Hacking - Autism Fiction: A Mirroring of an Internet Decade?

Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?

Ian Hacking

University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2010,pp. 632-655 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto PressDOI: 10.1353/utq.2010.0225

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I A N H A C K I N G

Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an InternetDecade?

ABSTRACT

In the past decade there has been an extraordinary explosion of literature – both

fiction and non-fiction – in which autism plays a key role. This paper surveys

the very diverse genre that has resulted and examines some of its effects on the

evolution of our understanding of autism and on our ability to talk about autistic

experience. It also notes the role of the Internet in enabling autistic people to inter-

act with others while avoiding the difficulties of face-to-face interaction. It

proposes that the public fascination with autistic texts mirrors the dominance of

the Internet in daily life. Both such texts and the Internet itself represent radical

changes in the horizon of communication.

Keywords: autism, autism fiction, Haddon, Coupland, aliens

Autism narrative is a boom industry. Autobiographies. Biographies. Stageplays. Movies. Documentaries. Novels. Stories for children. Improvingmanga for adults. Space fantasy comics for more-or-less grown-ups,now called graphic novels. There’s the exhilarating 2007 HBO special,Autism: The Musical, about a group in Los Angeles who put together amusical in which the singers are autistic children. And above all, thereis a vast amount of story-telling on the Internet, which has become aliving home for so many autistic people. There are even retroactiveautism novels; I mean famous old novels that are reread as novelswhose characters are autistic.

My question is not about autism but about our times. Why shouldautism stories so flourish today, when they were virtually non-existenta quarter century ago? Most of the stories date from after 2000. Whatdoes the extraordinary proliferation of the genre show about ourdecade? If, by analogy with the sixties or the nineties, we call thisdecade the oughts, is autism the pathology of the oughts, mirrored inits fictions?

The idea that decades or epochs have pathologies has been around atleast since Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978). One of her secondarythemes was that every era has its own illness, which shows as much aboutthe age as about the disease. Tuberculosis was the cultural icon and moral

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

doi: 10.3138/utq.79.2.632

marker of the nineteenth century. She singled out cancer as the pathologyof her own time. Her book was a tour de force, using the ways in whichher own body suffered, in order to achieve a heightened awareness ofwhat was said about cancer.

Sontag observes how cancer, which is basically a disease of aging thatattacks a few younger people as well, was turned into an enemy thatshould be fought with moral weapons such as meditation, diet, andsupport groups. This viewpoint implied that your cancer was somehowyour fault, to be countered with moral rearmament. To be merelymedical was to lose ethical stature. The obituary tag ‘died after a longbattle with cancer’ implicitly recalled our earlier battles with Satan.Sontag later applied similar reflections to the scourge of the eighties inAIDS and Its Metaphors.

One now encounters the idea that autism is the pathology of ourdecade. Sontag is usually forgotten as the source and wellspring ofthis line of thought. The idea does not call into question the reality ofautism, any more than Sontag doubted the reality of cancer. It suggestsonly that the heightened awareness of autism may reflect some moregeneral features of our time. But I am the kind of philosopher whoattends to petty detail and who resists sweeping generalization. Ifocus on a tiny but illustrative thread in a much larger tapestry.Certainly I shall not engage in a general reflection on the cultural mean-ings of autism. For that one may wish to read Stuart Murray’s veryuseful Representing Autism. The present essay is self-consciously (anddeliberately) less ambitious. It chooses a local phenomenon, theexplosion of autism stories, and wonders at the end how that relatesto the radical change in modes of human communication caused bythe Internet.

T H E G E N R E

It is no exaggeration to speak of a boom industry. You will get a dauntingreading list just by scanning the titles at the end of this piece. A year ago Isuggested to Alastair Cheng, the assistant editor and associate publisherof Canadian Literary Reviews, that he look around for autism novels. (Hepublished my review in April 2009.) He recently wrote, ‘Ever since Idid that original search for autism-related fiction titles, I seem to beseeing them everywhere.’

Well-written autism tales prosper on their own merits, even if they alsocash in on a fashion. Rupert Isaacson’s family adventure, The Horse Boy,has, at the time of writing, just been published. Father and autisticfive-year-old son go to Mongolia in search of healing from shamansand from friendship with horses. Even before the duo had embarkedon their trip (of only four weeks!), let alone written the book, Little

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Brown paid advance royalties of over a million dollars.1 That fits theprofile of a booming literary industry.

The best-known autism novel is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident ofthe Dog in the Night-Time. The author is a long-time professional writer ofyoung adult fiction. His publishers had the wit to market the book in twoformats, one directed at the public that reads middlebrow novels, and theother directed at teenagers. They hit the jackpot: 2003 Whitbread Book ofthe Year and a genuine bestseller.

Temple Grandin was the first autistic autobiographer. She has gone fromstrength to strength, not only with her books and other media productionsabout autism, but also with her remarkable improvements to Americanabattoirs. Her books (such as 1986; 1995; 2009) are only a fragment of hermedia productions – consult her website to see their ample scope. Ofother autobiographies, Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere was on theNew York Times bestseller list for months in 1993, and the sequel,Somebody Somewhere, did almost as well. Her website, too, is rich invarious types of product. Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day also madeit to the New York Times bestseller lists in 2007. Autie-biographies, asDonna Williams calls them, continue to flourish. There are also many bio-graphies of autistic people, usually written by a member of the family.Many aim at uplift, but some are honestly grim. The most recentexample of the latter is Karl Greenfield’s Boy Alone. Karl’s severely autisticbrother absorbed all his parents’ time and love from his 1960s birthonward, so there were two boys alone, one of whom, Karl, crashedthrough a disastrous adolescence to come out angry and a bit self-pitying,while the other is still ‘alone,’ institutionalized.

The success of most of the books just mentioned is well earned. Thegenres of both autistic fact and autistic fiction are, to be polite, muchmore variable in quality, but many of the lesser lights are thriving too.Why? It is not the somewhat unrelenting stream of more or less factualaccounts that concern me here, but the astounding proliferation of fiction.

T H E A U T I S M M A N I F O L D

Before canvassing the many sensible answers, we need to grasp thebreadth and depth of autistic fiction. There are literally hundreds ofworks, so I shall give only a sampling, chosen for variety, and backedup by the titles referenced below. I give a number of plot summaries,not for their intrinsic interest, but to provide a window onto the enormous

1 Motoko Rich, ‘Galloping toward Hope: An Adventure in Combating Autism,’ New YorkTimes, 15 April 2009. This was a family trip. The title and the publicity emphasize thefather, but Isaacson’s wife, Kristin Neff, was there too. She is director of the SelfCompassion Research Lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

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range of the genre. You might imagine that if you have read one autismnovel, you have read them all. If so, you are in for a big surprise. Here Iam playing on a standard saying in autism circles: if you know one autis-tic child, you know one autistic child.

That saying well emphasizes that people diagnosed with autism varyenormously in their difficulties. Yet I shall not distinguish kinds ofautism, unless the distinction is made by one of my authors. We do notunderstand the causes of autism well enough to make valid distinctions.It is now common, perhaps even standard practice, to write about theautistic spectrum, and of autism spectrum disorders, standardized bythe initialism ASDs. I don’t. Since ordinary spectra are linear, thisjargon misleadingly suggests a single dimension from severe to high-functioning. Spectra come from physics. Think of Newton’s red-orange-yellow-blue-indigo-violet produced by a prism, which wenow know to be a continuum of increasing wavelengths. Autism is notlike that.

Metaphors tend to be dangerous. I think ‘manifold’ is pretty safe. TheOED gives as its first definition of the adjective, ‘Varied or diverse inappearance, form or character, having various forms, features, relations,applications etc.’ In mathematics and physics, a manifold is a space thatin the very small looks familiar, like ordinary Euclidean space, but inthe large is much more complex. Manifolds are not simply linear; theycome in any number of dimensions. Hence the idea captures, far betterthan the metaphor of a spectrum, our present awareness of autism.

The most familiar name in the autism manifold is Asperger’s, after theAustrian pediatrician who published some cases of childhood autism in1944. That was the year after Leo Kanner, an Austrian emigre to JohnsHopkins, had published cases of ‘infantile autism.’ Kanner’s childrenhad severe language impairments, as well as difficulties in social relationsand a sort of obsessive fixedness and inability to pretend or to play likemost children do. Hans Asperger’s cases did not have the sameproblem with learning language, and so, in 1980, the British psychiatristLorna Wing proposed that his name be used for autistic children whoacquired speech quite easily. The label has really caught on, but Wingnow regrets its success. It may disappear from the next Diagnostic andStatistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.

At any rate I shall not mention Asperger’s or other variants of autism,unless an author specifically does so. I shall speak simply of autismthroughout. This conforms to a lot of practice in autism fiction and biogra-phy. For example, publicity for the Horse Boy constantly refers to thechild’s autism; in fact, Isaacson’s son was not diagnosed with autismbut with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.Publishers take their pick when marketing their products. DanielTammett’s Born on a Blue Day was sold in the United Kingdom as A



Memoir of Asperger’s and an Extraordinary Mind, and in the United States asInside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. The 2006 comic –graphic novel – by Jeff Davidson and Stephen Buell, Fragile Prophet,brusquely announces on page 7 that the little hero, Jake, is not a ‘tardo’and that he is autistic. In fact he suffers from fragile-X syndrome, a raregenetic disorder that includes symptoms of autism. Jake seldom speaks,but when he does, he prophesies horrible futures – and he is right.

To go back to an early merging of fact and fiction, Dustin Hoffman’sRain Man of 1988 put autism on the public map. It was to a large extentmodelled on a real person, the late Kim Peek. Peek was a remarkablesavant who had a malformed brain and also probably had a very specificand rare genetic condition called FG syndrome. These may have partlyaccounted for his savant capacity, and also for some autist-like behaviour,but most experts now would say he was not autistic. Rain Man was greatat advancing autism advocacy, but gives a completely misleading imageof the autist as savant.

With the exception of fragile-X and a few other rarities such as FG, wehave no idea what causes autistic-like symptoms. Hence all distinctionsare tentative. Some autistic children are more capable of getting onwith their families and members of their age-cohort than others, andmay be called high-functioning, but that is only the beginning of astory. For present purposes, there is just a collection of difficulties.

Present culture and present psychiatry emphasize the cognitive. Forexample, hyperactivity in children, a behavioural problem, was a centraltopic in pedagogy and psychiatry from the 1930s to the 1960s, the erawhen behaviourism ruled psychology. After the cognitive revolution ofthe 1960s, it became attention deficit disorder, a cognitive problem. Evenwhen, by compromise, it is filed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,the problem is officially supposed to be cognitive, and the hyperactivity aconsequence of cognitive deficit. Autism seriously came on the scene inthe 1960s and so was treated as a cognitive disability. But many aspectsof autism are filed as cognitive only because of the cognitive paradigm.The bodies of many autistic people often work poorly. Seizures are afamiliar fact of life for many. Sensory overload is common and is perhapswhat causes many violent tantrums. Sounds are too loud, colours toobright, or tastes are too piquant; touch may also be painful. Even the sen-sation of water being swallowed may be intense. Some autists have pro-blems with initiating or stopping motion. Many autistic children calmthemselves by flapping their hands or performing other sorts of obsessivemovement or fidgeting. Perhaps only the research interests of our timeslead us to say this is a cognitive issue.

It is good to emphasize, as advocacy groups often do, that each autisticperson is different in his or her own ways. Autism is a complex andill-understood manifold of differences. That is why I evade subcategories.

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What about people who are not autistic? They are surely far more variousthan those in the autism manifold. One influential group of autism advo-cates now call them all, including me and perhaps you, ‘neurotypicals.’Often the word is used in a disparaging way; we neurotypicals just donot understand anything. Stripped of that connotation, I find the worduseful and will use it from time to time.

C R E A T I N G A L A N G U A G E

In an earlier essay, ‘Autistic Autobiography,’ I argued that in addition tothe telling of gripping personal battles and victories, autobiographies bygifted people with autism have evolved an unexpected role. They havebeen creating a language in which to talk about autistic experience.Every human language has evolved its own ways to describe the experi-ences of neurotypicals. Poets and novelists and the broad mass of workersand peasants have been honing their languages since time immemorial. Iam not of that school of philosophy that despises what it jeeringly calls‘folk psychology’ and would replace ordinary descriptions of what wefeel and think with yesterday’s neurological talk. Ordinary languages,English in Toronto or Quechua in the Andes, are the ways in whichpeoples in English- or Quechua-speaking worlds convey their experi-ences. What is said in one language about a feeling or a state of mindcan often but not always be said in another. But there has been nolanguage for expressing the lives of autistic people until recently.Autistic autobiographies have been helping to create this new discoursein English, for nearly all the autobiographies are in English. But whatthey have developed is slowly spreading to other languages.

I have continued the argument of ‘language-creation,’ in passing fromautobiography to fiction, in ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk aboutAutism: A Role for Stories.’ One could well ask whether the ways inwhich autistic people tell their own stories are instructively differentfrom the ways in which neurotypicals write their fictions about autisticprotagonists. Do they contribute to ‘language-creation’ in differentways? No, because they – and their editors – all read each other andjointly create the new ways of describing experience. In a sense there islittle difference between the finished products because the novelists, thebiographers, and the autobiographers all feed on each other.

My interest here is very different from that of the two essays justmentioned. I am not discussing how autism stories help communicatean understanding of autism, and even develop ways of speaking aboutautistic experience. I do think that they are helping to generate a new dis-course in which to frame a long-ignored aspect of the human condition.But here my concern is wholly external. Why are neurotypicals today sofascinated by autism? What does the fascination show about our times?



C O R R E C T B U T B A N A L P A R T I A L E X P L A N A T I O N S O F T H E G E N R E

There are plenty of small-scale boosters of sales for autism stories. Someof the people who read autism fiction are themselves autistic individuals,or their family members or friends. Then there is the larger class ofreaders who are beginning to wonder if they themselves, or their familymembers or friends, are autistic. There is, among other things, a scareabout autism, and people do read autism novels to get a sense of whatit is about. That unspoken fear cannot be gainsaid. (I had it at the birthsof my two youngest grandchildren.) And of course there is a copycateffect. One top success – Haddon’s Dog – naturally and properlyinvites other authors to try their hand. I shall mention some of the solidjourneyman work in which autism plays a central role in the plot; someof these sell not because of autism but because they are good novels. Itis the larger genre that concerns me, and for that I need a few startlingportraits. I want to establish that we are concerned with a phenomenon,not just quantity of books, but diversity of content and markets.

I need to give an impression of how various the phenomenon is. A listof titles and topics gives no idea. I must convey the intensity of some ofthe writing. My aim is not literary criticism, although it would be jejuneto pretend to have no judgments: better to be upfront with one’s reactionsand one’s prejudices. I want to give a sense of the genre in all its variety,richness, and sometimes silliness. At the end I shall emphasize somenovels that enlarge on connections between autism and computing orthe Internet. The richer diet of examples that precedes them will makeplain that, although I find these novels significant for what is saidabout autism, they are only one part of a vastly larger picture.

S P O O N F A C E S T E I N B E R G

To begin with the unexpected, let us take a hit radio play. SpoonfaceSteinberg began on the BBC, whose listeners voted it one of the best tenradio dramas of all time. The author is Lee Hall, the prolific British play-wright in his forties. He wrote the screenplay for Billy Elliot, the movie.After playing with Elton John lyrics in London and Sydney, the musicaltook ten of the 2009 Tony awards on Broadway, including Best Musical,Best Book of Musical, and, uniquely, the three different teenage actorswho rotate the role shared the Best Actor award. In short, the character,or personage, won the Best Actor Award.

Hall does personages. For philosophers, one of his works isWittgenstein on Tyne. Like a number of contemporary British and Irishplaywrights, he does, or at any rate used to do, monologues – sometimesseveral interweaving ones. These earlier plays work as much by theunderlying versification as by the content of the words used. Spoonface

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Steinberg is one such work, a 1997 radio drama, which did not do well onthe London stage but seems to have an afterlife in British student actinggroups. It has played at the Kennedy Center and other importantvenues around the world, but it seems never to have as happy a life onstage as it did on radio.

This is doubly fitting. First, it is the sound of the words that matters,and there are no actions. Seven-year-old Spoonface was played on stageby a gifted forty-four-year-old actress who just sat on a stool. Second,autism is the pathology of absence of social interaction, absence of eyecontact. Hence faceless radio, like faceless (despite Facebook) Internet,must be its chosen medium.

The play is a monologue by a Jewish girl whose parents are divorcingand whose mother is a drunk. Spoonface is autistic, she is dying of leuke-mia, and she idolizes the dying scenes sung by Maria Callas. (If only Icould grow up and sing them!) She also treats us in passing to a medita-tion on the Holocaust. By word count, these themes appear about equallyoften in the play, but one-sentence accounts always highlight the girl’sautism. Notice that we have an entire roster of current obsessions:cancer, child abuse, Shoah, drink, divorce, and young death, all piledup on top of autism.

A few snotty theatre critics who saw the play on stage thought it wasmaudlin. I agree, but that is of no moment to Spoonface as a social phenom-enon. The responses of radio audiences are what counts. The BBC sold35,000 copies of the audio cassette directly after the program aired.

The girl named Spoonface conforms to no stereotype of autism. Herlanguage is far too lucid to serve as something to which many autisticpeople could aspire. Lack of empathy is the common fate of autisticpeople. But our heroine empathizes, if only in a sentimental way, withthe sufferings of others: in the camps, or with TB, and even her ownparents. Even her name, ‘Spoonface,’ better suggests Down’s syndromethan autism. The play nevertheless effected a profound change in percep-tions of autism. Those 35,000 people who bought the cassette can nowthink of autistic children aged seven as having a rich emotional life.

N O T S E N S A T I O N A L I S M

You may wonder if the fascination with autism in fiction is just sensation-alism. I fear that some may make that accusation even against Spoonface.There is no doubt that different mental conditions can excite a frenzy ofexploitation. My own experience is with that strange phenomenon of yes-teryear, multiple personality. I encountered a lot of story-telling aboutmultiples. There are fascinating and classic old tales – by Hoffmann,Hogg, or Dostoevsky, for which any reader may be grateful. But inthe period when multiple personality disorder (MPD) flourished,



1970–1994, there were oodles of sensational novels about people withalter personalities. Most of it was trash. (My own account of theseevents is in my 1995 book, Rewriting the Soul.) I am glad that, like disso-ciative identity disorder itself (as MPD was renamed in 1994), this kindof writing has mostly gone away. Even the current reincarnation, orremultiplication, of MPD, in the sitcom The United States of Tara, is sooth-ing. It is in the ‘we can all get along together’ format, ‘we’ being all ofTara’s family and her various me’s.

There was once talk of an epidemic of MPD. There is recent talk of anepidemic of autism. They both produced a spate of fiction. So I need tomake plain that they are completely different phenomena, both medicallyand from a literary point of view. Most cases of autism are undoubtedlyneurological, while most cases of dissociative identity disorder (DID)are not. Autism may be a heritable trait, but DID certainly isn’t.Multiple personality, and its nineteenth-century manifestation calleddouble consciousness, were what I call transient mental illnesses – asexplained in my book Mad Travelers. A transient mental illness is onethat thrives only in certain times and places, in what I call a ‘niche.’Autism, although brought to the fore only in our own time, is not transi-ent, despite the way in which a few theorists have tried to transfer myniche analysis to autism. More plausibly, certain types of current socialarrangement and malaise – a niche of a sort – have projected autismonto centre stage among psychopathologies. But autism, whatever it is,and however we reorganize or rediagnose its characteristics in thefuture, will not prove to be transient.

To avoid any misunderstanding, it may be necessary to hammer homethis observation in a mindlessly blunt way. It must by now be widelyrecognized that after an initial joyful flurry, the formerly trendy enthu-siasm for talking about ‘social construction’ is not worth the candle. Butif anyone should still want to use that language that I deplore, they cansay that MPD was ‘socially constructed’ while autism is for real.

This is not to say that the label ‘autism’ has some fixed and unchangedreferent. On the contrary, there is a complex history of its movement fromthe early 1940s to the present. That history includes the passage fromautism as rare to autism as common or ‘epidemic.’ Autism has beentaking up space once allotted to mental retardation, a process admirablyanalyzed by Gil Eyal and his co-authors in The Autism Matrix. In a recentlypublished lecture, ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets,’ I have used autismas one of two primary examples in a continuation of my theme of ‘makingup people.’

The fact that autism is what we might call a classification-in-motiondoes not imply that we are concerned with something artificial or madeup. Last night (23 July 2009) I had at my door a man from my neighbour-hood soliciting for a charity. It is a charity he himself has just succeeded in

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founding, for adult autists. His twenty-seven-year-old-son is one. Theman at my door is a labourer, an immigrant, not strong in English,unused to bureaucracies, but over two years he managed to convincethe Canadian government to allow him to found this charity, namedafter his son, for tax-deduction purposes. The aim is to afford to hireone full-time trained person to help attend to the needs of seven adultautists, all of whom are in institutions, and all of whom have beenbrutalized because they are difficult people. A big strong mutetwenty-seven-year-old man having a tantrum, and an understaffed for-profit institution, are not a happy mix. We are not talking somethingmade up here, even if the classification and the very name ‘autism’have histories. We are talking a depressing moment of horrible localhistory, and a valiant attempt to light a candle in the darkness.

T R I U M P H O V E R A D V E R S I T Y

There is always a morbid fascination with the odd. But, to repeat, thesituation of autism is not like that of multiple personality disorder in itsheyday. The MPD novels and made-for-TV movies were voyeurism thatused a sensational behaviour much in the news in order to reworkgothic themes. The autism narrative seldom assumes that form. Autisticcharacters are usually portrayed as people who are interesting in theirown right and not just because they are strange, or worthy of thereader’s sympathy. Moreover autism stories, from autobiographies tocomics, are almost always upbeat and uplifting. ‘A triumph of thehuman spirit,’ as the Daily Telegraph said of The Horse Boy, a line muchused in the book’s publicity.2 I have yet to encounter an autistic villain,though one must be in press, so ample is this genre. Doubles as villains,on the other hand, are two a penny, starting, if you will, with Mr Hyde.3

The graphic novel Fragile Prophet, also mentioned above, equally exem-plifies triumph over adversity. Jake, the Fragile Prophet, is about to die ina foreseen car-smash. He transfers his power to a foetus that will growinto a baby whom medical genetics will soon be able to cure, and thenbecome a man, whose prophesies make him able to shape the world forthe good ‘more than any man before him.’ That captures, in its exagger-ated way, one guiding theme of autism fiction.

If such fantasy helps make neurotypicals look at autistic people withfresh eyes, so much the better. If it provides some solace to families and

2 For example, in the full-page advertisement, New York Times 15 April 2009, quoting thereview by Jane Shilling, ‘Triumph of the Human Spirit,’ Daily Telegraph 6 March 2009.(The book was first published in the United Kingdom.)

3 Having just implied that dissociation as a literary theme is dead, I have to own up to acounter-example in a recent thriller by Fred Vargas, Dans les bois eternels.



friends, to think of their loved ones as being not just different but special,that is wonderful. The trouble is that it perpetuates the myth of the autisticchild or person as being imbued with special, nay fantastic, gifts that theneurotypicals lack. And that is a harmful fiction. Some people diagnosedwith autism are indeed able to develop unusual skills, often, as we shallnotice below, on the edge of computer or similar technology. Some peoplewith those skills self-diagnose as autistic. But many others are like thetwenty-seven-year-old man of the preceding section. It may be comfortingto think of all autistic people as having their own unique endowments,and perhaps even being secret savants, but that is an illusion that doesno one any good. Unfortunately a lot of autism fiction fosters that illusion.

S O L I D C R A F T S M A N S H I P

Some stories in which the central character is autistic are fine examples ofjourneyman writing, where the autism of a character is essential to theplot, and yet is just one facet of a complex human being. Examples areMargot Livesey’s romance Banishing Verona (2004), and Karin Fossum’sScandinavian thriller Black Seconds (first published in Norwegian in2002). Other books, also the work of professional novelists, are perhapstoo eager to carry messages about autism and the family to succeed asnovels in their own right. Examples are novels by mothers of autisticsons, such as Cammie McGovern’s 2006 mystery, Eye Contact, and MartiLeimbach’s Daniel Isn’t Talking of the same year. Sometimes a majorpiece is written to make the life of the autistic person or his family acces-sible to others. One notable example is Keiko Tobe’s many-volume mangaWith the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, appearing in English 2007–09. TheJapanese made-for-TV anime version swept the 41st Television DramaAcademy Awards in Tokyo, 2004.

Whether the point of the book is autism, as with Leimbach, McGovern,and Tobe, or autism is merely incidental, as with Fossum and Livesey, theportrayals of autistic characters are virtually always supportive. Theyoften give a plausible impression of the life of a real person. Livesey’shero finds happiness; Fossum’s book is deeply sad. In either case thefigures are not in general weirdoes, as were fictional multiple personal-ities. The male hero of Livesey’s Banishing Verona is exceptional, but inan ordinary, human way. It is not that he has gifts that others lack, butthat he lacks vices others have. Many people with autism have no ideaof pretending and are obsessively truthful. Livesey exploits this fact inher plot. Her heroine lives in a world full of cheats and liars; the hero’ssimple truth-telling contributes to her falling in love with him, after anumber of alarming, but merely romantic, escapades. Conversely thesad autistic figure of Fossum’s mystery – and his aging mother – justhang in trying to get along in a cruel world.

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E X P L O I T A T I O N F A N T A S Y

And then there are the bad apples. No genre can avoid dismal failures.How bad can you get? There’s a mediaeval manuscript book on displayat the entrance to the Yale library. Scientists have determined that it iswritten in a language, but not one known on the face of this earth.There is a priest, lovably Irish-named, secretly embedded by theVatican in the library to guard it. Name of the Rose? Da Vinci Code? Betteryet. A mute autistic boy on a school tour goes over to the book andstarts reading it aloud. The Vatican guardian just happens to be passingby and overhears. All hell breaks loose. This tale is called The Tongues ofthe Dead. The author, Brad Kelln, is a forensic scientist in Halifax, NovaScotia.

The unreadable book (I mean the one at Yale, not the one under discus-sion) is written in the language of the fallen angels. The autistic boy is afallen angel! The Vatican has a special office dedicated to expunging sur-viving fallen angels and any traces they may have left. It launches twoscary creatures to kidnap the boy. The author passes them off as fallenangels, until revealing that they are lepers. He has read somewhere thatthis is an old Vatican ploy: use lepers to do your foul deeds. But tworeal fallen angels are also after the boy. They have a sideline in bodysnatching to make themselves incarnate. And there is a top secretVatican agent dispatched from Thailand, where he is top-secreting onanother mission. The lovable priest and the boy escape to Nova Scotia.(Underground railroad!) Just after they cross the border, they go to adiner for breakfast. The pancakes are served with real maple syrup. Youcan count on the triumph of Canadian Decency from here on in.

All the bad guys hotly pursue them, keenly followed at a distance bythe head ogre in the Holy Office in Rome. They are foiled by a homelessman who is being treated by a shrink who has a son who is inadvertentlykilled by the bad guys but miraculously recovers. Homeless Man NotMad: He Knows More Than They Do. The foiling is only partial, for theautistic lad has meanwhile been withered to death by a leper or fallenangel, I forget which. But perhaps you already figured out the miracleof the psychiatrist’s son who recovered. He did not recover; his bodywas snatched by the autistic boy who passes as the beloved son, sothere is a fallen angel still on the loose in the last line of the book.

A L I E N S

It is a cute gimmick to make an autistic boy into a fallen angel. It is anextreme form of the trope of the autist as alien, a topic that I have dis-cussed at length in an essay called ‘Humans, Aliens, and Autism.’ Ithas been attractive for neurotypicals who wanted to express how autistic



people seemed strange, foreign, incomprehensible – in short, alien. But itwas also an attractive way for some autistic people to express theirdifference: it is the neurotypicals who are the aliens! Temple Grandinmust have helped set the ball rolling when in a conversation withOliver Sacks she said, ‘Much of the time I feel like an anthropologist onMars’ (Sacks 295.) He took the phrase as the title of his bestsellingbook. We neurotypicals feel like Martians to Grandin.

There are books with titles like this: Through the Eyes of Aliens (1998).The author, Jasmine Lee O’Neill, is herself autistic. Or Jean KearnsMiller’s 2003 Women from Another Planet? Miller is afflicted by, amongother things, Asperger’s syndrome. She has organized a women’s collec-tive to tell stories of their lives with Asperger’s. One of its chapters is‘How I Came to Understand the Neurotypical World.’ You can hear twotypes of voice behind these titles. O’Neill says, yes, we are aliens, and itis great to be different, quirks and all. Miller says no, we are not; we arewomen here on Earth out to reorganize social norms.

Autistic people can, then, be pictured as alien for non-autistic people,and non-autistic people as alien for autistic people. The online story of theextragalactic planet Aspergia brings out this symmetry. UnhappilyAspergians have been exiled to Earth where Earthlings regard them asalien. But likewise, Earthlings are an alien life form for Aspergians.4

Perhaps the demise of this site indicates a dimming enthusiasm for thisonce-comforting folk tale, but variants continue.

I have not mentioned autism stories for children, many of which aredidactic. They suggest ways in which neurotypical children can orshould think of autistic children they meet in school, of ways in whichautistic children may carve out roles for themselves in the neurotypicalworld.

The alien metaphor finds a comfortable home in science fiction tales forchildren. The sci-fi angle leaves room to try out all sorts of comparisons.There are aliens in autism fiction that play on the theme of the autist asalien other. But an Earth-born autist and intergalactic alien join forces inKathy Hoopmann’s Of Mice and Aliens (2001). The non-autistic peopleof Earth are alien to the main characters – Martians, to echo Grandin.Ben, a boy recently diagnosed with Asperger’s, befriends Zeke, an alienfrom another planet who crash-lands in Ben’s backyard. The twoco-explore suburban Australia. They commiserate and learn how tocope with life on Earth. Such plots replicate. In Caroline Ann Levine’sJay Grows an Alien (2007) an aspergic boy happens to meet a cyborgfrom outer space. Together they work out who neurotypicals are.

4 The story of Aspergia was available on www.aspergia.com, but to the dismay of someonline autism communities, the website is no longer active. For discussion see http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=7252.

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The converse image of the autist as alien is nicely echoed in the titleof a book just out, Francesca Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World.Seventeen-year-old Marcelo has great difficulty in reading facialexpressions, and, in general, understanding what other people are upto. Sounds autistic. His lucky parents are able to afford him an electrifiedtree house where he sleeps, and a private school in Boston for childrenwith special needs.

Marcelo may be a new breed of autism hero. He rejects labels, callshimself different and not abnormal. He admits that the best populardescription of his condition is that he has Asperger’s, and that otherpeople (not him) need names like that to make themselves comfortable.His father introduces him to his law office, and the book turns into alegal thriller where only the non-standard youth can see what all the stan-dard devious players are up to. Marcelo does not have exceptionalpowers. The plot hinges only on the point that his distance from neuroty-picals helps him see what they themselves do not.

H A D D O N ’ S D O G

Perhaps Stork’s book, primarily for the young adult market, but with awider appeal, will come to rival Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident ofthe Dog in the Night-time. Haddon never actually says what ails his hero:it is a mark of the book’s excellence that he does not once use the wordautism. Ian McEwan’s prepublication puff for the book called it the ‘por-trayal of an emotionally dissociated mind.’ But Oliver Sacks’s puff madeplain that it was the first good novel about an autistic person, so now allreaders know. I should warn that Haddon’s boy hero has a lot of pro-blems, but he is an atypical high-achiever, getting through advancedmathematics examinations at the age of thirteen.

Dog is so widely read that it provides many of its readers with theironly sharp vignette of an autistic teen. In an essay called ‘Who OwnsAsperger’s Syndrome?’ the psychiatrist Douwe Draaisma has provideda brilliant analysis of the book, and of the ways in which it serves to fixpopular conceptions of autism. Even more importantly, Haddon’s bookhas become a staple textbook in teacher-training courses, in the unit dedi-cated to working with children with special needs. Thus the model furn-ished by Haddon is transmitted to a generation of teachers. It may in turnbe implicitly passed on to their charges. And they, the autistic children,thereby learn how they are expected to be. Role models are important,but not if they make you think you can ace mathematics by the timeyou are thirteen years of age.

Reviewing Haddon’s Dog, Charlotte Moore, the author of George andSam, the remarkable book about her two severely autistic sons, wrote,‘Autistic people are not easy subjects for novelists. Their interests are



prescribed, their experiences static, their interaction with others limited.’5

Thus the emotional life of people with autism is presented by this verycaring and dedicated mother as what we might call ‘thin.’ She refusesthe self-indulgence of imagining a thicker life for her two autistic children(she has a younger neurotypical child too). For that she has been muchcriticized. In my loaded terminology, her words imply that George andSam were thin boys, destined to grow up into thin men. And that, shesays, is what makes Haddon’s book a coup, even if it is a fantasy. It hasmade a young autistic lad interesting.

In an interview a year after Moore’s review, Haddon implied completeagreement, but ironically reversed its connotations. The lives of autisticpeople are so boring on the face of it, he said, that he modelled himselfon Jane Austen, describing the lives of equally boring people, andmaking them fascinating.6 He thereby turns some preconceptionsupside down. Jane Austen’s personages are truly thick, yet, as Haddonplayfully insists, most of us would be bored stiff in their socially assignedroles. There is a tension here, for his character Chris is much more high-functioning than George and Sam were said to be. Should we conceive ofGeorge and Sam as living far more complex and indeed more ‘interesting’lives than we get on first impression after reading Moore’s book? Or isMoore more true to the lives of most autistic children? The dilemma isfalse: Moore is writing about two of her three children. To adapt anadage used above, If you know two autistic children, you know twoautistic children.

R E T R O A C T I V E F I C T I O N

When Haddon, possibly in jest, mentioned Jane Austen’s boring charac-ters, little did he know about the amazing subgenre of retroactiveautism narrative that was waiting in the wings, starring none otherthan Jane Austen herself.

Classic tales are reread as stories about people on the autistic spectrum.Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird was autistic, as was Benji in The Soundand the Fury. Such is the fate of Calla, the main character in Joyce CarolOates’s novella, I Lock My Door upon Myself. Calla is the secret name ofEdith Margaret Freilicht, born 1890. She indifferently marries, bearsthree children, and assumes silence. In 1912 she goes over a waterfallwith her lover Tyrell, an itinerant Black water-dowser. The falls arenamed Tintern Falls, recalling Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and itspaean to nature, which is Calla’s refuge with her man. The title is froma line of Christina Rossetti’s 1876 ‘Who Shall Deliver Me.’ The line had

5 Charlotte Moore, ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am,’ Guardian 24 May 2003.6 Mark Haddon, ‘B Is for Bestseller,’ Observer 11 April 2004.

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already been used for the title of a painting, a sort of post-pre-Raphaelite1891 masterpiece by the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff.

In my opinion it is an extraordinary lessening of Oates’s complexachievement to diagnose Calla as autistic. It is also grossly banal.Oates’s own diagnosis of her heroine is stunning: ‘A life split in two,but not in half.’

Shakespeare’s fools must be waiting in the wings, as honorary citizensof Aspergia. But at present, no one does retroactive faction as bravely asPhyllis Bottomer. She has diagnosed no fewer than eight characters ofPride and Prejudice, with proud Darcy as the prime personage withAsperger’s or high-functioning autism.

Bottomer is a speech therapist (speech language pathologist) forschools in North Vancouver, and so she is well acquainted with autism.She has noticed every trait ever mentioned in autism texts, and whichcan be matched by some words of Austen’s about some character. Thetrouble is that almost everyone has autistic traits. You may say thisteaches us something about autism, that it is pretty hard not to havesome autistic traits. But it doesn’t show any more about Jane Austenthan Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Among thereactions to Zombies is an extraordinary echo of Mark Haddon’s remarkabout Austen: her ‘characters other than the protagonist are so often sur-rounded by people who aren’t fully human, like machines that keeprepeating the same things over and over again.’7 Autism buffs willknow that is called echolalia. ‘What’s wrong with those people? Theydon’t dance well but move in jerky fits.’ That’s called dyspraxia.Echolalia and dyspraxia are traits commonly recognized in some peoplewith autism.

The reader may consider whether Samuel Beckett’s Murphy has justjoined the ranks of retroactive autism narratives, thanks to AtoQuayson’s essay at the end of the present issue.

T E C H S

Aliens, fallen angels, zombies. Not an attractive lot, considering thatmovie aliens are usually out to get us. DreamWorks’ first animated 3Dfilm was Monsters vs Aliens (2009). The monsters are all on our side;they save us from the aliens. In the heyday of the zombie movie, it waszombies who were the threat. There is now a philosophical gameplayed by the cleverer philosophers, discussing how or if you could

7 Brad Pasanek of the University of Virginia quoted in Jennifer Schuessler, ‘I Was aRegency Zombie,’ New York Times 21 February 2009.



tell a really well-designed zombie from a person.8 Perhaps that is the newthreat: how can you tell your lover is not a zombie?

There is a widespread stereotype of the computer nerd or geek as beingsome kind of alien, living in his own world. How can you tell your tech isnot a zombie? This is a grotesquely false image, but there it is. It is playedout in recent fiction, where the computer whiz is characterized as autistic.

Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark (2002) and Claire Morrall’s TheLanguage of Others (2008) are among the better-written books that takeup the autistic computer geek theme. The heroine of Morrall’s story is amiddle-aged, middle-class Englishwoman who makes her way withmeagre means and few emotional ties. Her computer-hooked loafer soneventually channels his obsessions by designing extraordinary videogames, for which he earns millions. Many readers probably guessed atthe son’s autism by about page 10, but we are made to wait until the endof the book for the diagnosis to be revealed to his mother. Her son’s diag-nosis spurs a realization. Since (in common lore, at any rate) autism isgenetic and heritable, she too has Asperger’s. Her difficulties can nowbe seen as the result of that condition. Finally she understands herself.

Moon’s The Speed of Dark is set decades ahead of the present. In this future,autism is prevented by undergoing neonatal gene therapy. The story getsgoing with a last cohort of twenty-somethings who were born too early toreceive the treatment. The last autistic people on earth. A group of thembecome computer screen pattern–detectors at a mega-corporation wherethe skill is milked. The Megacorp group is selected to be the first humantest subjects for a new brain-wiping technique that makes autistic peopleneurotypical. The hero oscillates for awhile but then, inexplicably, he landson the decision to undergo the brain treatment. Now that he is neurotypicalhe can fulfil his dream of becoming an astronaut. The stereotype of the autis-tic computer nerd with savant skills looms large in Moon’s story.

J P O D

The master of the theme that techs are autistic is undoubtedly DouglasCoupland, the Vancouver author and artist. He is the man who gave uswords such as McJob, and Generation X, which was the title of his firstmajor novel (1990). His artwork is increasingly everywhere, and hewrites a couple of books a year, divided roughly into fiction and non-fiction. His online materials are often brilliant or funny or both.

8 See the long article ‘Zombies’ in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. DavidChalmers, the influential Australian philosopher who writes a great deal about con-sciousness, is the trendsetter and maintains a lively Internet site for zombic discussion,Zombies on the Web, http://www.consc.net/zombies.html. It is fitting that the Internetis the primary habitat of the philosophical zombies, for how can you tell if your Internetpartner is a zombie or not?

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The hero of his Microserfs (1995) raises the theme that all techs are(mildly) autistic. In interviews Coupland likes to say that he too ismildly autistic. But then he likes to play with intelligent interviewerswho write well. He is quoted as saying, ‘Every era tends to reward aspecific pathology.’9 This is a variant on Susan Sontag’s idea, which I men-tioned at the start, that every era has its own pathology. In the nineteenthcentury you were blamed, according to Sontag, for being tubercular – itwas your moral fault. Yet at the same time, Coupland might add,young lovers dying of tuberculosis became a focus for romantic fantasy,especially in the opera.

Coupland produced for his interviewer a whole new symptom ofautism, his own, namely, that he cannot tell where different sounds in aroom are coming from. This led the interviewer to think of autism as con-nected with the information overload of our times, with repetitive actions,and with Google. He was not the first, as I am certainly not the last, towonder about the Internet and the fascination with autism that betraysitself in the vogue for autism stories. But Coupland is original. He isright to observe that autism has been extraordinarily rewarded in ourdecade, both by attention and sheer money. Not enough, advocates say,but in fact it has displaced all other childhood disorders both in sumsawarded by governments and in sums collected by charities.10

Coupland took up the theme of techs and autism more fully in jPod(2006). It is about a pod – a work cell within a vast Vancouver video-gamedesign company. All inhabitants of the pod have names that begin with J.In the middle portion of the book, the social awkwardness, individualquirks, personal obsessions, and ritualistic behaviours of fellowjPodders lead one of them to speculate that everyone in the pod ismildly autistic. She even builds a calming ‘squeeze machine,’ whichapplies pressure to both sides of her body, in imitation of a bear hug.Temple Grandin invented this kind of device and later adapted it invarious ways to calm cattle during their final moments before slaughter.Whereas Elizabeth Moon’s characters are put in a pod as a result of affir-mative action that says the remaining autistic people in the world must beemployed, Coupland’s inhabit the pod because that is what techs do, andthen they notice they are autistic.

S E L F - A B S O R P T I O N

The autism theme plays well in the middle two hundred pages of thenovel, but fades away. The interest of the book is not the (by 2006)

9 Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Feeling frail,’ Daily Telegraph 17 Oct 2004.10 For a brief rundown, see the special report ‘Autism Speaks: The United States Pays Up,’

Nature 448 (9 August 2007), 628–629.



rather familiar thought that techs are autistic, but the fact that the bookitself is a profoundly, and I am sure deliberately, autistic work. I meanthis partly in the old-fashioned sense of the word, the sense you willfind in twentieth-century dictionaries. They may mention ‘infantileautism’ as a secondary meaning, but the primary definition will begin‘Absorption in self-centered mental activity’ (Webster’s New Collegiate1994). It may be worth recalling where this meaning came from.

The great Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who gave us the word schizo-phrenia in his classic Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias in 1911,also gave us the word autism, or rather autismus. He meant obsessive self-absorption, which he thought was a trait of many of the schizophrenicpatients in his Zurich clinic. From there the word acquired a metaphoricaluse in colloquial language meaning any kind of unworthy self-absorption.Bleuler himself wrote a scathing attack on the medical profession, askingwhy doctors were so autistic. It is pretty clear that he thought thatautism, in both the narrow medical and larger metaphorical senses inwhich he used the word, was a moral failing. His descriptions of some ofhis schizophrenic patients who had autistic traits (in his meaning of theword) are both funny and nasty (e.g., 62–68). Bleuler’s uses of the wordbecame standard in both medical parlance and colloquial usage, especiallyin German, between the two world wars. It is no accident that the twodoctors who gave us infantile or childhood autism – Leo Kanner andHans Asperger – were trained in German-language medical traditions.As a young man, Kanner emigrated to America after the Second WorldWar, but he established the first American pediatric clinic, at JohnsHopkins, under the aegis of the immensely influential psychiatrist AdolfMeyer, who had himself trained in Zurich in Bleuler’s ascendance.

There is a conceptual as well as a historical and linguistic line connect-ing Bleuler’s word autism and the modern one. Many autistic people arevery bad at face-to-face interactions. Notoriously, autistic people are saidnot to look other people in the eye. Many have great difficulty in under-standing what other people are doing. They cannot read intentions fromthe face, the eyes, or the body language. Hence many people diagnosed asautistic appear to be (or simply are?) obsessively self-absorbed.

Because of the difficulty in face-to-face relationships, autism is a path-ology made for the Internet. Once autistic people can handle a keyboard,many of them can explore a space where you never actually need to con-front anyone face-to-face. They can communicate with others in a newway, sometimes establishing profound personal relationships that wereotherwise inaccessible. That experience has been truly liberating formany people with autism.

The situation is especially striking for some of the very severelyaffected, those who have great difficulty in speaking or are even mute.Some of them use what is called facilitated communication to write to

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others, including persons sitting in the same room. These individualscannot type completely unassisted, but with some help they can gettheir fingers on the keys. This is a highly controversial technique.Cynics say the assistant is doing the talking. I prefer to think of theteam doing the talking.

The keyboard and the Internet thus become a sort of cure for self-absorption, because there is a new way to relate to people in the modal-ities opened by the Internet, email, blogging, chat rooms, and so forth.Back to jPod. Everyone in the pod lives in what is, by traditional stan-dards, a totally self-absorbed world. In the old days the office unitwould be co-workers who chat, have affairs, hang out around the watercooler, and so forth. Here they converse only by email. Much of thebook consists of e-exchanges, on topics as gripping, and sometimesamusing, as what food to send out for. The book itself is strangely self-absorbed, as if made for a world in which no one ever looks at faces;they look only at screens. The very fonts mimic screens; the book isreferred to as the first Web 2.0 novel.

P O D S

The ‘pod’ of jPod is brilliantly evocative. Of course the immediate resonanceis with the iPod, first marketed by Apple in 2001. More generally, we areincreasingly empodded. Pods are many things. Seeds such as peas comein pods. The pods are protective enclosures. That underlying sense hasrun through a host of metaphors in the past fifty years. If you use moversnowadays, all your things are packed into an interchangeable pod, whichis then picked up by the van and put down somewhere else. There mustbe a novel waiting in the wings about misdirected pods: your life’s memen-tos arrive on my new doorstep, and mine on yours. You acquire the memen-tos, then the memories, and then gradually become me. Another example:when, for example, Air Canada changed its business-class configurationfor long-haul flights, passengers stopped sitting beside each other, fortheir seats could now roll out completely flat: an imitation bed. Eachbusiness-class passenger now flies in isolation from every other, even if itis a honeymooning couple. The flight staff call these solipsistic cubicles pods.

Pods in fiction go way back. In the 1954 novel Body Snatchers, and in thefour movie versions from 1956 to 2007, the aliens snatch human bodiesand incubate them in pods. Here it is ‘pod’ in the sense of seed-pod.Unfortunately body snatching – alien abduction – is one of the more des-picable metaphors widely in use to say what it is like to have your greatlittle baby gradually turn, around the age of two or three, into a severelyautistic child. In its least objectionable form one finds this trope on themasthead of Autism Speaks, now the world’s most powerful autism



charity. There we read, as part of the ‘Founders’ Message,’ ‘This diseasehas taken our children away. It’s time to get them back.’11

The name ‘iPod’ itself goes back to science fiction, nothing less than theKubrick movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s the line, ‘Open the pod baydoor, Hal!’ The pods in question are Extravehicular Activity mini space-ships in which one person can leave the main ship for repair or other pur-poses. One pod, one person. A copywriter in San Francisco was asked tohelp name the iPod. As soon as he saw a prototype, he recalled Hal andthe pods. That settled it. The prefix i was a no-brainer, because the InternetMac had been labelled ‘iMac’ since 1998.

Another San Francisco brander, Athol M. Foden, is quoted as observ-ing that the i prefix has a double meaning: ‘It can mean “internet,” as in“iMac,” or it can denote the first person: “I,” as in me.’12 Let us notforget how neat it all is. The iPod, launched 23 October 2001, isnamed after the solipsistic repair pods in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Inmuch less than a decade the streets have become full of people attachedto their iPods, inhabiting worlds of their own sound. This has becomepart of daily life at the office. Staff are doubly isolated, doing dullwork on a keyboard at a screen, and also hooked up to the iPod. Thedouble meaning of the i prefix formally encodes the lonely interlockingof the me and the Internet, freed of the necessity of face-to-face inter-action. For those who like excessive and highly misleading metaphors,the neurotypical are becoming autistic. The kids on the playgroundaren’t playing with each other any more; they are texting on, if theycan afford it, their iPhones.

Only the novels with which I have ended explicitly play on a connec-tion between autism and computer techs. I think this play is ratherdangerous loose talk. It melds two false stereotypes and encouragesmisleading or just plain false ways to think about computer skills andabout autistic people. There may or may not be some truth in thetwin theses of Simon Baron-Cohen: (1) that there is a specifically maletype of thinking, a male brain, given to abstract impersonal reasoning,to mathematics, engineering, and the computer, and (2) that the think-ing of autistic people is at an extreme end of this male proclivity. Asa psychological/neurological hypothesis, that has some merits. Forexample, it would begin to make sense of the fact that most peoplediagnosed with autism are male. But the doctrine that all techs aremildly autistic should be dismissed with the same contempt as theclaim that all Austen’s characters had Asperger’s syndrome. The

11 http://www.autismspeaks.org/founders.php.12 Even if this is folklore, it rings true. Throughout I am using Leander Kahney’s Cult of

Mac blog, see ‘Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth,’ Wired News, 17 October 2006, http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/10/71956, 15 July 2009.

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connection between autism and the Internet is connected in only a looseway with banal chat about techs having autistic traits. So what might bethe connection of interest?

T H E D E C A D E ’ S M I R R O R

This is the first Internet decade. That is not to say that the Internet has nohistory; it began as a U.S. military idea early in the cold war. But if we takeGoogle as the emblem of the Internet, Google incorporated in 1998 andmoved to its present ever-expanding site, the Googleplex, in 1999. Thatis when the Internet became an essential part of everyday life. That iswhen Apple started prefixing its stellar products with the ambiguous i.

The Internet is world shattering, world changing. The boom in autismfiction is trivial and ephemeral by comparison. Why think that the fictionmirrors the great change of the decade? The mirror relies on the fact thatboth are involved, in inverse ways – inverse as befits a mirror – withhuman communication itself.

The fictions concern people who do not, and cannot, interact with otherpeople in the ways that have been traditional for the neurotypical for centu-ries, nay for millennia. The neurotypical relate primarily face-to-face, seeingwhat each other is doing from the look in the eye, from the movement of thebody. That ability, which is the common property of neurotypical human-kind, is a precondition for the formation of language about human thoughts,minds, and human relationships. The difficulties of speech experienced bymany autistic people are not an independent aspect of autism but derivefrom such prior social impairments, in particular the simple inability toreadily grasp what another person is intending to do.

The Internet is the inverse. It is radically changing human communi-cation, that is, the ways in which human beings interrelate. No longer do Ilook at you, make eye contact, or notice bodily discomfort, when we aretalking to each other. We text. We email. We form social groups of peoplewho would not even want to set eyes on each other. Some will say Internetcommunication is like the invention of writing or of printing. There is acertain resemblance, for those also lessened the role of the body, of lookinginto the eyes of the other. But the Internet is different in scope, and, I urge,in kind, from any of the phenomena that Marshall McLuhan so marvellouslyanalyzed. But I shall not make that argument here. Suffice that the Internet ischanging all the modalities of human interaction.

The Internet makes neurotypicals behave much more like autisticpeople than could have been imagined even a decade ago. But I am speak-ing of something reciprocal. It is striking that now an autistic person can,like Alice, walk through the looking glass, which is the Internet, and withpractice or even with an aide, be able to communicate, just like neuroty-picals, on keyboard and screen.



None of the authors mentioned in this essay are likely to have had thatthought (unless it be Coupland). But in almost all these works, includingthe silly ones, there is the recognition of something that is changing in thelife of the autistic hero. This is the uncovering of new ways to communi-cate, of a communicative life other than the ancient neurotypical one. Ihave criticized as a point of psychology the repeated idea that the autisticperson has some special gift that neurotypicals lack. Now read the entiregenre differently, as about creatures who can become fulfilled only by thisnew technology. Thus the attraction for the subsidiary theme, of thenerd as autist and the autist as nerd. This too is terrible psychology, butthe role of this trope – whatever the authors may intend – is not to tellthe truth about autism. It is to reflect an aspect of our times that we areonly beginning to think about.

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Hacking - Autism Fiction: A Mirroring of an Internet Decade?

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