The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read by Michael Bérubé (review)

Michael Bérubé's prose is a pleasure to read. Whether he is describing conversations with his sons about the nature of stories, laying out the intricate plot details of Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, or explaining Peter Brooks's and Roland Barthes's elaborations of narrative codes, his tone and diction are straightforward, engaging, and witty. The Secret Life of Stories is a treat: an enjoyable and illuminating discussion of a wide range of literary and cinematic works as they are informed—often directly formed—by the presence of mental disability.

As Bérubé argues, "narrative deployments of disability do not confine themselves to representation. They can also be narrative strategies, devices for exploring vast domains of human thought, experience, and action" (2). Rather than delineating how disabilities are represented in the texts he considers, then, Bérubé explores how disability as a textual element affects or interacts with other textual elements such as narrative motive, temporality, and self-consciousness (his chapters are entitled "Motive," "Time," and "Self-Awareness"). This approach results in valuable readings of texts ranging from the difficult (The Sound and the Fury, Life and Times of Michael K) to the popular (Harry Potter, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) to the downright weird (Martian Time-Slip).

One of Bérubé's goals in his exploration of how intellectual disability interacts with narrative is to "get at the question of how narrative irony works when it involves a character with an intellectual disability, a character who is rendered explicitly as someone who is incapable of understanding the story he or she inhabits" (13). This focus on narrative irony leads him to engage with reader-response theory and Russian formalist notions of defamiliarization as he demonstrates that intellectual disability plays an active role in authors' constructions of their narratives and of the imagined social worlds in which those narratives take place.

In his reading of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Bérubé deftly discusses Benjamin Compson's sense of time and how it bends, or "derange[s]," "ordinary protocols of narrative temporality" (83). By exploring particular passages in Benjy's section of the novel, Bérubé is able to show how misguided (and ableist) it is to see Benjy as childlike, as the other characters in the novel and most critics do.

He is an intellectually impaired adult, even though his intellectual impairment is completely fictional; and as Bérubé compellingly points out, he shares his brothers' concern about the family honor and about "female sexuality in general" (81). This reading expands our understanding of Benjy's obsession with his sister Caddy. It is not just that she was the only family member to care about him, but also that Benjy too has been interpellated by "the standard old-Southern ideologies of gender and race" (80). This, in turn, changes our view of the role of Caddy's sexuality in the novel as a whole: realizing that Benjy is an "interested party" (81) rather than an innocent grants us a much-needed critical distance from the text's "pathologization of her sexuality."

Bérubé's similarly engaging discussion of J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K reads Michael's blankness, or storylessness, as involving the text in paradoxical maneuvers, narrating while "approach[ing] the condition of nonnarative" (67). Noting Michael's occasional adoption of "strategic mindblindness"—a variety of what Tobin Siebers has called disability masquerade, though Bérubé doesn't mention Siebers in this context—Bérubé explores the role Michael plays in controlling how other characters respond to him. His intellectual disability "becomes the impetus not only for the narrative of his life, and of every character's interaction with him, but also for all interpretive procedures brought to bear...