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"What's Your Story, Son?": Disability and Narrative in Stewart Parker's Hopdance

Hopdance, a novel by the Northern Irish playwright Stewart Parker, was published for the first time in 2017, twenty-nine years after its author’s death.1 It is in many ways autobiographical, based on Parker’s own traumatic experience of acquired disability. Parker started writing the work in the 1970s, long after he had had his leg amputated at the age of nineteen becauses of a rare form of bone cancer. His biographer Marilynn Richtarik explains that Parker desired fervently, at the time, “to appear merely inconvenienced by his loss,” and so “threw himself back into his old activities with an intensity that left him little opportunity to reflect on it”—his avoidance of the topic being further motivated by the fear “that the cancer could recur.”2 Yet, his need to come to terms with this experience resurfaced years later; Richtarik goes on to note that Parker confided to an interviewer in 1977 that “he sought to exorcise the trauma by getting it out of his head and into the page.”3 Parker completed the first draft of the novel in 1973, but set it aside. He returned to it only in the 1980s, when he decided to reorganize the structure completely. He was unable to complete the reorganization, however, before his untimely death in 1988. An episodic and unchronological text, the novel has certain features of a trauma narrative, Hopdance is mostly written as a third-person limited narrative in which the narrator reports the events from the perspective of the main character, who is Parker’s alter ego, a narrative strategy that suggests a form of dissociative withdrawal on the author’s part. Clare Wallace, in a recent article on Hopdance, notes that “pulsing at the center of the novel is the matter of pain— its imperative force and the protagonist’s efforts to find a means of articulating