ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 turns to Wallace’s fascination with anomalous bodies, with deformity, disability, and disfigurement. Each of Wallace’s fictions to some degree explore anomalous bodies, whether that be Rick Vigorous, Mario Incandenza, or Johnny One-Arm. However, rather than reading these through a disabilities studies approach, the chapter examines Wallace’s use of ‘crip humour,’ a mode of comedy that usually involves the members of that group. Arguing against the idea that Wallace uses disability simply as a literary trope, what Mitchell and Schnyder would call an ‘opportunistic metaphor,’ I suggest that Wallace, in his conception of all bodies as inherently and multifariously disabled and disabling, encourages a sense of community predicated on this idea, and that as a result he sees no distinction between the ‘multiple amputee’ and the ‘weak-chinned’ (Davis 2013, 222; IJ, 192). It is in his portrayals of the non-typical that Wallace uses the double bind to greatest effect, and no more so than through his use of crip humour. Here, while saying something about the corporeally atypical body, I argue also that for Wallace disability is universal and therefore unifying.
