Toward a transhuman model of medieval disability

To elaborate an understanding of medieval humanity rooted in the body, we must consider a broad class of ‘bodies’ beyond the physical. Applying the methodologies of disability studies to textual corpora offers new ways to reflect on the boundaries of the human in medieval literature. The dits, generically mixed texts, may thus be read as a corpus generated from a posthuman blending of textual elements; the prevalence of disabled narrators in the dits compounds their play with the margins of humanity. This essay proposes a ‘transhuman’ model of medieval disability, an elastic and non-binary paradigm of corporeal difference. According to this transhuman model, disability in medieval texts can represent an enhancement, a constructive alteration of the human state. A brief reading of lyric ‘insertions’ in Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit suggests the concept of textual prosthesis as a productive point of contact between Disability Studies and the posthuman. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 173–179. doi:10.1057/pmed.2009.4; published online 9 February 2010 In what sense can there be said to be a premodern posthuman? One might approach the question from the perspective of Disability Studies, a critical movement that interrogates the fringes and limits of human experience – although most of its practitioners would be unlikely to define their object as such. Indeed, such a formulation runs counter to many disability scholars’ commitment to the destigmatization of disability and also to the study of cultural constructs of bodily difference. This activist strain in Disability Studies stems directly from a reaction to the perceived ‘parahuman’ if not subhuman r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 173–179 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ social roles assigned to the disabled in modern and contemporary contexts. As we translate the vocabulary of Disability Studies from the modern to the medieval body, why not explore whether this critical discourse can also take us from the subto the posthuman? Disability scholars’ acute consciousness of the complex interplay between physiological and social alterity should remind us, if the point requires reinforcement, that the question of what it is to be human is staked in terms of biological existence as well as subjective experience. Even when focusing primarily on the corporeal dimensions of disability, though, the medievalist cannot reduce her conceptualization of the body to a matter of physiology, normative or otherwise. In order to elaborate an understanding of medieval humanity related to the body, its structures and functions, we must think more broadly about the types of body to which we can put the disability question. In the absence of miraculously preserved physical bodies, I propose that, instead of thinking of impairment as a condition of the biological human, we seek material traces of medieval disability within the textual human. The late medieval French dit, in particular, offers a remarkably rich opportunity for a joint interrogation of anatomical and textual corpora. Often pseudo-autobiographical in nature, these texts invite the reader to identify the author with his first-person narrator(s) and with his literary corpus, his body of work. Moreover, the fourteenth-century dit, a courtly narrative typically incorporating allegorical characters and lyric forms, is a (non-)genre whose most salient common trait is its very lack of a formal norm. It is by no means coincidental that this taste for generic and structural experimentation is often coupled with a preponderance of ‘abnormal’ or ‘other’ narratorial bodies. Whether elderly and squint-eyed (as in Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit, c. 1362), possessed of a clockwork heart (Jean Froissart’s Orloge amoureus, c. 1368), transgendered or simply female (Christine de Pizan’s Mutacion de Fortune, 1403, or Avision Christine, 1405), or beset by severe mental illness (Alain Chartier’s unfinished Livre de l’Espérance, c. 1429), the first-person narrators of these fourteenthand early fifteenth-century French texts tend to express their subjective alterity through a mélange of narrative verse, prose and lyric, creating a composite textual body so unlike the shorter thirteenth-century verse dit as to seem a different species altogether. The characterization of the dit as a ‘hybrid’ genre has become a commonplace in the critical literature; such a designation, however, tends to obscure what I see as the fundamental post-organicity, if not posthumanity, of the genre (Singer, 2009). Whereas a hybrid is, in essence, a seamless blend, an integrated whole engendered from disparate parents, the fourteenth-century dit retains explicit markers of alterity – not just otherness as compared to other, more established genres, but alterity within itself. The lyric, prose and narrative verse portions of these texts distinguish themselves from one another by means of rubrication, mise en page and intercalated musical partitions: the composite dit is a singular 1 On this