How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the
pleasures of reading
Narrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine.
We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their
"well-formedness" within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk.
Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our
species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of
writing then re-wired our brains.
In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically
different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of
intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative.
Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas
about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of
narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking
through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the
experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of
such texts as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Haddon's The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston's The Woman Warrior,
and Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into
practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role
of disability studies within it.
Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the
immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed
within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to
be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality
and causality--and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael
Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. For
all readers, The Secret Life of Stories will fundamentally change the
way we think about the way we read.
