Le Guin and empathy

[elettaria]

*looks around shiftily* I really shouldn't collude in breaking copyright, but the story is up on someone else's website anyway, so I thought I'd put it up here for general discussion. But do be good creatures and buy the book if you like it! This is a follow-up to the discussion on telepathy as disability in the Sookie Stackhouse novels/True

Comments

[elettaria]

Well, it's science fiction. It's not meant to be about autism, it's meant to be about empathy, and the autism is being used to illustrate some points. The question of course is how far it's acceptable for writers to use a disability or illness as a metaphor for exploring something else, and I think my own answer to that is that it depends on how they do it. This isn't like Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids or Saramago's Blindness, where blindness is used extremely disrespectfully for an end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it type scenario, or come to that, King Lear, where it's just a way of exploring people's egos. But just because it's not like the dreadful "better dead than disabled" ideas out there, does that make it acceptable? Is it OK for writers to borrow illnesses and disabilities to use to explore something else? My gut feeling is yes, we shouldn't be censoring writers in that way and anyway that's what they do, use one thing to explore another thing. The crucial point is how well and respectfully they do it. And in this case, I find it difficult to judge because I don't know enough about autism. She certainly doesn't seem to be going into the category of "absolutely bloody awful". I'm having a bit of a Google, and this page looked interesting. Do you feel that this story is more likely to teach the uninformed public useful things they needed to know about autism, or that it's reinforcing myths instead?

I'm thinking about what you said about wanting a story to be about autism and not using it as a metaphor for something else for once. The problem with this is that it's about overall trends: it's OK for a single story to do that, it's just that when they all do it, it becomes insufferable. But that doesn't mean that a single story shouldn't do it! I wonder if autism is more prone to this issue than other disabilities/illnesses? To go back to blindness, since it's a madly popular metaphor, I've seen plenty of metaphorical blindness in literature but I've also seen quite a bit of literal blindness, and while writers may attach symbolic resonance to practically everything they write, a fair amount of that was just physical blindness that was about itself and not being used purely for "I have no way and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled when I saw" purposes. I can't even think of another example of autism I've seen in literature, either metaphorical or literal, but I'll take your word for it that it always ends up metaphorical. I suspect that with blindness, the literary tradition extends back so far (try Sophocles for a start) that writers are used to divorcing it from the physical reality and don't really think about it as real any more, which is a problem in its own right. Plus it's an obvious disability, some people think that anyone can work out what it's like to be blind. Autism is more recently recognised and I think has a lot more taboos attached to it, so I suspect that in this case, writers are intimidated or even shocked by it and have various unpleasant prejudices they're not dealing with, resulting in the metaphorical approach being used as a way of distancing themselves from the reality (and, say, actually having to do any research). OK, that was rather uncharitable, especially since I don't think Le Guin was necessarily guilty of that and I haven't encountered authors who were, I'm just extropolating based on how other disabilities get treated in literature.