The mere idea of hammering home to readers that we've only recently realized how basically all biographies were written assuming neurotypicality (<----is that even a word?) and that there's no doubt much more neuro-atypicality in history's biographical subjects seems like a fascinating project.
When I ponder this project the first thing I think of is the weight of research needed to turn a subject into something fresh. Maybe I don't fully understand this project. EX: I've read a lot about Joyce and Pound. There are triangulations I go through as I read about these writers through the lenses of different biographers. For one: they're both very rich, strange characters. Almost all the biographical writing about them was done by writers who I doubt were thinking about the semantics of "neurotypical." That both Pound and Joyce were weird is obvious from their own writing. I find when I read about these two figures that I'm paying attention to what was included vs. what was left out. But these two examples might be bad ones for your project, as, for just one example: they're closer to our time and so there's much more data to reference: letters, books of "I was friends with James Joyce", "Here's a chronicle of the people who hung out with Pound when he was detained for insanity at St. Elizabeth's Hospital", etc.
The second thing that comes up for me, here: the defense of scholars and their adherents when someone tries to say something new about a famous figure. Lots of resistance there. So I'm forever looking for divergent takes on, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. And they're there! There's quite a lot of minority scholarship on these guys. Was Jefferson really that much of a snob? Was Franklin blinkered by Enlightenment fetishism over "reason"? Did Washington not only grown that hemp crop but separate the males from females so he could smoke some of it and get high, probably to deal with dental pain? Etc.
In the Western "canon", after Plutarch, often the Big Book that comes up biography-wise is Boswell's Life Of Johnson. Boswell, by his side for many years, and Johnson is very strange and wonderful, but Boswell has zero modern-day vocabulary for our modern psychological categories. In some sense, we always were neurotypical, but didn't have the words for it?
I tend to think our collective historical memory/knowledge can't possibly be as fleshed-out as it "really was." That is: there was far more non-neurotypicality than most books let on. But how to persuasively show this? It can be done. And should be done.
Wow, thanks for commenting – you really get both the importance and the challenge of this project.
There’s a lot to consider and discuss here, but some responses that immediately come to mind:
(1) You hit an important point with “paying attention to what was included vs. what was left out.” Relying solely on biographies – even using multiple for each person, as I am – means the evidence is filtered before I review it. Biographies that focus on a person’s interiority are most useful to me, and especially biographies that extensively quote the subject in their own words – as well as quote contemporaneous reactions to or descriptions of the subject by people who knew them. Those are particularly useful.
(2) Luckily, there are published volumes of letters and diaries for most of my subjects. For various reasons, I don’t have the ability to seek out original archival records for these subjects, so if there are records that have never been published, I don’t have access to them at the moment. (That could change if my proposal is accepted!)
(3) For some subjects, there is a wealth of first-person material that provides rich evidence. One subject wrote – all her life – about building on an “island” where she could be in solitude and escape society. Where no one could “get at her.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory). It was an obsession that suggests both discomfort within society and recursive focus. That alone doesn’t evidence autism, but it can form part of a larger body of evidence that suggests autism alignment. (I have a rigorous methodology for whether there is sufficient evidence to include a subject. I’ve had to exclude a few subjects where the evidence didn’t rise to the necessary level across multiple autistic traits, although my gut tells me they likely were autism-aligned).
(4) I like your word “triangulation,” and that process of triangulation is also important because it can reveal the biases that the biographer may be bringing to the project. You can try to trace different reactions to the same aspects of a person over time. Part of my project is to examine how society perceives and explains neurodivergence, so that triangulation is useful.
(5) This project is thrilling because I'm seeing unexpected trends across subjects who meet the inclusion methodology. Both in how they were described by their contemporaneous, AND in how later biographers attempted to explain certain shared traits. (One recurring explanation of a particular trait is very neurotypical.) You can start to see how people make sense of autism alignment when they don't have recourse to the concept of "autism," historically and more recently.
(6) There would absolutely be a backlash, but I’m hoping that the careful research and responsible use of facts that I’m bringing would make that a minority, and that the broader reaction would be positive interest and even inspiration.
Your final point about doing this “persuasively” also hits the nail on the head. Nothing is definitive; there can be no conclusive argument that a historical figure was aligned with autism. What I’m aiming to do is make a persuasive case that lets the reader reflect further on the evidence for and against, as well as reflect more broadly on what autism looks like, how it might hide beneath the veneer of appearances, and what latent assumptions we make when we interpret historical figures.
2.) There exists no spit or blood test to make a clean determinative Yea or Nay, re: was this historical person on the spectrum (and to what degree) that we might use when we employed our Time Machines:
It's up to you to do the next best thing: use your research and wits to tell us.
I really do hope your book proposal goes as wanted and needed and that you carry through on your quest. I'd love to read that!
Just a side note: the "mind" in your writing at Strange Clarity, together with your background training in Law, have me harboring zero doubts that you can successfully pull off this project.
You may be atypical, but you're smart and write well. I wonder how many biographers in the past had no idea about their own neuro-atypicality but just forged ahead, realizing that other people have always tended to think they were odd birds.
Just thought about a conversation I had last week with a friend. The subject drifted to all the artistic (musicians, writers, painters, poets) who seem to have been afflicted with what was called "melancholia" but then became "manic depression" in the 20th century and "bipolar" in our times: the neuroscientist/psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire helped re-frame many artists in this way, and she also writes very candidly about her own manic episodes. I found her book not only exceedingly interesting, but deeply moving too.
Sorry to be writing too much on your comments, so will stop now. Best wishes on this project!
Not at all, you are welcome in my comments at all times! That's an interesting line you're tracing... and just the sort of thing I'm interested in. Some of the figures I'm studying had recurring periods of "unexplained illness" (per their biographers) or of melancholia, and I'm trying to discern what details I can from the context. Is there a connection to sensory or social overload? Etc. (There's a fair amount of self-medication with alcohol, too). I haven't read Touched With Fire, I'll check it out! Also, thank you!
Laura-
The mere idea of hammering home to readers that we've only recently realized how basically all biographies were written assuming neurotypicality (<----is that even a word?) and that there's no doubt much more neuro-atypicality in history's biographical subjects seems like a fascinating project.
When I ponder this project the first thing I think of is the weight of research needed to turn a subject into something fresh. Maybe I don't fully understand this project. EX: I've read a lot about Joyce and Pound. There are triangulations I go through as I read about these writers through the lenses of different biographers. For one: they're both very rich, strange characters. Almost all the biographical writing about them was done by writers who I doubt were thinking about the semantics of "neurotypical." That both Pound and Joyce were weird is obvious from their own writing. I find when I read about these two figures that I'm paying attention to what was included vs. what was left out. But these two examples might be bad ones for your project, as, for just one example: they're closer to our time and so there's much more data to reference: letters, books of "I was friends with James Joyce", "Here's a chronicle of the people who hung out with Pound when he was detained for insanity at St. Elizabeth's Hospital", etc.
The second thing that comes up for me, here: the defense of scholars and their adherents when someone tries to say something new about a famous figure. Lots of resistance there. So I'm forever looking for divergent takes on, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. And they're there! There's quite a lot of minority scholarship on these guys. Was Jefferson really that much of a snob? Was Franklin blinkered by Enlightenment fetishism over "reason"? Did Washington not only grown that hemp crop but separate the males from females so he could smoke some of it and get high, probably to deal with dental pain? Etc.
In the Western "canon", after Plutarch, often the Big Book that comes up biography-wise is Boswell's Life Of Johnson. Boswell, by his side for many years, and Johnson is very strange and wonderful, but Boswell has zero modern-day vocabulary for our modern psychological categories. In some sense, we always were neurotypical, but didn't have the words for it?
I tend to think our collective historical memory/knowledge can't possibly be as fleshed-out as it "really was." That is: there was far more non-neurotypicality than most books let on. But how to persuasively show this? It can be done. And should be done.
Wow, thanks for commenting – you really get both the importance and the challenge of this project.
There’s a lot to consider and discuss here, but some responses that immediately come to mind:
(1) You hit an important point with “paying attention to what was included vs. what was left out.” Relying solely on biographies – even using multiple for each person, as I am – means the evidence is filtered before I review it. Biographies that focus on a person’s interiority are most useful to me, and especially biographies that extensively quote the subject in their own words – as well as quote contemporaneous reactions to or descriptions of the subject by people who knew them. Those are particularly useful.
(2) Luckily, there are published volumes of letters and diaries for most of my subjects. For various reasons, I don’t have the ability to seek out original archival records for these subjects, so if there are records that have never been published, I don’t have access to them at the moment. (That could change if my proposal is accepted!)
(3) For some subjects, there is a wealth of first-person material that provides rich evidence. One subject wrote – all her life – about building on an “island” where she could be in solitude and escape society. Where no one could “get at her.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory). It was an obsession that suggests both discomfort within society and recursive focus. That alone doesn’t evidence autism, but it can form part of a larger body of evidence that suggests autism alignment. (I have a rigorous methodology for whether there is sufficient evidence to include a subject. I’ve had to exclude a few subjects where the evidence didn’t rise to the necessary level across multiple autistic traits, although my gut tells me they likely were autism-aligned).
(4) I like your word “triangulation,” and that process of triangulation is also important because it can reveal the biases that the biographer may be bringing to the project. You can try to trace different reactions to the same aspects of a person over time. Part of my project is to examine how society perceives and explains neurodivergence, so that triangulation is useful.
(5) This project is thrilling because I'm seeing unexpected trends across subjects who meet the inclusion methodology. Both in how they were described by their contemporaneous, AND in how later biographers attempted to explain certain shared traits. (One recurring explanation of a particular trait is very neurotypical.) You can start to see how people make sense of autism alignment when they don't have recourse to the concept of "autism," historically and more recently.
(6) There would absolutely be a backlash, but I’m hoping that the careful research and responsible use of facts that I’m bringing would make that a minority, and that the broader reaction would be positive interest and even inspiration.
Your final point about doing this “persuasively” also hits the nail on the head. Nothing is definitive; there can be no conclusive argument that a historical figure was aligned with autism. What I’m aiming to do is make a persuasive case that lets the reader reflect further on the evidence for and against, as well as reflect more broadly on what autism looks like, how it might hide beneath the veneer of appearances, and what latent assumptions we make when we interpret historical figures.
Thanks again for taking the time to comment!
Laura-
Because:
1.) We have no Time Machines
2.) There exists no spit or blood test to make a clean determinative Yea or Nay, re: was this historical person on the spectrum (and to what degree) that we might use when we employed our Time Machines:
It's up to you to do the next best thing: use your research and wits to tell us.
I really do hope your book proposal goes as wanted and needed and that you carry through on your quest. I'd love to read that!
This is exactly the encouragement I didn’t realize I needed until I read your comment. Thank you.
Just a side note: the "mind" in your writing at Strange Clarity, together with your background training in Law, have me harboring zero doubts that you can successfully pull off this project.
You may be atypical, but you're smart and write well. I wonder how many biographers in the past had no idea about their own neuro-atypicality but just forged ahead, realizing that other people have always tended to think they were odd birds.
Just thought about a conversation I had last week with a friend. The subject drifted to all the artistic (musicians, writers, painters, poets) who seem to have been afflicted with what was called "melancholia" but then became "manic depression" in the 20th century and "bipolar" in our times: the neuroscientist/psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire helped re-frame many artists in this way, and she also writes very candidly about her own manic episodes. I found her book not only exceedingly interesting, but deeply moving too.
Sorry to be writing too much on your comments, so will stop now. Best wishes on this project!
Not at all, you are welcome in my comments at all times! That's an interesting line you're tracing... and just the sort of thing I'm interested in. Some of the figures I'm studying had recurring periods of "unexplained illness" (per their biographers) or of melancholia, and I'm trying to discern what details I can from the context. Is there a connection to sensory or social overload? Etc. (There's a fair amount of self-medication with alcohol, too). I haven't read Touched With Fire, I'll check it out! Also, thank you!