In Oliver Sacks’ account of his meeting with the autistic Temple Grandin he writes: ‘She was bewildered, she said, by Romeo and Juliet (“I never knew what they were up to”) and with Hamlet she got lost with the back and forth of the play. Though she ascribed these problems to “sequencing difficulties,” they seemed to arise from her failure to empathise with the characters, to follow the intricate play of motive and intention. She said that she could understand “simple, strong, universal” emotions but was stumped by more complex emotions and the games people play.’
Causality in storytelling often depends on states of mind: she loved him, he loved her, but falsely believing her dead all ended in disaster. Grandin’s problem is the stitching between events, the psychological and emotional states that supply motivation. Narrative is a means of giving order to the world, but without this emotional stitching narrative instantly loses all coherence as human actions are left bereft of causation. There’s experimental evidence that if autistic children who enjoy reading are given books with blank spaces between words, often they seem unable to guess what’s missing. If silly words are substituted here or there, they often don’t seem to mind, even though this makes a nonsense of the global sense of the story. Unpick the causal, psychological stitching and they’re unfazed because they probably weren’t paying it much heed in the first place; their enjoyment of books must be based on something other than narrative logic.
When we observe Joe’s consumption of stories, what do we see? He reads books as if they are not stories at all, but rather a series of snapshots, one page in proximity to the next, maybe, but not necessarily related. Watching him watch videos, I have the feeling he absorbs them scene by isolated scene, not with continuity. Like Temple Grandin, he probably feels mystified by motivation and intention, by Pat’s reasons for stopping on his round to have a cup of tea, a cake and a chat with Granny Dryden. ‘Teat,’ – (something) to eat – says Joe, observing the fact but not really knowing why it occurred. The result must be that much of life doesn’t flow one thing to another so much as arrive in lumps in his lap. Not being able to see the psychological connections between events means that even if I gave Joe a telling off, he might often be unsure why; moreover, I’m honestly not sure what Joe thinks Postman Pat is: a copy of reality, a representation of it, or a reality in itself?
My friend Katey tells me of her niece, Rose, who wanted to play a game: ‘Let’s pretend Mummy and Daddy are dead and we have to go and live in an orphanage,’ she says. When I argue that socio-dramatic play helps us understand social events, I’m not suggesting that Rose is educating herself to cope specifically in the event of her parents’ early and no doubt gruesome death. Stories are not literal rehearsals, they have more generic power than that; they probably serve as archetypes for many experiences, in this case perhaps the many forms of separation she might experience in life.
Christopher Booker’s recent work, The Seven Basic Plots, is an encyclopaedic feat of categorisation, arguing in common with some others that stories are displaced myths. He rounds them up under titles like ‘Voyage and Return’ or ‘Overcoming the Monster’ and it seems, he says, that they work as archetypes because of some deep resonance in the unconscious, in the way our psyche organises experience, perhaps, according to one reviewer of Booker’s work, because narrative patterns, experienced from childhood, have priority over conscious thought; that is, when we wonder how to explain what’s going on around us, our first instinct is to reach for an archetypal story, rather than to sit back in analytical contemplation. Speaking for my own trade, that certainly seems to be the way journalism works, defining events in terms of commonplace narratives such as ‘the betrayal’, ‘the feud’, ‘the pledge’, ‘the bungle’. Though we’re all taught to avoid clichés, the fact seems to be that newspapers in particular (and perhaps readers) are happier once a story can be nailed down in terms of one or another stock theme.
In creating fictions during play, are we not learning about and establishing in our developing minds the same kind of myths? Susan Isaacs, a psychologist, writes that ‘play is indeed the child’s work, and the means whereby he grows and develops. Active play can be looked upon as a sign of mental health; and its absence … of mental illness.’ There’s some support for the idea that pretend play is social education from another study, by Wendy Haight and Peggy Miller in 1993, which found that three-quarters of pretend play is social, not solitary. In 1987, Alan Leslie, a former research associate of Uta Frith, wrote a paper suggesting that an important capacity of the human mind was the ability to decouple representation from reality:
The perceiving, thinking organism ought, as far as possible, to get things right. Yet pretence flies in the face of this fundamental principle. In pretence we deliberately distort reality. How odd then that this ability is not the sober culmination of intellectual development but instead makes its appearance playfully and precociously at the very beginning of childhood … how is it possible for a child to think about a banana as if it were a telephone, a lump of plastic as if it were alive or an empty soap dish as if it contained soap?
Once you can form a mental representation unshackled from reality, you can play with it, imagine it otherwise, project it onto others as a way of accounting for what they do, use it to help organise experience. We can, as in Francis Spufford’s description of the value of fiction, build and stretch and build again the chambers of our imagination. Without that skill, without an ability to bring to life what is not, or what might be, or to take what has been and arrange it in patterns with which we feel comfortable, we have only a chaotic hailstorm of what is, and only what is on the surface at that. We cannot hypothesise, speculate or – and here the deficit is alarming but has to be faced – imagine.
I do not know how deep this deficit goes in Joe; he simply must be able to invoke an image or idea, of pasta, say, in order to ask for it when it isn’t there. I suspect, though, that it is an inflexible image, not one he would consider playing with in the imagination, and perhaps this inflexibility accounts for his own love of routine; perhaps another of the ways in which we are able to cope with variation, flux and change is because the imagination has accustomed us to such alteration, it has previewed so many changes that we become comfortable with the process of change. With every degree that Joe’s thoughts have to move into what is not here, not now and not him, he seems to find increasing difficulty. The rest of us are masters at imagining and manipulating the world, near or far, in our thoughts, and we do it relentlessly. It is another commonplace for us, a skill we take for granted, but a sign of extravagant mental dexterity.
Sometimes Joe will bring into jumbling collision a plastic Postman Pat in his left hand and a Mrs Goggins in his right as if in some unlikely lecherous congress on the post office counter, but I’m not sure what’s actually going on, whether Joe is acting out a scene or simply crashing plastic. Even if the former, the scope of behaviours he plays out must be tiny, for it usually involves his plastic figures gliding through the space in front of him as he sits in an armchair. Pat the astronaut? I don’t think so. In general, it is striking, this lack of feeling for the pretend among autistic children. They do not engage in ordinary spontaneous symbolic play with dolls, nor in role play. Sometimes when prompted by example, Joe will offer Pat a bite of biscuit, but never on his own initiative.
Thus the educating capacity of the stories that are told to us, or the pretend games we play, whether as proxies for experience or places to flex the imagination and work out what’s sayable and acceptable, are probably largely lost on Joe.
Can we be sure the ability to decouple reality and representation is linked to social competence? When Joe decides to take off his clothes in the café because he’s spilt a lone drip on his T-shirt, when he hits babies or grabs strangers’ food from their plates if it takes his fancy, it’s unquestionably true that he mistakes the boundaries of the acceptable. Had he been able to explore the unreal, would it have helped him? Up to a point, I thi
nk it might.
Normal infants learn specifics about the world, direct facts, says Uta Frith, but by the second year, they go a step further and show the first signs of learning to form representations of what other people think about those facts. The difference is profound, beginning as it does to make possible the development of children’s ideas about not just an object itself but anything that another person might hold in her head about it. Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist, has written that we use an ‘as if’ mechanism to think ourselves into someone else’s predicament. Thus can Mummy pick up a banana and pretend it is the telephone and the child instantly cotton on to what she’s doing, instantly see that she is holding in her head an attitude to the banana that is not dictated by the fact of it being a banana. Seeing me speak into a banana, Joe would write it off as another of the mysterious ways of people, with no apparent sense or purpose.
This helps us see why pretence of this kind might be linked to social understanding. Pretence is a mental attitude. Social acceptability is likewise determined by mental attitudes: if I use a banana like a telephone, it is only like a telephone because of my attitude towards it. If I take care to wear clothes in public it is partly because I am aware of the mental attitudes of those who might disapprove if I was naked. Therefore, if I can understand pretence, I am also more likely to be capable of understanding that other people can have diverse mental attitudes towards the people and things around them, similar skills being deployed in both cases. Possessed of that understanding, I might even become mindful of those attitudes and try to make sure my behaviour doesn’t offend them. So it seems perfectly plausible that we use the same piece of mental machinery for understanding others as we do for exploring the unreal.
Alan Leslie, who first suggested this line of thought, proposed that in most of us the developmental origins of our sense that other people have minds lie in the capacity for pretence. His argument is controversial. In support, there is some evidence from small studies that children who do engage in more socio-dramatic play have a better understanding of social situations and particularly of other people’s motivations, but the statistical basis for these findings is insufficiently robust. Yet there is this signal piece of uncontested evidence: children with autism, a condition defined principally by deficient social awareness, don’t do socio-dramatic play. This strong association does not imply causation, of course, in either direction, but it certainly suggests a link.
A final, bizarre indication of the lack of such a decoupling mechanism in autistic children, one that has obvious repercussions for their social life, is that they find it exceedingly hard to lie or to detect lies. Oliver Sacks says that Temple Grandin was an easy victim of tricks and exploitation who failed ‘to understand dissembling and pretence … missed allusions, presuppositions, irony, metaphor, jokes …’.
Most children understand jokes with word-sounds of multiple meaning by about the age of six: ‘What’s black and white and red all over? A newspaper.’ ‘Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9.’ But every child I know has been through some phase, much younger, aged about three or four, where bouncing down the stairs is even funnier to the rhythm of ‘wee, wee, poo, poo, bum, bum’ that so makes parents smirk at one another. Taking delight in exploring the borders of rudeness is a recognition of the layers of meaning in words and behaviour, a sense that things and actions have many kinds of representation, and here’s one thing – wee – objectively uninspiring, with a layer of meaning that grown-ups are comically twitchy about. Children rejoice in trespassing on language, sounding it out, in or out of context, to see what happens; rabbits on Mr MacGregor’s vegetable patch, or dipping a toe into embarrassment and finding it tickles. They already know these things are subject to weird social codes and play helps probe and define the limits. The fact that a single word, ‘bum’, can be a joke, tells them it has at least two registers. Temple Grandin and others with autism find life easier to understand if the rules are simple, clear and explicit. Sadly, social rules thrive on subtlety; their light shines on behaviour through a prism, where it’s fractured for endless different occasions. Embarrassment, which, according to Sacks, Grandin never feels, is a complication born of life’s multiple registers, many of them attitudinal: how it looks from here, from there, who’s watching, what they know, where you are, what time the event happens. Most of us are busily decoupling representation and reality all the time, to enrich meaning, add emotional shades, social mores, jokes, or lies. If it were possible to have a world of facts alone, without such added layers of representation, Joe, Grandin and others with autism would find it more comprehensible; the rest of us would lose an immeasurable range of subtleties, and laugh not nearly so much.
Joe’s inability to imagine that others might see his actions in Do It All differently from the plain facts of the situation – needed a wee, found toilet, did one – means that, like Grandin, he can’t be embarrassed; he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks and can’t be taught. In the hardware store, where I do care, I face a dilemma: it would be unconscionable to slink out without telling someone, but think of the explaining. And yet … the poor member of staff who’ll stumble across it if I don’t. Oh sod it, I’m going to have to confess, I think, as we walk towards the tills; there can be no slinking out of this one.
And so we slink out. A metre away from the sliding doors, Joe stops and turns. Not now, Joe, not with escape so close. I half expect the long arm of security to appear brandishing a bucket of incriminating evidence. ‘Is this yours, sir?’ I yearn to be outside, but Joe insists; he often does.
‘What is it, sunshine?’ I say wearily, and he reaches up, takes hold of my neck and pulls me into an immense embrace. As the doors slide shut behind us, he’s tempted to make them open again, which he knows he can do by going back in; he understands basic cause and effect. But I won’t let him and he’ll never know why, for the cause and effect in my head is non-existent for Joe. Mind-blindness takes another toll as, on the whole, he assumes my thoughts to be identical to his own, as if his thoughts are all the thoughts there are, as if there is but one great universal thought we all share. With his trousers round his ankles, smiling, I suppose he expected me to feel the same relief.
A few weeks later, out and about in St Albans, Joe tugged on my hand as we passed a bathroom display in a shop window. Why not, he must have wondered, consolidating routine, it worked last time? We found somewhere in the station down the road instead.
There is a story I could tell another child, the story I tell you, about how the strange boy did a wee in a funny place and his daddy ran away; and from that you would learn a great deal about the social acceptability of certain kinds of behaviour. Joe would understand only if I could explain the causation almost mechanistically, talking to my son as if we were such rigid physicists that Newton’s laws of motion provided the only acceptable vocabulary. It is as if I need to make explicit understandings that usually strike the rest of us instinctively. Theories of child development, quite rightly, don’t generally assume that children learn social behaviour by direct analysis and instruction, taking life apart, pulling open its mechanics, contemplating interaction cog by cog. We do that sort of thing when we’re older, when the realisation hits us that what we do with contemptuous ease in childhood is actually rather sophisticated, and then some of us become academics. One wouldn’t expect that to be a consideration for any ten-year-old. Sadly, though in Joe’s case it might help him make sense of the world, the ambition is lunar.
Learning social behaviour is simpler, more osmotic than that, thank God, at least for those who can do it. On the whole, it is argued, the rules governing our social interaction are either biological or insidiously cultural. That is, we grow into social beings according either to the promptings of our genes, without much effort, or as a result of the environmental broth on which we’re nurtured, again with only limited conscious reflection. There is no manual, no intellectual deconstruction necessary; what we know is either there from th
e outset or it seeps in, an accidental agglomeration: a bit of example here, a word of correction there, play whenever possible, certainly not by the kind of painstaking elucidation Joe seems to require.
Storytelling is similarly hybrid, similarly easy, coming to us like milk from a mother’s breast, a nurturing commodity naturally prompted. Storytelling comes in infinite forms but often deals in themes that resound like an echo down the centuries, an echo in our bones. ‘What,’ asks Francis Spufford, ‘is the most embedded form of language, for all that it seems devoted to carrying those who hear it outside the moment? What way of speaking deals out situations one after another, is full of concrete particulars and keeps an eye on people’s intentions all the time? What packs in cognitive material most richly in a form children are able to attend to? The story.’
It is, he says, an inheritance which may be as genetic as the upright gait of our branch of primates or opposable thumbs. Imagine life without it. Imagine Joe. We’re lucky we can.
8
Innocence
Joe was languid but pensive in the play area outside school. It was mid-December and in little more than a week he’d be home for Christmas. He was preoccupied by the thought, not of Christmas, the tinselled festivities of which don’t impress, but of home, scene of his greatest indulgence regardless of the season. Next to him stood a young classmate similar in age and size, a boy of comparable ability and disability who sat with Joe, often shared his Lightwriter and was closer than any to being called his friend.
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