Review: Truchan-Tataryn, Maria. (In)visible Images: Seeing Disability in Canadian Literature,
1823-1974. Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. ISBN
978-3-8465-0472
Reviewed by Tanya Titchkosky, Ph.D, OISE,
University of Toronto
Maria Truchan-Tataryn's book, (In)visible Images: Seeing Disability in Canadian Literature,
1823-1974, is beautifully written and represents an original contribution
to the discipline of English and
Disability Studies. Invisible
Images methodically pursues an analysis of the representations of disability
in Canadian literature tracing the literary use of disability in eight
Canadian-authored Anglophone novels written between the years 1823-1974. The
analysis is impressively nuanced and addresses the rich complexity of
disability insofar as the author reads disability as a product of, as well as a
response to, the context of its appearance. This nuanced reading allows Truchan-Tataryn
to critically discuss how disability is ambiguously positioned in Canadian
social, historical and political scenes.
One of
the most important (and impressive) qualities of (In)Visible Images is that disability
becomes much more than a problem and more than a troubling condition in need of
diagnosis. Truchan-Tataryn is not content with the
practice of merely noting that disability does appear in Canadian literature
and that this appearance is often a degraded one. Instead, Truchan-Tataryn's
analysis brings the reader into relation with disability and human variation as
a space where we might learn something new (192). She shows how the typically objectified and degraded symbol
of disability can and should be read through a disability studies
perspective. Her disability
studies perspective entails reading disability always in relation to other
characters in the novels and in relation to wider social contexts and other
trajectories of meaning, and in these ways (In)Visible Images demonstrates how disability can be read
as an agentive character within literary scenes. For example, Truchan-Tataryn grapples
with literary commentators' proclivity to treat disability as a mere symptom
of, or metaphor for, a character's "deformed" inner state. She reads literary commentary in the
same way that she reads disabled characters in the novels, that is, both are
treated as part of an interpretive relation gesturing at the unexamined
cultural assumptions from which they spring. Truchan-TatarynMaria
shows how the meaning that is made manifest through disability extends beyond
its expediency as a metaphor for oppression (70) or a "stock metaphor for
deficit" (163). That is, the
meaning of disability extends into relations that need to resist this
oppression;,
extends into the uncertain nature of our interrelatedness in love,
family and citizenry; into personal and social relations to vulnerability,
ordinariness, fate, religion, nation; and ultimately extends
into the question of the human condition insofar as the meaning of disability is
situated between ourselves and others.
Truchan-Tataryn helps us to
re-engage the stories that we may think we already know, -- The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitzs or Love and Salt Water. Through her discussion of these eight
novels, Truchan-Tataryn demonstrates that the images
of disability, that could be dismissed as distasteful,
can nonetheless be engaged to reveal more complex or hidden narratives. Her analysis of disability encourages a
self-reflective reader who might embrace a desire-filled relation to more complicated
depictions of embodiment. Whether
as metaphor for living death, inadequate response, or a devalued state of being,
Truchan-Tataryn finds more through an incisive and
politically productive analysis that always locates the figure of disability as
it interacts within a literary scene.
She shows how any attention to the appearance of disability needs to
also attend to the relations between self and other, relations that can hold
even in the face of the most degrading depictions of humans we can imagine. In this way, (In)Visible Images work exemplifies a key
principle in disability studies scholarship -- it begins from the need to regard
disability as it exists between people.
Truchan-Tataryn shows
how the Canadian context is reflected in the novels' disability
depictions. She then shows how
those depictions of disability which are "of"
Canada are not "at one" with it. Some differences -- the differences of agentive response, of
representing and speaking back to the "ways in which national communities
read the bodies of their citizens" are thus actualized (202). Through this process of critical
reading, Truchan-TatarynMaria
opens up the possibility that all of us can learn something new about the
contexts within which disability is forced or invited to make an appearance. Speaking
from my interpretive sociological background, this move to grapple with the
literary appearance of disability as a performance of meaning between the
various characters located in particular narrative structures is as enjoyable
as it is an unique read. This book represents a form of critical
reading that makes disability manifest as a complex character that has
something to say back to the scene(s) within which it appears. (In)visible Images offers an analysis that manages the
complexity of disability as both object of, and subject in, a story from which
there is always more to learn than stereotypes we likely already know.
Tanya Titchkosky, PhD
SESE of OISE/UT
or