MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, representations of conjoined twins have provided a means of opening a critical dialogue about the phantom boundaries between oppositional pairs—self and other, mind and body, and normal and abnormal, to name but a few. Placing greater emphasis on the material body and individual struggles, including the relation between physical conjoinment and other forms of difference, such as racial dissidence, contemporary fiction draws attention to the relationship between the individual and the collective. In doing so, it creates what disability scholar Susan Peters refers to as an “enduring hyphenation” in which personal identity and the lived body form a dynamic bond with shared communal experience (1996: 231).

This paper examines the ways in which Cutting for Stone, by novelist-surgeon, Abraham Verghese, promotes an understanding of disability as a category of identity that is shaped simultaneously by the individual body and the meaning that the body has come to bear within a wider social context—both in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a nation on the brink of revolution, and in New York City. It also, as this paper will show, opens up the representation of conjoined twins and disabled people more generally, in order to critique the process of representation as a whole.

Cutting for Stone, in the way that it tackles both the material reality of the body as well as its position as a socially constructed entity, offers a nuanced understanding of physical difference that challenges both the medical and the social models of disability. Importantly, conjoinment is neither presented as a purely medical condition associated with the body nor is physical difference entirely socially imposed. The emphasis throughout the text lies on the individual’s own experience and negotiation of the physical realities and social meanings of the body. Thus, for instance, Marion is not victimized through a physical condition, but rather chooses conjoinment as a means of describing his identity and narrating his life story. In a sense, then, an imagined disabled or non-normative body is not a sign of failure, but presented as another form of existing in the world and understanding the self. In this novel, the category of the ‘other’ assumes an empowering and enabling role: Marion is not ‘othered’ by society because of his separation, but he ‘others’ himself by reading himself as conjoined throughout his life.

At the same time, the body is not denied, even though the very distinction between an essentialist and constructionist reading of the body is rendered problematic. Marion continues to long for Shiva (the brother from which he was separated) because he was ‘born’ conjoined, which may imply an essentialist, biologically determined connection between the two brothers. However, it is also possible to argue that Marion actively constructs himself as a conjoined twin through his reading and medical learning. As a result, it is impossible to decide whether his longing for his brother is biologically determined or a result of Marion’s own construction of his identity and life story. Ultimately, the novel does not dissolve this tension and points therefore to the significance of acknowledging the individual’s own negotiation of his body and its meaning.