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  • This Disability Which Is Not One:Autistic Intermittency in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Joseph Valente (bio)

To date, autism has been diagnosed on the basis of behavioral characteristics. No identifying neurological or biomedical insignia that is specific and universal to autism has yet been determined, only hypothesized or surmised. We must take as our focus the outward diagnostic signs of autism, the decisive property of which, in aggregate, is their heterogeneity. Christopher Boone, the protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, displays an extensive yet quite partial slate of these symptomatic markers: a taste and talent for systemic pattern recognition, difficulty with nonverbal cues, detachment and dysfunctionality, stimming, enhanced visual perception, obsessive routines, detail orientation, susceptibility of savantism, tremendous rote memory, poor facial reading/recognition, empathetic deficits, psychic rigidity, imaginative defects, aversion to being touched, inability to lie, mindblindness or mentalizing deficiency (otherwise known as failed theory of mind). Other such markers include (but are not limited to) perseveration, weak central coherence, poor executive function, attentional deficits, language delay/deficiency, susceptibility to intellectual handicaps, poor eye contact, an inability to imitate, imitative echolalia, narrow but passionate interests, vestibular and proprioceptive issues, literal mindedness, synesthetic tendencies, transition problems, sensory hyperarousal, and deficiency/proficiency in abstract thought.

As massive as the list is, the heterogeneity of autism cannot be gauged on an additive basis alone. No autistic person displays at any time more than a fraction of these markers; no autistic person [End Page 35] displays all of them, even over the course of a lifetime; and no autistic person has the same set of signature traits in the same way, degree, or combination as any other. If there is an "autistic fingerprint," it is rather like, well, a fingerprint, an individualizing rather than a typological sign.1 No wonder the autism community has a maxim, "if you know an autistic person, you know one autistic person." Perhaps not even that. The leading symptoms of an autistic person will likely not stay the same from one phase of life to another. The condition of autism is no less dynamic than any other element in a developing personality, and like other such elements, it renders interpersonal knowledge a contingent, circumstantial affair, not the fixed, reified apprehension due a specimen. Finally, many of the most salient perceived symptoms counterindicate (not to say preclude) one another. For example, extreme literal mindedness but synesthetic sense perception; inability to imitate but imitative echolalia; sensory hyperarousal but very high pain threshold; poor working memory but extraordinary rote memory; aversion to touch but need for touch; liability to intellectual disability but susceptibility to savantism.

None of this is to suggest an absence of overlap, family resemblance, or convergence among the myriad specimens and multiple subgroups of autism; only that the substance of these affinities differs on a case-by-case basis and thus calls into question the validity and even the relevance of large-scale comparisons. As such, autisms of whatever type or subgroup are neither fully separable from nor securely linked to one another, and autism is, by implication, "not one," in Luce Irigaray's phrase, neither singular nor plural, but fundamentally in transit, fissile, discrepant. The differences within the autistic phenotype are the very constituents of that phenotype, to which they belong by modifying (however slightly) its boundaries.

Autypicality

To be sure, the heterogeneity of autism receives a good deal of lip service from all informed parties. But few have been unduly [End Page 36] deterred from addressing the subject of autism as if it were a unified whole. In this regard, most scholars, researchers, and activists rely on the same rhetorical building block: the Freudian defense mechanism of disavowal. "I know perfectly well … but." In this case, they know perfectly well that autism presents as heterogeneous in every aspect—behavioral, sensory, cognitive, neuronal, genetic. But they continue to approach, portray, and affirm autism as if it were otherwise. I might even go a step further and propose that the trope of disavowal forms the bedrock of contemporary autism studies. That is, the predicate that autism, while undeniably heterogeneous, must be and must...

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