The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

I just finished this novel by Mark Haddon as a part of my class on novels of illness, and it's one of the most fascinating accounts of Asperger's Syndrome that I've ever read.

While the link provides a better summary, the story is essentialized as follows (WARNING: SPOILER!):
Chris, a young male student with Asperger's, wakes up one night to see the neighbor's dog speared with a gardening fork. He hugs it and is caught by the owner, Ms. Spears. He gets in trouble when he punches the officer who touches him (he can't stand being touched). His father comes to the rescue. The story progresses as you gain insight into his school life, his ethics, his way of reasoning. More importantly, you enter his mind. He is deceived by his father, who tells him that his mother died of a heart attack (but this is a coping mechanism on his part, as she ran away with Ms. Spears' original husband). Chris's father is then discovered to be the one who killed the dog. Chris, who now thinks his father will kill him, runs away to his mother's apartment (she lives with Mr. Spears). The story ends on an optimistic note from his perspective, but as a reader, you can see how his family is still in shambles.

I think back to my student Roger (pseudonym), a brilliant fellow with a penchant for difficult math and physics problems, rocking back and forth in an eerie way, and looking right through your head when talking to you. I think back to Adam Pugh, a great friend of mine who only mildly suggested Asperger's (but Adam, you did tell me once that you suspected you had the syndrome). He was perhaps the most intelligent student here on campus I've ever met.

The novel is heart-wrenching, but even more fascinating in that its narrator, a savant who soaks in every detail of his surroundings, cannot understand emotions very well. Rather, the world is literal and has no space for lies: metaphors, exaggerations, figures of speech. Mathematics and science are the tools for understanding a positivist world, logically broken into pieces. As such, the "human" characters serve as a foil to Christopher's seeming inhumanity.

To be entirely honest, I envy Chris. While everything in his family goes haywire, he cannot comprehend some of the greater difficulties that his father and mother face. I sometimes feel pity for his father--the kind of searing pain that arises from perceived betrayal, then the kind of coping mechanisms that lead to his irrationality, but his timeless but sometimes useless love for his son... exhibited in his eternal patience but unfortunate incompetence... gah. You'll have to read the book to understand exactly what I mean, unfortunately. I think Haddon's portrayal of humanity as I understand it is fantastic: the brokenness, inability to commit, transience, complexity... but of course also our honor, integrity, love, and endurance. It's never simple.

Sure, Asperger's Syndrome is a mild form of autism... but it elicits such a complicated mixture of normative evaluations. Our college cultural emphasis on competence finds its pinnacle in the amazing skills of Chris's savant abilities... and yet he suffers from what we imagine to be meaninglessly easy issues. His dream is to be in a submersible in the bottom of the ocean... or better yet, to have a virus wipe out all other humans in the world. At one point, at his most extreme when placed under huge amounts of stress, he wants to just destroy everything with his Swiss pocket knife.

And yet. Sometimes I long for that feeling myself--to have people just disappear... because they make this world so damn complicated. Or damn painful. We really screw each other up sometimes (Can we look at some of those lovely genocides... and not to mention closer to home, all the backstabbing that goes on). I often wish the world were, as Chris wants it to be, completely logical, precise, and rational. Is that pathological?

Key question: why do psychiatrists get to decide who is ill and who isn't?

I think *I'm* sick as can be... and Chris is the healthy one. Human emotions can be so unbelievably ill-adaptive. We do, as Chris says, stupid things that make no logical sense. Haddon illustrates this most poignantly with the broken marriage of Chris's parents... Maybe it's just having read so many books and seen so many things that bash marriage and courtship, my view of relationships is becoming *very* bleak. If only we had a bit more rationality and fewer emotional complexities, wouldn't this world be a much easier place to live in?

Here is a question that leaves me deeply ambivalent, especially as a novice educator and qualitative researcher. There are things that Chris will have huge difficulties experiencing or enjoying that I find essentially human: love and faith being two of them. And one wonders... in our complete rationality, maybe we would all just kill each other. And indeed... it's often the irrationality of love that makes relationships work (sometimes... um, given the recent statistics, maybe occasionally is a better way to put it). Maybe an easier world isn't what we want... but tell that to Chris's father and he'll probably scream at you.

Is pure sense and logic what we want, though?

Gah. Maybe I'm just jaded. I do wish there were buttons you could press that would shut down all the emotional centers in your brain, say, when you need to concentrate. Having no emotions gives me more control of myself and focuses my energies.

Then again.... would I be "I" after the emotions are gone? Is control of one's own life really that important?

Would I turn emotions back on if I turned them off to begin with?

Okay. I'm blabbering. To close, I think Haddon has an unbelievably good grasp of Asperger's syndrome... at least in terms of my own observations of others who self-identified as having it. It's left me with an array of unfortunately random and unsettling thoughts (and yes, Roger would say I'm jumping topics, being unclear, and worst: making no sense).

*-EDIT-*
And that reminds me of the hedgehog's dilemma yet again. Schopenhauer I think at least caught on to a little truth about human relationships.