The Body Silent
Jackall, Robert
BOOKS The compass of capricious fate THE BODY SILENT Robert F. Murphy Henry Holt, $17.95, 242 pp. Robert Jackall This book records an anthropologist's personal journey into the...
...The disabled ransack their own pasts and their subconsciousnesses to discern some reasons that might make their calamities explicable...
...the pathologies of Irish Catholic families and the alcoholism they often produce...
...the significance of work itself to social identity...
...Such symbolic acceptance of misfortune comforts the able-bodied and restores some normalcy to social relationships...
...Bodily paralysis, particularly when it occurs with some suddenness, fundamentally alters one's social relationships...
...Each curb that is cut, every wheelchair ramp erected, every kneeling bus on city streets is not only a notable material victory for the disabled, but a tribute to their rage to live, and live fully...
...Others' fear and guilt first produce shame in the disabled for causing social disruption...
...the indissoluble relationship between intellectual work and teaching...
...The severely disabled are "the antiphony of everyday life," social anomalies who represent the inevitable decline of all flesh into entropy...
...He speaks of the soothing cadence and rhythm of childhood prayers, of bodies broken and pierced on the crosses of modern medicine, and of liturgies whose sacrament is not the breaking of bread but the bursting of the bonds of the flesh so that the mind can soar...
...One's encounter with the hard intelligence and sheer nerve behind this work make one wonder just who among us are really disabled...
...the painful joys of long-lived marriages...
...326...
...the structure and meaning of social rituals in both primitive and modern societies...
...They instill profound fear in the able-bodied because they remind the able-bodied of their futures...
...Murphy understood the story for the first time, he tells us, one night in the hospital when his nurse left him lying on his back without access to the call bell...
...Every social encounter between the disabled and the able-bodied harbors the potential for disaster...
...In discussing all of these things, Murphy moves easily and often humorously between his early field experiences with the Mundurucu Indians of Brazil, his recent studies of the disabled, and his ongoing collegial relationships with the denizens of the modern academy...
...In effect, as Murphy points out, the punishment begets the crime...
...It is also, as he argues, "an allegory of all life in society...
...Murphy's own rage to live is evident in still other ways, ways characteristic of a man dedicated to the life of the mind...
...and the subtle and intricate patterns of social deference and distancing in our society that a person suddenly declassed through physical disability comes to know intimately...
...At the same time, the disabled arouse guilt among their intimates, a familiar symptom afflicting lucky survivors...
...Shame is followed by guilt for one's condition, even though, as in Murphy's case, illness is the result of a wholly capricious fate...
...He also treats religious themes and images that, willy-nilly, float in and out of consciousness long after belief is gone...
...Profound dependency on others, even for the most ordinary functions, fuels the ever present human impulse to withdraw into a womb-like isolation, even while one longs for autonomy and wishes to reach out to others not just for help but for companionship...
...the conflict between scientific and clinical medicine...
...The only way to assuage such fear and guilt, and begin or maintain relationships with the able-bodied, is for the disabled to don masks of stoic cheerfulness...
...Robert Jackall This book records an anthropologist's personal journey into the twilight social world of quadriplegia...
...Such interaction damages the psyches of the disabled...
...Even while paralytics represent death, their remarkable struggles against their own inertia and against our society's neglect of their plight symbolizes life at its best...
...Murphy documents the battles of the disabled to break out of their constructed liminal states into full-fledged social and political participation...
...And in this book, as in his previous writings, Murphy's mind 324: does soar...
...With the passionate dispassion that marks the best of his craft, he dissects, while telling his own story, the sociology of the sick role...
...It does so precisely by allowing many able-bodied to maintain cherished illusions about the justice evidenced by their good health...
...Imagine, for a moment, that one awakens from a fitful sleep transformed, as was Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, into a great insect, floundering on one's hard-shelled back...
...For many, particularly those who suffer sexual impairment, the quest, while ultimately fruitless, is profoundly disturbing...
...The book is filled with packed excursions into social theory and substantive issues that show a lifelong habit of careful rumination...
...But companionship with the ablebodied carries its price...
...Fifteen years ago, the author, then forty-eight and healthy, suffered the first muscle spasms caused by a spinal tumor that by 1986 had reduced his body to an inert mass...
...The book is simultaneously a history of his personal illness and a report of his own recent anthropological fieldwork among the severely disabled...
...Murphy reminds us that Oedipus means "Swollen Foot," a crippling inflicted by his father to help prevent what eventually came to pass...
...In the end, almost all disabled persons ask themselves: What have I done to deserve this...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
