Project of the Month: Disability in Early Modern French Literature: Working with Anachronism

Each month, we aim to feature a current research topic by a doctoral student or Early Career Researcher. This month, Sam Bailey (School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham) talks about a theme that emerged from his doctoral thesis on disability in early modern French literature.

When speaking about my work on disability in early modern French literature, I am sometimes asked questions along the lines of ‘Isn’t it a little anachronistic to speak of disability at this time in history?’ 

My response usually involves an explanation of how, on the one hand, I agree that disability (as we understand it in 2022) greatly depends on the nineteenth-century medical binary of normal/abnormal for its discursive contours. Previously a geometric term meaning ‘standing at right angles’, the concept of the norm began to be applied to human bodies by medical professionals in the first half of the nineteenth century. The norm necessitated the creation of the category we call disability, referring to deviance of the body or the mind that they believed ought to be minimised, studied, medicated, concealed, and corrected [1]. Without the existence of the medical norm, the argument goes, disability would not exist as an operative category into which medical professionals can place ‘abnormal’ bodyminds. [2]

On the other hand, there were clear predecessors to the medical norm in early modern Europe, the main difference being that bodily deviance was measured not against norms but ideals, such as pseudo-Aristotelian physiognomical mediocritas, or a perfect moderation of body and mind. [3] When measuring human bodies against such ideals as mediocritas, disability was often conceptualised by early modern natural philosophers as a deviation in Nature’s proper course. [4] In French literature from this period, disability can often be found as a metaphor for natural systems gone awry or a philosophical motif used to explore the concept of reason – perhaps most compellingly by Denis Diderot in his Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749, ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See’). [5]

But I wonder whether this answer to the question of anachronism misses the point. I wonder if a more succinct – not to mention honest –  response would be ‘Yes, it is anachronistic to speak of disability in the early modern period, but I don’t see why that’s a problem’. For one thing, I think you would be hard pressed to find any literary or historical scholarship on early modern France that is not anachronistic in some way, so why should scholars working on subjects such as disability (or queerness, or race) be singled out? Besides, it can be intellectually productive to work with rather than against anachronism in theoretical readings of disability.

Experimenting with anachronism by putting early modern material into dialogue with modern theoretical concepts can highlight surprising convergences as well as divergences in ways of thinking that might at first seem highly incompatible. The disabled queer poet Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595-1670) connects unconventional physicality to unconventional sexuality, affirming that his status as ‘perclus’ (‘crippled’) is no barrier to his sex life:

Chevalier, ne me raille plus
Sur tous les plaisirs de la vie,
J’en goûte encore, quoique perclus,
Qui pourraient bien te faire envie,
Mais quand les prends, en un mot,
Crois-moi, ce n’est pas comme un sot. [6]

Chevalier, taunt me no longer
About life’s many pleasures,
Though crippled, I still enjoy plenty
That could make you green with envy,
But in short, when I enjoy them,
Believe me, I don’t do it like a fool. [7]

This epigram purportedly addresses the Chevalier de Méré (1607-1684), a salon theorist and proponent of precise moderation of one’s behaviour and aesthetic appearance in search of ‘le juste milieu’ (‘the golden mean’). [8] Saint-Pavin’s chosen self-descriptor is perclus, announcing his opposition to Méré’s quest for moderation of body and mind. Perclus is also a word that carried negative connotations but was reclaimed by the poet as a marker of singularity and nonconformity in his quasi-autobiographical poetry. In this piece, he insinuates that, far from limiting sexual pleasure, his disabled embodiment as a perclus opens up new avenues for pleasure. Furthermore, the narrator’s concluding remark implies that it is the Chevalier, not Saint-Pavin, who is the fool here, reversing the argument made by many early modern thinkers that disability was a sign of unreason.

Saint-Pavin’s reclaiming of perclus in verse about his personal experience of disability can be compared to more recent efforts to reclaim the word ‘crip’. Short for ‘cripple’, it has historically been used to stigmatise disabled people but, starting in the 1960s, became subject to efforts of reclamation within the disability rights movement, connoting instead defiance, community, humour, and empowerment. [9] The epigram quoted above anticipates Tobin Siebers’s argument that disability can be claimed ‘not as a defect that needs to be overcome to have sex but as a complex embodiment that enhances sexual activities and pleasure’. [10] In so doing, the poet rejects the commonplace assumption that where there is disability, there cannot be sex, and where there is sex, there cannot be disability. [11]

Like disability rights activists who self-identify as crip, Saint-Pavin wears the word perclus like a badge of honour, proudly and with a keen sense of humour, as part of a subversion and reclamation of the language used to stigmatise him by the likes of the Chevalier. He shuns language seeking to minimise or patronise, preferring to draw attention to his disability as a way of distinguishing himself from his nondisabled peers as a superior wit and lover.

Perhaps most importantly, Saint-Pavin refuses to elaborate on the precise nature of the ‘many pleasures’ he enjoys, preferring to leave it as coy innuendo. The narrator’s coyness in this concluding pronouncement pushes back against nondisabled people’s voyeuristic fascination with disabled sexuality. Despite what the Chevalier might derisively assume, the narrator’s disability is no barrier to sex. In fact, he boasts, he is able to enjoy some pleasures that would make the Chevalier seethe with jealousy… if only he knew what they were.

⁓ Sam Bailey

Notes:

[1] Waltraud Ernst, ‘The normal and the abnormal: reflections on norms and normativity’, in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal, ed. by Waltraud Ernst (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1-25 (p. 3).

[2] This popular argument is summarised and deconstructed with reference to the early modern period in Elizabeth B. Bearden, Monstrous kinds: body, space, and narrative in Renaissance representations of disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019), pp. 79-108.

[3] For an analysis of early modern mediocritas, see Bearden, p. 33-78. For physiognomy more generally, see Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[4] Bearden, pp. 79-108. Caroline Warman, ‘From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France’, Psychology & Sexuality, 1. 3 (2010), 200-213 (p. 205).

[5] For an analysis of Diderot’s use of blindness, see Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: an essay (New York: Continuum, 2011).

[6] Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, Poésies, ed by Nicholas Hammond (Paris: Garnier, 2012), p. 91. For a critical assessment of Saint-Pavin’s life and works, see Kathleen Clark Collins’s doctoral thesis, ‘A Libertine in the Salons: The Poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin’ (Catholic University of America, 1986).

[7] The translation is my own.

[8] Méré’s quest for the juste milieu is analysed in Lewis Seifert, Manning the Margins: Masculinity & Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 27.

[9] This can be compared to how ‘queer’ has been reclaimed by some LGBT+ people. For the reclaiming of crip, see Eli Clare, ‘Thinking about the word crip’, (2009) <http://eliclare.com/poems/thinkingabout-the-word-crip> [accessed 22/02/2022]. 

[10] Tobin Siebers, ‘A Sexual Culture for Disabled People’, in Sex and Disability, ed. by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 36-53, (p. 41).

[11] This assumption is also interrogated in Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow, ‘Introduction’, in Sex and Disability, ed. by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 1-34.

Bibliography

Bearden, Elizabeth B., Monstrous kinds: body, space, and narrative in Renaissance representations of disability (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019)

Clare, Eli, ‘Thinking about the word crip’, (2009) <http://eliclare.com/poems/thinkingabout-the-word-crip> [accessed 22/02/2022]

Collins, Kathleen Clark, ‘A Libertine in the Salons: The Poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin’ (Catholic University of America, 1986)

Ernst, Waltraud, ‘The normal and the abnormal: reflections on norms and normativity’, in Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal, ed. by Waltraud Ernst (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1-25

McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow, ‘Introduction’, in Sex and Disability, ed. by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 1-34.

Porter, Martin, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Saint-Pavin, Denis Sanguin de, Poésies, ed by Nicholas Hammond (Paris: Garnier, 2012)

Seifert, Lewis, Manning the Margins: Masculinity & Writing in Seventeenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009)

Siebers, Tobin, ‘A Sexual Culture for Disabled People’, in Sex and Disability, ed. by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (London: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 36-53

Tunstall, Kate E., Blindness and Enlightenment : an essay (New York: Continuum, 2011)

Warman, Caroline, ‘From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France’, Psychology & Sexuality, 1. 3 (2010), 200-213