The important thing is that no one will ever give you grief for not writing any autistic characters in your book. They will, however, give you grief for writing autistic characters and getting them (as they see it) wrong. Therefore, best just to ignore them.
1: Yes, and for autistic you can also substitute all minority groups and women. Well, most likely you'll have to include a few women, but don't make any attempt to show their interior life, just present them as objects of interest, who can also sometimes be annoying.
But keep them marginal as much as possible, right. The grief you'll get for getting it wrong isn't worth it.
I think the best way to handle it would be to not mention autism when describing a character with the condition, but to have them cough into a white handkerchief and reveal a spot of blood.
When I think of autistic people in fiction the first title that comes to mind is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Does she mention it? I can't read the article, because I've already reached my NYT limit this month.
Is that the one where the dog didn't bark or the one where the woman in Florida swung a Chihuahua at a guy in a bar?
7: me too, and no, she doesn't.
That should never have been published, not because it had an autistic narrator but because it was terrible.
Meanwhile, don't forget to display your delicate understanding of autism by claiming all sorts of existing literary characters (eg Sherlock Holmes) as autistic based on the fact that they are a bit anti-social.
11 to 9. Don't tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm not sure I've ever read Dan Brown. I thought I'd read the Da Vinci Code based on my vague memory of the albino monk assassin who has two prosthetic legs plus spares of different lengths, so he can alter his height as part of his disguise, but I have been informed that this character does not exist in the Da Vinci Code so I assume I haven't read it after all.
9.2: Well, I think any attempt to evaluate the novel would have to deal with the question of how convincing it was in presenting the point of view of an autistic person.
13: There's an albino assassin whose clerical status I can't recall. Mainly it was just too much Gary Stu.
the albino monk assassin who has two prosthetic legs plus spares of different lengths
That was from And To Think That I Saw That on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss.
Still, easier reading than epic poetry.
It's too bad the only options on the table are to leave marginalized groups out entirely or to write them in ignorance.
10: Sherlock Holmes is a really interesting example. In Doyle's stories he's actually very genial and polite. Charming even. He might be impatient sometimes but it's always because he's enthusiastic, not becuase he's rude. The reading of Holmes as quasi-autistic hinges on his intelligence, not his social skills.
20: AIUI The Imitation Game did the same to Alan Turing. Not coincidentally with the same actor.
He could be kind of shitty, but yeah, fine with the niceties.
"We have got to the deductions and the inferences," said Lestrade, winking at me. "I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies."
"You are right," said Holmes demurely; "you do find it very hard to tackle the facts."
When I think of autistic people in fiction the first title that comes to mind is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
I hated that book so much. So many well-intentioned people told me to read that bc my daughter is autistic.
I read about 15 pages and threw it away bc I was so irritated by it. Shockingly, not all autistic people are the same. Like most humans, my daughter can be amazing, boring, compassionate, and a huge jerk all in the same day.
That should never have been published
Never read it, but it became a very good Broadway play.
Holmes comes across as an idiot-savant in the first story (where he does cocaine and claims to not know that the Earth goes around the Sun, for example). TV/movie Holmes tends to reduce him entirely to the first story, the one with Irene Adler, the one with Moriarty and the sequel, and the fact that Watson eventually gets married to a Mary.
Doesn't it just get mentioned once, and then again when Watson says he cured him of it?
30: Is The Seven-Percent Solution accepted as canon?
He stopped injecting the 7% solution and switched to freebasing.
"Autistic" genius characters piss me off a lot. I'm probably overthinking, but it feels like they're buying into Romantic* Genius mythology, where excellence is this supernatural gift and like all supernatural gifts it exacts a price, which is used variously to excuse assholes mistreating people or to deny experts normal social lives.
*I say confidently, not actually knowing anything about Romanticism.
Watson and Mary never had any children because Holmes wouldn't tell them how because he wanted Watson following him instead of sitting at home.
Holmes-as-autistic never seemed plausible to me, unless we've watered down "autism" to mean obsessive Romantic genius. His rudeness, as in the quote above, requires a fine-tuned understanding of language, norms, etc. 'Autism' isn't just a synonym for 'unconventional and quirky.'
Yeah, I vastly prefer Elementary's Sherlock to the BBC's. Holmes isn't autistic, just profoundly self-centered and fucked up but learning and trying hard not to be. Huge difference.
I thought about this a lot when reading the Rosie Project. In and of itself it was extremely enjoyable, but I felt profoudly uncomfortable with the premise that I was inside an Asperger-suffering person's head. I think it's okay to write other perspetives than your own in fiction, but you have to do some fucking research. That research is going to be a lot harder in this case than with other marginalized/othered identities. Also there are are plenty of authors on the spectrum, so one could ask them to speak on the subject and read their books, etc.
Hey I should use this thread to promote a beautiful composition by an autistic person. In the short, quiet documentary Neurotypical, which you can watch on Amazon if you're a Prime subscriber, one of the interviewees writes spontaneously utters (though I suppose he had thought about it a lot) this meditation on the game of tag that is so beautiful I cried. It's broken into a few parts, so you have to keep watching to get the whole thing; I can't give you one timestamp. I don't think I was the only one to respond this way, because at the end of the movie he's given the tagline "poet in denial" by the documentarian. I think the interchange that likely led to that was the filmmaker saying to him, "this tag shit is gorgeous; you are a poet," and the the interviewee saying nah.
I got curious about the linkage to Romantic genius because that's definitely part of the package, but not at all the whole thing. Genius according to Kant integrates various faculties of the whole person; I don't think he would have granted the name to any sort of lopsided facility. Shelley's Frankenstein turns obsessive under extremity but isn't much like a movie mad scientist. H.G. Wells's Dr. Griffin (1897) maybe gets closer.
The OED credits the first instance of "idiot savant" to
Édouard Séguin in 1870, and it seems to get more common toward the close of the nineteenth century, coincident with the professionalization of psychiatry and large-scale institutionalization in asylums. (In the 1931 Frankenstein, the monster is a monster because he was accidentally installed with a "criminal brain"; that concept is nowhere in Shelley.)
One of the cases in Séguin's writings was the musical prodigy Blind Tom Wiggins, whose case, just to lay it on thicker, combines familiar ideas about autism with race prejudice and the carnival barker's incentive to sensationalize the outlier.
Kant's a bit too intellectually girthy to fit in any one movement, but an enormous amount of Romantic theory, including the conception of genius, starts with him.
Kant's a bit too intellectually girthy
Are you calling me fat?
Romantic genius because that's definitely part of the package, but not at all the whole thing.
So what part is Romantic? And hoe does the TB/autism parallel work, if at all?
There's an obscure sect of Kantians who believe his ethical teachings are best understood when set to romantic pop music from the '90s. This school of thought is known as Celine Diontology.
Well, the idea that the possessor of special gifts is set apart because of them, and endures compensatory suffering, is definitely Romantic. Percy Shelley and others made it part of the legend of Keats, and Byron made it part of the legend of himself.
That idea isn't yet prominent in Séguin's idiot-savant concept, I don't think - his description stays pretty clinical - but you can argue that the twentieth century garbles the two together.
TB/consumption has a history from the Renaissance onward as a disease of lovesickness or spiritual longing - one is consumed from within by one's passions - and with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility it becomes a mark of the generally sensitive person, which easily feeds into the Romantic conception of the artist. This isn't yet much like autism; the consumptive has a general oversensibility, where the savant is imagined as completely insensible to those aspects of life outside their specialty. But you can see how they're primed to come together, and I'd say the more recent depictions of autism that people above dislike show how the Romantic trope of talent coupled to suffering has come to exert a pull.
That's helpful. Especially after the pain of 44.
FUCK YOU. CELINE IS THE FUCKING THE BEST.
I think that one of the original psychiatric uses (around 1911) of the word autism was to describe what we now call schizophrenia. Same guy Bleuler. The current autism was a post-war development. So, I don't think idiot savant maps on to what people then understood as autism.
Bleuler, Bleuler, Bleuler.
This place still has the best straight lines.
48: That's plausible; it's not surprising that a word with such a vague root would be used for lots of things. But even if the word "autism" circa 1911 didn't have anything to do with the idiot-savant concept, the way we use it now (and especially the popular-culture Rain Man understanding under discussion here) certainly does.
51: Is that still really popular? I'm out of the loop. I think of autism popularly as kind of asperger's-y autism spectrum OR non verbal kids with self-harming behaviors.
52: I think you're right that the idiot-savant stereotype of autism is less prevalent now.
There's apparently a play showing now about a family with an autistic kid, but the (nonverbal) kid is being portrayed by a puppet. Which, yeah, sounds more about the parents' perspective.
52: That's a fair point, I think.
Does everyone already know about Mary Temple Grandin and her work with the bovines?
56 link is interesting. It seems to allude to an unhelpful puritanism wrt slaughterhouses similar to that NW described recently in the Neeson thread.
18: THE CATALOGUE OF SHIPS IS JUST ONE BOOK LONG I THINK THE REST IS VERY READABLE THANK YOU.
You didn't even know you were written.
"I sing of arms and the man." That's a good way to start an epic poem.
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NMM to nutbag Lyndon LaRouche. The Queen finally got him.
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I wonder if she's too big of a person to send Phil to shit on the grave.
Forgot that he lost his license to drive.
I think she's actually a very small person, unless the BBC is doing forced-perspective stuff.
52: I think you're right that the idiot-savant stereotype of autism is less prevalent now.
Counterpoint: The Big Bang Theory has been one of the most popular TV shows for a decade now, and will doubtless be in syndication for another decade, and that's basically its whole setup, no? (I've never watched it.)
I have an oscilloscope. I just watch sine waves.