Autism Fiction: a Mirror of an Internet Decade?
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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 inter- act with others while avoiding the difficulties of face-to-face interaction. It proposes that the public fascination with autistic texts mirrors the dominance of the Internet in daily life. Both such texts and the Internet itself represent radical changes in the horizon of communication. Keywords: autism, autism fiction, Haddon, Coupland, aliens Autism narrative is a boom industry. Autobiographies. Biographies. 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 university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010 634 ian hacking 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 bio- graphies 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 autis- tic 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.