Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment by Michael D. Snediker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment by Michael D. Snediker Clare Mullaney (bio) Snediker, Michael D. Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment. U of Minnesota P, 2021. 278 pp. $27.00. Since the inception of disability studies in the humanities, metaphor has been a point of contention. Early scholars and activists urged people to relinquish the terms "blind" and "deaf" when referring to moments unrelated to disability. For example, to "turn a deaf ear" to a pressing debate is to equate deafness with dismissal, failing to understand the ways that D/deaf communities communicate without sound. To put it more simply, such figurations efface the realities of disabled peoples' lived experiences. Michael D. Snediker's Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment refuses this rebuff of figuration and its reduction to mere metaphor or allegory. "The substance of chronic pain," he writes, "is substantively . . . figurative in both its movement and work" (2). Or, as he clarifies pages later, "figuration isn't external to . . . lived embodiment: it is lived embodiment" (32). For Snediker, figuration articulates the endlessly shifting presence of chronic pain via language. On the first page of the monograph, Snediker explains that definitions of figuration are never obvious; it is a term "that isn't so easily defined" (1). Attempting to disrupt our binary thinking in which the literal and the figurative are too often pitted against one another, he explains that readers are misguided in "understand[ing] realness and figuration as mutually exclusive" (13). Figuration is not "a form of erasure"; instead, it bears a physicality that accounts for embodied feeling: "this is how it feels . . . but not what it is" (2). With this claim, Snediker follows a trajectory of recent scholarship in literary disability studies that calls for attention not just to literary texts' content but their formal features. Michael Bérubé's The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read models a similar turn, proposing that mental disability does not only adhere to character but presents itself "in the form of a disabled textuality that cannot be attributed simply to any one character's mental operations" (15). Asserting that disabled characters are not, in fact, "real disabled people," Snediker reveals the messiness of such "disabled textuality," tracing how returning pains are located within and outside the body, straddling subjects and objects alike. [End Page 67] Contingent Figure is required reading for anyone working in literary disability studies because it offers a strong case for why pain is inherently figurative. To spend time with Snediker's pages is to mend disciplinary fissures between, on the one hand, a fidelity to the reading practices afforded by literary studies and, on the other, disability studies' critique of careless metaphors. As someone working at this intersection, I am swayed by the ethics of refusing metaphor, but my practices of close reading often negate the very resistance to figuration that I (and others) claim. Snediker's argument allows us to lean into rather than away from disability's many meanings, some of which bear their origins in poems, short stories, and novels. As such, Contingent Figure is less interested in what disability is than in how it feels—the ways chronic pain morphs and morphs again into known and unknown forms. Refusing to settle in any one disciplinary place, Snediker's book blends personal, cultural, and literary meditations. Like many scholars of disability, Snediker begins by sharing his embodied experience—the mutually constitutive relationship between his chronic neck pain and his queer identity, which give rise to ever sprawling claims. Rather than curtail each chapter to a single literary figure or text, every section of Snediker's monograph blossoms into another, modeling the warp and weft of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's textile art with which Contingent Figure's final chapter concludes. In addition to engaging with prominent queer and cultural theorists like Sedgwick and Leo Bersani, Snediker looks to the metaphorical wound signified by Hester's A in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as a chronic condition rather than a character. We witness, too, a stunning close...