Order Within Fragmentation: Postmodernism and the Stroke Victim's World

Order Within Fragmentation: Postmodemism and the Stroke Victim's World MARGOT ANNE KELLEY Describing American novels ofthe 1960s and '70S, Richard Ohmann maintained that many ofthe works which have been canonized teU "one story," a narrative of illness that "lransform(s) deep social contradictions into a dynamic of personal crisis, a sense of there being no comfortable place in the world for the private self.'" His assessment seems especially applicable to a variety of "disability plays" published in the late 197os, works that attempt to offer models for retaining personal freedom despite the confining strictures of social authority. Arthur Kapil's play Wings, written for radio in 1976 and revised for the stage in 1978, is one in a group of works focussing overtly upon illness, death and dying. Indeed, many of Kopit's contemporaries used long-term disease or disability as metaphors for living and as situations in which new ars moriendi and ars vivendi could be wrought.' Like them, Kopit stresses the need for communication to alleviate the pain that isolation creates for patients. Wings, however, records the experiences of a stroke victim, making the disability more than simply an effective state for exploring the alienation of the patient. Instead, the world of the stroke victim, as it is represented in the language and staging, becomes itselfa signifying system for a state ofalienation and dissociation, a system in which all correspondences between word and object, self and world have been rendered incomprehensible. By concentrating on a stroke victim, Kopit presents a startling transformation of the subject, one that Fredric Jameson describes as inevitable in a late-stage capitalist society, in which even "concepts such as anxiety and alienation are no longer appropriate ". [instead, the] shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.'" Neither in Jameson's postrnodem world nor in the stroke victim's world is one able to create or decipher meanings easily; one must learn to (re)construct patterns and ways of knowing in order to survive. The ways of discerning meaning which Kopit finally espouses bear a marked similarity not (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 383 MARGOT ANNE KELLEY only to those currently being explored by postmodern writers and literary critics, but also to those of scientists interested in information theory and the Chaos Sciences. Wings is written in four sections, a brief "Prelude" during which Emily Stilson has her stroke, the " Catastrophe" section in which she and we experie,!ce it, "Awakening" as she begins to understand what has occurred, and "Explorations," in which she tries to find meaning and order. The play includes extensive production notes, and in a prefatory one, Kopit described the playas about' 'language disorder and its implications.'" While this is true, Kopit's use of the rhetoric of information theory in his notes and his dramatic techniques accentuates the postrnodemist concern with infonnation, noise, meaning thereby adding a critically interesting twist to the easy link between neurology and information theory. The "Catastrophe" section is prefaced by Kopit's observation that a stroke is "an experience in chaos ... [during which] real information is being received by the victim, but it is coming in too scrambled and too fast to be properly decoded. Systems overload" (p. 9). This chaos is his rationale for offering a scene which "must not seem like utter 'noise,' though certainly it must be more noisy than intelligible" (p. 9). Indeed, "Catastrophe" is a dramatic equivalent to the stroke, as the reader tries to process three distinct clusters ofsensory data which are presumably of equal significance. The visual is an intermingling of mirrors, labyrinths, and hospital images; one auditory set is the sounds of the hospital, some immediately intelligible, othersrequiringextensivedecoding; and the other set is Emily's words, as she tries to make sense of what is happening, an effort which devolves into a recitation of " primary symbols": "AB-ABCABC123DE451212 what? 123-12345678972357" (p. 19). Like Emily, readers find themselves in the midst of a chaotic jumble out of which sense must be made, but withouteven basic ordering techniquesfor guidance, since the reading version of the text has no...