July 24, 2005

HORSEFEATHERS SUMMER READING

        Horsefeathers summer 2005 award for cant clearing creativity in fiction goes to Mark Haddon, author of an enjoyable novel titled, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The narrator of the story is a 15 year old autistic boy with a talent for mathematics. The book is a flawed tour de force. It attempts to get inside an autistic's mind, to portray the world as experienced by such a person. However, in making the hero very appealing, Haddon risks romanticizing his condition. In the 1960's R.D. Laing, an English psychiatrist, argued that psychotic people have access to deeper truths that are unavailable to the 'sane'. Thus schizophrenics were trying to communicate important insights to the rest of us. We in turn were "normal", i.e. cogs in a repressive capitalist system, cut off from emotional authenticity. Similarly, Haddon's hero sees through the self-deception of the 'normal' world and holds fast to his own simple beliefs. However, what makes this character more than just a collection of politically correct shibboleths about the virtues of the handicapped is that he subjects the "normal" P.C. world itself to amusing critical scrutiny. Here is the 15 year old narrator discussing the utopian P.C. desire to spare everyone's feelings by censoring hurtful words: "..All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters who wears a beige-colored hearing aid or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.
        But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout "Special Needs! Special Needs!..."