Abstract

The discursive construction of idiocy during the modern era shares a basic architecture with the discursive construction of autistic spectrum disorder today: each elides the fixed scientific demarcations to which it has been nonetheless subjected. This significant overlap in the symptomatic profile of the two cognitive syndromes is emergent in The Secret Agent. Conrad fashions the character of Stevie in a manner calculated both to invoke and to explode the category of idiocy, thereby inadvertently giving his protagonist attributes at once consistent with and corrective of the dominant contemporary social and scientific construction of autism. The tertium quid in this play between Conrad’s deliberate and unwitting intervention in the history of cognitive disability is the figure of the artist. By installing Stevie as the antitype (opposite) of the idiot he is supposed to be, Conrad frames him as a proto-modernist, a mute inglorious alter ego of the author, and, accidentally, as an antitype (precursor) of the autist.

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