What can an autistic perspective in novels show us about contemporary subjectivity?
Tom Cutterham:
Christopher Boone loves prime numbers and hates being touched. Oskar Schell has a hyperactive imagination. He won't swear, but he will say, "Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake." The behavioral problems of Christopher and Oskar, the respective narrators and protagonists of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, are never explicitly labeled as autistic spectrum disorders, In a brief statement, worth reading, Mark Haddon has written that "Curious Incident is not a novel about Asperger's... If anything, it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider."but it has been easy for readers to identify them in these terms. As much as both novels have relied on an existing public understanding of autism, they have each -- supported by stage and screen adaptations -- also helped to construct it. More than any other two books, these have encoded the autistic perspective into a literary trope with its own set of mechanisms and effects.
While both the novels have male protagonists, and males are about four times more likely to have autistic spectrum disorders than females, the most prominent autobiographies of autism have been by women: See Temple Grandin's Emergence and Donna Williams' Nobody Nowhere.What distinguishes the autistic person is a difficulty gaining access to other people's minds. TNI Vol. 18: Family Planning is out now. Subscribe for $2 and get it today. He lacks the ability to reconstruct and predict thoughts, feelings, desires, and reactions. The neurologist Simon Baron-Cohen has called this "mindblindness." Those who don't suffer from this problem, on the other hand, unconsciously translate myriad physical and symbolic cues -- subtext, allusion, tone, and all the elements of body language. In Baron-Cohen's terms, we can read minds.
Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 3, 2013 2:42 AM
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