274 RüdigerKunow
as an emblem of divine wrath. Examples can be found, for example, in
the Yoruba legends of West Africa, which refer to the disabled as "Eni
Orisa" (divine beings) (Kehinde 62); in such a context disability is a
privileged site of divine intervention into the mundane world. In
Western cultures the most prominent examples for this line of thought
are Jesus Christ's more than two dozen healings reported in scripture,
among them the paraplegic at Capernaum (Luke 5:17-26; Mark 2:3-12;
Matthew 9:2-8) or the blind man at Jericho (Mark 10:46-52; possibly
Luke18:35-42).
Aside from the world of myth and faith, fiction has been a realm
wheredisabledpeoplecanbefrequentlyfoundincentralpositionsofthe
plot.Infact,someofworldliterature's^104 mostmemorablecharactersare
constructed around a disability, with their "physical and cognitive
idiosyncrasy allowing [them] to stand out against an otherwise
anonymous backdrop of homogenous, non-disabled bodies" (Mitchell
and Snyder, "Masquerades of Impairment" 38): Shakespeare's Richard
the Third, Melville's Captain Ahab, Hugo's Hunchback of Nôtre Dame,
ConanDoyle'sSherlockHolmes,Faulkner'sBenjyinTheSoundandthe
Fury, Oskar Matzerath in Grass'sTin Drum, or Beckett's multiply
disabled dramatis personae. In these and many other cases, non-
normativeembodimentsarenotonlysignificantattributesthatguideour
understandingofthefictionalcharactersthemselvesbuttheyalsosignify
forthetextasawhole.Atthesametime,theappearance,eventhevery
notoriety of these figures can be read critically as disappearance,
marking the non-normative bodies as rara avis (Melville), as an
exception, an idiosyncrasy that mirrors, perhaps against their inventor's
will, the isolation of the disabled individual, not only in the fictional
world but also its empirical counterpart (Mitchell and Snyder,
"MasqueradesofImpairment"38-39,NarrativeProsthesis178).
The brief references presented here so far cannot do justice to the
broad range of disability representations which often vary widely with
stigma, as Goffman has shown in his groundbreaking study is often a physical
characteristicthatreducesahumanbeing"inourmindsfromawholeandusual
persontoatainted,discountedone"(Stigma3).
(^104) Thetermishereusedinapre-critical,abbreviatingsense.Formoreelaborate
reflectionsonthe conceptseeHornung,Alfred,and RüdigerKunow."Preface."
Amerikastudien/AmericanStudies47.2(2002):193-98.Print.