The Secret Life of Stories

by Bérubé, Michael;

  The Speed of Dark explicitly opens and closes with the question of who knows what about whom, and who is thereby authorized to ask questions and validate answers. The narrator in the passage below is Lou, and he is registering his (fruitless) objections to the endless barrage of psychiatric evaluations to which he is subjected:

  Questions, always questions. They didn’t wait for the answers, either. They rushed on, piling questions on questions, covering every moment with questions, blocking off every sensation but the thorn stab of questions. . . . Dr. Fornum, crisp and professional, raises an eyebrow and shakes her head not quite imperceptibly. Autistic persons do not understand these signals; the book says so. I have read the book, so I know what it is I do not understand.

  What I haven’t figured out is the range of things they don’t understand. The normals. The reals. The ones who have the degrees and sit behind the desks in comfortable chairs. . . . She doesn’t want to know what I mean. She wants me to say what other people say. “Good morning, Dr. Fornum.” “Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” “Yes, I can wait. I don’t mind.” (1–2)

  Lou eventually decides to volunteer for the experimental cure; the epilogue, written seven years afterward, suggests that the treatment has been “successful,” even though it has stripped Lou of his feelings for Marjory, a neurotypical woman with whom he had been in love. The last line of the novel, fittingly, is “Now I get to ask the questions” (340); now, too, Lou needs no secondary diegetic device to explain his life.

  Whether or not one is happy with Lou’s decision—and some readers have objected to it, on the grounds that “cures” for autism should be categorically refused, even in fiction2—the point remains that the novel opens with a Lou who does not understand the larger narrative structuring his life, and ends with a Lou who does. For Lou, Benjy, Stevie, and Oedipus, in other words, narrative irony—the distance between what we know as spectators or readers and what they know as characters—constitutes the very fabric of the narrative (as it does for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, as well). But this phenomenon is heightened when the character in question has an intellectual disability, not only because of the possibility that other characters might be exploiting that disability to their own advantage (this provides the structure of Memento, and the tragedy of The Secret Agent) but also because the inability of characters with intellectual disabilities to understand the narratives they inhabit appears, in contrast to Oedipus’s hubris, as radical innocence. (Again, think of Steinbeck’s Lennie.) We feel pity and terror, as Aristotle suggested, at watching our fellow humans flail about in a world they do not fully understand, subject as they are to their passions, their blood feuds, and their capricious and vengeful gods. But our fellow humans with intellectual disabilities are more vulnerable, more precarious than Oedipus; and if theorists from Aristotle to Freud to Ricoeur to Teresa de Lauretis are right in seeing fundamental narrative principles at stake in the unfolding of Oedipus’s story, then perhaps the narrative irony at work in stories involving characters with intellectual disabilities can tell us something important about irony, self-awareness, and self-reflexivity as well as about intellectual disability.3

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  I trust that I have already made clear, and more than clear, my aversion to diagnosing characters. But I have to reemphasize that aversion here, especially with regard to Curious Incident and The Speed of Dark, because so much commentary has focused largely on whether the narrators in question are accurate representations of persons with autism; and that commentary, unfortunately, has been explicitly licensed by the novels themselves (and their marketing materials). Curious Incident notes, in its front matter, that “Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of numerous award-winning children’s books and television screenplays. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals” (n.p.).4 The Speed of Dark makes much of Moon’s status as the mother of a young man with autism: the lead blurb on the back cover of the Ballantine paperback (provided courtesy of the Denver Post) states that “Moon is the mother of an autistic teenager and her love is apparent in the story of Lou.” The novel also features a “reader’s guide,” an appendix consisting of an interview between Moon and Paul Witcover, that is devoted chiefly to questions about autism, and does not fail to include the perfunctory “I know you have an autistic son; how much of Lou is based on your son and your experiences in raising him?” (n.p.).

  But I can anticipate the objection to my diagnosis-aversion when it comes to texts like these: The Speed of Dark quite literally announces itself as a novel about autism, and though Curious Incident does not, Haddon seems to have outfitted Christopher Boone with every stereotypical marker of someone on the Asperger’s end of the autism spectrum—aversion to touch, asocial behaviors, inability to read facial expressions, preternatural facility with math, and trouble with the Sally-Anne test, just for starters. (He does, however, understand why he does not pass the Sally-Anne test.) Moreover, it seems that in some quarters, Curious Incident has become the go-to book for young-adult fiction dealing with autism (even though it was not considered a YA book when it was published), just as Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon wound up selling over five million copies a generation ago by becoming a widely assigned middle and high school text dealing with the matter of what was then called mental retardation. It would seem that autism is literally written onto the pages before us. So why shy away from literalism?

  For many reasons, not least of which is that literalism is so (literally) literalist. As I have noted above, the diagnostic mode leads us to conclude that character X has Y disability and can thereby preclude us from asking broader interpretive questions about plot and motive (and with Curious Incident and The Speed of Dark, the temptation becomes all but inevitable: all autistic people are like that). The diagnostic mode then leads us away from the grainy details of specific passages and utterances, distracting us from what we should be asking about narrative as such. Mark Osteen offers a useful corrective to this tendency in his introduction to the edited volume Autism and Representation. Oddly, he does so even in the course of plaintively asking for more literal representations of people with autism in novels and film: “Is it too much to expect simple accuracy?” (30) Simple accuracy! When was fictional “accuracy” ever simple? When I hear calls for “simple accuracy,” I reach for my Aristotle—and then my copy of Beckett’s Molloy. And Osteen’s demand comes, remarkably, in response to Tom Shakespeare’s rather reasonable reminder that “it is dangerous to develop hard and fast rules of representation” (qtd. at 30). Nevertheless, despite invoking a mimetic criterion that would hold creative writers to the most naive forms of literalism, Osteen proceeds to show deftly how Mark Haddon’s ironic humor works in the text:

  Christopher’s inability to comprehend others’ emotions also enables Haddon to filter the bathos from potentially overwrought scenes. For example, when Christopher finally arrives at his estranged mother Judy’s apartment following a harrowing train journey to London, he informs her that his father, Ed, had told him she was dead. Christopher—a big fan of TV nature shows—blandly tells us, “And then she made a loud wailing noise like an animal on a nature program on television.” Christopher’s neutral narration makes the scene more powerful. (39)

  That it does, clearly enough. (I confirmed this, at least to my own satisfaction, by seeing the stage version of Curious Incident, in which I found Christopher’s parents’ moments of anguish less compelling for being directly represented to us by their characters.) Moreover, it is the key to reading the book: Christopher’s neutral narration compels us to read over his shoulder, so to speak, particularly with regard to his interactions with the novel’s other characters:

  And I asked the policeman, “How much does it cost to get a ticket for a train to London?”

  And he said, “About 30 quid.”

  And I said, “Is that pounds?”

  And he said, “Christ alive,” and he laughed. But I didn’t laugh because I don’t like pe
ople laughing at me, even if they are policemen. (151)

  This structure, whereby readers must supply the missing connective tissue that explains why the policeman laughed and said “Christ alive,” subtends nearly every one of Christopher’s exchanges—with his father, about whether he is crying because he is sad about Wellington (“Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that” [21], he replies, rather than explaining that he is sad about the breakup of his marriage and his relationship with Mrs. Shears), with Mrs. Alexander, about why his father does not like Mr. Shears, or with the Indian man in the Underground kiosk about the location of 451c Chapter Road, London NW2 5NG. For diagnostically minded readers, that exchange with the Indian man happens because Christopher has autism; fair enough, but for my purposes the exchange with the Indian man produces a dialogue that reveals just how many implicit nonverbal and social cues can reside in the phrase “two ninety-five,” and that is the point of the textual operation, regardless of whether Christopher’s intellectual disability is represented “accurately”:

  So I went up to the man in the little shop and I said, “Where is 451c Chapter Road, London NW2 5NG?”

  And he picked up a little book and handed it to me and said, “Two ninety five.”

  And the book was called London AZ Street Atlas Index, Geographers’ A-Z Map Company, and I opened it up and it was lots of maps.

  And the man in the little shop said, “Are you going to buy it or not?”

  And I said, “I don’t know.”

  And he said, “Well, you can get your dirty fingers off it if you don’t mind,” and he took it back from me.

  And I said, “Where is 451c Chapter Road, London NW2 5NG?”

  And he said, “You can either buy the A-to-Z or you can hop it. I’m not a walking encyclopedia.”

  And I said, “Is that the A-to-Z?” and I pointed at the book.

  And he said, “No, it’s a sodding crocodile.”

  And I said, “Is that the A-to-Z?” because it wasn’t a crocodile and I thought I had heard wrong because of his accent.

  And he said, “Yes, it’s the A-to-Z.”

  And I said, “Can I buy it?”

  And he didn’t say anything.

  And I said, “Can I buy it?”

  And he said, “Two pounds ninety-five, but you’re giving me the money first. I’m not having you scarpering,” and then I realized that he meant £2.95 when he said Two ninety-five. (186–87)

  Comic (and/or painful) though it is, this conversation is also a pointed commentary on the limits of literalism—for Christopher’s difficulties in understanding the communicative protocols of a simple commercial transaction (on a literal reading of this exchange), but perhaps also for readers inclined to read representations of intellectual disability exclusively as representations of intellectual disability.5

  Now that we are talking about textual operations rather than about character diagnoses, I want to linger for a moment on the fact that Christopher’s “harrowing train journey to London” takes up about one-third of the book. That in itself is remarkable, or should be: where a neurotypical narrator might say, “And then I went by train to my mother’s house in London,” Christopher recounts the entire journey in minute detail for over sixty pages.6 The narrative is thrilling, as we learn from Christopher’s perspective just how harrowing his journey is; but at the same time, it forces us to reconsider our ordinary distinction between significant and insignificant detail. If I were to tell you about my most recent travels in New York City subways, you would consider it odd if I included in my narrative a detail like the one Christopher provides about the London Underground:

  there were signs saying Great Western and cold beers and lagers and CAUTION WET FLOOR and Your 50p will keep a premature baby alive for 1.8 seconds and transforming travel and Refreshingly Different and IT’S DELICIOUS IT’S CREAMY AND IT’S ONLY £1.30 HOT CHOC DELUXE and 0870 777 7676 and The Lemon Tree and No Smoking and FINE TEAS. (145–46)

  But in Christopher’s narrative, these details make perfect sense, not only because he habitually notices things that neurotypical people miss (“most people are almost blind,” he remarks [144], in a nice piece of disability détournement), but also because the constant threat of sensory overload is part of what makes Christopher’s journey so harrowing, as when all the signs turn to gibberish (gubbish?) on the page “because there were too many and my brain wasn’t working properly” (170). As we have seen time and again, intellectually disabled characters can do that: like Manfred Steiner, they can bend the narrative around themselves so as to warp our expectations for degrees of detail or continuity. It is something of a relief, then, when Christopher finally ends his epic train journey and walks the remaining way to his mother’s house, but cuts back on what most readers would consider irrelevant detail: “So I started walking, but Siobhan said I didn’t have to describe everything that happens, I just have to describe the things that were interesting” (189).

  The things that are interesting as we approach Christopher’s destination, I suspect, include questions like, What is Christopher’s mother’s life like with Mr. Shears? How will they manage to accommodate Christopher in their household? (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) What will happen when Christopher’s father arrives to try to retrieve him? But I have a meta-question about what is and is not “interesting”: How can it be that we are reading a detective novel written by a teenager who cannot distinguish significant from insignificant detail? Doesn’t this violate the very mechanism of detective fiction, articulated by Conan Doyle’s ars poetica of detective and novelist, the interpretive operation of separating the essential elements of plot from the irrelevant? Haddon could not have made matters more explicit: his protagonist is a Sherlock Holmes fan who deliberately sets out to write a murder mystery, and who knows that the solution to murder mysteries turns on the capacity of the detective to function as an information-sorting demon. At one point Christopher comes upon a detail that he thinks might be an important clue to who killed Wellington—“either that,” he writes, “or it was a Red Herring, which is a clue which makes you come to a wrong conclusion or something which looks like a clue but isn’t” (31). What we have in Christopher, then, is a curious set of textual capacities for a detective: on the one hand, a keenly observant eye, a brilliant memory for detail, and an awareness of the distinction between legitimate clues and red herrings; on the other hand, an inability to sort sensory information, an inability to tell when people (such as his father) are lying to him, and an inability to understand motive.

  Now we are getting at why—for me, at least, and I hope for you—the self-reflexivity of Curious Incident should take interpretive precedence over the question of the “accuracy” of Haddon’s representation of a person on the autism spectrum. At the very least, we need (if we are literary critics) to stop ourselves from reading right past the text to the “content” within; though The Speed of Dark and Curious Incident are both “about” autism and autistic narrators in a baseline sense, these texts differ in substantial and important ways. To begin with, from start to finish, Curious Incident is about texts; the title itself, remarking an absence (the absence of sound from the dog who does not bark in the night), announces its relation to the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” and Christopher tells us in so many words that “I do like murder mystery novels. So I am writing a murder mystery novel” (5). He pointedly contrasts murder mystery novels with “proper novels,” which he does not like—and he briefly explains why: “In proper novels people say things like, ‘I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.’ What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor does Siobhan or Mr. Jeavons. I have asked them” (4–5).

  To be honest, I don’t know what this passage means, either. But I do know it comes from The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, hardly a proper novel. So what is the point of this sly literary-history joke, and
why should Curious Incident announce its relation to improperly “proper” novels in its opening pages? It is not just a matter of determining whether The Waves constitutes a “proper novel,” though we will revisit the question of what we mean by “proper” novels in the course of discussing Don Quixote, Pale Fire, and Foe. The larger point, obviously, is that the neurotypical characters in Curious Incident aren’t any better at reading that passage than Christopher is. It is as if, in the face of The Waves, no one in Curious Incident is any more or less intellectually disabled than anyone else. That possibility in turn opens onto the novel’s implicit but profound suggestion that no one in Christopher’s world, with the possible exception of Siobhan, his paraprofessional aide, is any less socially maladroit than he is. As James Berger writes, “The social order is itself firmly placed on the autism spectrum,” inasmuch as it “is characterized by its members’ isolation and inability to communicate with each other” (201). This is an appropriate “thematic” reading of Curious Incident’s intertextual relation to The Waves, cuing us to the fact that the novel will be full of misunderstandings and misreadings, beginning with Christopher’s misreading of the central mystery to which the death of Wellington the dog is epiphenomenal. But it is critical, for my purposes, that the cue is one of relation between text and text.