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The Limping Man

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

≈ 5 Comments

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Born on the 4th July, Captain Ahab, Disabilities, Double Indemnity, God, Illness as metaphor, Inspector Bucket and the Beast, Inspector Bucket and the Olympics, Limping, Matthew 15, Meniscus tear, Old Testament, Redemption, Shaun of the Dead, Sherlock, Sumerian texts, Susan Sontag, The Annotator, The Usual Suspects, Token Magazine, Wrestling with God

 

‘For no one who has a defect shall approach: a blind man, or a lame man, or he who has a disfigured face, or any deformed limb. (Leviticus 26.18)

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For nine months I have been a lame man: a limping man. Meniscus tear, don’t you know – for which, back in January, I had arthroscopy of the knee. I’ve had nothing but sympathy, of course, during this time, but my crab-like gait has put me in a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of people who have (or have had) a gammy leg – and worse. We are legion, we limping men.

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Yet in films and fiction and ancient lore we, the limping people (crippled by arthritis, Achilles’ tendon injuries, twisted ankles or dodgy knees, on crutches, in plaster casts, missing a limb and in wheel-chairs – temporarily or permanently) are, as often as not, seen as objects of suspicion, omens of evil, ripe for mockery or an easy target for abuse or exploitation.

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From the limping man, in the eponymous British noir thriller (The Limping Man) to limping, weaselly con-man Roger Kint in The Usual Suspects, the man with the limp (as I shall call those who are temporarily or permanently disabled) is presented as a figure of menace or ineptitude. From The Day of the Dead to Shaun of the Dead, it is the lurching, limping man (woman or child) shuffling towards us that establishes a sense of mockery or impending terror.

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Amongst the multitude of the disabled, one might mention evil Captain Hook with his hooked hand; the hobbling and dangerous Long John Silver; manic Dr Strangelove (in his wheelchair with his deranged mind and uncontrollable Nazi salute); Captain Ahab, limping along the foredeck in Moby Dick with his peg-leg and epic desire for existential revenge; even the poor put-upon but hapless Mr Nirdlinger in JM Cain’s Double Indemnity – whose murder the reader or viewer feels is somehow justified.

All lurching, shuffling, limping men.

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What all this is about, of course, is not a malicious prejudice against us limpers but, as I have discussed in one of my earlier posts (and as Susan Sontag famously argues in her essay ‘Illness as Metaphor’) another example of writers using disability as a metaphor for character. The correlation is clear: if a character in fiction is wicked, morally compromised or challenged in some way, he is likely to be pre-marked with a physical affliction. At the best he might rise above his physical disability to show himself morally renewed; at the worst, he must be seen to be punished for his evil, an evil so obvious in both his inner and outer nature.

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Giving a man a limp is, at the very least (notwithstanding its metaphorical overtones), a way of making a character, as Doc Henshaw argues in one of his on-line creative writing sessions, “interesting”. This idea is one of the standard clichés of creative writing classes. Henshaw boasts of being able to list thirty-four limping characters from literature, film or TV, and all within the space of fifteen minutes. (Quite a party trick!) He includes Chester’s twisted gait in Gun Smoke, Dr. Philip Carey’s lurch from W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Dr. Weaver’s tapping cane from the TV show ER and Dr. Watson’s “psychosomatic limp”, as seen in the first episode of Sherlock. (An interesting grouping of Doctors there!)

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The disability, however, doesn’t have to be a limp, it is obvious to state. Henshaw himself begins by recommending to a student that he make a character deaf to make them more dramatically appealing. It could be a missing arm, as with the infamous one-armed man in The Fugitive; Jamie Lanaster’s golden prosthetic hand in Game of Thrones, or John Wayne’s/Jeff Bridges’ eye-patch in True Grit.

In the bizarre biblical story of Jacob wrestling with what most commentators agree is God, Jacob himself ends up as a limping man. Although Jacob seems to win the bout, God’s parting shot is to dislocate Jacob’s hip. The price of seeing (and wrestling with) God face-to-face is apparently to be blighted with the mark of the limping man.

In my capacity as a god-like author who is in control of my characters’ fates, I confess to using this trick myself: of metaphorically and actually disabling my characters. In my novel, Inspector Bucket and the Beast, I curse the morally suspect Frederick Dreadnaught with small-pox, and in one of my ‘Inspector Bucket’ short stories, Inspector Bucket and the Olympics, a character uses the fact that he is on crutches (another limping man!) to attempt a desperate fraud. In The Sad Strange Tale of Jon Bergersson I handicap my eponymous hero with ‘sickness’ and ‘asthma’. And in my experimental steam-punk story, Moriarty’s Revenge, I curse the moral coward Markham, who partially narrates the story, with both a limp and a glass eye – double metaphorical imperfections! I might also have taken the opportunity to give the rather psychotic protagonist in my  The Annotator, (due to be published in the first print edition of Token Magazine on the 1st May) a  physical imperfection – but I resisted. Perhaps hearing voices that he feels are controlling him, or at least prompting him to certain actions, is already enough of a handicap: a kind of limping in its own way.

There are precedents for all this (as always, and as I have already implied) in the Bible. The Author of All Things easily outdoes us earthly authors in the way He seems so shamefully happy to blight those who offend him – and with the most terrible of infirmities too:
“The LORD will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart. (Deuteronomy 28-9)

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He seems equally happy (smug almost) about accepting the blame (or praise) for causing the disabilities in the first place:
“The LORD said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” Exodus 4:11

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Thus, the blueprint for the metaphorical use of the limping man is deeply embedded in the Bible itself where, as Jeremy Schipper argues, disability, more often than not, is seen as a religious, moral or theological issue under the control of the divine (as at Gen 16:2; 20:18; 25:21; 29:31; Exod 4:11; 23:26; Deut 7:14; Judg 13:2-3; 1 Sam 1:5; 2 Chron 16:12).

Christian commentators often use the Jacob story to show how when mankind gets too cocky about himself, God will put him in his place. The key quote here seems to be from Psalms 147:10-11: “God does not delight in man’s strength or cleverness, but in those who fear Him and put their hope in His unfailing love”

Thus God cripples Jacob. Seems like a low blow to me. And after the bell too, for Jacob had clearly won the bout.

However, in a turn-around to my central point, I must concede that some Christians advise us not to, “trust a man without a limp.” The idea here being that a man who doesn’t realise he is nothing without God, and that he is dependent on the Lord just as a crippled man might be dependent on his crutches, is a lost man.

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Nevertheless, what we are seeing here, once again, is how disability is being used as a signifier of a moral condition.

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However, this moral attitude to the limping man goes back even earlier still than the Hebrew Bible, to, arguably, the most ancient of ancient texts. The first tablet of the earliest extant Sumerian prophetic texts predicts, we are told, the danger to ancient society of contact with a limping man:

“If a woman gives birth to a limping male : penury”

Another tablet reads, with even more confidence, that, “If a woman gives birth to a cripple, the land will be disturbed; the house of the man will be scattered.”

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Modern narratives, however, when not turning the limping man merely into an object of menace or bitterness, do sometimes present the possibility of redemption through disability. We see this, for example, in Ron Kovik’s Born on the 4th July (film directed by Oliver Stone) where, by the end of the narrative, the wheelchair bound Kovik attains, it seems, a form of both political and moral regeneration.

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The Christian New Testament, too, it is fair to say, in its use of disability metaphors, focuses (in contrast to the Old Testament) just as much on the redemption of the sick and the lame as on the disabilities themselves. It employs both figurative language and the actuality of disability itself to suggest that the limping man may one day be restored to transcendent moral and actual health:

“And large crowds came to Him, bringing with them those who were lame, crippled, blind, mute, and many others, and they laid them down at His feet; and He healed them. So the crowd marveled as they saw the mute speaking, the crippled restored, and the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.”
Matthew 15

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A fantastically moving passage, of course, and yet I find it hard to believe that this redemptive God of Israel is the same deity who clearly seems to relish causing the disabilities that afflict mankind in the first place.

As for me, the operation (you’ll be pleased to know) was successful – although I confess a residue of the limping man returns to haunt me if I become way too cocky in my walking!

Nevertheless, this limping man is back to walking a less crooked path – at least physically.

Preparation for a Double: Twins in Literature

09 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

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Agatha Christie, Bob Dylan, Castor and Pollux, Detectives, Doppelgangers, Dostoyevsky, Doubles, Harry Potter, Ian McEwan, Inspector Bucket and the Beast, James Hogg, Jekyll and Hyde, Lord of the Flies, Old Testament, Shakespeare, Stephen King, The Detective Club, Tintin, Tweedle dum and Tweedle Dee, Twins, Writing

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A pox take it!

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by Peter Cooper in The Contexts of Writing

≈ 2 Comments

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Bleak House, Dickens, Inspector Bucket and the Beast, Old Testament, Smallpox, Susan Sontag, The Book of Job

blakes job      “That stinking child!  Look what she did to me. Look!” He began to rub at his cheek where he had been perspiring, and, as the cakes of paste seemed to fall away, he slowly uncovered a face terribly lined and pocked with smallpox scars. “Look at me! Look at me!” he shouted. Everyone in the whole room looked at him with fresh distaste.

(Inspector Bucket and the Beast, Dahliapublishing.co.uk)

In life, as well as in literature, the idea of being struck down by disease always seems to have had a moral implication. Here, in this quotation from my ‘Inspector Bucket and the Beast’, once the malevolent Beast is unveiled it is clear that his ugly character is matched by his true ugly and “distasteful” appearance – in this instance caused by smallpox.  I confess, now that I have read some of it, that I am perpetrating the wrong described by Susan Sontag (in her essay ‘Illness as Metaphor‘)  of using disease as a metaphor for character. The correlation is clear:  if you are wicked you will be punished with an affliction. I am not, of course, alone in doing this sort of thing. We can see this attitude to disease, for example, in the earliest reactions to AIDS, which was widely seen, I remember, as the ‘gay disease’  – in other words AIDS was considered by some to be some sort of moral judgement on and punishment for the ‘sin’ of being homosexual.

Disease as moral punishment starts as long ago as (and no doubt before) the Old Testament. For example, because the pharaoh wouldn’t let The Israelites go free, therefore disobeying God’s will, Egypt was punished with ten plagues, the sixth of which was “boils”

plague of boils“And the LORD said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you handfuls of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven in the sight of Pharaoh. And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast, throughout all the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 9:8)

I’ve always wondered why God didn’t just spring the Israelites himself, rather than forcing Egypt to undergo all the unnecessary horror of dispensing TEN Plagues. But let’s leave that to one side for a moment. God seems to have had a thing about boils and sores and tumours. Skin complaints of all kind actually:ugly and painful sores

“The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people who had the mark of the beast and worshiped his image.” (Revelations 16:2)

“But after they had brought it around, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic, and he afflicted the men of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.”(1 Samuel 5:9)

It’s clear already that disease is to be seen as the direct result of disobeying the Lord’s strictures.

And as it is in theology so it will be in history.

dance of death

“…. there came the death-dealing pestilence, which through our own iniquitous doings, (was)  sent down upon mankind for our correction by the just wrath of God …”—Giovanni Boccaccio

According to William Blake, it was “boils” that Satan smites Job with, not the pox (neither the grand – syphilus – nor the small version) and not the plague. But it seems, in actuality, that the Hebrew term used in the Bible at this point in Job’s seemingly interminable sufferings was (apparently) non-specific. Satan, theoretically I suppose, had every disease in the universe available to him (past, present and future). He could have applied any chronic disease that took his fancy. Chief culprit as far as biblical scholars is concerned, it seems, is leprosy. (1)

        But in the 17th and 18th centuries physicians and pamphleteers wondered(2) if it mightn’t have been smallpox after all that Job had been afflicted with, for surely (they thought) there must be some biblical precedent for such a terrible scourge. It is no wonder that they saw smallpox as something that surely must have had cosmic antecedents for it was the cause of such epic and widespread carnage. According to one calcusmallpoxlation made in 1760, smallpox is said to have accounted for one-tenth of all mortality during that period. It affected approximately three quarters of all living people in the 18th century. If true, this is a remarkable statistic. (it was still killing vast numbers of people a year worldwide in the early 1950s(3) and though eradicated by 1977 is still rumoured to be extant and possibly obtainable by terrorists.)

By the latter part of the 17th Century, data  from the Bills of Mortality (2) indicated (according to the statisticians) that smallpox had supplanted the plague as Great Britain’s biggest killer, as well as the biggest scourge on those who survived it – for its consequence, if not death, was blindness and disfigurement. As Ben Jonson(3)said smallpox could “nullify a face.”

        Despite the beginnings of vaccination, Smallpox was an ever-present feature of life in the 19th century too, as I try to show in my own novel. bucket coverIn the following quotation the child killer, finally tracked down by Inspector Bucket, wonders aloud if Bucket’s own child, like the Beast himself, might not have suffered from the dread disease:

“I believe the one child you and your wife … spawn(ed) died of some disease,” he taunted. “What was it, Inspector, what was it? Influenza? Cholera? Or was it the smallpox?” He paused, pondering. “I might have died of that too.”

The literature of the 19th century generally, it might seem, treated smallpox as so much part of the fabric of life that, as in George Elliot’s ‘Daniel Daronda’, its consequences might be used as a commonplace comparison with feelings of rejected love. For one character (Alex) we are told, “… the disappointment of a youthful passion has effects as incalculable as those of small-pox …” Similarly In ‘The Sad History of the Reverend Amos Barton’ (‘Clerical Lives’) Amos has, “a narrow face of no particular complexion – even the smallpox that has attacked it seems to have been of a mongrel, indefinite kind.” So prevalent were smallpox scars throughout this period that Wilkie Collins too, like Elliot, refers to smallpox almost casually in his depiction of characters’ features.  In two of his sensationalist novels, for example,  (‘Poor Miss Finch’ and ‘No Name’ ) several characters are described as having faces “pitted” or “deeply pitted with the smallpox.” The implication is often that the smallpox sufferer is at heart a wicked person or, as in the case of Amos Burton, judged by others to be so.

smite the wicked         Of course the righteous, or the noble and the beautiful, are, on the whole, content (at least philosophically) to see disease as a judgement on the wicked and the irresponsible poor, but smallpox was different in that it was egalitarian in its attacks. That is, the wealthy and the noble were as likely to be smitten by it as the poor and disreputable.This was very unlike the plague, which seemed to deliberatly select the poor and spare (certainly in terms of numbers affected) the rich because (presumably) they could retreat to their country estates and generally they had a standard of living which (relative to the state of the poor) protected them from the sources of infection. Nobody, it was felt, could suspect a lady to die of the plague(!) But, apparently, smallpox wasn’t quite so class-conscious as its sister scourge.

Queen Anne, for instance, suffered a severe attack from smallpox (and her son died of it, putting paid to the future hopes of the Stuarts).The son and daughter of  Charles 1st died of it too, as did Queen Mary. The plague was seen very much as a judgement of God for wickedness. But when the victims of smallpox seemed to be everybody, the pure and the angelic as well as the wicked and the ugly, the simplistic notion of divine punishment for sin perhaps needed to be modified (that is if the well off wanted to continue to maintain their faith in a benign Creator.)

Job’s afflictions are not, of course,  the consequence of his wicked behaviour either (though his friends and relatives, like the parishoners of Amos Barton, quickly jump to this conclusion). Job’s sufferings are, it seems, rather a test of his faith – of his inner beauty and steadfastness, rather than merely (!) an attack on his outward appearance. old job

My inspiration for ‘Inspector Bucket and The Beast’ is, of course, from Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ and it is in this novel that we see the character of Esther Summerson famously afflicted by smallpox. Esther is clearly a ‘good’ even an ‘heroic’ person, if often (it must be said) overwhelmingly sentimentalised. And yet she too, falls prey (by common critical agreement) to smallpox (though like Job the illness is never actually specified). She survives  but is (temporarily) made blind by it. Dickens is clearly using smallpox, as well as the other ‘infections’ in the novel such as cholera and money and the law and legal system) as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of society. Lady Dedlock’s love affair with ‘Nemo’, now an impoverished document copier, links her with the poor classes and the likes of Jo the crossing sweeper – from whom Esther, by way of Charley, contracts her smallpox (because of her many acts of selfless care.) In turn she could have infected the wards of Jarndyce, Ada and Richard, but, selflessly again, shuts herself off from them. The upper, the middle and the poor classes are connected by a chain. Esther’s ultimate  reward is that Allan Woodcourt, the stalwart surgeon, who, like her, is connected to and cares for people in all classes, marries her and sees only beauty in her. Dickens is here showing (unlike my poor effort  in ‘Inspector Bucket and the Beast’) that the uglness of smallpox (and by extension any disease) may reveal the beauty and moral strength of the person within.

Just as it did in the end with Job.

(1) J. E Hartley,’‘Book of Job’.

(2) R.A. Anselment ‘Smallpox in Seventeenth Century English Literature    

(3)   According to the W.H.O. factsheet, 50000 worldwide a year

(4) An Epigram to the Smallpox

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