The philosopher AJ Ayer was once asked what he saw when he thought of Paris — for example, the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. He pondered for a moment and replied: “A sign saying Paris.” “This is,” observes Fitzgerald, “classically autistic.” WB Yeats would emit “a low, tuneless humming sound” when starting to compose his poetry. He would often do so while roaming the streets of Dublin. He would also “flail his arms around in a violent way that . . . intrigued policemen”. Repetitive motor mannerisms, explains Fitzgerald, are typical of autistics.
These strange, comic but painful examples appear in Fitzgerald’s new book, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts, a study of the bio-
graphies of 21 writers, philosophers, composers and painters, all of whom, he concludes, suffered from AS. The list also includes Mozart, Beethoven, Swift, Melville, Orwell, Kant, Warhol and Van Gogh. Elsewhere, Fitzgerald has drawn the same conclusion about Michelangelo, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Newton. Contemplating such a pantheon, one feels that “suffered” is almost the wrong word. Clearly, if Fitzgerald’s diagnoses are correct, then AS might be considered the royal road to the greatest heights of which the human imagination is capable. Indeed, as Fitzgerald put it to me, if a parent came to him and said “My child has an IQ of 150 — could he win a Nobel prize?”, his response would be that if he also has AS, then quite possibly. Otherwise, no.
Fitzgerald’s book is the latest example of a fascination with autism and AS that extends far beyond merely seeing them as complex mental disorders. In 1988, we had Barry Levinson’s film Rain Man, in which Dustin Hoffman played an autistic “savant”, incapable of normal social interaction, but fully capable of memorising an entire phone book. We have had Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, an astonishing evocation of the world-view of a teenage boy with AS.
There is also the Josh Hartnett film Mozart and the Whale, about two AS sufferers. The late Stephen Jay Gould, meanwhile, ended his collection of essays, Questioning the Millennium, with a truly moving essay on an autistic numerical savant, the shock ending of which won’t leave a dry eye in your house.
One DIY way of getting astride this particular wave is to test yourself for autism. A simple test was devised by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. You can take it at www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html. I did, and came out borderline. Story of my life — neither one thing nor the other.
But Fitzgerald’s book is also part of a tradition of scientific fascination with art, inspired by the power and persistence, yet utter mysteriousness, of this human phenomenon. Art, like God, has accompanied every human society. Also like God, it has driven people to inexplicable agonies and ecstasies. Art has even created a fantastically rarefied pantheon of saints — or, as we say, geniuses — whose gifts transcend mere talent or diligence and somehow define the whole of the human condition.
The key scientific assault on this mystery was Freud’s. In essence, he saw art as the result of the sublimation of the asocial unconscious. We have these drives that cannot be expressed in socially acceptable ways, so, through complex processes of repression and transformation, they are turned into acceptable products. Art is thus a link between fantasy and reality. “Art,” Freud wrote, “is a conventionally accepted reality in which, thanks to artistic illusion, symbols and substitutes are able to provoke real emotions.”
Few would now find this, or Freud’s diagnosis that art is an expression of some form of narcissistic neurosis, particularly plausible or adequate. It is, nevertheless, a quasi-scientific version of an old belief: that geniuses are mad. For Seneca, all great geniuses had “a touch of madness”. Shakespeare said, “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet /Are of imagination all compact”. For Dryden, “Great Wits are sure to Madness near alli’d”. And anybody watching Charles Hazlewood’s admirable BBC series on Mozart and Beethoven might have concluded that demigods and fruitcakes are, indeed, “near alli’d”. Fitzgerald, more politely, explains that their brains seem to be modular rather than integrated.
Following Freud, there were numerous attempts to explain art, none of which seemed to live up to the scale of the phenomenon they were trying to describe. Almost any explanation can seem laughably reductive when confronted with Hamlet or the Missa Solemnis. There is, in Freud and other thinkers, the implication that art is a disorder, again like God, that we could somehow grow out of. But in the face of such works, why on earth would we want to? In this context, the link between AS and art is liberating. Though it still depends on the view of the genius as disordered, it does so from a positive, expansive perspective.
The extent to which it represents a complete break with the Freudian tradition is briskly represented in Fitzgerald’s book. He quotes the Yeats biographer Brenda Maddox: “The secret of Yeats is that his mother did not love him.”
“I disagree with this view,” says the stern Fitzgerald. “I believe the secret of Yeats was the impact of autism on his life and work.” This means something — perhaps a great deal. But first, as poor Jennifer Aniston says in those shampoo adverts, here comes the science.
Autism was first described by Leo Kanner in 1943 as, among other things, “the profound withdrawal from contact with people, an obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness, a skilful relation to objects”. In the same year, Hans Asperger described a similar condition. AS was later accepted as a form of autism, but with distinctive features: it often involved high intelligence; and, as Fitzgerald puts it, whereas autistics cannot communicate and do not want to, AS sufferers also cannot communicate, but they do want to make themselves understood and to understand, to find their way into the normal human realm — an impulse that almost exactly describes the late philosophy of Wittgenstein.
We don’t know what causes these things, but we do know they are overwhelmingly genetic. AS is 93% heritable, which means an identical twin of an AS sufferer is almost certain to have AS. This does not mean cloning Mozart would produce another Mozart; it might just result in a very brilliant, very unhappy and entirely unproductive man. A genetic package may have made Mozart the man, but it would have meant nothing had the man not been marinated in a specific musical environment from birth. There may, therefore, be a genetics of genius, but it will certainly be complex, involving many genes. In addition, you would need the entire set: one wrong nucleotide and you can forget the Nobel prize.
AS produces some significant symptoms. Those afflicted have phenomenal powers of concentration, but a weak sense of self. They become obsessed with detail and pattern.
They frequently lack normal motor skills, and they have enormous difficulty understanding the dynamics of human relations. They also retain a childlike view of the world, asking questions most of us would find embarrassingly simple-minded. Wittgenstein once wondered what would look different if the sun revolved round the earth, and Einstein began his explorations with the question: what would it be like to sit on a beam of light?
Of course, the vast majority of people with AS or any form of autism are not great artists. For almost every sufferer, these conditions are a grave misfortune.
Meanwhile, among the autistic artists, there is an almost bizarre variety of ways in which the symptoms become art. Mozart and Beethoven may have had the same disorder, but it is difficult to imagine two more completely different artists. And the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Jonathan Swift may have something in common, but it is not immediately apparent to me.
Of course, any theory of genius that said all geniuses had to be the same would be absurd, so radical variation does not weaken Fitzgerald’s argument. In any case, this is not a theory of art. Fitzgerald does not claim all artistic geniuses have AS, and, crucially, his argument takes the art as a given. He asks neither what art is nor whether, say, Van Gogh was an artist. All he does say is that there seems to be a strong link between the disorder known as AS and the disorder known as genius.
The crucial question, then, becomes: why? On the face of it, there seems something staggeringly improbable about the idea that minds so comprehensively disordered should be able to shine such dazzling light into the imaginations of “neurotypical” (ie, non-disordered) people. Fitzgerald’s explanation is that they are able to show us utterly different views of the world and thus lift us into entirely new forms of consciousness: “This is because they have a different perspective, on account of their weak central coherence and focus on detail, and are able to show neurotypicals part of the world that they miss because of their normal global processing of the world for gist.”
This is fair enough, but it can only be half the answer. It is perfectly possible, for example, to imagine a perspective on the world provided by a brilliant and gifted AS sufferer that made no sense whatsoever to the rest of us. Genius only becomes genius by being recognised in the world; art only becomes art by joining the collection of other things that have become known as art. It is not enough to be mad; the artist must also be, at whatever level, intelligible. And so, as Fitzgerald acknowledges, a mystery remains: what is it about these strange, possibly crazy creations that projects them so far and so deep into the human consciousness? We cannot begin to imagine; and, with luck, we never will.
The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts by Michael Fitzgerald (Jessica Kingsley Publishers £13.95)
