Autistic Criticism
- PDF / 206,438 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 206 Views
Autistic Criticism Gorman Beauchamp
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
My son is autistic. He likes loud, brightly colored action movies, not the talky kind his mother and I prefer; so I took him to see Spider-Man, which he seemed to enjoy. “Did you like Spider-Man?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered. “What was it about?” “Baskin-Robbins,” he replied. My wife took him to see the first Harry Potter film, followed by the same catechism : “Did you like Harry Potter?” “Yes.” “What was it about?” “French fries.” In one scene, my wife explained, the kids at Hogwarts sat around a table eating French fries; in Spider- Man, I have to assume, the hero at some point must have swung (literally) by a Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor, a feat that constituted the rationale of the film for Jeffrey. You will notice a certain leitmotif in his answers: a fixation on food, a fixation that extends far beyond the movies, of course, and manifests itself in a reassuringly detailed review of each day's menu. Why autistics think as they do and act as they do is a great mystery that science has yet to unravel. Suffice it to say here, observing Jeff as my proof, that the autistic's response to an experience or an event will be unpredictable, oblique, non sequiturial, mystifying, answering only to some private logic—nothing at all like the response of a normally rational person (and, yes, Virginia, despite what your professors tell you, there are normal, rational people). Spider-Man, I have no qualms in insisting, is, in fact, not about Baskin-Robbins, nor Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone about French fries. A trend in literary studies has arisen analogous enough to my son's malady that I think of it as autistic criticism. I refer not to such notoriously idiosyncratic
Gorman Beauchamp is the author of a book on Jack London and essays on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to science fiction; [email protected]. Beauchamp is also an associate professor of humanities, emeritus, at the University of Michigan.
G. Beauchamp
and mistaken judgments as D. H. Lawrence's on Dostoevsky's “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”—that the author sides with the Cardinal against Christ—or G. Wilson Knight's on Hamlet—that the Prince is the villain and Claudius a good king (for a murderer). A sottisier of such views could be easily assembled, reflecting the eccentricities and deficiencies in taste and judgment of the perpetrators. But these would be their personal peccancies. Instead, the kind of critical autism to which I'm referring is ideologically induced. Nietzsche says somewhere that Christianity taught its believers to read badly, which is no doubt true; but the same holds for the effect of most ideologies: their practitioners interpret literary works in ways to make them accord with, even exemplify tenets of their faith, religious or secular. And this often involves radical distortions, many of the French fries at Hogwarts variety. A specific example will illustrate what I mean—Anne MacMaster's “Wharton, Race and The Age of
Data Loading...
