In this era of identity politics, most minorities find a smorgasbord of books with which to slake the appetite for personal identity literature. Folks outside those groups can sup at the same table, getting a taste for how others live: educational osmosis.
Books - fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry - create links between one sensibility and another. Books are the most vital cultural tools, bridging chasms riven by racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia.
The exception is the disabled. "Niche marketing" is the publishing buzz phrase of the '90s, but as the clock rolls over toward the millennium, the disabled find themselves stuck in a literary Dark Ages no other minority would tolerate.
African-Americans, for example, would rage - and rightly - if the industry ignored changes wrought by civil rights and relegated black literature to Uncle Tom, "Gone With the Wind" and Steppin Fetchit How-To's with only the occasional pass at Stella's groove or being "Beloved" by Toni Morrison or listening to James Baldwin "Go Tell It on the Mountain."
Yet that is how America's largest minority, the disabled, finds itself depicted still: marginalized to stereotype, as invisible as Ralph Ellison's eponymous man.
The one in six Americans who are disabled can visit local superstores or libraries, now nearly all wheelchair accessible, but they'll find very little comparable literary access within. Publishing has yet to confront realistically the disabled reader, who remains, for the most part, like Hellen Keller standing pumpside waiting for Annie Sullivan to arrive with the key to language and the world it unlocks.
This publishing paradox is as curious as it is frustrating, for books hover ever closer to disability without quite risking the final step toward creating a literary canon. Thus a glance at best seller lists locates numerous tomes on self-health - all aimed at avoiding disabling illness and disease, through everything from garlic to belief in angels.
And disability has made a pass or two in other guises. For more than a year, Mitch Albom's "Tuesdays with Morrie" (Doubleday, $19.95), the tale of college professor Morrie Schwartz and his battle with ALS, has ensconced itself on the same list, joined recently by actor-turned-disability activist Christopher Reeve's autobiography "Still Me" (Random House, $21.95).
These books each have something to say about disability, but the message might have been excised from a novel penned more than a century ago, "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickens (Yale University Press, $25).
The allegorical tale retold each December places at its heart and soul the crippled son of Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim. This child's disability keeps him from all the things young children are wont to do. Yet despite such limitations, he exudes cheerfulness and spirit that encourages despairing adults; his "God bless us, every one," resounds throughout the book like Christmas bells pealing.
Dickens had a heavy hand with his metaphors; Tim's role in "A Christmas Carol" is no exception. The sustaining message that life is not bleak but sublime certainly shakes up Mr. Scrooge. As a seasonal tale, "A Christmas Carol" wields just the right manipulative touch.
But the model set by Tiny Tim, the prototypical Good Cripple, has pervaded - even driven - literature ever since. Despite changes in society that have rendered the disabled more than marginal creatures to be pitied, the disability literature of the '90s bears striking resemblance to that of a century and a half before.
The Good Cripple remains a comfortable model for publishers because it takes no risks. Who can remain unmoved by the crippled and/or dying person imparting wisdom from his/her pallet? The heroic and tragic nature of the battle with the incomplete or failing body has, as Dickens knew, stunning metaphoric power. What it doesn't have is depth or range.
The oracular power of the Good Cripple metaphor certainly resounds in "Tuesdays with Morrie." Morrie has his bits of wisdom to share; a life lived well and thoughtfully over six decades had better leave some legacy. But were Morrie not a dying cripple - and a defining exemplar of the Good Cripple at that - there would be no book.
Morrie Schwartz, former college professor, has little literary heft. Morrie Schwartz, former college professor dying tragically of a degenerative disease that will (and did) eventually suffocate him has all the metaphoric drive of Tiny Tim. From that Morrie we may have much to learn.
Nor would an autobiography of yet another movie star score big with either publisher or audience. But plummet the rich, handsome Superman to earth, snap his spinal cord, thrust him into a wheelchair "driven" by blowing air into a straw and you have a metaphor worthy of Dickens.
Still, publishers ever hedge their bets. Counterpoint to Morrie, Reeve, Helen Keller, et al. are books to keep disability at bay. The book-buying public may want to sit at the knee of Morrie on a Tuesday taking notes; nobody wants to be Morrie. Fear of disability in a nation driven by images of hard bodies and supermodels is defining, and publishers know it. Thus the phenomenal sales of healing and angelic books.
Where then lies the literary middle ground? Reeve's "Still Me" tells two stories - the autobiography of a wealthy, accomplished actor and sportsman, and the tale of the man catapulted from his horse one May afternoon into the life of a quadriplegic dependent for his very breath on machines and other people.
Each tale is interesting, but there is, despite the book's title, no intersection. Post-accident Reeve tools himself into the Good Cripple to fill the void left by all he can no longer do. "Still Me" reiterates Reeve's fears of no longer being "useful," his deep desire for a cure and his efforts to find one.
Such stories hold a gothic frisson for the nondisabled. Cautionary tales, they can propel us to buy cheery, self-help books, make us think twice about that high dive at the local pool. But for the disabled, these are celebrity bios of people too privileged to be us; the disabled have no more affinity with the paralytic Reeve than with Reeve the movie star. No quadriplegics sharing space at the rehab center with Reeve got calls from the president; few had the luxury of a private room. As Fitzgerald noted, the rich are different from you and me. So too are the Good Cripples.
Which is why the disabled yearn for a lexicon truly their own, a literature that reflects more than the cautionary tale or the iconic characterization. One is Karin Cook's beautiful novel of disease and dying in the life of an ordinary child, "What Girls Learn" Vintage, $13). Another: the quirky, ironic and mesmerizing tale by Emily Colas, "Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive" (Simon & Schuster, $22).
The arduous, decade-long quest by two deaf parents to have their deaf daughter educated in the local school, detailed in veteran journalist R.C. Smith's "A Case about Amy" (Temple University Press, $26), reads like a thriller, even as it explores the very essence of what justice entails. Beth Kephart's exquisitely drawn account of her son's autism in "A Slant of Sun" (Norton, $23) defies the Good Cripple perspective, demands, like Smith's book, accountability to and inclusion for the disabled.
Perhaps Dorothy Herrmann's biography "Helen Keller" (Knopf, $27), has the most resonance, because it delineates how little has changed for the disabled since Keller became a global icon. As Herrmann explains, Keller was never left to her own devices - good or ill; this was the scourge of her iconic status. Disabled far more by the standard of Good Cripple she was forced to uphold than by her blindness and deafness, Keller was kept from experiencing many of life's most essential joys.
The lives of celebrities like Reeve will always hold a certain fascination. But the dailiness of disabled life - just like nondisabled life - needs explication, evocation, introspection, reflection; more than mere recounting of the terrible accident, the degenerative disease, the caustic chemotherapy, the moment when one slipped from the solid ground of nondisabled life and fell into the murky waters of disability.
Just as Helen Keller waited in the silent dark for her teacher, Annie Sullivan, to lead her into the bright light of language, the fierce music of communication, the disabled wait for the books that explore all aspects of their lives, not just those the nondisabled deem worthy of merit.
Victoria A. Brownworth is author or editor of 13 books. Her writing has appeared in Ms. the Nation, the Village Voice, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Disability Studies Quarterly and others. Her most recent book is "Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors" (Seal Press), co-authored with Judith Redding. Her book on women and disability, "Restricted Access," will be published next spring.
Pub Date: 10/18/98