In the Blink of an Eye: Teaching Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly While Learning from Eye Blinks

The old axiom write what you know remains a respectable bit of composition advice, but teach what you know seems so painfully obvious that it scarcely needs reaffirmation at all. The bit about teaching what one knows, however, is itself a rather loaded aphorism, replete with images of scientists with years of laboratory training, straining over beakers and humanists in all their Socratic glory, struggling to pass forth the intrinsic allures of poetry. What one might not imagine, then, is teaching what one truly knows: intimate, personal experience. In the humanities, students frequently encounter somewhat self-revelatory instructors, but those same instructors might rarely base designs of entire courses on personal, rather than relatively conventional topics. As an adjunct instructor, I am rarely afforded the opportunity to create the content of the courses I teach. In a recent semester, however, I was granted the unusual occasion to do just that, in the form of an academic foundation class comprised entirely of student athletes. I designed the content of the course due to three equally driving forces: my inherent passion for literature, my ongoing interest in disability studies, and the very personal experience of my stepson’s recent brain injury.

My initial struggle, because of my absolute inexperience in such design, was naming the course. As a lifelong lover (and thus, scrutinizer) of language, I am as aware as anyone of the sheer force and veracity of the title of anything. After much personal anguish and some political consideration, I decided on Crip Lit for the Athlete. My goals for the course were reflected fairly well in the title. I primarily wanted my students (the athletes) to be exposed to a variety of literary texts, representing disparate genres, which either demanded scrutiny of disabled authors or disabled characters. On a secondary and tertiary level, though, I wanted them to understand the absolute unpredictability of sudden devastating life changes, the potential triumph, and the aftermath.

I selected the texts with even greater care than the title. After reviewing what proved a rather large array of eminently appropriate (if somewhat neglected) texts, I decided on five rather ambitious selections. Because the college required each of the first-year academic foundation classes to have a winter reading, I assigned the work I thought would be (if nothing else) most shocking to their collective sensibilities: Dalton Trumbo’s classic anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. I figured the book could serve an array of purposes, but for this class it could allow a strong focus on a disabled protagonist while introducing the genre of the novel. I, of course, integrated Metallica’s almost equally classic music video “One” and Trumbo’s film adaptation, but the rather disengaged athletes were not terribly impressed by Joe’s plight. Although I brought to my students’ attention the fact that there were plenty of real “basketcases” in World War I and that the not-so-subtle allusions to the various notions of the body politic has hugely relevant contemporary implications, they could not seem to work beyond their implicit assumptions that this fiction was basically a highly convoluted form of make believe. While I was discouraged, I was not honestly surprised.

I upped the ante of reality one step further by next introducing Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. A child-soldier of the same war—the one that purported to, indeed, end all wars—Owen seemed certain to strike a visceral, deeply unsettling chord with students. We, of course, read “Disabled.” The power of that particular poem has always, literally, shaken me; reading it, my voice becomes unsteady and wobbles in my throat. I have seen too many disabled veterans—and too many student veterans—not to be moved by the incredible beauty and horror of the verse. I told them about Owen’s letters to his mother. I told them that he was only slightly older than them (and slightly younger than me) when he wrote his classics. But the past was too distant. Despite much historical contextualizing, nearly 100...