The Uncertainty of Autism

Apart from the obvious separation between fiction and memoir, Exiting Nirvana and The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time are two books about autism, separated by view points. Haddon gives the perspective of Christopher, an autistic boy whereas Park gives her own, neurotypical perspective on her autistic daughter, Jessy. Something that struck me after reading Park’s memoir was the constant and very detailed search for an answer to her daughter’s differences and the
realizations and perceptions that come from the perspective of an outsider.

Exiting Nirvana is written in such a way that allows the reader to work through the same process that Clara experienced when trying to understand or at least grapple with her daughter’s autism. The anecdotes are usually coupled with Clara’s attempts to reason and come to grips with the fact that Jessy meant to ask a question rather than make a statement, or that she has a sudden obsession with clichés, or that the sky suddenly has so much power over her emotions. Through deduction and reasoning, much like the way Jessy solves math problems, Clara comes to the conclusions that Jessy’s “clichés help her express herself, but their real advantage is far more fundamental. They help her give structure to chaos” (37) and “ ‘Jane’s house is in New Jersey.’ It sounds like a statement…Yet she doesn’t know where Jane’s house is, and the statement is false. But she has no reason to mislead me, and she is incapable of a convincing lie, so I’m able to guess: this is one of her odd assertions that function as a question” (55). These efforts to understand do not always end in success, however.

Jessy’s need to keep everything constant and in perfect order and her inability to comprehend change and abstraction is difficult for any outsider, including her mother, to decipher. “Jessy loves charts: they too reduce an untidy world to order” ( 36). In spite of all her efforts to understand Jessy, for Clara, there will always be a void. When recalling the anecdote where Jessy had eight pieces of bacon, Clara states, “Though it would make for a neater narrative, I won’t reinvent the words of the question I didn’t record. My question mark, floating in the blankness, is a truer rendition” (26).

The math that Jessy employed as a child didn’t have any real rhyme or reason to an observer and although it seemed that “gradually, numbers lost their magic” and Jessy’s “emotions seemed independent of the weather” (82), a meeting with Oliver Sacks twenty years later proved these theories to be only somewhat true. Something that I was very taken with after reading both, Mark Haddon’s novel, and Clara Claiborne Park’s memoir, is the world of total “bewilderment” that comes with autism. Not only does it come from the observers of the autistic, like Clara Claiborne Park, but it most certainly comes from the person housing the illness, like Jessy and Christopher.