Summary

Intellectual disability is difficult to define—in the past it was generally understood as “mental retardation” or “feeblemindedness”—and difficult to distinguish from developmental and/or psychosocial disability (e.g., muscular dystrophy or schizophrenia, neither of which entails cognitive impairment). Nevertheless, it has been widely depicted in literature for centuries. In the 21st century, the field of literary disability studies, which had begun in the 1990s with an almost exclusive focus on physical disability, began to develop theories of literary representation that could be extended to depictions of literary characters with intellectual disabilities as well. Some of those characters are among the most widely discussed figures in the fiction of the past few centuries, such as Benjy Compson, the nonverbal thirty-three-year-old man in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Christopher Boone, the (apparently) autistic teenager in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Much of the analysis of literary characters with intellectual disabilities has turned on the question of whether the depictions of those characters are realistic, accurate portrayals, since there is understandable concern as to whether the literary representation of intellectual disability might contribute to the stigmatization and ostracism of actual people with intellectual disabilities (some of whom, it is presumed, may be incapable of representing themselves in fiction). However, there are other ways to read intellectual disability in literature that do not rely on representation but rather seek to understand how intellectual disability functions to reveal the workings of narrative. Intellectual disability can be used as a device to explore temporality, causality, and a text’s capacity for self-reflection, which might serve as an analogue for human self-reflection in general. Moreover, literary texts can mobilize ideas about intellectual disability, including the stigma attached to intellectual disability, regardless of whether they contain any characters with identifiable intellectual disabilities. Finally, intellectual disability can be rendered in such a way as to disorient readers, either in the service of psychological realism (showing what it is like to have dementia) or in the service of narrative experimentalism. A literary text might thereby expand the capacity for human self-expression precisely, if paradoxically, by allowing us to imagine humans with limited capacity for self-expression.