Autism as Metaphor

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee, "Autism as Metaphor," New York Times Book Review, February 10, 2019, pp. 12-13.

     I ask myself why using autism the way these books do feels wrong. As a child who was disappointed to find the only Asian Characters in any book in the library to be the Japanese-American family in "Farewell to Manzaner," I am acutely aware of the importance of feeling represented in literature.  And yet, when it comes to autism appearing in literary fiction, I instinctively feel a need to protect my son from these portrayals.  He's not an Ojibwe curse, a savant or an alien.  Nor is he an emotionless cipher with no inner life.
     As a writer, I understand the absurdity of trying to place restrictions on what can and can't be written about. Keats defined negative capability as an artist's ability to transmute an experience or idea into art even if she hasn't experienced it herself; without it we'd have no historical fiction, no "Madame Bovary," no "Martian Chronicles."
     The crux of the issue is that with autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a wrier can inscribe and project almost anything; Autism is a gift, a curse, super intelligence, mental retardation, mystical, repellent, morally edifying, a parent's worst nightmare.
   As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want.  As a parent, I find this terrifying given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day. 

COMMENT

    Borrowing a title from Susan Sontag's famous essay, Myung-Ok-Lee is distressed by the way fictional characters with autism become a fill-in-the-blank plot device, not people but a metaphorical illness.  She argues that this blank spot constitutes a form of erasure similar to the way that diversity blank spots in library collections render Asian people invisible.   

    For a more authentic view of people with autism, Myung-Ok-Lee suggests The Reason I Jump (2013)  by Naoki Higashida, a non-verbal Japanese man with autism whose mother assisted his writing.   Other autistic authors do have a voice to explain themselves such as scientist Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, 1995; The Autistic Brain, 2013), or photographer Rosalie Winard (Wild Birds of the American Wetland, 2008).  As for fiction, there is a fully-realized autistic character  in The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) (biologist Patricia Westerford) who seems to be modeled on someone like Grandin.  

   So the problem is not just a problem of diversity, but one of avoiding stereotypes.  The story of Asians in America is much broader than just Japanese internment camps; the story of Autism is not limited to the reaction of neurotypical people.