ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 is concerned with the ageing body. Disabilities theorists have made us aware that, as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, ‘Every life evolves into disability, making it perhaps the essential characteristic of being human’ (2005, 524). Wallace’s fear of bodies manifests in a related fear of ageing, one that is pervasive and remarkably consistently articulated throughout his writings. He seems to agree that life is necessarily a series of incremental steps, or incremental (sometimes exponential) movements along the already ambiguous spectrum from able to disabled. Ageing, for Wallace, has to do both with the physical and the social restriction of being, and, perhaps more, the radical curtailment of the already radically curtailed will. That said, his conception of the horrors of ageing is gendered; for the male subject, it has more to do with the loss of freedom, succumbing to the realities of adult life typified by a chronic boredom that borders on despair; for the female, ageing has more to do with the body and its multiple failures. It is in the ‘older’ female, the ‘ropy’ and ‘sexless,’ that we see Wallace’s most troubling but most visceral fears of and for the body and its inevitable decline. Indeed, this word ‘older’ is itself interesting and is discussed here. Of course, the eventual end point of the be outside of, bereft of the body.
