Gripla - 2020, Page 253

GRIPLA252
story even in the process of highlighting the existence of the impairment it-
self. As I argue below, the traumatic aspects of such cases of dis/ability may
even make it impossible to narrate such stories in the first place.
As mentioned above, juridical negotiations and arbitrations tend to centre
on the (unblemished) body. Besides their capability for restoring the social equi-
librium, such negotiations are a means of making both communal relationships
and individual bodies appear whole and undamaged – or at least not distinc-
tively damaged – through the tallying up of certain injuries as equivalent and the
prescription of financial compensation for outstanding impairments without
apparent equivalence. This pretence at effacing the damage caused is, of course,
an illusion. No financial compensation could reverse the physical damage caused
by cases of killings and dis/ability. Yet such compensation can be read as a form
of prosthesis, in the sense that it attempts to create a substitute for the aspect of
the body damaged or displaced by the conflict so as to downplay the embodied
difference signalled by its presence.
This process has notable similarities to the concept of narrative prosthesis
developed primarily by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Following on the
symbolic aspect of the material prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder suggest that cer-
tain narrative elements can be used to cover up instances of dis/ability, thereby
making them acceptable to a specific society and its perception of ‘normal’, in
similar ways to the use of material prostheses. It is worth emphasising that
narrative prosthesis is neither a specific narrative mode nor a particular use of
language; rather, identifying its use involves the in-depth analysis of how nar-
ratives deal more broadly with experiences and representations of dis/ability, as
well as the tracing of narrative devices that are in fact unsuccessful in deceiving
a reader or an audience in regard to dis/ability. As Mitchell and Snyder put it,
‘narrative Prosthesis is first and foremost about the ways in which the ruse
of prosthesis fails in its primary objective: to return the incomplete body
to the invisible status of a normative essence’.64 Tracing and decoding the
use of narrative prosthesis thus allows for a better understanding of a given
community’s notion of and their literary response to dis/ability. No matter the
extent to which a society attempts to silence the public discourse on dis/ability,
such discourse always resurfaces, forcing society to take seriously the topic and
the concerns of those it affects and to deal with them adequately.65
64 Mitchell and Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis,” 8.
65 Mitchell and Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis,” 49. On comparable confrontations that society