of Satan before the fall, for which she hires Blizzard to model. She initially is unaware of his connection to her father; Blizzard, however, has been watching the Ferris family for years. The already convoluted book complicates things with another love interest for Barbara—Harry West, who is Blizzard’s son. Additionally, the novel reveals that Bubbles, Barbara’s boy servant, is also Blizzard’s son and West’s half-brother. West is eliminated entirely in the film adaptation, and Bubbles’s character is simplified—his role as helpmate

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maintained but his relationship to Blizzard removed. In the novel, these characters speak to Blizzard’s virility and cruelty—the two sons are products of Blizzard’s relationships with, and subsequent torture of, women— yet they also suggest Barbara’s attraction to Blizzard may be more prurient, as she is charmed by Blizzard’s handsome and charismatic biological son. Through their shared knowledge of art, Blizzard and Barbara become friends, though he pines for something more. When his romantic gestures are laughed at, he threatens Barbara and attempts to dupe Dr. Ferris into cutting off Allen’s legs and reattaching them to his own. As in the film, once Blizzard is unconscious, Dr. Ferris instead operates on Blizzard’s brain, curing his real childhood injury so that when Blizzard awakens, he disassembles his criminal connections, and everyone lives happily ever after. The film version of The Penalty, on the other hand, opens with Blizzard’s surgery and cover-up, a scene that does not enter the novel until chap. 15. The first expository intertitle of the silent film identifies Blizzard, not yet introduced visually, as “A victim of the city traffic” (emphasis added). Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary) enters into his “first serious case.” The young Blizzard appears lying in bed via a quick medium shot taken from a lower height, so although the viewer is not at eye-level with the unconscious child, the viewer also is not looking down on him. Dr. Ferris, however, does look down on him with a scowl. Another doctor enters, and when the two look at Blizzard, he is shot from a higher angle, creating something of a point-of-view shot of the doctors looking down on the victim. Only then does an intertitle explain that Dr. Ferris has already amputated both of Blizzard’s legs. These shots immediately set up the relationship between Blizzard and the doctors: he is lower than they are, and yet the audience is on his level. The audience’s relationship with Blizzard quickly deepens as the elder doctor notes the child has a contusion at the base of his skull and did not need the double amputation. Blizzard listens as the doctors lie to his parents. Blizzard tries unsuccessfully to convince his parents of the truth, and the world closes in on him via an iris shot. Norden explains that films featuring disabled characters from 1912 to the late 1920s primarily relied on two endings: curing the disabled character and returning him to society—or killing him. Curability films “generally followed the mainstream psychological beliefs of the time, in that the characters once cured were basically the same as they had been before the disabling incident” (72). These films tended to isolate disabled characters both from normate characters and from each other. The scene described above follows the “cinema of isolation,” as Blizzard and the doctors never

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share the same screen space except during one wide shot in which Blizzard’s face is imperceptible. Only his father, whom we later learn is of the upper class, crosses back and forth between these two spaces. The camera also portrays young Blizzard’s contemplation of the doctor’s conversation in an iris shot to focus attention on his reaction while simultaneously minimizing his presence in the frame and his control over his world. This furthers the isolating effect, as does the fact that he is physically in a different room than the doctors. Norden refers to this structure as a “divide-and-quarantine approach to controlling minorities” (2), and the cinematic apparatus underscores the film’s themes of vulnerability, seclusion, and victimization—themes that inform the rest of the film, although the staging of the adult Blizzard illustrates how he has flipped his situation to create a social environment suited for him. The film’s plot order allows the audience to understand Blizzard, because although he is a flawed character later in the film, he is presented initially as a sympathetic child and even provided with an excuse for his adult behavior—his unaddressed brain injury. This story restructuring emphasizes the surgery as crucial to Blizzard’s motivation. Since the film does not introduce Barbara and Allen until thirty minutes in, the focus is fully on Blizzard’s character arc. The film establishes him as a wronged character while explaining the place from which his evil nature stems, which allows the audience to comprehend why he behaves as he does even if his actions are not necessarily excusable. Although The Penalty film incorporates both of Norden’s proposed endings—it cures Blizzard only to kill him—when the film isolates him, it tends to create similarities between other characters and him. Blizzard also is not isolated throughout. Instead, many of his scenes put him at the center of action and balance him with other characters on screen. The cinematography reinforces Blizzard’s centrality to this world by creating framing to suit him, while the normate characters that surround him are often staged at levels that diminish the distinctions between their body types. This complicates how elements of the “cinema of isolation” work in this film, and to what effect. The adult Blizzard is introduced in the film twenty-seven years after the surgery as “Blizzard ~~ Lord and Master of the underworld,” a man with so much power that other people commit murders for him. When the audience first sees the adult Blizzard, he stands against a pole outside his house. The camera is placed at a lower height so his eye level is approximately at the same screen level it would be were his legs not amputated at the knees. When one of his lackeys, Frisco Pete (James Mason), enters, the

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shot widens to include both characters, but Blizzard stands center frame, keeping him central to the action. This immediately subverts the cinema of isolation tropes, because the film presents a world where normates, and the camera, do not look down on Blizzard as they do both in the opening sequence of the film and in the novel, where he is characterized throughout as “beneath” people, literally and figuratively: “he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf, beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall” (chap. 2). In the film, the audience looks at him on his level, and his eyeline is at a typical height for Hollywood films, near the top of the frame. Blizzard’s control even extends to how characters move through his space in early scenes. He opens the door for Frisco Pete’s escape before convincing the police that Pete is nowhere to be found. Notably, the only shot in which the camera looks down on Blizzard is the point-of-view shot of the policeman talking with him. This aligns audiences with the perspective of the authority figure momentarily, but this is not a dominant perspective throughout the film. In fact, this viewpoint mirrors that of the doctors’ in the first scene, which connects the policeman with the doctors: both potentially represent suspect authority. Since the audience spends much more time seeing Blizzard’s world on his level, the idea that audiences are meant to observe as an authoritarian figure (the police, the doctors) is displaced by the cinematography. Parallels between Blizzard and other characters are established early in the film, including Rose (Ethel Grey Terry), a secret service operative assigned to spy on Blizzard. Rose is in both versions of The Penalty, but her role is expanded in the film and she enters the story much earlier, to some extent displacing the Barbara Ferris character, who enters considerably later in the film. In the novel, Rose appears only a few times to illustrate Blizzard’s brutality, though she falls in love with him anyway. The film gives Rose more agency and visibility; she is a smart career gal whose bosses trust her with a difficult assignment. Rose’s introduction in the film occurs just after Blizzard’s and via a scene in which her boss, Lichtenstein (Milton Ross), gives her the rundown on her nemesis. Images of Lichtenstein and Rose are intercut with shots of Blizzard and his lackeys. This links Blizzard to what is being said about him—he is a “cripple from hell” and head of a “criminal machine”—but the two groups are shot in essentially the same way, putting them on similar visual footing. When the audience learns Frisco Pete committed murder for Blizzard, Frisco Pete is isolated in the frame, not Blizzard, who sits with a pickpocket.1 In fact, Blizzard is placed slightly higher than the others in these two-shots.

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Although Blizzard is established as an orchestrator of murder and a generally cruel man, the matched framing between the criminals and investigators establishes Rose and Blizzard on opposite but equally weighted sides of a scale. The audience can see him as monstrous in action, but he is not framed as a monster. Rose’s introduction portends her position as a complicated, if not compromised, authority figure. She eventually falls in love with Blizzard after seeing the world from literally below his level when she operates his piano pedals for him. This theoretically aligns her with how Blizzard sees the world (although the audience is never put in this lower-angle position), and it also connects the two of them via art. Rose knows music and adeptly pedals for Blizzard while he plays, elevating her status from servant to musical accompanist. Furthermore, although she exhibits a love for Blizzard akin to Stockholm Syndrome, she also investigates his lair and communicates with the police. In other words, Rose and Blizzard share a duality of spirit. She is threatened by him, but via her enlarged role, he sees her as indispensable, especially when it comes to musical timing, creating a synergy between their relationship and his with Barbara, who is introduced later than Rose in the film. Blizzard’s relationships with these women provide a counterpoint to how the male doctors undermine each of these characters, and their associations are based to some extent on the characters’ connection to, and understanding of, art. Rose’s musicality complements Blizzard’s in a way that helps balance their relationship despite his violent and unpredictable demeanor. Part of Blizzard’s duality lies in how proficient he is at using his entire body to spy, play music, travel around town, or command space. In keeping with the novel’s focus on Blizzard’s strength, agility, and virility, the film features several scenes highlighting Chaney’s ability to perform tasks in the manner Blizzard would have. Most of these scenes have little to do with Blizzard’s character other than illustrating bodily mastery, though they also showcase Chaney’s talents. In one scene, Chaney climbs the stairs, a move taken directly from the novel: His boarding of a street-car was a feat of pure gymnastics, swift and virile; so, too, was his ascending or descending of a flight of steps, or the high platform on which he was to pose. Incessant practice, added to natural skill and balance, enabled him to accomplish, without legs, feats which might have balked a man with a capable and energetic pair of them. He could travel upon his crutches for the length of a city block almost as fast as the

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average man can run, and if it came to climbing a rope or a rain-duct he was more ape than human. In his own dwelling he had for his own use, instead of the laborious stairs needed by its other inmates, a system of knotted ropes by which he could ascend from cellar to attic, and polished poles by whose aid he could accomplish the most lightning-like descending slides. (chap. 6)

Elsewhere in the film, Blizzard utilizes a pole to descend to a different level of his house, scales a wall of pegs designed for spying on his employees, and climbs a trick fireplace via chains representing the knotted ropes described above. Each feat showcases Chaney’s strength, commitment to acting craft, and chameleon-like ability to embody his roles, and although the description likens Blizzard to an animal, these acts also showcase his dexterity, potency, and muscle. Blizzard remains a threat to normates in part because he so adeptly uses what they perceive as a disabled body. Utilizing Thomas Elsaesser’s idea of “negative performativity” and applying it to another of Chaney’s disabled film characters, Alonso the Armless in Tod Browning’s 1927 film The Unknown, Karen Randell suggests: If the absence of signs of trauma are what alerts the audience to its very presence, then there must be a performed display of this absence present in the narrative. If there is a performance in which the absence is made apparent, I would suggest that trauma is displaced within the narrative structure of the film to make such a gap possible. (217)

Furthermore, Randell says an “overperformance” or “excess” exists in Chaney’s characters due to his use of things like prosthetic devices and actual physical pain, which “presents a paradoxical situation in which the absence is marked by its over-presence [and] the negative performance of trauma is marked by excess” (217). In keeping with this notion of “negative performativity,” Blizzard’s disability is made most noticeable in the film via his dexterity and “excessive” acts. By normalizing Chaney’s body via the framing of scenes, Chaney the actor performs disability. Yet through this performance, the character Blizzard in no way lacks able-bodiedness, complicating how audiences perceive him. Chaney preferred practical effects, and he would consult source material, including observing people with the disabilities he needed to embody, for nuanced insight into how a character should look and move (Blake, Man Behind, 80). Known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” due to his skills in makeup artistry, he created a leather harness to strap his legs to his

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body to portray Blizzard, and with the help of knee guards and crutches, he walked on his knees for the role. Chaney is said to have been drawn to disabled characters because of his upbringing. His parents were deaf, so he learned to pantomime as a child, which translated well to silent film acting. Chaney’s childhood also made him empathetic to non-normate people, which informed his ability to humanize a wide range of unusual characters, including criminals. Jeanine Basinger explains: He seemed to identify deeply with characters who were outsiders and loners. No matter how twisted mentally or physically these characters were—either human or monster—he played them as having recognizable emotions. He impersonated wicked people in the most human way possible, so the audience could understand their evil, realize where it came from, and even sympathize with it if they chose to. He brought understanding and tolerance to these outsiders, and a conviction that there was another side to their lives beneath the obviously ugly surface. (342)

By taking on Blizzard’s physique, Chaney’s performance adds to Blizzard’s emotional depth. Of The Penalty, Michael Blake writes, “This role is typical of the ones Lon would essay throughout this period […]. Despite playing the heavy, Lon made his characters realistic, not stereotypical. He used subtle gestures to give his parts depth and texture” (A Thousand Faces 31–32). Robert Stam explains that “the cinema offers possibilities of disunity and disjunction not immediately available” to novels because “the cinematic character is an uncanny amalgam of photogenie, body movement, acting style, and grain of voice, all amplified and molded by lighting, mise-en-scène, and music” (60). Since films involve both characters and performers (Stam notes that actors may bring “a kind of baggage” to their films), this allows “for possibilities of interplay and contradiction denied a purely verbal medium” (60). The “baggage” Chaney brings to Blizzard allows audiences to see him as a real person rather than just a depraved caricature of a disabled man. As Stam suggests, the veracity of Chaney’s performance comes through via his physical commitment to the role, and Blake speculates that Blizzard’s emotional confliction was reinforced by the fact that Chaney was physically in pain during this production (Man Behind 81). Ronald Bergan quotes Chaney as saying, “Every moment before the camera [while making The Penalty] was one of excruciating agony, yet I must not let it show in my face. I had to be the character I was portraying, and disregard the pain” (14). In discussing The

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Unknown, Randell also suggests a blurring of character and actor, an “agony” that is “doubly coded” because “Chaney’s performance of pain” is the result of Chaney incorporating his own pain into his character and thus, “the two are inextricably linked in this screen moment” (219). This, along with his personal biography, according to Randell, creates a situation in which Chaney’s characters “demand pathos, requiring the audience to sympathize with the character, not just to shrink back in horror” (220), perhaps elucidating a different form of “negative performativity” via the bodily excess of Chaney’s genuine pain. Furthermore, Chaney wanted people to feel deeply for the characters he portrayed: “When you see a deformed, wretched creature, you instinctively shrink from him. […] But what do you know of him, really? If I have given one person a feeling of brotherly love, of sympathy and understanding for the downtrodden creatures of the earth, I feel well repaid for all I went through” (qtd. in Bergan 14).2 Certainly Blizzard is meant to oscillate between extreme anger and remorse, but it is possible that something beyond Chaney’s talent—actual physical pain—permeates this character and ends up reading as more sympathetic than characters like Frisco Pete. Felt even before the audience sees him, Blizzard’s merciless power affects everyone. When Blizzard enters a workroom of his female hat-­ makers, he stands on their worktable among them, hits one woman, and pulls her up by her hair. He threatens them before leaving to visit a woman kept locked in a separate room. Although she does not appear fearful of him, Chaney’s performance is noteworthy: he stretches his fingers before his hands touch her body. This is not an embrace of love but rather that of a monster catching his prey. He lowers her to work the pedals on his piano, which he otherwise skillfully plays. His playing allows him to dream of walking “as men walk,” being “master of a city,” and retaliating for his “mangled years,” but while lost in the daydreams of musical creation, he is overtaken by his desire for vengeance—a juxtaposition seen throughout both film and novel. Blizzard is humanized by the arts, but they are closely linked to his deviltry. His connection to—and deep understanding of—the arts reflects his backstory as an upper-class child prior to his surgery. Yet this connection feeds his rage as well. Initially pedaling the piano seems illustrative of a form of abuse, though Rose becomes his musical partner later in the film, just as he becomes something of a co-creator of Barbara’s bust of Satan. This scene, however, ends with Blizzard grabbing and threatening the woman before the camera closes in on his face, isolated in his yearning for revenge. While the film relies on elements of the cinema

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of isolation and Obsessive Avenger tropes at certain times, as it does here, the film also counteracts most of these interactions via parallel scenes later in the film, which reflect Blizzard’s two competing minds. He is never entirely likable or relatable, and yet he is not totally monstrous either. This conflict can be seen throughout in Blizzard’s sexuality as well, as The Penalty does not shy away from sexual innuendo. Paul K.  Longmore explains, “people with various disabilities are often perceived as sexually deviant and even dangerous, asexual, or sexually incapacitated either physically or emotionally” (141). Both the film and the novel imply that Blizzard is perhaps more sexually active than one might expect from a double-amputee, and this aligns him with “monster” characters. Yet monsters “menace beautiful women who would ordinarily reject them” (141), and though some of the women Blizzard preys on would fall into this category, both Rose and Barbara express desire for him in either the film or the novel. Thus, although there is often an undertone of sexual danger, there is also sexual longing. It is only at this point in the film that Barbara and Allen are introduced, yet here Allen is Dr. Ferris’s younger assistant. His backstory and dealings with the underworld have been entirely eliminated so that, unlike both Dr. Ferris and Blizzard, he remains untarnished. Barbara, Allen, and Dr. Ferris are introduced in her sculpting studio, where the men voice reservations about her career. She is not visually isolated, and yet her father and her love interest both express their desires for her to abandon her ambitions, isolating her in a patriarchal world. This sets the stage for parallels between Barbara and Blizzard’s relationship and his relationship with Rose. Yet Barbara’s introduction to Blizzard lends itself most to the idea of exploitation, as she is repulsed by Blizzard’s body, though their meeting is by his design. Responding to an advertisement stating, “If you think you look like Satan,” Blizzard applies to be her model. When Blizzard arrives, Bubbles (Edouard Trebaol), a child servant, answers Barbara’s studio door, visually equating Blizzard and the boy, because their stature is so alike. Although reverse shots of Barbara and Blizzard initially focus on their faces from a similar eye level, within moments of opening the door, the film cuts to a point-of-view shot of just Blizzard’s half-legs from Barbara’s perspective. Barbara winces until Blizzard looks down, chuckles, and says he will pose for her, “If there is enough of me.” This is the first and only time the film blatantly isolates Blizzard’s disability. Barbara’s repulsed response is reinforced when Bubbles and she enter a different room, and Bubbles says, “Gawd look at that face.” Another point-of-view

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shot mimics Barbara’s perspective as she peers through a cracked door at Blizzard, now in profile, grimacing, aligning spectators with Barbara’s and Bubbles’s judgmental gazes. This differs from how Blizzard and Barbara meet in the book, which is in public, though similar in that she initially hesitates: “he had a tortured look,” but his face is “terribly moving” because she sees “not a human being, but an inspiration” (chap. 7). This quickly changes as she notices his legs and “felt throughout her whole being a cold gushing of horror and revolt,” which hurts Blizzard, who “winced as beneath a shocking blow between the eyes” (chap. 7) rather than snickering as he does in the film. The pair recovers, and she offers him the job. However, her inversion of reactions is important, because in the book, she is driven by her own art to see first the inspiration and his disfigurement second. By flip-flopping this in the movie, the film highlights Blizzard’s anomalous body in a way that it has not yet (thus far, it has only been illustrated via acts of strength) while creating distance between Barbara and him by indicating that, although Blizzard is something of an equal in other areas of his life where people (and the audience) do not stare at him, he is now in a space where he does not fit. In his book Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers explains that aesthetics “has always stressed that feelings produced in bodies by other bodies are involuntary, as if they represented a form of unconscious communication between bodies” (25). Furthermore, “the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testament to the power of otherness” (25). The visual treatment of this story accounts for a stronger reaction from Barbara upon first seeing Blizzard, because it’s easier to show this shock in film than to elicit it in print. The book mentions that she “masters” her “repugnance,” which speaks to the way upper-class women were meant to conceal disgust to maintain pleasantries. This affect becomes something of a blind spot to her in both versions of the story, because she cannot tell when Blizzard’s emotions are changing from respectable to evil. Indeed, she deliberately blinds herself to what is really happening. In a scene where Dr. Ferris walks in on Barbara and others sculpting a nude model, the book explains, “He had left only the good sense and the good manners not to make a scene” (chap. 7). This same impulse, one passed down from her father, makes Barbara unable or unwilling to see Blizzard’s ulterior motives. Yet Barbara’s initial reaction in the film seems like an overreaction. Since their introduction occurs so late in the film, audiences have already grown accustomed to watching Blizzard adeptly use his body. Thus, although the moment calls attention

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to Blizzard’s body in a way the film has not prior to this scene, it also foregrounds the overreaction society can have to disability. These visual inequalities dissipate as Barbara and Blizzard begin working together. When she sculpts, he is lifted so the camera is at eye level of both characters, which inverts how Rose is lowered to pedal for him. Barbara also becomes interested in him personally the more he talks about art. Although Barbara initially does not like Blizzard in the book, she eventually admits to her father that she genuinely respects Blizzard and has grown used to his physique. This change of heart plays out via the visual equivalencies established between Barbara and Blizzard in the film, and even though the Barbara of the novel does not value Blizzard as an art critic, she cherishes him as someone who takes her work seriously. Furthermore, she says several times that she imagines they will stay friends and that she sees Blizzard as a man: Half a man? She was not sure. There was a certain compelling force about him which at times made him seem more of a man to her than all the rest of them put together. “I can’t imagine him in love,” she thought. “It’s really too revolting. But if he was, I can imagine nothing that he would let stand in his way. I wonder if he is married. And if he is I pity her. And yet she could say to other women, ‘My husband is a man,’ and most of the women I know can’t say that.” (chap. 18)

By seeing him as a man, Barbara facilitates a reader response that moves beyond the disqualification of Blizzard based on his body, which Siebers defines as a “symbolic process” that “removes individuals from the ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment” and possibly bodily harm (23). Yet “disqualification is justified through the accusation of mental or physical inferiority based on aesthetic principles” (24). Since both the novel and the film focus on Blizzard and Barbara’s arts-focused conversations, knowledge, and talent, Blizzard is reframed as a more equal human via his relationship with the grotesque bust of Satan. The novel continues emphasizing the visual and social disparities between Blizzard and Barbara primarily (though by including Barbara’s crush on Harry West, Blizzard’s dashing son, it acknowledges that her interest in him is partially carnal), yet his appreciation of her work also propels her clout in the eyes of other men, as her father says, “I wish, my dear […] that I had taken you more seriously in the beginning” (chap. 14). Blizzard’s disability helps break down barriers between men and women, gender

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roles, and social norms, leaving the two characters to have an intellectual relationship based in the arts. Although Blizzard is seen as a sexual character in relationship to women of his own class status in other scenes in the film, and even a threatening one at that, here the lack of returned sexual attention between the characters allows a relationship based on art and aesthetic intellect alone. Blizzard inspires her to do her best work, and only through him can the normate men see her talent. This differs from the dynamics between Blizzard and the other men in Barbara’s life. Initially when Dr. Ferris enters Barbara’s studio space and finds Blizzard there, the framing and staging remains equal. Dr. Ferris recognizes Blizzard immediately, and since Blizzard is on his pedestal, the three are lined up on screen at nearly the same level, including the Satanic bust. Left alone, Blizzard tells Dr. Ferris: “I have followed every step of your career, and you have indeed profited by your early mistakes.” Dr. Ferris bows his head in exactly the same position as the bust of Satan. This visual match aligns Dr. Ferris with Satan before rebalancing the frame, emphasizing his relationship with both Blizzard and villainy. Yet, after the bust is finished and Blizzard knows he will no longer see Barbara, he reaches for her with genuine desire. “When you have finished that, don’t give me up,” he pleads. “I love you, Barbara, with my whole heart and soul.” She winces and breaks into laughter. The film isolates the two of them—Blizzard in close-up as his pleading turns to despair, while Barbara moves away from the camera, physically recoiling from Blizzard. He lunges at her, falls to the floor, and screams at her before pulling himself up, looking more monstrous than ever. He chases her, and for the first time, he looks not only physically smaller than her but also completely out of place. Blizzard commands the frame, but he no longer controls it, reestablishing the dynamics of their initial meeting momentarily. A title card states: “almost immediately he knew that he had blundered.” Still in close­up, Blizzard shrinks and says, “I am the unhappiest beast in the world.” Although he loves Barbara, he also needs to manipulate her in order to force her father to perform surgery on his legs.3 To regain her sympathy, he refers to himself as a beast—lower than a man, and something she might see him as in this moment. Pity for Blizzard is not the norm for the film, and even here the audience is not asked to engage in this emotion. Allen interrupts the exchange, but Blizzard, already back in control, rests his arm near the sculpture. Blizzard and Satan look alike and share the frame, bringing full circle the previous comparison between Dr. Ferris, Satan, and Blizzard, before Allen brings Blizzard his crutches, the prop

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that reflects how Dr. Ferris turned Blizzard into Satan himself. Blizzard says to Barbara, “Forgive me for having dared to lift my thoughts to you,” knowing she will forgive him, as she has been trained to do. In this moment, however, Chaney quickly glances upward to see if the trick is working. This clues the audience into his insincerity in a way that she cannot read, shifting the audience to be his in-group. A title card follows: “After a night of jealous fury, the Beast takes action.” The capitalization of “Beast” is notable, because what was, just moments earlier, a word Blizzard used to tear himself down quickly becomes a proper noun naming him. Meanwhile, Allen declares: “That monster ought to be chloroformed and put out of the way.” Since this is a silent film, all dialogue is read by the audience, and the emphasis on Beast and monster in the onscreen text dehumanizes Blizzard as much as anything else in the film. While Barbara initially stared at individual sections of his body, Allen suggests not only that Blizzard is inhuman, but also that he should be killed. Barbara defends Blizzard, but this scene reaffirms the distastefulness of doctors, young and old, even as they are presented as upstanding people, and it indicates that Blizzard is most beastly and out of place in this upper-class world. Blizzard fits better in the underworld, populated by dancing girls, drug addicts, and other misfits, reinforcing the relationship between disability and monstrosity and illustrating how society segregates disabled people: “when bodies produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they also invite judgments about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human community. People thought to […] produce unusual levels of pleasure and pain in other bodies are among the bodies most discriminated against,” including disabled people and sex workers (Siebers 25–26). Yet the shifting perspectives within the scene make it unusual in that the audience is never firmly aligned with one character. Blizzard exists on a spectrum of intellectual monstrosity, perhaps reflected by his physical anomaly, and yet in the space of the artist’s studio, he is valued for his physicality as well. He oscillates between art scholar, model, and criminal. The film, then, interrogates these shifts, and their nature, as well as other characters’ reactions to them, which at times seem equally unhinged if not simply illogical. Blizzard, however, is presented as animalistic in other places in the film, including at the end, which juxtaposes the drug-addicted and violent Frisco Pete with Blizzard. It is no surprise that Frisco Pete shoots the reformed Blizzard at the end of the film because Frisco Pete’s addiction makes him too shifty to trust anyone who has gone clean. It is noteworthy that Frisco Pete shoots Blizzard from behind a caged window used earlier

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in the film to show both Blizzard and Rose’s emotional entrapment. In an inversion of those shots, Frisco Pete watches Blizzard and Rose through the window from above Blizzard’s surveillance spot, the peg wall, fully embodying an animal in a cage. As Blizzard and Rose settle into their piano-playing postures, Frisco Pete shoots Blizzard in the back. Not only has the more normate character become the animal, but this also inverts the cinema of isolation because Blizzard dies embraced by a loved one while bringing together the Obsessive Avenger and curability narratives. Blizzard’s complexity ultimately means he cannot be saved, and yet he is not so different from others in the story. Later Chaney films settle into a pattern of monstrosity or outsider status and unfulfilled romantic desire, as seen in The Penalty via his longing for Barbara, but the interaction with both romantic models in this film—being both rejected and embraced by one or the other women characters—creates a more psychologically complex interaction between audience and narrative. Spectators negotiate their responses to the characters through storylines of romance, duplicity, madness, and revenge, while also visually absorbing what they see in and via the frame, including Blizzard’s agility, disability, monstrosity, and egalitarianism. As characters’ perceptions change of one another, and more than once in both the novel and the film, audience members are encouraged to shift course with the characters, and biases about disabled characters and women’s roles may shift for audiences as well. The barred window is used twice earlier in the film to connect Rose and Blizzard.4 While Blizzard is out, Rose searches the house and finds his secret passageways and a cache of weapons where two men dig a ravine.5 When Blizzard returns, he climbs the peg wall using his upper arm strength and perches on a platform to watch her work. Blizzard looks his most devilish here, as a reverse shot shows him peering through a barred window at the woman. The bars add shadows to his face, making his visage especially contorted and evil. Since this is no one’s perspective in the film, this shot is meant for the discomfort of the audience. Blizzard looks like a monster trapped in a cage, a visual repeated at the end of the film when Frisco Pete shoots Blizzard. Blizzard beckons Rose and immediately puts her under the piano, planning to kill her. As the intensity of the song increases, however, he realizes he can only play so well because of her adeptness with the pedals, and he has a change of heart: “Go back to your work—I can murder anything but music.” In a wide shot, Blizzard slumps at his piano in self-loathing. This isolation reflects Blizzard’s duality— though grim throughout, his monstrosity is controllable, which suggests

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curing him is possible and that humanity lies beneath the beast, evoked through his artistic talents and knowledge. Rose is caged by choice. When she writes to her bosses, she drops her letter to an agent through a barred window. As she does, the cinematography creates a parallel between Blizzard and her that is further established once Blizzard returns and both are shot in close-up iris shots, visually connecting the solitary characters. Opposition between the human and the animalistic also drives Barbara’s interest in Blizzard, though to a different end. Perhaps not unlike the film itself, she desires to capture the contradiction in his face and how society sees him: “the face of a man whom one jury would hang upon the merest suspicion; for whom another would return a verdict of ‘not guilty’ no matter what the nature of his proved crimes” (chap. 8). This reflects the duality of Blizzard’s character but suggests that it does not matter what Blizzard truly is as society will always read him through the lens of pity or monstrosity. Siebers explains, “This is why aesthetic disqualification is […] a political process of concern to us all. An understanding of aesthetics is crucial because it reveals the operative principles of disqualification used in minority oppression” (26). To some extent, then, it also does not matter what causes Blizzard to be vengeful—the brain contusion or the lack of legs—because society would judge him the same way regardless. The novel takes the relationship between bodies and society a step further, creating a kinship between Dr. Ferris’s and his daughter’s interest in physicality that is not in the film, though Dr. Ferris does not appreciate her professional ambitions in either version of The Penalty. Their first argument about Blizzard plants the seed of Dr. Ferris’s guilt. Barbara asks, “Have you never made a mistake of judgment?” to which he explains, “My dear, […] I once made a very terrible mistake of judgment. There isn’t a day of my life altogether free from remorse and regret” (chap. 7). Yet “they resumed together their life of punctilious thoughtfulness and good manners. Dr. Ferris continued to cut up famous bodies for famous fees, while Barbara continued to do what she could to reproduce the bodies of more humble persons” (chap. 7). They both possess a desire to construct or reconstruct bodies to a normative state. Prior to Dr. Ferris’s confession about amputating Blizzard’s legs, Dr. Ferris explains to Barbara that he has been grafting arms from one monkey onto another. Blizzard has been his motivation, and he wants to fix his error. Barbara explains a similar drive:

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The statues in the Metropolitan that have lost their arms and heads and legs. I felt very sorry for them. I was very young and foolish, and I invented a game to play. I’d select a statue that needed an arm, say, and then I’d hunt among the other statues for an arm that would fit, or for a head or whatever else was missing. Through playing that game I got the idea of making whole statues from the beginning and not bothering with fragments. (chap. 15)

His desire to make things whole has been genetically passed along in her desire to do the same, perhaps influenced by Blizzard’s impact on both of them. Dr. Ferris says as much: “Why, Barbs, your ambition is a direct lineal descendant of mine. It was a maimed marble that showed you your life’s work. It was a maimed child that showed me mine” (chap. 15). Here he finally tells her Blizzard’s story, which is much the same in the novel and the film aside from its placement in the narrative arc. Although this discussion does not explicitly take place in the movie, it points to the reason The Penalty can move from an Obsessive Avenger tale to a curability story: normates are trying to right a wrong. Their desire is simply propelled by the avenger who is not “cured” in the way he hopes for, and indeed he has no say over how he is cured. In other words, although Chaney’s presence looms large throughout the film, the shifting perspectives can exist because the normates want to do right by him, if only for absolution for themselves. Ultimately it is in their interest as much as Blizzard’s to cure him. Yet the film also “heals” Barbara by ending in her studio. Barbara, now in furs instead of a smock, has left her profession and married Allen; the bust is “[a]ll that’s left of him—an evil mask of a great soul.” The parting shot is not reflective of a traditional happy ending, however. The bust of Satan sits between Barbara and Allen, implying the sculpture embodies something else or perhaps masks her truth, her ambition, her father’s centrality to the events that occurred, or the symbolic patriarchy that restrains her. Blizzard certainly represents a threat to normative patriarchal structures, especially in his relationships with Rose and Barbara, who both fight for professions in a male-dominated world and have talents that are recognized and discouraged by men other than Blizzard. Upon Rose’s introduction, Lichtenstein says he wishes she were not so good at her job, because he is afraid for her. Characterizing women as surprisingly proficient balances Rose and Barbara’s attempts to upset the male influences within their worlds. The women are characterized as fearless, in part because all of Blizzard’s relationships with women are tinged with abuse. The book suggests Blizzard is a rapist due to his books about obstetrics

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(chap. 6), and he also is said to have cut out Bubbles’s mother’s tongue, perhaps punishing others for the mutilation he endured. Ultimately class divisions save Barbara in the novel. Not only does Blizzard know he cannot merely kidnap her, because she would be missed—“If she were to disappear suddenly […] there would be raised a hue and outcry greater, perhaps, than his utmost powers and resources could check” (chap. 16)— but her status also protects her from the threat of rape, as he admits he is attracted to her and used to taking the women he wants. Rose is also threatened with rape in the book: “She could not sleep. Twice she had heard the legless man pass her door upon his crutches. Each time he had hesitated, and once, or so she thought, he had laid his hand upon the door-knob” (chap. 11). She notes that she may have to risk her “honor” for the assignment. These threats are removed from the film, and although Blizzard borders on violence with both women, the film focuses on their artistic talent and bravery as reasons he cannot harm them. Blizzard values that Rose looks at him without fear, which Barbara also does. The film establishes this idea via framing in which art plays a key role in equalizing the space between Blizzard and Rose, as it does Barbara. When the audience initially sees Rose in Blizzard’s lair, she sits on the floor at the piano. It is not a position of power, but when she stands up, Blizzard says, “You’re a find” with real admiration. The camera stays at Rose’s eye level, not Blizzard’s. This visual rise of Rose suggests the tables may be turning. He notices this: “You aren’t afraid of me—you look me in the eyes.” This sets up the pair to be counterparts based on musical talent, like sculpting equalizes Blizzard and Barbara. Rose has considerably less autonomy in the book. She is never seen actively trying to investigate Blizzard, and she has been working as a hat-maker for Blizzard for five months when he chooses her to become his confidant and promises he will teach her the piano. In the novel, Rose also assumes she will be left to die if Blizzard achieves his plan of marrying Barbara and looting the city (chap. 45). Although in both storylines Blizzard immediately calls for Rose after he is healed, the film allows the couple to form a partnership, and they unravel together as well. Rose becomes Blizzard’s accomplice on his emotional descent. Though he continues threatening to kill her, together they set in motion the surgery that ultimately heals Blizzard. Blizzard traps Allen and convinces Dr. Ferris to come to his lair. Climbing the metal rungs from the secret passageway below his fireplace, Blizzard is framed to give the illusion that he is as wide as the fireplace itself. While Dr. Ferris stands motionless,

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befuddled, Blizzard paces manically, refers to himself as Dr. Ferris’s “victim,” and talks of marrying Barbara while becoming increasingly crazed. As a title card reads, “Give me legs and I will be a model son-in-law,” the film cuts to a flash-forward of Blizzard standing on full legs and leading a group of men out of a bank robbery. This is the second time the audience sees Blizzard as he sees himself in his fantasies, with full legs.6 It passes quickly before Dr. Ferris cons Blizzard into believing he will reattach his legs. Blizzard encourages Dr. Ferris to follow him down the fireplace hatch, and in a parallel to the earlier moment when Chaney gives the audience a knowing look, Dr. Ferris now does the same, bringing full circle the relationship between Blizzard and Dr. Ferris as trapped in the cycle created by the unnecessary amputation decades ago. When the surgery on Blizzard’s brain is complete, Dr. Ferris explains Blizzard has never been “wholly responsible for his acts,” which allows the police to let Blizzard go free. Dr. Ferris now is also rid of his obligation to right his wrong, extending the curability trope to him, as he, too, can return to who he was prior to Blizzard’s amputation. As such, and in keeping with the disability trope that “with the proper attitude one can cope with and conquer any situation or condition, turning it into a positive growth experience” (Longmore 139), Blizzard is free to embrace his artistic and philanthropic tendencies, fall in love, and rejoin society a cured man, though this ending is quickly cut short when Frisco Pete murders him. Although The Penalty reforms Blizzard at the hands of Dr. Ferris, the film’s use of the curability trope is complicated by Blizzard’s murder. His death illustrates Norden’s idea that if disabled characters “strayed from their socially sanctioned roles to become self-reliant action-takers, especially embittered and vengeful ones” they were usually punished with death (106). Although one deft surgery erased Blizzard’s deviant inclinations, it could not erase the collective effects of his actions. (In the novel, he lives.) In making Blizzard more dependent on the goodwill of society, the doctor removed the portion of Blizzard’s brain that allowed him to survive in the underworld, finally resolving the idea that aesthetics should not be the basis for social isolation or perceived evil. Frisco Pete, however, cannot be cured. Regardless of his access to a more normate body that the right medical regiment or sobriety theoretically could heal, he appears not to possess the duality of mind that would suggest a better version of Frisco Pete is possible. He is pure maniac. In contrast, Blizzard fluctuates between Beast and intellectual, criminal and patron. He threatens women and also advocates for their professional and artistic talents in ways the normate

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men do not. Although some of his actions make him a worse man than others in the film, he also at times seems nobler. The choices made while adapting The Penalty from a textual into a visual narrative creates a situation where the aesthetics of disability can be reframed. The adaptation process contributes to Blizzard’s ability to explore a variety of emotions and states of mind, because alterations to the narrative structure situate the audience’s perspective with Blizzard initially, encouraging them to grieve with him before he becomes a vengeful amputee. Moreover, Chaney’s performance, coupled with cinematography that by and large frames Blizzard as a typical man onscreen when it easily could have made Blizzard look smaller, more hideous, and less in control, allows audiences to explore various visual, emotional, and intellectual perspectives. Blizzard’s fluid place in society as a masterful criminal, sophisticated art critic, and disabled man further enables distinctive allegiances with women through art. The culminating result of each of these storylines and cinematic decisions is a filmic adaptation that unsettles simplistic ideas about audience relationships to onscreen disability, and instead encourages shifting perceptions of both the Blizzard character and the myriad worlds that embody him.

Notes 1. Frisco Pete does not exist in the book, though he seems to be based on Blizzard’s pal Kid Shannon. Yet, Kid Shannon does not have Frisco Pete’s drug addiction or violent tendencies, and he remains loyal to Blizzard throughout the novel. 2. It is unclear what original source or interview author Ronald Bergan is quoting here. 3. Something similar transpires between Barbara and Blizzard in the book, though her laughter in the novel is attributed to Blizzard’s misunderstanding; he “mistook the cause of her laughter, so that a kind of hell-born fury shook him, and he rushed at her, his mouth giving out horrible and inarticulate sounds” (chap. 32). 4. The cage imagery stems from a line in the book after Blizzard attacks Barbara. She asks her father if he remembers when their dog, Rose, “went mad, and tried to get at us through the bars of the kennel? Blizzard looked like that—like a mad dog” (chap. 34). She suggests he should be shot, as their dog was. However, the novel does not extend the image to other characters as the film does.

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5. These men reflect a scene in chap. 29 where Bubbles finds two blind, legless men digging under Blizzard’s house. They are nice to Bubbles and speak freely of men who were drowned there, and one woman they helped free, though she drowned anyway because she could not swim. When Blizzard discovered her body, the men were “most skinned alive” (chap. 29), and it is unclear if Blizzard cut off their legs for this act or just keeps the men as workers. Overall, the men are kind, if not simple. They also represent a second tripling of Blizzard’s body. While in the novel both Bubbles and Harry West are Blizzard’s sons, these two men are his physical brethren of a different sort. 6. Earlier in the film, as Blizzard explains his plan to loot the city, the audience sees Blizzard’s fantasy of standing among men and giving orders during the riot. In this dream, his legs are also fully formed.

References Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. Knopf, 2000. Bergan, Ronald. “Warts and All: How Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Faces, Brought a More Human Side to the Movie Monster.” The Guardian, 21 Nov. 2000, p. 14. Blake, Michael F. Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces. Vestal, 1990. ———. A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures. Vestal, 1995. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia, 1997. Lewis, Kevin, and Arnold Lewis. “Include Me Out: Samuel Goldwyn and Joe Godsol.” Film History, vol. 2, 1988, pp. 133–53. Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures.” Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, Temple UP, 2003, pp. 131–46. Morris, Gouverneur. The Penalty. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Ebook. Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. Rutgers, 1994. Randell, Karen. “Masking the Horror of Trauma: The Hysterical Body of Lon Chaney.” Screen, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 216–21. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. U of Michigan P, 2010. Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Revised ed., Faber and Faber, 1993. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, Rutgers, 2000, pp. 54–76. Worsley, Wallace, director. The Penalty. Performances by Lon Chaney, Ethel Grey Terry, and Claire Adams, Goldwyn, 1920.

CHAPTER 9

“The Blunt Remnant of Something Whole”: Living Stumps and Prosthetic Relations in Thomas Bernhard’s Die Billigesser and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America Maren Scheurer The fourth chapter of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America is bluntly called “The Stump.” The novel’s speculative version of historical events, in which Charles Lindbergh, famous aviator and Nazi sympathizer, is elected President of the United States in 1940, is told through the eyes of one of Philip Roth’s many avatars, the boy he might have been during these years of counterfactual history. As the Lindbergh government launches several policies to enforce the assimilation or eradication of Jewish culture, the war against Germany is already underway in the rest of the world. Philip’s cousin Alvin, impatient with the developments at home, joins the Canadian army, is wounded in service, and loses a leg as a consequence of his injury. His is the eponymous “stump” that is, at first, only an object of disgust for eight-year-old Philip. However, since the boy

M. Scheurer (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_9

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has to share a bedroom with his cousin, he has to cope with what, for him, are Alvin’s incomprehensible expressions of anger and grief as well as the disconcerting presence of his maimed body. Eventually, he becomes Alvin’s primary assistant in taking care of his stump. Alvin’s is not the only “shattered” existence (362) Philip encounters throughout the Lindbergh years, however. As the animosity between Jews and Gentiles intensifies, riots break out. During one of these, Seldon, a boy who used to live in the same house as the Roths, loses his mother. Philip, who has inadvertently placed Seldon’s family in harm’s way, has to struggle with his own guilt as orphaned Seldon takes the place of Alvin as Philip’s roommate. The final words of the novel read: “There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, […] I was the prosthesis” (362). Philip, for all his disgust and resistance, ultimately becomes a crucial part in two different rehabilitative—or prosthetic—relationships that shed light on the crucial work of opening up to and mourning disability. Thomas Bernhard’s 1980 novella Die Billigesser (The Cheap-Eaters) offers a radically different image of prosthetic relationships. Bernhard’s protagonist Koller loses his leg after a botched attempt to treat a dog bite—a first hint at the text’s parodic nature. We hear of Koller’s fate from an unnamed friend, who, like Philip, serves as the text’s narrator and as a reluctant relational prosthesis. Unlike Philip, however, the narrator does not engage in actual care work. Koller’s coping strategy consists in denying the embodied nature of his condition and idealizing his disability, which he reads as a necessary step on his way to devoting himself fully to his mind and a crucial expedient in his frantic endeavor to write a work of great scientific and philosophical significance on the topic of physiognomy. The narrator is an important component of Koller’s coping strategy, as an addressee of Koller’s only effort to communicate his findings and as a victim of Koller’s reversal of the hierarchies of ableism: in order to elevate physical impairment to the mental heights Koller wishes to reach, he has to prove the healthy narrator’s inferiority over and over again, up to the point where they become locked in a grotesque power struggle that reveals their underlying antagonism. Bernhard’s bitter struggle for dominance may read like a sardonic reversal of the ultimately benign prosthetic relationships of Roth’s novel. Instead of the nostalgic realism that drives Roth’s novel, Bernhard’s text operates with ironic and grotesque inflections as well as a type of frantic narration that is closer to Roth’s own texts of the 1970s and 1980s than his late alternate history. Nevertheless, what both texts have in common,

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despite their different tonalities, is their emphasis on the relationality of disability. As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have pointed out, disability in literature tends to be used and read as “a stock feature of characterization” and “a metaphorical signifier of social and individual collapse” (47), but it is seldom explored “as an experience of social or political dimensions” (48). This, as we will see, is also true for the reception of Roth’s and Bernhard’s texts. What I wish to highlight even beyond Mitchell’s and Snyder’s admonition to pay attention to the material, social, and political implications of disability, is how these texts may be read in terms of the relationships forged and formed by disability. While it has often been noted that Philip plays a crucial role in Alvin’s rehabilitation or that Koller exploits the narrator’s weakness, little attention has been paid to these dyadic processes in light of the experience of disability itself and regarding their implications for a relational understanding of disability. In this sense, the metaphorical dimension Roth’s novel invites us to enter when it tells us that Philip “was the prosthesis” (362) also forces us to acknowledge the quite literal significance of what caring for and being cared for, and serving as, or needing, a prosthesis entails within a relationship between a person with an impairment and one without. In other words, what my reading will attempt is to open a space between disability as a metaphorical signifier and disability as an experience of relational dimensions. These relational dimensions are arguably central to understanding disability. After all, disability as a concept relies fundamentally on a relational dynamic in which the other is recognized and made as Other, as not able, in an interpersonal and more widely social environment (Hall 21).1 Erving Goffman’s foundational 1963 study, for instance, locates the creation of stigma in “the interaction between a person and their social context, in the relationship between the stigmatiser and the stigmatised” (Hall 22). The terms “interaction” and “relationship” are indeed crucial because their importance reaches beyond the construction of disability: relationships are the critical nodes in which disability is experienced, created, expressed, read, and interpreted; and they are an important nexus in which social, political, individual, and metaphorical dimensions of disability are played out. Expanding Goffman’s theory, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has more closely examined the relationship between the normate, “the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries” (Extraordinary Bodies 8),2 and the “disabled person”:

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The interaction is usually strained because the nondisabled person may feel fear, pity, fascination, repulsion, or merely surprise, none of which is expressible according to social protocol. Besides the discomforting dissonance between experienced and expressed reaction, a nondisabled person often does not know how to act toward a disabled person […]. Perhaps most destructive to the potential for continuing relations is the normate’s frequent assumption that a disability cancels out other qualities, reducing the complex person to a single attribute. This uncertainty and discord make the encounter especially stressful for the nondisabled person unaccustomed to disabled people. The disabled person may be anxious about whether the encounter will be too uncomfortable for either of them to sustain and may feel the ever-present threat of rejection. Even though disability threatens to snap the slender thread of sociability, most physically disabled people are skilled enough in these encounters to repair the fabric of the relations so that it can continue. (Extraordinary Bodies 12–13)

I would like to emphasize two aspects in Garland-Thomson’s remarkable description: first, she claims that the encounter is as, or perhaps even more, stressful for the non-disabled person; and second, she emphasizes the skills  of people with disabilities at managing these relationships, to an extent that their position in this relationship and their managing skills become crucial components of what it means to be disabled: “Those of us with disabilities are supplicants and minstrels, striving to create valued representations of ourselves in our relations with the nondisabled majority” (13). In returning agency to people with disabilities, Garland-Thomson offers us an understanding of relationality and disability that is not exclusively focused on discrimination or stigmatization. It alerts us to a complex dynamic in which, in light of cultural constructions and social taboos,  two  people, disabled and non-disabled, engage in mutual constructions and communications, in which both have power and in which both have anxieties that can be resolved with mutual benefit or build up into opposition. Literary texts are prone to stage these confrontations, especially when they are focalized through first-person narrators whose mentalization of these encounters is delivered to the reader’s inspection. Narratives of amputation tend to focus a particularly sharp lens on these relational dynamics because, as Garland-Thomson adds, it is precisely their new communicative role, “us[ing] charm, intimidation, ardor, deference, humor, or entertainment to relieve nondisabled people of their discomfort,” that “many newly disabled people can neither do nor accept; it is a subtle part of adjustment and often the most difficult” (13). In staging

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resistance and adjustment to new relational dynamics, literary engagements with the consequences of amputation offer insightful analyses of disability as a relational experience, in which we, as readers, are often made a participant in the experience, regardless of whether we identify with the normate or the disabled perspective. In this sense, I propose to read Bernhard’s and Roth’s different texts as provocations to our understanding of the relational dimensions of disability. Through a non-disabled, normate perspective, they highlight fascination and repulsion, resistance, rejection, and rehabilitation in prosthetic relations. Following Garland-Thomson’s emphasis on the complexity of social relations in the context of disability, my aim in this chapter is to read these social relations not just as disabling but also as enabling, and to draw out new narratives about amputation involving love, mourning, and interdependence to challenge one-sided notions of (dis)ability through relationality. In their own ways, Bernhard’s and Roth’s texts sketch what Adam Phillips has called “new styles of relating” (144) to promote rethinking the relationality of disability through metaphor and the relational act of reading.

“The Higher State of Crippledom” Disability pervades Thomas Bernhard’s work. From the legless personnel of Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris, 1970) to variously disabled characters in other plays, stories, and novels like Verstörung (Gargoyles, 1967), Kalkwerk (The Lime Works, 1970), and Korrektur (Correction, 1975), to the themes of sickness and impairment throughout his autobiographical works (Part 175–76), Bernhard is fundamentally concerned with the impact of disability on personal vision, intellectuality, and relationality. Die Billigesser is possibly one of the most extensive explorations of these themes. Like many other Bernhard protagonists (such as Konrad in Kalkwerk or Rudolf in Beton [Concrete, 1982]), Koller works on a scientific study that will not get finished, a study of great dimensions and purported significance, which is closely related to his impaired health and questionable state of mind. As such, he has been read both as the epitome of the sick and (therefore) genial “person of the mind” (“Geistesmenschen”; Anz)3 and as a caricature thereof (Marquardt 164)—“Koller,” taken literally, means “tantrum,” or “rage.” The starting point of the text, which is only revealed at the end of the second third, is the unnamed narrator’s unexpected running into his

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former schoolmate Koller. Koller, who has been working on his study for almost two decades, wishes to explain to the narrator “the central point of his work on physiognomy” (88), and despite his dislike of the restaurant, he joins the narrator for dinner at the “Auge Gottes” (“God’s Eye”) to expound his theories to him. The entire text is the narrator’s retrospective attempt to explain Koller and his thinking: “And the effort I entertain here can in turn only consist in remembering his remembrances thereof, implying his implications” (40).4 This work of remembrance, however, is not straightforward narration, but a convoluted, repetitive network of ideas the narrator recalls Koller to have uttered as well as the narrator’s interpretation of Koller’s intellectual edifice and his evaluation of their relationship. In typically Bernhardian fashion, the text is thus a recorded monologue within a monologue, punctured throughout by markers of such reported speech and thought. Like Philip in The Plot Against America, the narrator tries to come to terms with the inexpressible impression the amputated Other has made on him, but even more so than in Plot, we have to be wary of what the narrator and Koller hold up as “fact.” Koller has lost his left leg due to a “fortunate as well as unfortunate dog bite” (15), and more so, as he thinks, due to the fault of his doctors. The ambiguity here is characteristic of Koller, who sees the loss of his leg not just as his “life’s misfortune,” as the narrator would like to call it, but as his “life’s fortune” (15),5 because it has ultimately led him to the discovery of the physiognomy of the cheap-eaters (“Billigesser”), which would form the basis of the scientific study that has occupied him for the past sixteen years (17). Koller believes that the inactivity his disability brought upon him led him inevitably to philosophical thinking (42). According to Thomas Anz, Koller is a typical Bernhardian genius, whose “morbid” power of mind results from his physical impairments. Following Koller’s own interpretation, disability in Bernhard’s novella has often been read as a mere signifier for an extraordinary mental state or for Bernhard’s aesthetics of fragmentation (Part 191), but in its own way, the text is also concerned with the material realities of disability. Koller’s intellectualization of disability is his and the narrator’s main strategy in coming to terms with the amputation. Koller transforms his physical disability into a mental triumph, as he sees it, and banishes the physical world from his existence. Paradoxically, for him, illness is the necessary and logical path toward full mental development, whereas the healthy are doomed to remain in their dull physicality:

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He had always despised people who did not have what he called lifelong holy illnesses and had always counted them as part of a very low category, with which any dealings, but particularly mental dealings, had been a degrading, if not filthy, but at the very least character-weakening affair. He felt sorry for the so-called healthy people because according to his ideas they never escaped the degradations of complete mental torpor and were condemned to remain all their lives in this base mental torpor. (55)

Thus, Koller radically reverses the conventional hierarchy of health and illness in which the sick body serves as a shameful reminder of our physicality, and he carries that reversal to an extreme by claiming disability as a badge of superiority (Anz). Anz shows that Koller’s position is not an ambivalent or dialectical questioning of the conventional hierarchy and its values but a superior and secure stance from which he proclaims the sacralization and nobilitation of the pathological; meanwhile, it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain what we are to believe, as Koller’s position is multiply refracted through the narrator, who, as we will see, is also a deeply problematic figure in the text. What makes Bernhard’s text unique, Anz continues, is not just the fact that he enacts a reversal of health and illness, promoting a Foucauldian critique of a discourse of pathology, but that he shows such a simple reversal to follow the same rules as the original opposition: Koller’s praise of illness and his contempt for health, besides satirically exposing a still prevalent and unrealistic valuation of health, are also earnest reminders that idealizing illness or disability instead only replicates problematic power relations and value assignments. Koller, however, not only reads his early, almost disabling, eye condition as a forerunner to his elevation to “the higher state of crippledom” but also believes the loss of his leg to be a necessary part of his mental completion (54).6 The idea follows the logic of the mind-body dualism that pervades Western culture and literalizes it in Koller’s magical thinking: he needs to shed his body quite literally through his amputated leg in order to reach mental perfection. The narrator reinforces this belief by suggesting that Koller might have brought the dog’s bite upon himself: “I would even go so far as to say that he had effectively attracted the Wellerian dog in the Türkenschanzpark with his willpower” (80). Koller and the narrator apparently share a communal fantasy of the omnipotence of the mind (or of Koller’s mind, at least), which might be read as a defense against the reality of Koller’s physical impairment.

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That it is a defense is repeatedly highlighted by subtle (and not so subtle) reminders in the text that Koller is, after all, struggling with his impairment: for instance, he can no longer go to the Türkenschanzpark, because, in his “pitiable circumstances,” this walk to the park is “too burdensome, at bottom indeed impossible” (19). The narrator, who knew him as a young, handsome person, notes that he now looks “piteous and at the same time repulsive” (78),7 and the text cruelly insists on Koller’s inability to deposit his crutches in a way that does not draw attention to him upon entering a tavern (27) or his fatigue after a fast walk with his crutches: “it was obviously embarrassing to him that I observed him now, after he had taken a seat, in his exhaustion” (91). Indeed, the physical reality of his impairment, and its dominance over Koller’s supposed mental triumph, is most strongly insisted on at the end of the novella, when Koller’s promise to the narrator to read his finished study “The Cheap-Eaters” to him is made impossible by an accident: However, he didn’t get to that anymore, for at the same evening, he had been delivered to the university clinic because of a severe head injury that he had incurred while falling over his artificial leg in the staircase in Krottenbach Street, as I learned from his doctors, and from which he could not be saved anymore. The Cheap-Eaters had been lost just like so many mental products of which their inventors have spoken to us. (149–50)

Even aside from embarrassing incidents and his untimely death, we learn that Koller perceives himself as “physically disabled in a most terrible and potentially most ridiculous, repulsive way” (29–30). His desire to elevate his impaired physical self to a higher mental sphere might thus be linked to his own sense of others’ potential pity, ridicule, and disgust. Bill Hughes has identified fear, pity, and disgust as the key affects to understand the “emotional relationships between disabled and non-­ disabled actors” and the “social distance” to which they contribute (67). While pity and compassion are often hailed as virtuous responses to disability, Hughes emphasizes that pity is “a hierarchizing emotion in which superiority is at work in those who feel it and inferiority the projected status of those who are its target” (71). The interaction evoked through pity is highly one-sided: “In the act of giving the non-disabled person converts pity into social capital and confirms her status as a benevolent person-citizen who is independent and authentic. There is no reciprocation in the charitable gift; it is a pure act of ‘othering’” (71)—which sheds

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light on the narrator’s repetitive use of adjectives related to “pity” (“Erbarmen”) when he speaks of Koller, and their tendency to veer toward contempt. In this logic, charity toward the invalid, defined as needy and pathological, creates “redemption and validation for the valid” (Hughes 71). This oppositional relational logic is also operant in fear and disgust as negative prime reactions toward disability. Like pity, they engage in Othering but are ultimately related to the threat that the disabled body poses to the ideal of physical integrity. Encounters with people with disabilities “challenge the stable view of embodied self that is characteristic of non-disabled identity” (Hughes 69) and serve as “reminders of our visceral, animal, messy selves” (73). As we have seen, Koller himself refuses any such reminder of his animal self and instead turns disability into the very means to deny it—but his desire to do so may be linked to the pity and fear he notes in others. In the novella, the source for Koller’s impression of being “crippled” is clearly located in relational constellations. When Koller realizes “that he is a cripple [‘Krüppel’] and what it in fact means to be a cripple,” this insight is related to the public’s reaction: “The public had reacted to this fact and therefore to his artificial leg in the basest way, by acting as it had at all times acted towards cripples” (24).8 This becomes particularly clear in the WÖK, the Viennese public kitchens, where he first meets the cheap-eaters, a group of men who gather at the WÖK every day for an inexpensive meal. Koller notices that the kitchen help acknowledges him when he enters the WÖK, but as soon as the boy realizes that Koller has a prosthesis, his attention rests “only on the floor and therefore on the Kollerian artificial leg” (29).9 Koller resents “such an intense and inconsiderate and primitive observation of his artificial leg and therefore his misery” (29), but he is not surprised, as he reasons that the boy, who knew Koller with two legs, must naturally be terrified at Koller’s transformation (29). Such pity and fear appear far from cathartic and cement Koller’s Otherness through every individual interaction. The cheap-eaters, in contrast, do not feel pity, just interest, toward Koller (37). Such interest promises a different kind of relation: less hierarchical, not exclusively driven by his disability (38), and more mutual, as Koller himself identifies the cheap-eaters as proper, interesting objects for his study of physiognomy (33).10 They treat Koller with common courtesy and readiness to help (21–22), acknowledge his disability without treating it as sensational (27), and subject his artificial leg to a “thorough and not in the least squeamish examination” (25)—in other words, they do not treat

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it with fear. What distinguishes their “curiosity” from other people’s is that it is not the “otherwise widespread filthy and repulsive” curiosity, with which “people like him” are confronted “everywhere and all the time, and to which they are exposed and extradited in the most vicious and insolent way” (24). Instead, they see him as “an asset and a welcome diversion” (37). The difference Koller establishes between the kitchen help’s pitiful and startled stare, and the cheap-eaters’ thorough examination suggests that the latter kind of attention opens room for understanding. In her 2009 study, Staring, Garland-Thomson describes the “social relationship” that is created by looking and being looked at in ambivalent terms that reckon with the epistemological and ethical potential of what may at first seem to be a simple gesture of Othering. “Extraordinary-­ looking bodies demand attention” (37), she acknowledges, and such attention is not exclusively negative. It “disorders expectations,” and by doing so, it may point both to the “novel” and to the “disturbing”; it can provoke “interest” or “disgust” (37). This is a crucial ambivalence. For although Garland-Thomson points out that “discomfort” dominates our reaction to visual engagement with disability (38), and that staring propels Othering and stigmatization and “can be used to enforce social hierarchies” (40), she recognizes that staring includes a wide range of meanings—“from domination, adoration, curiosity, surprise, allegiance, disgust, wonder, befuddlement, openness, hostility, to reverence” (39)—and may ultimately lead to recognition and a form of beholding: To be held in the visual regard of another enables humans to flourish and forge a sturdy sense of self. Being seen by another person is key to our psychological wellbeing, then, as well as our civil recognition. Staring’s pattern of interest, attention, and engagement, the mobilization of its essential curiosity, might be understood as a potential act of be-holding, of holding the being of another particular individual in the eye of the beholder. (194)

Garland-Thomson’s notion of beholding suggests that the social relations established in the context of disability may be enabling, rather than just disabling, for both parties involved, and that it is worth looking closer at pity, fear, and disgust, rather than dismissing them right away as problematic gestures of Othering, to allow for underlying anxieties to emerge and transform them in the same way that staring may turn into beholding. Such tolerance for and transformation of gestures of Othering are visible

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not only in the cheap-eaters’ behavior towards Koller but also in the novel as a whole, which uses the mold of parody to unfold the entanglements of pity, fear, and disgust in the face of disability and explore underlying interpersonal dynamics. The full complexity of Bernhard’s relational analysis of disability is encapsulated in the relationship Koller entertains with the narrator, about whom we do not learn much except that he is the normate to Koller’s deviant. This narrator was a late addition to Bernhard’s revisions of the story to call into question Koller’s interpretation of the world (Höller 118), but in our context, it serves an additional function in creating further provocation to the “social protocol” (Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 12) and the hierarchical binaries we usually associate with disability. The instantaneous radicality with which amputation creates a state of disability is a particularly threatening challenge to ideals of physical integrity and self-determination, which is one of the reasons why narratives of amputation participate to a large degree in what David Bolt has called the “ever-present metanarrative of disability” with its “binary logic” of “independence—dependence, usefulness—uselessness, needed—needy, helper—helped” (295). The amputee is often constructed as having been ejected radically from the first category of the independent, useful, and needed individual, now needy and dependent on other people’s help. However, Bolt also highlights the “frequently overlooked point […] that if and when these roles are realized they are also likely to be traded” (295). Bernhard’s text stages this trade-off in a way that exposes the cruelty of the original binary logic of disability. From the beginning of their relationship, and even before Koller’s injury, Koller and the narrator have been interlocked in a strange interdependency of attraction and repulsion (47). On the one hand, the narrator acknowledges freely that Koller has always been superior to him, particularly in his mental powers (76). The opposition between the exceptional, but sick, Koller, and the comparatively “normal,” healthy narrator introduces a strange binary, in which the positions of helper and helped are reversed: For a long time I had believed that I was the one from whom he profited so much, who was helpful to him in his helplessness in every respect and a necessary support, until I realized that it was correct exactly in inverse proportion, for in truth he had always been much more useful to me than I had been to him, at least in the mental regard, as he termed it. (45)

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This “usefulness,” on the other hand, has a sinister quality as the narrator insists that Koller has always profited from the narrator’s comparative debasement: “From the start, there had been only an interdependency between us, from which he had to benefit in the highest measure, while I had in the same proportion been weakened, yes indeed oppressed, by him” (77). This interdependency is reinforced by Koller’s later impairment, but it also instigates a cruel struggle for dominance between the two. The narrator repeatedly reports that Koller uses this disability—his “mutilation and crippledom” and his “repellant exterior”—as an “instrument of power” against him and others (79).11 Koller employs his cane to issue orders (88) or push the narrator in a certain direction (90), and it appears that Koller has even battered the narrator with his cane to get his will: “I shouldn’t have said No, if I didn’t want to be beaten by him, as I know. I have often witnessed how he has attacked people physically who refused obedience to him, me, too, he has beaten with the cane several times” (110). But such literal employments of Koller’s disability as a means of power do not capture the extent to which the narrator seems to be dominated by him. At first glance, the narrator’s claim that Koller gains power through his disability seems like one of the absurd reversals that characterize the text and drive it toward parody. The narrator’s reference to Koller’s abject appearance, however, is a clue to a different reading of the text in light of Garland-Thomson’s and Hughes’s analyses of the relational dimensions of disability. Whatever Koller’s disability evinces in the narrator—social discomfort, anxiety over his own physical and mental powers—the usual reaction, as we have seen, would be to deflect these emotions with disregard and contempt, enforcing power relations that defuse the potential threat of disability to the normate’s self-construction. Bernhard confirms this suspicion in his autobiography, where he argues that pity for the victim of such discrimination is “nothing but the bad conscience of the individual about the course of action and cruelty of the others, in which he is in reality involved with the same intensity as an agent of cruelty” (116). Pity is a defense—against one’s own cruelty, but also, as the narrator’s claim that he submitted himself to Koller’s abuse out of pity (Billigesser 110) tells us, against one’s own insecurity. Yet, Koller is not willing to relinquish his power; instead of submitting himself to cruelty, pity, and disgust, he upholds his discursive superiority and showers others with disregard and contempt. More importantly, in refusing to become an object of these defensive emotions, Koller makes it impossible for the narrator to deflect his anxiety—and leaves him vulnerable.

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This dynamic is most clearly reflected in the strangest interaction that the text stages for Koller and the narrator. When both walk down Billroth Street to get to the restaurant, the narrator notices that despite his expectations that Koller would have to be slow or even fall because of his impairment, Koller is actually much faster than the narrator: He had adopted a shrewd method to get ahead and the crutches had not only, as I had seen clearly at this opportunity, served him to support himself but to propel himself ruthlessly forward, he had at all events been faster than me and I had had the greatest difficulty to catch up with him. (111)

Not only do Koller’s crutches not pose a hindrance or act as a mere support, they make him faster than he would usually have been—and he appears definitely more able than the narrator, mentally and physically, in this scene. However, the narrator is not willing to accept this defeat. He races Koller to the door of the restaurant, and when he gets there first, he gloats over Koller’s “dreadful situation and indeed his pitiable condition,” hoping to have shown Koller that his mental superiority has a terrible price (112). The narrator’s justification is one of his harshest statements in the entire text: “We must not completely surrender to the cripple, we must hold our ground against him, even if we have to resort to malice” (112).12 The situation itself does not justify this behavior or even this rationale: despite Koller’s initial advantage, the able-bodied narrator’s desire to prove his physical superiority appears either as mere pettiness or as the ultimate grotesquerie in a text full of grotesque reversals. But the wording is crucial: the narrator does not talk about Koller but about “the cripple,” which reveals his desire to make a larger point. As I argued earlier, what the narrator confronts is not only Koller’s assumption of superiority in their relationship—which, despite the lost race, is quickly reestablished (112)—but the threat of disability itself: its questioning of the narrator’s illusion of the stability of normalcy, physical integrity, and superiority. “Surrendering to the cripple” would entail a much greater loss than losing a contest to Koller; it would mean losing the foundations of his position in life as a “man of emotion and action” (53).13 What Bernhard exposes in this crucial scene, then, is the all too easy failure of the narrator’s charity: the cruel flip-side of his pity and the resistance that underlies his apparent willingness to assist Koller. In concluding the narrative with Koller’s death, Die Billigesser seems to give in to this resistance; instead of surrendering to the “cripple,” the text

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eliminates him. The story thus appears to follow a conventional pattern of disability narratives, “the extermination of the deviant as a purification of the social body” (Mitchell and Snyder 53): Koller’s deviation is eventually reined in by his death. But this conclusion ignores the actual dynamic of the text, which is, as we find out, the narrator’s posthumous attempt to make sense of Koller’s impairment and his own relationship to Koller. Franz Norbert Mennemeier has pointedly noted that the narrator does not simply tell a story about Koller, as an object of a distanced narrative point of view; instead, he reproduces Koller’s own “monomaniacal manner of speaking” almost mimetically (219). The text’s endless repetitions thus become readable as a work of mourning, an attempt to continue the mutual sense-making process that Koller reluctantly invited the narrator to enter. The “discomforting presence” of disability (Mitchell and Snyder 59) is thus reinforced rather than abolished; it is preserved in the narrator’s posthumous attachment to Koller.

“The Great Supporting Role” Alvin’s stump in The Plot Against America has attracted a great number of metaphorical readings. For Debra Shostak, it “connotes inevitable suffering, mortality, and Alvin’s participation within the public sphere—it is the wound of history” (“Introduction” 95)—particularly in the context of the forceful suppression of Jewish identity that happens all around Alvin and young Philip.14 In describing his novel, Roth himself uses disability as a metaphor for discrimination: “exclusion is a primary form of humiliation, and humiliation is crippling—it does terrible injury to people, it twists them, deforms them. […] In this book it’s the humiliation that helps to tear apart and very nearly disable the family” (“The Story,” emphasis added). The amputation serves as a metaphorical “crutch” to point to themes of historical trauma, political collapse, and discriminatory Othering—and I do not wish to question these readings, as they capture an important element of the construction of Roth’s novel. However, beneath these symbolic dimensions, the novel offers a particularly astute analysis of the relational dimensions of disability, which deserves more attention—for its own sake and because whatever symbolic reading we might want to engage in, the meaning collated on this level determines whatever might transpire on the level of metaphor and allegory. Like Bernhard’s novella, Plot stages an unabashed confrontation with the negative emotions disability initially elicits in the non-disabled person,

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and it achieves this high level of frankness through its child narrator.15 When Philip is first confronted with the double amputee “Little Robert, the living stump,” who moves about on “a small platform of plywood” and begs for alms outside Philip’s father’s office, Philip is unable to look closely at the man, for “the fear of gaping merged with the terror of seeing” (128). Petrified by horror and the behavioral codes he has already learned, Philip cannot behold Robert in Garland-Thomson’s sense. The same is patently true when his cousin Alvin returns from the war, “missing half of one of the legs that he’d left with” (125). Disability “overwhelm[s]” the boy with its “colossal freakishness” (127), a freakishness that is, as the language suggests here, closely tied to fragmentation. The amputation has made Alvin less than whole, split apart and transformed, as another, equally awkward yet illuminating phrase suggests: “I saw what had become of the upper man since the lower man had been blown apart” (135–36). When he looks at the stump, he sees “the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there” (136). The “colossal freakishness” is rooted in this incomprehensible, fractional reduction of a human being, in the uncanny embodiment of an absent presence. As we’ve already seen, amputations, like other sudden onsets of disability, create particularly fraught situations: body image, social standing, and communicative expectations are suddenly and radically altered. Janet Cater has noted that amputees not only struggle with their own drastically changed body, having to “reconcile three body images: before, with a prosthesis, and without a prosthesis” (1444), but also have to adjust to “a changed perception by others” (1451). In essence, then, if we link this to Garland-Thomson’s observations about staring, sudden onsets of disability like amputation force the newly disabled to juggle an even greater number of body images: how they see themselves is refracted not only through their own past and present experience, but also through others’ memories and expectations of what their body was like and what it will be. A relationally constructed self- and body image is then to be reconciled with unexpected patterns of interaction and new communicative tasks— the relational dimension of amputation is thus a critical element of how amputees will view and narrate themselves, but it is also vital to how they are seen and represented. Philip’s insistence on Alvin’s physical impairment, on his fragmentation and incompleteness, signals a general concern with physical integrity and lays bare how Alvin’s body image, through amputation, has suddenly become of concern to others, and how Philip must readjust his view of Alvin’s body in order to negotiate the threat to

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physical integrity Alvin presents to him now. Roth’s novel explores body image as a relational construct that is developed in and transforms social interaction. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection helps further unlock this dynamic: amputation threatens our notions of bodily integrity and wholeness and destabilizes our idea of the limits of the body, especially so when leakage or infection make it impossible to develop a sense of the “clean stump” or the restoration of wholeness through prosthetic devices. Kristeva has linked abjection to threats to our identity coming from without—“[e]xcrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.)” (71)— that remind us of our mortality and our animal nature, to which category amputation seems most clearly to belong. But disability is also closely related to those threats from within identity, “social or sexual” (71): for Kristeva, the child’s struggle to “exist outside of” the mother is a powerful motor of our abject fear of being dependent, fluid, not separate from others (13). As Garland-Thomson has suggested, the more we rely on notions of integrity, individuality, and self-determination to define our identities, the more fearful of but also fascinated with disability we become: “The disabled body stands for the self gone out of control, individualism run rampant: it mocks the notion of the body as compliant instrument of the limitless will […]. Even more troubling, disability suggests that the cultural other lies dormant within the cultural self, threatening abrupt or gradual transformations from ‘man’ to ‘invalid’” (Extraordinary Bodies 43). Individual and cultural responses to disability are closely tied to this abject fear, reliant on confining others to the “world of the in-between, aberrant, anomalous” to retain a sense of normality (Hughes 73). By employing the child’s perspective to tell Alvin’s story, Roth has a unique chance to represent Philip’s reactions to Alvin’s stump unfiltered— or at least much less filtered than through an adult’s perspective, which would never be allowed to express the same amount of terror, wonder, and disgust at the sight of an amputated limb. The narrative perspective thus confronts us with the normate reaction patterns described by Garland-­ Thomson and Hughes, but with much less ability to distance ourselves from or gloss over these raw affects—and this in turn allows us to analyze such reactions in much more detail. And unlike the narrator in Bernhard’s novella, who, for the most part, focuses on the intellectual impact of Koller’s amputation, Philip’s gaze remains on the brute physical details of the stump and the prosthesis and exposes the full force of abjection elicited by them. For instance, Philip describes how his initial disgust is

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intensified by Alvin’s “rotten” smell: “I thought at first that the smell must be coming from his leg, but it was coming from his mouth” (127). This smell signals that Alvin has, along with his stump, completely broken down after the amputation, and it “suggest[s] that Alvin’s stump serves as a synecdoche for the body as a corpse” (Shostak, “Prosthetic Fictions” 25), which renders it abject. Yet, despite his terror and disgust, the boy forces himself to confront Alvin: “I still didn’t want to look his way …and so I did, trying to be a soldier in my bed” (136). Philip forces himself to behold Alvin and, filtered through his disgust, provides a detailed description of what he sees. The stump “opens up, it cracks, it gets infected. There are boils, sores, edema” (135). Even after the infection has healed, the stump still resembles “the elongated head of a featureless animal” (136), “one whose head had to be muzzled extra carefully to prevent it from sinking its razor-sharp teeth into the hand of its captor” (137). It appears to be a non-human Other, a separate, dangerous, living thing, disconnected from and yet reminiscent of its previous existence as “something whole.” Thus linked with the abject and the uncanny, the “colossal freakishness” Philip encounters in the stump becomes readable as a rejection of any reminder of something beyond conscious human control in our own, and yet so often foreign, dangerous bodies. The possibility of “healing” or “adjustment,” of virtually “eliminating” the disability, is quickly discounted. Alvin informs Philip that the healing will take “[f]orever” (137) and that “[t]he stump goes bad whatever you do” (137). What the novel depicts instead of a linear progress toward cure or reintegration is a complicated emotional process in which Philip serves as a double surrogate: not only does he transmit Alvin’s emotions to us, but he also processes them along with and, in part, for Alvin. Ashamed of his condition, Alvin changes into his clothes and practices walking outside of Philip’s and everyone else’s view (136, 143). Philip suspects that “the long future ahead as a one-legged man” is “weighing on his mind” (143). His efforts to comprehend Alvin’s state are revealed best in an apparently comedic episode. By chance, he catches a glance of Alvin masturbating, but since he does not understand what he sees, he assumes that Alvin’s moans are a sign of the “anguish at his no longer himself having two legs to walk on” (148). The ejaculate he discovers later is equally puzzling to him: “In the presence of a species of discharge as yet mysterious to me, I imagined it was something that festered in a man’s body and then came spurting from his mouth when he was completely consumed by grief” (148). In this captivating image, grief is described as a visceral process that

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produces a discharge of its own. Thomas Ogden has suggested that “mourning […] is a process centrally involving the experience of making something, creating something […] to meet, to be equal to, to do justice to, the fullness and complexity of [one’s] relationship to what has been lost, and to the experience of loss itself” (Ogden 117–18). In Roth’s novel, grief is conceptualized in terms of a physical work of mourning, creating an embodied response to loss. Philip does justice to this notion by paying close attention to the condition of the stump, the ever-present sign of Alvin’s distress, and his description of Alvin’s “discharge” as “slick and syrupy” (148) resonates with the tenaciousness, stickiness, and perseverance of his grief. The semiotics of “loss” is written large upon amputation: the loss of a limb is paramount, even though that loss is often (but not always) brought about to save the rest of the body. Amputation as a medical treatment sacrifices the part for the whole and is thus entangled in a paradoxical symbolic exchange of loss and gain. Individuals who have experienced this loss, and the resulting work of mourning, often describe it as similar to the loss of a loved one and the work of mourning for a significant other (Schulz 73). Amputation can be re-imagined in relational terms; although the limb is a part of the self, it is also a lost object. Metaphorical relations are thus ingrained in how we talk about amputation: as the medical procedure itself is experienced in terms of one’s relationship to the body, it can easily be translated into other relationships, and vice versa—particularly if a prosthesis extends that potential for relational connections. Prostheses that are supposed to compensate for limb loss are often initially resisted; they are, after all, complicated devices that elicit a wide range of reactions—they can be a source of pain as much as of autonomy, a part of “me” and yet “not me” (Senra et al. 185). Amputations and prostheses produce experiences in which we face our own and our loved one’s bodies as “Other”—but not necessarily only as abject Others, but also as loved, missed, and mourned others. These experiences highlight that the binary logic with which we view disability—independent/dependent, useful/ useless, needed/needy—is also a part of how we narrate our bodies more generally, and it offers new narratives for disability: of love, mourning, and interdependence. Part of the reason why Alvin has such a hard time processing his loss is only revealed at the end of the chapter, although the conversation precedes most of its action. Therefore, by withholding this explanation, the child narrator’s perplexity and retrograde comprehension of Alvin’s

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condition are transmitted to the reader. Pressured by his uncle Monty, Alvin eventually tells everyone that he got hit by a grenade when he spit on a dead German soldier, thus losing any means of justifying his loss in front of himself and others. “There it was, and nothing like the heroic reality that I had so shallowly imagined” (151), Philip comments. This resolution does not only retroactively present a psychological explanation to Alvin’s intense anger and shame; more importantly, it deflates the stereotype of the heroic soldier amputee, homing in instead on the suffering and the senselessness of the loss Alvin has to face. The novel resists endowing Alvin’s disability with the political resonance of martyrdom and heroic war effort. This resistance to a “repair of deviance” through cure, “rescue […] from social censure” or metaphorical revaluation (Mitchell and Snyder 53–54) characterizes the entire novel. Even though Alvin eventually mends physically and adjusts to the prosthesis, his rehabilitation remains limited in the family’s eyes; his conduct continues to be less than heroic as a gambler and racketeer. Philip disapproves: “Was it for this that he’d run off to fight in the war? I thought, ‘Take your fucking medal, gimp, and shove it!’ If only he would learn his lesson by losing every last penny of his disability pension, but in fact he couldn’t stop […] himself from abandoning the desire to ever again be anyone’s hero” (162). In the novel’s plot as well as on the novel’s symbolical level,16 Alvin refuses to be read as a hero—he remains a real, and aching, presence that discomforts the family and Plot itself. Much later in the novel, when Alvin returns for a family dinner to introduce his fiancée Minna, he gets into a fight with Philip’s father Herman over his involvement in the war. Herman accuses him of valuing “big cigars and motor cars” over “what is happening to the Jews,” while Alvin contends, “I lost my fuckin’ leg for the Jews!” (297). Angry at Herman’s judgment of him, but perhaps more so at the actual senselessness of this loss, he repeats the gesture that led to it and spits in Herman’s face, which results in a fight that leaves them both maimed: “Alvin’s prosthesis had cracked in two, his stump was torn to shreds, and one of his wrists was broken. Three of my father’s front teeth were shattered, two ribs were fractured […], and his neck was so badly wrenched that he had to go around in a high steel collar for months afterward” (296). Herman and Alvin both struggle over the meaning of Alvin’s injury, but his recovery process just won’t fit neatly into the categories of heroic conduct or admirable rehabilitation into the community. The physical altercation, just like Bernhard’s race on crutches, is a dark reminder that such neat

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solutions are not to be had, that the struggle over meaning is brutal but, ultimately, a shared one. The mutuality of meaning-making and mourning is also emphasized in the earlier episode in which Alvin reveals the reason for his injury. While metaphorical meaning cannot be generated from the war incident, some form of understanding is transmitted from Alvin to Philip. The episode concludes with Philip grieving for Alvin, in his becoming a substitute vessel for Alvin’s suppressed emotions: “He was too far gone to roar that day. Or even to crack. Only I did, after he refused to open his eyes and look at me when I begged him to; only I cracked” (152). Alvin’s grief does not take place in isolation; it is embedded in social relationships and shared by Philip, who will become a valuable support throughout Alvin’s physical rehabilitation. While Alvin is adjusting and learning to take care of his stump, Philip reluctantly takes on this “great supporting role” (146). Despite his revulsion, Philip shows a tendency to identify with Alvin early on. After his cousin has shown him the complicated procedure of bandaging the stump, Philip practices on himself, with frightening effects. In Alvin’s bandages, “a ragged scab from the ulcerated underside of Alvin’s stump” has remained, which is more than Philip can bear (138): the safe distance between their bodies has been breached; it is “as if the very loss itself has been translated to him” (Shostak, “Prosthetic Fictions” 25)—abjection through vomiting is the result. What is important here, however, is that Philip persists through his sense of abjection and is soon expert at bandaging Alvin’s stump (142). He also suggests a zipper for Alvin’s trousers and steals a football for Alvin to practice with his prosthesis. Thus, a bond is established between the two, who will now be “examin[ing] the stump together” (144)—a practice of joint beholding and caring for the vulnerable body. When Alvin finally admits, “I couldn’t live without you” (145), Philip has already transitioned into the metaphorical position of Alvin’s prosthesis—an object he views with no less trepidation and puzzlement than the stump. His artificial leg is a big nuisance to Alvin, and even more so because an imperfect fit has caused an infection of his stump (135), further complicating its application. To Philip, however, it is the very idea of the prosthesis that is most disconcerting: Except for its eerily replicating the shape of the lower half of a real lower limb, everything about it was horrible, but horrible and a wonder both,

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beginning with what Alvin called his harness: the dark leather tight-corset that laced up the front and extended from just below the buttock to the top of the kneecap and that was attached to the prosthesis by hinged steel joints on either side of the knee. The stump […] fit snugly into a cushioned socket carved into the top of the prosthesis […]. [The foot] screwed neatly into the leg without any of the hardware showing, and though it looked more like a wooden shoe-tree than a living foot with five separate toes, when Alvin slipped into his socks and shoes […] you’d have thought that the feet were both his own. (142–43)

The prosthesis’s uncanny quality relies on Philip’s observation that it looks like Alvin’s real leg and yet doesn’t, that it fits and yet doesn’t, that it is Alvin and yet isn’t. It is an indeterminable object of an intermediate region, both familiar and unfamiliar. As Philip tries to help Alvin with his stump and his prosthesis, he has to overcome his fear of both parts of Alvin’s new existence, and, battling with his own disgust and shame, engages in a relationship with Alvin that serves a prosthetic function. Roth’s vision of the metaphorical link between human and non-human prostheses draws the complexities of that relationship out in the open. Rehabilitation and re-embodiment are encouraged through another’s care for Alvin’s body. Both his prosthesis and Philip are outside, “not-me,” but they are also always present, inside, tied to and thus re-aligning his notion of self. Both Alvin and Philip struggle with grief and abjection at and through each other, signaling the possibility for a shared work of mourning that relies on recognizing each other’s vulnerability. This vision of shared mourning also undergirds the novel’s conclusion, when we receive the stunning analogy of Seldon as “stump” and Philip as his “prosthesis” (362). Throughout the novel, Philip has no love for his neighbor Seldon Wishnow, and when his family is in danger of being relocated to Kentucky, Philip tries to get Seldon’s family sent in their stead. When, through misunderstanding and coincidence, Seldon and his mother are, in fact, forced to move to Kentucky and Mrs. Wishnow is killed in an antisemitic riot, the Roth family takes Seldon in. Philip, weighed down by guilt, accepts his role as Seldon’s prosthesis—an image that relates grieving for a lost limb with grieving for a loved one and invites us to consider the implications of this metaphor. “The intimacy between human stump and human prosthesis becomes the redemptive image of attachment amid a world of loss, a world most of whose members seem to have signed the contract of mutual indifference,” Ross Posnock proposes (280), but the

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novel’s earlier descriptions of stump and prosthesis suggest that the intimacy and attachment we witness here in the face of loss is an ambivalent, rather than a purely redemptive, one. Seldon is not just described as a person having lost a limb but as the stump itself, and it is here that the connection between amputation and grief serves Roth most powerfully. At the end of the novel, not much more needs to be said about Seldon’s pain. Having read Philip’s descriptions of the stump and the prosthesis before, readers are equipped to “prostheticize” the text by drawing the metaphoric connections themselves. Alvin’s stump is recalled, “the blunt remnant of something whole” (136), raw, infected, animal-like. In a similar fashion, Seldon’s grief reduces the boy to his basic animal functions, leaving him emotionally raw and incomplete. Philip is involved in and clearly serves a therapeutic, prosthetic function in Alvin’s and Seldon’s experiences of loss. With this prosthetic function, however, an uncanny dimension is also introduced into their relationships: Philip, Alvin, and Seldon are “stuck” to each other, a “fit,” perhaps, but always, “forever” in the process of healing and in danger of reopening wounds, of blowing up the stump. Philip is involuntarily “harnessed” to his chamber mates, and as much as he may try to compensate for their losses, he can never come close enough. Nevertheless, he enters a community of grief and care with Alvin and Seldon, absorbing and processing their emotions, and, as narrator, telling their stories within his own. In this manner, Philip also becomes a prosthesis for readers. They, too, are perhaps reluctant witnesses of Alvin’s and Seldon’s intense pain, and what Philip can offer them is not a redemptive vision of disability, but his own struggle with disgust, guilt, and shame, as well as limited insight into Alvin’s and Seldon’s emotional lives. Like the prosthesis, this narrator may not be a perfect fit; in conveying their feelings, he may not give us “the real thing”; and there is definite pain involved in referring to him: through his voice, the texts confronts us with lengthy descriptions of the abject and the incomprehensible, evoking a visceral appreciation of what Philip—if not Alvin and Seldon—is going through. Disability may often serve as a “narrative prosthesis,” as Mitchell and Snyder have argued (49), but in Roth’s novel, it is the “able” narrator who serves as prosthetic device. Like Bernhard’s Billigesser, Plot does not let us be mere observers; both texts involve readers in the ambivalent experience of confronting a disabled Other and thus stage a passage from staring to beholding, from pity, fear, and disgust to love and mourning. Disability, and post-amputation experience in particular, is conceptualized in relational terms, but more so,

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the texts point us toward “new styles of relating” (Phillips 144) that refuse to stick to the conventional binaries and instead imagine us all as interdependent. Bernhard and Roth suggest that we need to make room for negative affect and for senselessness in order to engage in shared works of mourning. Such prosthetic relationships may not be a perfect fit, and they may not be able to replace the lost object, forever facing the “blunt remnant of something whole,” but they challenge us to think anew about how we might want to relate to each other in the face of embodied loss.

Notes 1. Relational models of disability, which argue that disability can only be understood as “situational or contextual” and “in relation to “‘the normate,’ normalcy and ableism” are outlined by Goodley (16–17). 2. It is important to recognize that the normate is not a real person but a construction, “not what we actually see everywhere but rather […] what we expect to see,” and what we try to be, even though “[a]ctual normates are as scarce as hen’s teeth” (Staring 45). 3. All translations from the German are mine. 4. This claim is also a typical example of the repetitions and figurae etymologicae that characterize Bernhard’s style: “mich seiner diesbezüglichen Erinnerungen zu erinnern, seine Andeutungen anzudeuten” (40). 5. Bernhard uses some of his characteristic neologistic compounds here, “Lebensunglück” and “Lebensglück,” which also echo the (un)fortunate dog bite, the “glück- wie unglückseligen Hundebiß” (15). 6. Bernhard calls this, in another compound, “den höheren Verkrüppelungsstand” (54). 7. In English, it is difficult to distinguish between Bernhard’s ­“erbarmungswürdig” (19)—literally “worthy of pity”—and “erbärmlich” (78)—which carries notions not just of pity, but of the “pathetic” and “abject.” I’m using “pitiable” in the first sense and “piteous” in the second. 8. The public’s reaction is described as “niederträchtig” (24), which translates as “base” but also as “malevolent” or “malicious.” The connotation of conscious ill will is probably intended and reflects Koller’s mistrust of others. 9. There is no way to replicate Bernhard’s alliterative “das kollersche Kunstbein” (29). 10. This may also suggest that Koller’s relation to the cheap-eaters is different because they allow him to objectify them in turn, to treat them as “material for his philosophy,” but not as “partners” (93).

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11. Bernhard uses the terms “Verstümmelung,” which carries the “stump,” the “Stummel,” at the heart of mutilation, and “Verkrüppelung,” which describes the state of being “crippled.” Both are used as a “Machtmittel,” another neologism that emphasizes the uniqueness of Koller’s treatment of disability. 12. The original passage reads: “Wir dürfen uns dem Krüppel nicht vollkommen ausliefern, nicht vor dem Krüppel kapitulieren, wir müssen uns ihm gegenüber behaupten, auch wenn wir in die Gemeinheit Zuflucht nehmen müssen” (112). Terms like “ausliefern” (“surrender”), “behaupten” (“hold the ground”), and “Zuflucht nehmen” (“resort to,” but also “seek shelter”) suggest a military context, a fight for land and life. 13. No other than Koller establishes the opposition between the narrator as “Gefühls- und Tatmensch” and himself as “Geistesmensch” (53), a man of the mind. 14. The stump has been read as an image of the “stunted absence of humanity” of isolationism (Posnock 277) or as an image for “Jewish self-shame” (Duban 32). For Toker, it is “part of the novel’s cultural and symbolic codes” (43) in which being Jewish is metaphorically connected to disability as a “negative identity, standing for all the social limitations of their lives” (44). 15. More precisely, the narrator is an older Philip who looks back at the events he witnessed as a boy. Ginevra Geraci notes that “the narrator’s voice can at times become ambiguous when older Philip steps in.” She points out that there are “sudden transition[s] in perspective from the supposedly naïve boy to the more experienced adult” (Geraci 200). However, the narrator’s construction goes beyond sudden transitions. Seeing through a little boy’s eyes, yet having the adult’s vocabulary at his disposal (Toker 41–42), the narrator is always a hybrid, prosthetic being: the boy serves as the adult’s eyes, the adult as the boy’s voice. 16. David Simon and Ed Burns, in their 2020 HBO adaptation of Roth’s novel, were apparently unwilling to accept this utter refusal of symbolic rehabilitation. The adaptation stages a limited, but significant recuperation of Alvin’s heroism, as he becomes an unwitting member of a British-­ Canadian plot against Lindbergh.

References Anz, Thomas. “Initiationsreisen durch die Krankheit und Ästhetik der Grenzerfahrung: Aus Anlass von Thomas Bernhards 15. Todestag.” Literaturkritik.de, 3. März 2004. https://literaturkritik.de/id/6899. Bernhard, Thomas. Die Autobiographie. Residenz, 2014. ———. Die Billigesser. Suhrkamp, 2016.

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Bolt, David. “Social Encounters, Cultural Representation and Critical Avoidance.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas, Taylor and Francis, 2013, pp. 287–97. Cater, Janet K. “Traumatic Amputation: Psychosocial Adjustment of Six Army Women to Loss of One or More Limbs.” Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development, vol. 49, no. 10, 2012, pp. 1443–56. Duban, James. “Written, Unwritten, and Vastly Rewritten: Meyer Levin’s In Search and Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith,’ The Plot Against America, and Indignation.” Philip Roth Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2011, pp. 29–50. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997. ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford UP, 2009. Geraci, Ginevra. “The Sense of an Ending: Alternative History in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.” Philip Roth Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011, pp. 187–204. Goodley, Dan. Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Sage, 2011. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. Routledge, 2016. Höller, Hans. “Die Billigesser.” Bernhard-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, edited by Martin Huber and Manfred Mittermayer, Metzler, 2018, pp. 117–19. Hughes, Bill. “Fear, Pity and Disgust: Emotions and the Non-Disabled Imaginary.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas, Taylor and Francis, 2013, pp. 67–77. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982. Marquardt, Eva. Gegenrichtung: Entwicklungstendenzen in der Erzählprosa Thomas Bernhards. De Gruyter, 1990. Mennemeier, Franz Norbert. “Poetische Reflexion und Ironie: Thomas Bernhards Prosawerk ‘Die Billigesser.’” Brennpunkte: Von der frühromantischen Literaturrevolution bis zu Bertolt Brecht und Botho Strauss, Lang, 1998, pp. 215–23. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder: Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Ogden, Thomas. Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming. Aronson, 2001. Part, Matthias. “Verkrüppelte Verwandtschaften: Über Thomas Bernhards reale und künstliche Krüppel-Welt.” Bernhard-Tage Ohlsdorf 1996: Materialien, edited by Franz Gebesmair and Alfred Pittertschatscher, Verl. Publication PNo1, Bibl. der Provinz, 1998, pp. 174–205. Phillips, Adam. Unforbidden Pleasures. Penguin, 2015. Posnock, Ross. “On Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.” Salmagundi, vol. 150/151, 2006, pp. 270–82. Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Vintage, 2005.

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———. “The Story behind The Plot Against America.” New York Times, 25 Sept. 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/books/review/the-­story-­ behind-­the-­plot-­against-­america.html. Schulz, Maria. “Psychologische Verarbeitung der Amputation.” VASA: European Journal of Vascular Medicine, vol. 38, 2009, pp. 72–74. Senra, Hugo, Rui Aragão Oliveira, Isabel Leal, and Cristina Vieira. “Beyond the Body Image: A Qualitative Study on How Adults Experience Lower Limb Amputation.” Clinical Rehabilitation, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 180–91. Shostak, Debra. “The Plot Against America: Introduction.” Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, edited by Debra Shostak, Continuum, 2011, pp. 95–97. ———. “Prosthetic Fictions: Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close through Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.” 9/11: Topics in Contemporary North American Literature, edited by Catherine Morley, Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 21–40. Simon, David, and Ed Burns, creators. The Plot Against America. HBO, 2020. Toker, Leona. “Between Dystopia and Allohistory: The Ending of Roth’s The Plot Against America.” Philip Roth Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2013, pp. 41–50.

CHAPTER 10

“But the Damage … Lasted”: Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser Juliane Prade-Weiss

An Aborted Amputation At the age of eight, Anton Reiser, the highly autobiographical protagonist of Karl Philipp Moritz’s 1785–90 “psychological novel” (1)1 of the same name, escapes death and the amputation of his left foot only to be left with a pain that rules his life during the subsequent years: In his eighth year he came down with a kind of consumptive illness. All hope was given up for him, and he continually heard himself spoken of like one who is regarded a dead person. […] He had been well but a few weeks when his left foot began to hurt during a walk in the fields with his parents, which was a rare thing for him and thus all the more pleasant. It was his first walk after surviving the illness and was to be his last for a long time. By the third day the swelling and the inflammation of the foot had become so threatening that [one] wanted to proceed to amputation on the fourth. Anton’s

J. Prade-Weiss (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_10

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mother sat and wept, and his father gave him two pennies. These were the first manifestations of compassion for him he could remember from his parents, and because of their rarity they made an even greater impression on him. On the day of the amputation, a compassionate cobbler came to Anton’s mother and brought her a salve, through the use of which the swelling and the inflammation of the foot receded within a few hours. Removal of the foot [did not happen], but the damage nonetheless lasted for four years before he could be healed. During this time our Anton, often amid unspeakable pain, once again had to renounce all the joys of childhood. (7)

The phantom pain left behind, paradoxically, by the canceled amputation is but one episode in a litany of a childhood lost to neglect and suffering, yet it is seminal to the text’s poetics and semiotics. Evoking a set of literary, aesthetic, and theological references, the aborted amputation casts the symbolic substitution of this “biography” (1) in terms of loss and prosthetic replacement. And yet the threatening amputation serves to re-­ member the childhood, to put it back together into the new genre of autofiction that Moritz’s foreword explains as “the inner history of a person” (1). The aborted amputation evokes “a body-phantom,” the idea of the body as functional wholeness, “whose very existence becomes evident through some bodily trauma or amputation” (Grosz 151). It is, paradoxically, violence and dysfunctionality that evoke the notion of the body as an integral functional whole. A threat or injury that harms and potentially dismembers the body physically has the symbolic side effect of giving rise to an idea of wholeness that had not been conceivable before. The notion of an original, unaffected wholeness of the body is an ex negativo visible only in retrospect, which grants it an important position in the poetics of modern autofiction. The restitution of physical functionality after an injury creates a further symbolic paradox insofar as a prosthetic limb stands out against the “body-­ phantom” as “both a replacement of a lack and the production of an excess” (Grosz 15), of activities or movements impossible for a natural limb. In parallel logic, the biographical ideas of a painless wholeness of the self, and of childhood as a time of joy, are evoked by psychological trauma (such as being given up as moribund), omnipresent pain, and neglect as a psychic phantom against which Anton Reiser’s “inner history” continuously stands out as both deficient and particular. With this symbolic framework, Anton Reiser casts individuality as passion and aberration. Choosing the “damage” and pain that “lasted” after the aborted amputation as the

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symbolic footing of his endeavor in autofiction, Moritz draws poetic consequences from the impasse reached by the earlier Sturm und Drang, which Fritz Breithaupt summarizes: “the Germans only recognize that they cannot meet the demand set by the notion of das Ich. Thus, instead of gaining a self, the German romantics suffer from their perceived weakness in failing to accomplish the creation of a self” (78). In Anton Reiser, the testimony of pain is what creates a textual self as a continuous voice by consuming the portrayed figure. Moritz’s re-membrance aims not at restoring unwounded individuality—an idea ex negativo, a phantom—but at gaining insight into the structure of the damage, and of the prosthetic compensation that forms the self. Anton Reiser is part of Moritz’s project of establishing a public discourse of experimental psychology. In a contribution to the influential Journal of Experimental Psychology (Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde) he founded, Moritz rephrases the interest in the biographical amputation episode in terms of the criminal psychopathology that is the focus of his inquiry into the inner history of souls (Sütterlin 145; Köhnen 111–29): “How did the inflammation of the damaged limb gradually increase? […] What small unnoticed splinter got stuck in it, causing, little by little, such a dangerous abscess?” (Moritz, Werke 793).2 Such questions are common, Moritz holds, while inquiries into psychological damage seem unusual by the end of the eighteenth century—although they are even more relevant, because: “How much more diverse, pernicious, and spreading than all physical diseases are illnesses of the soul!” (793–94).3 Rather than merely paralleling physical with psychological defects, the amputation scene in Anton Reiser testifies to Moritz’s interest in undermining this distinction and asking for the interlinking of psyche and soma. A significant part of the pain that drives the narrative of Moritz’s “biography” is that of mourning, which, just like phantom pain after an amputation, undermines the distinction between psychological grief and physical complaint. The phantom logic at the basis of the poetics of Anton Reiser structures not so much the anatomy of the re-membered self but, rather, the relationality of “the inner history” of the portrayed person—his relation to others and a world in contrast to which only the text can “focus the view of the soul into itself” (Moritz, Novel 1). Moritz’s autofictional reflexivity radically outlines that without relationality there is, in fact, no soul on which to focus. In Anton Reiser, however, this insight is cast not as fundamental human sociability and reciprocity but, rather, as a prosthetic relation of a

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subject never quite fitting into a world he inhabits “for lack of something better,” as his first reading material is qualified (7). This chapter will proceed in three steps: First, it will outline the relationality of the self with reference to canonical pretexts of autofiction evoked in Moritz’s Anton Reiser; second, it will expound the self-­formative gesture of presenting a wound against the background of enlightenment aesthetics; and third, it will relate the prosthetic self-formation and the exposed wound to an individual and cultural lack of mourning.

Relational Self Anton Reiser enters the world, literally, as sub-ject: “Anton was born, and one can say of him in truth that he was oppressed from the cradle on” (Moritz, Novel 4). Anton, whose name can be read as referring to a lack of tone, is muted by what affects him in infancy, first of all by domestic unrest: “The first sounds his ear perceived and his developing reason understood were the oaths and curses” (4) his parents throw at each other while lacking any tenderness for the child. After the amputation of the foot is averted, the lasting pain of the wound and the procedure confines the boy to the hallucinatory pleasure of reading, and the symbolic substitution of letter for voice not only serves as prosthesis of emotional and verbal reciprocity but also provides silence: “Whenever he was surrounded by nothing save shouting and cursing and domestic discord, or he had looked in vain for a playmate, he hastened off to his book” (7). The search for mental quietude is, paradoxically, a second influence Anton is exposed to at home, in the quietist piety of self-mortification. The sect of “Quietists or Separatists,” to which Anton’s father adheres, follows “the writings of Madame Guyon” and seeks to attain a “completely disinterested love for God” (5), devoid of all egoism, in “returning to their ‘nothingness’ (as Madame Guyon calls it) by ‘killing’ all emotions and extirpating all ‘individuality’” (2). In quietist self-observation, subjects constantly direct their affects against themselves, which stirs them rather than killing them off, and effects solipsistic, self-righteous cruelty rather than calm depersonalization (Binczek 59–61). Beginning a “psychological novel” (Moritz, Novel 1) “with a cult that promotes the negation of the self certainly points not to the historical permanence and empirical immutability of the subject” (House 180) but points out that the self is subject to construction by means of cultural techniques such as devotion or poetics. Starting Anton Reiser with quietism is not only a document of Moritz’s intellectual

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and emotional heritage but also a poetic decision to start the construction of “the inner history of a person” with a condition of utmost emotional and intellectual deprivation. When they opened Madame Guyon’s “head after her death, they found her brain was almost as if dried out” (Moritz, Novel 3). Without relationality, self-reflection provides no insight. The aborted amputation is another decision that carries religious and poetical implications: featuring prominently in piety and art, hurt feet are an emblem of the passion of Christ, one of the most paradigmatic life stories told in and beyond the Western realm. The history of the Western genre of autofiction4 has commonly been written as starting with Augustine’s Confessions, and referencing back to a prehistory of apologies and res gestae (Spengemann 1). This history goes along with understanding modern autofiction as soliloquy and self-formation of a sovereign subject that appropriates its past (Dilthey 200; Niggl 43). This approach neglects the dialogism (Bakhtin 279) inherent to discourses on the self, which far transcends the oft-noted tension between speaking and former self(s). Augustine’s Confessions start by addressing the intended listener: Magnus es, domine (“Great are you, O Lord”; I.1). The speaking “I” takes shape by way of addressing God; this dialogic evocation of the self still informs the emphasis of the individual relation to God in modern texts such as Anton Reiser, in which the child, having survived illness and near-­ amputation, “began to converse with God […] on a rather familiar footing” (10). The individuality of the relation to God, in turn, gives rise to the practice of textual self-reflection and the notion of the subject as individual (Rüggemeier 3)—a notion realized, not least, in the psychic phantom of a painless wholeness of the self that informs Anton Reiser. The other, to whom the discourse of the “I” is directed, plays no secondary role but is prerequisite to the formation of the “I.” The God whom Augustine addresses does not need to be informed of his deeds; the discourse of the “I,” rather, testifies to self-reflection that reacts to him. Therefore, Augustine ponders the question Et quomodo invocabo deum meum (“And how shall I invoke my God”; I.2), given that he precedes the self-reflexive discourse. This foundational role of the other in autofiction is accounted for in the notion of a “relational autobiography.” Coined by Susan Stanford Friedman in order to oppose a “relational self” of female writing to the autonomous “I” of the male-dominated canon (45), the term “relational autobiography” has since been transferred onto a broader corpus, expounding relational patterns in male writing, too (Eakin 61–98). The relational approach understands the self as

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social construct, formed, in contemporary literature, in exchange with others (Rüggemeier 43). That the self is inherently relational, however, i.e. that it cannot but be in reciprocity with others, is a key insight of classical autofiction such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. His 1782 Confessions are an important pretext for Anton Reiser, most notably in the relational principle that “affectability is the essence of the new pedagogical man” (Breithaupt 84), i.e., of the post-enlightenment human defined by his perfectibility. Rousseau, prime theorist of the pros and cons of humanity’s desire to perfect itself, starts his Confessions de profundis, when it can only get better: “I was the unfortunate fruit …” (Rousseau, Confessions 12). This is not the only one of Rousseau’s autobiographical gestures to be adapted in Moritz’s Anton Reiser, whose protagonist is “oppressed from the cradle on” (4). Equally informative of a relational poetics of autofiction in Rousseau is a strategy of textual somatization: his physical complaints—the illnesses as well as the utterances—mark Rousseau’s body, and the body of his work, as a junction of philosophical, theological, social, financial, erotic, and other discourses that form him by concerning, affecting, hurting, hindering him. As Riley states, “What differentiates Rousseau’s work from earlier autobiographies is its consistent presentation of the self as a historical product, […] as dependent on its transactions with the world” (Riley 89). In the Confessions, a leitmotif of such psycho-­ somatic transaction is the complaint of “an almost continual retention of urine” due to which the infant almost dies (417), matched by the fact that the grown-up has no “verbal memory, and never in his life could retain by heart six verses” (133), which makes it hard for him to speak in public. These two traits come together in what Rousseau calls “my frankness” (527), a poetics of unreserved autobiographical openness even about bodily functions. What links Rousseau’s retention to Anton Reiser’s aborted amputation is that a post-mortem found nothing wrong, as Jean Starobinski notes: “Rousseau’s medical file, rich as it is, contains almost nothing beyond the patient’s own declarations. All verification is denied us” (70). The complaint is, first and foremost, a symbolic structure constituting the self as feeling subject in relation to (compassionate, shocked, ignorant) others. The constitutive relationality of Rousseau’s autopoetics is manifest in the difficulty of finding an adequate connection to others. The complaints concerning retentions put the body in the focus of autofiction and form the influential figure of “the-self-as-victim” (Gans 411), which, adapting the position of the Christian martyr (409–10), casts the modern subject as subject to all the things that concern him. Anton Reiser

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is such a figure, too. A second prominent form of relationality in Rousseau adapted by Moritz is a paranoid sense of persecution by “all Paris, all France, all Europe” (Rousseau, Judge 3), which puts the autofictional subject at the center of all attention; everything concerns him. The flip side of this exceptionalist logic is spelled out at the opening of the first chapter, or “Walk,” in the later, 1782 Reveries of the Solitary Walker: “So here I am, all alone on this earth” (40). Anton Reiser, early on oppressed, neglected, and solitary, however, not a walker after the aborted amputation—“With his [damage] he sometimes could not go out of his house for three months at a time” (Moritz, Novel 7)—is equally informed by his physical complaint. Confined to the indoors of domestic unrest, “the book had to be his friend, his comforter, and everything” (8), so much so that “he spoke a kind of book language” (15). Just as Rousseau’s retention is both a hindrance to and a vehicle for intense communication with others, Anton Reiser’s lasting pain makes him an isolated reader who is on a “familiar footing” only with God, and, at the same time, puts others into relation to Anton: his otherwise cold parents show compassion (7) when faced with the imminent limb loss, so does the cobbler who averts it, so do others later on (15), and even the reader is included in the compassion with the protagonist’s “unspeakable pain” when he is evoked as “our Anton” (7). The “compassion” or pity of others with the neglected, starving child (10) is the primary form of positive relationality the child encounters; hence he mimics it in self-pity: “that melancholy, tearful rapture” which “always retained something attractive to him” (10). Physical pain is a key operator of relationality in Moritz’s autofiction, hence the subjectivity conceived in Anton Reiser is that of a passion. The physical and mental roaming of Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker requires room to move (Läubli 76), of which Anton Reiser initially has none. The “inner history of a person” told in Moritz’s text is that of finding such room, mirrored in outward wanderings,5 following the acquaintance of a first friend, an Englishman, who “went on walks with him” (14). Moritz’s sentimentalist autofiction negotiates the soul, looking “into itself” (1), not as a stable entity that will survive the body but as a relational phenomenon (Koschorke 156). It is not for mere chronological reasons that Rousseau and Moritz start their autofiction with infancy; the child is the model case of relationality: “the child’s weakness and absolute reliance on the outside turns out to be the condition of possibility for selfhood” (Breithaupt 78).6 The newly found interest in infancy and childhood in enlightenment pedagogics and philosophy

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culminates in Rousseau’s 1762 Emile, or On Education. Moritz follows Rousseau in the notion that childhood is not a beastlike, irrational epoch best ignored, as earlier times and, for instance, Descartes had thought,7 but a formative period. This formation, Moritz emphasizes, sets emotional limits to later intellectual education: When he stepped into his parents’ house, he entered a house of discontent, anger, tears, and accusations. Never in his life were these first impressions erased from his soul and they often made it a place where black thoughts assembled which he could not dispel through any philosophy. (Moritz, Novel 5)

Displaying Wounds Anton Reiser has been read as a discourse testifying to the author’s psychic wound, i.e. an individual trauma (Rohse), and as testifying to the historical invention of trauma to solve the psycho-poetic impasse that no empirical subject can attain the sovereign wholeness that enlightenment had envisioned the “I” to be (Breithaupt). The “wounds of the past,” Breithaupt proposes, “become the most important assets of the self” (80) since presenting them as re-membrance creates the autobiographer’s position as a “‘refuge’ from which observation takes place” (83), and trauma becomes “a positive possibility for transformation” (80). Sütterlin objects that the productive aspect of affectability might—instead of trying to give the clinical term trauma a positive turn—better be captured as vulnerability, and the sentimentalist conception of the self-as-vulnerable might not be the invention of trauma yet, but an essential condition for it (127). The scene of an aborted amputation that leaves a lasting damage (rather than being resolved in a happy ending) presents Anton Reiser as psychologically and physically vulnerable. Apart from evoking contemporary discourses on the newly found self, this presentation of the protagonist’s vulnerability also evokes the far older religious and artistic tradition of ostentatio (or ostensio) vulnerum, the presentation of the wounds on hands, feet, and the side of his chest Jesus suffered during the crucifixion. It is no far stretch to link Moritz’s text to older traditions of piety.8 Apart from adapting motifs from Rousseau’s texts, Anton Reiser also evokes the confessional history of autofiction, which casts the subject as vulnerable in terms of the ontological and ethical deficiency of sinfulness. Moritz quotes Augustine in the notion of a life so oppressed that Anton is, in every moment, dying alive

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(“lebend starb,” Roman 90), while the Confessions place the subject in istam dico vitam mortalem an mortem vitalem (“this life which is mortal— or is it perhaps life-giving death”; I.6.7), and in the narrative of a juvenile robbery of cherries (Moritz, Roman 232–34), while Augustine elucidates the ontologically void nature of sin in a narrative of a theft of pears (II.4.9–6.12), which Rousseau (Confessions 46–47), too, quotes in the narrative of a stolen apple to highlight the morally corrupting aftermath of cruel education. Presenting Anton Reiser’s foot wound—the lasting damage and chronic pain—adopts the gesture of Jesus indicating his crucifixion wounds, prominent in German medieval and renaissance painting and sculpture. The ostentatio vulnerum establishes a dialogue between the Man of Sorrows and the observer (Panofsky 289). In sacred art, the ostentation is achieved by Jesus (and others) pointing at the wounds and by accompanying glosses or banners; since Thomas Aquinas, ostentatio is also a textual strategy of producing evidence and clarity (Prica 80–82). Semiotics and hermeneutics—the comprehension of signs and texts—are, in fact, the focus of the origin of the gesture in the Evangelist Luke. Resurrected Christ appears to the disciples, requesting: “Look at my hands and my feet, see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. (Lk. 24:39–40; NRSV)

What the display of his hands and feet points out is that Jesus appears in a human body that is, Aquinas writes, of the same “number” as the one he had before (IIIq.55a.6co). In other words: Jesus proves his identity by displaying his wounded limbs. The wounded hands and feet serve as “argument and sign,” Aquinas writes (argumento seu signo; IIIq.55a.6co). Having presented himself as “I myself,” Christ parallels the sign of the wounds with “testimony” (testimonio; IIIq.55a.6co), i.e., with textual evidence predicting his passion and reappearance: Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” (Lk. 24:44–46; NRSV)

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Aquinas’s concern is the same as Moritz’s: establishing clarity about who is speaking by providing a living body (not a corpse) to underpin the voice presented by the body of a text that claims to speak an essential truth. The son of God may establish unambiguous clarity for his audience through the sign of his wounds, but Aquinas struggles with inconsistent scriptural evidence of resurrection (IIIq.55a.6arg1–4) just as a reproduction of Jesus’s gesture of indicating his wounds in visual art is profoundly ambivalent (Panofsky 286): the wounds may ask for compassion, promise eternal life, call for repentance, calm the conscience, or threaten the beholder with the horrors of the last judgment (289). Wounds may serve as sign of, and argument for, many causes, which all require further testimony. This difficulty is rendered into an autopoietic strategy in Anton Reiser: the display of the psycho-somatic foot wound opens a hermeneutics of suffering. It embodies the figure of Anton Reiser, who presents the life and sufferings of its author Moritz, though with the reserve of fictionalization. The exact differences between Moritz’s and Reiser’s biographies are unclear,9 and so is the exact nature of the “damage” that “lasted” after the aborted amputation: is it just the pain, or is there something more? It is also unclear why Anton’s parents show compassion for him before the amputation but not earlier, when he is about to die. The display of the foot wound prompts these questions, thus necessitating the subsequent biographical narrative that will elucidate who the one is that displays his sorrows in a gesture of besieging frankness, confronting the reader—just like an ostentatio vulnerum confronts the beholder—with the sum of all pain and grief he suffered (Panofsky 292). Returning from the dead, almost rising from his bed on the fourth day, when the amputation is cancelled, Anton Reiser’s imitation of Christ,10 while defective, is no mere travesty. It is, rather, a poetical gesture of pointing out a fundamental hypothesis of Moritz’s project of experimental psychology: self-comprehension and psycho-somatic self-­ relation are essential elements of education and not merely given by sensations and emotions; forming and naming feelings, rather, relies on preestablished, taught or observed, hermeneutical frames of reference. The imitation of Christ Anton Reiser’s foot wound presents is deficient, yet that is precisely what makes it particular. Founding individuality onto vulnerability means that in-dividuality is produced by the very threat of being dis-membered—so that re-membrance in an autofictional text is no mere record of impressions but, in fact, the very production of the self. Moritz’s biographical hermeneutics of pain in Anton Reiser challenges the key thesis of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s influential 1766 Laocoon; or

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the Limits of Poetry and Painting. The reference is suggested, not least, by the parallel to Philoctetes, a second key figure in Lessing (2–7), who suffers from a lasting foot wound, and whose cries of pain isolate him. As Johnson writes: “Lessing writes three chapters on the artist’s duty to suppress all ugly […] or disgusting […] aspects of experience; this includes any overt expressions or admissions of pain” (Johnson 76). Physical pain, Lessing assumes, has no place in art as it cannot be expressed and hardly evokes pity, but, rather, unnerves audiences (21–27). Lessing’s assessment of pain still features prominently in current debates. Elaine Scarry, for instance, holds that pain brings about a split between the self and the world and is thus characterized by “unsharability” and a “resistance to language” (5–6; see also Johnson 83–84). Scarry supposes this to be true only for physical pain: “Psychological suffering, though often difficult for any person to express, does have referential content” (11). This distinction follows Lessing, too, who “also elaborates on the necessity of separating the body, whose limitations restrict the free expression of the artist, from the mind when he insists that too much physical detail compromises the artwork” (Johnson 76). The distinction between physical and psychological pain is eminently historical and culturally specific (Morris 15–19). A key innovation of Moritz’s psychology is to link the corporeal and the mental in the field of the psycho-somatic. The phenomenon of phantom pain, in particular, links body and psyche in a pain that can hardly be ascribed solely to one of them, and it substitutes Lessing’s canonical distinction with a differentiation between inner and outer world, linked in relational emotions such as compassion. What connects Moritz’s psychology to Lessing’s aesthetics (and Jesus’s gesture) is that the experience of concrete violence, pain, and suffering is transposed into a model of insight into something more general than what had caused the hurt—in Laocoon, in beauty and bravery, in Anton Reiser, in developmental psychology. In “Moritz’s Bildungsroman[,] […] the process of channeling personal memory traces into art results in an objectification that releases the ‘community’ of recipients from the limitations of their individual existences by actually expanding subjective experience” (Johnson 83). One of the things that sets Reiser apart from Moritz is that he is not only a testimony to childhood suffering but formed to be subject to the attention of a wider audience. The two backgrounds to the display of Anton Reiser’s foot wound— one, that frames of reference are necessary to produce self-comprehension and feelings; two, the transposition of individual suffering into general

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interest—combine in a further dimension of this display of vulnerability: defective transgenerational transmission. It can be read in the variation of the semantic field of roaming and wandering: Madame Guyon’s religious enthusiasm (Moritz, Novel 2) makes her a bekannt[e] Schwärmerin (Moritz, Roman 7), literally a “well-known swarmer,” someone whose mind moves about like a swarm of bees (DWB 152287). Anton’s father adheres to her teachings after “a rather wild, vagabond life” (Moritz, Novel 3). His son contracts the “damage” of his foot “during a walk in the fields with his parents” (7), becomes immobilized and yet “knew no greater wish than to become like his eponym, Saint Anthony, and like him to abandon father and mother and flee into the desert”; however, “the pain in the foot compelled him to turn back” (8). What makes Anton’s father search for stability, of all things, in a roaming piety of self-­ mortification, and what immobilizes the son while also driving him away— in short: what corrupts spirituality into a physical symptom—is unacknowledged mourning.

Phantoms in Mourning One might, still, wonder why I speak of phantom pain in Anton Reiser, given that his amputation has been averted, and that it is hard to conceive grief for the missing act of cutting off a limb. Mourning evokes phantoms in Moritz’s text because it has been dissociated and transferred onto the foot wound. His father’s repressed mourning informs Anton’s biography: “After the death of his first wife he suddenly turned inward, became pensive and, as the saying goes, became a completely different man” (Moritz, Novel 3–4). This is when he becomes “a professed follower of Herr von Fleischbein” (4), a widower himself (2), who translates and transmits Madame Guyon’s “dry, metaphysical fanaticism” (3). The “total mortification of all so-called ‘individuality’” (3) she teaches frees Anton’s father from the necessity to mourn his first wife (Rohse 91). The name Fleischbein—literally: “flesh-leg”—refers to a historical person (Wingertszahn), and yet it appears as no coincidence that the flesh of Anton’s leg becomes inflamed since Fleischbein’s translations of Guyon’s writings are the main source of disagreement between Anton’s father and his second wife, Anton’s mother (Moritz, Novel 4). The foot wound is a symptom that refers to a transgenerational transmission: in Anton’s oppression, “from the cradle on,” his father finds a way to act out the repression of his mourning, to the effect that the son adopts the father’s

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non-mourning and difficulty to feel psychic suffering (Rohse 91). His suffering from cruelty is, rather, expressed in a symptom that embodies a paradoxical, prosthetic relation: Anton grows up in the presence of his mother, and yet there is an absence lingering in the household—the unmourned first wife—that cannot be named, first, because the position of the wife has been “refilled,” and second, because the piety of mortification dismisses love, and consequently mourning, as mere self-interest. This lingering presence of a loss that is not his own is transposed into the scene of the aborted amputation of the foot: Anton walks on his own feet; still, the “damage” done by the injury and the threat of losing the limb “lasted” since there is no recompense for realizing one’s physical vulnerability. The complication that his own mother appears as but a substitute, as an original supplement, and the parallel struggle with his father, link Anton Reiser to the figure of Oedipus as a further famous bearer of foot wounds. Moritz briefly outlines the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in a 1795 synopsis of ancient mythology (Götterlehre oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten, 268–71), characterizing Oedipus’s feet as swollen (not wounded) because he had been bound to a tree when abandoned by his original family. More than one hundred years before the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, however, Oedipus is one among many tragic characters, not the model for a supposedly common human condition, such that Anton Reiser’s parallels to Oedipus bear much less significance than his imitation of Christ. The lingering absence of the unmourned first wife affects Anton as conflicts of ambivalence: “Although he had mother and father, he was neglected by both […], for he didn’t know whom he should side with nor whom he should stay away from since the two hated one another, and yet the one was as close to him as the other” (Moritz, Novel 5). In corresponding ambivalence, Anton experiences domestic peace after “his father marched away to the Seven Years’ War,” but the parental fights return when political “peace” is restored (5). And even his prosthetic pleasure of reading, which must substitute for human interaction, is given to him in a gesture of cruel—because disorienting—ambivalence: “In his eighth year, however, his father began to teach him a little of how to read and to this end bought him two small books, the first of which contained a guide to spelling and the second an essay attacking spelling” (6). Anton receives the contradictory gift of spelling in the same year as, but before, suffering the foot wound, and it appears as though Moritz presents familiarity with the principle of symbolic substitution as prerequisite to forming this

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symptom of phantom loss. Moritz evokes the theme of non-mourning in the ambiguous description of Anton’s home as “a house of […] tears, and accusations [Klagen]” (Moritz, Novel 5; Roman 13): Klagen denotes lamentations, such as for a dead person, as well as accusations of somebody, and in Anton’s home, the latter are supposed to replace the former, but cannot, of course. Shifting blame onto somebody is, rather, opposed to accepting pain over the loss of someone. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have analyzed the interrelation between the inability to mourn and cruel education as a long-standing tradition in the German-speaking world and call it “the German way of loving” (3), referencing it as far back as to Luther (22). Authoritarianism, lust in subjugation, and the desire to discredit authorities, they propose, do belong to the same cycle, wherein the “exploitation of obedience in […] social relationships” leaves subjects in “inner helplessness” (39) because it results in “an unusually ambivalent attitude toward paternal authority” (46). The forbidden aggression against authority is repressed and channeled to idealize the (paternal) authority: “If I identify with him with all my strength, I feel the oppression he exercises not as a burden, but as a joy” (22). Anton Reiser articulates the idealization of, and identification with, authority, the ambivalence, and the lust: Anton’s heart melted in sadness whenever he had to find one of his parents wrong, and yet it very often seemed to him that his father, whom he simply feared, was more in the right than his mother, whom he loved. Thus his young soul swayed back and forth between hate and love, between fear of and trust in his parents. […] It seemed to him as if he had to be scolded continually. (5)

This imagination of a continuous need for punishment is indeed a desire more than a threat: “Even the thought of his own destruction was not only pleasant to him, but also produced a kind of voluptuous sensation” (14). The production of a symptom such as the foot wound is a way out of the profound helplessness thus produced, not least as the lasting damage confines Anton to reading as his compensatory medium, where grief may, finally, unfold: In his ninth year he read all the stories in the Bible, from the beginning to the end, and when one of the principal characters such as Moses, Samuel, or

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David had died, he could be saddened for days and he felt as though a friend had died. (8)

Yet even with the link of non-mourning to education, it, still, requires some elucidation how non-mourning for a woman who was not his mother translates into Anton’s sentimental reading. The relay is the aborted amputation and the pain it leaves behind. A pivotal form of theoretical and poetic negotiations of loss, especially in transgenerational transmission, is ghostliness and haunting. According to Sigmund Freud’s 1923 considerations of mourning, “introjection” is “the sole condition under which the it can give up its objects” (SE19 29), which is to say that swallowing the hard truth is necessary in order to realize someone or something has been lost. Introjecting loss includes, quite literally, putting loss and grief into one’s mouth so as to speak about it. In 1976, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok describe the phantasy of “incorporation” as a dysfunctional alternative to mourning that abstains from using words associated with the loss in order not to introject but reject it, reverting things in such a way that the ego has not sustained any loss and does not feel any pain (126–28). Rejecting mourning by way of a fantasy of incorporation avoids symbolization and strives for a substitution of a different kind, “one mouth-work in place of another” (128). What comes to pass by way of swallowing the lost is “an intrapsychic secret” that Abraham and Torok call a “crypt” (130): a psychic structure akin to a hidden tomb, serving to conceal all pain from consciousness, to contain all thoughts and feelings linked to the loss as well as the very lost love object itself. Abraham and Torok assume that an individual crypt is transmitted to the next generation, or generations, as a “phantom” (171): Since the phantom is not related to the loss of an object of love, it cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as would be the case with melancholics or with all those who carry a tomb in themselves. It is the children’s or descendants’ lot to objectify these buried tombs through diverse species of ghosts. What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of folklore merely objectify a metaphor active in the unconscious: the burial of an unspeakable fact within the love-object. (Abraham and Torok 171–72)

Moritz sets the path for Romanticism, which widely explores the psychological insights articulated in folklore. Abraham and Torok propose that

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an ancestor’s crypt releases ghosts by which descendants are haunted without understanding what affects them. What is haunting them results from a loss they have not suffered, and could not have mourned, themselves. The ancestral ghost is real, nevertheless, insofar as it informs the descendant’s speech and psychic reality: traumatic phantoms bar introjection, prevent a regular usage of words,11 and “point to a gap, […] refer to the unspeakable” that lies hidden in the other’s crypt. The inherited phantom thus, paradoxically, appears as a lack, becomes present as an absence, when descendants cannot put into their mouths what is buried in the ancestor’s crypt. Recent approaches describe transgenerational lacunas as “psychic holes,” “empty circle” (Salberg 83–87), or “communal crypts” (Schwab 46). Analyses of historical transmissions of trauma often focus on family settings without implying a separation between public and private; “the family is,” rather, “what might best be called a ‘remembering context’” (Coates 123) fostering the transmission of individual attachment patterns as much as structures of collective memory. These recent approaches connect to a point unclear in Abraham and Torok: the exact manner in which crypts are transmitted as phantoms (173). Recent approaches suggest that the dependency on reciprocity with an attachment figure who keeps them alive makes children form communicative patterns that complement their parents’ traumatization so as to be able to address their parents in a way that invites a response: “The child must do this in order to have an attachment relationship,” Salberg explains, “thereby becoming attached to the parent’s presence and absence” (90). Complementing the non-presence of repression and negation requires a high intensity of repression that needs to be “transmitted to the child, who must not know what he/she actually does know” (89). This traumatic learning—an un-learning of individual perceptions to make room for a heritage of repression—comprises practice in disregarding one’s feelings as much as repeating leaps in historical narratives. In Anton Reiser, it is this kind of learning by adopting repression, informed by quietist piety, that translates the non-mourning of Anton’s father into Anton’s limb pain; reading enables him to find Biblical characters to whom to attach the sense of mourning that haunts him. His phantom pain, paradoxically left behind by an amputation that is not carried out, is pain deferred over one generation. This transmission inspires grief over a loss Anton did not sustain himself, but which shapes his life nevertheless. The “damage” done by this learning of how to adopt the losses of others psycho-somatically—rather than feeling them in relational

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emotions such as compassion—is indeed “lasting,” even if the limb remains intact. Anton Reiser, however, is as much a figure of individual testimony as of translating individual experience into communal insight. The phantom pain from which he suffers can, therefore, be read as prosthetic mourning that relates to his father’s non-mourning on the narrative level of testimony and, at the same time, on the level of cultural context, to a historical change: the loss of a “hermeneutics of death” (Koschorke 155), the detachment of death from everyday knowledge and its confinement to medicine (Ariès), as if death was a pathology or mishap. Part of this process is that communal and ritual forms of mourning such as lamentations, dirges, and wakes have been culturally marginalized in favor of the modern paradigm of the inwardness of emotion. The psychoanalytic theory that I have employed to describe Anton’s phantom pain is part of this historical change: psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics of pain under the conditions of individualized psycho-somatization that are spelled out—and have, historically, been in part produced—in Anton Reiser. Freud’s discussion of mourning as a psychical issue makes Darian Leader wonder: “What happened to the social dimension of mourning?” (71). It has been abolished by the modern paradigm of the inwardness of emotions, wherein only silence—silence as taught by quietist piety—counts as authentic expression of mourning but is indistinguishable from the silence of repression and denial. What is left behind is the problem of the transgenerational transmission of trauma due to a lack of mourning—as a rest that haunts silent grief like a phantom but cannot be named anymore because the vocabulary to do so has been lost. In a ritual context, sorrow and pain are valid not as private sensations best expressed by silence but, rather, as “socially constructed” phenomena (Seremetakis 120). Modernity’s turn from sociality toward the inwardness of emotion means that “one must ‘perform oneself’ rather than a more distanced role” (Wilce 201). Moritz’s “biography” as Anton Reiser serves the purpose of establishing autofiction as a form of self-performance, testifying to individual suffering and, at the same time, identifying the individual through its particular suffering. What remains of the language of lamenting and complaining under the paradigm of authentic inwardness is the language of defense that Freud calls melancholic and that speaks in order not to lament, not to accept any loss, but to remain unmoved (SE14 248). Literature is one of the few discourses in which the articulation of mourning and lamenting can be negotiated in modernity as it is a prominent realm into which plaintive

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language has been relegated from everyday practice. Embedded into the conditions of modernity, however, literature does not simply speak the obsolete language of lamenting and complaining, yet it may outline its lack, phantom lingering, and prosthetic replacements.

Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, the citation of Moritz’s novel follows the English translation by John R. Russell. To distinguish the translation from the original, the parentheses will refer to “Novel” and “Roman” respectively. 2. My translation of: “Wie nahm die Entzündung in dem schadhaften Gliede allmählich zu? […] Welcher kleine unbemerkte Splitter war darin stecken geblieben, der nach und nach ein so gefährliches Geschwür erweckte?” 3. My translation of: “Wie weit mannigfaltiger, verderblicher, und um sich greifender als alle körperlichen Übel, sind die Krankheiten der Seele!” 4. There are, of course, justified doubts whether autofiction is a genre such as tragedy or elegy. A literary genre is, usually, a form of texts that can be aesthetically and historically differentiated. This is not the case in autobiographical writing, first, because it is a pervasive gesture of mirroring the reciprocal relation of reading, between reader in front and voice in the text, when authors talk about themselves. Second, the subject of autofiction is none other than forming a historical narrative, and a critical narrative of the history of a genre would only mirror this narrative rather than analyze it. 5. Anton’s last name Reiser means, literally, “traveler.” 6. Augustine starts his autobiographical narrative with infancy, too, analyzing how relationality is established in language; however, in the Confessions, the infant is the model case for Augustine’s concept of original sin as what shapes human life even before consciousness arises (I.6.8-7.11). 7. Descartes writes: “we were all children before being men, at which time we were necessarily under the control of our appetites and our teachers, and […] neither of these influences is wholly consistent, and neither of them, perhaps, always tends towards the better” (11). 8. Pietism combines Augustine’s imperative of self-reflection with a bourgeois ideal of productivity (Köhnen 125). 9. Moritz’s and Reiser’s voices are marked as distinct: “I have gone back in my story to retrieve Anton’s first feelings and notions of the world. […] He remembers clearly” (Moritz, Novel 18). 10. “Imitation of Christ” is a key concept in the history of spirituality and literature, based on the idea of following the life of Jesus as an example (O’Collins and Farrugia 115).

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11. This marks an important difference between Abraham and Torok’s concepts and Derrida’s “hauntology” (9). What haunts ontology is the ambiguity of all words that philosophical language seeks to eradicate from terminology, most prominently in the concept of “spirit” (Geist) as supposed to designate nothing but rationality. While Derrida’s approach is about the inevitable perspective in all thinking and knowing (the ghost [Geist] that cannot be exorcised), the psychoanalytical concept applied here is about the destruction of comprehensibility and transmission due to repression and negation that (unlike Derrida’s) cannot be accepted as a structural axiom because it destroys life and perpetuates genocide. For a detailed comparison see Davis.

References Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Nicholas Rand, U of Chicago P, 1994. Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa theologica.” Corpus thomisticum, Fundación Tomás de Aquino, 2000–2019. www.corpusthomisticum.org/iopera.html. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver, Boyars, 1976. Augustine. Confessions 1–8. Translated by Carolyn J.-B.  Hammond, Harvard UP, 2014. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. U of Texas P, 1981. Binczek, Natalie. “Psychophysiologie des Schmerzes in Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser.” Revista de Filología Alemania, vol. 12, 2004, pp. 51–65. Breithaupt, Fritz. “The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 77–101. Coates, Susan. “The Child as Traumatic Trigger.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 22, 2012, pp. 123–28. Davis, Colin. “État présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.” French Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2005, pp. 373–79. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Translated by Lawrence J. Lafleur, Bobbs-Merrill, 1960. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften: Gesammelte Schriften VII. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1927. DWB = Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm. 32 vols., Hirzel, 1854–1971. Eakin, John Paul. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell UP, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, 24 vols., Vintage, 1999. [SE]

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Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, U of North Carolina P, 1988, pp. 34–62. Gans, Eric. “The Victim as Subject: The Esthetico-Ethical System of Rousseau’s ‘Rêveries.’” Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Critical Assessments of Leading Political Philosophers, vol. 4, edited by John T. Scott, Routledge, 2006, pp. 402–29. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Allen & Unwin, 2005. House, Michael. Fact and Fiction: Literary and Scientific Cultures in Germany and Britain. U of Toronto P, 2016. Johnson, Laurie Ruth. The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism. Niemeyer, 2002. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Fink, 2003. Köhnen, Ralph. Selbstoptimierung: Eine kritische Diskursgeschichte des Tagebuchs. Lang, 2018. Läubli, Martina. Subjekt mit Körper: Die Erschreibung des Selbst bei Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Phillip Moritz und W. G. Sebald. Transcript, 2014. Leader, Darian. The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. Graywolf, 2009. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon; or the Limits of Poetry and Painting. Translated by William Ross, Ridgway, 1863. Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. Translated by Beverley Placzek, Grove, 1975. Moritz, Karl Philipp. Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel. Translated by John R. Russell, Camden House, 1996. ———. Anton Reiser: Ein psychologischer Roman. Reclam, 1986. ———. Götterlehre oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten. Unger, 1795. digi. ub.uni-­heidelberg.de/diglit/moritz1795. ———. Werke in zwei Bänden: Band 1: Dichtungen und Schriften zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Edited by Heide Hollmer and Albert Meier, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. U of California P, 1991. Niggl, Günter. Studien zur Autobiographie. Duncker & Humblot, 2012. [NRSV] The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. 5th ed., edited by Michael Coogan et al., Oxford UP, 2018. O’Collins, Gerald, and Edward G.  Farrugia. A Concise Dictionary of Theology. Paulist P, 2014. Panofsky, Erwin. “Imago Pietatis: Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des ‘Schmerzensmanns’ und der ‘Maria Mediatrix.’” Festschrift für Max J. Friedländer zum 60. Geburtstag, Seemann, 1927, pp. 261–308. Riley, Patrick. Character and Conversion in Autobiography: Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, and Sartre. U of Virginia P, 2004.

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Rohse, Heide. “Abgespaltene Trauer.” Adoleszenz: Freiburger Literaturpsychologische Gespräche, edited by Johannes Cremerius et  al., Königshausen & Neumann, 1997. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by W. Conyngham Mallory, Floating P, 2012. ———. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated by Russel Goulbourne, Oxford UP, 2011. ———. Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, translated by Judith R.  Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger D. Masters, UP of New England, 1990. Rüggemeier, Anne. Die relationale Autobiographie: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie, Poetik und Gattungsgeschichte eines neuen Genres in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur. WVT, 2014. Salberg, Jill. “The Texture of Traumatic Attachment: Presence and Ghostly Absence in Transgenerational Transmission.” Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma, edited by Jill Salberg and Sue Grand, Routledge, 2017, pp. 77–99. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985. Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Columbia UP, 2010. Seremetakis, C.  Nadia. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago UP, 1991. Spengemann, William C. The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre. Yale UP, 1980. Starobinski, Jean. “The Illness of Rousseau.” Yale French Studies, vol. 28, 1961, pp. 64–74. Sütterlin, Nicole. Poetik der Wunde: Zur Entdeckung des Traumas in der Poetik der Romantik. Wallstein, 2019. Wilce, James M. Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Wingertszahn, Christof. Anton Reiser und die “Michelein”: Neue Funde zum Quietismus im 18. Jahrhundert. Wehrhahn, 2002.

Discussion: Grief and Prosthetic Relations

From the larger social and historical contexts of disability to amputation’s impact on the individual’s negotiation of identity, the previous parts of this volume have already shown us that amputation may isolate the amputee but does not take place in isolation: relationships are crucibles in which the meanings of disability are played out and ultimately forged. The chapters in this part pay particular attention to these relational meanings and unpack the ways in which amputation is a relational experience that has an impact on and is itself impacted by relationships. Having one’s limb amputated, with the associated trauma, injury, and surgery, is often a moment of crisis in an individual’s life that changes how they relate to others. Doctors or care workers are important agents in the early stages of response to limb loss, and Dr. Ferris’s responsibility for the amputation in The Penalty plays a huge part in driving Blizzard’s desire for revenge. Family members or loved ones who remember the amputee before the amputation and have certain expectations of the amputee’s future behavior may act as both helpful and empathetic caregivers but may also be painful reminders of a past that seems lost, along with the limb, as we see in The Plot Against America. Traumatic family constellations, like the ones in Anton Reiser, may even be inscribed onto the body and produce a form of transmitted “phantom” disability. Friends or new acquaintances may be repulsed by the amputee or see how their pity turns into resistance, like the narrator in Die Billigesser. How amputees navigate the

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multitudes of relationships that shape how they experience their newly disabled state is an important preoccupation in many literary and filmic explorations of amputation. There is, however, another relational experience that undergirds these encounters, and that is the relationship that amputees entertain with themselves. As Juliane Prade-Weiss emphasizes, relationships, but also physical experiences like pain, are important ways through which a sense of self and a grid for one’s life’s story are developed. Amputation, in particular, highlights how we, as embodied beings, relate to our own bodies. The emotions and behaviors elicited between human beings are mirrored on this level: the amputee may be shocked and repulsed by her new body, she may mourn for her lost limb, and she may learn to care for and love her body in new ways. Similarly, in the texts discussed by Susan Kerns and Maren Scheurer we encounter the body as damaged goods in need of repair through overcompensation—as in Blizzard’s feats of excessive bodily mastery; as a hindrance to perfection that can only be overcome through disease—as in Koller’s frantic attempts to transcend his body; and as a source of shame and grief that must nevertheless be cared for in new ways—as in Alvin’s reluctant path toward rehabilitation. What is of particular interest to literary and film scholars is, of course, how these constellations are transferred to the relationship between text and audience. Texts shape our response to the fictional amputees we encounter, as Kerns’s comparison between Morris’s novel and Worsley’s film makes clear. While the novel presents us with a “monster,” the film, through cinematographic framing and the actor’s physical performance of dis/ability, allows for a more graduated response to the disabled character that includes repulsion as well as understanding and empathy. Literary form, genre, and language may themselves be linked to and shaped by experiences of trauma, pain, and suffering, as Prade-Weiss argues in relation to Anton Reiser’s project of relating psychological and physical suffering with a vision of a fundamentally relational self that is formed and explored in autofiction. At the same time, through literary devices like the narrator, literary form may also explore art’s potential to address negative affect. Scheurer’s reading of Bernhard and Roth suggests that literary texts provide provocative spaces in which readers may confront pity, disgust, abjection, and grief in order to develop new modes of relating to disability. All three chapters emphasize that the question is not whether empathy with disabled characters is possible or not but how we, disabled or not,

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respond to the ambivalent emotions inherent even in empathetic response—and how art mediates these emotions. In this vein, the texts discussed play a significant role in expanding potential discourses of mourning. As Prade-Weiss observes, Reiser’s phantom pain derives from phantom grief—mourning that has been repressed and unwittingly transferred to the next generation. Mourning, as we know, is not always possible or allowed; the ritual tools or language for expressing grief may be lacking, unavailable, or not permissible; and the object of grief may not be “grievable,” to use Judith Butler’s term. Amputation seems to have a complicated relationship to grievability, in the sense that the need to mourn a limb is often acknowledged but quickly enclosed in a demand for speedy rehabilitation and adjustment, and in the sense that Western cultures, at least, have generated no language for this type of grief. The arts may be a possible exception: in a slight specification of Prade-Weiss’s closing argument, we may take this entire part of the volume to suggest that the arts may be one of the few modern discourses in which mourning for a lost limb may be negotiated. Kerns, for instance, shows us how The Penalty presents Blizzard’s desire for revenge as a misguided replacement for grief, which may then be shared by the audience. And Scheurer highlights instances in Die Billigesser and The Plot Against America where non-disabled characters learn to share the mourning that amputation entails. It is from such visions of shared mourning across all three dimensions of amputation and relatedness that further research into the relationality of disability may take its cues and explore the varied ways in which we understand disability within human interactions.

Reference Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.

PART IV

Philosophy, Language, Disability

CHAPTER 11

Zhuangzi, Amputees, and Virtue (de) Danesh Singh

In the ancient Daoist text Zhuangzi, stories abound in which individuals who are mutilated and disfigured are valorized for their ability to accept their unconventional physical bodies and thereby accord with the patterns of nature referred to as the Way (dao). The text features stories involving amputees in particular, in order to undermine a conventional understanding of health and flourishing and convey the message that these characters embody wholeness of a natural capacity Zhuangzi calls virtue (de), despite their lack of bodily wholeness. But the valorization of these figures gives rise to a puzzle, since the text also appears to praise those who maintain a conventional standard of the value of bodily integrity; there are figures other than the mutilated or deformed who are praised precisely because they maintain bodily integrity and live out their years by avoiding harm. This tension in the text can be resolved once we recognize first that Zhuangzi gives priority to the exercise of virtue (de), indicating that virtue is sufficient for full and complete health and flourishing. While bodily integrity reflects the value of living in accordance with nature, it only has value insofar as it facilitates exercise of virtue, which includes an

D. Singh (*) Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_11

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acceptance of fate (ming) and the transformation (hua) of things, a state in which we can experience psychological ease and practical success in our dealings with the world. In addition, we can further steer between the tension in the text by recognizing that the amputated individuals are exemplars of the Daoist approach to human life (called “the Way”) in the sense that they are able to negotiate and attend to their somewhat unique circumstances. Amputees in particular offer readers the full extent of Zhuangzi’s radical message: they are models of those who have attained the Way precisely because they are able to live virtuously by accepting fate and the transformation of things in the world. Amputees embrace transformation to such a degree that they can even welcome the loss of their feet. When Zhuangzi was written, while some amputees were born without limbs or lost them in war, many had their feet amputated as a punishment by the authorities for committing a crime. It is this latter group for whom Zhuangzi gives particular focus. In accepting their punishment and their fate, these individuals achieve the height of virtue. The Daoist view stands in direct contrast, and is indeed a response to, the competing school of thought of Confucianism. Confucians in Zhuangzi’s time maintain that bodily integrity is necessary for the realization of social harmony, given ritual’s role in Confucian thought. I will explain this connection in more detail in the final section. What emerges from Zhuangzi’s view is that amputees are just as capable of achieving the Daoist Way and a virtuous life (de) as anyone else; the lack of bodily integrity is no bar to the exercise of virtue, which is by itself sufficient for the achievement of the Daoist Way. Zhuangzi would even say that the amputees represented in the text achieve the height of virtue, insofar as they radically embrace their fate and the transformation of things.

Stories About Virtue, Fate, and Transformation Zhuangzi lived in the fourth century BCE. The text that bears his name uses short stories, philosophical argumentation, dialogues, and prose to convey his profound philosophical message. The core ideas of the text are contained in the first seven parts of the book. They are known as the “inner chapters” and are understood as truly representative of Zhuangzi’s ideas; all of the passages referenced here will come from the inner chapters. I will give focus to the fifth of these inner chapters, where nearly a half of it features amputees and their exercise of virtue (de). The “outer” and

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“miscellaneous” chapters often include elaborations of these ideas but were probably written by followers of Zhuangzi’s message. While Zhuangzi himself did not belong to an official school, adherents to this thought would later help create the movement known as Daoism. His ideas are clearly responses to the ideas of Confucius and his followers, whose thought would later have tremendous influence on Chinese culture. At the time that Zhuangzi was written, however, Confucian ideas were only beginning to be developed. While the thought of Zhuangzi is notoriously difficult to interpret in its details, it is clear from the inner chapters in particular that he encourages readers to use their innate capacities to negotiate the world with psychological equanimity and ease. Attunement to the Daoist Way, or the preferred path or approach to human life, involves having the right relationship to the constant change in the world. Zhuangzi believes that we should remain largely unaffected by this change, even the changes for which we have strong preferences, for and against. Zhuangzi articulates this posture toward the world in terms of the cultivation of an inner capacity or potency he often calls “de,” and occasionally refers to as “cai,” which are often translated as “power” and more often translated as “virtue.” Living in accordance with the Daoist Way, then, entails the cultivation of virtue. According to Chris Fraser, the concept refers to an inner disposition as well as success and effectiveness in one’s outward actions and behavior (“Wandering the Way” 543). The perfection of virtue is a key concept in the text, insofar as it highlights the specifically psychological aspect of flourishing (Fraser, “Emotion and Agency”). This psychological concept describes an acceptance of fate (ming) in which individuals are at ease with transformation (hua) in a world of immense change. According to the text, we inhabit a world of constant transformation; the forces that coalesce to generate the circumstances of our lives outstrip our control and comprehension (Fraser, “Wandering the Way” 559). Successfully negotiating transformation involves recognizing one’s proper place in the flux of nature in all its totality and constitutive processes (Fraser, “Emotion and Agency” 100). One story that captures the exercise of virtue and acceptance of fate and transformation involves Zi Gao, Duke of She, a high official of the state called Chu, who is having a conversation with Confucius (Watson 55–58; Zhuangzi 4/34–53). While Confucius, one of Zhuangzi’s philosophical opponents, belongs to a competing school of thought in real life, Zhuangzi in this and in other stories represents him as a spokesman for his Daoist

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vision of the Way, while representing Confucius differently in other stories, as we shall see (Van Norden 157). The duke has been recently assigned by the King of Chu to deal with diplomatic affairs in the state of Qi. He doubts his ability to succeed in the mission and is so fearful that he even feels feverish. Zi Gao finds himself in a situation in which he cannot refuse the king’s orders, and neither can he fall short of bringing about a successful outcome in his mission, for if he fails, he will surely be punished. This predicament has brought about a considerable amount of emotional stress for the duke. The story involves a nobleman on a political mission, and that Confucius would give advice to him is a familiar motif, both within and outside the Zhuangzi. In the Analects, a work compiled by Confucius’s followers about the life and philosophical thought of Confucius, there are passages in which their philosophical master has occasion to give wise advice to rulers and other officials about how to handle governmental affairs. Zhuangzi, however, is more interested in human life more generally than he is with the affairs of the state, and the story is meant to set the stage for Confucius to discuss virtue, fate, and the transformation of all things. As spokesman for Zhuangzi’s Daoist Way, Confucius responds to Zi Gao’s predicament by saying that humans invariably find themselves in situations governed by circumstances outside their control. Confucius’s examples include love toward parents and duties to rulers, as subjects (Watson 56; Zhuangzi 4/39–42). Humans are born into families and are invested in the care of their aging parents. It is part of the fate (ming) of individuals to be confronted with these circumstances. In the same way, individuals are also born into political society. It is their duty to follow the requirements that are imposed on them as political creatures. In order to follow the Way, the aim is to manage these and various other inevitable matters: And to serve your own mind (xin) so that sadness or joy do not sway or move it; to understand what you can do nothing about and to be content with it as with fate (ming)—this is the perfection of virtue (de). As a subject and a son, you are bound to find things you cannot avoid. If you act in accordance with the state of affairs and forget about yourself, then what leisure will you have to love life and hate death? Act in this way and you will be all right. (Watson 56; Zhuangzi 4/42–44)

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At the end of the conversation, Confucius reiterates the value of accepting what is inevitable. He encourages Zi Gao to develop in himself a level of equanimity and psychological ease in the midst of change: “Just go along with things and let your mind (xin) move freely. Resign yourself to what cannot be avoided and nourish what is within you—this is best” (Watson, 57–58; Zhuangzi 4/52–53). In effectively managing our affairs, we maintain the integrity of our minds (xin). Those who have sufficiently cultivated their virtue (de) attend fully to their surroundings; they achieve an effectiveness and harmony leading to psychological ease and practical success in their dealings with the world. In another story from the inner chapters, another nobleman named Ai has a conversation with Confucius about a man named Ai Tai Tuo (Watson 68–71; Zhuangzi 5/31–49). He is not mutilated or disfigured, but he is characterized as a physically unattractive and yet highly charismatic man. Much like in the previous story, Confucius sounds more like a Daoist than he does the founder of Confucianism; here, he again plays the role of Daoist spokesman. Confucius praises Ai Tai Tuo’s abilities, primarily because he wins the trust and affection of others without saying or doing anything in particular. Confucius goes on to give an anecdote within the larger story about piglets who were at the body of their dead mother, to compare the mother pig to Ai Tai Tuo and his capacity or virtue (cai), which utilizes the body (xing) for its purposes (Watson 69; Zhuangzi 5/26–27). Confucius points out that once the piglets realized that their mother was no longer alive, they left her. He explains that what the piglets loved about their mother was not her body, but the potency, power, or virtue (de) that employed and engaged the body. In the same way, what makes Ai Tai Tuo so special is not his body, but his capacity or wholeness of virtue (cai), which utilizes the body. Seemingly out of nowhere, Confucius goes on to compare wholeness of virtue to wholeness of body. According to Confucius, if a person has an amputated foot but has the same approach to life as Ai Tai Tuo, then the amputee will not be troubled by his supposed loss (Watson 69; Zhuangzi 5/28). As in the previous passage, Confucius tells the duke that the wholeness of virtue involves acceptance of fate (ming). He says, Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat—these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate (ming). […] If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy, if you can do

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this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind (xin)— this is what I call being whole in power (virtue, cai). (Watson 70; Zhuangzi 5/43–46)

Confucius calls the acceptance of all of the different states of affairs in the world—life, death, success, failure, and so on, the wholeness of virtue (cai). Confucius adds that in a world in which great care is taken to keep the body whole, attention to the wholeness of virtue (de) should be held to be of even greater value (Watson 69; Zhuangzi 5/41–42). In other words, wholeness of virtue is contrasted with having a body that is in some way deficient and even defective, by conventional standards. Ai Tai Tuo is not mutilated or disfigured, but it is important to note that he is extremely unattractive. In Ancient China, it was understood in some traditions that good looks, defined in terms of having a jade-like appearance, reflected good inner character (Csikszentmihalyi 127). But despite his ugly appearance, Ai Tai Tuo is extremely charming and has a tremendous power to influence others. Rather humorously, the story presents his charismatic power as so strong that other men struggle to separate from him when in his company and women would rather be his concubine than another man’s wife (Watson 68; Zhuangzi 5/31–33). Significantly, Ai Tai Tuo’s ugliness is likened to an amputated foot, indicating Zhuangzi’s interest in addressing the lives of amputees and demonstrating that neither a lack of good looks nor of bodily integrity need be a hindrance to achieving wholeness of virtue. Finally, a passage from the text involving a master named Yu, whose body is in the process of becoming disfigured—presumably from old age—has much to say about transformation (hua) (Watson 80–81; Zhuangzi 6/45–60). Yu serves as a model for how to negotiate events outside of our control or comprehension. Yu expresses wonderment at the prospective changes his body may undertake amid continual transformation. With more than a hint of hyperbole and humor, he welcomes whatever changes the “Creator” has in store for him, even those that are totally unlike any he has experienced before: If the process continues, perhaps in time [the Creator will] transform (hua) my left arm into a rooster. In that case I’ll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform (hua) my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I’ll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he’ll transform (hua)

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my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I’ll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again? (Watson 80–81; Zhuangzi 6/28–30)

Zhuangzi employs hyperbole in this passage to make the point that all transformations should be radically affirmed, rather than resisted or denied. The suggestion here seems to be that future transformations offer benefits that his limb does not, regardless of the nature or content of the transformation. Master Yu’s response to change illustrates the importance of accepting what Confucius calls “the alternations of the world” and “the workings of fate” in the story about Ai Tai Tuo. Zhuangzi believes that no matter how drastic the changes in question are, the exercise of virtue requires adaptation. Like the disfigured, amputees also face changes that test the limits of what most people consider tolerable. In the final section, I will explore how it is that amputees are Daoist exemplars who display the height of virtue, in that they accept fate and transformation to an extraordinary degree. Before turning to an account of amputees, however, we must first consider Zhuangzi’s emphasis on preserving bodily integrity by avoiding harm.

Stories About Avoidance of Harm and Being Useless In the story about Ai Tai Tuo, there is reference to the value that people in Zhuangzi’s time generally attach to bodily integrity. The story also says that wholeness of virtue (de) should be regarded as more important than bodily integrity, as the passing mention of an amputee by Confucius suggests. And yet, the importance placed on wholeness of virtue appears to be in tension with other passages that emphasize the importance of avoiding bodily harm to live out one’s natural lifespan. Exploring this tension further sets the stage for Zhuangzi’s argument about amputees, namely that bodily integrity is secondary to virtue and that virtue is linked to one’s specific physical circumstances and thus cannot be judged by conventional notions of bodily wholeness. The passages that praise longevity encourage the readers of the text to keep their desires small and their lives simple, yet carefree. These passages often appeal to a concept in Daoism called tian, translated as “nature” or “heaven.” The term refers to living naturally in the sense that it refers to organic processes, such as the regularity of the seasons and the processes of human life and death (Coutinho 31); the term also concerns heaven in

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the sense that it has a transcendental quality, as it bestows power or gives life to, and impels the growth and development of, things in nature (Coutinho 30). Tian and virtue (de) have overlapping meanings, insofar as both prescribe living in accordance with the facts and processes of nature. Longevity is important because it reveals an orientation in which individuals abide by natural cycles of birth, growth, maturity, and death (Coutinho 104). Zhuangzi includes stories featuring useless trees in order to promote the value of avoiding harm to oneself. In one story from the text (Watson 59–61; Zhuangzi 4/64–75), a carpenter named Shi tells his apprentice to pass over a certain tree that has grown so large that people are regularly gathering around it to marvel at it. Shi concludes the tree is useless (wu yong) since it cannot be used to make boats for sailing the seas or coffins for burying the dead. That night, the oak tree appears to him in a dream. The tree criticizes the carpenter for his fixation on the value of being useful. It is precisely because the tree is so useless that it has been able to live so long. Other trees, such as pear trees and orange trees, die prematurely precisely because they are so useful. According to the tree, What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? […] Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes their life miserable for them, and so they don’t get to finish out the years Heaven (tian) gave them but are cut off in mid-­ journey. (Watson 60; Zhuangzi 4/69–70)

The tree in the dream explains that it has been trying to be of no use for a long time. The next day, the carpenter has a conversation in which he tells his apprentice that the tree cannot and should not be judged by conventional standards. Surely, Zhuangzi is less interested in the integrity of trees than he is in the bodily integrity of human beings. In the context of the human world, individuals who are “useless” like the tree in the abovementioned story keep their body whole and avert premature death. In so doing, they lead a long life, in accordance with one’s natural (tian) lifespan. In one story involving a man named Shu (Watson 62; Zhuangzi 4/83–86), he possesses a body that by conventional standards would be considered disfigured: “There’s [Hunchback] Shu—chin stuck down in his navel, shoulders up above his head, pigtail pointing to the sky, his five organs at the top, his two thighs pressing his ribs” (Watson 62; Zhuangzi 4/83). Since Shu is

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disfigured, he is unable to perform tasks that most can, such as serving in the military and participating in corvée work groups for the benefit of public service (Watson 62; Zhuangzi 4/84–85). But it is precisely his uselessness as a hunchback that offers him the possibility of bodily integrity in the more robust sense. These limitations enable him to care for his basic needs, and though he leads a modest life, his uselessness keeps him out of harm’s way. In being so useless, he finishes out the allotted years heaven has given him. “With a crippled body, he’s still able to look after himself and finish out the years Heaven (tian) gave him. How much better, then, if he had crippled virtue (de)” (Watson 62; Zhuangzi 4/86). From these final lines of the story, the text suggests that the Daoist Way can be achieved without bodily integrity. Encouraging individuals to avoid harm by being useless in order to lengthen their lifespan is difficult to square with the view that individuals ought to accept the transformation (hua) of things and their fate (ming) in light of this transformation. There is tension between the two views in cases where fate has decided that individuals live without bodily wholeness. If bodily integrity is so important, one wonders why exactly Zhuangzi valorizes those who are unable to keep their bodies intact, such as Hunchback Shu. A puzzle arises in the text about the status of the disfigured and mutilated. However, the story about Shu also suggests that conventional thinking concerning the body as well as the mind requires a reversal; what is normally understood as warped and disfigured should be taken to be what is in fact flourishing, at least in Shu’s case. If following the Way means attending to the specific circumstances of one’s life, then Shu’s circumstances require that he navigate the world differently than those whose bodies remain whole. Hence, “crippled virtue” enables him to lead a life that offers psychological ease and practical success. In light of this reversal, we recognize that bodily integrity is of secondary importance in Zhuangzi’s thought. As Mark Berkson has explained, humans possess by their nature a propensity to value life. But given their unbounded desires as well as their unique capacity to think, act intentionally, and in turn stray from their nature, humans are also able to abandon their proper place in the cosmological order, thereby putting their bodies at great risk and hastening their demise (Berkson 218). The avoidance of harm can facilitate the goal of living out one’s years, and lengthening one’s life, in accordance with nature (tian) (Berkson 206). Longevity and life can be understood as separable concepts, and Zhuangzi takes

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nourishing life, which is primarily psychological, to be more valuable (Berkson 205; Stanley-Baker 18). Zhuangzi’s emphasis on longevity need not imply that individuals ought to pursue longevity for the sake of itself, and by extension, pursue bodily integrity for its own sake. In the context of leading a life of health and flourishing, the puzzle is resolved when we understand that practicing virtue by accepting fate and the transformation of things take priority over longevity and bodily integrity (Singh 105). For Zhuangzi, one ought to pursue the latter goods only if they are in accordance with nature, and only in terms of the specific conditions of an individual’s life. The stories from Zhuangzi recounted in this section about the tree and the hunchback named Shu convey the idea that living in accordance with nature is not universal and cannot be judged by the standards of conventional ideas of bodily integrity. In the last section, I hope to show that, for Zhuangzi, neither should these standards be applied to amputees. The amputees mentioned in Zhuangzi are clear examples of how acceptance of fate and the transformation of things are sufficient for the full exercise of virtue.

Virtue Stories Involving Amputees Zhuangzi’s stories involving the disfigured and the mutilated capture his ideal not only because they show that bodily integrity is not necessary for the exercise of virtue (de), but also because the characters in these stories display a high degree of virtue in accepting their respective disfigurement and mutilation, an expression of their fate (ming) and of the transformation (hua) of things. Their virtue is evidenced by the extent to which they overcome conventional thinking about the body as well as about who can exercise virtue. In order to make better sense of Zhuangzi’s views on amputees, the body, and virtue (de), we must first understand how Zhuangzi’s view contrasts with the Confucian view. The Confucian view is influenced in part by views of physiognomy that already existed in Chinese culture. As mentioned earlier, Zhuangzi’s ideas about virtue are in response to these physiognomic traditions; Zhuangzi seems to be criticizing those who think that people with an unconventional outer appearance, such as extreme ugliness or the loss of a foot, necessarily possess a poor or deficient moral character. In contrast to the thought of Zhuangzi, Confucianism, as a burgeoning school of thought of the times, perpetuated the physiognomic traditions,

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to the extent that the school believed that outward appearance and practice reflected appropriate moral intention. While Confucians lacked cultural influence in Zhuangzi’s time, their ideas would later come to dominate ways of thinking about the self and society. In Confucianism, bodily integrity was necessary to success in ritual action (li), which is a means to establishing social order (Galvany, “Debating Mutilation” 77–79). According to this view, individuals cannot properly fulfill their social duties unless their bodies are completely whole and fully able to practice ritual gestures and movements. For Confucians, in order to develop oneself individually as well as ensure social harmony, the performance of ritual is indispensable. The preservation of the body is an integral component of their conception of individual and social flourishing, to their Confucian Way. In Ancient China, amputees oftentimes, but not always, lost their feet as a consequence of being punished by the authorities for committing a crime; amputation marked them as transgressors of both the existing moral and legal order (Galvany, “Debating Mutilation” 84). Of course, some disabled individuals were born without a limb or a particular body part, while others, who were technically not amputees, suffered losses to their bodily integrity from engaging in warfare. But as it concerns the lawbreakers, Albert Galvany claims that once Confucianism held great influence on the culture, amputation was utilized as a means of rendering offenders to the established order socially dead. Upon amputation, these individuals lacked the status of a person. Galvany writes, [The amputee] must be defined then as an outlaw, an expelled and excluded being, an element of social perturbation. Because of his bodily deformation, the amputee stands outside the order of law and ritual, disqualified from the most elementary religious and social forms, unable to fulfil two basic aspirations in the life of any successful man of his time (being filial and serving his lord): he is no longer a human being and finally becomes a real monster. (Galvany, “Debating Mutilation” 85)

Here, Galvany presumably refers to an historical and cultural moment that develops hundreds of years after Zhuangzi is written. Though it transpires later, it is important to note this development, since it is the historical and logical consequence of an aspect of Confucian thought that had its origins around the time Zhuangzi was being written. For the Confucians, the mutilated characters that appear in Zhuangzi are “monsters” who are not

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recognizable as human. Zhuangzi, of course, disagrees with this characterization and, fortunately, he offers hope for the disfigured and mutilated. In contrast to the Confucians, Zhuangzi denies the existence of a physical norm or paradigm for human beings (Perkins 161), and his “monsters” challenge this corporeal or bodily norm and disrupt conventional thinking (Allinson 56). Zhuangzi even goes beyond merely presenting a problem for these epistemological and cultural categories of “monsters” and adds a political analysis that offers the potential of emancipation for those who are not represented by politics in the standard sense (Galvany, “Radical Alterity” 9). Zhuangzi does all this by valorizing the lives of amputees, whose condition ironically provides them greater depth of understanding about leading a virtuous (de) life. Zhuangzi’s amputees, who have been punished by authorities with the penalty of having a foot amputated, are praised for their ability to go along with the various transformations (hua) of things to such a degree that they are even able to accept the loss of a foot. By conventional ancient Chinese standards, represented by Confucian thought, the loss of a foot would be a barrier to both bodily integrity as well as psychological flourishing. In spite of the hold conventional thinking may have on those living under it, these amputees manage to confront and relate to their mutilation in such a manner that, to use the language of Zhuangzi’s Confucius, neither sadness nor joy sways or moves their mind; in so doing, amputees allow it to “be spring with everything,” reflecting both psychological ease and effectiveness in their dealings with the world. In being able to accept their impairments, these figures exemplify the height of living virtuously. In the first story from “The Sign of Virtue Complete,” a man named Chang Ji is having a conversation with Confucius (Watson 64–65; Zhuangzi 5/1–13). Chang Ji praises an ex-convict and amputee named Wang Tai for having such a positive influence over those around him. Though he does not actively teach, he is somehow able to assist others by benefiting their minds (xin). Confucius responds by saying that Wang Tai is indeed a sage. He admits that he has not gone to see Wang Tai and become his student but that he is overdue for a visit (Watson 64; Zhuangzi 5/3). In this story, rather than acting as a spokesman of Zhuangzi’s Daoist Way, he perhaps plays the role of a wistful Daoist, namely a figure who sees the value of Zhuangzi’s vision and learns from it but is not fully capable of realizing its radical implications (Van Norden 157). This may explain Confucius’s hesitancy to visit Wang Tai.

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Confucius goes on to explain to Chang Ji that Wang Tai is distinctive in his being able to recognize the unity of all things. Confucius describes Wang Tai’s virtuous disposition this way: If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, [Chu] and [Yue]. But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one. A man like this doesn’t know what his ears or eyes should approve—he lets his mind (xin) play in the harmony of virtue (de). As for things, he sees them as one and does not see their loss. He regards the loss of a foot as a lump of earth thrown away. (Watson 65; Zhuangzi 5/7–8)

Wang Tai understands that the “ten thousand” or countless things in the world, including parts of the body like the liver and the gall, or the ancient territories of Chu and Yue, are “one” in that they combine to make a spatial and temporal whole. His understanding of this oneness involves a recognition of the unity of his physical body with the broader process of transformation (hua) (Lambert 82). Later in the passage, Confucius goes on to compare Wang Tai’s perception and worldview to a mirror that reflects still water (Watson 65; Zhuangzi 5/10). It describes the way and extent to which Wang Tai experiences no loss or injury in the midst of ceaseless change; he is even untroubled by the most substantial of changes, such as the amputation of his foot. Remarkably, since he is not concerned with bodily integrity and concerns himself instead with the unity of his body with transformations in the world, he perceives the loss of his foot as he would the loss of a clump of dirt. In the second story about amputees, there is a conversation between Shentu Jia and Zichan, two students of a master named Bohun Wuren (Watson 66–67; Zhuangzi 5/13–24). Zichan is a character from a work called the Zuo zhuan, which is a commentary of a famous historical narrative called the Spring and Autumn Annals. In the Zuo zhuan itself, Zichan is represented as a trustworthy and skillful statesman (Chapman 19); in this story, he expresses disdain for Shentu Jia, because Shentu is an amputee. Zichan insists that, in order to stick to ritual practice, Shentu should not walk with him in and out of the hall; one of them must go first, and the other should stay put. Shentu Jia proceeds to make a reference to mirrors not unlike the reference made by Confucius in the previous story; he says that “if a mirror is bright, then no dust will settle on it” (Watson 66; Zhuangzi 5/17–18).

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He presumably intends to compare their master Bohun Wuren to a mirror. Like a mirror, the master does not make judgments about the world. Specifically, he does not judge Shentu for being an amputee. Shentu goes on to say, Master and I have been friends for nineteen years and he’s never once let on that he’s aware I’m missing a foot. Now you and I are supposed to be wondering outside the realm of forms and bodies, and you come looking for me inside it—you’re at fault, aren’t you? (Watson 67; Zhuangzi 5/22–24)

In this dialogue, Shentu Jia calls Zichan out for his smug attitude that assumes an amputated foot indicates an inferior status. Shentu scolds Zichan for not being more like their teacher. For the master, Shentu’s status as an amputee is irrelevant to his moral worth. Like characters in other stories already discussed, Shentu Jia shifts to the topic of fate (ming). He says, “To know what you can’t do anything about, and to be content with it as you would with fate (ming)—only a man of virtue (de) can do that” (Watson 66; Zhuangzi 5/20). Of course, Shentu is relating living virtuously to the loss of his amputated foot; according to him, only a man of virtue can accept the loss of a foot, whether it be one’s own amputated foot or the amputated foot of another. At the end of the story, Zichan cannot adequately respond to Shentu’s argument and suddenly decides to end the conversation: “Zichan squirmed, changed his expression, and put a different look on his face. ‘Say no more about it,’ he said” (Watson 67; Zhuangzi 5/24). While Zichan accepts Shentu’s belief about the insignificance of lacking a foot, at the same time he appears to retain his bias toward amputees, which explains why Zichan does not want to talk any longer about Shentu Jia’s amputation. Zichan continues to hold the conventional attitude characteristic of the Confucian view of amputees, that they are somehow inferior in status. The final story from “The Sign of Virtue (de) Complete” features a man named Shushan No-Toes (Watson 67–68; Zhuangzi 5/24–31). While he still possesses part of his foot, the nature of Shushan’s mutilation is that he has lost all his toes on one of his feet. In the story, Shushan hobbles on his heels over to Confucius’s school for an opportunity to learn directly from the master, but he is denied (Watson 67; Zhuangzi 5/24). Confucius is portrayed neither as a spokesman for the Daoist cause nor a wistful Daoist, but rather, as he occasionally is in the Zhuangzi, a

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mouthpiece of smug and self-righteous conventional thinking (Van Norden 157). Shushan is at a loss as to why Confucius refuses to teach him simply because he was unable to preserve the wholeness of his body. Shushan explains in the story that he didn’t understand his duty and was careless with his body, which resulted in his being punished with the loss of his toes, but he also declares that he possesses something more valuable (Watson 67; Zhuangzi 5/26). He gives this reason for why he originally thought Confucius would admit him: There is nothing that heaven (tian) doesn’t cover, nothing that earth doesn’t bear up. I supposed, Master, that you would be like heaven (tian) and earth. How did I know that you would act like this? (Watson 67; Zhuangzi 5/26–27)

By heaven (tian) and earth, Shushan presumably refers to the natural universe, which makes no judgments of who is or is not mutilated. Confucius realizes his mistake, changes his mind, and offers Shushan entry to receive teachings. But it is too late, and Shushan has already departed. Confucius tells his disciples who saw what took place, Be diligent, my disciples! Here is No-Toes, a man who has had his foot cut off, and still he’s striving to learn so he can make up for the evil of his former conduct. How much more, then, should men whose virtue (de) is still unimpaired. (Watson 67–68; Zhuangzi 5/28–29)

At the end of the story, Shushan has a conversation with Laozi, another famous figure in the history of Daoism, about why Confucius has failed to become virtuous (de) (Watson 68; Zhuangzi 5/29–31). Here, Shushan glosses what it really means to value “something that is worth more than a foot.” It describes an inner, rather than an outer, wholeness that pertains to the exercise of virtue, including the acceptance of fate and the transformation of things. Laozi also says that the exercise of virtue implies ceasing the pursuit of fame and reputation, which are unnatural desires (Watson 68; Zhuangzi 5/29–30). Finally, Laozi points out that Confucius fails to recognize how “life and death are the same story” (Watson 68; Zhuangzi 5/30). This refers again to the idea we saw in the Wang Tai story that all things in the world are in fact “one,” in the sense that they combine to make a spatial and temporal whole, and that this oneness involves a recognition of the unity of Shushan’s physical body with the broader process of

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transformation. Both Laozi and Shushan agree that Confucius is “handcuffed” and “fettered” by the conventional thinking about the deficient value and worth of amputees (Watson 68; Zhuangzi 5/31); this serves as Confucius’s greatest obstacle to embracing Zhuangzi’s worldview. The Zhuangzi is a complex text with numerous strands or trains of thought that intersect to produce a comprehensive Daoist worldview. From my analysis, two relevant strands emerge: first, there are a set of stories and passages that emphasize practicing virtue (de) by accepting fate (ming) and endless transformation (hua) in the world; second, there are stories and passages that promote the value of keeping one’s body whole, by avoiding harm and being useless (wu yong). The first strand takes priority over the second, and the second strand can in an important sense be subsumed under the first. The text appears to be saying that while individuals should strive to keep their bodies whole in order to live in accordance with nature (tian), the greatest mark of the natural is to accept fate and the transformation of things by living virtuously. Most of the stories I have recounted in this study involve the disfigured and the mutilated. The amputee stories in the text, particularly those involving amputees who have been punished for breaking the law, represent the height of the exercise of virtue. This stands in stark contrast to the Confucian worldview, which maintains that bodily integrity is necessary for living well. For Zhuangzi, insofar as amputees in the text accept the transformation of things to such a degree that they can even embrace the loss of their feet, they are extraordinary examples of those who abide by his Daoist alternative.

References Allinson, Robert. Chuang-tzu for Spiritual Transformation: An Analysis of the Inner Chapters. State U of New York P, 1990. Berkson, Mark. “Death in the Zhuangzi: Mind, Nature, and the Art of Forgetting.” Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought, edited by Amy Olberding and Philip J. Ivanhoe, State U of New York P, 2011, pp. 191–224. Chapman, Jesse. “Unwholesome Bodies: Reading the Sign of the Amputated Foot in Early China.” Asia Major, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–26. Coutinho, Steve. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. Columbia UP, 2014. Csikszentmihalyi, Mark. Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. Brill, 2004.

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Fraser, Chris. “Emotion and Agency in Zhuangzi.” Asian Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 1, 2011, pp. 97–121. ———. “Wandering the Way: A Eudaimonistic Approach to the Zhuangzi.” Dao, vol. 13, no. 4, 2014, pp. 541–65. Galvany, Albert. “Debates on Mutilation: Bodily Preservation and Ideology in Early China.” Asiatische Studien, vol. 64, no. 1, 2009, pp. 67–91. ———. “Radical Alterity in the Zhuangzi: On the Political and Philosophical Function of Monsters.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 14, no. 9, pp. 1–10. Lambert, Andrew. “Daoism and Disability.” Disability and World Religions, edited by Darla Schumm and Michael Stolzfus, Baylor UP, 2016, pp. 71–92. Perkins, Franklin. Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Indiana UP, 2014. Singh, Danesh. “Health as Human Nature and Critique of Culture in Nietzsche and Zhuangzi.” Comparative Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 91–110. Van Norden, Bryan. Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Hackett, 2011. Watson, Burton, translator. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. By Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi), Columbia UP, 1996. Zhuangzi. A Concordance to Zhuangzi (《莊子引得》Zhuangzi Yingde). Harvard Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series, no. 20, Harvard UP, 1956.

CHAPTER 12

Speech—Amputation—Writing: Philomela’s Notalogy Thomas Emmrich

The Anatomy of Culture Amputations—whether as medically necessary surgical operations or as sadistic punishments or methods of torture—are incisive encroachments on the body’s sovereignty, circumcisions of the body’s mechanics and regular processes. They are, however, more than mere reductions of the physiological and physical range of actions since body parts always participate in aesthetic, social, and cultural orders as well. What is at stake with the amputation of the tongue and hands is not just the loss of gustatory and haptic functionality. Rather, what gets lost with them is the ability to produce signs and meaning, and, therefore, the opportunity to practice an elementary cultural technology. The conjunction of the tongue and hands is tied to the affiliation of speech and written language, or oral and written communication. The sign-producing organs—tongue and hands—are further interconnected

T. Emmrich (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_12

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with the organs that finalize the communicative process qua reception, in the form of a monologue or a dialogue: the sending tongue vocally addresses the listening, receiving ear. In this process, the sender and the receiver can be identical, as, for example, in a soliloquy. Similarly, the sending hand addresses the seeing, receiving eye in writing; another person’s eye or also, as in the case of a diary entry or memo, one’s own eyes. Thus, they form an anatomical ensemble that is not exclusively designed to guarantee the proper functioning and integrity of the human organism but has the task of producing communication, of initiating and keeping up an exchange with oneself or, in the sense of social interaction, with others. Speech, tongue, and ear on the one hand, and writing, hand, and eye on the other, are closely connected in a corresponding circle of production and perception. This chapter will discuss the epistemic and pragmatic qualities of speech and writing in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and Ovid’s myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela from the sixth book of the Metamorphoses. In Plato, the primal scene of phonocentrism, i.e., the assumption of the primacy of speech over writing with regard to the transmission of truth and knowledge, is couched in the myth of King Thamus and Theuth, an Egyptian God and the inventor of writing (274c–275c). Instead of praising the art of writing, Thamus—who represents Plato’s/Socrates’ own opinion— rejects writing as a form of forgetting and hermeneutic non-committal. Against this Platonic founding document of the critique against writing, Ovid’s narrative of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela (6,412–674) will be taken into account as a grammatology in mythological guise. Tereus is asked by his wife, Procne, to bring her sister from Athens to Thrace. Instead of carrying out his mission, however, Tereus abducts his sister-in-­ law, rapes her, and amputates her tongue to prevent her from bearing testimony of the crime. After having already presented speech acts and vocal attributions of meaning in their deficiency and dysfunctionality before this delinguation, with Philomela’s “carmen miserabile”—the “mournful record” (6,582)1 that she stitches onto a linen sheet—the superiority of literality over orality is exposed. In this context, a narrative of disability—of amputation and prosthetic compensation—is used to demonstrate the unreliability of the voice, laying the groundwork for a critique of phonocentrism and constructing a complementary counter-­ myth, which, in contrast to Plato’s version, presents the primal scene of writing as a gendered scene.

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Phonocentrism and Thanatography According to Jacques Derrida, speech and writing have, since antiquity, not been regarded as equal and neutral concepts in classical western philosophy but as a hierarchal binarism, with speech having a privileged status among the two: “the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been, except for a metaphorical diversion that we shall have to consider, the debasement of writing, and its repression outside ‘full’ speech” (3–4). Plato stages this primal scene of phonocentrism, and, complementing this, the primal scene of the debasement of writing, in Phaedrus, thus paradoxically documenting the primacy of speech in written, literary form. The text is autosubversive, but not just because Plato’s plea for φωνή (voice) and against γράμμα (letter) could only unfold its appeal in writing (even though it stays mimetically connected to speech in the form of an oral dialogue). No less problematic for the hypothesis of the primacy of speech is the geographical and temporal placement of the myth with which Plato initially illustrates the inferiority of writing and makes his thesis plausible. The probably Attic author Plato introduces Socrates from Athens as leader of the maieutic dialogue with Phaedrus, who is also of Attic origin, and lets him recite a prehistoric legend from Egypt. Here, Socrates does not want to take responsibility for the truth of the story. Instead, he refers back to the authority of the unspecified “ancients”: “ἀκοήν γ᾽ ἔχω λέγειν τῶν προτέρων, τὸ δ᾽ ἀληθὲς αὐτοὶ ἴσασιν”: “I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know” (274c). This protective assertion, however, does not protect him from liability, and the established constellation seems inconsistent: the actual geographic and cultural space of Plato’s writing, the literary location of Socrates’ fictional speech, and the literary location about which Plato talks when presenting his teacher Socrates in writing. The (hermeneutic) difference between speaking and the matter spoken about, which has to be bridged by the written tradition—that is, the spatial distance between Greece and Egypt as well as the temporal distance between the historical point of time of Socrates’ fictional speech and Plato’s factual writing on the one hand, and the mythological events in Egypt on the other—seems to demonstrate the primacy of writing. Of course, the Greek “ancients” can narrate prehistoric myths; legends can be passed on by word of mouth, circulate internationally and through time. This technique of transmission, however, depends on a continuous presence of oral traditions and listening receivers. Writing, in contrast, allows for discontinuity, for a breaking of the chain of traditions. It

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forgives gaps because it is a more stable and patient medium than speech and makes it possible to resume transmission chains after they have been broken. Socrates’ explicit refusal to vouch for the veracity of the narrated Egyptian myth is, at the same time, a concealed admission of the higher rate of error in speech. Both oral and written traditions can begin with a lie or fiction; in this, speech and writing do not differ. Where they do differ is in their degree of reliability. While it only takes one piece of writing to traverse space and time, continents and centuries, oral transmissions of the same dimensions require several oral and auditory subjects. Even if the original text was to be multiplied and reproduced numerous times, this large number of texts would still be more reliable than the collective of individuals who participated in the oral transmission. Of course, written texts can be changed and distorted in the process of copying, with mistakes finding their way into the text, which critics then feel the need to emend. Apart from deliberate and accidental deformations of the archetype, however, a text’s “memory” is literally much more conservative and robust than human memory. As long as there are no critical aspirations, written texts can be copied one-to-one. The only requirement is the presence of a mechanically and monotonously performing hand that imitates the signifier. Oral transmission, in contrast, is in constant need of oral reproduction and transfer of signs. It is not difficult to reproduce written signifiers when the signified is unknown (for example when these signifiers are derived from a foreign language or an unfamiliar discourse in one’s own language). It is much more difficult to memorize and repeat auditory information without understanding it first. The problem of oral tradition is that it always depends on the reliability of the speaker’s memory, hermeneutic efficiency, and on a community of existing speakers and listeners who can take over the roles of speakers in turn. Plato is not primarily concerned with diachrony or the reliable long-­ term recording and filing of narratives, but with philosophical instruction within a temporal and spatial frame: contemporary Athens (from his point of view). This is why he pronounces a negative judgment on the advantageous aspects of the written tradition, its relative independence from memory and hermeneutic processes. Plato’s phonocentrism and his commitment to a metaphysics of presence is anti-global and anti-­intertemporal, which, of course, it is allowed to be. In this light, however, it seems like a strategical error to begin the argument for the primacy of speech with a myth because myths, and especially those from faraway countries like

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Egypt and passed down by the “ancients,” who tell each other even more ancient stories, automatically raise questions about the principles of transmission. Socrates’ skepticism toward the narrated legend’s authenticity emphasizes this. According to Plato, using writing is “proper”: “χαριῇ” (274b), as long as it provides the wise man with a “path”: “ἴχνος” (276d).2 Writing is granted no further relevance than to store up mementos for oneself in old age: “οὐ γάρ: ἀλλὰ τοὺς μὲν ἐν γράμμασι κήπους, ὡς ἔοικε, παιδιᾶς χάριν σπερεῖ τε καὶ γράψει, ὅταν δὲ γράφῃ, ἑαυτῷ τε ὑπομνήματα θησαυριζόμενος, εἰς τὸ λήθης γῆρας ἐὰν ἵκηται, καὶ παντὶ τῷ ταὐτὸν ἴχνος μετιόντι”: “No, that is not likely—in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path” (276d). For Plato, graphemic writing is not much more than a mnemonic heurism, a prosthesis in a rather monological context of communication, or, in simple terms: writing in the form of notes and diaries is legitimate, but in the form of a culturally institutionalized medium of systematic, global transmission of knowledge, it is not. Much more serious than the objection that writing does not improve memory, as Theuth, the “πατὴρ ὢν γραμμάτων”: “father of letters” (275a) claims, but that, on the contrary, it “will create forgetfulness in the learner’s soul, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (275a), is the ontological degradation of writing. Nothing “in writing or receive[d] in writing […] would be intelligible or certain” because every “written word” (275c) is just an “εἴδωλον,” an “image” of “the living word of knowledge which has a soul”: “λόγον ζῶντα καὶ ἔμψυχον” (276a). The consequence of declaring written words to be images is demonstrated in Plato’s criticism of mimesis in his Politeia, in which Socrates charges the arts of painting and poetry with being merely imitations of reality in the sense of the illusionary, the φαινόμενα. Art represents a removal from truth—from ideas as archetypes—because the empirical reality that it imitates is itself just an image: poetry and painting are images of images and, as a result, ontologically subordinate. Plato himself draws the analogy between the mimetic character of art and that of writing: δεινὸν γάρ που, ὦ Φαῖδρε, τοῦτ᾽ ἔχει γραφή, καὶ ὡς ἀληθῶς ὅμοιον ζωγραφίᾳ. καὶ γὰρ τὰ ἐκείνης ἔκγονα ἕστηκε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ᾽ ἀνέρῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ. ταὐτὸν δὲ καὶ οἱ λόγοι: δόξαις μὲν ἂν ὥς τι φρονοῦντας αὐτοὺς λέγειν,

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ἐὰν δέ τι ἔρῃ τῶν λεγομένων βουλόμενος μαθεῖν, ἕν τι σημαίνει μόνον ταὐτὸν ἀεί. ὅταν δὲ ἅπαξ γραφῇ, κυλινδεῖται μὲν πανταχοῦ πᾶς λόγος ὁμοίως παρὰ τοῖς ἐπαΐουσιν, ὡς δ᾽ αὕτως παρ᾽ οἷς οὐδὲν προσήκει, καὶ οὐκ ἐπίσταται λέγειν οἷς δεῖ γε καὶ μή. πλημμελούμενος δὲ καὶ οὐκ ἐν δίκῃ λοιδορηθεὶς τοῦ πατρὸς ἀεὶ δεῖται βοηθοῦ: αὐτὸς γὰρ οὔτ᾽ ἀμύνασθαι οὔτε βοηθῆσαι δυνατὸς αὑτῷ. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (275d–e)

If the written word is vagrant and cut off as if it were a limb amputated of its “parent,” who would be able to account for it in “questioning,” it is, according to Plato, not only in danger of not being understood, but, at worst, of being misunderstood, even misused, or of being “maltreated or abused.” Plato explains the superiority of speech and the insufficiency of writing—at least with regard to their ontological status—by focusing on reception. His whole reasoning centers on the question of which medium— speech or writing—is more suitable to make truth transparent and not only to show a semblance of it.3 While, as reconstructed above, Socrates’ Egyptian myth, or myth in genere is clandestinely counterproductive in assisting and illustrating a plea for the privilege of speech over writing, the sixth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with an episode about Tereus, Procne, and Philomela constructs a myth that offers a literary, crypto-theoretical alternative to Plato’s dialogical-discursive phonocentrism. Here again, speech is given priority over writing since Philomela’s mournful record: “carmen miserabile” (6,582) results from the amputation of the tongue and thus from an inability to communicate orally, which seems to confirm Plato’s theory of writing as the “image” of speech. However, it does not necessarily follow that everything that is derivative and secondary has to be associated with decadence and degeneration. It can just as well be seen as an evolutionarily progressive, ascending line of development. Ovid’s grammatological

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alternative to Plato’s Egyptian myth of phonocentrism demonstrates the advantages and reliability of graphemic communication as well as the defects of speech as a medium in the transmission and constitution of meaning. Next to the body and culture as semiotically active or recruitable systems, it is mainly communication via speech that misleads the receiver, causing misunderstandings and misinterpretations: attributions break down, propositions do not contain truth, declarative speech acts miss their aim, directives and expressives deceive and cheat; speech acts establish a relation of superiority and inferiority, based on violence, between the producer of phonemes and their recipient, or even turn against the sender.4 To begin with, and independent of the question of valid decryptions of meaning, it has to be stated that in Ovid’s metamorphorical world, in which any character can change into a new, but not any, body—“In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora”: “My intention is to tell of bodies changed / To different forms” (1,1–2)—speech is in the defensive, under constant threat, unstable, unsafe, and fragile. Together with human anatomy the characters lose the ability to create semantically functioning sounds with their “os,” meaning “mouth” and “face.”5 The final step in a metamorphosis is often this double combination of face and mouth: the human face is destroyed and the mouth muted. After the transformation, animals can at least spit out protosemantic sounds: they become audible through mooing, roaring, bellowing etc.: “Human existence ends when the changed being is not capable of articulating itself anymore” (Gauly 64, my trans.).6 Daphne’s transformation into laurel is, in contrast, sealed with the words “ora cacumen habet”: “her head became a tree top” (1,552).7 Callisto’s anthropomorphical physis ends with “posse loqui eripitur”: “The power of speech […] / was taken” (2,483), as she is transformed into a bear by a jealous Hera. Afterwards, an “angry threatening growl” is heard: “vox iracunda minaxque / plenaque terroris rauco de gutture fertur” (2,483–84); but the “human feelings” are retained in the new body, which is important with regard to the value of writing as a prosthesis, as a derived function of absent speech: “mens antiqua tamen facta quoque mansit in ursa”: “Her human feelings / Were left her in her bear-like form” (2,485). Actaeon is also allowed to keep his human consciousness after his morphological reorganization into a deer: “mens tantum pristina mansit”: “There is one thing only / Left him, his former mind” (3,203), whereas his original voice is lost: “dicturus erat; vox nulla secuta est. / ingemuit; vox illa fuit”: “He tries to say, but has no words. He groans, / The only speech he has” (3,201–02). As long as the “mens antiqua” or

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“pristina” stays intact within the aphatic animal, the human turned animal retains the ability to decipher conventionalized signs, phonemic and graphemic conglomerates of a human langue, as well as the ability to produce, if not oral signifiers, then at least written ones. This ability generates an asymmetrical context of communication: after the transformation, reception pertains to both spoken and written words; production of meaning, however, is limited to graphic characters. Io, who is transformed into a “nitentem / […] iuvencam”: a “heifer, white and shining” (1,610–11), as well as Callisto and Actaeon, learn that the human “vox” in the Metamorphoses has an ephemeral, volatile, morbid status, as it were. Io, however, still makes use of her enduring ability to generate written signs to communicate: “si modo verba sequantur, / oret opem nomenque suum casusque loquatur. / littera pro verbis, quam pes in pulvere duxit, / corporis indicium mutati triste peregit”: “If she could talk / She would ask for help, and tell her name and sorrow, / But as it was, all she could do was furrow / The dust with one forefoot, and make an I, / And then an O beside it, spelling her name, / Telling the story of her changed condition” (1,647–50).8 The myth of Io, just as the myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, may demonstrate that writing compensates for the aposiopesis of speech and that, therefore, it is secondary—an image or a placeholder for speech. At the same time, however, it also shows the instability and fragility of oral communication, and in relation to this, the more conservative and solid ability of generating written signs, which is more resistant to metamorphorical intrusions: “littera pro verbis.” After the human’s death, the animal form retains the human thanatographic literacy, and not the “vox humana.” Humans can vanish in Ovid’s metamorphorical world “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault, Order 422). What remains at the shore, in the case of Io at the bank of the river Inachus, and commemorates the vanished face, the “nomen” and “casus” of the protagonist, is writing.

Delinguation and Grammatology While the myth of Io from the first book of the Metamorphoses contrasts the durability and reliability of writing and speech, of “littera” and “verbis,” the narrative about Tereus, Procne, and Philomela in the sixth book problematizes diverse sign systems and different modalities of creating meaning in relation to their referentiality on the one hand, and the

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interaction between sender and receiver on the other. In comparison to Phaedrus, the geo- and gender-political implications are rearranged, sometimes with an increased degree of complexity. The “father of letters” (275a) becomes a “mother of letters.” As in the myth of Io, the subject of writing is female and not male.9 Although Philomela did not invent writing, as Theuth was said to have done, she is the only character in the myth who is involved in an act of writing. The mythological constellation becomes more complex because Ovid, a Roman author, lets Philomela write as an Attic princess on Thracian land, the land of barbarians, addressing her Attic sister Procne, who, as wife of the Thracian Tereus, is likewise in Thrace. What both Plato’s mythological (anti)primal scene of writing and Ovid’s writing scene have in common is their geographical marginality: Egypt is the southern periphery of the Greek-Roman cosmos and Thrace the northern. The difference, however, is that while Theuth represents writing—from the Greek perspective—as a barbarian in his home of Egypt, the Athenian Philomela does the same in Thrace, a foreign and barbarian land. Extraterritoriality—a topography that functions as liminal and ultimate distance in relation to a presumed cultivated center, be it Rome or Athens—seems to promote written correspondence because only writing, which in the ancient Mediterranean was mostly transported by ship, can reduce the distance between the center and the periphery in an efficient and globalizing manner. The fact that writing is only used to suspend the spatial separation between Procne and Philomela in Thrace after the amputation of Philomela’s tongue, and not to shorten the local distance between Thrace and Athens, is part of the tragedy. In her trust in orality, Procne asks her husband, Tereus, to travel to Athens and inform Philomela and her father verbally—that is, in person—of her desire to see her sister again. The fact that Procne does not write a letter to be delivered by messenger is fatefully linked to Philomela having to resort to her own “letter” later in the myth: her grammatological manifest of the “carmen miserabile” (6,582), which is vital for her and which is understood by Procne so well that she is lost for words: “et (mirum potuisse) silet. dolor ora repressit, / verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae / defuerunt”: “Procne said nothing— / What could she say?—grief choked her utterance / Passion her sense of outrage” (6,583–85). The writing that is produced as a consequence of Philomela’s silence due to delinguation causes the same silence in Procne. What survives is written, not oral communication, no matter if it

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constitutes the cause or effect of the speech defect. The lesson that can be drawn from Ovid’s myth is that the (Platonic) basic trust in the voice is deceptive and dangerous. Writing as a medium of communication, in contrast, can be perfectly valid and show the truth in a clear manner. Although literacy is not invented in the Metamorphoses or, as it is done in Phaedrus, discussed as an innovation, it is nevertheless tested and evaluated concerning its applicability, both independently as well as in relation to other systems of generating and transmitting meaning, and especially the spoken word. It passes the test precisely because it can rove around, cut off from the presence of its “father” (Phaedr. 275a), or in the case of the Metamorphoses: its “mother.” Right at the beginning of his narrative, Ovid implements a hierarchically constructed binary between Athens and the barbarians, which will have an important impact on the myth’s treatment of sexual violence and the unreliability of the voice: “credere quis posset? solae cessastis Athenae. / obstitit officio bellum, subvectaque ponto / barbara Mopsopios terrebant agmina muros. / Threicius Tereus haec auxiliaribus armis / fuderat et clarum vincendo nomen habebat”: “All except Athens, but Athens was in trouble / With war at her gates, barbarian invasion / From over the seas, and could not send a mission—/ Who could believe it?—so great was her own sorrow. / But Tereus, king of Thrace, had sent an army / To bring the town relief, to lift the siege, / And Tereus’ name was famous, a great conqueror” (6,421–25). Athens was not able to send a delegation to offer condolences for Amphion’s death because it was harassed by a barbarian army. The fact that other versions of the myth do not refer to this barbarian threat to Athens, as Franz Bömer mentions in his commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (122), may be taken as an indication that the supposedly stable binarism between the ostensibly civilized Athens and the militarily, and later sexually, motivated barbarian aggression is highly significant for the whole episode. This dualistic system of categories becomes even more complicated by Tereus’s intervention in support of Athens—as well as through Procne’s and Philomela’s barbaric murder of Itys at the end.10 In the exposition, Ovid adds Thrace as a third element in the conflict between the Athenian civilization and the barbarian aggressors. This is why Charles Segal’s analysis of the initial constellation has to be amended: “Ovid plays the center of the civilized world—Athens—off against its dubiously civilized periphery, Thrace” (285).11 At the beginning Tereus is not played off against the center of civilization but rather unsettles the opposition between civilization and its atavistic archaic periphery.

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Accordingly, his attribute is not the noun or adjective “barbarus” but “Threicius” (6,424), an adjective derived from a location. If βάρβαρος is understood as onomatopoeia for a sound, the amorphous babble of a non-­ Greek person that is unintelligible from a Greek perspective, then Tereus is a barbarian. Still, we have to assume at least the possibility of a conversation between the Athenian royal family and Tereus: either Tereus knows Greek or the characters from Athens know Thracian, or both parties understand and/or speak the respective language of the other. Otherwise, a military cooperation with Athens and the marriage of Tereus and Procne would be difficult to realize. As the use of direct speech shows, on the level of the diegesis, Tereus, Procne, Philomela, Pandion, and Itys speak the same language: Latin. If, however, βάρβαρος is not only understood as onomatopoetic trope for heteroglossic speaking but also as a cultural value judgment, the binary nomenclature becomes entirely obscure. The question is if Tereus the barbarian can still be seen as a barbarian in the sense of an uncivilized savage since he helps Athens, the center of civilization, to fight the barbarians. By repelling: “fuderat” (6,425) the “barbarian invasion”: “barbara […] agmina” (6,423), he rather confounds the culturally coded opposition between Athens and the barbarians. Tereus’s position as a third element between the two poles also informs Pandion’s marriage policy, when he gives Tereus his daughter Procne as a wife: “conubio Procnes iunxit” (6,428). Tereus eludes unambiguous definition, at least for the moment, due to his military engagement and his position as dynastic, conjugal conjunctum. The initiatory liminality12 opens up a series of deficient phonetic transactions, a set of failed semantic decryptions, which scheme against those who carry them out. In addition, it introduces pseudological, dissimulative, and manipulative speech acts that deceive the addressee. In this way, the tragedy of events is initialized by a crisis of speech. The victory over the “barbara […] agmina” (6,423) leads to a first defect within the oral production of meaning: “clarum vincendo nomen habebat”: “Tereus’ name was famous, a great conqueror” (6,425). His “famous name” circulates because of his military merit; his glory, as the product of social attribution and gratification, becomes a part of the oral tradition. The reader, informed by the authorial narrator, learns about the fragile and precarious nature of this attribution in the next couple of verses where the exegetical efforts of the characters fail again. Here it is not a “nomen” anymore, not a nominal phonetic sign, which is given an inadequate meaning, but a cultural sign. For, in the course of the

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narrative, through his sexual victory over Philomela, Tereus proves to be a barbarian after all. The cultural turn established a general semiology, instituted in Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic turn, as its paradigmatic epistemological grid13: cultural manifestations, social practices and rituals as well as natural phenomena are treated as graphic or phonetic signifiers, alongside speech and writing. Their meaning is arbitrary but conventionalized. Cultural systems are a wink not a blink.14 In verse 6,428, the syntactical break after “iunxit” is followed by a stylistically dense description of omens, which, if they had been interpreted correctly, would not have led to the declaration of Tereus’s and Procne’s marriage and the birth of Itys as holidays: another declarative speech act that turns out to be unreliable. A paradoxical game of written presence, intradiegetic absence, and substitution is initiated through anaphoric accentuation (Hardie 259–60): “non pronuba Iuno, / non Hymenaeus adest, non illi Gratia lecto”: “neither Juno, / Nor Hymen, nor the Graces, blessed the marriage” (6,428–29). While Juno, Hymenaeus, and the Graces are present as signifiers, they are absent as favorable auspices during the nuptials. They are substituted, on the one hand, with the Furies, topological figurations of doom, which are dramatically placed at the beginning of the verses and create parallel structures: “Eumenides tenuere faces de funere raptas, / Eumenides stravere torum”: “The Furies swung, or, maybe, brandished torches / Snatched from a funeral; the Furies lighted / The bridal bed” (6,430–31). On the other hand, an owl offers another ominous sign: “tectoque profanus / incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine sedit”: “and above the bridal chamber / Brooded the evil hoot-owl” (6,431–32). Ovid validates the “bubo” semantically in the fifth book of the Metamorphoses: Persephone’s return from Hades is prevented by Ascalaphus’s betrayal. As punishment, he is transformed into the “the foul screech-owl,” which functions as “a bad omen / To mortals”: “venturi nuntia luctus, / ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen” (5,549–50). Ovid does not limit the etiological tale to the genesis of a zoological entity, an additional element of nature, but, simultaneously, creates a “dirum […] omen.” The owl turns into a semiotic sign and, at the same time, is decoded by the authorial narrator with his reference to the “venturi nuntia luctus.” The reason for the punishment is identified in Ascalaphus’s “lingua,” i.e., an organ indispensable for spoken communication: “indicio poenam linguaque videri / commeruisse potest”: “He deserved it / For being such a tattle-tale” (5,551–52). This indictment of the tongue prefigures the problem with oral tradition in the

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myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela. Although nobody is betrayed here, lingual communication, in the forms of lying, concealing, and flattering, is responsible for creating a balance of power between sender and receiver, in which the receiver takes the position of the defeated, betrayed, or cheated. The generation of the owl and its semantic value in the etiological narration in the fifth book is followed by its implementation in the sixth book. Just as a “clarum” was added to Tereus’s “nomen” (6,425), which the plot refutes, the hermeneutic reaction of the Thracian collective of interpretation to Tereus’s and Procne’s wedding as well as to the birth of Itys also turns out to be rather desolate. The paronomasia “gratata est” (6,434) and “grates egere” (6,435): “rejoiced” diametrically parallels the twice repeated, anaphorically positioned modal ablative “hac ave”: “such omens” (6,433; 6,434), as does the declaration of the two festive events mentioned in the ensuing verses: “diemque, / quaque data est claro Pandione nata tyranno / quaque erat ortus Itys, festam iussere vocari”: “making the day of marriage, / The day of Itys’ birth, both festal days” (6,435–37). The result is not only a breaking down of the cultural semantization of time but also of the ability of speech to generate signifiers—a breakdown that is signaled by the fact that perfect tense “iussere” in the superordinate sentence and the infinitive passive tense “vocari” in the conditional Accusativus cum infinitivo denote verbal actions. It is striking that, “at the beginning of the tale, the inhabitants of Thrace do not realize that events have been set in motion that will result in unspeakable suffering. In their ignorance, they celebrate the wedding of Tereus and Procne and the birth of Itys with thanksgiving to the gods” (Gildenhard and Zissos 6). The two patterns of meaning making staged in the exposition form a first cluster of misinterpretations and hence a failure of the oral tradition. This cluster creates an antithetical relationship between the hermeneutic performance of the speaking characters and that of the reader, who is able to collaborate with the narrator. The passage ends with the gnomic comment “usque adeo latet utilitas”: “People never know, it seems” (6,438), a reference to the hidden meaning of the cultural signifiers “marriage” and “birth.” After the passage of five years of time has been summarized in one and a half verses (6,438–40), a new chain of events starts, which on the one hand implements Ovid’s ornithosemantics, and on the other hand shows a further aspect of the corruption of the “voice”: blandital speaking and pathological lying are presented as types of oral communication, which,

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with the exception of Itys who flatters his mother in vain (6,619–46), effectively fulfill the intention of the sender by subjecting the receiver to a linguistic act of violence. However, they may also turn against the sender, and, to come back to Plato’s primal scene of phonocentrism, they do not convey “a semblance of truth” (275a), let alone “truth.” As David Larmour states, “In the Tereus, then, language is an instrument not for expressing, but rather, for covering up true thoughts and intentions” (134). The first person to pursue the rhetorical practice of ensnaring and flattering, which is here clustered around the lexical paradigm of blandiri (6,440; 6,476; 6,626; 6,632): “to adulate,” “to flatter,” is Procne. She tries to convince Tereus to take Philomela from Athens to Thrace: “cum blandita […] dixit” (6,440). As an aspect of the conative function of language, however, Procne’s blandital speaking does not outsmart her partner in communication—as Tereus will later on outsmart his father-in-law and sister-in-law. Instead, she will be outsmarted herself since it is just her wish to see her sister again that functions as the progressive moment of the tragedy. The extent to which Procne is deceived by the semantic ambiguity of her own language—her own speaking—is shown in the predicative expression “magni […] muneris instar” (6,443): The meeting with her sister will be “the finest present,” as stated at the end of Procne’s direct speech, the written illusion of oral communication, which is marked by verba dicendi, by a semantic field of speaking, as for example “dixit” (6,440; 6,510), “exclamat” (6,513), or “ait” (6,534). The signifier “munus,” though, does not only mean “present” or “gift,” but also “funeral,” “offering to the dead,” or “gift to the dead.”15 This ambiguity shows how deceptive vocally and lingually generated language can be in Ovid’s myth: it deceives the sender in some situations and the addressee in others. In the end, and against Procne’s intention, the lethal component of “munus” is fulfilled, not the idea of the “present”: Tereus’s lie about Philomela’s accident on the journey from Athens to Thrace leads to an “inane sepulcrum” (6,568), a cenotaph that is as empty as Tereus’s claim for truth. Later on, after Philomela’s liberation, the “present” turns into the ventral “funeral” of Itys performed by his own, unwitting father: “bustum miserabile nati”: “the pitiful resting-place / Of his dear son” (6,665). The “feast”: “mensis” “served to Tereus, / Who did not know”: “adhibet […] ignarum Terea” (6,647) changes into a funeral feast. Procne’s attempt to manipulate Tereus qua language ultimately manipulates herself, as the producer of phonetic signs and semantic polyvalence. As speaking subject, she becomes the subiectum of speaking.

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An example of a successful speech act in which the sender’s intention matches the outcome is Tereus’s usage of directive speech acts at Pandion’s court. He calls upon the father again and again, referring to Procne’s mission, and thus pursuing his own wishes: “iamque moras male fert ­cupidoque revertitur ore / ad mandata Procnes et agit sua vota sub illa”: “Delay, delay! He suffered, / Was all too eager, and when he spoke for Procne / Spoke for himself” (6,467–68). Tereus’s persuasive speech act is preceded by a comment made by the narrator, which restabilizes the hierarchical binarism of Athens and the barbarians from the exposition. Tereus, who had earlier been described as being related to Mars, the god of war, is now said to have an affinity for Venus that is both psychological as well as ethnogenetic: “hunc innata libido / exstimulat, pronumque genus regionibus illis / in Venerem est; flagrat vitio gentisque suoque”: “He was a passionate man, and all the Thracians / Are all too quick at loving; a double fire / Burnt in him, his own passion and his nation’s” (6,458–60).16 While the “auxiliaribus armis” (6,424) resulted in a victory for the Athenian ruling house, Tereus’s “militia amoris,”17 understood literally, and his sexual victory over Philomela (“vicimus,” 6,513) end in an incestuous confusion of the family structure to which he had been added because of his military triumph. Tereus’s elegiac love discourse relies both on the metaphorical hybridization of love and war, which he demetaphorizes through literalization, and on a language of flattery and seduction. The latter is legitimized in the heightened form of pseudologia, as documented in Ovid’s instructions in the Ars amatoria: “non tua sub nostras veniat facundia leges; / fac tantum cupias, sponte disertus eris. / est tibi agendus amans imitandaque vulnera verbis; / haec tibi quaeratur qualibet arte fides”: “Don’t let your smooth talk yield to poets’ rules; have just / One goal, and talk will come from self-trust. / Become The Lover; tell her that your heart is aching. / (The tactics have to be of your own making)” (1,609–12). Tereus’s verbal production of signs is fueled by burning love18: “facundum faciebat amor”: “Love made him eloquent” (6,469). “Facundum”19 refers to the rhetorical system, whose “officia” include “elocutio” and “pronuntiatio/actio,” the recital during which the body turns into a semiotic collaborator of language.20 Just like speech, the rhetorically claimed body is precarious in its referentiality in the myth; it is potentially violent toward the receiver. Ovid’s Ars formulates a piece of advice for such simulative body politics: “et lacrimae prosunt; lacrimis adamanta movebis: / fac madidas videat, si potes, illa genas. / si lacrimae, neque enim veniunt in tempore semper, / deficient, uncta lumina tange

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manu”: “Tears help as well; tears melt life’s adamantine peaks. / So show her, if you can, your tear-drenched cheeks. / If tears won’t come (and sometimes they just don’t), then why / Not wipe a sweat-damp across your eye?” (1,659–62). Tereus follows Ovid’s advice when he adds tears to his rhetoric of flattering: “addidit et lacrimas” (6,471). This lacrimal simulation is not limited to persuasive language; later on, it also promotes his lies about Philomela’s death: “at ille / dat gemitus fictos commentaque funera narrat, / et lacrimae fecere fidem”: “And Tereus, with a groan / Lamented, wept, and told some kind of story, / Saying that she was dead, oh, most convincing / With all his show of sorrow” (6,564–66). In contrast to the somewhat enigmatic “People never know, it seems” (6,438), the narrator’s comment on the feigned tears at Pandion’s court and on the audience’s defective decoding specifies the relation between the true meaning of Tereus’s phonetic and lacrimal signs on the one hand, and the meaning that is attributed to them on the other: “ipso sceleris molimine Tereus / creditur esse pius laudemque a crimine sumit”: “Tereus seems a most devoted husband, / So eager to please Procne, and wins praises, / The secret crime-contriver” (6,473–74). The interpretative community, presented in the passive singular “creditur,” considers as “pius” what is, in reality, a crime: “Tereus is able to embody the paradox of a pia impietas” (Hardie 263). After the metrical caesura through the penthemimer, verse 6,474 modifies the paradoxical constellation between signs and their interpretation by means of another oxymoron: “laudemque a crimine sumit.” Philomela also acts in a persuasive manner: “quid quod idem Philomela cupit patriosque lacertis / blanda tenens umeros, ut eat visura sororem, / perque suam contraque suam petit ipsa salutem”: “Philomela / Is eager to go, wants the same thing, or seems to, / Wheedles her father, and fondles him, and coaxes, / And argues how much good it will do them both, / Her sister and herself (little she knows!) / If she can make the visit” (6,475–77). Just as before, however, when Procne’s flattery turned against the flatterer herself, Philomela puts herself, as “blanda,” in an inferior position within the disparity of power between sender and receiver. The disparity between intention and reception is condensed in the contradictorily utilized prepositions “per” and “contra,” emphasized by the reflexive possessive pronoun “suam,” which is prepended twice. Eight verses later, the narrator resorts to antithetical logic once again and unfolds the succinct “per salutem” in a crescendoing tricolon: “gaudet agitque / illa patri grates et successisse duabus / id putat infelix, quod erit lugubre

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duabus”: “Philomela, / Poor girl, is happy, and thanks him; both his daughters, / She thinks, have won; they are losers, both his daughters, / But how was she to know?” (6,483–85). “Contraque salutem” is substituted by the apostrophe “infelix” and by the adjective “lugubre.” The appellative speech acts, useful for Tereus, counterproductive for Philomela, serve their aim with Pandion, and just like Procne at the beginning of the episode, he does not know about the destructive sediment layers of what he is saying. Below the surface, his plea to Tereus to protect Philomela “with a father’s love”: “patrio […] amore” (6,499), contains a destructive dimension because Tereus projected himself into the father a few verses prior, when Philomela embraced him in a flattering manner: “quotiens amplectitur illa parentem, / esse parens vellet. (neque enim minus impius esset!)”: “she is in his [i.e., Pandion’s] arms […]. He [i.e., Tereus] would like to be / Her father, at that moment; and if he were / He would be as wicked a father as he is husband” (6,481–82). The oral producers of signs do not only fall into the abyss of language when they speak, however. Pandion is also deceived by a social ritual that he performs, which can be understood as an element of the symbolical structure of culture. In order to affirm the “vow” nonverbally, he joins the right hands of Tereus and Philomela: “utque fide pignus dextras utriusque poposcit / inter seque datas iunxit”: “and hands were joined / To bind the agreement” (6,506–07). Philip Hardie, referring to the ambiguity of this ceremony, states: “But as a gesture this joining of hands is indistinguishable from the iunctio dextrarum of bride and groom in the marriage ceremony, performed by the pronuba” (266). Just after speaking the last farewell: “supremumque ‘vale’” (6,509), Pandion seems to understand the semantic inscrutability and subtleness of his leave-taking expression: “vix dixit timuitque suae praesagia mentis”: “And his voice broke, and underneath his sorrow / Foreboding lay” (6,510). While the narrator only used the spatial term “Threicius” (6,424) to characterize Tereus in the exposition, he now cements the antithesis of Athens and the barbarians expressis verbis. At first, Tereus was excluded from the “barbara […] agmina” (6,423) because of his military victory: “vincendo” (6,425). Now he is reintegrated into the group of the “barbari” due to his sexual victory over Philomela. While speech acts, until the rape scene, appear to be dysfunctional for both the sender and the receiver, oral signs are now made transparent with regard to their truth in the speech mode of “confessing”: “fassusque nefas et virginem et unam / vi superat”: “And he told her then / What he was

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going to do, and straightway did it / Raped her, a virgin, all alone” (6,524–25), and all of this in the heterotopic21 wasteland of Thrace, i.e., beyond any publicity and public communication processes: “in stabula alta trahit, silvis obscura vetustis”: “To the deep woods, to some ramshackle building / Dark in that darkness” (6,521). By “confessing” his “nefas,” Tereus corrects the hermeneutic mistake by which he was attributed with “laus” and the property “pius” (6,474). Philomela then follows the narrator and refers to Tereus using the vocative “barbare”: “Barbarian” (6,533), thus correcting herself and her previous misinterpretation of his behavior, his persuasive language and lacrimal body economy. The following section no longer discusses the precarious epistemic status of speech, whose phonocentric authority has been corrupted by strategies of flattering and pathological lying, and turns to the narrow pragmatic limits of speaking. The narrator uses the tricolon “frustra clamato saepe parente, / saepe sorore sua, magnis super omnia divis”: “calling / For her father, for her sister, but most often / For the great gods. In vain” (6,525–26) to draw attention to the fact that speech as medium of meaning making and transmission is dependent on a receiver, whether it be father, sister, or some God, if the act of calling (“clamato”) is to be successful. The adverb “frustra”: “in vain” is an authorial addition of the narrator. Philomela’s direct speech, however, is also implicitly critical in tone. In a protasis, which is structured by the twice repeated conjunction “si,” the condition for dialogic speech is identified, i.e., the presence of listeners: “ipsa pudore / proiecto tua facta loquar. si copia detur, / in populos veniam; si silvis clausa tenebor, / implebo silvas et conscia saxa movebo. / audiet haec aether et si deus ullus in illo est”: “Now that I have no shame, I will proclaim it. / Given the chance, I will go where people are, / Tell everybody; if you shut me here, / I will move the very woods and rocks to pity. / The air of Heaven will hear, and any god, / If there is any god in heaven, will hear me” (6,544–48). When Tereus leaves Philomela behind in the prison of the “stabula alta” (6,521), he locks her in but also locks potential listeners out. After Philomela’s threat to reveal the rape in an oral report: “tua facta loquar” (6,545, emphasis added), Tereus is turned into the subiectum of his affects, of anger and fear: “ira […] postquam commota tyranni / nec minor hac metus est, causa stimulatus utraque” (6,549–50). In consequence, the “cruel king” resorts to a measure that takes advantage of the insufficiency of oral information transmission:

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talibus ira feri postquam commota tyranni nec minor hac metus est, causa stimulatus utraque, quo fuit accinctus vagina liberat ensem arreptamque coma flexis post terga lacertis vincla pati cogit. iugulum Philomela parabat spemque suae mortis viso conceperat ense; ille indignantem et nomen patris usque vocantem luctantemque loqui comprensam forcipe linguam abstulit ense fero. radix micat ultima linguae, ipsa iacet terraeque tremens immurmurat atrae, utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae, palpitat et moriens dominae vestigia quaerit. hoc quoque post facinus (vix ausim credere) fertur saepe sua lacerum repetisse libidine corpus.

The cruel king Was moved to a fierce anger, to equal fear; The double drive of fear and anger drove him To draw the sword, to catch her by the hair, To pull the head back, tie the arms behind her, And Philomela, at the sight of the blade, Was happy, filled with hope, the thought of death Most welcome: her throat was ready for the stroke. But Tereus did not kill her; he seized her tongue With pincers, though it cried against the outrage, Babbled and made a sound something like Father, Till the sword cut it off. The mangled root Quivered, the severed tongue along the ground Lay quivering, making a little murmur, Jerking and twitching, the way a serpent does Run over by a wheel, and with its dying movement Came to its mistress’ feet. And even then— It seems too much to believe—even then, Tereus Took her, and took her again, the injured body Still giving satisfaction to his lust. (6,549–62)

The amputation scene produces a tightly synchronized choreography of syntactic subjects and agents, of empowerment and disempowerment, which reveals that the tongue cannot survive without its “mistress”: “dominae” (6,560), a trait in which it differs markedly from writing.

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While a piece of writing, as Socrates holds in Phaedrus, can exist and circulate on its own, cut off from the “father,” the “πατὴρ ὢν γραμμάτων” (275a), Ovid’s myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela illustrates the merits of the autonomy of literal signs with the help of an extreme case—the amputative aggression against the sender’s body. After Philomela has determined the diegesis with her oratio recta (see 6,533–48), Tereus begins dominating the action. He unsheathes his sword: “vagina liberat ensem” (6,551), snatches his victim cryptoactively with the past participle “arreptamque” (6,552) directed at Philomela, and forces her into chains: “vincla pati cogit” (6,553). Philomela rules in just one and a half verses of the amputation sequence as a subject over the predicates: she offers her throat, “iugulum Philomela parabat” (6,553), and finds hope for deliverance through death at the sight of the sword: “spemque suae mortis viso conceperat ense” (6,554). Immediately after this insertion, Tereus returns to the position of the active, or, in the past participle “comprensam” cryptoactive, subject. With tongs, he captures the tongue: “comprensam forcipe linguam” (6,556) and severs it with his sword: “abstulit ense fero” (6,557).22 In verses 6,555–56, a new agent is announced, albeit in the form of active past participles that express activities of the object “linguam” (6,556)—which Humphries mirrors in his translation by transforming the participles into a coordinate sentence, in which the tongue has the function of the subject (“though it cried against the outrage” etc.). The tongue demurs: “indignantem” (6,555), keeps calling the name of the father: “nomen patris usque vocantem” (6,555), and struggles to speak: “luctantemque loqui” (6,556). Restrained in its possibilities, the “lingua” can utter but one word, the nomen proprium of the father, not even the name of the sister or of the gods as before (“clamato saepe parente, / saepe sorore sua, magnis super omnia divis” [6,525–26]). To “speak”: “loqui” (6,556), that is, to form phonetic sentences and generate meaning, is completely denied to it. Abscising the tongue: “abstulit ense fero” produces, via the penthemimer, an incision into the rhythm of verse 6,557. What had already been laid out in the active past participles (“indignantem,” “vocantem,” “luctantemque”), is realized after this metric caesura: the actions of human beings are defocused and, as a complement, a newly autonomous body seizes the syntactic status of the subject. The root of the tongue twitches and is no longer capable of anything but uncontrolled movement without acoustic signification: “radix micat ultima linguae” (6,557); the tongue itself is on the floor: “ipsa iacet terraeque,” trembles:

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“tremens,” and murmurs unintelligibly into the blood-stained earth: “terraeque […] immurmurat atrae” (6,558). In contrast to writing, which, even if separated from its author, is capable of an autonomous existence as medium of sense transmission, the significative function of a “lingua” that has been severed from the sender’s body perishes. With its murmur, an asemic sound, speech collapses as does the meaningful communication it produces. What follows in the text is an animal simile introduced with “utque”: as the severed tail of a snake is wont to jump, so also does the amputated “lingua” of Philomela jump: “utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae / palpitat” (6,559–60). The meaning of human language collapses in the tongue’s murmur, but what used to be at least acoustically marked now shrivels into a soundless muscle reflex with this comparative incursion of animal taxonomy. And, as if the tongue were conscious of being neither anatomically nor semantically autonomous without its “mistress,” it looks for her in its agony: “moriens dominae vestigia quaerit” (6,560). The fate of the tongue that is now on its own is finalized in death: “moriens,” which implicitly confirms the preference of literality over orality. The amputation of “lingua,” in which “tongue,” “speech,” and “language” semantically coincide, is accompanied by the amputation of communicative immediacy, the vocal presence of propositional, direct, and emotive speech acts. The narrator reports that Philomela laments this loss after Tereus’s involuntary cannibalism and compensates for her incapacity to produce phonetic signs with an authorial insertion: “nec tempore maluit ullo / posse loqui et meritis testari gaudia dictis”: “There was no time, ever, / When she would rather have had the use of her tongue, / The power to speak, to express her full rejoicing” (6,659–60). Introduced by the deliberate question “quid faciat Philomela?”: “And what of Philomela?” (6,572), an earlier passage recounts how Philomela, imprisoned in the heterotopic geography of a deviant wood, does communicate the crime committed against her: “indicium sceleris” (6,578): she weaves a “carmen miserabile” (6,582) into a tapestry: “tela” (6,576). The question whether Philomela’s “tela” is the carrier of a pictorial-­ iconographic or a literal presentation has been a persistent topic of critical discussion. Although “carmen” commonly refers to a metrically organized oral or written text, it is not limited to this dominant meaning. Ovid himself uses it in a different sense in the Myrrha episode of the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, when he lets the “funereus bubo” reappear in its function as a bad omen and paraphrases the bird sounds as “letali carmine”

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(10,453).23 There are alternative readings of “carmen” apart from the possibility of metaphorical use, such as “crimen,” “casum,” or “fatum,” as Richard Tarrant notes in his critical apparatus. “Carmen” by itself cannot be considered a sufficient argument for a graphematic piece of weaving, neither in regard to its semantics nor its tradition. “Notas” (6,577) is a similar case: although the preponderant meaning of “nota” is “letter,” there are also aspects of meaning here which could imply a pictographic representation.24 The decisive element to answer the question of whether Philomela weaves a picture or letters into the “tela,” is not so much the act of producing the “carmen” with the help of “notas,” but Procne’s mode of reception, to which the text refers to as “legit” (6,582).25 The semantic spectrum of “legere” refers only to the deciphering of letters, not of pictograms, and the tradition is unambiguous here, in contrast to “carmen.” In addition to the analysis of the textual material, David Fitzpatrick offers yet another consideration, based entirely on pragmatism and efficiency. The fact that his ideas refer to the lost Tereus of Sophocles instead of Ovid does not diminish the relevance of his arguments for the analysis of the Tereus episode in the Metamorphoses because both versions require a philological analysis of Philomela’s woven “texture”26: While certainty about the nature of Philomela’s weaving is impossible, nevertheless the weight of argument appears to be in favour of a text. A pictoral representation risks the serious possibility of discovery by Tereus himself or one of his loyal servants. One might even ask how much graphic detail Philomela included in the depiction of her horrific experiences, whereas, in contrast, a text need only include several significant words. (Fitzpatrick 97–98)

Sophocles’ Tereus is also mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics. In connection with the αναγνορίσις: anagnorisis, Aristotle incidentally refers to Philomela’s “κερκίδος φωνή” (1454b): “voice of the fly-shuttle” (my trans.), as an example of the recognition of “inanimate objects” (1452a, my trans.), in other words, events. His somewhat complicated description, in which “φωνή” is modified by the possessive case “κερκίδος,” shows that Aristotle, just as his teacher Plato, is totally committed to phonocentrism and that he defines writing in its dependence on speech, i.e., as a second-­ class signifier. Aristotle defines the nature of writing as a specific form of speech.27 Assuming that Philomela produces a literal text, then “textus” combines the perfect passive participle of weaving (“texere”), the result of a

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tactile handicraft, and the text as a meaning-making arrangement of manually produced graphic characters. The semiotically evaluable organ(on) “hand,” whose gestures serve as another surrogate for speech—“pro voce manus fuit”: “She tried to say so with her hand” (6,609)—is mirrored on the side of reception by Procne’s reading, i.e., an optical procedure of data processing, after she has rolled up the tapestry like an ancient “volume” (“evolvit,” 6,581): “matrona tyranni / […] carmen miserabile legit” (6,581–82). Ironically, Procne only mentions the wish to see her sister in her direct speech at the beginning of the myth: “me visendae”: “Let me go see my sister” (6,441). She should have chosen her “present” (6,443) more carefully since the future “me visendae” of the Accusativus cum infinitivo becomes reality in both the “carmen” and the optical reception of the delinguated sister. The text makes the visual reunion possible, even if it does not do the same for the aural one. The “purpureasque notas” (6,577),28 which are manual devices in times of need for Philomela, serve as prosthesis for her disabled voice: “grande doloris / ingenium est, miserisque venit sollertia rebus”: “her grief has taught her / Sharpness of wit, and cunning comes in trouble” (6,574–75). Thus, the circulation of textile carriers of meaning in Ovid is based on a privative act. Although the reason for the “ingenium” of writing might be terrible, it is just this amputative power applied to the tongue that opens up the advantages of written signs. Firstly, as already discussed in the section about Plato’s phonocentrism, the graphemic “notas” may not be able to override the repressive, limiting effects of space and time, but they can weaken them. Secondly, they are not dependent on the presence of listeners: they can preserve meaning without an oral tradition from mouth to mouth and ear to ear, while speech fades away when nobody is there to listen. Therefore, it is not Philomela’s invocationes and shouts for help that lead to her rescue, but solely the communication to her sister via writing— and only to her sister, while the male instances of “parente”: “father” (6,525) or “divis”: “gods” (6,526) remain absent.29 The primal scene of writing as a stable and reliable storage medium of meaning is exposed in Ovid as the result of an amputation of the presence of sender and recipient, reified as the loss of the tongue.30 The superiority of “notae,”31 in their general meaning as “signs,” over speech, is confirmed again at the end of the episode, which sees the metamorphosis of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela into birds: a swallow, a nightingale, and a hoopoe. Here, the superiority is not related to their epistemic status, but, as in the myth of Io, to their immunity to the change of time

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and form: “quarum petit altera silvas, / altera tecta subit; neque adhuc de pectore caedis / excessere notae, signataque sanguine pluma est”: “One flew to the woods, the other to the roof-top, / And even so the red marks of the murder / Stayed on their breasts; the feathers were blood-colored” (6,668–70). Friedmann Harzer misses an important detail when he states that of all things, Philomela transforms from the dumb weaver into the songful nightingale (76). The literary tradition before and after Ovid portrays the nightingale as songful and wailing, turning it into the ornithological cipher for elegy. Virgil, for example, in the fourth book of his Georgica, compares the grieving Orpheus with the wailing nightingale, thus metaphorically transposing the juncture “carmen miserabile” to the birdsong. Ovid applies the same formula to Philomela’s weaving of text, but with a formal difference: Virgil’s “miserable” is in a prenuclear position, while Ovid’s is postnuclear: “qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra / amissos queritur fetus, quos durus arator / observans nido implumes detraxit; at illa / flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabile carmen / integrat, et maestis late loca questibus implet”: “even as the nightingale, mourning beneath a poplar’s shade, bewails her young ones’ loss, when a heart-less ploughman, watching her resting place, has plucked them unfledged from the nest: the mother weeps all night long, as, perched on a branch, she repeats her piteous song and fills all around with plaintive lamentation” (4,511–15). Procne, who has been transformed into a swallow, is also characterized topologically by an elegy. In his Tristia, Ovid calls her “querulam Procnen” (5,1,60). In the Metamorphoses, however, neither Philomela nor Procne is in any way associated with acoustical qualities. Thus, the nightingale is not at all songful here, as Harzer claims, a fact that breaks markedly with literary conventions. The suppression of the birds’ voices must therefore be of significance.32 Although the swallow’s and nightingale’s signature, like Philomela’s “carmen” in red, cannot be seen as a graphical sign of an animalistic langue, the inscription of the bird’s belly and the aphasia of the birdsong nevertheless demonstrate the stability of graphemes and thus the fragility and instability of phonemes. What remains is the written text, not speech, no matter if it is the writing and speech of humans or of birds that used to be humans: “littera pro verbis” (1,649). With the ornithographical signifiers (“signataque,” 6,670), the bird writing is spread in flying; and human writing expands fast, like time is flying. It circulates as a medium of mediation and generating meaning: intercontinental and potentially global, globalizing, and stretching infinitely through time. In literary discourse, intertextual

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transactions testify to this infinite global potential: the Metamorphoses and the “carmen miserabile” influenced literature as far away as, for example, Shakespeare in Renaissance England. In the digital age with its new ways and technologies to process writing, it does barely take a wing beat—a second—to save or reproduce any piece of writing. Both Ovid and Plato see written text as secondary to and as a replacement for the amputated tongue, like a prosthesis. Nevertheless, the epistemic and temporal advantages of writing on the one hand and the epistemic and temporal defects of speech on the other show that a derivative can be superior to the source from which it derives. It was not the aim of this philological reconstruction to simply invert Plato’s binary hierarchy of speech and writing, to put writing over speech—a project which would not do justice to a grammatology in line with Derrida, who might postulate writing as the origin of speech (77) but, in doing so, refers not to the graphemic notation system but to a type of “writing” much “more fundamental than […] the simple ‘supplement to the spoken word’” (7). Instead, the aim was to show that Ovid, in his narrative about Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, designs an alternative model to Plato’s mythological primal scene of phonocentrism, based on Philomela’s delinguation.

Outlook: Shakespeare’s Renaissance of the Mouth The success of writing does not only manifest itself within the Metamorphoses, but also in the intertextual circulation of the fabric of the text—both Ovid’s and Philomela’s—spanning as far as, and beyond, Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus. Having anachronistically studied the Metamorphoses, the sons of the Queen of the Goths cut off the speaking tongue and, in addition, the writing hands of their victim Lavinia. The saving idea, however, is not developed by the female rape and amputation victim, but by her uncle Marcus. In Shakespeare, the woman is dependent on the male ingenium, both in reporting and revenging the crime.33 This sandy plot is plain; guide, if thou canst, This after me. I have writ my name Without the help of any hand at all. Cursed be that heart that forced us to this shift! Write thou, good niece, and here display at last What God will have discovered for revenge.

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Heaven guide thy pen to print thy sorrows plain That we may know the traitors and the truth. (IV.1.69–76)

The “shift” (IV.1.72) consists in the restitution of the meaning of the mouth, by giving it new and different functions. Shakespeare turns the organ(on) of speech into an organ(on) of writing: the talking mouth becomes the writing mouth. This variant of communication leads to a transgression of the traditional distribution of tasks between the culturally active organs, a traversing of the anatomical field of competence. In Titus Andronicus, nothing more than the crime and the names of the two delinquents, without any syntactical relation, are drawn into the sand: “Stuprum—Chiron—Demetrius” (IV.1.78). The writing in the “sandy plot” does not, like in Ovid, constitute a narrative plot. The fact that a “carmen,” a whole text, is fabricated in the Metamorphoses, shows the priority of the writing hand over the writing mouth. While writing directed by the mouth only constitutes a singular and provisional remedy in Shakespeare, writing directed by the hand as a prosthesis for absent speech has been established as a complex and global cultural technology. Translated by Gesine Bowen and Maren Scheurer

Notes 1. Greek and Latin texts will be cited in the original and in a translation, as listed in the references. The verses given in parentheses follow the original. 2. The term “ἴχνος” is better translated as “track” or “trace.” See Liddell and Scott 846. 3. For a cultural history of the transition from orality to literality, see, for example, Assmann, Goody, Havelock, and Ong. 4. For the classification of the functions of language see Austin and Searle. 5. See Gauly: “The Latin word os, which in these cases refers to the parts of the body transformed last, is ambiguous. The original meaning is ‘mouth’; as synecdoche it then also refers to the face. In both cases it is the ability to talk that is important so that the word refers to the talking mouth or talking face specifically. […] For a Roman, a person is a talking head” (65–66, my trans.). 6. Similarly, Bettini, in his attempt to design an anthropology of the body in Roman culture, focuses on the nexus of human existence and the ability to talk (1–6). 7. For the homology of motifs and structure between the episodes of Apollo and Daphne as well as Procne and Philomela, see Jakobsen 45–52.

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8. For the meaning of writing in the myth of Io, see Harzer 75–76 and Heller-­Roazen 121–29. 9. In Ovid’s Heriodes writing represented by women forms its own genre of epistolary literature. 10. See Larmour: “For instance, the barbarian/Greek antithesis […] is subjected to some close scrutiny: Tereus’ violent behaviour is related to his Thracian, barbarian origin. […] These words have a somewhat ironic ring in retrospect, however, when Procne and Philomela, the sisters from Athens, wreak their barbaric revenge on Tereus” (133). In the final scene, it is not the women who are being manipulated by Tereus, but the other way around. The blandital, persuasive speech acts were first directed against the female talking subjects, partly because they do not take into account the semantic spectrum of what they are saying, partly because what they try to achieve through the directive function of speech is ultimately autodestructive, or because they were dazzled by Tereus by words and tears. Then, however, Procne manages to manipulate Tereus. And Tereus does not know what he is asking for and does not understand Procne’s answer: “intus habes”: “He [Itys] has come in” (6,655). See also Hardie: “The second half of the story reverses the first, as Tereus’ control of appearance and reality, absence and presence, is overtaken by the women’s manipulation of surrogacy and dissimulation” (268). 11. Segal here refers to Bömer who ignores the expository collapse of the antithesis of Athens and the barbarians and succinctly concludes: “Tereus, a son of Ares […], is a King of Trace in classical times, thus a barbarian” (115–16, my trans). 12. For the concept of liminality, see, for example, Turner 94–130. 13. See Saussure: “Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. […] A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it ‘semiology’ (from Greek semeîon ̄ ‘sign’)” (16). 14. See Geertz: “The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (5). For the distinction between winking and blinking in a theoretical cultural context see Geertz 9–10. 15. For the meaning of “munus,” see Glare: “1 The action demanded of or requisite for a person, a function, task. d […] the last duties owed to a ­person, i.e. funeral rites […] 3 something given as a duty, a tribute offering

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(to deities, the dead, etc.). 5 Something freely bestowed, a present, gift” (1146). 16. It is the Thracians of all people to which Orpheus teaches pederasty (“in teneros […] mares”) in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses: “ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem / in teneros transferre mares citraque iuventam / aetatis breve ver et primos carpere flores”: “he told the Thracians / That was the better way: enjoy that springtime, / Take those first flowers!” (10,83–85). 17. For the cataclysmic demetaphorisation of the elegiac program of the “militia amoris,” see Gildenhard and Zissos: “Upon reaching Thrace, Tereus exultingly exclaims vicimus! (6.513), mobilizing a military metaphor often used in erotic contexts. The application of military imagery and terminology to the affairs of love is a constitutive feature of Roman love elegy, contributing, along with the contemporary literary metaphor of servitium amoris, to the genre’s complex erotic ideology. Here, however, as the subsequent narrative makes clear, Tereus, son of Mars, ‘concretizes’ the metaphoric discourse of militia amoris, reducing the subtle gender dialectic of love poetry to simplistic (epic) brutality” (8). 18. For fire metaphors in the myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, see Kaufhold 66–71. 19. For the meaning of “facundus,” see Glare: “Able to express oneself fluently, eloquent. b (transf., of speeches, writings, etc.)” (671). 20. For the “officia oratoris,” see, for example, Cicero 1,9. 21. For the term “heterotopia,” see Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 22–27. 22. For a discussion of the representation of violence in Latin literature, see Fuhrmann 23–66. 23. For the semantics of “carmen,” see Glare: “1 A solemn or ritual utterance, usually sung or chanted and in metrical form. […] 2 A song, poem, play […] 3 […] Poetry, song. b (spec.) lyric poetry. […] 4 The cry or song of birds. […] 5 Instrumental music” (278). 24. For the semantic spectrum of “nota,” see Glare: “1 A mark attached, imprinted, etc., in order to identify or distinguish; […] 6 A mark used to represent a sound, letter, word, etc., a symbol, character […] 7 A signal, sign” (1191–92). 25. For the meaning of “legere,” see Glare 1014. 26. For this discussion, see Curley 193–94, Gildenhard and Zissos 11, Hardie 268, and Pavlock 42. 27. See Aristoteles, De interpretatione: “Ἔστι μὲν οὖν τὰ ἐν τῆι φωνῆι τῶν ἐν τῆι ψυχῆι παθημάτων σύμβολα, καὶ τὰ γραφόμενα τῶν ἐν τῆι φωνῆι”: “Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds” (16a). See also Derrida’s interpretation of this passage in Aristotle (11–12).

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28. The “purpureasque notas” and the “filis […] albis” (6,577) reproduce the chromatic binary code of the love elegy. In the example at hand, the colors purple and white cannot be seen as a topological sexual stimulant, however. Instead, they symbolize the consequences of a perversion of the elegiac love discourse and of a realization of his standardized war imagery. See also: “The juxtaposition of the two colours […] is highly significant: albus is the colour of virginal innocence and purpureus symbolizes violence, especially of a sexual kind (note also premebat). […] In both cases, the combination of red/purple and white is connected with the act of rape: male aggression against defenceless female” (Larmour 140). 29. For the absence of Olympian Gods in Ovid’s myth of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, see Tarrant: “Here, the painful absence of divine involvement marks the reappearance of chaos in the moral sphere” (353). 30. In Ovid’s Amores, amputation is not solely restrictive but also contains a productive aspect. This is shown in the prologue where Cupido steals a “pedem” (1,1,4), i.e., a “metrical foot.” He mutilates the dactylic hexameter into an elegiac distich and thus causes the generic change from heroic epos to love elegy: “Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam / edere, materia conveniente modis. / par erat inferior versus; risisse Cupido / dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem”: “Prepared for war, I set the weapon of my pen / To paper, matching meter, arms, and men / In six feet equal to the task. Then Cupid snatched / A foot away, laughing at lines mis-matched” (1,1,1–4). 31. The meaning of “notae” (6,670) at the end of the episode is explained by Segal: “Thus the signifying marks of the art-work […] return at the end of the poem as the marks of blood that remain stamped upon the face of nature in perpetual witness of the savage deed […]. By shifting between these two meanings of the notae as both textual and extra-textual marks, Ovid also looks beyond the frame of his tale to the moral codes which surround, qualify, and certainly problematize the pleasure of his text” (283). 32. For the topos of the nightingale, see Burkert 201–02 and Herter 161–71. 33. For the implications for gender theory, see Brockman 344–78, Detmer-­ Goebel 75–92, Florescu 23–35, and Regehr and Regehr 27–34.

References Aristotle. “De interpretatione.” The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. I, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by John Ackrill, Princeton UP, 1991. ———. De interpretatione/Περὶ ἑρμηνείας. Edited by Hermann Weidemann, De Gruyter, 2014. ———. Poetics. Edited by Donald W. Lucas, Clarendon P, 1968.

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Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. C. H. Beck, 1992. Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by James O.  Urmson, Harvard UP, 1975. Bettini, Maurizio. “‘Einander ins Gesicht sehen’ im antiken Rom: Begriffe der körperlichen Erscheinung in der lateinischen Kultur.” Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte, vol. 51, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–23. Bömer, Franz. P.  Ovidius Naso. Metamorphosen: Kommentar. Book 6–7, Winter, 1976. Brockman, Sonya L. “Trauma and Abandoned Testimony in Titus Andronicus and Rape of Lucrece.” College Literature, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 344–78. Burkert, Walter. Homo necans: Interpretationen altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen. De Gruyter, 1972. Cicero. (Marcus Tullius Cicero). Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione. Edited by Eduard Stroebel, Teubner, 1977. Curley, Dan. “Ovid’s Tereus: Theater and Metatheater.” Shards from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments, edited by Alan H.  Sommerstein, Levante, 2003, pp. 163–97. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Detmer-Goebel, Emily. “The Need for Lavinia’s Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 29, 2001, pp. 75–92. Fitzpatrick, David. “Sophocles’ Tereus.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1, 2001, pp. 90–101. Florescu, Carmen. “Turning the Body of Texts into Spectacle: Titus Andronicus, Gender Performances and the Objectification of Lavinia.” Analele Universitat̆ i̧ i Ovidius din Constant ̧a: Seria Filologie, vol. 26, no. 2, 2015, pp. 23–35. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miscowiek, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge, 2004. Fuhrmann, Manfred. “Die Funktion grausiger und ekelhafter Motive in der lateinischen Dichtung.” Poetik und Hermeneutik 3: Die nicht mehr schönen Künste, edited by Hans Robert Jauß, Fink, 1968, pp. 23–66. Gauly, Bardo Maria. “Verba imperfecta: Reden, Erzählen und Verstummen in Ovids ‘Metamorphosen.’” Antike und Abendland, vol. 55, 2009, pp. 62–79. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books, 1992. Gildenhard, Ingo, and Andrew Zissos. “Barbarian Variations: Tereus, Procne and Philomela in Ovid (Met. 6.412–674) and Beyond.” Dictynna: Revue de Poétique Latine, vol. 4, 2010, pp. 1–25. Glare, Peter G. W., editor. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Clarendon P, 1982. Goody, Jack. Literacy in Traditional Society. Cambridge UP, 1968. Hardie, Philip. Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion. Cambridge UP, 2002.

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Harzer, Friedmann: Erzählte Verwandlung: Eine Poetik epischer Metamorphosen (Ovid—Kafka—Ransmayr). Niemeyer, 2000. Havelock, Eric A.: The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. Princeton UP, 1982. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language. Zone Books, 2005. Herter, Hans. “Schwalbe, Nachtigall und Wiedehopf: Zu Ovids Metamorphosen 6,424–674.” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 6a, 1980, pp. 161–71. Jakobsen, Garret A. “Apollo and Tereus: Parallel Motifs in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” The Classical Journal, vol. 80, 1984–85, pp. 45–52. Kaufhold, Shelley D. “Ovid’s Tereus: Fire, Birds, and the Reification of Figurative Language.” Classical Philology, vol. 92, no. 1, 1997, pp. 66–71. Larmour, David H. C. “Tragic ‘Contaminatio’ in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’: Procne and Medea; Philomela and Iphigeneia (6.424–674); Scylla and Phaedra (8.19–151).” Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 1990, 131–41. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Clarendon P, 1996. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge, 2012. Ovid. (Publius Ovidius Naso). Amores: Medicamina faciei femineae. Ars amatoria. Remedia amoris. Edited by Edward J. Kenney, Oxford UP, 1995. ———. Erotic Poems: Amores and Ars Amatoria. Translated by Len Krisak, U of Pennsylvania P, 2014. ———. Metamorphoses. Edited by Richard J. Tarrant, Oxford UP, 2004. ———. Metamorphoses. New, annotated edition, translated by Rolfe Humphries, annotated by Joseph D. Reed, Indiana UP, 2018. ———. Tristia. Ibis. Epistulae ex Ponto. Halieutica. Fragmenta. Edited by S. G. Owen, Oxford UP, 1963. Pavlock, Barbara. “The Tyrant and Boundary Violations in Ovid’s Tereus Episode.” Helios, vol. 18, 1991, pp. 34–48. Plato. Opera: Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Demetra P, 2019. ———. Tetralogias III–IV continens, tom. II.  Edited by Ioannes Burnet, Oxford UP, 1963. Regehr, Cheryl, and Kaitlyn Regehr. “Let Them Satisfy Thus Lust on Thee: Titus Andronicus as Window into Societal Views of Rape and PTSD.” Traumatology, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, pp. 27–34. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, translated by Wade Baskin, Philosophical Library, 1959. Searle, John. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge UP, 1969. Segal, Charles. “Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: Ovid’s Myth of Tereus in the Metamorphoses.” The Two Worlds of the Poet: New Perspectives on

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Vergil, edited by Robert M.  Wilhelm and Alexander Gordon McKay, Wayne State UP, 1992, pp. 281–96. Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Alan Hughes, Cambridge UP, 1994. Tarrant, Richard J. “Chaos in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Its Neronian Influence.” Arethusa, vol. 35, no. 3, 2002, pp. 349–60. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas.” The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine de Gruyter, 1995, pp. 94–131. Virgil. (Publius Vergili Maronis). Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I–VI. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, Harvard UP, 1999. ———. Opera. Edited by Frederic Arthur Hirtzel, Clarendon P, 1956.

CHAPTER 13

(In)complete Amputation: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and Maurice Blanchot Monika Loewy

Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) (also called Body Integrity Dysphoria, xenomelia, and apotemnophilia) is a condition wherein individuals desire to amputate an existing limb because they feel that it does not belong to their body. Paradoxically then, the present limb causes the individual to feel incomplete, while the idea of its removal enables a sense of completion. Poststructuralist literary theory, as in the work of Maurice Blanchot, which will be my focus here, is concerned with the way in which unity is a construct; it is interested in fragmenting conventional notions of self, other, and language.1 Thus, both BIID and Blanchot’s theoretical work involve a preoccupation with fragmentation. I suggest that, therefore, poststructuralist thought can help us to think through BIID, and BIID can help to illuminate how poststructuralist thought might relate to a lived reality. What grounds this relationship is that for Blanchot, as for related poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan,

M. Loewy (*) Department of Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_13

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“there is no such thing as ‘the body’ before language” (Sarup 25): the body is constituted through our relationship with language. Derrida, in particular, has emphasized the text as body, and the body as text. The linguistic and the somatic, in other words, are permeable, or, as Naomi Segal writes, texts “invoke the movement of eye or hand towards something one ought to be able to caress” (120). Poststructuralist literary theory, in this way, is not only abstract (a mechanism with which to describe the world), and not only material, but also corporeal. Thus, I argue that a certain kind of literary theory that is concerned with physical and linguistic fragmentation can tell us more about the way in which the body is conceived of in BIID.  Since the disorder has predominantly been studied through a biomedical paradigm that fails to find definitive answers or cures, a theoretical analysis is important. Through the use of theory that foregrounds linguistic and embodied fracture, this chapter explores various ways to think about BIID sufferers’ drives toward wholeness. In bringing the experiences of those with the syndrome toward a theoretical model, I additionally address the contention that, as Peter Brooks puts it, “there ought to be a correspondence between literary and psychic dynamics, since we constitute ourselves in part through our fictions within […] language itself. Through study of the work accomplished by fictions we may be able to reconnect literary criticism to human concern” (xiv). Studying literature and the psyche together, then, can help to shed light on the ways in which we are constituted through language, and what this might mean. This chapter investigates relationships between the body and literature by thinking about the ways in which BIID and Blanchot’s thought share a similar core; about how they are both interested in perceiving a lack that is predicated upon a desire for wholeness. In BIID, this lack is located in the body and involves more immediate, and often overwhelming, pain, and in Blanchot’s thought, it is more abstract and does not disrupt everyday life. More specifically, those with BIID desire to control a lack to attain wholeness (by surgical removal of a body part), and Blanchot is concerned with creating a lack through language. By expanding upon these links, my aim in this chapter is not to suggest a direct relationship between BIID and certain strands of poststructuralist thought, but I believe that by bringing the two in conversation we can open up new ways of thinking about BIID and theory, by exploring the lived reality between the body and language to which they both respond. To do so, I begin this chapter with a discussion of BIID, and subsequently consider how a drive

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to perceive rupture is also central to poststructuralism. Following this is a more detailed examination of the overlap between the fractured body and fractured language through the writings of Maurice Blanchot.2

What Is BIID? BIID “is a long-standing desire to have one or more body parts removed or made non-functional, with significant unhappiness about having a whole body,” writes one individual with BIID on the internet Yahoo! Group “Fighting It” (which was instigated by Dan Cooper, an American man with BIID who is featured in the documentary Whole [2003]). Those with the syndrome complain of feeling that with four limbs they are not themselves and become obsessed with the desire for the limb’s removal; and several who are unable to amputate have a strong urge to commit suicide. “The main motivation for the preferred body modification,” explains Rianne Blom, “is believed to be a mismatch between actual and perceived body schema” (1),3 a disjunction between physical structure and identity. Though there are no known cures, individuals have reported that they found most relief when they self-amputate. Since BIID involves the fantasy of losing a limb, it is often confused with (though may still be linked to) acrotomophilia, a sexual attraction to amputees. According to a 2003 survey conducted by Dan Cooper on “Fighting It,” 36% of those with BIID believe it is a neurological problem, while 63% believe it has psychological origins. However, Cooper also explains that “[t]hese are informal polls. There is no control over who chooses to participate. Nevertheless, these are probably the best data available” (“Fighting It”). Other studies show that although the most common request is an above-­ the-­knee amputation of the left leg, BIID may also involve other parts of the body or a desire to remove certain senses—such as hearing and sight— though I will focus on the more common desire for the removal of a limb. The syndrome, moreover, usually originates in childhood and is often associated with the memory of seeing an amputee for the first time. In order to self-cure, some sufferers (referred to as “pretenders” in the BIID community) may feign a disability by using devices such as wheelchairs, prostheses, or leg braces. “Wannabes” refer to those who self-injure, self-­ amputate, or pursue black-market surgery. The word “apotemnophilia,” which was coined by Gregg Furth and John Money, derives from the Greek “apo” (away from), “temno” (to cut), and “philia” (attachment, affection, or tendency toward). Here,

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there is a paradoxical relationship between removal (away from) and proximity (attachment). This paradox illuminates and is illuminated by a point central to poststructuralist writing, which is often interested in exploring the paradoxes inherent in language, and how these paradoxes shape individuals (which I soon discuss). In 2004, Michael First renamed apotemnophilia “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” which is indicative of the way in which one identifies with a sense of bodily integrity (wholeness), albeit excluding the element of “cutting” found in the former definition. It was subsequently renamed xenomelia by Paul McGeoch in his 2011 study on “a new right parietal lobe syndrome,” the word stemming from the Greek “xeno,” (foreign), and “melia” (limb). This definition, as opposed to the original apotemnophilia, denotes an attachment to something foreign rather than an attachment to a removal. From this perspective, it would appear that those with BIID are defined by a foreign body rather than an amputation. They are depicted here, in other words, as being driven to grasp, rather than remove, a felt absence. Thus, if we simultaneously apply apotemnophilia and xenomelia to the sufferer, it seems as though the individual with BIID may only hold onto their absence by cutting it away. The syndrome is only recently beginning to gain recognition through films such as Complete Obsession (2000), Whole (2003), Quid Pro Quo (2008), and Armless (2010), V.S. Ramachandran’s writings on the condition, and the rising popularity of internet forums, such as “Fighting It.” Though research is limited, some hypotheses, which I will survey at this point, do exist. Sabine Müller writes that “psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists […] discuss whether it is a neurotic disorder, an obsessive-­ compulsive disorder, an identity disorder like transsexuality, or a neurological conflict […] which could stem from damage to a part of the brain that constructs the body image in a map-like form” (37). Other psychologists liken the disorder to psychosis (such as Bayne, First, and Blom), because the sufferers’ beliefs differ from “normality” and “reality.” However, unlike in psychosis, patients do not hallucinate, they acknowledge their intact limb. And, furthermore, those with BIID tend to reject the classification of psychosis for fear of further stigmatization. Other psychologists classify the syndrome as a Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). However, as Sarah Noll notes, in contrast to BDD, “in BIID subjects there is only a very small tendency to judge the attractiveness of the concerned limb as ‘unaesthetic’ and ‘disgusting’; they have the feeling it is ‘soulless’ and ‘not belonging’ to the self” (230). Amy White adds that “[u]nlike BDD, persons suffering from BIID are not delusional and do

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not imagine their bodies as ugly. Persons with BIID acknowledge that their bodies are perfectly normal and functional” (227). In short, those with BIID are concerned with the felt, as opposed to the visual, aspect of bodily incongruity and are considered to be less delusional than those with BDD. Moreover, those with BDD “often describe that they are not seeking an ideal body; they just want to be ‘normal’” (Lemma 83). Put another way, those with BDD associate the ideal body with normality, while those with BIID associate the ideal body with abnormality. Although BIID is also often compared to anorexia, according to White, “[a] person with anorexia will believe that they are overweight despite contrary evidence. Persons with BIID acknowledge that their bodies are healthy, they just identify as a disabled person […]. It is a mismatch that causes a BIID patient to suffer, not an alleged false belief” (White 229). However, anorexia, dieting, and body modification do provide different ways of understanding BIID: they demonstrate how desiring to remove (or alter) part of one’s body to reach an imagined ideal is not entirely uncommon and perhaps exists in each individual to some degree. Another disorder that is concerned with internal fracture is Gender dysphoria (GD), with which BIID is also associated. In GD, individuals are uncomfortable with their anatomy and desire to surgically alter their body as a result. What fundamentally connects GD and BIID, then, is: an expression of discontent with actual embodiment; the draw to seek out surgery to become ideal; and a discrepancy between current and felt body. “Sufferers of BIID” writes White, “often describe themselves as being transabled, drawing a parallel with transgendered individuals” (226). They also display a male predominance, symptoms tend to begin in childhood, and there have been individual case reports and descriptions of MtF transsexuals who have undergone limb amputation. Furthermore, many BIID patients exhibit gender identity issues, are often homosexual or bisexual, and some have reported feelings of wanting to be the opposite sex (Lawrence 264). In short, in both conditions, individuals are uncomfortable with their bodies and desire to physically alter them to fit a subjectively imagined ideal. However, it is important to keep in mind the differences between the two conditions: mainly that in BIID, desires for amputations are usually related to the arms and legs (not the genitals and breasts), and that (as far as we know at this point) BIID is less common than GD. I now discuss some neurological hypotheses, which are “fascinating but have several limitations” (First 7). One of the most influential put forward

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is by Ramachandran, who, along with Paul McGeoch, theorizes that a “mismatch between the genetically-determined body map and the physical body leads to BIID, and that this discrepancy is evident by the lack of activation in the right SPL (superior parietal lobe)” (Johnson et al. 11); since there is no stimulation in the parietal lobe, the limb cannot be felt. Though prominent, their research has been criticized by others in the field, partially because those who desire an amputation often change their preference for the limb they would like amputated. Neurologists have additionally used various medications to “treat”4 the conditions and although some prescribed for various mood disorders have worked to reduce suffering, attempts to clarify whether these medications relieve BIID specifically (or other related problems) remain unsatisfactory. An additional neurological attempt to “treat” BIID was conducted in 2015 by Bigna Lenggenhager, Leonie Hilti, and Peter Brugger in their “Rubber Foot Illusion” study. The experiment involved two groups: one with BIID and one without. In both groups, the researchers stroked an artificial foot and the subject’s own foot simultaneously, which had been previously known to lead to an illusory feeling of ownership for the false foot (209). What they found was that both groups experienced the rubber foot illusion in the same way, thus suggesting that those with BIID have normally functioning senses, and that the integration of visual, tangible, and proprioceptive information is intact (thus contradicting Ramachandran and McGough’s hypothesis). Subjects could, in other words, feel ownership of a false foot and yet continue to deny ownership of a real one. Those who conducted the study are attempting to learn more about whether the experiment can be used to alter feelings involved in body representation; however, the therapy has yet to be sufficiently tested. Though therapies are being pursued, most BIID patients report that they only feel better when they undergo (black market) surgery, and several argue that this is the only cure. According to White, those who have surgery “report feeling more whole and better able to function without the mental suffering from BIID” (232). However, White also writes that “[w]hile anecdotal evidence suggests a high satisfaction rate from those who have managed to realize their ideal disabled body, studies are on a very small scale” (227). This is not only due to the scarce amount of people who have publicized their desires for amputation, but also because it is illegal to perform a BIID amputation, which poses several problems for the BIID community and raises ethical concerns.

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White states that “[s]everal individuals find ways to amputate limbs themselves. They may use a wood chipper, a chainsaw, shotgun, or dry ice. Others seek surgery on the black market, one individual suffering from gangrene and dying” (226). Although it seems that surgery performed legally would be helpful for those seeking dangerous methods, one reason that the amputation is illegal is due to the danger that this kind of surgery entails. According to Müller, “[e]ven the argument that an amputation would be the only effective BIID therapy does not hold: first, their success has not been proven scientifically but only anecdotally. Second,” she continues, “at least sometimes the success is not sustainable: some amputated patients develop further amputation desires” (42). While some sufferers who have limbs removed are dissatisfied and seek additional surgery, and others simply desire to continue severing different body parts, still others are thrilled to have finally removed the limb. Müller hopes, however, that “less invasive and efficient therapies can be expected” (42). Nevertheless, several believe surgery to be “ethically permissible because it will prevent many BIID patients from injuring or killing themselves” (Bayne and Levy 79). In the medical community, this question of ethics often relates to the patient’s mental health: on very rare occasions, if the patient can be trusted to make the right decision, that patient may be permitted to carry through with the amputation. Müller writes: “The crucial question is whether the amputation desire is an autonomous decision or an obsessive desire” (42). If the patient is overtaken by a sickness that might be altering her mind, for instance, the amputation is considered to be unethical. However, if the patient seems rational enough to make a decision, several believe that she or he should be permitted to amputate. This consideration necessitates a distinct differentiation between rational and irrational, and mental health and sickness, which is highly problematic. In order to form decisions regarding psychical health, White suggests that prior to amputation, there should be “a screening process in place to ensure informed consent,” but that “less radical treatment options for BIID should be utilized before a surgical intervention” (234). Less radical “treatments,” however, have not been well researched: a small number of individuals with BIID have undergone counseling or taken medication for accompanying symptoms, and the results are mixed and unsubstantial. Dosanjh Kaur suggests that a medical cure has not been identified because “identity is not located in any simple way in anatomy” (1), indicating that since medication “treats” the body (and is largely unhelpful), sufferers’ pain must be rooted in the

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psyche. Thus, neurological, psychological, and psychotherapeutic research continues to face difficulties in defining terms and finding origins and cures. In this chapter, I do not attempt to find specific origins or cures but will examine a more theoretical approach. If, as Vivian Sobchack writes in “A Leg to Stand On,” “[e]xperience of any kind requires both bodies and language for its expression” (18), I am interested in what attending to the connection between the body and language will convey. More specifically, I am concerned with the fragmentation involved in this intersection between the physical and the linguistic, and at how discussing BIID and literary theory together can open new ways of thinking about rupture in both; in finding ways to think through the BIID sufferer’s experience. I want to begin by linking this disorder to a central poststructural notion: that language is an illusion structured through fabricated wholes that obscure its endless referent. Since BIID also involves an imagined whole that takes place through fragmentation, I turn to theory that is concerned with the paradoxical relationship between fragmentation and completion. I am interested in, as Ihab Hassan puts it, “what kind of self […] is adequate to our postmodern world, a world caught between fragments and wholes” (xiv).5

Fragmentation: BIID and the Text-Body One individual with BIID in the film Whole explains that for him, BIID involves an idea that actually by making something less, you make people more complete, which is the complete opposite to most amputees who perhaps have accidents or disease. By taking that limb away from them they feel less complete. But for us, it’s the other way around. By taking it off you make us more complete.

What this man seems to be saying is that those with BIID oppose the standard concept of normality: while others may feel whole with four limbs and incomplete with three, those with BIID only feel complete with three limbs. They are, in this sense, aware of, interested in, and (to a degree) accepting of their own unconventionality (while still experiencing the pain involved). Unconventionality is also central to poststructuralist thought, or as Catherine Belsey puts it, it “offers a controversial account of our place in the world, which competes with conventional explanations” (6).

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It is, moreover, concerned with the way in which language is inseparable from physical interaction, in how language and the body shape one another. It is thus helpful to investigate poststructuralist theory that is interested in corporeal fracture in relation to BIID in order to reach a nuanced understanding of the syndrome. These links, I suggest, can additionally help to elucidate the ways in which “[t]he possibility of using words to represent the very quality they do not possess” (Segal 119–120) is related to BIID; as BIID involves a desire to somatically represent the absent limb that sufferers do not physically possess. To learn more about the possibility of using language in this way, I will turn to Jacques Derrida’s notion of the text-body and Maurice Blanchot’s thoughts on literary negation. However, firstly, I note that in this reading I am not suggesting that BIID can be undone, cured, or fully understood through an exploration of literary negation and poststructuralist thought. I am interested in learning more about the syndrome from a non-neurobiological approach, from analyses of physical and linguistic struggles with rupture provided in specific strands of poststructuralist theory. In so doing, I am careful to avoid what Vivian Sobchack6 warns against: that for several who write about limbs, “corporeal wholeness tends to be constituted in purely objective and visible terms; body ‘parts’ are seen […] as missing or limited,” irrespective of the subjective experience of the individual who may have “successfully incorporate[d]” a prosthesis and may not have the sense that something is “lacking” (22). The types of theoretical works to which she refers, in other words, fail to discuss the more structural and functional aspects of limb loss (though she discusses this in relation to prosthetics as opposed to BIID). She is interested in how a subjective experience of limb loss conveys both a material and a metaphorical concept of, in this case, a prosthetic limb. In so doing she hopes to debunk the way prosthetics are often discussed, as being fetishized and removed from a subjective reality. Sobchack is additionally interested in how a subjective experience of limb loss might transform the more objective idea of wholeness and lack; and my discussions of wholeness and lack in this chapter relate to personal experiences with BIID and theories about negation (thus aiming to avoid objective notions of wholeness). Like Sobchack, I am interested in linking more subjective experiences of limb loss with metaphorical insights, and I address this by relating literary theory to statements that those with BIID have expressed on internet forums, documentaries, and in books. I do not personally have BIID and do not suggest that I understand how it feels; I

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want to find new ways of thinking about what those with the syndrome have expressed. At this point, I will begin to unpack the relationship between individuals’ experiences with BIID and poststructuralist theory, thus connecting the material and the metaphorical. Michael First explains that those with BIID do not feel themselves with all their limbs intact, and that the primary reason for amputation is the wish to feel complete through a lack (2). Although some poststructuralist thought is concerned with the discomfort associated with incoherence, fracture, or fragmentation, it is more accepting of lacks and ruptures, and may therefore offer a helpful framework to understand the suffering that an individual with BIID experiences. It is interested in an illusory desire for completion, while also “celebrating incompletion.” Or according to Rob Pope, “[p]oststructuralists in general, and deconstructors in particular, are especially fascinated by absences, gaps and silences” (128). These absences are particularly important because poststructuralists are interested in challenging the ideas of centers and binaries in order to discover what is left out, what is absent (Pope 128). BIID also involves a conflict between the oppositions of the body and mind and the inside and outside. As one individual from “Fighting It” explains: [T]he issue boils down to this in my mind: I get the amputation, feel whole and complete for once in my life hopefully, and have to explain my unique situation to the people I know over the years (I really don’t like to lie about things), OR, I live with two feet for the rest of my life, continuing to appear “normal” to everyone, but on the inside I’d still be in mental anguish, and suffering in silence.

The author of this statement displays a binary: he must either amputate to feel whole or remain intact and feel forever incomplete. This binary involves yet another: a mind/body disconnect (the desire to feel whole as opposed to lacking), and a disjoint between external and internal notions of self (to appear externally normal, while also feeling internally broken). This recognition of problematic binaries is brought forth forcefully in Derrida’s deconstructive thought, which “is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body” (Culler 126). Thus, since, as discussed, the text and the body are permeable, it is important to explore the ways in which those with BIID struggle with physical, psychical, and

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environmental oppositions, in conjunction with the way in which poststructuralists aim to deconstruct these oppositions through language. Although “deconstruction is widely perceived as having little or nothing to say about embodiment,” Jones Irwin sees Derrida’s writing as fundamentally concerned with the body, for “‘[i]n every reading,’ Derrida tells us, ‘there is a corps-à-corps [body to body] between reader and text’” (1). For Derrida, the body is in part a text, and the text, a body. He explains of the relationship between the body and language that “there must be some representations of things as naturally certain as the body, hands, etc., however illusory this representation may be, and however false its relation to that which it represents” (Derrida 58). The body, he suggests, must be represented; however, it can only be represented at a removal, through language. Furthermore, Derrida deals with a fractured self and a fractured language, and BIID concerns a fractured identity; here, the body in BIID and the literary text are connected through a concern with rupture. Derrida’s notion of différance is particularly pertinent here because it involves the concept that “language is fundamentally unstable […] and identities are multiple, contradictory, and subject to change across settings and through interaction” (Morgan 1033); language and identity are in constant flux and thus decentered. For Derrida, unity is an effect of separation. “Multiplicity,” he writes, must “be included in, subjected to, the domination of unity” (Derrida 110). Firstly, this suggests that rupture and splitting cannot be disentangled from a coming together, and secondly, that there is a falseness of “unity” or a “center.” For those with BIID, unity is also intertwined with a concept of rupture, as the drive toward completion is predicated on an amputation. Thus, Derrida’s thought brings out the ways in which the struggles involved with BIID are not confined to the BIID sufferer alone. Moreover, it alters the way in which BIID is often viewed: as a “disorder,” “neurological conflict,” or “abnormality.” When we think about Derrida’s notion of différance, BIID does not appear “abnormal” in this way. It is, in a sense, a physical representation of the entwinement between rupture and wholeness that Derrida discusses. If, according to Derrida, unity necessitates fragmentation, BIID brings out what those without BIID may not be consciously aware of in the same way: that the representation of physical unity is always false or lacking. From this perspective, the concept that an individual must have four limbs to be whole is not more logical than the belief that an individual must have three limbs to be whole. For Derrida and those with BIID, in other words, unity is founded upon a lack.

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I will now turn to the thoughts of Maurice Blanchot, who writes in a fragmented manner in order to materialize this concern with rupture and disrupting binaries. Similar to Derrida, Blanchot is concerned with one’s experience with the text and with the text as a type of body. As Gray Kochhar-Lindgren writes, for Blanchot, human beings “are each an essay that is experiencing itself as its own experiment.” Blanchot’s writing embodies rupture and brings awareness to the reader’s interaction with the text. I suggest that for Blanchot, this kind of experience with fragmentary writing may engender a release of feelings of excess. It is the incision of the pen, in other words, that can create a lack (words may lead to an experience of negation); in BIID, it is a surgical removal of a limb. I focus here on what Blanchot’s concept of literary fragmentation might reveal about those with BIID who struggle with a different and painful feeling of excess.

There’s Nothing Here: Blanchot and BIID Although Blanchot’s work cannot be completely confined to any one field or discourse, it is most closely associated with poststructuralism. As Terry Eagleton writes, in poststructuralist literary criticism, “the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is always in some sense absent from it too” (111); and thus, the theory involves “an unsettling venture into the inner void of the text” (126). Poststructuralism, in other words, explores the absences within something, specifically, within the literary text. Blanchot is particularly concerned with this “inner void,” in the way in which language is structured through a lack. He theorizes that the linguistic system is a false yet necessary one that is used for communication, and he is interested in illuminating what cannot be expressed. He additionally explores the way in which individuals are formed through language, the concept that, in the words of Eagleton, “since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction” (112). Here, the idea of an individual’s wholeness is fictional; those with BIID feel an imaginary sense of unity based upon a lack. For Blanchot, it is important that we explore and experience this fictional wholeness, this lack, which he believes can occur through the process of reading. In turn, Blanchot writes in a fragmentary manner that disrupts the habitual way of reading (a desire for textual cohesion), thereby aiming to disturb assumed linguistic meanings (false notions of unity).

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In relation to Blanchot’s thoughts, Paul de Man writes: “we [beings] try to protect ourselves against this negative power by inventing stratagems, ruses of language and of thought that hide an irrevocable fall” (Blindness 73); language acts as a veneer to hide the inexpressible, to hide absence. For Blanchot, it is literature that turns toward this void, that desires an experience with the negative. Though BIID sufferers also desire to experience fracture, they strive to contain it, while Blanchot insists that we turn toward it openly. He is interested, moreover, in how interacting with language involves a physical and psychical experience that cannot be captured or shared. As de Man attests: for Blanchot, “[l]anguage, with its sensory attributes of sound and texture, partakes of the world of natural objects and introduces a positive element in the sheer void” (69); language is sensory and material, it affects and is affected by the physical world. Here, de Man seems to be suggesting that for Blanchot, the sensory experience with language offers a presence to this linguistic lack or void. Blanchot believes that literature is not confined to a certain philosophy or literary movement, explaining that “it is not a matter of developing a unified theory or encompassing a body of knowledge” (Hanson xxv). A unified discourse, according to Blanchot, closes off knowledge by attempting to answer questions instead of opening knowledge by asking them. Blanchot aims instead to break down this cohesion by answering questions with more questions, because the “question inaugurates a type of relation characterised by openness and free movement, and what it must be satisfied with closes and arrests it” (Infinite 13–14). The exemplary question that concerns Blanchot is the question of literature, which, for him, is outside any discipline that attempts to define it. Leslie Hill explains: “any literature that knows itself to be literature, Blanchot implies, is by that token no longer literature” (19), and this is because literature’s very nature is, paradoxically, to illuminate what language cannot know. Language cannot convey precise meanings and comprehensive definitions, partially because it is formed through subjective and ambiguous psychical images and perceptions. Rather than attempting to define literature through ordinary language, therefore, Blanchot “steadily borders on the inexpressible and approaches the extreme of ambiguity, but always recognizes [words] for what they are” (de Man 62). He does not attempt to clarify or contain linguistic meaning but to bring out its ambiguous nature. Thus, Blanchot’s writings are difficult to define and interpret: he is “fundamentally opaque at the level of comprehension” (Critchley 31).

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The impossibility of completely understanding Blanchot’s writing dramatizes his interest in a reader’s failure ever to fully capture authorial meaning. To read Blanchot, one must release the desire for cohesion and allow the fracture to exist. From reports by individuals with BIID, we learn that they, too, desire to experience fracture, but whereas for Blanchot, fracture is experienced in the mind through a textual body, the individual with BIID seeks that fracture in a physical body. The textual fracture is experienced, moreover, through what Blanchot refers to as the two slopes of literature. Here, there is the word which can be spoken, and that which it renders absent, which may, I suggest, illuminate the double self in BIID: the physical presence of a whole body, and the paradoxical and subjectively felt absence. Language, then, from Blanchot’s perspective, is materialized in the way that those with BIID feel; it is a physical presence that is imperceptibly hollow. The two slopes of literature, writes theorist Simon Critchley, “constitute the poles of [literary] ambiguity […]. Literature always has the right to mean something other than what one thought it meant” (49). The first slope of literature involves a notion of abstraction in the service of meaning. It is, Blanchot writes, “meaningful prose. Its goal is to express things in a language that designates things according to what they mean” (Work of Fire 332). However, language cannot completely express thought or sensation. Blanchot contends that language “murders” the “thing”: in naming something, that thing is negated. Thus, language involves an experience of death and erasure. Blanchot explains: “For me to be able to say, ‘This woman,’ I must somehow take her flesh-­ and-­blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness” (Work of Fire 322). When the woman is named, she is erased, because language is at a remove from the physical, the “flesh-and-blood.” Put another way, when “things” are translated to conscious thought they are negated. Here, language is a tool that erases a person, it causes the reader not to imagine the presence of a person but their absence. The reader is reminded of “this woman” who is not there. In a way then, language embodies what those with BIID express; absence is necessary to create a particular notion of wholeness. Though this parallel does not offer a solution, it may open a space for understanding more about BIID, and how it is a magnification of a more common problem with conceptualizing wholeness and presence. For Blanchot, they are paradoxically linked to fragmentation and absence, which, I suggest, can help us to conceive of the BIID experience as a

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variation of a discomfort with the idea of wholeness and presence that others have also expressed. In Alex Mensaert’s Amputation on Request (2011), a compilation of stories about those with BIID, an individual explains that he encountered a German “wannabe,” who, after having amputated his toes, kept them in the freezer. The German man also explained how easy it was to perform a “painless” and “safe” self-amputation. Although he does not want to experience pain and does not want to die, he is drawn to death; he instigates bodily harm and contains a piece of his own dead body (his frozen toes). This, I propose, can be understood from a different perspective through the literary writer’s plight as Blanchot conceives it. It is a well-­ known idea that some writers desire immortality through their words, which continue to create meaning posthumously. Ulrich Haase and William Large clarify that for Blanchot, “the dread of death is expressed in the dream of writing the definitive book, the most outstanding novel which might bestow immortality on its author” (51). Immortality is secured by leaving a part of oneself on the page, and the German wannabe attempted to (from this perspective) secure his immortality by freezing parts of his body. However, they continue, “death cannot be overcome, and the book, once written, always disappears in the face of the demand of the work” (Haase and Large 51–52). The author cannot secure the text’s meaning or how it will be received, and thus, though the text may bestow immortality upon the author, it also reveals the author’s absence. As Barthes writes in “The Death of the Author,” “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings […] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (146); it is language rather than the author that speaks in literature. Thus, “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes 142); as language takes over, the author is erased. In relation to this, Blanchot indicates that there is a certain kind of release in the author’s death, and this, I suggest, can be linked to a feeling of release perhaps experienced by some with BIID. As, in Blanchot’s thought, the text might both create in the author a certain kind of immortality and simultaneous erasure or death, freezing one’s toes can be perceived as an attempt to immortalize the body, while simultaneously proving its mortality. Though the toes might remain, they represent his death, an absent part of himself.

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Accordingly, Blanchot postulates that we have “two relations with death, one which we like to call authentic and the other inauthentic” (Space 155). Aligned with the two slopes of literature, there is one side of death that can be grasped (the physical body), and one that cannot be comprehended. In BIID, one may be able to grasp death (physical absence) by amputating the body, but the desire for this death may never be understood. In this way, the textual body, as Blanchot sees it, and the body in BIID, involve a presence that paradoxically reveals an absence. And for Blanchot, grasping an understanding of life, of the living body, can only be approached through an image. Hill writes: “On the one hand, death is negation, separation, language.” Death, he continues, “is constitutive of what is human, but it necessarily exceeds all that is human, which is why it can be addressed at all […] only indirectly, through ritual, myth or fiction” (182). It is implied here that death is both what makes us human and keeps us from being a complete individual, and our only way of attempting to see or understand it is through images and language. Thus, I want to ask if there is a way of articulating the soma that may have an effect. I ask if BIID, in other words, may involve the (unconscious) human drive to comprehend death while living, to complete the lack that is left from the impossibility of experiencing death. And to explore this question, I will examine Blanchot’s thoughts on how a body of text can or cannot be articulated. For this, I turn to Blanchot’s concept of the “space of literature.” In his writing, Blanchot focuses on how language cannot signify its referent, and in so doing, he attends to the negation within words, what words cannot convey. This negation, the space within language, is what Blanchot calls the space of literature. It involves a desire to turn toward invisibility, toward what language cannot show—a thought which makes us see with more clarity that what the individual with BIID may want to experience is an absence that cannot be perceived by others. Blanchot is interested in how negation is not only metaphorical, but also physical: he not only discusses absence, but writes in fragments to enable an experience of fragmentation and erasure in the process of writing. Thomas Carl Wall explains: “He writes fragments, and even writes about fragmentary writing […]. Anamorphic, the fragment’s only life is its separation from any whole, any narrative, and any history. It cannot be put in place and therefore demands from the writer something other than form. It demands destruction” (84–85). Again, Blanchot’s style and his thoughts on how the fragmentary text allows a reader and a writer to glance at their destruction

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help us understand that self-amputation allows those with BIID to glance at their destruction. Blanchot proposes that both the writer and the word can be partially erased in the process of writing, that a moving hand may reveal one’s annihilation. As he discusses in “Literature and the Right to Death,” language only represents its object through its destruction: “when [literature] names something, whatever it designates is abolished; but whatever is abolished is also sustained, and the thing has found a refuge (in the being which is the word) rather than a threat” (Work of Fire 329). Thus, like the frozen toe and the author, the word, from this perspective, is simultaneously present and absent, it stands for its own loss. Though writers may visualize their thoughts and presence in the text, the words also disclose their own erasure; they stand for an absence. Blanchot writes: “literature’s ideal has been the following: to say nothing, to speak in order to say nothing” (Work of Fire 324). Here, the physical text cannot be comprehended as a whole thing, and yet there is a desire to reach completion through language, through a fictional unity (a word cannot express coherent meaning). Blanchot believes that the reader can be exposed to her fragmentary self in the movement of reading, because she is also being altered through the process of absorbing words and meanings through textual interaction. Thus, the individual is affected when language shapes thoughts. Wall explains of Blanchot’s writing: if “I can ‘imagine the hand that writes them,’ I will only find myself face-to-face with a gaze that does not regard me, that dispenses with me” (103). In being dispensed of in this way, Blanchot suggests, one may be free of oneself, “outside oneself, ecstatic, in a manner that cannot leave the ‘oneself,’ the proper, the essence, intact” (Sallis 97). In facing one’s erasure through the process of reading or writing, the weight of living is dispersed. In reading, one’s identity and self can be absorbed into the words, and the reader may experience her own erasure. While not offering a solution, Blanchot’s notion that interacting with the text allows readers to explore physical and psychical erasure, it may allow us to understand a little bit more about the way that those with BIID might feel: interacting with their bodies, they might explore their erasure through physical loss, dispersing the weight of living. I have suggested that Blanchot shares the BIID sufferer’s interest in perceiving their own negation; and that he explores this through language, which, for him, may create a release, which is connected to a feeling of absence. Those with BIID also aim for release, albeit one that feels rooted

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in a specific part of the body. Though Blanchot’s theories are seemingly unrelated to the medical condition of BIID, I have suggested that they share a similar core, an interest in the paradoxical relationship between wholeness and fragmentation. More specifically, both are concerned with the drive to perceive fragmentation through a notion of wholeness and a desire to experience negation. While for those with BIID this is painful and difficult, certain poststructuralist theories pose that experiencing negation is a difficulty that all of us face when we engage with language and literature, one in which we may find pleasure as well as pain. Blanchot’s writing specifically is concerned with how this paradoxical drive can be experienced through language, through the negation that language may create. BIID thus reminds us that theoretical notions are not confined only to the abstract. The poststructural concern with the disturbing paradox between unity and fragmentation is real; for those with BIID, it is a day-to-day reality. Thus, bringing theory and the condition together can help us to conceive of BIID as a particular and important struggle with unity and fragmentation, rather than an inexplicable “abnormality.” When investigated together, both BIID and theory about presence and absence can provide new imaginative pathways into paradoxical psychosomatic experiences.

Notes 1. The differences between postmodernism and poststructuralism are vague and abstract, and thus, there are several overlapping ideas, particularly concerning the relationship between physical and linguistic absence. Put simply, however, the difference is that “[p]ostmodern theory became identified with the critique of universal knowledge and foundationalism” (Sarup 132). Poststructuralists, Sarup writes, “want to deconstruct the conceptions by means of which we have so far understood the human” (2). Although I focus on Maurice Blanchot, other poststructuralist theorists that are concerned with absence include Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan. Lacan is particularly of interest because he discusses linguistic absence in relation to the body. For him, the individual is physically and psychically composed of a lack. For more on this see Russell Grigg’s Lacan, Language and Philosophy (2008). 2. I explore the connections between Blanchot’s writings and the concerns of BIID in more depth in my book Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where I also discuss Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus.

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3. According to Paul Schilder, a body schema is “the immediate experience that there is a unity of the body. […] [It] is the tri-dimensional image everybody has about himself” (11). In the case of BIID, there is a loss of a feeling of unity in one’s body schema. 4. Susan Wendell writes that in the medicalization of disability, “disability is regarded as an individual misfortune […] that medicine can and should treat, cure, or at least prevent” (161). 5. Although Hassan focuses on postmodernism for this text, he also discusses Maurice Blanchot, who is more closely associated with poststructuralism and whose writings are central to this chapter. 6. Sobchack is a cinema and media theorist and cultural critic who incidentally has a prosthetic leg and is thus personally connected to the theoretical ideas in discussion.

References Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977. Bayne, Tim, and Neil Levy. “Amputees by Choice: Body Integrity Identity Disorder and the Ethics of Amputation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005, pp. 75–86. Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2002. Blanchot, Maurice. Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson, U of Minnesota, 1992. ———. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1989. ———. The Work of Fire. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford UP, 1995. Blom, Rianne M., Raoul C.  Hennekam, and Damiaan Denys. “Body Integrity Identity Disorder.” PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 4, 2012. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard UP, 1992. Critchley, Simon. Very Little—Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. Routledge, 2004. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2000. De Man, Paul. Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1971. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, Routledge, 2001. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. U of Minnesota P, 1996. “Fighting It.” Yahoo! Groups. groups.yahoo.com/group/fighting-it/. First, Michael. “Desire for Amputation of a Limb: Paraphilia, Psychosis, or a New Type of Identity Disorder.” Psychological Medicine, vol. 34, 2004, pp. 1–10. Gilbert, Melody, director. Whole. Performance by Michael First, Sundance, 2003. Grigg, Russell. Lacan, Language, and Philosophy. State U of New York P, 2008.

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Haase, Ulrich M., and William Large. Maurice Blanchot. Routledge, 2001. Hanson, Susan. “Foreword. This Double Exigency: Naming the Possible, Responding to the Impossible.” Infinite Conversation, by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Susan Hanson, U of Minnesota, 1992, pp. xxv–xxxiii. Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Ohio State UP, 1987. Hill, Leslie. Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit. Oxford UP, 2001. Irwin, Jones. Derrida and the Writing of the Body. Routledge, 2010. Johnson, Alicia J., Sook-Lei Liew, and Lisa Aziz-Zadeh. “Demographics, Learning and Imitation, and Body Schema in Body Identity Integrity Disorder.” Indiana University Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science, vol. 6, 2011, pp. 8–15. Kaur, Dosanjh H. “Producing Identity: Elective Amputation and Disability.” Scan Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, 2004. scan.net.au/SCAN/journal/print.php?journal_id= 38&j_id=3. Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray. “Nothing Doing: Maurice Blanchot and the Irreal.” The Café Irreal, 2010, cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/review13.htm. Lawrence, Anne A. “Clinical and Theoretical Parallels Between Desire for Limb Amputation and Gender Identity Disorder.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 35, no. 3, 2006, pp. 263–78. Lemma, Alessandra. Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification. Routledge, 2010. Lenggenhager, Bigna, Leonie Hilti, and Peter Brugger. “Disturbed Body Integrity and the ‘Rubber Foot Illusion.’” Neuropsychology, vol. 29, no. 2, 2015, pp. 205–11. Loewy, Monika. Phantom Limbs and Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Routledge, 2019. McGeoch, Paul D., et  al. “Xenomelia: A New Right Parietal Lobe Syndrome.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, vol. 82, no. 12, 2011, pp. 1314–19. Müller, Sabine. “Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID): Is the Amputation of Healthy Limbs Ethically Justified?” The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 36–43. Mensaert, Alex. Amputation on Request. lulu.com, 2011. Morgan, Brian. “Poststructuralism and Applied Linguistics: Complementary Approaches to Identity and Culture in ELT.” International Handbook of English Language Teaching, edited by Jim Cummins and Chris Davison, Springer, 2017, pp. 1033–52. Noll, Sarah. “Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID): How Satisfied Are Successful Wannabes.” PBS Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 3, no. 6, 2014, p. 222. Pope, Rob. The English Studies Book: An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2002. Sallis, John. Double Truth. State U of New York, 1995.

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Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993. Schilder, Paul. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. International UP, 1978. Segal, Naomi. Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch. Rodopi, 2009. Sobchack, Vivian. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, MIT, 2006, pp. 17–41. Wall, Thomas Carl. Radical Passivity: Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. State U of New York, 1999. Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses and Disabilities.” The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, U of Michigan P, 1997, pp. 161–73. White, Amy. “Body Integrity Identity Disorder Beyond Amputation: Consent and Liberty.” HEC Forum, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp. 225–36.

Discussion: Philosophy, Language, Disability

In many ways, the three chapters comprising the fourth and final part of this volume appear to move away from the lived experience so central to the narratives at the heart of the first three parts into the more abstract territory of philosophical and linguistic inquiry. Although, at first glance, this part may strike some readers as abandoning (or, worse, using) the discourse of disability to explore theoretical concepts largely unrelated to the concrete ontological concerns of amputees, these three chapters provide us with useful tools to interrogate and illuminate that very discourse while expanding its scope to include fields as disparate as ancient Chinese ethics and poststructuralist philosophy of language. Both Thomas Emmrich and Monika Loewy, for instance, demonstrate how language may serve a prosthetic function, providing a compensatory presence for meaning that has been lost or removed. In metaphorizing prosthetics in this fashion, we not only confront the (in)ability of language to contain or replace meaning, but also reflect upon the source of the metaphor: What, exactly, have we come to expect of a prosthesis? What does it do? What is its purpose? Similarly, while both Loewy and Danesh Singh draw upon amputation to explore notions of bodily integrity, wholeness, and health in the writings of Maurice Blanchot and Zhuangzi, their chapters simultaneously encourage us to examine our own preconceived notions of the normative body. By placing these three chapters together, at the end of this volume, we hope to add nuance to the concepts explored in the first nine chapters

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as well as open up potential new avenues for future scholarship on amputation in literature and film. Of course, the chapters in this part also highlight just how relevant stories featuring amputations can be to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines outside of literature and film. Indeed, in their engagement with philosophy, gender studies, sociology, folklore, psychology, classics, and philosophy, almost all of the chapters in this volume could be considered interdisciplinary in scope. In the final part, however, those previously peripheral subjects move from the margins of discourse to the center. In doing so, it is important to note that these chapters are not marginalizing amputation. Rather, amputation may be seen as part of a larger discourse in which it neither dominates the conversation nor vanishes from view. Significantly, in assuming a less prominent role in these chapters, the subject of amputation becomes more semantically fluid and we are able to see some of the ways in which ideas explored in previous chapters of the book may be applicable to new and even surprising situations. Through their explorations of psychological and philosophical concepts, Singh, Emmrich, and Loewy tackle ideas that have preoccupied discourses of disability since antiquity, as we see here. In this way, the chapters explore the historical and philosophical backgrounds of contemporary cultures and the founding myths on which our ways of thinking about disability are built. Both Singh and Loewy engage with the question of bodily integrity—what it means to be whole in body and mind. Through ancient and contemporary philosophy, we are led to the conclusion that our value judgments are based on all too easy assumptions about wholeness and completion that do not take into account how variable and how intimately linked to experiences of fragmentation a sense of integrity may be. In this line of thinking, amputation, or even the desire for amputation, is not a hindrance to achieving integrity in everyday life, and it may be a potent metaphor to destabilize assumptions about wholeness that prevent us from achieving more inclusive thinking. Similarly, Emmrich’s analysis of Philomela’s “grammatology” stimulates further consideration of the relationship between original and substitute. In his reading, disability is placed at the center of our cultural myths about language, speech, and writing, wherein the latter, as a central cultural technology, is imagined as a prosthetic device. In contrast to earlier assumptions about such “substitutes,” however, Ovid’s myth demonstrates not only the unreliability of what is conceived as the original ability but also the greater adaptability of the prosthetic—the secondary—device. In their efforts to unpack the myths

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and concepts with which disability discourse struggles, the chapters in this part may help pave the way to new ways of thinking about wholeness, integrity, authenticity, and normality, the uncritical embracing of which has often led to marginalizing individuals with disabilities as defective and abnormal. When these chapters privilege the metaphorical dimensions of amputation or emphasize what non-disabled individuals have in common with people with disabilities, the aim is not to diminish the reality or the specificity of disability experience. What their methods do highlight, however, is that the marginalization of amputation may be related to beliefs and preoccupations that we all share. And we may only be able to resolve them if we acknowledge that disability, and amputation in particular, opens up difficult questions about how we understand selfhood, our bodies and relationships, and our vulnerability as embodied beings. We might rest more comfortably with holding on to the “Otherness” of disability, but this supposed Otherness is highly unstable, whether we consider ourselves disabled or not. As Loewy’s chapter emphasizes, disabled identities are fluid—up to the point of “transabled” identities, but starting with the simple fact that anyone, at any time, may become disabled or suffer trauma or illness that might lead to the loss of a limb. Singh’s analysis of Daoist philosophy reminds us that transformation is an inevitable part of human life; Emmrich further suggests that even our so-called abilities may at any time become “disabling.” Lost, phantom, and artificial limbs are potent signifiers precisely because they “embody” the transient boundaries between self and other, normal and abnormal, able and disabled. The chapters throughout this volume have demonstrated that their recurrence in literature, film, or even philosophy does not have to be a sign of metaphorical exploitation but may instead open new and creative ways of thinking about disability and navigating the social, political, and emotional complexities of limb loss and replacement.

Further Reading

Below, readers will find a list of literary texts and films that feature a prominent engagement with amputation and/or prosthetics. While the purpose of the list is to highlight the importance of these motifs throughout literary and cinematic history, it is neither exhaustive nor does it claim to identify the most important depictions of amputation in literature and film. Rather, the texts listed here are included in this volume as a starting point to encourage further scholarship in the area. The list has grown organically over the years and owes to the suggestions of colleagues and friends. As such, the list is biased somewhat toward texts that have engaged academic attention. Consequently, we are aware that we only provide a glimpse into the horror and science fiction genres, in which dismemberment and prosthetics, respectively, play major roles. Likewise, the list excludes anime, graphic novels, comics, manga, and video games featuring amputees, which fall beyond the scope of this volume. We encourage readers to investigate those rich sources in addition to the texts below.

Literature Ulrich von Lichtenstein, Vrouwen dienest (Service of the Lady, 1255) William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (1594) Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2

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FURTHER READING

Anonymous, A Larum for London (1602) Frances Burney, “Journal Letter to Esther Burney, 22 March–June 1812” (1812) Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, “Mädchen ohne Hände” (“The Girl Without Hands,” 1812) Thomas Hood, “Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg: A Golden Legend” (1840) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) Silas Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866) Lev Tolstoj, Vojna i mir (War and Peace, 1868–1869) Guy de Maupassant, “La Main d’écorché” (“The Dead Hand,” 1875) Guy de Maupassant, “En mer” (“At Sea,” 1883) Guy de Maupassant, “La Main” (“The Hand,” 1883) Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883) Guy de Maupassant, “L’Infirme” (“The Cripple,” 1888) William Chambers Morrow, “His Unconquerable Enemy” (1889) Benito Pérez Galdós, Tristana (1892) Émile Zola, La Débâcle (The Downfall, 1892) Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Case of Lady Sannox” (1894) J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (various works from 1902–1911) Gouverneur Morris, The Penalty (1913) Robert Frost, “Out, Out—” (1916) Wilfred Owen, “Disabled” (1917) Siegfried Sassoon, “They” (1917) Knut Hamsun, Konerne ved vandposten (The Women at the Pump, 1920) Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) Edogawa Ranpo, “Imomushi” (“The Caterpillar,” 1929) William Faulkner, “The Leg” (1934) Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (1937) Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1939) Blaise Cendrars, La Main coupée (The Severed Hand, 1946) Boris Polevoi, Povest’ o nastoyashchem cheloveke (The Story of a Real Man, 1946) Wolfgang Borchert, Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside, 1947) Roald Dahl, “The Man from the South” (1948) Bernard Wolfe, Limbo (1952) Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People” (1955) Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit, 1956) Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957) Edward Albee, “The American Dream” (1961) Thomas Bernhard, Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris, 1970) Marge Piercy, “Barbie Doll” (1971) Anne Sexton, “The Maiden Without Hands” (1971)

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J.G. Ballard, Crash (1973) Toni Morrison, Sula (1973) Michel Tournier, Les Météores (Gemini, 1975) John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978) Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (1979) Thomas Bernhard, Die Billigesser (The Cheap-Eaters, 1980) Stephen King, The Dark Tower Series (1982–2004) Stephen King, “Survivor Type” (1982) Stephen King, Misery (1987) Hua Yu, Yijiubaliunian (Nineteen Eighty-Six, 1987) Péter Esterházy, Tizenhét hattyúk (Seventeen Swans, 1987) Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1989) Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992) David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) Margaret Atwood, “Girl Without Hands” (1995) Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995) Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, Hjartastaður (Heart Place, 1995) Miral al-Tahawy, Al-Khiba (The Tent, 1996) Quim Monzó, “Vida familiar” (“Family Life,” 1996) Megan Whalen Turner, Queen’s Thief Series (1996–2020) Hermann Kinder, “Um Leben und Tod” (“A Matter of Life and Death,” 1997) ̄ Ryu Murakami, Odishon (Audition, 1997) John Irving, The Fourth Hand (2001) Eduard Kochergin, Angelova kukla (Angel’s Puppet, 2003) Per Olov Enquist, Boken om Blanche och Marie (The Book of Blanche and Marie, 2004) Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004) Colm Toíbín, The Master (2004) J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2005) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) Oleg Rossiyanov, “Vojna-to von kogda byla” (Zhizn’ vtoraya) (“The War Was Long Ago…” (The Second Life), 2007) Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008) Anne Finger, Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection (2009) Finn-Ole Heinrich, “Zeit der Witze” (“A Time for Jokes,” 2009) Aminatta Forna, The Memory of Love (2010) April Daniels, Dreadnought (2017) Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille (2020, posth.)

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FURTHER READING

Film and Television Wallace Worsley, The Penalty (1920) Robert Wiene, Orlacs Hände (Hands of Orlac, 1924) King Vidor, The Big Parade (1925) Tod Browning, The Unknown (1927) Tod Browning, Freaks (1932) Karl Freund, Mad Love (1935) Maurice Tourneur, La Main du diable (The Devil’s Hand, 1943) Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat (1944) Robert Florey, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) Newt Arnold, Hands of a Stranger (1962) Luis Buñuel, Tristana (1970) Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1971) David Lynch, The Amputee (1974) Irvin Kershner, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Oliver Stone, The Hand (1981) Oliver Stone, Born on the Fourth of July (1989) Jane Campion, The Piano (1993) Chris Carter, The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–2018; especially S3E7 “The Walk,” S4E2 “Home,” and S4E9 “Terma”) Jennifer Chambers Lynch, Boxing Helena (1993) Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump (1994) Anthony Minghella, The English Patient (1996) ̄ Takashi Miike, Odishon (Audition, 1999) Julie Taymor, Titus (1999) Darren Aronofsky, Requiem for a Dream (2000) Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amores perros (Love’s Bitch, 2000) Jen and Sylvia Soska, American Mary (2002) Julie Taymor, Frida (2002) David Shore, House, M.D. (2004–2012; in particular S1E21, “Three Legs”, and S6E22, “Help Me”) Fred Amata, Anini (2005) Shonda Rhimes, Grey’s Anatomy (since 2005) Carlos Brooks, Quid Pro Quo (2008) Habib Azar, Armless (2010) Danny Boyle, 127 Hours (2010) Frank Darabont, The Walking Dead (since 2010) Kōji Wakamatsu, Kyatapirā (Caterpillar, 2010) Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, American Horror Story (since 2011) David Benioff, Game of Thrones (2011–2019) Charles Martin Smith, Dolphin Tale (2011)

  FURTHER READING 

Jacques Audiard, De rouille et d’os (Rust and Bone, 2012) Bong Joon-ho, Seolgungnyeolcha (Snowpiercer, 2013) Ana Lily Amirpour, The Bad Batch (2016) Sofia Coppola, The Beguiled (2017) David Gordon Green, Stronger (2017) Alexander Payne, Downsizing (2017) Bruce Miller, The Handmaid’s Tale (since 2017) David Simon and Ed Burns, The Plot Against America (2020) Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer (since 2020)

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Index1

A Abjection/abject, 11, 12, 92–94, 97, 101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 196, 200–202, 204–206, 207n7 Ableism/ableist, 13, 24, 29, 35, 186, 207n1 Abraham, Nicholas, 225, 226, 229n11 Alternative Limb Project (altlimbpro), 5 Aquinas, Thomas, 219, 220 Aristotle, 101, 104, 278, 284n27 Poetics, 278 “Armless Wonders,” 54, 55 Augustine, 215, 218, 219, 228n6, 228n8 Confessions, 215, 219, 228n6

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 215 Barthes, Roland, 303 Beauvoir, Simone de, 102, 142, 151n7 The Coming of Age, 142, 151n7 The Second Sex, 102 Bellmer, Hans, 130 Bernhard, Thomas, 12, 185–207 Beton, 189 Die Autobiographie, 196 Die Billigesser, 12, 185–207 Ein Fest für Boris, 189 Kalkwerk, 189 Korrektur, 189 Verstörung, 189 Blanchot, Maurice, 14, 289–306 Infinite Conversation, 301 The Space of Literature, 304 The Work of Fire, 302, 305

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 E. Grayson, M. Scheurer (eds.), Amputation in Literature and Film, Literary Disability Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2

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INDEX

Bolt, David, viii, 6, 195 Breton, André, 129 Browning, Tod, 53, 169 Freaks, 53 The Unknown (film), 44, 53–57, 169, 171 Bruhn, Jørgen, 125 Buñuel, Luis, 11, 113–133 Tristana, 113–133 Un chien andalou, 115, 129, 133n2 C Carter, Angela, 96 Castration complex, 44, 48 Cervantes, Miguel de, 116 Chaney, Lon, 12, 53–55, 161–163, 168–171, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182 Cicero, 284n20 Cinema of isolation, 165–167, 171–172, 177 Coetzee, J.M., viii, 11, 137–150 Disgrace, 138 Elizabeth Costello, 138 Slow Man, 137–150 Confucianism, 14, 240, 243, 248, 249 Confucius, 241–245, 250–254 Creed, Barbara, 94, 105, 106 Crypt, 225, 226 Cyborg, 13 D Dalí, Salvador, 115–116 Daoism, 14, 241, 245, 253 Dekker, Thomas, 21, 23, 27, 29, 31 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 9, 21–38 de Man, Paul, 301 Derrida, Jacques, 229n11, 259, 281, 284n27, 289, 290, 297–300, 306n1 Of Grammatology, 259, 281, 284n27

Specters of Marx, 229n11 Writing and Difference, 299 Descartes, René, 218, 228n7 Douglas, Mary, 49, 108, 109 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 44, 48, 49, 51, 56, 57, 58n2 “The Case of Lady Sannox,” 44, 48 Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, 48 E Eakin, John Paul, 215 Elsaesser, Thomas, 169 Embodiment, vii–ix, 11, 13, 35, 47, 54, 56, 69, 91–110, 125, 131, 151n7, 199, 293, 299 Empathy, 12, 13, 32, 163 Exotic, 12, 79 F Fetish/fetishization, 7, 11 First, Michael, 292, 298 Flaubert, Gustave, 6, 116 Madame Bovary, 6 Foster, Hal, 141 Foucault, Michel, 45, 264, 306n1 Discipline and Punish, 45 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 45 The Order of Things, 264 “Of Other Spaces,” 284n21 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 43, 44, 48, 92, 104, 225, 227 Civilization and Its Discontents, 6–7 “Femininity,” 104 The Interpretation of Dreams, 43 “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” 44–45, 48 The Uncanny, 92 Freund, Karl, 91 Mad Love, 91

 INDEX 

G Galdós, Benito Pérez, 11, 113–133 Tristana, 11, 113–133 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 3, 9, 10, 22, 54, 55, 100, 104, 115, 123, 131, 162, 187–189, 194–196, 199, 200 Extraordinary Bodies, 187, 195, 200 Staring: How We Look, 54 Gilbert, Melody Whole, 291, 292, 296 Goffman, Erving, 66, 67, 69, 187 Stigma, 66, 67, 69, 187 Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm, 92–94, 96–99, 103, 107–109, 110n2 “Aschenputtel,” 92 Children’s and Household Tales, 93, 94, 97, 99, 108 “The Girl Without Hands,” 92, 97, 99, 107–109 “Good Bowling and Card Playing,” 94 Grosz, Elizabeth, 105, 106, 109, 212 H Hall, Alice, 6–8, 12, 187 Hall, G. Stanley, 100, 116 Hassan, Ihab, 296, 307n5 Hemingway, Ernest, 92 A Farewell to Arms, 92 Hughes, Bill, 192, 193, 196, 200 I Integrity, bodily, 8, 13, 14, 200, 239, 240, 244–251, 254, 292 K Kirkup, John, 2–4, 15n1, 15n2 Kochergin, Eduard, 63, 75–82 Angel’s Puppet, 63, 75–81

323

Kriegel, Leonard, 123, 128 Kristeva, Julia, 93, 105, 108, 200, 306n1 The Powers of Horror, 105, 200 L Lacan, Jacques, 289, 306n1 Laozi, 253, 254 Larum for London, A, 9, 21–38 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 220, 221 Laocoon; or the Limits of Poetry and Painting, 221 Lister, Joseph, 3 London, Jack, 64 Longmore, Paul K., 163, 172, 181 Lynch, Jennifer, 92 Boxing Helena, 92 M Maresev, Aleksei, 63, 64, 67–70 Maupassant, Guy de, 12 “En mer,” 12 McLuhan, Marshall, 7 Medical gothic, 44, 49, 57, 57n1 Melville, Herman, 6 Moby-Dick, 6 Mensaert, Alex, 303 Amputation on Request, 303 Metaphor, 5–9, 23, 37, 115, 122, 123, 189, 198, 205, 225, 284n17 Metonymy, 5 Mitchell, David, 6, 7, 9, 13, 23, 114, 115, 122, 124, 125, 131, 187, 198, 203, 206 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 224 Modesta, Viktoria, 1–3, 5, 8–13 Monstrosity monstrous, disability as, 9, 21–23, 38, 177 monstrous, femininity as, 94, 104

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INDEX

Moritz, Karl Philipp, 12, 211–228 Anton Reiser, 12, 211–228 Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde, 213 Morris, Gouverneur, 12, 53, 161, 162, 164 The Penalty (novel), 12, 53, 161, 162, 164 Morrow, William Chambers, 44–48, 51, 54, 56, 57 The Ape, The Idiot, and Other People, 45 “His Unconquerable Enemy,” 44, 45 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 56 Narrative prosthesis, 6, 7, 23, 37, 206 Negative performativity, 169, 171 Norden, Martin F., 163, 165, 166, 181 Normate, 6, 9, 162, 163, 165–167, 169, 175, 177, 179, 181, 187–189, 195, 196, 200, 207n1, 207n2 O Obsessive Avenger, 163, 172, 177, 179 O’Connor, Flannery, 10 “Good Country People,” 10 Oedipus, 44, 48, 223 Oppenheim, Meret, 130 Orientalism/orientalist, 49 Ostentatio vulnerum, 219, 220 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 67 Othering, 193, 194, 198 Other, the, 192

Ovid, 14, 258, 262–266, 268–272, 276–282, 283n9, 285n29, 285n30, 285n31 Amores, 285n30 Ars amatoria, 271 Metamorphoses, 14, 258, 262, 266, 268, 277, 278, 280–282 Owen, Wilfred, 52, 55 “Disabled,” 52 P Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 114, 119, 122 Paré, Ambroise, 27, 36 Pasteur, Louis, 3 Perrault, Charles, 96 Phantom pain, 12, 66, 211–228 Phillips, Adam, 189, 207 Phonocentrism, 14, 258–264, 270, 278, 279, 281 Plato Phaedrus, 258, 259, 262 Politeia, 261 Polevoi, Boris (Boris Kampov), 63–71, 74, 79–82 The Story of a Real Man, 63–70, 79 Prokofiev, Sergei, 68 Propp, Vladimir, 95 R Raimi, Sam, 92 Evil Dead 2, 92 Relationality, 12, 13, 187–189, 213–217, 228n6 Renard, Maurice, 53 Les Mains d’Orlac (novel), 53 Rossiyanov, Oleg, 61, 62, 70–75, 81, 82 “The War Was Long Ago…” (The Second Life), 62, 70–75

 INDEX 

Roth, Philip, viii, 12, 185–207 The Plot Against America, 12, 185–207 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 216–219 Confessions, 216, 219 Emile, or On Education, 218 Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 217 S Santer, Eric, 150n4 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 107 Sassoon, Siegfried, 52 “They,” 52 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 268, 283n13 Scarry, Elaine, 221 Shakespeare, William, 43, 92, 119, 281–282 Richard III, 38n5 Titus Andronicus, 27, 36, 43, 92, 101, 281, 282 Shildrick, Margrit, 101, 102, 104, 107 Siebers, Tobin, 8, 173, 174, 176, 178 Simon, David, and Ed Burns, 208n16 The Plot Against America (TV series), 208n16 Snyder, Sharon, 6, 7, 9, 13, 23, 114–116, 122, 124, 125, 131, 187, 198, 203, 206 Sobchack, Vivian, 7, 296, 297, 307n6 Socrates, 258–262, 276 Sophocles Oedipus Rex, 223 Tereus, 278 Spring and Autumn Annals, 251 Stigmatization, 10, 67, 72, 73, 81, 188, 194, 292 stigma, 187 Stolper, Aleksandr, 68 Story of a Real Man (film), 69

325

Strock, Herbert L., 91 The Crawling Hand, 91 Supercrip, 13, 34 Symbolic castration, 54, 104, 133n6 See also Castration complex Synecdoche, 32, 36, 201, 282n5 T Tanning, Dorothea, 130 The Miracle Man (film), 162 Tolstoy, Leo, 6 War and Peace, 6 Torok, Maria, 225, 226, 229n11 U Uncanny, 35, 92, 170, 199, 201, 205, 206 Ussher, Jane M., 106 V Virgil, 280 W Wicomb, Zoë, 137 Wiene, Robert, 53, 91 The Hands of Orlac (film), 91 Wills, David, 4, 5 Winterson, Jeanette, 8 Worsley, Wallace, 12, 53, 161–163 The Penalty (film), 53, 161–182 Z Zhuangzi, 239–254 Zhuangzi, 14, 239–242, 248, 249, 252, 254 Zuo zhuan, 251