William Blake’s The Book of Los ends with this vision of a human form appearing through darkness, reinforcing a similar image presented in an earlier poem The [First] Book of Urizen (1795). While this form is determined ‘a Human Illusion,’ the poem preceding this statement explores the different facets of embodiment and bodily functions. The poem is framed as a prophetic cry, and it addresses the ways in which the physical embodiment of a form conflicts with the conceptualising of the form itself. The disjunction between perception and presentation creates an epistemological break in what constitutes the human body. Grounding itself in Disability theory, this paper will examine how encountering the human form in Blake necessitates the erasure of what we understand as ‘normative’ and able-bodied. Standardisation is an illusion, one that when pressed, can copen the form to post-human possibilities.

The boundary between the human and the divine has been questioned, contested, and reimagined in many ways throughout history. I propose to examine how this perceived boundary has been shaped by notions of ability and disability. My case study is Johannes Brahms’s choral composition Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), Op. 89 (1882). Based on a bleak poem from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1786 version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen aligns the Greek gods with power and strength, while describing human beings as helpless and despondent, as Margaret Notley (2012) and Nicole Grimes (2019) have argued. Building on their work, I suggest that Brahms portrays the human condition as inherently disabled throughout Gesang der Parzen. 

 

The stanzas that describe the athletic power of the gods employ tonal keys such as F Major (bars 72-80) and C-sharp Minor/Major (bars 81-99). When the text returns to the sorrowful lot of humankind, however, the music takes on a Phrygian color (bar 100ff). Thus, Brahms uses certain musical scales, especially the Phrygian mode, to reflect Goethe's textual dichotomy between the powerful gods and the helpless humans. The association of modal scales with human incapacity was a common trope in 19th-century Austro-German musical culture. Adolph Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), for example, referred to the helpless dependency of the Phrygian mode (The School of Musical Composition, 1841) and the “weak, breathless affect” of the Lydian mode (Ludwig van Beethoven: Life and Works, 1859). Similarly, Brahms’s close friend, the musicologist and Bach scholar Philipp Spitta (1841-1894), wrote about the “solemn and twilight effects of the Phrygian.” By using these modes in Gesang der Parzen, Brahms gestures toward a notion of humankind as disabled, potentially opening a space for disability to be normalized as an intrinsic part of life rather than a pathological condition.

Beasley describes the good human as being governed by the requirement to speak, and to speak well (Beasley, 2021). The requirement for competent and competently speaking humans has been incorporated into the ableist norms to which we are all expected to conform. It is an imperative which is closely linked to other familiar humanist tropes of agency, bodily mastery, and boundedness (Davis, 1995; Moser, 2005), working to inform who can be considered fully human and who, in Campbell’s words, exists in ‘a diminished state of being human’ (Campbell, 2009, p. 5). Despite this, the presence of these ableist norms in relation to impaired speech is relatively under-researched.
Those living with a disability which affects their speech often experience a sense of social disconnection (Miller et al., 2006) and a sense that their humanity often goes unrecognised (Beasley, 2021). We invited Australian adults with life-long experience of impaired speech to talk to us about their experience of their speech and their ability to make themselves heard. These interviews work to place the focus back on the disabled voice, exploring not only how disability and competence are invented through large scale cultural discourses, but also how disabled speakers work within these possibilities, and sometimes at their edges, to invent themselves.
This paper will approach these semi-structured interviews with a view to exploring how impaired speakers navigate and move between various conceptualisations of disability and understandings of competence to position themselves as competent, or incompetent, speakers.
Paying attention to the ways in which impaired speakers play with, draw on, resist and subvert these ableist norms to validate their voices and their humanity allows us to not only expose the networks of beliefs which have invented the (competently speaking, able-bodied) human, but also to begin thinking about how the diversity of human voices might be invented differently.