Sonya Freeman Loftis’ Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum is a groundbreaking examination of autism as it is depicted through characters who are either explicitly named autistic, or whose traits are popularly understood to signify an autism diagnosis. Unlike many widespread ideas of autism as a deficit of particular qualities (e.g. empathy, communication), Loftis’ goal is to look at texts which ‘treat autism as a presence, an identity, a source of agency … (and) to explore fictional depictions of the spectrum as signs of disabled presence’ (154–155).
Loftis draws deeply from texts that consider autism through a narrative, rather than clinical, lens: Stuart Murray’s Representing Autism and Mark Osteen’s Autism and Representation. However, unlike these authors, Loftis plants herself squarely in the human center of the discussion about autistic representation by opening the book with a disclosure of her own autistic identity. When she writes ‘Even though the stereotypes of autistics is that we lack empathy …,’ her choice of pronouns (‘we’) may first seem innocuous, until the reader goes on to realize that she is speaking of the hours following the Newtown (Connecticut) massacre; the ensuing discussion of the role that the shooter’s diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome may have made upon public perception of the tragedy, as well as those bearing that diagnosis, is only one way in which her autistic identity deepens her discussion of literary and popular autism representation. Similarly, the closing pages allude to Loftis and her husband’s difficult quest to adopt a child once they learn she will be unable to bear a second. By the time she concludes that ‘Literature both reflects the society that creates it … and reinforces and re-creates the social understandings and ways of being that created that literature’ (152), her readers will have gained a deepened understanding of the very real effect that fictional representation has upon actual autistic lives. In this way, Loftis’ work may rest more fully with Ian Hacking, as she acknowledges:
(T)he ways we think about, describe, and write about autism affect people labeled as ‘autistic,’ and this in turn affects the way that autistic people understand themselves, the way that their identity as autistics is enacted, and the way that people perceive and interpret the behavior of autistics. (13)
The book is organized semi-chronologically in order to show the influence fictional autistic depictions have made upon one another. She opens with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (and his modern-day television, film and fictional offspring) and G.B. Shaw’s Henry Higgins (in Pygmalion), and closes with contemporary best-sellers such as Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. She looks to mid-twentieth-century classics for literary representation found in chapters such as ‘The Autistic Victim’ (Lennie in Of Mice and Men, the character of Charlie in Flowers for Algernon) and ‘The Autistic Gothic’ (Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, Laura in The Glass Menagerie, and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury). As Loftis observes, ‘there is sense of historical continuity in the literary representation of these characters, whether the authors recognize them autistic or not’ (152).
Acknowledging the spectrum of autistic characteristics varies more widely than any single representative could portray, Loftis attempts to show a range of verbal and intellectual abilities. The character of Charlie in Flowers for Algernon is shown first as someone with intellectual disabilities before receiving intervention that propels his intellectual capacity into supernormal capacities, albeit leaving him just as ‘disabled’ by his intellect and challenges with social interaction as he had been prior to the intervention. ‘I would argue,’ Loftis writes, ‘that Charlie is always “mentally disabled” – he merely moves from a state in which intellectual disability causes his primary impairments to a state in which social disability is his primary impairment’ (77).
Loftis draws attention to the ways fictional representation affects not merely popular ideas of autism, but also the lived experiences of autistic people. For example, she shows that autistic characters, no matter their importance to the story, are often shown through the lens of the non-autistic narrator. For instance, the stories of Sherlock Holmes are narrated by the well-meaning Mr Watson, who views Holmes as a puzzle; this affirms that the reader will share his (non-autistic) view. Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as well as Jonathan Safron Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close are described as ‘having three levels of mystery.’ The reader must ‘decode the mind of the autistic child’ even while the detective narrative unfolds; simultaneously, ‘a larger emotional mystery is also playing out ….’ as the boy narrators learn painful truths about their parents (128). Loftis makes a convincing claim that the behavior of autistic people is primarily seen as mysterious only when viewed through the eye of a non-autistic narrator (or reader), due to unshared perspective.
When Steinbeck portrays the murder of Lennie by his friend George as a form of mercy killing (thus simultaneously ‘saving’ Lennie from a mob’s angry lynching, and society from Lennie himself, representing ‘disabled sexuality’ [68]), Loftis engages her reader in discussions of contemporary filicide, the prevalence of and general benevolence towards parents who kill their autistic children. Another example may be found in the state of Texas, in which a criterion was constructed by the Court of Criminal Appeals based on Steinbeck’s Lennie which explains that only those people with characteristics such as Lennie’s, who ‘by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills,’ should be exempt from the death penalty; these characteristics, drawn from the fictional character of Lennie, override clinical tests developed by clinical psychologists, drawing the objections of Steinbeck’s son who expressed outrage that the state would use ‘a fictional character that my father created … as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die’ (62–63).
Imagining Autism is a readable, scholarly study that should be of interest to those interested in literary fiction, history, disability studies, or cultural studies.
Independent Scholar, Asheville, NC, USA
[email protected]
© 2016 Carolyn Ogburn
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1219524