Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination

  • Stuart Murray
Liverpool University Press: 2008. 288 pp. £50 9781846310911 | ISBN: 978-1-8463-1091-1

Representing Autism examines how we use the word autism and what this reveals about how we think about it. A form of literary criticism or cultural anthropology, this original book fills an important gap. Too often, scientists believe that they have direct, unmediated access to the object of their study. Stuart Murray reminds us that autism is not an unambiguous 'natural kind': our scientific taxonomy is also prone to biases.

Dustin Hoffman (seated, centre left) played a card-counting autistic savant in the 1988 film Rain Man. Credit: GUBER-PETERS CO./MIRAGE ENTERTAINMENT/STAR PARTNERS II /RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE

Autism lies on a spectrum, and comprises two major subgroups: people with classic autism and those with Asperger's syndrome. These groups share the combination of social-communication difficulties, narrow interests (pejoratively called obsessions) and a love of sameness (known clinically as resistance to change). In classic autism, language development in children is also delayed and they can have additional learning difficulties. Autism and Asperger's syndrome are genetic in origin, affecting how the brain develops and thus affecting mind and behaviour. The terms 'autism' and 'Asperger's syndrome' are medical diagnoses, applied when the defining features interfere with an individual's ability to function, causing them to suffer.

According to Murray, whether we are making a film or writing a scientific paper about autism, we are superimposing categories on to it. For example, the major charity for families and individuals with autism in Britain, the National Autistic Society, was founded in 1962 as the Society for Psychotic Children. This shift in the name could have affected what we looked for and what we saw. Similar shifts occurred in the first scientific journal for autism research. Now called the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, it began as the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia. These changes signal how we used to believe autism was just the childhood form of schizophrenia, and how we used to think this condition only affected children.

We now know that autism and schizophrenia are distinct. For example, schizophrenia typically causes delusions, hallucinations and 'thought disorder' whereas autism does not. And schizophrenia may entail a rather loose or casual use of evidence to form beliefs, whereas Asperger's syndrome may be marked by a desire for very tight, unambiguous evidence as a basis for forming beliefs. We now also know that autism is lifelong, and the old view that this was just a condition of childhood has meant there have been few, if any, studies of autism-spectrum conditions in adulthood.

One narrow slice of the autism spectrum disproportionately dominates public perceptions of the conditions. In the 1988 movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman's character Raymond Babbitt could impressively recall all airline crashes by date of incident, or could tell a waitress her phone number just from seeing her name badge, having memorized the local phone directory up to the letter G. Kim Peek, the real man on whom Babbitt is based, is even more impressive. He can recall every word of every one of the thousands of books he has ever read, and can read two facing pages of a book simultaneously. Interestingly, he also completely lacks a corpus callosum, the connective tissue between the two hemispheres of the brain, which may be related to his remarkable skills. Peek was described as a 'living Google' in a British television documentary about him in February 2006. Another documentary in 2007, entitled Brain Man, featured Daniel Tammet, a British man with Asperger's syndrome and synaesthesia, who memorized pi to 22,514 decimal places.

TV documentaries and box-office successes such as Rain Man have educated the public only about the savant subtype of autism. This same bias appears in best-selling novels too. The central character Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (Jonathan Cape, 2003) was a boy assumed to have Asperger's syndrome who, despite his limited social understanding, took advanced mathematics exams at the age of 13. In such books and films, it is fiction that ends up educating the largest audience about autism.

Murray discusses why art is attracted to autism. We are fascinated, he posits, because autism seems to strike at the neural systems that define us as a species: the ability to pretend and deceive flexibly, to communicate through hints and innuendo, and to respond with empathy. At the same time, autism can, in some cases, facilitate other systems that also define us as a species, such as the ability to do mathematical calculations. Murray suggests the range of representations of autism in fiction include Spock from Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes.

Slanted views about autism can even be found in the research community. On the website of Autism Speaks, the major charity funding autism research in the United States, are the words “This disease has taken our children away. It's time to get them back.” This is as clear a statement as one can find of autism as a disease, a view that many but not all autism scientists would endorse. Contrast this with Amanda Baggs's online video In My Language (http://tinyurl.com/2pczl2), which she launched as a statement about her civil rights as a person with autism, to be recognized and understood as different but not diseased. Another website, Autistics.org, proudly proclaims that people with autism are simply differently wired, and names one of their online groups the Autistic Liberation Front. These statements, along with Representing Autism, serve as a valuable reminder that we need to challenge how we conceptualize such medical conditions.