Autism and Post-Human: A Cyborgian Reading of Sabina Berman’s Me Who Dove into the Heart of the World

ABSTRACT

The concept of “cyborg” in Donna Haraway’s much-discussed “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) is outstanding in its depiction of the hybrid body that is untouched by long-standing polar dichotomy stemming from a hierarchal mode of thinking founded on prehistoric anthropocentricism: a worldview embedded mostly in western cultures which considers (normal¹) human beings to be superior to nature and has often resulted in victimization of the so-called other. Haraway’s cyborg is capable of “becoming” animal or machine and is, hence, better suited to the Posthuman world. Following in Haraway’s footsteps, we intend to discuss that autistic people – labeled/stigmatized as intellectually disabled – are able bodies that share close affinities with animals, robots, nature, and environment. To this purpose, Sabina Berman’s debut novel Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World (2012)² is examined to help us draw an analogy between a cyborg figure and an autistic body to bring to light the necessity of inclusion of all as prescribed by Posthumanism.

Keywords:

• Dualism
• Cyborg
• Autism
• Becoming
• Posthuman

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Meaning neurotypical.

2. Originally published in Spanish in 2010.

3. Autistic people face difficulties in locating the boundaries of their own body because “there is no clear separation between the world and the body. World and body are startlingly, painfully, exquisitely, processually one” (Manning 54).

4. For example, for Mukhopadhyay, an autistic who lives in a state of constant becoming, there hardly exists any boundary between the body and the surroundings since he can hear “stories of the wall” or stories which are “covered with smells [and come] from the kitchen” (23). These stories, moreover, begin to play “in-and-out games” with the “fingers of [his] flapping hands” (23), making it seem like Mukhopadhyay is not fully aware of his own body parts.

5. Such behavior is also reported by other autistic individuals: “They called me Tape Recorder because I’d stored up a lot of phrases in my memory and I used them over and over again in every conversation … . I’d tell the story all over again, start to finish. It was like a loop inside my head, it just ran over and over again. So, the kids called me Tape Recorder” (Grandin, Translation 8).

6. Interestingly, Bruno Bettelheim has published an article entitled “Joe: The Mechanical Boy” on an autistic child.

7. Katherine Hayles understands the autistic body as an “information-processing machine with fundamental similarities to other kinds of information processing machines, especially intelligent computers” (246). Likewise, believing that she thinks in pictures, Grandin compares her visual thinking to a Google image search engine or a CD-ROM and says that her mind, in order to come up with a proper response in a particular situation, travels through a library of images, scanning for a particular image and then, in a second-phase process, gets languaged.

8. In his personal account of his experience with Asperger syndrome, Beyond the Wall (2001), Stephen Shore notes his preoccupation with special interests such as computer or science that ensure predictability, fascination with maps, attention to visual similarities, and his remarkable ability to remember “smell and seemingly unimportant characteristics of objects and people” (Shore 34). He goes on to describe his need to have a “virtual computer” in his mind in order to “simulate the procedures” before being able to verbally explain them.

9. According to Russian Formalists, “defamiliarization” is “the special task of art to give us back the awareness of things which have become habitual objects of our everyday awareness” (Selden et al. 32).

10. cogito, ergo sum (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”) was coined by René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Saei Dibavar

Sara Saei Dibavar is an assistant professor of English Literature at University of Mazandaran, Iran. Her interests include literary theory, cultural studies, contemporary fiction and world literature.

Alireza Neyestani

Alireza Neyestani is an M.A. student of English literature at University of Mazandaran, Iran. His interests include disability studies and modern fiction.