Disability and the Nobel Prize: A Discussion with Dr Alice Hall

Dr Alice Hall is a lecturer in Contemporary and Global Literature at University of York. In 2013, she was one of ten academics chosen as ‘New Generation Thinkers’ by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC. With Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya, she set up a new MA in Medical History and Humanities, which launched in 2016. She currently holds a Springboard Fellowship funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Wellcome Trust. Disability and Modern Fiction Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature is the book she published in 2012.

Within disability studies there are the medical and social models. The medical model is about functional impairment such as a missing limb, while the social is about how society disables that person such as the lack of wheelchair ramps.

We learn about the world through literature. Literature can promote stereotypes and be damaging, but it can also promote discourse that promotes engagement. Literature presents different perspectives and creates a unique space for thinking about disability rights. People’s perception of disability is shaped by the language used in stories, therefore reading and writing sensitizes us to how the narratives are constructed. Disability is a shifting category that is constantly being rewritten.

Toni Morrison’s works matter for disability rights as they collapse the boundaries between the author and the reader, allowing us to get under the skin of the characters, sensitizing us to others’ points of view while acknowledging the limits of the struggle to do so. From her Nobel lecture:

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed.

Morrison shows how language can be a tool of oppression and the enactment of violence, therefore the process of studying the use of language helps challenge those stereotypes.

Hall chose Faulkner, Morrison and Coetzee as subjects for her book in order to challenge most people’s view that disability is a niche concern. Three celebrated canonical writers with great prestige help highlight the fact that disability is actually a key concern among some of the most important 20^th and 21^st century writers. Disability is everywhere in a whole wealth of representation. These three are also public intellectuals. Their Nobel lectures outlined their views on what it is to be a writer and why it is important. Interestingly they all used disability as metaphors at key moments in their careers as a way of structuring their own contributions to the field.

All three also spoke of the responsibility of the writer; Faulkner said “this award is only mine in trust”.  Writers have an ethical responsibility of dealing with disability, race, gender etc. With language comes power, an agency. There is an ethical weight that comes with complexity, ambiguity, challenges and the difficulties manifested in their works as writers experiment with form.

Alfred Nobel stipulated that the literature prize is to be awarded to “the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”. Idealism in literature in 1901 meant it was not realism, but works of transcendent values. These values today are how writers mediate between the roles of the writer and the critic, the writer and the character and the writer and the reader. There is process of working towards an ideal, Moving between the physical and metaphorical, between different levels of consciousness, between the fictional and the critical. The ideal is malleable. The process of moving towards the ideal is what connects these three different writers.

In Morrison’s Nobel lecture she uses a relatively classic format of a fable, fairy tale like structure of the blind old woman and the young people with a bird in the hand. During the story she intervenes as the writer by taking control of the language, inviting a range of metaphorical readings of the tale. The bird is the metaphorical representation of language as something one holds in one’s hand; it can be moulded, changed and for which one takes responsibility. The collaborative story telling between the old lady and the young people is a move towards the ideal of meaning as an unfinished process. Rather than explaining the metaphor, Morrison invites people to have agency over literature rather than just be passive participants.

This quote from Faulkner’s Nobel lecture is often mis-interpreted as a late 19^th century view of the writer whose work is spiritual and perpetuates a nostalgia for old ideals, a loss of the golden age of the American South.

… writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself …. [man] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The … writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

But in reality this quote is more about the fragility of the individual body versus universal ideals The direct question of the Cold War era: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” There is a constant fear of physical threat. The process of writing is very physical; a life’s work of agony and sweat of the spirit. One must write with compassion. Faulkner wrote about what it meant for young men to come back from war and not fit the ideals of masculinity imposed on them. The scars are the images of the challenges of writing.

The ideal of the Nobel prize moves away from the pre-war writers and marks the moment when the kind of work to be rewarded are those that challenge and are experimental in their approach to what is ideal. It is a process of piecing together the elements of a story, which is a painful process in itself.

Coetzee had a very clear adoration of Faulkner. He was especially interested in Faulkner as a biographer who portrayed himself as a war hero and feigned disability. This fantasy of disability becomes the trigger of fiction writing. Morrison did her MA dissertation on Faulkner and was interested in the alienated outsider in his works and the big effect this had on her. All three refuse to look away from the unspeakable and try to find form to address the taboos and what is unspoken of in society. This discomforting yet compelling element is shared by them all.

Kenzaburo Oe is a Nobel laureate with a clear disability engagement. In his Nobel lecture he imagines the world from the perspective of his disabled son. Harold Pinter used his disability as part of his performance of the Nobel lecture, as well as the backdrop for the visceral and physical metaphor of his criticism of Blair, Bush and the media’s role in the invasion of Iraq. Pinter was very focused on the physical aspect of his disability which made speaking a struggle, but yet he felt a responsibility to do so as a physical and political defiance.

Perspectives of disability studies, health and embodiment are becoming a greater part of English literature. Hall has edited books that allow students to access this field by allowing thinking of critical movements such as feminism, disability studies, post-colonial studies, and how they are rooted within activist campaigns.