Disabled hero, sick society: Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Robert Silverberg’s the man in the Maze

Abstract

As the United States Congress adopted the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, requiring public buildings be made accessible to people with disabilities, Robert Silverberg published The Man in the Maze (serialized 1968; novel 1969), about a disabled man who uses an alien labyrinthine city to shut out abled society. It was a literary reversal typical of the 1960s science fiction (SF) by the New Wave and other writers, who rebelled against-or reversed-the themes, style, and outlook of traditional SF, focusing on “inner” rather than “outer” space and character development and personal relationships over gadgets, exhibiting a pessimism that contrasted with SF’s earlier, optimistic worldview, and striving for a more elevated literary style (Latham, Merrick). In The Man in the Maze, Silverberg takes on the literary challenge of adapting an ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, for a science fictional, near utopian world that seems to embrace the 1960s ideals of free love, elimination of war, complete racial and sexual equality, and technology that can cure nearly anything. Adaptations of classical literature as implicit critiques of political, military, and equal rights themes were popular in that decade (Hall), but Silver-berg takes his work in a new direction, reframing ancient notions of disability in Philoctetes to project contemporary debates about disability into a future that has seemingly eliminated it. In the process, ability and disability come to construct and problematize both individual and collective human identity for the past, present, and future.