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Hunchbacks and Their Cathedrals
I read two books about hunchbacks recently, and something struck me. In both cases, the living quarters of the hunchbacks was very important to them.
In Notre-Dame de Paris (published 1831; I went with the Krailsheimer translation), Victor Hugo describes an almost symbiotic relationship between his hunchback, Quasimodo, and the cathedral of Notre-Dame:
So Quasimodo was in charge of the peal at Notre-Dame.
With time an indefinable close bond had been formed uniting the bell-ringer and the church. Cut off for ever from the world by the double fatality of his unknown birth and his natural deformity, imprisoned since infancy within this double circle from which there was no escape, the poor unfortunate had become accustomed to seeing nothing of the world beyond the religious walls which had received him into their shadow. Notre-Dame had been successively, as he grew and developed, his egg, his nest, his home, his country, his universe. And assuredly there was some sort of mysterious pre-existent harmony between that creature and the building…
Thus is was that little by little, always developing in tune with the cathedral, living, sleeping there, almost never leaving it, subject at every moment to its mysterious pressures, he came to resemble it, to be encrusted on it, so to speak, to become an integral part of it. His protruding angles fitted, if we may be allowed the comparison, the concave angles of the building, and he seemed to be not just its denizen but its natural contents. You could almost say that he had taken its shape, as the snail takes the shape of its shell. It was his abode, his hole, his envelope. Between the old church and him there was an instinctive sympathy so profound and magnetic, and material affinities so numerous, that he somehow adhered to it like the tortoise to its shell. The rugged cathedral was his carapace.
Hugo has Quasimodo expertly swinging from gargoyles, just like I remembered in the Disney movie of my childhood, though the comparison to a monkey and a pre-historic child gives me pause.
It is equally needless to say how familiar the whole cathedral had become to him during so long and intimate a cohabitation. This dwelling place was his. It had no depth which Quasimodo had not penetrated, no height he had not scaled. Many times he had climbed up several elevations of the facade with no help other than the projections of the stone carving… By dint of leaping, climbing, frolicking amid the abysses of the gigantic cathedral, he had become some kind of monkey and chamois, like the Calabrian child who swims before it can walk and from infancy plays with the sea.
That he is not only able but an expert at locomotion in his own cathedral is no long surprising to me, thanks to my understanding of disability concepts like the social model of disability. According to that model, only once at in Paris, on the ground, Quasimodo is disabled, which is indeed reflected in the novel. Of course part of the fun is that Quasimodo cathedral, his carapace, is one of the most famous buildings ever built.
All this said, there are some painfully ableist passages and sentiments in Notre-Dame de Paris. I can try to put a positive spin on that by saying it’s good to see how far we’ve come in 200 years. Overall, it is a good book. Recommended!
The other book was simply called Hunchback and it’s by a Japanese woman named Saou Ichikawa. It’s about a woman with a severe physical disability who lives in a group home, where, among other things, she writes erotica.
For her, this existence in a group home — which she never leaves — is akin to a Nirvana.
For twenty-nine years now, I have been residing in Nirvana. Ever since the day that my underdeveloped muscles had prevented my heart and lungs from maintaining a normal level of oxygen saturation, and I’d grown faint and passed out by the classroom window in my second year of middle school. That makes it almost thirty years since I stopped walking outside, the soles of my shoes scraping along the pavement.
The way she moves around her room in the home is, by physical necessity, highly orchestrated and planned out. It’s not “mysterious,” but it’s also almost like a musician playing an instrument.
Even when moving about inside this one-room apartment of mine, I always planned each and every movement meticulously before getting up.
She’s also not shy to share her inner thoughts and worries about her body and how it meets the world.
The posture that didn’t put a strain on my neck put a strain on my lower back instead, so after thirty minutes I let my legs down into a position that eased my back. In another thirty minutes my neck would grow numb, so I’d fold my legs back up into their standard jigsaw arrangement. All the while, gravity was doing its best to compress my S-shaped backbone still further. Sandwiched as they were between my twisted spine and the hard plastic corrective brace in which my torso was encased so as to better resist gravity’s exhortations, my heart and my lungs used the pulse oximeter readings to make their feelings of constriction known, constantly.
How large should your world be?
I have heard that it’s not good to have a small world. We should want large worlds. That we should frequently get out of our “comfort zones.”
I’m still working to square this moral command with disability as explored here, but who am I to judge Ichikawa’s protagonist and her Nirvana?
I think Hugo shows this traditional “large world better than small world” morality and how it conflicts with (physical) disability quite directly here:
Moreover, it was not only his body which seemed to have been fashioned to fit the cathedral, but his mind too. The state of that soul, the habits it had contracted, the shape it had taken beneath that constricting envelope, leading so unsociable a life…
I’ve been struggling with a wee bit of agoraphobia since the pandemic started. But also, it seems like a trend that once you go deeper into your 30s, abled or otherwise, you just want nicer things, a nicer home. Dedicated wine glasses, an L-shaped couch, and a real vacuum cleaner. Cozy and comfortable or constricting and unsociable? Can we have both?
Twisted body, twisted mind?
It’s one thing to metaphorically equate a physically disabled body to a crab in its shell. It’s another to allege that the soul of a disabled person is “twisted” as their body is. Hugo does this blatantly, with no hesitation, irony, or (apparently) knowledge of the ableism he’s perpetuating:
It is certain that the spirit atrophies in a defective body… His brain was a peculiar medium; the ideas which passed through it merged all twisted. The reflections resulting from such refraction were inevitably divergent and deviant.
More interestingly, here’s a line from Hunchback that I underlined:
Of course the tweetings of a hunchbacked monster would be more twisted than those of someone with a perfectly erect spine.
I’d say it’s slightly more difficult to tease out what Ichikawa is saying here. Does she/her protagonist truly believe that the thoughts of a seriously disabled person are more “twisted” than an able-bodied person? Does she truly see herself as a monster? Is that (internalized) ableism, or is it a realistic understanding of the effects of an ableist society on disabled people and their (darker) senses of humor?