After providing an overview of modernist disability studies, this essay uses three prone modernist bodies to explore some of the ways weakness, illness, madness, and disability suggest a revisitation of what Paul Saint-Amour has called “the politics of force or strength.” The prone and potent bodies of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz and Elizabeth Bowen’s Madame Fisher and Josephine Mather blur the distinction between active and passive, their strength inseparable from their weakness. Disability in these texts is able to infect the self of the “normate,” replacing the oppositions of self and other, normate and abject, with characteristically modernist instability. By highlighting the ways the prone bodies of these characters collapse such distinctions, this essay sheds light on the ambivalence folded within modernism’s embrace of the active and the fit.

The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.