An Interview with Ato Quayson

Q: What does the concept of aesthetic nervousness refer to?nnAto Quayson: Aesthetic nervousness becomes apparent when disability short-circuits the dominant rules of representation within the literary text. The primary level in which it may be discerned is in the interaction between disabled and nondisabled characters, where a variety of tensions may be identified. However, in most texts aesthetic nervousness is hardly ever limited to this primary level but is augmented by tensions refracted across other levels of the text such as the disposition of symbols and motifs, the overall narrative or dramatic perspective, the constitution and reversals of plot structure, and so on. For the reader, aesthetic nervousness becomes partially coextensive with social attitudes to disability, which themselves often remain unexamined in their prejudices and biases.nnQ: Who are some of the writers you discuss in the book, and what brings them together in your view as illustrating the concept of aesthetic nervousness?nnAQ: The main writers I look at are Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee. These writers come from Ireland, America, Nigeria, and South Africa, respectively. I also have a chapter on the history of Robben Island in South Africa. It was for many years a leprosarium before it became the famous political prison. A number of things brought the writers together in my mind. First was that I had been teaching and researching each of these writers for over a decade. But second was that the broad range of their writings, both collectively and individually, helped to illustrate in quite clear terms what I sought to pinpoint with the concept of aesthetic nervousness. Finally, even though it was not conscious to me then, it now strikes me that these writers also served the purpose of foregrounding the general relation between postcolonialism and disability studies, something that has not as yet been properly attended to in the two scholarly fields.nnQ: You say you wrote also of Robben Island. In what ways was the history of the island relevant to your discussion of the relation between literature and disability?nnAQ: In my mind the turn to Robben Island and the lives of various disabled persons that had dotted its history was designed to show how useful features of a critical literary reading might be for understanding disability issues in a nonliterary context. But in this chapter the other, larger, objective I pursued was to animate the various historical personages I wrote about and to imagine what it was like to have suffered prejudice produced at the intersection of colonialism, race, and disability. The central historical protagonist in that chapter is a woman called Krotoa, who was the first Christian convert to work with the Dutch settlers at the Cape. She worked with them from 1652, when they first arrived, until her death at thirty-one. She became proficient in Dutch and Portuguese and acted as a highly regarded interpreter for them. However, the end of her days was deeply unhappy. She married a young and enterprising Dutch surgeon among the settlers and was promptly sent off with him to live on the desolate Robben Island. He himself took off on slave-hunting expeditions and was killed by the slaves he was trying to capture. Her life on the island was marred by alcoholism, a condition that led her to be bundled back and forth between the island and the cape settlement on her husband’s death. Late in her life she was discovered stark naked on the beach in Cape Town smoking a pipe. I take this as a sign of a nervous breakdown. Thus my question in the chapter is on the social and political conditions that impinge upon the life of such an obviously intelligent native woman and that produce what Frantz Fanon terms the “nervous conditions” (or a psychoexistential complex) that cannot be resolved within the terms set by society. The link of the Robben Island chapter to the literary parts of the book come from the protocols of reading history that I deploy. For unlike a traditional historian, I try to animate both the life and the conditions of the historical characters and to speculate on what it must have been like to lose one’s mind in such a context. How, in other words, might a reading of the fertile history of a place such as Robben Island generate a radically different perspective when pursued from the coupling of literary disability studies and history as opposed to plain history?nnQ: Are there any predictable patterns to the representation of disabled people in literature?nnAQ: The answer here is both yes and no. On the one hand, there are cross-cultural and near universal depictions that may be discerned in whatever context we explore closely. These depictions may be summarized in terms of disability-as-moral-deficiency and disability-as-superior-insight. Each of these has popular and well-known articulations. Thus in the case of the first category we have the redoubtable Captain Cook and Long John Silver of children’s stories, whereas in the second category we have all the disabled characters from the Greek Tiresias onward whose disability (often blindness, but not exclusively) was thought to give the disabled character superior ethical insight. And yet it is precisely this apparent predictability that I sought to problematize inAesthetic Nervousness. My main argument on this score is that because the disabled character is first and foremost a literary product, she comes to share certain discursive features with other aspects of the literary representation (such as other characters, the descriptions of setting, spatiotemporal coordinates). However, on top of that, the disabled character also serves to reorganize the entire textual domain within which he is being represented. This is because literary discourse suffers a kind of seizure or discursive constriction in dealing with the disabled. Thus disability’s effect on the literary aesthetic domain is not dissimilar to that of the sacred or of pain, both of which tend to simultaneously incite and frustrate or distort representation. In the second chapter of the book, titled “A Provisional Typology of Disability Representation,” I provide a lengthy discussion of how these things take place, referencing a very wide range of texts from medieval romance, Shakespeare, Disney animation, postcolonial children’s literature writing, and various other sources.nnQ: What is the most important message of the book do you think?nnAQ: This is very hard to say since the book is supposed to carry several strong and not-so-strong messages. But perhaps the most salient is the fact that there is an ethics to reading that influences what worlds we come to imagine. Literary disability forces us to acknowledge the often concealed ethical dimension to all literary writing by focusing intently on the question of corporeal difference at the most fundamental level—that of the fragmented body. For ultimately literary criticism is, or at least ought to be, about ethics.