Autism In Fiction

Post Reply New Topic

For the past while I've been slowly putting together a rather lengthy fantasy story. One element that I'm incorporating is that several characters are intended to have some form of mental illness, besides this one is intended to have ASD. Because their understanding of medicine (both physical and mental) is far limited compared to our own I'm not allowing myself to use medical terms we would recognize. One might suffer idiocy or madness, but there's no schizophrenics (even if someone would meet our criteria).

For expediency sake his ASD symptoms and experience largely are based on my own, although it's somewhat difficult to grasp how their society would interpret his eccentricities.
...
Anyways, all this makes me curious about how actual authors have depicted autism in fiction, and if any depictions from fiction are actually viewed as viable and realistic, or if they virtually always end up as stereotypes and fail.

I realize this is a pretty unguided post so feel free to respond with anything whatsoever (except funny cat gifs).

This is a huge challenge.

I immediately thought of a novel that was recently a big seller, "The Rosie Project". The main character is a university lecturer who doesn't know he is on the spectrum, but does know that he has problems in finding a girlfriend who "gets" him (that's a stereotype perhaps, though not a particularly unrealistic one), and he orders his daily life into fairly rigid schedules (for example, it's beef for dinner on Saturday, fish on Sunday, omelette on Monday etc). He is naive and affable, helpful and quite kind. There are people on the spectrum who would fit that constellation, and it is not an invalid representation. No author, I think, could create an autistic character who represented every possible variety of ASD tendencies, it just wouldn't be possible.

Maybe you can't entirely avoid stereotype to some degree (you want to make your character authentic after all). It's perhaps more an issue of selecting true stereotypes over false stereotypes. Suppose a novelist writes of a geek-ASD character - that can be a realistic depiction because there are ASD geek characters in real life - though most aren't geeks (in my experience). The question then is, how do you portray that without feeding the myths that already exist and which some people believe - "geeks = Aspergers, Aspergers = geeks".

Some writers deal with conundrums like that by adding an explanatory piece after the main content of the story. Some weave it into dialogue or observations made by characters as they go. It seems to be a huge achievement to get it just right!

I read an article about this topic which directly addresses the use of ASD stereotypical representations in fiction.

The author makes the point that there are multiple stereotypes, but the most troublesome one is the "Asperger's as only pathology stereotype"; he considers that "most aspies object to the stereotype that Asperger's is nothing but a set of limitations". I know not everyone agrees though I think it is an important observation, and that's the stereotype that I find the most troublesome and misleading too.

I'm somewhat accepting that stereotypes will still be seen (after all, most exist for a reason even if they're flawed oversimplifications or based on outdated understandings). The harder part for my mind is depicting it against the backdrop of a much more socially rigid culture (strong gender norms, strong gender segregation, strong class system and segregation, etc). Basically, on the one hand failing to get these norms would be even more disruptive than in our society, but social privilege would allow folks in some social classes to be far less 'disadvantaged' by it compared to folks in our society. He's not a noble so it's mostly against his favour, his family are wealthy enough to compensate in someways, but status/class > wealth here.

I take your point OP that the biggest challenge is to place the depiction within the wider context.

This book may interest you:

Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome Have Influenced literary writing.

It covers much more than just literary writing, and the first 30 pages which I have just read online were wonderful in that the author recognises particular features that tend to be a hallmark of ASD writers. Someone mentioned it tonight in the Arts and Literature forum and I am so glad they did

I've never read a book with a realistic autistic character, or even an unrealistic one that I can relate to on any level. It seems like every (NT) author goes out of his or her way to use the same sort of voice, narration style, and thought pattern for their autistic characters. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's a very robotic, limited voice (note that I don't mean monotone). It might be accurate for some people with ASD, but I've never met anyone who actually spoke that way. I think if you can avoid using that voice, you'll have a decent portrayal even if you go all out with the stereotypes and make your character a savant on top of it. That's an exaggeration, of course, but that's how much that voice bothers me. It reads false and really puts me off autistic characters in books.

Here's the best example of the voice I can come up with on the spot:

Danny walked across the house to find his mother and father. They were sitting on the couch making strange faces at each other. Danny did not know what the faces meant, but they made him uncomfortable. He began making noises and shaking his hands because he was uncomfortable. His mother and father stopped making faces and turned toward him.

"What do you need, Danny?" his mother asked.

"It is Tuesday. I have to eat spaghetti on Tuesdays at noon. It will be noon in two minutes and you are not cooking my spaghetti," Alex said. He continued making the noises and shaking his hands.

"Oh, I'm sorry! Let me go do that right away," his father said.

And so on... It really isn't a great example, but you can pick up basically any book written from the perspective of an autistic character for a better one. That's the number one thing that bothers me about autistic characters. I'm also really tired of the autism = math genius stereotype in particular.

I published a novel recently called "Commoner the Vagabond". Commoner is autistic, and as such, influences some of the decisions he makes. Some are good, some are bad.

The challenge in writing Commoner is trying my best to avoid clichés, yet at the same time, allow the reader to see that there are enough traits to qualify him as autistic. The best way I thought to show that without going overboard is spread his off-center behaviors over the span of his life. This was easier because the book is, in essence, biographical in nature.

Even here on WP, a few months ago, there was a heated debate of who really was autistic vs who may not have enough traits to merit a diagnosis. In other words, even amongst our population, we don't all agree as to where the cutoff from NT to Autistic lies, and that's the reason why fiction writers exaggerate some symptoms.

Wouldn't it be horrible if you wrote a book about an autistic guy then people came along and said, "He's not autistic!"? It's almost like writing that book for nothing.