Erevis Cale and Narrative Prosthesis

Week of 10/3-10/9

During this week, I encountered a topic that we covered and discussed briefly in the first week of class: the perspective of disability in a narrative context. I am currently reading a series of books by Paul S. Kemp called The Erevis Cale Trilogy, and what I have discovered is the disability is very much prevalent in the representation of characteristics between certain characters and as a jumping off point for discursive metaphors. For example, a character named Azriim—one of the main antagonists in the book—is blind in one eye. This disability emphasizes the villainous aspect the author is trying to achieve. Not only does this lead to a breakdown the structure of a character that desires not to embrace normalcy, but it also becomes a metaphor signifying a social and individual collapse of the character.
In chapter 21 of The Disability Studies Reader, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder cover this topic of disability in a narrative context. They call it “narrative prosthesis”, a thesis which centers around the idea of people with disabilities being the object of representational treatments, a two-fold aspect found both in the literary notions of character models and literary devices related to the body and mind. This serves as a symbolical symptom on the studies and interpretation on the body, defining the “able” bodied as merely average and having no “definitional core”. On the other hand, the “disabled” are labeled as being “outside the norm”, and in literary schemes this makes it easier to discuss the overbearing physical and worldly “weights” normally attributed to an interesting protagonist or antagonist. Thus, Kemp’s character of Azriim, is assumed to be created upon a prescriptive analysis of a physically, and therefore spiritually, overburdened character.
But surprisingly, narrative prosthesis doesn’t need to always be viewed in a negative light. A positive view of disability in literature takes away the notion of it historically being a crutch in which stories convey “representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight”. Instead, this dependency creates disability as a foundation, and not as a crutch. Mitchell and Synder state: “…disability is foundational to both cultural definition and to the literary narratives that challenge normalizing prescriptive ideals” (277). Disability in characterization and metaphor become a trivial prosthetic in which literature, and more importantly culture, heavily relies upon.