“I Am, (Therefore and with Difficulty) I Think”: An Enactive Reading of Sabina Berman’s Autistic Narrator

ABSTRACT

This first novel of Mexican film director, scriptwriter, poet, multi-award-winning playwright, journalist, and political activist, Sabina Berman, appeared in English translation in 2012. Berman’s autistic narrator, Karen Nieto, uses notebooks and diaries to produce a memoir-style narrative that undercuts Cartesian understandings of rational human(ist) subjectivity; Nieto is embodied, and embedded in the world, then she attributes meaning. This paper argues that Berman repositions readers in relation to standard human subjectivity and values by consistently calling attention to differences between (an assumed) neurotypical reader and the representation of a neurodivergent narrator. Taking a Disability Rights perspective, Berman refuses to subsume the narrator’s neurodivergence to a neurotypical plot by representing her as an autistic savant or allowing her life story to be reduced to pain and suffering through social or medicalized deficits. An enactive reading of this autistic narrative highlights differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent positions without favoring the former as a point of origin or destination thereby facilitating a revaluation of what it means to be human. It highlights embodiment and embeddedness in environment. The paper also examines stylistic features of the text’s materiality that engage with echolalia and alexithymia to analyze how they enable defamiliarization to reposition readers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Hereafter indicated by page numbers where there is no intervening reference.

2. I thank Marco Marco Caracciolo and his wonderful team at Ghent University for their engagement and feedback on this paper.

3. This is not affect as previously discussed but affect as used in psychology, “the act of feeling a sentiment spanning from distress to extreme joy”. (Pam).

4. For a discussion of the nuances and ironies of estrange and enstrange as an outcome of an error by Shklovsky, see Alexandra Berlina’s introduction to her translation where she discusses enstrange as usefully reproducing the original effect. See 151-154, in particular. On page 154 Berlina uses the phrase ’makes the reader sit up and see’ in relation to Shklovsky’s esthetic notions.

5. As early as 1987, independent UK publishing house, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, formed what is now a multi-national company specializing in academic publications from social and behavioral sciences and accounts from people with autism thus addressing a social deficit that prevented autistic people from having their voices heard in the mainstream.

6. The idea that people with autism have no imagination has been rigorously critiqued by Marion Quirici 71 as ableist in a paper that has accessible commentary for the non-clinical lay person.

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Sue Lovell

Sue Lovell teaches literature in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University. Her research interests include critical posthuman narrative theory with a focus on identity, and engagement with the concepts of embodiment, affect, agency and extended cognition in both literary and biographical narratives.