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

In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé makes a major contribution to disability studies by shifting the focus in literary studies of disability away from the diagnosis of fictional characters and towards an analysis of the ways in which disability in narrative fiction can be deployed as a means for exploring important questions about human experience and thought. "Disability studies," he writes in the introduction, "need not and should not predicate its existence as a practice of criticism by reading a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other" (20). Anyone who has taught books involving "disabled" characters (broadly defined) will inevitably cheer at Bérubé's intervention. I have myself despaired at trying to convince students that diagnosing Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim as a sufferer of PTSD does not ultimately tell us anything useful about the ways in which Slaughterhouse-Five functions as a narrative that disables normative temporality and thereby teaches us something about time itself and the human relationship to it. Even though the Vonnegut example is not mentioned by Bérubé, it is a sign of his book's effectiveness that it immediately provided me with a framework and theoretical foundation to articulate what I always knew Vonnegut's text had been doing through the means of what I would now call a "disabled" narrative practice.

In resisting the temptation to narrowly constrain the field of disability in fiction to representations of diagnosable disabilities in fictional characters, Bérubé productively broadens the scope of what counts as disability in fiction. Who would have thought to discuss Don Quixote in terms of disability, or the Disney film Dumbo? Yet The Secret Life of Stories is full of such paradigm-shifting revelations that only now seem obvious because of the force of Bérubé's argument. Part of what Bérubé accomplishes in this shift is to turn the focus away from a discussion of whether or not fictional disability is being represented "accurately." The problem with trying to preserve or protect a "real" disability or actual disabled persons from their (mis) representation in fiction is that such an endeavor can be a slippery slope that leads to a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (45) that ultimately distrusts the very endeavors of fictional representation and interpretation. Protecting disabled people from being reified, mystified, or immiserated by the narrative enterprise is a laudable goal, but as Bérubé demonstrates through close reading of a range of texts, including Philip K. Dick's Martian Time Slip, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, among many others, disability in fiction can generate productive and ethically urgent questions about how and why we read and what it means to be human.

These are big topics indeed for what Bérubé himself acknowledges is a "short and sharp book" (21). He therefore helpfully separates the book into three main categories (Motive, Time, and Self-Awareness), and while he acknowledges the fluidity of these categories, generally this division into three key themes works well at allowing Bérubé to illustrate the ways in which disability can be provocatively situated right at the core of narrative practice. In the "Motive" chapter, for instance, he discusses narratives that derive their motive force by positioning themselves in relationship to disability. The Harry Potter series' Albus Dumbledore is motivated by his sense of responsibility and guilt towards a disabled sister, while the narrative of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior treats its various forms of "madness" as a kind of barometer for "the very possibility of narrative representation" (64). The "Time" chapter explains how disabled forms of narrative temporality can provoke an examination of time scales that extend beyond the human, while the chapter on...