Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature by Jeremy Colangelo (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature by Jeremy Colangelo
• Margot Gayle Backus (bio)

DIAPHANOUS BODIES: ABILITY, DISABILITY, AND MODERNIST IRISH LITERATURE, by Jeremy Colangelo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. xiii + 216 pp. $70 cloth, $54.95 ebook.

Jeremy Colangelo's highly original study, Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature, represents an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning scholarship of disability studies and to both Irish and modernism studies. Colangelo's writing is lucid and often elegant. His argument is well organized, clear, and persuasive, and his posture toward others working in the fields in which he engages is notably generous, not only toward the scholars with whom his work is in dialogue but also toward readers who may not have an extensive background in disability studies. As a result, his highly readable introduction not only clearly delineates his own project, but also offers a useful primer on relevant debates in disability studies, and on ongoing post-Enlightenment philosophical debates about the implications of Cartesian subjectivity for our understanding of the self in relation to the body, the senses, and perception.

Colangelo's overall project hones in not primarily on disability but, rather, on its presumed but never-defined counterpart, ability, or on what Colangelo terms the "diaphanous abled body" (1). Colangelo initiates his extended exploration of the incoherence of able-bodiedness as a category in the first paragraph of his acknowledgments by invoking his own experience as a humanities scholar writing a book during the COVID pandemic. He sets forth a beautifully crafted paradox, observing that writing this book during the pandemic made [End Page 155] apparent not only "how much the work of writing a book is the labor of many, regardless of what the byline might tell you," but also "how much [he] miss[es] this codependency when it is so suddenly taken away" (vii). This simple description of the author's own situation during the pandemic introduces the central contradiction with which this study contends: everyone is dependent on others, and yet this dependency is, for most of us, for much of our lives, routinely and compulsorily denied, with results that are themselves distorting and disabling.

As Colangelo readily demonstrates, to be ostensibly not disabled is in no way the same as having complete adequacy and self-sufficiency in every respect. Indeed, to be not disabled is rather like possessing the Lacanian phallus, a condition simultaneously categorical and imaginary. To be in soi-disant possession of a non-disabled body or, in Colangelo's terms, of the "mythic diaphanous abled body," is not, of course, to be superbly able in every respect (whatever that might mean) but, rather, to have a "means to side-ste[p] the omnipresence of weakness and limitation" (4). Thus, self-deception and misrecognition are at the heart of the fundamentally illusory distinction on which the category, disabled, is predicated.

The study's theoretical focus—the illusory nature of the abled/disabled opposition—is well suited to its literary critical engagements with a series of Irish modernist writers (James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, George Egerton, and Elizabeth Bowen). Through a series of adroit critical readings, Colangelo's work amounts to a substantial contribution to "a disability poetics–that is, a theory of how disability relates to and constructs patterns of meaning within works of literature" (22). Championing "literary disability studies [as] a collection of tools and models for reading the construction of abled and disabled bodies generally," Colangelo's focus "on ability rather than disability puts the more abstract processes of social construction at the forefront" (22). This approach results, at times, in a kind of "disability formalism" that positions ability as arising "from a convergence of the enlightenment call to disembodied reason with the role of the novel in constructing the bourgeois subject" (22).

The Cartesian epistemology Colangelo critiques construes the disabled as an easily identified Other, an illusion that is reinforced through the ways we habitually frame our perceptions of our own and others' bodies. Colangelo's inquiry into the implications of this constitutive post-Enlightenment binary opposition as fundamentally perceptual elegantly brings us to the study's first chapter, which takes as its touchstone...