See it feelingly: classic novels, autistic readers, and the schooling of a no-good English professor £27.50

One of the first things to say when reviewing See It Feelingly is to acknowledge my position as a non-autistic reader, of which I became very aware by the beginning of the second chapter – I was learning about the experiences of autistic people, through the approach of a neurotypical scholar. This book is a series of accounts from a study of autistic people’s engagements with literature, a project described by the author, Ralph James Savarese, as ‘intentionally, if casually, ethnographical’ (12).

In accordance with concerns of academic tourism, and the author’s own reflections on his place within these debates, I feel that it should be stated that the rest of my discussion of the book commences from my own non-autistic (if not neurotypical; I have multiple sclerosis) perspective. I perhaps have a higher-than-average amount of knowledge of autism than many non-autistic ‘non-experts’, gained primarily through indirect experiences of autism within my family. In attempting to parent my children I came to learn much more about autism, from them, with very little sense being wrought from the medical/scientific theory which was available at the time.

By the time I learned about the social model, and of ‘neurodiverse politics’, much damage had been done, not least to/within my own family. The socially embedded attempts to modify both my sister and my child to ‘best fit’ mainstream culture (Milton 2012, 883–884) had served to render them both as ‘abnormal’, along with all of the forms of social and psycho-emotional disablement that entails. In some ways, then, I occupy a similar position to the author of this book, particularly in my ongoing parental desire to comprehend my child’s life world. Indeed, I would describe myself as a ‘model reader’ for this book, with under-developed and conflicting knowledge, but armed with a strong desire and enthusiasm to gain deeper understanding of the disabling processes imposed by neurotypical norms. I was not disappointed; centring the voices of the autistic students who participated in his study, my expectations were exceeded. Indeed, Savarese was well qualified to undertake this project, including his ‘love’ for books, his academic position as a literature professor, his work in neurohumanities, and his numerous publications on autism and literature. However, it was his passion to use his knowledge to explode myths and question neurotypical ideals of normality which grabbed my attention from the start.

Thankfully, before I read See It Feelingly the work of people such as Damien Milton and Laurence Arnold was well known to me, so, equipped with some of with their insights, I grasped the chance to read this book as a way to gain a deeper understanding of autism, literature, and affect, not least in learning more about how the ‘double-empathy’ problem (Milton 2012) is encountered by the autistic readers. Implicitly, this was a golden thread running through the book. Reflecting many of the experiences I witnessed my own child enduring, all those who featured in the book had had to face considerable, and ongoing, struggles to understand ‘about non-AS [autistic spectrum] perceptions and culture’, in social situations where ‘non-AS people lack insight into the minds and culture of “autistic people”’ (Milton 2012, 886). Further, despite some similarities of experience, the five students chosen by Savarese provided an excellent challenge to stereotypes of autistic people, demonstrating a wide diversity of difficulty, experience, and barriers to fuller forms of inclusion.

I enjoyed and learned something from most of the chapters. Stephen Kuusisto provides a short foreword to the book, indicating the value of investigating what ‘neurodivergent minds bring to reading’, suggesting that this will add to a more complex, nuanced picture of writing and readership. This is followed by Savarese’s own introduction, where he raises a number of literary questions and we learn something of his relationship with his son, DJ, his previous research, and his work with autistic students, before he familiarises us with each of the students and literature he goes on to discuss in the proceeding chapters.

Chapter One, ‘From a World as Fluid as the Sea’, is the one I found the most difficult, and is rather densely written. This is based on the author’s work with Tito Rajarshi Mikhopadhyay, a young man from India who had been taught by his mother, when a school-based education was denied to him. Tito is very well known, as is the method ‘pioneered’ by his mother, Soma; this is known as the ‘Rapid Prompting Method’, a technique associated with facilitated communication. Although this is not the place to discuss the ethics of either of these methods, the little knowledge I have gained from other scholars (for example, Sherry 2016) and my own personal distrust of, and disappointment with, methods promised to improve communication for my sister (Wilde 2010) rather distracted me from the initial discussions about Tito’s engagements with Moby Dick. Nonetheless, I found the discussion between them fascinating, especially on the relationship of several characters to autism and Captain Ahab’s attitudes towards the whale.

Other novels discussed include Ceremony (in Chapter Two), defined as ‘a seminal text in Native American Literature’; this appears to have been chosen due to the prior interests of the author’s second student, Jamie. It was positioned as a novel that neither of them had read, which they could discover together. Like the other chapters of the book, Jamie’s story, interpretations of the literature, and cultural attitudes towards autism are interwoven with the author’s own readings and questions. The blending of these themes is entwined with a host of other relevant topics. Common subjects were the strategies used by each of his students to move into listening, speaking, writing, and comprehension; within these discussions is found ongoing explanation and comparison of medical knowledge and theories (neurological, sensorimotor, ‘theory of mind’, embodiment, experience, use of space, time, rhythm, and more) which feed back into discussions of how each person conceptualised autism for themselves. Savarese shows us, for example, how Jamie conceptualises autism as a ‘literacy instructor’ (72) (with literacy being understood here as a way of being in the world) while Temple Grandin’s well-known habit of ‘thinking in pictures’ positions words as a second language. The synthesis of personal stories with explanations of experience, which allows us glimpses into the diverse and common characteristics of autistic readers, continue throughout the book. In this particular chapter we can discern the similarities found between Jamie’s ‘friendship’ with detailed ‘celebration’ of ‘irreducible particularities’ (72) and another participant’s use of ‘delayed decoding’ (72). Delayed decoding is explained to be a trait which is believed to afford ‘extraordinary pattern recognition’ (72) for many autistic people, in strong contrast to the competences in ‘social pattern’ recognition found in neurotypical people; these themes are developed further throughout each chapter to build a compelling argument for the inclusion of neurodiverse perspectives in, and on, literature.

The book then goes on to examine Dora’s experiences, focusing on Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?, whilst also discussing the film Blade Runner and other forms of science fiction. The discussion of androids, machines, and humans facilitated a very engaging discussion of empathy and post-human, or ‘more than human’, ethics (114), not least in Dora’s love for assistive technology as a self-confessed ‘giga-cyborg’ (117). As much as I enjoyed this, simultaneously extending my knowledge of perspectives on anthropomorphism and synaesthesia, my favourite chapter was ‘Finding her Feet’ (Chapter Four). Here, Savarese talks with ‘Eugenie’, a ballet dancer who is described as a ‘multiracial, Jewish Deaf woman with Asperger Syndrome’ and ‘mother of an autistic child’ (123). The novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was chosen for her because of the Deaf protagonist John Singer – an indication, perhaps, of Savarese’s prior assumptions of probable identifications. Unsurprisingly, given some of the explicitly racist content (e.g. references to ‘coloured smell’ [141]), Eugenie found some of this story to be offensive. I found the entire chapter fascinating (regardless of the fact that I have not read this book), and particularly insightful into how she navigated her identity. This allowed for a number of in-depth and interwoven explorations of race/multi-raciality/mixed heritage, gender, neurodivergence, social/familial attitudes, embodiment, and intersectionality. Key to many of these discussions was an interrogation of gender norms and concepts of queerness, neuroqueerness, and gender vagueness and a convincing argument for more fluid ideas of identity and the need to remember ‘the queer instability of categories’ (152).

Chapter Five is focused on Savarese’s discussion of two books with Temple Grandin. Adopting the same principle he had used with prior participants, he chose them according to his presuppositions of her interests; these were C. S. Malerich’s Meat and Midge Raymond’s The Ecstatic Cry (a story about someone who has ‘renounced intimate relationships for an animal centred career’ [177]). As interesting as this was, in showing the complexity of Temple Grandin’s life, there was a sense that she did not engage as fully as the other participants, although this could equally be a strong indication of the diversity of responses to literature and the author’s implicit emphasis on the expected structures of feeling. However, this may well be my misreading. Savarese extends his discussion of the conversations with her to question his own ethnographic approach towards her ‘avoidant attachment’, and his fishing for ‘neurotypical empathy’ as a symptom of ‘people disease’. He admits: ‘In a flash I became that dreaded tourist who drops his ethnographical tissues and gum wrappers all over the place’ (183).

Questions about whether or how people researching those in ‘other’ social categories are always close to the surface in reading such academic work, and I am glad that Savarese confronted this throughout. As much as we may all disagree on who should speak for whom, and how, and I would like to hear the opinions of autistic people on this book, I can say, with few reservations, that I learned a lot from it, from the unexpected synthesis of literature and autistic identities with scientific/neurological knowledge to understandings of social relationships and individual experiences of the world (neurotypical and neurodiverse). The sense of critical self-reflection is crucial to this enterprise, and is evident throughout the book. Thankfully, this never veers into self-indulgence; as such, his ethnographic work in this area is an exemplar to all those who study ‘others’, as outsiders with situated knowledge (i.e. most of us).

I struggled with the form of referencing the author adopted, being unfamiliar with his system of notation. There were no references in the main text, nor a conventional footnoting system – I felt thwarted when I found myself wanting to investigate the many studies discussed in the text, until I found 48 pages of notes at the end of the book, divided into relevant chapters. Although the notes were numbered, there was no page information given, and no corresponding numbers in the main text, so readers have to guess when to look for a reference or further information/explanation, or read a fuller set of notes after reading sections of the book, referring back to individual chapters.

Overall, I loved See It Feelingly and it taught me much, providing a holistic picture of all its participants and their engagement with, and contributions to, literature (potential and actual). The price of the book is worth it for Chapter Four alone, as a fine piece of intersectional analysis on Eugenie’s interactions with literature, culture, and her own self-identity. Despite any doubts I may have had at the beginning, I found the majority of this book to be aligned with the authors I cited earlier. In particular, Savarese’s perspective echoes Laurence Arnold’s statement that ‘the approach to each individual has to vary according to and be appropriate to their given needs having regard to the situation they find themselves in and whatever goals are considered to be appropriate’ (2012, 3). Indeed, we are left in no doubt that our failure to engage with neurodiversity will leave us impoverished, and less able, collectively, to think of better ways to live.

Alison Wilde
School of Education and Childhood,
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK
[email protected]