Autism Fiction: a Mirror of an Internet Decade?

Home , Nobody Nowhere, Speed of Dark, The Horse Boy, With the Light

IAN HACKING Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?

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 interact 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. Stage plays. Movies. Documentaries. Novels. Stories for children. Improving manga 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 a musical in which the singers are autistic children. And above all, there is a vast amount of story-telling on the Internet, which has become a living home for so many autistic people. There are even retroactive autism novels; I mean famous old novels that are reread as novels whose characters are autistic. My question is not about autism but about our times. Why should autism stories so ﬂourish today, when they were virtually non-existent a quarter century ago? Most of the stories date from after 2000. What does the extraordinary proliferation of the genre show about our decade? If, by analogy with the sixties or the nineties, we call this decade the oughts, is autism the pathology of the oughts, mirrored in its ﬁctions? The idea that decades or epochs have pathologies has been around at least since Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978). One of her secondary themes was that every era has its own illness, which shows as much about the 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 autism fiction: a mirror of an internet decade? 633 marker of the nineteenth century. She singled out cancer as the pathology of her own time. Her book was a tour de force, using the ways in which her own body suffered, in order to achieve a heightened awareness of what was said about cancer. Sontag observes how cancer, which is basically a disease of aging that attacks a few younger people as well, was turned into an enemy that should be fought with moral weapons such as meditation, diet, and support groups. This viewpoint implied that your cancer was somehow your fault, to be countered with moral rearmament. To be merely medical was to lose ethical stature. The obituary tag ‘died after a long battle with cancer’ implicitly recalled our earlier battles with Satan. Sontag later applied similar reflections to the scourge of the eighties in AIDS and Its Metaphors. One now encounters the idea that autism is the pathology of our decade. Sontag is usually forgotten as the source and wellspring of this line of thought. The idea does not call into question the reality of autism, any more than Sontag doubted the reality of cancer. It suggests only that the heightened awareness of autism may reflect some more general features of our time. But I am the kind of philosopher who attends to petty detail and who resists sweeping generalization. I focus 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 very useful Representing Autism. The present essay is self-consciously (and deliberately) less ambitious. It chooses a local phenomenon, the explosion of autism stories, and wonders at the end how that relates to the radical change in modes of human communication caused by the Internet.

THE GENRE

It is no exaggeration to speak of a boom industry. You will get a daunting reading list just by scanning the titles at the end of this piece. A year ago I suggested to Alastair Cheng, the assistant editor and associate publisher of Canadian Literary Reviews, that he look around for autism novels. (He published my review in April 2009.) He recently wrote, ‘Ever since I did that original search for autism-related ﬁction titles, I seem to be seeing them everywhere.’ Well-written autism tales prosper on their own merits, even if they also cash in on a fashion. Rupert Isaacson’s family adventure, The Horse Boy, has, at the time of writing, just been published. Father and autistic ﬁve-year-old son go to Mongolia in search of healing from shamans and from friendship with horses. Even before the duo had embarked on their trip (of only four weeks!), let alone written the book, Little

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1 Brown paid advance royalties of over a million dollars. That fits the profile of a booming literary industry. The best-known autism novel is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The author is a long-time professional writer of young adult fiction. His publishers had the wit to market the book in two formats, one directed at the public that reads middlebrow novels, and the other directed at teenagers. They hit the jackpot: 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year and a genuine bestseller. Temple Grandin was the first autistic autobiographer. She has gone from strength to strength, not only with her books and other media productions about autism, but also with her remarkable improvements to American abattoirs. Her books (such as 1986; 1995; 2009) are only a fragment of her media productions – consult her website to see their ample scope. Of other autobiographies, Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere was on the New York Times bestseller list for months in 1993, and the sequel, Somebody Somewhere, did almost as well. Her website, too, is rich in various types of product. Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day also made it to the New York Times bestseller lists in 2007. Autie-biographies, as Donna Williams calls them, continue to flourish. There are also many biographies of autistic people, usually written by a member of the family. Many aim at uplift, but some are honestly grim. The most recent example of the latter is Karl Greenfield’s Boy Alone. Karl’s severely autistic brother absorbed all his parents’ time and love from his 1960sbirth onward, so there were two boys alone, one of whom, Karl, crashed through 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. The genres of both autistic fact and autistic fiction are, to be polite, much more variable in quality, but many of the lesser lights are thriving too. Why? It is not the somewhat unrelenting stream of more or less factual accounts that concern me here, but the astounding proliferation of fiction.

THE AUTISM MANIFOLD

Before canvassing the many sensible answers, we need to grasp the breadth and depth of autistic ﬁction. There are literally hundreds of works, so I shall give only a sampling, chosen for variety, and backed up 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 York Times, 15 April 2009. This was a family trip. The title and the publicity emphasize the father, but Isaacson’s wife, Kristin Neff, was there too. She is director of the Self Compassion Research Lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 autism fiction: a mirror of an internet decade? 635 range of the genre. You might imagine that if you have read one autism novel, you have read them all. If so, you are in for a big surprise. Here I am playing on a standard saying in autism circles: if you know one autistic child, you know one autistic child. That saying well emphasizes that people diagnosed with autism vary enormously in their difficulties. Yet I shall not distinguish kinds of autism, unless the distinction is made by one of my authors. We do not understand the causes of autism well enough to make valid distinctions. It is now common, perhaps even standard practice, to write about the autistic spectrum, and of autism spectrum disorders, standardized by the initialism ASDs. I don’t. Since ordinary spectra are linear, this jargon 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 we now know to be a continuum of increasing wavelengths. Autism is not like that. Metaphors tend to be dangerous. I think ‘manifold’ is pretty safe. The OED gives as its first definition of the adjective, ‘Varied or diverse in appearance, form or character, having various forms, features, relations, applications etc.’ In mathematics and physics, a manifold is a space that in the very small looks familiar, like ordinary Euclidean space, but in the large is much more complex. Manifolds are not simply linear; they come in any number of dimensions. Hence the idea captures, far better than the metaphor of a spectrum, our present awareness of autism. The most familiar name in the autism manifold is Asperger’s, after the Austrian pediatrician who published some cases of childhood autism in 1944. That was the year after Leo Kanner, an Austrian e´migre´ to Johns Hopkins, had published cases of ‘infantile autism.’ Kanner’s children had severe language impairments, as well as difficulties in social relations and a sort of obsessive fixedness and inability to pretend or to play like most children do. Hans Asperger’s cases did not have the same problem with learning language, and so, in 1980, the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing proposed that his name be used for autistic children who acquired speech quite easily. The label has really caught on, but Wing now regrets its success. It may disappear from the next Diagnostic and Statistical 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 autism throughout. This conforms to a lot of practice in autism fiction and biogra- phy. For example, publicity for the Horse Boy constantly refers to the child’s autism; in fact, Isaacson’s son was not diagnosed with autism but with pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. Publishers take their pick when marketing their products. Daniel Tammett’s Born on a Blue Day was sold in the United Kingdom as A

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Memoir of Asperger’s and an Extraordinary Mind, and in the United States as Inside 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 rare genetic 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’s Rain Man of 1988 put autism on the public map. It was to a large extent modelled on a real person, the late Kim Peek. Peek was a remarkable savant who had a malformed brain and also probably had a very specific and rare genetic condition called FG syndrome. These may have partly accounted for his savant capacity, and also for some autist-like behaviour, but most experts now would say he was not autistic. Rain Man was great at advancing autism advocacy, but gives a completely misleading image of the autist as savant. With the exception of fragile-X and a few other rarities such as FG, we have no idea what causes autistic-like symptoms. Hence all distinctions are tentative. Some autistic children are more capable of getting on with their families and members of their age-cohort than others, and may be called high-functioning, but that is only the beginning of a story. For present purposes, there is just a collection of difficulties. Present culture and present psychiatry emphasize the cognitive. For example, hyperactivity in children, a behavioural problem, was a central topic in pedagogy and psychiatry from the 1930stothe1960s, the era when behaviourism ruled psychology. After the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, it became attention deficit disorder, a cognitive problem. Even when, by compromise, it is filed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the problem is officially supposed to be cognitive, and the hyperactivity a consequence of cognitive deficit. Autism seriously came on the scene in the 1960s and so was treated as a cognitive disability. But many aspects of autism are filed as cognitive only because of the cognitive paradigm. The bodies of many autistic people often work poorly. Seizures are a familiar fact of life for many. Sensory overload is common and is perhaps what causes many violent tantrums. Sounds are too loud, colours too bright, or tastes are too piquant; touch may also be painful. Even the sensation of water being swallowed may be intense. Some autists have pro- blems with initiating or stopping motion. Many autistic children calm themselves by flapping their hands or performing other sorts of obsessive movement or fidgeting. Perhaps only the research interests of our times lead us to say this is a cognitive issue. It is good to emphasize, as advocacy groups often do, that each autistic person is different in his or her own ways. Autism is a complex and ill-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 various than those in the autism manifold. One inﬂuential group of autism advocates now call them all, including me and perhaps you, ‘neurotypicals.’ Often the word is used in a disparaging way; we neurotypicals just do not understand anything. Stripped of that connotation, I ﬁnd the word useful and will use it from time to time.

CREATING A LANGUAGE

In an earlier essay, ‘Autistic Autobiography,’ I argued that in addition to the telling of gripping personal battles and victories, autobiographies by gifted people with autism have evolved an unexpected role. They have been creating a language in which to talk about autistic experience. Every human language has evolved its own ways to describe the experiences of neurotypicals. Poets and novelists and the broad mass of workers and peasants have been honing their languages since time immemorial. I am not of that school of philosophy that despises what it jeeringly calls ‘folk psychology’ and would replace ordinary descriptions of what we feel and think with yesterday’s neurological talk. Ordinary languages, English in Toronto or Quechua in the Andes, are the ways in which peoples in English- or Quechua-speaking worlds convey their experiences. What is said in one language about a feeling or a state of mind can often but not always be said in another. But there has been no language for expressing the lives of autistic people until recently. Autistic autobiographies have been helping to create this new discourse in English, for nearly all the autobiographies are in English. But what they have developed is slowly spreading to other languages. I have continued the argument of ‘language-creation,’ in passing from autobiography to fiction, in ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk about Autism: A Role for Stories.’ One could well ask whether the ways in which autistic people tell their own stories are instructively different from the ways in which neurotypicals write their fictions about autistic protagonists. Do they contribute to ‘language-creation’ in different ways? No, because they – and their editors – all read each other and jointly create the new ways of describing experience. In a sense there is little difference between the finished products because the novelists, the biographers, and the autobiographers all feed on each other. My interest here is very different from that of the two essays just mentioned. I am not discussing how autism stories help communicate an understanding of autism, and even develop ways of speaking about autistic experience. I do think that they are helping to generate a new discourse in which to frame a long-ignored aspect of the human condition. But here my concern is wholly external. Why are neurotypicals today so fascinated by autism? What does the fascination show about our times?

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CORRECT BUT BANAL PARTIAL EXPLANATIONS OF THE GENRE

There are plenty of small-scale boosters of sales for autism stories. Some of the people who read autism fiction are themselves autistic individuals, or their family members or friends. Then there is the larger class of readers who are beginning to wonder if they themselves, or their family members or friends, are autistic. There is, among other things, a scare about autism, and people do read autism novels to get a sense of what it is about. That unspoken fear cannot be gainsaid. (I had it at the births of my two youngest grandchildren.) And of course there is a copycat effect. One top success – Haddon’s Dog – naturally and properly invites other authors to try their hand. I shall mention some of the solid journeyman work in which autism plays a central role in the plot; some of these sell not because of autism but because they are good novels. It is the larger genre that concerns me, and for that I need a few startling portraits. 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 list of titles and topics gives no idea. I must convey the intensity of some of the writing. My aim is not literary criticism, although it would be jejune to pretend to have no judgments: better to be upfront with one’s reactions and 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 some novels that enlarge on connections between autism and computing or the Internet. The richer diet of examples that precedes them will make plain that, although I find these novels significant for what is said about autism, they are only one part of a vastly larger picture.

SPOONFACE STEINBERG

To begin with the unexpected, let us take a hit radio play. Spoonface Steinberg began on the BBC, whose listeners voted it one of the best ten radio 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 musical took ten of the 2009 Tony awards on Broadway, including Best Musical, Best Book of Musical, and, uniquely, the three different teenage actors who 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 is Wittgenstein on Tyne. Like a number of contemporary British and Irish playwrights, he does, or at any rate used to do, monologues – sometimes several interweaving ones. These earlier plays work as much by the underlying 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 on the London stage but seems to have an afterlife in British student acting groups. It has played at the Kennedy Center and other important venues around the world, but it seems never to have as happy a life on stage 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 stage by 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 eye contact. 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 divorcing and 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 I could grow up and sing them!) She also treats us in passing to a meditation on the Holocaust. By word count, these themes appear about equally often in the play, but one-sentence accounts always highlight the girl’s autism. Notice that we have an entire roster of current obsessions: cancer, child abuse, Shoah, drink, divorce, and young death, all piled up on top of autism. A few snotty theatre critics who saw the play on stage thought it was maudlin. I agree, but that is of no moment to Spoonface as a social phenomenon. The responses of radio audiences are what counts. The BBC sold 35,000 copies of the audio cassette directly after the program aired. The girl named Spoonface conforms to no stereotype of autism. Her language is far too lucid to serve as something to which many autistic people could aspire. Lack of empathy is the common fate of autistic people. But our heroine empathizes, if only in a sentimental way, with the sufferings of others: in the camps, or with TB, and even her own parents. Even her name, ‘Spoonface,’ better suggests Down’s syndrome than autism. The play nevertheless effected a profound change in percep- tions of autism. Those 35,000 people who bought the cassette can now think of autistic children aged seven as having a rich emotional life.

NOT SENSATIONALISM

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

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1970–1994, there were oodles of sensational novels about people with alter personalities. Most of it was trash. (My own account of these events is in my 1995 book, Rewriting the Soul.) I am glad that, like dissociative identity disorder itself (as MPD was renamed in 1994), this kind of writing has mostly gone away. Even the current reincarnation, or remultiplication, 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 of Tara’s family and her various me’s. There was once talk of an epidemic of MPD. There is recent talk of an epidemic of autism. They both produced a spate of fiction. So I need to make plain that they are completely different phenomena, both medically and from a literary point of view. Most cases of autism are undoubtedly neurological, 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 called double consciousness, were what I call transient mental illnesses – as explained in my book Mad Travelers. A transient mental illness is one that 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 transient, despite the way in which a few theorists have tried to transfer my niche analysis to autism. More plausibly, certain types of current social arrangement and malaise – a niche of a sort – have projected autism onto centre stage among psychopathologies. But autism, whatever it is, and however we reorganize or rediagnose its characteristics in the future, will not prove to be transient. To avoid any misunderstanding, it may be necessary to hammer home this observation in a mindlessly blunt way. It must by now be widely recognized that after an initial joyful flurry, the formerly trendy enthusiasm for talking about ‘social construction’ is not worth the candle. But if anyone should still want to use that language that I deplore, they can say that MPD was ‘socially constructed’ while autism is for real. This is not to say that the label ‘autism’ has some fixed and unchanged referent. On the contrary, there is a complex history of its movement from the early 1940s to the present. That history includes the passage from autism as rare to autism as common or ‘epidemic.’ Autism has been taking up space once allotted to mental retardation, a process admirably analyzed by Gil Eyal and his co-authors in The Autism Matrix. In a recently published lecture, ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets,’ I have used autism as one of two primary examples in a continuation of my theme of ‘making up people.’ The fact that autism is what we might call a classification-in-motion does not imply that we are concerned with something artificial or made up. 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

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 autism fiction: a mirror of an internet decade? 641 founding, for adult autists. His twenty-seven-year-old-son is one. The man at my door is a labourer, an immigrant, not strong in English, unused to bureaucracies, but over two years he managed to convince the Canadian government to allow him to found this charity, named after his son, for tax-deduction purposes. The aim is to afford to hire one full-time trained person to help attend to the needs of seven adult autists, all of whom are in institutions, and all of whom have been brutalized because they are difficult people. A big strong mute twenty-seven-year-old man having a tantrum, and an understaffed for- profit institution, are not a happy mix. We are not talking something made up here, even if the classification and the very name ‘autism’ have histories. We are talking a depressing moment of horrible local history, and a valiant attempt to light a candle in the darkness.

TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY

There is always a morbid fascination with the odd. But, to repeat, the situation of autism is not like that of multiple personality disorder in its heyday. The MPD novels and made-for-TV movies were voyeurism that used a sensational behaviour much in the news in order to rework gothic themes. The autism narrative seldom assumes that form. Autistic characters are usually portrayed as people who are interesting in their own right and not just because they are strange, or worthy of the reader’s sympathy. Moreover autism stories, from autobiographies to comics, are almost always upbeat and uplifting. ‘A triumph of the human spirit,’ as the Daily Telegraph said of The Horse Boy, a line much 2 used in the book’s publicity. I have yet to encounter an autistic villain, though one must be in press, so ample is this genre. Doubles as villains, 3 on the other hand, are two a penny, starting, if you will, with Mr Hyde. The graphic novel Fragile Prophet, also mentioned above, equally exem- pliﬁes triumph over adversity. Jake, the Fragile Prophet, is about to die in a foreseen car-smash. He transfers his power to a foetus that will grow into a baby whom medical genetics will soon be able to cure, and then become a man, whose prophesies make him able to shape the world for the 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 with fresh 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 the review 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 a counter-example in a recent thriller by Fred Vargas, Dans les bois e´ternels.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 642 ian hacking 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 autistic child or person as being imbued with special, nay fantastic, gifts that the neurotypicals lack. And that is a harmful ﬁction. Some people diagnosed with autism are indeed able to develop unusual skills, often, as we shall notice below, on the edge of computer or similar technology. Some people with those skills self-diagnose as autistic. But many others are like the twenty-seven-year-old man of the preceding section. It may be comforting to think of all autistic people as having their own unique endowments, and perhaps even being secret savants, but that is an illusion that does no one any good. Unfortunately a lot of autism ﬁction fosters that illusion.

SOLID CRAFTSMANSHIP

Some stories in which the central character is autistic are fine examples of journeyman writing, where the autism of a character is essential to the plot, and yet is just one facet of a complex human being. Examples are Margot Livesey’s romance Banishing Verona (2004), and Karin Fossum’s Scandinavian thriller Black Seconds (first published in Norwegian in 2002). Other books, also the work of professional novelists, are perhaps too eager to carry messages about autism and the family to succeed as novels in their own right. Examples are novels by mothers of autistic sons, such as Cammie McGovern’s 2006 mystery, Eye Contact, and Marti Leimbach’s Daniel Isn’t Talking of the same year. Sometimes a major piece 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 manga With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, appearing in English 2007–09. The Japanese made-for-TV anime version swept the 41st Television Drama Academy 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, the portrayals of autistic characters are virtually always supportive. They often give a plausible impression of the life of a real person. Livesey’s hero finds happiness; Fossum’s book is deeply sad. In either case the figures are not in general weirdoes, as were fictional multiple personalities. The male hero of Livesey’s Banishing Verona is exceptional, but in an ordinary, human way. It is not that he has gifts that others lack, but that he lacks vices others have. Many people with autism have no idea of pretending and are obsessively truthful. Livesey exploits this fact in her plot. Her heroine lives in a world full of cheats and liars; the hero’s simple truth-telling contributes to her falling in love with him, after a number of alarming, but merely romantic, escapades. Conversely the sad autistic figure of Fossum’s mystery – and his aging mother – just hang in trying to get along in a cruel world.

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EXPLOITATION FANTASY

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 display at the entrance to the Yale library. Scientists have determined that it is written in a language, but not one known on the face of this earth. There is a priest, lovably Irish-named, secretly embedded by the Vatican in the library to guard it. Name of the Rose? Da Vinci Code? Better yet. A mute autistic boy on a school tour goes over to the book and starts reading it aloud. The Vatican guardian just happens to be passing by and overhears. All hell breaks loose. This tale is called The Tongues of the Dead. The author, Brad Kelln, is a forensic scientist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The unreadable book (I mean the one at Yale, not the one under discussion) is written in the language of the fallen angels. The autistic boy is a fallen angel! The Vatican has a special office dedicated to expunging sur- viving fallen angels and any traces they may have left. It launches two scary creatures to kidnap the boy. The author passes them off as fallen angels, until revealing that they are lepers. He has read somewhere that this is an old Vatican ploy: use lepers to do your foul deeds. But two real fallen angels are also after the boy. They have a sideline in body snatching to make themselves incarnate. And there is a top secret Vatican agent dispatched from Thailand, where he is top-secreting on another mission. The lovable priest and the boy escape to Nova Scotia. (Underground railroad!) Just after they cross the border, they go to a diner for breakfast. The pancakes are served with real maple syrup. You can count on the triumph of Canadian Decency from here on in. All the bad guys hotly pursue them, keenly followed at a distance by the head ogre in the Holy Office in Rome. They are foiled by a homeless man who is being treated by a shrink who has a son who is inadvertently killed by the bad guys but miraculously recovers. Homeless Man Not Mad: He Knows More Than They Do. The foiling is only partial, for the autistic lad has meanwhile been withered to death by a leper or fallen angel, I forget which. But perhaps you already figured out the miracle of the psychiatrist’s son who recovered. He did not recover; his body was snatched by the autistic boy who passes as the beloved son, so there is a fallen angel still on the loose in the last line of the book.

ALIENS

It is a cute gimmick to make an autistic boy into a fallen angel. It is an extreme 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.’ It has been attractive for neurotypicals who wanted to express how autistic

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 644 ian hacking people seemed strange, foreign, incomprehensible – in short, alien. But it was also an attractive way for some autistic people to express their difference: it is the neurotypicals who are the aliens! Temple Grandin must have helped set the ball rolling when in a conversation with Oliver Sacks she said, ‘Much of the time I feel like an anthropologist on Mars’ (Sacks 295.) He took the phrase as the title of his bestselling book. 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 Kearns Miller’s 2003 Women from Another Planet? Miller is afflicted by, among other 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 two types of voice behind these titles. O’Neill says, yes, we are aliens, and it is great to be different, quirks and all. Miller says no, we are not; we are women 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 the extragalactic planet Aspergia brings out this symmetry. Unhappily Aspergians have been exiled to Earth where Earthlings regard them as 4 alien. But likewise, Earthlings are an alien life form for Aspergians. Perhaps the demise of this site indicates a dimming enthusiasm for this once-comforting folk tale, but variants continue. I have not mentioned autism stories for children, many of which are didactic. They suggest ways in which neurotypical children can or should think of autistic children they meet in school, of ways in which autistic children may carve out roles for themselves in the neurotypical world. The alien metaphor finds a comfortable home in science fiction tales for children. 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 as alien other. But an Earth-born autist and intergalactic alien join forces in Kathy Hoopmann’s Of Mice and Aliens (2001). The non-autistic people of Earth are alien to the main characters – Martians, to echo Grandin. Ben, a boy recently diagnosed with Asperger’s, befriends Zeke, an alien from another planet who crash-lands in Ben’s backyard. The two co-explore suburban Australia. They commiserate and learn how to cope with life on Earth. Such plots replicate. In Caroline Ann Levine’s Jay Grows an Alien (2007) an aspergic boy happens to meet a cyborg from 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 some online 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 title of a book just out, Francesca Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World. Seventeen-year-old Marcelo has great difficulty in reading facial expressions, and, in general, understanding what other people are up to. Sounds autistic. His lucky parents are able to afford him an electrified tree house where he sleeps, and a private school in Boston for children with special needs. Marcelo may be a new breed of autism hero. He rejects labels, calls himself different and not abnormal. He admits that the best popular description of his condition is that he has Asperger’s, and that other people (not him) need names like that to make themselves comfortable. His father introduces him to his law office, and the book turns into a legal thriller where only the non-standard youth can see what all the standard devious players are up to. Marcelo does not have exceptional powers. The plot hinges only on the point that his distance from neurotypicals helps him see what they themselves do not.

HADDON’ SDOG

Perhaps Stork’s book, primarily for the young adult market, but with a wider appeal, will come to rival Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the 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 word autism. Ian McEwan’s prepublication puff for the book called it the ‘por- trayal of an emotionally dissociated mind.’ But Oliver Sacks’s puff made plain that it was the ﬁrst good novel about an autistic person, so now all readers know. I should warn that Haddon’s boy hero has a lot of pro- blems, but he is an atypical high-achiever, getting through advanced mathematics examinations at the age of thirteen. Dog is so widely read that it provides many of its readers with their only sharp vignette of an autistic teen. In an essay called ‘Who Owns Asperger’s Syndrome?’ the psychiatrist Douwe Draaisma has provided a brilliant analysis of the book, and of the ways in which it serves to ﬁx popular conceptions of autism. Even more importantly, Haddon’s book has become a staple textbook in teacher-training courses, in the unit dedicated to working with children with special needs. Thus the model furn- ished by Haddon is transmitted to a generation of teachers. It may in turn be 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 time you are thirteen years of age. Reviewing Haddon’s Dog, Charlotte Moore, the author of George and Sam, the remarkable book about her two severely autistic sons, wrote, ‘Autistic people are not easy subjects for novelists. Their interests are

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5 prescribed, their experiences static, their interaction with others limited.’ Thus the emotional life of people with autism is presented by this very caring and dedicated mother as what we might call ‘thin.’ She refuses the self-indulgence of imagining a thicker life for her two autistic children (she has a younger neurotypical child too). For that she has been much criticized. In my loaded terminology, her words imply that George and Sam were thin boys, destined to grow up into thin men. And that, she says, is what makes Haddon’s book a coup, even if it is a fantasy. It has made a young autistic lad interesting. In an interview a year after Moore’s review, Haddon implied complete agreement, but ironically reversed its connotations. The lives of autistic people are so boring on the face of it, he said, that he modelled himself on Jane Austen, describing the lives of equally boring people, and 6 making them fascinating. He thereby turns some preconceptions upside down. Jane Austen’s personages are truly thick, yet, as Haddon playfully insists, most of us would be bored stiff in their socially assigned roles. 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 of George and Sam as living far more complex and indeed more ‘interesting’ lives than we get on ﬁrst impression after reading Moore’s book? Or is Moore more true to the lives of most autistic children? The dilemma is false: Moore is writing about two of her three children. To adapt an adage used above, If you know two autistic children, you know two autistic children.

RETROACTIVE FICTION

When Haddon, possibly in jest, mentioned Jane Austen’s boring characters, little did he know about the amazing subgenre of retroactive autism narrative that was waiting in the wings, starring none other than 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 Sound and the Fury. Such is the fate of Calla, the main character in Joyce Carol Oates’s novella, I Lock My Door upon Myself. Calla is the secret name of Edith Margaret Freilicht, born 1890. She indifferently marries, bears three children, and assumes silence. In 1912 she goes over a waterfall with her lover Tyrell, an itinerant Black water-dowser. The falls are named Tintern Falls, recalling Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and its paean to nature, which is Calla’s refuge with her man. The title is from a 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.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 autism ﬁction: a mirror of an internet decade? 647 already been used for the title of a painting, a sort of post-pre-Raphaelite 1891 masterpiece by the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff. In my opinion it is an extraordinary lessening of Oates’s complex achievement 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 citizens of Aspergia. But at present, no one does retroactive faction as bravely as Phyllis Bottomer. She has diagnosed no fewer than eight characters of Pride and Prejudice, with proud Darcy as the prime personage with Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. Bottomer is a speech therapist (speech language pathologist) for schools in North Vancouver, and so she is well acquainted with autism. She has noticed every trait ever mentioned in autism texts, and which can be matched by some words of Austen’s about some character. The trouble is that almost everyone has autistic traits. You may say this teaches us something about autism, that it is pretty hard not to have some autistic traits. But it doesn’t show any more about Jane Austen than Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Among the reactions to Zombies is an extraordinary echo of Mark Haddon’s remark about Austen: her ‘characters other than the protagonist are so often sur- rounded by people who aren’t fully human, like machines that keep 7 repeating the same things over and over again.’ Autism buffs will know that is called echolalia. ‘What’s wrong with those people? They don’t dance well but move in jerky ﬁts.’ That’s called dyspraxia. Echolalia and dyspraxia are traits commonly recognized in some people with autism. The reader may consider whether Samuel Beckett’s Murphy has just joined the ranks of retroactive autism narratives, thanks to Ato Quayson’s essay at the end of the present issue.

TECHS

Aliens, fallen angels, zombies. Not an attractive lot, considering that movie aliens are usually out to get us. DreamWorks’ ﬁrst animated 3D ﬁlm 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 was zombies who were the threat. There is now a philosophical game played by the cleverer philosophers, discussing how or if you could

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

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8 tell a really well-designed zombie from a person. Perhaps that is the new threat: how can you tell your lover is not a zombie? There is a widespread stereotype of the computer nerd or geek as being some kind of alien, living in his own world. How can you tell your tech is not a zombie? This is a grotesquely false image, but there it is. It is played out in recent fiction, where the computer whiz is characterized as autistic. Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark (2002) and Claire Morrall’s The Language of Others (2008) are among the better-written books that take up the autistic computer geek theme. The heroine of Morrall’s story is a middle-aged, middle-class Englishwoman who makes her way with meagre means and few emotional ties. Her computer-hooked loafer son eventually channels his obsessions by designing extraordinary video games, for which he earns millions. Many readers probably guessed at the son’s autism by about page 10, but we are made to wait until the end of the book for the diagnosis to be revealed to his mother. Her son’s diagnosis spurs a realization. Since (in common lore, at any rate) autism is genetic and heritable, she too has Asperger’s. Her difficulties can now be 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 gets going with a last cohort of twenty-somethings who were born too early to receive the treatment. The last autistic people on earth. A group of them become computer screen pattern–detectors at a mega-corporation where the skill is milked. The Megacorp group is selected to be the first human test subjects for a new brain-wiping technique that makes autistic people neurotypical. The hero oscillates for awhile but then, inexplicably, he lands on the decision to undergo the brain treatment. Now that he is neurotypical he can fulfil his dream of becoming an astronaut. The stereotype of the autistic computer nerd with savant skills looms large in Moon’s story.

JPOD

The master of the theme that techs are autistic is undoubtedly Douglas Coupland, the Vancouver author and artist. He is the man who gave us words such as McJob, and Generation X, which was the title of his first major novel (1990). His artwork is increasingly everywhere, and he writes 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. David Chalmers, the inﬂuential Australian philosopher who writes a great deal about consciousness, 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 Internet is the primary habitat of the philosophical zombies, for how can you tell if your Internet partner 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 is mildly autistic. But then he likes to play with intelligent interviewers who write well. He is quoted as saying, ‘Every era tends to reward a 9 specific pathology.’ This is a variant on Susan Sontag’s idea, which I mentioned at the start, that every era has its own pathology. In the nineteenth century you were blamed, according to Sontag, for being tubercular – it was 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 of autism, his own, namely, that he cannot tell where different sounds in a room are coming from. This led the interviewer to think of autism as connected 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, to wonder about the Internet and the fascination with autism that betrays itself in the vogue for autism stories. But Coupland is original. He is right to observe that autism has been extraordinarily rewarded in our decade, both by attention and sheer money. Not enough, advocates say, but in fact it has displaced all other childhood disorders both in sums 10 awarded by governments and in sums collected by charities. 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-game design company. All inhabitants of the pod have names that begin with J. In the middle portion of the book, the social awkwardness, individual quirks, personal obsessions, and ritualistic behaviours of fellow jPodders lead one of them to speculate that everyone in the pod is mildly autistic. She even builds a calming ‘squeeze machine,’ which applies pressure to both sides of her body, in imitation of a bear hug. Temple Grandin invented this kind of device and later adapted it in various 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 be employed, Coupland’s inhabit the pod because that is what techs do, and then they notice they are autistic.

SELF- ABSORPTION

The autism theme plays well in the middle two hundred pages of the novel, 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.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 650 ian hacking rather familiar thought that techs are autistic, but the fact that the book itself is a profoundly, and I am sure deliberately, autistic work. I mean this partly in the old-fashioned sense of the word, the sense you will find in twentieth-century dictionaries. They may mention ‘infantile autism’ as a secondary meaning, but the primary definition will begin ‘Absorption in self-centered mental activity’ (Webster’s New Collegiate 1994). 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,orratherautismus. He meant obsessive self- absorption, which he thought was a trait of many of the schizophrenic patients in his Zurich clinic. From there the word acquired a metaphorical use in colloquial language meaning any kind of unworthy self-absorption. Bleuler himself wrote a scathing attack on the medical profession, asking why doctors were so autistic. It is pretty clear that he thought that autism, in both the narrow medical and larger metaphorical senses in which he used the word, was a moral failing. His descriptions of some of his schizophrenic patients who had autistic traits (in his meaning of the word) are both funny and nasty (e.g., 62–68). Bleuler’s uses of the word became standard in both medical parlance and colloquial usage, especially in German, between the two world wars. It is no accident that the two doctors who gave us infantile or childhood autism – Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger – were trained in German-language medical traditions. As a young man, Kanner emigrated to America after the Second World War, but he established the first American pediatric clinic, at Johns Hopkins, under the aegis of the immensely influential psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, 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 are very bad at face-to-face interactions. Notoriously, autistic people are said not to look other people in the eye. Many have great difficulty in understanding what other people are doing. They cannot read intentions from the face, the eyes, or the body language. Hence many people diagnosed as autistic appear to be (or simply are?) obsessively self-absorbed. Because of the difficulty in face-to-face relationships, autism is a pathology 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 new way, sometimes establishing profound personal relationships that were otherwise inaccessible. That experience has been truly liberating for many people with autism. The situation is especially striking for some of the very severely affected, those who have great difficulty in speaking or are even mute. Some of them use what is called facilitated communication to write to

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 autism fiction: a mirror of an internet decade? 651 others, including persons sitting in the same room. These individuals cannot type completely unassisted, but with some help they can get their fingers on the keys. This is a highly controversial technique. Cynics say the assistant is doing the talking. I prefer to think of the team 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 modalities 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 unit would be co-workers who chat, have affairs, hang out around the water cooler, and so forth. Here they converse only by email. Much of the book consists of e-exchanges, on topics as gripping, and sometimes amusing, 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 is referred to as the first Web 2.0 novel.

PODS

The ‘pod’ of jPod is brilliantly evocative. Of course the immediate resonance is with the iPod, first marketed by Apple in 2001.Moregenerally,weare increasingly empodded. Pods are many things. Seeds such as peas come in pods. The pods are protective enclosures. That underlying sense has run through a host of metaphors in the past fifty years. If you use movers nowadays, all your things are packed into an interchangeable pod, which is then picked up by the van and put down somewhere else. There must be 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 configuration for long-haul flights, passengers stopped sitting beside each other, for their seats could now roll out completely flat: an imitation bed. Each business-class passenger now flies in isolation from every other, even if it is 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 the four movie versions from 1956 to 2007, the aliens snatch human bodies and 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 great little baby gradually turn, around the age of two or three, into a severely autistic child. In its least objectionable form one finds this trope on the masthead of Autism Speaks, now the world’s most powerful autism

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 652 ian hacking charity. There we read, as part of the ‘Founders’ Message,’ ‘This disease 11 has taken our children away. It’s time to get them back.’ The name ‘iPod’ itself goes back to science fiction, nothing less than the Kubrick movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s the line, ‘Open the pod bay door, Hal!’ The pods in question are Extravehicular Activity mini space- ships in which one person can leave the main ship for repair or other purposes. One pod, one person. A copywriter in San Francisco was asked to help name the iPod. As soon as he saw a prototype, he recalled Hal and the pods. That settled it. The prefix i was a no-brainer, because the Internet Mac 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 12 “iMac,” or it can denote the first person: “I,” as in me.’ Let us not forget how neat it all is. The iPod, launched 23 October 2001,is named after the solipsistic repair pods in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In much less than a decade the streets have become full of people attached to their iPods, inhabiting worlds of their own sound. This has become part of daily life at the office. Staff are doubly isolated, doing dull work on a keyboard at a screen, and also hooked up to the iPod. The double meaning of the i prefix formally encodes the lonely interlocking of the me and the Internet, freed of the necessity of face-to-face interaction. For those who like excessive and highly misleading metaphors, the neurotypical are becoming autistic. The kids on the playground aren’t playing with each other any more; they are texting on, if they can afford it, their iPhones. Only the novels with which I have ended explicitly play on a connection between autism and computer techs. I think this play is rather dangerous loose talk. It melds two false stereotypes and encourages misleading or just plain false ways to think about computer skills and about autistic people. There may or may not be some truth in the twin theses of Simon Baron-Cohen: (1) that there is a specifically male type of thinking, a male brain, given to abstract impersonal reasoning, to mathematics, engineering, and the computer, and (2) that the thinking of autistic people is at an extreme end of this male proclivity. As a psychological/neurological hypothesis, that has some merits. For example, it would begin to make sense of the fact that most people diagnosed with autism are male. But the doctrine that all techs are mildly autistic should be dismissed with the same contempt as the claim 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.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 autism ﬁction: a mirror of an internet decade? 653 connection between autism and the Internet is connected in only a loose way with banal chat about techs having autistic traits. So what might be the connection of interest?

THE DECADE’ SMIRROR

This is the first Internet decade. That is not to say that the Internet has no history; it began as a U.S. military idea early in the cold war. But if we take Google as the emblem of the Internet, Google incorporated in 1998 and moved to its present ever-expanding site, the Googleplex, in 1999. That is when the Internet became an essential part of everyday life. That is when Apple started prefixing its stellar products with the ambiguous i. The Internet is world shattering, world changing. The boom in autism fiction is trivial and ephemeral by comparison. Why think that the fiction mirrors the great change of the decade? The mirror relies on the fact that both are involved, in inverse ways – inverse as befits a mirror – with human communication itself. The fictions concern people who do not, and cannot, interact with other people in the ways that have been traditional for the neurotypical for centu- ries, nay for millennia. The neurotypical relate primarily face-to-face, seeing what each other is doing from the look in the eye, from the movement of the body. 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 by many autistic people are not an independent aspect of autism but derive from such prior social impairments, in particular the simple inability to readily grasp what another person is intending to do. The Internet is the inverse. It is radically changing human communication, that is, the ways in which human beings interrelate. No longer do I look at you, make eye contact, or notice bodily discomfort, when we are talking to each other. We text. We email. We form social groups of people who would not even want to set eyes on each other. Some will say Internet communication is like the invention of writing or of printing. There is a certain resemblance, for those also lessened the role of the body, of looking into 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 marvellously analyzed. But I shall not make that argument here. Suffice that the Internet is changing all the modalities of human interaction. The Internet makes neurotypicals behave much more like autistic people than could have been imagined even a decade ago. But I am speaking of something reciprocal. It is striking that now an autistic person can, like Alice, walk through the looking glass, which is the Internet, and with practice or even with an aide, be able to communicate, just like neurotypicals, on keyboard and screen.

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

WORKS CITED

Bleuler, Eugen. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Trans J. Zinkin. New York: International University Press, 1950 Bottomer, Phyllis Ferguson. So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2007 Coupland, Douglas. jPod. Toronto: Random House Canada 2006 – Microserfs. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers 1995 Davidson, Jeff. Fragile Prophet. Illus Stephen R. Buell. Encina, CA: Lost in the Dark 2006 Draaisma, Douwe. ‘Who Owns Asperger’s Syndrome?’ Sartoniana 21 (2008), 23–48 Eyal, Gil, Brendan Hart, Emine Oncular, Neta Oren, and Natasha Rossi. The Autism Matrix: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic. London: Polity 2010 Fossum, Karin. Black Seconds. London: Harvill Secker 2007 Grahame-Smith, Seth (‘and’ Jane Austen). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk 2009 Grandin, Temple. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. New York: Houghton Mifﬂin Harcourt 2009 – Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism. New York: Doubleday 1995 Grandin, Temple, with M.M. Scariano. Emergence: Labeled Autistic. Novato, CA: Arena 1986 Hacking, Ian. ‘Autistic Autobiography.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences. 364.1522 (2009), 1467–73 – ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk about Autism: A Role for Stories.’ Metaphilosophy 40.3–4 (2009), 499–516 – ‘Humans, Aliens, and Autism.’ Daedalus 138.3 (2009), 44–59

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