Blaming the Patriarchy for Autistic Children

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There's a brief passage in Betty Friedan's landmark study of American housewives in the 1950s and '60s, The Feminine Mystique, where she discusses autism. She embraces the understanding of autism popular at the time, which posits that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from the relationship between mother and child. Yet she parts company from other popularizers of this theory by arguing that the confining, constricted nature of the housewife role distorts women's personalities and their relationships with their husbands and children, thereby making psychological problems more, not less, likely in the families where the mothers are full-time housewives.

She was, of course, massively wrong about autism, though I think her overall thesis about women's needs, and the failure of traditional gender roles to meet them, was (and is!) sound. The few paragraphs she devotes to autism aren't crucial to the points she makes in the rest of the book, and the psychogenic theory of autism is pretty much dead today, and hardly in need of aggressive debunking, but she talks about increasing prevalence of autism with an urgency similar to the "autism epidemic" fears of today.
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The Classic Text of the Modern Women's Movement which Exploded the Myth of THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and instead of talking about the book as a whole, or evaluating it in a modern context (as so many other people, far better informed than I, have already done), I am going to spotlight one small part in the book, where she talks about autism.

(If you've read the book, even recently, you might not even remember her talking about autism at all! The idea might even strike you as anachronistic, given that freaking out over an Autism Epidemic is so pervasive in our time. But it's in there --- it hit me with particular force because I am autistic, and the passage is the kind of thing it's not at all nice to read if you're reading it about yourself.)

If you haven't read this book, do, especially if you're interested in feminism or women's history. As profoundly limited in scope as it is (a quality it shares with the earlier, similar work by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which also concerns itself with society's neglect of women's minds and non-reproductive capacities) --- the only women who show up in its pages are well-educated, middle-and-upper-class white women, who don't have to do hard, physical work (or much of any work) to survive, for whom work outside the home could be intellectually demanding and emotionally rewarding, instead of boring, exhausting, dangerous, soul-killing drudgery, and whose labor is only exploited within the home and never also outside it --- it's still valuable for its detailed enumeration of the psychological costs of limiting women's lives to marriage, home and family.

Off and on throughout the book, and in a more sustained fashion in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Friedan talks about how, perversely, the 1950s and '60s funneling of women back into the full-time housewife role actually hurt family life and sexual relations. In Chapter Twelve, "Progressive Dehumanization," she describes a pattern she sees of women whose too-early entry into marriage and motherhood precluded their developing authentic selves of their own, and thus rendered them incapable of raising children with all the skills and character traits they needed to become independent, themselves.

(I am going to quote at some length from the chapter, so for readability's sake I'm going to do what I did in this post and not blockquote the entire thing, but instead draw lines above and below the quoted text to separate it from my own. Quotations within the quoted passage I will still blockquote).

Here she brings in autism as the logical endpoint of this Great Chain of Nonbeing, this "progressive dehumanization" as one psychologically stunted generation brings up another, even more psychologically stunted, to the point of being autistic.
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At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: "autistic" or "atypical" children, as they are sometimes called. I visisted a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects --- cars, radios, etc., or with animals --- pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child's reality; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."

At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children's Center in Boston) the workers were cautious about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of "missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves" that he encountered --- "It's just the thing we've always known, that if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will."
Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were "extremely immature individuals" themselves, though on the surface they "give the impression of being well-adjusted." They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and "have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother."

The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene. [This passage, along with the one a few paragraphs down, comes from Beata Rank (1949), "Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry*, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 130-139]

Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following "the picture of what a good mother should be," in the hope that "through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling."
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(Is anyone else starting to think of the evil Other Mother from "Coraline" yet?)
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And thus, the child is reduced from "passive inertia" to "screaming in the night" to non-humanness. "The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud." When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

... she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim --- victim of the mother's helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat, to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.

And so he becomes a "thing," or an animal, or "a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through."

In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.
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The first thing about this passage that jumps out at me is the objectification of the autistic children Friedan and her expert interlocutors are observing. 

It's just so explicit: autistic people are not human, we're not even conscious. We represent the endpoint of a multigenerational loss of humanity. It's kind of ironic and weird that a book whose aim is to prove that women's minds are more complex, capable of more and needing more, than the psych experts of the time thought possible, would make the same kind of categorical dismissal of the possibility of any inner life in another group of people.

Maybe it's not that weird. And the point she's trying to make --- that people who are shunted into parenthood without any opportunity to live their own lives, or find out what they really want (including whether they want to be parents!) tend to make poor parents --- is a valid one; it's just that autistic people are neither "dehumanized" nor the result of poor parenting. We're as fully human as anyone else.

Moving on: You can see Bruno Bettelheim's** "refrigerator mother" theory of autism supplying most of the basic theory here; it's just that Friedan is more sympathetic to the mothers than he is. Both writers (and Friedan was trained as a psychologist, too) think autism is a state of psychological emptiness (no self, no thoughts, no capacity to relate to others) caused by something going wrong in the mother/child relationship --- something the mother does wrong. Bettelheim thought children became autistic because their mothers rejected them --- at some level (whether they were aware of it or not) they "wish(ed) that (their) child(ren) should not exist." For Friedan, the problem starts earlier: the mothers' own emotional development is curtailed, because they never had a chance to do anything other than marry young and have children, so the mothers lean too hard on their young children for emotional support, which then stunts the children's emotional growth to an even greater extent. Mother and child are both victims, and the social order is to blame.

I see no difference at all between Friedan and Bettelheim in their degree of empathy for actual autistic children (and perish the thought that they might consider autistic adults): there is none. The whole point of both of their theories is that we are not people, we have no inner lives worth considering; they only differ on how we came to be that way. We represent the end stage of some pathology, whether it is social (patriarchy, in Friedan) or personal (refrigerator motherhood, in Bettelheim).

*Am I the only person who finds the term "orthopsychiatry" to be very creepy? It has a connotation of straightening, of bringing into line, that I don't think belongs in the mental-health profession. I know (partially from reading The Feminine Mystique itself, although The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd also helped give me this impression) that that was indeed the aim of psychiatry in those days --- to bring people into line, to help them "adjust" --- but it still creeps me out a lot.

**Bettelheim isn't cited in any of the sections describing autism, probably because The Feminine Mystique predated his most famous work about autism, The Empty Fortress, by four years. But he had been running his Orthogenic School for "disturbed" children since the mid-1940s, and had written at least two things (an essay for Scientific American magazine, and an article about feral children, whom he believed were really autistic) about autism prior to The Feminine Mystique's publication in 1963. Bettelheim is quoted at length elsewhere in the chapter --- Friedan devotes a lot of space to his observations of his fellow prisoners in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Also, William Long, who has written a series of articles on how various writers have understood autism throughout its history, believes that Bettelheim must have been popularizing his theories of autism long before he published The Empty Fortress, because Bernard Rimland criticizes Bettelheim and his "psychogenic" view of autism in his own book, Early Infantile Autism, published in 1964.

Guest Blogging

I wrote a guest post about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's book Herland for Her Circle Ezine, a website about women, writing and art.

The post is an expansion on one paragraph in this old post I wrote juxtaposing Herland with Marilyn French's book The Women's Room*.

I expanded this paragraph into a longer essay on how masculinity and femininity are portayed in Herland, which is as complementary performances that distort human nature and interactions between the sexes, and which each depend on the other to work. (Particularly, I look at the character of Terry, and how his brand of brash, overbearing hypermasculinity works against him in the all-woman, but not particularly "feminine," society of Herland.)

Here's the link, if you want to go read it!

*Here are a couple of essays on the same blog that deal with that book; there's also another essay on Gilman, this one about The Yellow Wallpaper.

In Which I Finally Get Back to Writing About Autism in Fiction

Marti Leimbach's 2006 novel, Daniel Isn't Talking, covers a lot of the same narrative territory as the first volume of Keiko Tobe's manga series "With the Light" --- the protagonist is a young wife and mother who discovers that her son is autistic, and the story follows this pattern, more or less: 1) following her child's diagnosis, the main character goes into shock, grieves for the "normal" child she wishes she had instead, and watches her life and her marriage fall apart around her; 2) she comes out of her depression and begins to fight for her child, wrangling with various therapists, educators and bureaucrats over what sort of treatment to pursue; and 3) as she, and her allies in the school and health-care systems, and among her in-laws, begin to find schools, therapies, and accommodations that work well for her child, her life regains a semblance of order and she comes to understand her child better and love him for the person he is more than she grieves for the person he's not.

I'll review this book as a whole later, but what I want to focus on right now is Leimbach's use of military metaphors throughout this book: her protagonist, Melanie Marsh, refers to herself repeatedly as someone fighting a war against autism.

Here are some instances of this parenting-as-combat, autism-as-The-Enemy metaphor:

Stephen's uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early attempts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn't regret a thing.

"Please come and see us," I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me around the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood by me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruin. He has seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. "I would not wish my memories upon you," he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother's damask linen.

"I will come," he says now. "But meanwhile, you mustn't blame yourself."

"I don't," I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscripted into this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example.

(Notice, too, the juxtaposition of Melanie's silence, as an embattled (in a metaphorical sense) Mom of an Autistic Kid with the silence of this other character, Raymond, who has fought in an actual war. He and Melanie have identical reasons for concealing their darkest thoughts from each other, and I think Leimbach's highlighting the similarities between Melanie and Raymond, and their reasoning behind fencing off a portion of their minds from other people, for those other people's protection, helps emphasize the mom-as-soldier metaphor in a way that merely explicitly stating it, as Melanie does when she says she has been "conscripted into this battle with autism," can't do.)

Another example:

"What about all these other therapies?" I ask Andy. There's art therapy, music therapy, sound therapy, therapies that involve brushing the child in order to help with "sensory" issues, not to mention many highly structured teaching practices that happen in schools.

Andy is setting out a new track [of a toy train set; he's playing a game with Daniel, who likes Thomas the Tank Engine], one that finishes at the edge of a seat cushion so the train will crash to the floor. He looks at me, then back down to the track again. He says, "You can try other things. Mostly they won't hurt him."

"But will they help him?"

He shrugs. "I'm a play therapist. And I like the behavioral approach." A flat statement, a non-comment. But it feels to me he is saying much more, that I am speaking to someone in the trenches, who has been in the trenches for a long time, who is battle-weary but full of wisdom. It is as though he is saying, "Here is the only gun that fires. Pick up the bloody gun."

Here's another metaphor that I think is related to the parenting-an-autistic-child-as-war metaphor; Melanie compares her efforts to get her son, Daniel, to speak before it's "too late" for his prognosis to improve to trying to get him out of a burning building:

To ask a person to do nothing for their child or to do very little is unfair. For them to do nothing means they have to fight the overwhelming urge to push away the danger, to run through the flames, to slay the dragon. However hopeless the situation might appear, it is infinitely more difficult to do nothing than even an ill-considered something. I knew a man whose teenage son was stabbed to death in the early hours of a Saturday night by kids his own age who wanted the sneakers he was wearing. His father had repeated dreams --- the day-and-night dreams that I came to be familiar with after Daniel's diagnosis --- in which he was there when it happened, just behind the gang as they circled his boy. There, hidden in the luxuriant green of unkempt bushes, he would be crouching. Or he stepped off the bus just in time to reach over and pluck his son, vibrant and alive, from the hands of his attackers. In his dreams, the five-inch steel blade that pierced his son's chest never so much as scratched his skin. Instead, he took his child in his arms as he had as a baby, running at a supernatural speed, flying even, not knowing where he was going but knowing it was away --- away from threat and danger and harm, away from four youths and their deadly, sharpened blade.

But the dreams were only dreams. The reality was, the boy died. The father slept.

My reality is that my child lives peacefully within a dysfunctional brain while I search madly --- tear myself apart --- trying to think for the both of us how to get out of the burning building of autism. Even using this method --- this play therapy mixed with applied behavior therapy and whatever else Andy brings to bear --- there are limitations. With every learned word or spontaneous moment of play, I see Daniel becoming more like any other child, less "autistic"-seeming, and I know that if he will interact with others as he is now interacting with Andy, with me, with [his sister] Emily, his life will not be entirely ruined by the condition. But there is also a time factor. As he develops so do all the other children around him. He has to race to catch up or never catch up at all. I understand this very well. It is almost as though someone has told me, "If he is going to escape the fire, he must do so early, before the roof caves in."

There's another comparison to armed conflict at the beginning of this quoted passage, where Melanie compares her own angst over having an autistic son to the recurring nightmares of a father of a murdered son; placing herself in the father's shoes, Melanie makes Daniel's autism into the gang of teenage thugs that took the other boy's life.

Later in the same passage, Daniel's autism becomes a burning building that he must escape --- that Melanie has to lead him out of.

All of these metaphors work to convey several things that I think Marti Leimbach was trying to emphasize with them --- Melanie's desperation, her constant feeling that something of life-or-death importance is happening in her son's life, that will determine the course of her son's life, that she cannot figure out how to wade in and help him. Her repeated use of images of battle, of sacrifice, of terrible, outsized, Herculean struggles waged on his behalf, seem like they reflect the gap between what she can do for him --- what she is doing for him --- and what she wishes she could do for him. She reaches for life-and-death scenarios to compare her efforts to, and most often she returns to the battlefield for her metaphor of choice.

While I am sure Leimbach chose these metaphors to highlight her character's sense of living under extreme circumstances, and her frustrated desire to help her son, I also see something in these metaphors that I'm not sure she meant to imply.

What all of these metaphors --- of war, of individual combat, of fleeing a collapsing, burning building --- do is they separate Daniel from a part of himself, and set that part in conflict with the whole person. To save her son, Melanie makes war on ... her son. She doesn't see it that way; she sees her war as being against the thing that has taken her son from her, but Daniel hasn't been taken from her at all. He's still there, he's just not the way she wishes he could be.

This conflict Melanie sees between Daniel and Daniel's autism reminds me of the autism-as-prison metaphor I described in my post about spatial metaphors and autism:

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers trying to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy In Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires, and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) and Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied ...

Melanie's understanding of her son's autism in Daniel Isn't Talking is, as I mentioned above, stuck in "But this is not my child!" mode. For her, Autism is a hostile Other that has taken, and changed, her son. Her son's autism might be a part of him, but it's a dangerous, diseased part that Melanie believes Daniel will be much better off without. Because she sees Autism as a separate, hostile entity and Daniel as its victim, she can cast herself as Autism's implacable foe without seeing any tension between that role and the unconditional love of Daniel that the maternal role demands.

Other reviews of this book: Sharon at The Voyage, Kristina Chew at Blisstree.com

In or Out? Using Spatial Metaphors to Describe Autism

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: People often use spatial metaphors to talk about autism. Ian Hacking, in his article "Autistic Autobiographies," points out that autistic autobiographies are often described (sometimes even in their own titles) as attempts to "go inside the mind" of their autistic authors. That expression compares "the autistic mind", which is usually considered interchangeable with the author's own mind, to an exotic foreign country rarely visited by outsiders. I would add a few other categories of spatial metaphor to Hacking's observation: first, autism (not "the autistic mind," but Autism itself, whatever the speaker imagines that to be) as foreign country; second, autism as fortress, prison cell or container --- the autistic person is "inside" while the world is kept "out" --- and third, autism as vast, uncrossable distance between people. I think all of these metaphors can be seen as outgrowths of a larger metaphor that linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss in their book Metaphors We Live By: that metaphor compares communication to sending physical objects from one person to another through physical space.
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I've noticed this trend for a while --- the trend of speaking and writing about autism like it's a place or a container that you can be inside or outside of --- and have long been planning to write about it, so I figure I might as well (start to) do that now.

The philosopher Ian Hacking mentioned this as well in the talk he gave at a 2008 conference on cognitive disability and moral philosophy, which has now been rewritten as an article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, on autistic autobiographies, parents' stories of raising their autistic children, works of fiction featuring autistic characters, and the media and journalistic commentary about all of these, and about autism in general.

My own list of autistic fictions has approximately 200 books, and counting. Especially important are the stories for children, some for autistic children, some for non-autistic children, and some for all children. They take great pains to describe behaviour and thereby serve as role models. The young adult category is also influential in determining what autism is like and in some sense should be like. They illustrate 'the norm' and thereby help stabilize what the norm should be. Detective stories, spy thrillers, science fiction, gothic horror and Harlequin romances all help to reinforce a way of talking about autism.

(The article, as it appears in print, is titled "Autistic autobiography"; in lecture format, it was called "How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism." I think the latter title is more accurate, since Hacking deals with conceptions of autism in non-autobiographical writing as well, even though he does spend lots of time on autistic autobiography and award it special significance).

The story-tellers learn from autobiographies how to tell their tales. But that is a two-way street. Temple Grandin's Emergence was written before the genre got underway, so her self-descriptions are unaffected. Today's autistic child, brought up on children's stories about autistic children, and who in later years goes on to write an autobiography, will give accounts that are textured by the early exposure to role models.

Hacking goes on to list examples of one particular metaphor that recurs throughout autism autobiographies, and especially in the text used to describe them: the back-cover snippets, the capsule summaries, reviewers' summation, etc. --- the expression of going 'inside' autism. Sometimes autism might be a container or vessel, with mysterious contents that are only now being revealed and made accessible to us, the readers; sometimes it's a place we can visit.

In his foreword to Grandin (2005) [link], Oliver Sacks wrote that her previous book, Emergence, was

Unprecedented because there had never before been an 'inside narrative' of autism; unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no 'inside,' no inner life, in the autistic. (Sacks, foreword in Grandin 2005, p. 11)

Even before we dip into these books, we find that word 'inside' over and over again --- on their covers. On the back cover of a current paperback of Grandin's (2005) Emergence:

A remarkable story ... uniquely valuable in helping us to see autism from the 'inside'.

A quotation from People magazine on a paperback of [Donna] Williams' Nobody Nowhere [link]:

By turns fascinating and harrowing ... a riveting autobiography that describes how autism feels like from the inside.

The subtitle of Mukhopadhyay's (2008) [link] is:

Inside my Autistic Mind.

The subtitle of the American edition of Tammet (2006) [link] is:

Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.

'Inside autism', in such phrasings, tends to be used more or less interchangeably with 'inside [Individual Autistic Person]'s mind', which Hacking finds terribly problematic:

When 'inside' connotes written or spoken by a person with autism, and 'outside' connotes written or spoken by an observer, parent, clinician or friend, then the metaphor is benign. But it is also, once the point has been made, rather banal, and hardly worth the constant repetition we have encountered.

Aside from such benign uses, I am cautious about 'inside the mind', for reasons presented in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. This is not the occasion to argue the case or even sketch what is at issue, but it does motivate my approach. It is certainly not a hankering after behaviourism.

A first danger of the 'inside' metaphor needs only be stated to be scotched. It is the idea of 'a unique insight into the autistic mind': as if 'the autistic mind' were a species of mind. Our four autists [Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Daniel Tammet and Tito Mukhopadhyay] have very different minds! Grandin described herself as thinking in pictures. Mukhopadhyay is dominated by sounds. Tammet sees abstract objects in colour. Hence Williams' (2005) metaphor of autistic spectrum 'fruit salads'. To quote a common adage: 'If you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person.'

Talk of getting inside the mind of another is apt in its place, but unreflective use out of context often suggests a misleading picture of mental life. It suggests that looking inside is much like looking outside, in the way that looking inside a cardboard box after opening it is no different from looking at it from the outside, except for a change in point of view. This goes along with the sense that our own minds are transparent to us (subject to Freudian reservations). We look inside them all the time. That generates the question of how we ever know what is going on in the mind of another person.
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There can always arise particular difficulties in understanding another person. But the puff writers who talk of getting into the mind of an autistic person do not, for a moment, think that there is the same general question for most people, as there is for autists. I cannot recall an 'inside the mind' (or any variant thereof) being written on the cover of any non-autistic autobiography that I have examined lately. It could certainly occur, of course, with a biography. 'Finally we have got inside the inscrutable mind of Vladimir Putin.' But that is not the norm.

I have more to add to Hacking's cursory listing of examples of the 'inside autism' metaphor:

The subtitle of the anthology Women from Another Planet? is "Our Lives in the Universe of Autism".

The synopsis on the back of my copy of Judy and Sean Barron's There's a Boy In Here (Simon & Schuster, 1992; hardcover) says, "Autism From the Outside In... / ... And From the Inside Out"; on the front cover there's the text "A mother and her son tell the story of his emergence from autism." The jacket text of There's a Boy In Here is especially full of in/out metaphors:

[T]hough nothing seemed to work, [Sean's parents] sometimes caught fleeting glimpses of the helpless child inside the stranger who shared their home. They were determined to free him, and somehow their love, their rage, their patience, their sheer humanness reached him at last ... [H]e remembers ... the terrifying isolation, the desperate desire to reach out ... until his family's indomitable and courageous resolve finally released him. ... [T]he poignant self-portrait of a boy trapped in a maze of compulsion and obsession.

In Nobody Nowhere, Donna Williams talk about living in "[her] own world" as a child; she draws a distinction between her world and The World, which is outside her, around her and mutually exclusive with her world. In a poem that acts as an epigraph to the book, she writes of "a world under glass" where sensations are dulled, and you think nothing can reach you, but where you're utterly alone:

In a world under glass, you can watch the world pass,
And nobody can touch you, you think you are safe.
But the wind can blow cold, in the depths of your soul,
Where you think nothing can hurt you till it is too late.

The titles of a lot of books, too, reflect a spatial metaphor: There's a Boy In Here; Emergence; The Siege --- all of these rely on a metaphorical understanding of autism as something that people become trapped in and have to be rescued, or rescue themselves, by a heroic effort (their own, someone else's or both); autism is not only a place, it's a place that's very hard either to get into from outside or to get out once you're inside. Autism as Death Star.
A later edition of There's a Boy In Here has the subtitle "Emerging from the Bonds of Autism."

Finally, all the images I have included in this post appeared when I did a Google Image search for "autism" --- all were illustrations for (sometimes mis-)informational websites on autism. I chose ones that I felt reflected the metaphor in a visual way: metaphors are not just for verbal thinkers!

Particularly, I feel there are subspecies within this category of metaphor that are worth identifying more precisely. Right now, I can think of three:

(1) Autism as prison cell/container
(2) Autism as (very large) distance between people
(3) Autism as unknown territory

I would also date the usage of the parent metaphor to all three of these --- autism as a discrete part of physical space --- earlier than the earliest autiebiographies; there was writing about autism for some decades before Temple Grandin wrote her first book, Emergence. While this earlier writing may or may not have influenced her way of thinking about her autism, it had certainly been informing the larger culture into which her story has become assimilated.

Even the title she chose for this work partakes of the metaphor whose ancestry I'm trying to trace here --- what is she emerging from? Is it autism in general, or one particular aspect of it she had to transcend to come into herself?

(This latter possibility occurs in Dawn Prince-Hughes' much-later autiebiography, Songs of the Gorilla Nation, in which she describes herself moving within the metaphorical terrain of autism, from its dark regions into its "beauty." So that's another possibility for the autism-as-geography subtype of autism-as-place/container: movement occurring within "autism". It also raises the possibility that "autism" is not a flat, uniform piece of terrain, and that different autistic people might inhabit different parts of that vast country).

Anyway, before Grandin wrote her hugely influential works, there was already a body of literature on autism: books written for popular consumption by clinicians, and personal narratives by parents of autistic children, of which the oldest is (as far as I know) Clara Claiborne Park's 1967 book The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child. Both the title and subtitle suggest that Jessy Park's autism is a physical place to be ventured into; calling that process a "siege" implies that this hidden realm has walls that its besiegers have to breach, and defenses they have to overpower; that autism is not always an inert landscape -- however forbidding --- but sometimes actively resists exploration.

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers struggling to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy in Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often-destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) or Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied, but, for Bettelheim at least, it would be logically impossible --- a bad metaphor, to say the least --- for anything to be in the "empty fortress", so it looks to me like the only way to interpret that one is that the autistic child's mind is the fortress, and Bettelheim was trying to tear it down and rebuild it to his liking.

Sometimes autism might be spoken of metaphorically as distance; I listed this as a third subtype of the autism-as-place metaphor, since in this case autism is not where the autistic person is so much as it the space between the autistic person and everyone around hir who isn't autistic, but now that I think about it more I've decided it functions more or less identically to the autism-as-container subtype. In both, autism is the barrier between the autistic person and the people seeking to understand or relate to hir; in both, the barrier must be overcome.

The autism-as-distance and autism-as-container subtypes of the autism-as-place metaphor also seem to me to be related to the larger, implicit metaphor described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By: the "complex metaphor" of communication as sending bits of meaning packaged in language along a conduit to another person. If communication is thought of as analogous to sending things through space, it makes sense that anything that makes communication harder (like a difference in neurotypes between sender and receiver) will be translated into this metaphor as a physical barrier.

Comparing Feminist Dystopias

In this post from two months ago, Red Megaera* says:

What I'd really like to see is a feminist dystopian novel about the creeping incursion of pornography into everyday life and its dangerous impact on women's freedom and autonomy. Margaret Atwood's acclaimed novel The Handmaid's Tale published in 1985 was written partly as a critique of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance which proposed to treat pornography as a violation of women's civil rights, and allowed women harmed by pornography to seek damages through a lawsuit in civil court. It also stands as a critique of radical feminism in general, particularly its analyses of intercourse and patriarchal beauty practices. Atwood's Gilead is a dystopian society in which alliances between radical feminists, religious fundamentalists and other social conservatives have led to the overthrow of the United States government by a repressive, totalitarian society. The implications for women are horrendous. The Handmaid's Tale is a wonderful piece of literature, but I'm not sure about its politics. I've always thought it would be far more instructive at this time, in this culture to write a radical feminist dystopian novel which critiqued pornography, cosmetic surgery and the mass media. Heaven knows you don't have to look far for inspiration. ... [W]hat are totalitarian theocracy and capitalist patriarchy if not different sides of the same coin?

Since my copy of The Handmaid's Tale is being lent out at the moment, I won't be able to quote from it --- and I remember next to nothing of the final chapter, with the future academics discussing the hows and whys of Gilead's coming into existence, so it may be that Atwood mentions a role for radical feminism there --- but I have read it multiple times**, and had a rather different view of it than Megaera has.

I don't really see a critique of radical feminism in The Handmaid's Tale because I don't remember any representation of radical feminism in that book at all. I saw plenty of examples of women collaborating with patriarchy, though: Serena Joy, former televangelist and wife of the Commander, who preached submission and domesticity for women but finds herself miserable living that life herself; the Aunts, whose job it is to prepare fertile women for their new lives as Handmaids, and who often use their power over other women to vent their own considerable frustrations; the unknown partner each Handmaid must have to carry out her everyday errands --- neither woman can trust the other, so each feels compelled to put on a show of religious piety and righteous patriotism, which of course feeds the other's reluctance to confide in her; and Janine/Ofwarren, the one character in the book who really does believe in Gilead, and in the rightness of her place in it.

There is one passage where I can see the critique Megaera is talking about --- the idea that radical feminists, in seeking to eliminate sexual exploitation and oppression of women, are easy prey for the far more powerful religious conservatives who seek to eliminate women's sexual freedom --- where Aunt Lydia is trying to convince her charges to see the bright side of their new situation by contrasting "freedom to" (go where you please, wear what you please, have sex with whom you please) with "freedom from" (rape, street harrassment, abduction, murder). This is, of course, a fundamentally conservative analysis of violence against women: by existing in public, women make themselves prey to predatory men; therefore, every woman should belong to one particular man, who will protect her from all the others.

So perhaps the absence of radical-feminist ideas or social reforms --- even in perverted form --- reflect the likely outcome of a radical feminist/social conservative alliance, which would be the complete annihilation of the radical-feminist element. Indeed, those women who cannot or will not adapt to the new regime are exiled from it, to the radiation-contaminated "Colonies."

The whole structure of Gilead also depends on a practice to which radical feminists are opposed: prostitution. Men's loyalty is assured by bribing them with women --- they get a wife once they've advanced a certain distance up the ranks, and if they reach a particularly high status, they also get a Handmaid, to assure that they have issue. Additionally, there are clandestine houses of ill repute, called Jezebel's, where high-status men can go to meet, drink with, and bed those "loose" women who were too rowdy to become Handmaids but were not cast off to the Colonies.

So, while Gilead is certainly a feminist dystopia, predicated as it is on the reproductive enslavement of women, it's not necessarily what Red Megaera has in mind as a radical feminist dystopia, although I'm willing to give it a lot more credit in that regard due to the regime's tacit acceptance of, and reliance on, prostitution.

I do know of another feminist dystopia that might fit the bill more closely, though: in Sheri S. Tepper's Beauty, the time-traveling heroine discovers a horrible future that starts coming into being in the 1990s. That future is gray, ugly, cramped and overcrowded, with a centralized authority crowding hordes of people together into hivelike apartment complexes to free up the biggest possible expanse of ground on which to grow food for them all. Everything is strictly utilitarian and barely adequate for ensuring everyone's mere survival, to say nothing of making them happy. The people change with their environment; they become mean, jumpy, quick to anger, afraid of each other, small-minded and nihilistic.

While Tepper makes it clear that what leads human society down this path is a complex, deep-rooted and pervasive network of cultural trends (see the passage quoted in this post), she does draw special attention to growing societal misogyny as part of the process. Aesthetic degradation is the other important indicator for her --- beauty, both natural and man-made, is vanishing from the world --- and both of these themes show up in the superabundance of really violent, gory pornography in her dystopia, and in the lead-up to it. One of the characters Beauty meets on her first trip into the late twentieth century is a novelist, Barrymore Grimes, whose work she can barely stand to read but who is wildly popular in his own time.

That's probably the most striking way in which Tepper's dystopian vision differs from Atwood's --- rather than be tightly (if hypocritically) regulated and harnessed for the benefit of a totalitarian state, the desire of men to exploit women sexually is given a free rein. While the people in Tepper's dystopia may be losing almost all of their other freedoms, they retain the freedom to do whatever they want sexually, which really means the men retain the freedom to do whatever they want to the women. Other than that, their visions are surprisingly similar, given the huge differences in style and substance between their books. Like Tepper, Atwood sets her dystopia on a ruined, poisoned Earth; both writers critique the reproductive enslavement of women --- Atwood explicitly, and Tepper by making overpopulation, which she links to society's restriction of women to the reproductive role, and its denial of her right to self-determination even within that role, the driving force behind her dystopia; and both blame religion for its role in upholding said exploitation.

*Because I'm a Greek-mythology geek, I pay special attention to bloggers who take their pseudonyms from that canon. I've noticed two radical-feminist bloggers using the names of Furies --- the aforementioned Megaera and Allecto. If anyone has seen the third Fury, Tisiphone, anywhere around the Internet, I'd appreciate a link.

**Four or five, maybe? Definitely more than three, but not a huge number of times. (The most-read book by me is probably Dune, which I've read maybe seven or eight times).

Criticism by Armchair Diagnosis

In the past month or so, I've come across two very similar instances of literary criticism in which the critic invokes "autism" to characterize strains of alienation and misanthropy in an author's body of work.

The first such usage I encountered was in a recent article in Raritan by Cambridge professor Andy Martin, titled "Autism, Empathy and Existentialism," which posited that French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus represented opposite extremes of alienation and empathy:

One way of understanding the difference between the two thinkers is to see them as occupying different ends of a spectrum with autism at one end and empathy at the other.
...
Camus manages to find much to identify with in Sartre, a sense of common ground: "Even in the most well-constructed lives, there always arrives a moment in which all the facades collapse. ... This feeling is common to us. ... As a result of going against the tide, a sense of loathing, a feeling of revolt, takes possession of our entire being, and the revolt of the body is what we call nausea." What they have in common is, paradoxically, the same thing that divides them from each other and even from themselves --- a sense of the unbearable lightness of being, pitting the individual against an interpretive community in a standoff that Camus would eventually evoke with the word "absurdity." It is characteristic of Camus that he derives some glimmer of empathy out of what can be understood as an extreme form of "social autism."

... [I]t is characteristic of Sartre that he takes Camus to pieces to see how his text works. In particular, he homes in on the use of the "passé-composé" --- what we tend to call the "perfect" --- tense. ... [T]he fact that the "composed past," consisting of an auxiliary (either être or avoir) plus a past participle can, in effect, be decomposed, seen as a bundle of disconnected pieces, appears to Sartre as the key to understanding the book: the world is just like that --- a miscellaneous collection of things that don't really fit together to make anything meaningful. It is not a plenitude but a series of gaps and voids, which we have tenuously stitched together. Camus, reading Sartre, asks himself: what does Sartre have in mind, and, by extension, what do we all have in mind, "at the limits of conscious thought"? Sartre, on the other hand, asks himself: what tense is he using?

The second instance (though it was written well before the first; I just encountered them in this order) of this literary use of autism-as-metaphor was a paraphrase of Simone de Beauvoir's "Must We Burn Sade?" in Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women.

In her essay on the Marquis de Sade, Simone de Beauvoir describes Sade's sexuality as autistic. Her use of the word is figurative, since an autistic child does not require an object of violence outside himself (most autistic children are male). Male power expressed in pornography is autistic as de Beauvoir uses the word in reference to Sade: it is violent and self-obsessed; no perception of another being ever modifies its behavior or persuades it to abandon violence as a form of self-pleasuring.

Both writers, de Beauvoir and Martin (and, to some extent, Dworkin too), are using "autism" and "autistic" to describe a worldview in which everything one encounters is either self or object.

Martin, in particular, is making explicit use of Simon Baron-Cohen's earlier "mindblindness" model of autism (which he has now incorporated into a larger theory involving sex differences in the brain):

Autism, from this point of view, is a form of mindblindness, an inability to form hypotheses about others, or even to acknowledge that there is such a thing as intentionality. Whereas solipsism is a refusal to believe in the existence of others, autism allows that other people exist out there --- I can see them, I can hear them, I can smell them, and so on --- but, at the same time, I cannot recognize them as conscious beings. I can't make sense of them.

(I should point out that, throughout his essay, Martin cannot seem to decide whether Sartre is truly "mindblind," in that he is unwilling or unable to think of other people as entities, with wills, desires and thoughts of their own, or whether he is simply alienated and antagonistic, seeing other minds as inevitably hostile to his own. These are not points of view that can be held simultaneously).

I said earlier that these writers have been using "autism" to describe a worldview. That's true, although Martin and de Beauvoir/Dworkin seem to be talking about different kinds of worldviews --- the former speaks of autism almost like a philosophical school or ideology, while the latter two treat it more like a psychological or character profile. The "autism" de Beauvoir attributes to Sade is, while less precise in what it implies about Sade's beliefs or modes of thought, is just as strong a determinant of his actions as the interpersonal agnosia and alienation Martin ascribes to Sartre.

There are a number of reasons why this use of "autism" annoys me. First, there's the perpetuation of ugly, tired stereotypes about autistics --- that we are unfeeling; that we're incapable of empathy and therefore incapable of kindness, consideration, friendship or love; that we lack understanding; that we are utterly disconnected from everything around us, etc., ad nauseam.

The second reason is that this particular lens doesn't seem to have generated any fresh insights into either Sartre or Sade. Without the oh-so-trendy use of the autism label, what would these articles have said about their subjects? That Sartre liked to take things --- texts, relationships, mental states --- to pieces until nothing recognizable was left of them? That Sade's sexuality was predatory? Neither of those would be much of a newsflash to anyone with a passing familiarity with either man's writing.

More about Jude the Obscure

Having finished Jude the Obscure not too long ago, I'd like to return to the subject of Sue Bridehead, and what an unusual, confusing character she is.

While she is easy to understand in crude functional terms --- like Arabella, she pulls at one extreme of Jude's mixed nature* --- there's a lot more to her personality than that, and it's this "more" that interests me.

(She seems to have interested Hardy, too: Elizabeth Langland, in her 1980 article in Studies in the Novel, cites a letter Hardy wrote in 1895, a year before Jude was first published, in which he says "Curiously enough, I am more interested in the Sue story than in any I have written.")

While the trait most critics (and, indeed, Sue and Jude themselves) single out is Sue's "inconsistency", I noticed a few other odd ones: asexuality, impulsivity, unconventionality, heightened emotional and aesthetic sensitivity, naivete, total frankness and a weird sense of not-quite-thereness with respect to time and place --- her thoughts, feelings and actions don't quite match her age or social position, and the books she's read seem more central to her identity than her family or place of origin. (Now that I lay them all out like this, they sound a bit familiar, except for the inconsistency and emotional lability).

The critical articles I read about Sue (which were Elizabeth Langland's "A Perspective of One's Own," cited above, and Mary Jacobus's 1975 "Sue the Obscure," published in Essays in Criticism) both explained her unusual qualities as a function of the novel's psychological realism, or lack thereof. (Langland argues that Sue's apparent inconsistency comes from her erratic characterization --- she infers from Hardy's own writings about his creative processes that Sue's role evolved somewhat faster than his ability to pin down her personality --- while Jacobus argues the opposite: that Sue's hypocrisy and vacillation make her appear more believably human as she struggles, and fails, to translate her high-minded principles into the tightly constrained sphere of action). Both invoke the distance between most of the narration (in which Jude's is the primary perspective) and Sue's thoughts and feelings. Jacobus observes that, while we get a little of Sue's perspective early in the novel, recurring infrequently up until the deaths of the children, after that point we hear nothing from her point of view. Her mental breakdown renders her mind inaccessible, both to Jude and to us.

Actually, for a character who's supposedly such a riddle to critics, Sue looked awfully familiar to me (and it wasn't just because I'd fairly recently read Jane Eyre, whose heroine is similarly bookish and unworldly). I found several passages in which I was able to identify with her completely, which you might guess rarely happens. Her emotional transports and childlike glee map fairly easily onto the immanence I experience as part of my sensory hypersensitivity, and her identification with the Venus Urania really speaks to me as a (mostly) asexual who sets a lot of store by intellectual romance. Also, as someone whose most significant (and longest-lasting) "perseveration" was Greek mythology, I was quite pleased when she smuggled the statues of Aphrodite and Apollo into her room at Miss Fontover's house.

Here, Sue relates to Jude how she came by her education:

"You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn't you?" she said, breaking a silence. "It was very odd you should have done that."
"Why?"
"Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it."
"You are very philosophical. 'A negation' is profound talking."
"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery.
"No --- not learned. Only you don't talk quite like a girl --- well, a girl who has had no advantages."
"I have had advantages. I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know the grammars of those tongues. But I know most of the Greek and Latin classics through translations, and other books too. I have read Lemprière, Catullus**, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher, Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brantôme, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest in the unwholesome parts of those books ended with its mystery."
"You have read more than I," he said with a sigh. "How came you to read some of those queerer ones?"
"Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident. My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them --- one or two of them particularly --- almost as one of their own sex. ..." (emphases mine)

The above passage, with its reference to "unwholesome" parts in books that cease to interest Sue once she's able to decipher their innuendoes ("Oh, that's all they were talking about? Yuck!"), hints at Sue's asexuality.

Here are a few more such passages:

"[Other people's] views on the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognized relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them --- the part of --- who is it? --- Venus Urania."

and

Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament or instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by gazing and worrying hopelessly.

I also have an alternate reading for her inconsistency and vacillation: she doesn't self-censor. Rather than sequestering her decision-making process away in the privacy of her own mind she thinks aloud, particularly to those she deems her friends and intellectual soulmates, like Jude and Phillotson. So she speaks, and acts, on whatever impulse enters her head, and often as not she will decide later (sometimes immediately after the fact) that she did the wrong thing and must go and make amends immediately.

(I share the lack of self-censorship with her, but do not share the flightiness and impulsivity. I am a very slow thinker, and do not ping-pong between options as Sue seems to do so much as shape the choice I will make out of the amorphous goo that in my mind's eye represents what might be).

Sue's disavowal of her gender (which comes up fairly often, as in the first passage I quote where she claims to mix with men as one of them), and of gender itself, is also familiar to me, and comes up with some frequency in the writings of autistic women. For her, androgyny and asexuality are both linked to her intellectual nature --- not because, as D. H. Lawrence saw it, she is an unwomanly woman, a bundle of essentially masculine urges to philosophize, to name things, to interpret, to systematize; all at the expense of the passive, maternal Feminine --- but possibly because she correctly perceives the dangers independent-minded women of her time brave when they choose to be sexual. For most, sex and romance lead to marriage, which in her time still means becoming someone's property. Your movement and social interactions become greatly restricted, lest your morals be questioned. Even if Sue were not, as the novel makes it clear she is, a natural asexual, she would have some very compelling reasons to try to stay celibate anyway.

It seems like the more I read, especially these old-but-not-too-old books, the more I run into these startlingly autistic-like characters. I think the Victorian novel in particular seems to produce a lot of them, if only out of a need for highly idiosyncratic characters to pit against a stifling social order.

*I did find it problematic that, while Jude gets to be fully, messily human, containing both fleshly appetites and spiritual aspirations, each of the female characters is given just one of these aspects of humanity. Madonna/whore dichotomy, anyone?
**A friend of mine who reads Latin tells me Catullus is pretty risqué. I wonder, given the history of later, especially 19th-century, translators of older texts altering, or leaving out entirely, those parts of the originals they found objectionable, whether Sue would have been able to get a reasonably faithful translation of Catullus at all.

Metaphor at the Expense of Characterization: Autism in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake"

Full disclosure: I love Margaret Atwood's books. I have ten or eleven of them (of which two are being loaned out to a friend in Tennessee), which may give me a slightly different perspective for this review, as Atwood is the only author I've reviewed so far with whose body of work I am extensively familiar. I'll try to stick to just Oryx and Crake, but I'm not completely ruling out comparisons from elsewhere in the Atwood canon, either.

Like Atwood's other dystopia, Oryx and Crake creates a bizarre near-future society by extrapolating certain trends in contemporary society. While The Handmaid's Tale focused on the backlash against feminism and the growing influence of Dominionist Christianity over US politics, Oryx and Crake explores the catastrophic potential of runaway biotechnology, social fragmentation and class stratification. The world in which her protagonist, Jimmy, and his friend Glenn (who later names himself "Crake") grow up is a starkly divided one in which wealthy technocrats and their families live and work in bubble-like gated communities (called Compounds) run by their employers and everyone else lives in the urban no-man's land Jimmy and Crake know only from rumor ("the pleeblands"). Government seems to have withered away entirely, with corporations running the Compounds as their own miniature fiefdoms.

Against this background, Crake emerges as a star inventor/researcher within his Compound, entrusted with projects of progressively greater importance and secrecy. Always a detached, cynical character, Crake is not shocked when he discovers that the pharmaceutical company that employs him also produces genetically-engineered diseases (to which it then markets the cure). If anything, he is impressed with the elegance of their solution to the problem of avoiding obsolescence. This marks a turning point in the Crake-Jimmy relationship, as it begins to dawn on Jimmy how little he really knows Crake, and as Crake, inspired and emboldened by his discoveries about the extent of his company's research, begins to concoct an apocalyptic plan to kill off most of humanity with an artificial plague and start over with a fast-growing humanoid species designed to his specifications.

About midway through the book, Jimmy visits Crake at the latter's elite technical university. This episode, besides being the one place in the book where Crake is identified as autistic, also serves to place Crake in context. At "Asperger's U," Crake is not unique; he's only the brightest specimen of a type.

Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking, single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude --- these were not your sharp dressers --- and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behavior.
...
"Compared to this place, HelthWyzer [the Compound where Jimmy and Crake grew up; also the name of its parent company] was a pleebland," Crake replied. "It was wall-to-wall NTs."
"NTs?"
"Neurotypicals."
"Meaning?"
"Minus the genius gene."

There are several things worth pointing out about the portrayal of autism and Asperger syndrome in that passage, but first I'd like to look at a similar scenario in another book. In Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, the protagonist is part of a small group of autistic coders employed in a supportive environment by an IT company in exchange for their unique gift for pattern recognition. With the advances in gene therapy that have taken place in Moon's not-too-distant future, these autistic adults represent the last of their kind. Before their autism could simply be cured, they had been assimilated into society by means of a mixture of workplace accommodations and intensive skills training. In Moon's world, these autistic coders are somewhat embattled within their company: their role is not widely understood, and managers looking to cut costs eye their supportive work environment with suspicion.

By contrast, in Atwood's near-future technocracy, autism is almost a status symbol. The leading university is named for the variant of autism its students all possess, and those students' obsessive singlemindedness and lack of the normal human need for social interaction or R&R makes them immensely valuable to the biotech corporations queuing up to hire them fresh out of college. Just typing that really brings home to me how profoundly unrealistic a scenario it is, not only in terms of the kind of worker employers tend to value, but also in its crude understanding of autism itself. Atwood seems to conceive of us as emotionless automata, uninterested in anything except solving puzzles and designing widgets.

I believe Atwood concocted this version of "autism" to stand as a personification of everything she is trying to criticize about biotechnology, agribusiness and consumer culture. The "tunnel vision" she locates in the unusual wiring of her elite bioengineering students' brains is endemic to our profit-driven society. I also see in her writing here a devoted fan of the liberal arts railing against the ascendancy of the job-training model of university education, with Crake obviously representing the kind of person such an education is meant to produce. (He's one of what C.S. Lewis called the "men without chests" in his The Abolition of Man --- people whose intellects have been educated far beyond their moral development. There is a long literary tradition of bemoaning this type of pedagogical asymmetry).

I think, for those reasons, that Crake is better read as an allegorical figure than a flesh-and-blood character. His portrayal in the story lends itself to that interpretation, too: though we meet Crake as a child, he does not change or mature at all over the course of the story, and his parents seem to have been written into the narrative as an afterthought, and then promptly dispensed with. Crake's role in his relationship with Jimmy is also decidedly one-dimensional: Crake is the critic, always making fun of Jimmy's stupidity and exhorting him to "use [his] neurons," and dismissing or belittling any effort of Jimmy's to argue with him on anything but purely practical terms. Crake's death is also fitting for a character who is little more than a dramatic device: once Crake has loosed his apocalyptic plague upon the world, he promptly commits suicide. He's fulfilled his purpose in the story, now he can go away and stop bothering Margaret Atwood and her editor.

Indeed, as a purely allegorical creation, Crake would not require any flimsy psychiatric diagnosis to explain his inhuman nature. He would already be inhuman, no slandering of large groups of people required.

A postscript: this is a fairly dramatic reassessment of Crake. The first time I read the book, I liked him and identified with him, seeing both myself and my boyfriend in him. (Crake demonstrated my rationality and intellectualism, my boyfriend's misanthropy and our shared tendency to ask a lot of "why" questions about human misery and try to come up with inventive, radical solutions).

Is It Enough Just to Say a Character Is Autistic? More Thoughts on Soon I Will Be Invincible

One thing I never got to in my last post, but which I wanted to write about, is the character of Blackwolf. He's the Champions' Batman analogue: a brilliant detective and elite-level athlete whose traumatic past led him to become a costumed crime-fighter. He's also supposedly autistic, although the story doesn't really develop this. The label gets dropped onto him a couple times, and it never seems to fit. He has no identifiably "autistic" traits, and the label gives the reader no insight into anything he says or does. Yet Grossman obviously thought it important to give him that label, since he repeats it.

On one level, I'm intrigued by this decision, since Blackwolf counters a lot of the most common sterotypes about autistic people. He's described as attractive, physically graceful, and charismatic, and he functions as a love interest for both Fatale and Damsel (his ex-wife). He's also not shown as having any particular difficulty understanding social dynamics; indeed, in one scene where Damsel's parents are taking her to task for her handling of the Doctor Impossible situation, Blackwolf rises spontaneously to her defense. Without even being prompted, he knows that she's feeling distressed and needs him to stand up for her. It may just be that he'd had enough practice mediating between her and her parents in their marriage, but even that sounds like an improbably diplomatic role for an autistic person to take. While it's awesome to have a character clearly labeled "autistic" who does all these things we don't often see autistic characters doing, problems arise when the character has so little in common with the category "autistic" that, rather than broaden the category, we question his inclusion in it.

There are a couple passages where we see hints of his autistic nature. The first describes a fight between Doctor Impossible and the Champions, in which Doctor Impossible (he of the "Malign Hypercognition Disorder") expresses a sort of mystified admiration of Blackwolf's unusual thought processes:

He's got that twitchy autistic look he gets in a fight, his odd neurology hyperaccelerating, problem solving in real time.

Bearing in mind how "hyperaccelerated" Impossible's own cognition is supposed to be, this is high praise indeed, possibly indicating a tactical savantism on Blackwolf's part. Later in the fight, Blackwolf slips away and surprises Impossible, indicating that he did plan out his actions ahead of time, while the evil genius was busy holding off the other Champions. And since everywhere else in the book, it is Blackwolf who is in awe of Impossible's intelligence and who despairs of ever anticipating his plan, his ability to outthink Impossible must apply only in very narrow circumstances, i.e. during a physical fight. Having narrow, hyper-specific areas of genius that rise far above one's general intelligence level is the defining characteristic of savantism, and autistic cognition in general, even among non-savants, is very uneven. It would make perfect sense from that standpoint for Blackwolf to be smarter than Doctor Impossible in some contexts and hopelessly outclassed by him in others.

In the other passage, Fatale tries to act on her feelings for Blackwolf, only to have him push her away:

Our lips touch, and for a second it's everything I thought it would be. The metal in my jaw is awkward but somehow exciting, and he kisses back. ... Then I make a mistake. I reach for the mask, and he catches my arm, ready to break it. His jaw sets, and I'm dealing with Blackwolf again. It's like watching a different personality take hold, and I get a glimpse of what he's been holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning. Something really god-awful must have happened to him at some point.

Blackwolf's obsession with avenging his lost siblings rules his life. Obsessions and compulsions are indeed a part of autism, but I see a more powerful authorial motive than mere verisimilitude at work here, one that explains the overall lack of depth to Blackwolf's exposition. The two things I've singled out as most autistic in Blackwolf, his inscrutable mind and his rigid obsession with vengeance, are also the things that alienate him most from the other characters, that make him most clearly "Other." Doctor Impossible and Fatale both marvel at him, wondering what could possibly lurk in that brain of his:

I wonder what makes him this way, what primal, originary scene branded him with an obsession that makes him dress like an animal, and helps him fight. Who does he see when he looks at me?

...I get a glimpse of what he's been holding back, a terrible, unappeasable mourning.

The other members of the Champions, as I detailed in the last post, are all isolated by their powers. Their powers, and whatever price their bodies pay for those powers, dictate every aspect of their lives. They are utterly alone, Grossman tries to emphasize. Because Blackwolf lacks a power, he had to be given something that would make him as alone as Fatale, with her amnesia and her metal body, or Damsel, with her alien parentage and force field. His autism, therefore, is a metaphor for what Grossman feels the real price of superhuman ability would be. As such, it is not and probably was never meant to be accurately portrayed, which is lame insofar as it fails to invest a character with sufficient depth to be truly alive to the reader. Ideally, a metaphor should succeed both on the literal level, as an accurate depiction of the object or idea being used in the metaphor, and on the allegorical level in which it stands in for something else. Blackwolf never rises above the level of a cipher, which not only fails to endear him to us but also leaves us with a superficial idea of autism. Autism, as embodied in Blackwolf, is just isolation, just a state of arrested development. We get no insight as to what it's like to inhabit his strange, unevenly brilliant mind, no concept of him as an individual. So, as much as I love Soon I Will Be Invincible for its clever plays on the comic-book idiom, I'm disappointed by its lazy use of its one autistic character.