Season 1 Episode 8
Brett Newski:
(Singing)
Ben Binversie: If you think autistic people are incapable of understanding literature, think again.
(Singing)
[00:00:30] This is All Things 51²è¹İapp. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week’s show we'll talk with Ralph Savarese, professor of English here at 51²è¹İapp. About his new book, See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. We'll also share some 51²è¹İapp music for the first time on the podcast. Today's featured artist is Seth Hanson, from the class of 2017. This weeks show is coming up next, after a word from 51²è¹İapp College.
[00:01:00] The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved, and do not represent the views of 51²è¹İapp College.
(Singing).
[00:01:30] For many years scientific researchers have claimed that autistic people suffer from a limited ability to understand language, engage in imaginative play, and appreciate literature. But, this prevailing view of autism didn't match what Ralph Savarese experienced while reading books with his autistic son DJ. With this book, Savarese challenges [00:02:00] our understanding of autism, but also how we think about literature and the world around us. Over the course of many years he read novels with autistic people, including his don DJ whose one of the first non speaking people to graduate from college, and with a 3.96 GPA no less.
The insights Saverese gleaned from this experience are essential. We're dedicating this weeks episode to our conversation. Also, he likes to talk. He readily admitted that many professors, [00:02:30] himself included, have a disease of sorts. They can't stop talking. They go on, and on, and on. Ralph told me that when he and his son would go on walks around 51²è¹İapp, DJ would see a faculty member in the distance, and he would sit down. Right in the middle of the sidewalk, preparing himself for the unbearably long conversations that would ensue. Like DJ, maybe you should sit down for this one. It's a long conversation, but it's incredibly powerful, and I promise [00:03:00] it's worth it.
Just to orient you for the discussion, some of you may not be familiar with the terminology we'll use, which comes from the Neuro Diversity Movement. I asked Ralph to define some of these key concepts for us before we really dig in.
Ralph Savarese: Neuro typical, neuro atypical, those words emerge as a function of folks who do not want to think about value judgments as they attach themselves to one kind of neuro [00:03:30] type, right? The idea of neuro typicals, and let me just pause for a second, say there's some folks who don't believe neuro typicals exist at all.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: There's some science to suggest that we really are each quite unique in the way that we think. But, the Neuro Diversity Movement itself suggests that there are diverse minds, and that we need to understand that a departure from the norm [00:04:00] is not necessarily bad, right? Folks working in this field have learned a lot from folks in ethnic studies, queer studies, recognizing that we're deeply, deeply invested in norms, and that, that invest in norms is neither fair, nor productive. You have neuro typical, you have neuro atypical. Some people use the term neuro divergent, they prefer that word as it describes [00:04:30] somebody who diverges from some typical or standard way of thinking, thinking or operating.
Ben Binversie: What are common misconceptions that scientific researchers, or maybe the uninformed public has about what autistic people are capable of as it pertains to reading?
Ralph Savarese: The first thing I would like to point out is that even though it's a stereotype, I think many of the folks who have written literature [00:05:00] over the last thousand plus years, have themselves hardly been typical. I think it's super interesting to me that we may be aware of that fact, and at the same time imagine that there are neuro atypical readers who are incapable of reading this thing that neuro atypical people have been producing. That strikes me as a kind of deeply ironic fact.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: But historically, the definition of autism spoken about [00:05:30] a triad of impairments. Impairments in language, impairments in imagination, and impairments in social understanding. And so, those impairments of language could have to do with all sorts of things. But for example, there's research that suggests that autistics don't understand metaphor, or irony. Once you start thinking about metaphor and irony, I mean these are basic ingredients as it were, of literary language. If [00:06:00] you're not very good at understanding social conflict and nuance according to this definition of autism, fiction would not be, literary fiction would not be a place for you to go, and enjoy the way in which conflict is developed, explored, and the like.
But, since the Neuro Diversity Movement first came about, maybe 20, 25 years ago and has really gathered steam over the last [00:06:30] 15 years. The emphasis has shifted from deficits to difference, and people started asking different questions, and had a different starting point. Rather than saying, "These people can't do this." We might say, "What does a different mind bring to the business of reading literature?" Of course as the father of an autistic son, I've read books with my son DJ forever. That experience [00:07:00] taught me all sorts of things about the inadequacy of clinical description of autism. I know lots of other autistic people, and you know, slowly but surely I started recognizing the degree to which these descriptions, these medical descriptions, this understanding of autism as a series of deficits, in no way lined up with what I understood to be my own experience with autistic people. Then, nor did [00:07:30] it line up with my experience with autistic people reading books.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: I've had plenty of autistic folks in the classroom at 51²è¹İapp, in fact in creative writing classes, and in other classes. I didn't see any desperate inability to understand what was happening in a poem, or in a novel.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: I saw lots of anxiety. But, I know lots of people have anxiety, I know lots of writers with anxiety. [00:08:00] I deal with a fair amount of anxiety, but that anxiety has nothing to do with understanding.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh. Your experience beginning with raising your son, and reading with him has taught you that those stereotypes don't necessarily capture the realities-
Ralph Savarese: Right.
Ben Binversie: ... Of autism. How did your fatherly reading sessions turn into this book?
Ralph Savarese: Let me back all the way up. I mean, I've been in the habit of reading at least one poem aloud to my wife in our household. [00:08:30] I remember back before my son was literate, just starting to type on a computer. He's non speaking, so he uses-
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: ... A text to voice synthesizer. I was reading Dillon Thomas' poem Fern Hill aloud, and it's an incredibly musical poem. DJ typed, "Very great sound, very great sound." He was responding to just the pattern musicality of poetry, beyond the words, right? Just beyond what the poem might mean. [00:09:00] I would say just as a side note, I think this is a real autistic strength. It's the thing that I have to actually teach neuro typical readers and writers of poetry at 51²è¹İapp. Yeah, yeah, words mean things. I get it, we do that all the time. But, let's make some patterns where the words are doing musical things.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: That's the part I have to teach typical kids. DJ, DJ's first, one of his first things that he ever types is, "Very great sound, [00:09:30] very great sound," in response to Dillon Thomas. And you know, just started recognizing that he was responding, so I got in the habit of reading with him. Jump ahead junior year of high school, he's now 26, the assigned essential text is Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was a little nervous about this because even though the book is told in kind of a comic way, [00:10:00] Huck is terribly savagely beaten by his father, he's adopted, and DJ's own experience as a foster ... First with his birth mother who tried to kill him in the bath, and then in foster care where he was savagely beaten. I thought, "How is my son going to respond to this text, especially since the way Twain has Huck narrate the story, is in a kind of sort of comic, shenanigans [00:10:30] sort of mode?"
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Lots of critics have talked about what is offensive with respect to dealing with slavery in this manner, but almost no one has talked about what is offensive with respect to talking about adoption, and child abuse in this manner. I was really worried about this, because contrary to the stereotype, DJ if anything responds with excess emotion-
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: ... To difficult situations. I decided we'd read this [00:11:00] thing together in the, I put a master bedroom addition onto our house in 51²è¹İapp. We just would sit up in that bed, sort of pretending it was like a raft. I'd constantly try, when he was getting upset, to nudge him more toward a kind of critical artistic reflection. How's this book written? What's the language doing? How does Twain have Huck speak? How does Twain have Jim speak? What are the descriptions of [00:11:30] the river like? As a way of making him more analytical, and less sort of in the experience of fear. Because, the other thing I would point out is, his only really good foster family in Florida was a very proud, politically active African American family who taught him a lot about civil rights.
You know, for a little while he actually thought he was black. I mean, really, [00:12:00] I mean it wasn't about what his skin color was.
Ben Binversie: Right.
Ralph Savarese: But with his experience, and he's really invested in civil rights. He decided to go to Overland College because they took the first African American student higher ed, first woman student in higher ed. He was really keen on this narrative of freedom. And so you know, of course the narrative with Jim in Huck Finn is, he's trying to get to freedom. There were a lot of things about that book that made me nervous.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: I wanted [00:12:30] to make sure, I wanted him to derive pleasure from reading. I wanted to modulate just how much he invested in reading. He also made me think a lot about why are the rest of us able to read such fearful books, and immediately turn them into something enjoyable? Maybe there were lots of other readers out there that I was unaware of, who'd had very difficult experiences in their pasts, or for whatever [00:13:00] reason were depressed. Here I am assigning Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, or whatever other book, and sort of clueless about what the experience might be like in their dorms, and what a struggle it might be like for some 51²è¹İapp students. Not that they don't enjoy it, but that the process itself might be overwhelming. They might get clobbered by some of these books, 'cause when we go into the classroom we don't talk about getting clobbered. We talk about, what's the point [00:13:30] of view? Let's follow this motif. Let's do this. We turn it into a kind of analytic enterprise.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: I tried to do that with DJ. It eventually worked.
Ben Binversie: Then, you wanted to do it with other people as well?
Ralph Savarese: Yeah, and so about the same time too I met a young man who's the subject of chapter one. DJ's the subject of the prologue. Really, really famous non speaking person with autism. He immigrated from India, his name is Tito Rajarshi [00:14:00] Mukhopadhyay, came to America at 12. I was working on a project with my wife about neuro diversity. We put together the first collection of essays on this concept. And so, I flew to Austin to interview him. At the end of this interview he asked to be my student, which totally shocked me. I sort of flippantly said, "Well, come to Iowa." Knowing full well he couldn't come to Iowa. [00:14:30] He'd never been allowed in a regular classroom-
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: ... Even though he'd, at that point-
Ben Binversie: Written a book.
Ralph Savarese: ... Yeah, three books by that point. Three books, yeah. And, was regarded, many people regard him as having written the best book by the youngest member of our species. He writes The Mind Tree, you know, nine, 10, 11 years old. It's a remarkable book. I've taught it here at 51²è¹İapp. He asked to be my student, 'cause he's never been allowed in a regular [00:15:00] classroom. Lots of anxiety, lots of autistic behaviors. I put quotations around that word. And so, I threw out the idea that we'll do this by Skype, because it's really becoming clear to me how privileged my son is. Even though his life story is kind of crazy, right? That, he starts as a homeless kid whose been nearly killed by his birth mother, abandoned. For a while he's in an institution, in foster homes.
But now, [00:15:30] he's an upper middle class honor student in the local high school-
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: ... With a nice family, and a nice house, having all sorts of opportunities, and there are plenty of other autistic folks who do not have opportunities. I started doing this with my friend Tito. Tito's mom is amazing. She's home schooled him, but she doesn't think he can sit in front of this computer screen.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: For, an hour to an hour and a half. One of the things I say in the book is, [00:16:00] you should not underestimate the engine of desire. He shows her that he can indeed do it. Skip 10 years ahead, we're still doing it every Sunday. I mean, I've read more books with that young man. I think he's the engine of my own reading, because we're constantly plowing through books of all kinds. Those two things, reading with my son, Huck Finn, [00:16:30] meeting Tito, feeling like other people deserve a chance. Those experiences, and then thinking really, the world needs to hear more about autistic readers.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: One final point I would make is that, we've talked about the stereotypes that would suggest autism makes it impossible to read literature. The sort of flip side of that is, all of the stereotype that says autistic strengths and talents exist only in math, science, [00:17:00] computer science. I know lots of autistic people that, you know they were okay at math and science, but that's not where their talents lie.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: I really wanted to reach teachers, and parents who might be inclined to only include their kid in a regular classroom for math and science-
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: ... Then 10 years later they say, "You see, my kids not any good at language arts." [00:17:30] I really want to get autistic kids in language arts classes.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: That's sort of how this book gets started.
Ben Binversie: Okay. For the book you read some classic American novels with a variety of autistic readers. You are an English Professor who knows his way around the pages of a book. But, they end up teaching you about how they engage with literature, and also about you and your neuro typical self, and how you [00:18:00] look at these texts, and maybe-
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: ... What you've been missing out on. Did you expect that relationship to be so reciprocal?
Ralph Savarese: One thing I would definitely say is that parenting is a humbling experience. If you're actually open to the experience, and honest about your own inadequacies, you will constantly be confronted with the failure of expectations.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Your own expectations, [00:18:30] and the problems with expectations, right? I think one of the great things about writing is that, you've gotta be honest, right? Candor is appreciated in creative non-fiction.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: I had no interest in writing this book in a way that made me seem well, wonderful. The subtitle, No Good English Professor, is on one hand a kind of joke and witty, but on the other [00:19:00] hand, real. I think no matter how sympathetic you are to whatever group you imagine you're serving as an ally for, you're still going to make mistakes. I knew already from reading with my son, that there were things that I would learn. The other thing I also knew is that, autistic people were as diverse as non autistic people.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: And, they would like things, one person would like something, and another wouldn't. I mean, I go [00:19:30] into a 51²è¹İapp classroom and there are 15 kids there. They're not the same, and thank God they're not the same because it would be really, it would be really, really boring. But, I would say the process of doing the ethnographical work for the book, that is reading these books over time. For example, with Tito I read Moby Dick for 17 months.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: Two chapters a week. That, that process, this kind of slow careful [00:20:00] way, we're making our way through these books. We're doing it by Skype, and for the folks that don't speak, they're typing their comments on the sidebar. I have everything they type, right?
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: Skype nicely collects that. If they speak, I'm using my voice, my iPhone voice memo function. I'm collecting enormous amount of data. That in and of itself is really, really important, and [00:20:30] I'm then able to use quotations. This is not ... I mean, there's a lot of framing from me, there's a lot of interpretation from me. But, the book has a ton of quotation.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: Where, you're hearing what these folks say. Which, I think is really, really important.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: That, yes I'm the filter, you encounter them through me. But, you really hear so many of their words, and they also had a chance to read everything in the book-
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: ... Ask for corrections, [00:21:00] tell me what I got wrong, I then would try to then bring that back into the narrative. Then, they finally approved what's in there, so that it really does, I hope, get as close as possible to their account of reading.
Ben Binversie: Yeah. How did you look at some of the texts differently afterwards? Or, maybe more broadly, how do you look at reading in general differently after the time that you've spent with [crosstalk 00:21:24].
Ralph Savarese: Wow, I mean so many things. Let me start with the third chapter [00:21:30] about Dora Raymaker, in which I read the Sci-Fi classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I'd like to say two things. One, historically literary critics have looked down on genre fiction. And so, they've imagined that literary fiction is one thing, fantasy and Sci-Fi are another. And so, it hasn't gotten the respect that other genres have received.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Much more [00:22:00] recently it has. This was interesting to me, and it was also interesting to me when I read Steve Silverman's Neuro Tribes book, which was a kind of history of autism, and the possibilities for neuro diversity. He suggests that the folks who really give birth to the genre of science fiction, may have themselves received an Asperger diagnosis, maybe even an autism diagnosis, had it [00:22:30] been available at the time. That's interesting to me. Then, I have a background in neuroscience as well, was a Fellow at the Institute for Brain Sciences at Duke. I'm really interested in the research that seems to show that autistics appear to be interested in objects, inanimate objects more than faces, human faces.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: What's that about? What do you have in Sci-Fi? You have objects coming to life. What [00:23:00] are androids, or replicants? But, this kind of weird middle ground between the human, and the object. I thought to myself, "What would an autistic reader bring to the business of reading Sci-Fi, that a non autistic reader wouldn't bring?" That's a whole range of things. I mean, Dora Raymaker made absolutely clear the extent to which she brought a history of stigma, [00:23:30] a history of exclusion. But also, many, many years as a computer coder, who worked late at night without other humans, because she had so much anxiety. As someone who had been laboring away at her own Sci-Fi fantasy novels. As someone who was really, really interested in objects, and actually believed that most objects were alive, or interacted with objects in a way that they were alive.
And [00:24:00] so, one of the things that became clear to me was, when you talk ... When autism experts talk about a failure of sociality in autistics, in autism, you could also talk about a failure of sociality in non autistics. We don't, we restrict our sociality largely to humans, and to a few animal species.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Then, we treat the rest of the world as some object to be used, or sold, [00:24:30] or destroyed. That was a very profound insight that came to me through this process of reading this novel. Of course in the novel, the replicants are said to lack empathy.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Even as they're being hunted by these empathy challenged humans. Then, to get Dora's real sense of the way in which she feels autistic people, and people with cognitive disabilities are hunted in this [00:25:00] culture. Demeaned, made fun of-
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: ... People thinking of a cure-
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: ... The need for a cure. That, this was incredible learning experience for me. I mean, I could go on, and on, and on. But, this is really the premise of a kind of theory in my discipline called reader response theory. Its premise was that, that we need to stop talking about a general or ideal reader, and recognize that there are [00:25:30] individual readers who bring things to texts. Those individual readers are conditioned by categories we're aware of. Gender, sexual orientation, race, class, age, all sorts of things. Also, neurology.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: I really think there is something to the fondness for Sci-Fi in autism.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: But, it's not, it shouldn't be interpreted the way autism [00:26:00] experts have traditionally interpreted it, as a failure to understand human sociality. No, as an expansion-
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: ... Of what sociality really could be. And also, as a way to teach those of us who are human, and somehow arrogantly human, about what deserves our attention.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I know in The Forward, Stephen Kuusisto asks, "What if no reader is neuro typical?"
Ralph Savarese: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ben Binversie: You know? I think that's powerful [00:26:30] to think about.
Ralph Savarese: I think it's really powerful. It also is in line increasingly with what neuroscientists are thinking about. I think there's a lot to be said in thinking about very particularly neurologies. There's a woman who teaches in Emery, a Lit. Prof. with a science background named Laura Otis, whose actually a MacArthur Fellow who published a book from Cambridge in which she interviews artists, really successful artists and scientists about the ways [00:27:00] they think. She recognized that while we can probably continue to make generalizations, those generalizations don't get us anywhere. The particular ways in which they think and make their breakthroughs, those stories are much more interesting, and useful, and helpful.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: And, probably reflective of their own brains.
Ben Binversie: Yeah. It seems like there's a tension in the lives of a lot of autistic people, and [00:27:30] you kind of hinted at this when you were talking about Dora. But, it seems like it's present in all the readers in the book between on the one hand, trying to ... You know, this movement to embrace neuro diversity. Yet, there's also a yearning to fit in, you know?
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: A yearning to on some level, feel normal-
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: ... Or, at least to not feel excluded.
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: How do you navigate that as a father and a scholar?
Ralph Savarese: That's a great question. I remember in fourth grade when DJ was really typing on his computer, [00:28:00] and one night he types on his computer, "Dad, freak is ready for bed." At that point I recognized that as an adoptive father, that I couldn't possibly, through my own love, make him feel good about himself.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: That, we really needed to change the culture about diversity, about neuro diversity. This is this whole journey that all sorts of folks must take, whether you're a trans [00:28:30] kid, a black kid. If you're living in a culture as a minority that has valorized something other than you are, how do you take the steps to start affirming your difference? While also as you say, seek that feeling that we all want of being part of a community? One of the first things we did with my son, was seek out other autistic people.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: Other self advocates, go to conferences, and the like. [00:29:00] The other thing we did was, really pursue this idea, this concept of neuro diversity, and explore it as much as possible. I teach courses on it, I'm teaching next semester, I'll teach a course called Neuro Lit. Which, takes up the novels, and memoirs about neurological conditions like autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, Tourettes, and we really get into the ways in which the culture represents these conditions, [00:29:30] and the way people who have these conditions would represent them.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: We look for ways in which these folks have created alternative subcultures or communities in which they can have that experience of fitting in, while pushing forward on the civil rights questions. 'Cause, nobody wants to fit in with a community that isn't a front to what they value.
Ben Binversie: Right.
Ralph Savarese: I mean, that's [00:30:00] a real challenge. But pushing, pushing a community forward. My son went to Overland, and he loved it. But, he discovered very quickly that it's, he could be more progressive on every other issue but disability. Some of the folks who were unbelievably on the cutting edge of trans issues, would say the most insensitive things about disability. But, he alerted them, and they discovered, "I can't believe I do [00:30:30] that. Why was I doing that? Why I was I thinking these things?" I think that's what a place like Overland or 51²è¹İapp can do, is it can have you recognize where do you need to do more work, you know?
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: I would also like to say that for the folks that had never felt like they had a good inclusion experience in school, the readerly journeys that I [00:31:00] took with these people. I mean, some of them I knew a little bit. I mean, they became my friends.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: I mean, I really do think each chapter's also a story of what happens when people read a book together and invest in it. You can create a community that is transcendent in some ways. For Tito, yeah, I also Skyped him into 51²è¹İapp classes.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: But, we did something that few people ever do, read Moby [00:31:30] Dick slowly over 17 months. I mean, we were up there on the masthead with Ishmael, tracking the wind, looking for whales.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: That in and of itself was fitting in, fitting in, in a grand way with the story. One final thing about Tito, Tito really loved the fact that after Melville's father dies, when Melville's still in his teens, and the family can't afford to [00:32:00] send him to college. He has to set out to sea as a common sailor.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: He's really upset about this, to the point that he's got Ishmael say in Moby Dick at one point, about 150 pages in, "A whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard." Tito really identified with that, and I think that the business of reading that novel. I hadn't thought about this at the beginning, it wasn't a set up on my part.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: But [00:32:30] he thought, "You know what? There are other folks that haven't enjoyed a college education. There are other people, there are other communities, even with people no longer alive. I can commune with Melville."
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: There's something about this, writers will do this. There are writers ... My son says, "I speak to Harriet Tubman every day." I mean, when he first said that to me I had to leave the room, I was ... I had like shivers, but he thought [00:33:00] almost from the beginning of his own inclusion experience, it's the first fully included non speaking person with autism in Iowa as equivalent to being on the Underground Railroad.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: Except, his was the above ground railroad, with everyone starting at him.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: He said he was seeking advice from her. There's that kind of community too.
Ben Binversie: Yeah. In your Writers At Cornell Talk you mentioned that there's some pioneering research that suggests higher intelligence [00:33:30] amongst autistics.
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: Than neuro typical people. But, I wonder if your book isn't a more powerful way of showing that, because a scientific study is not nearly as accessible. As we see with like climate change research or other things like that, sometimes the numbers don't always make an impact, or change our minds. But, this book is kind of a hybrid of scientific research, with literature. How do you see science and literature working together, at least [00:34:00] in your field?
Ralph Savarese: Well, I mean I think you really nicely described what I was trying with this book. Here's what I would say, is that there are different audiences, right? So, how compelling will this book be to, with just a story of reading, a straight story of reading literature, with some autistic people, be to a kind of neuro traditional scientist? How compelling would, as you said, or accessible would just a standard study be? I [00:34:30] think you need all of these things. One of the things that I discovered as a parent, I needed to learn the neuroscience so I could educate my son. Then I discovered the neuroscience on autism was wildly inadequate, it had all sorts of problems with it, it reflected all sorts of biases, and it didn't match up with what I was experiencing with my son. On top of it, it generalized. [00:35:00] Even as it talked about a spectrum, that was a spectrum of severity.
Ben Binversie: Right.
Ralph Savarese: It was still generalizing in every point along the spectrum. But, the science doesn't stand still. There's new science. As I said at the reading, there are plenty of autistics now working on teams, new research is coming about. I thought what I could try to do with this book, was use my experience as a literature professor, as a writer, as a father, [00:35:30] as somebody whose trained himself in neuroscience, and received training in neuroscience. To produce a hybrid that would do what you say, but also ... I mean, I don't really get into this in the book. But also, would testify to the power of a liberal arts education. 'Cause I really believe in the liberal ... I received one, I went to Wesleyan University, the undergrad.
I think that experience of learning [00:36:00] in a kind of broad, diverse, interconnected, political way, laid a foundation that allowed me at one point to say, "I'm going to adopt this kid from foster care." It wasn't the only thing, it allowed me to do some very atypical things in my life. To think in a very atypical way about something that experts had said this about. And then, to also be inventive about solutions, [00:36:30] and get to a point where maybe, here's another account of what autism is, or what autistic strengths might be.
I'd like to say that, there's this emerging field called neuro humanities that is trying quite vigorously to bring these two fields together, science, neuroscience, and the humanities.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: You know, Joe Nicer in philosophy teaches some neuro [00:37:00] humanities courses, and I do too. I think there's a lot to be said for seeing how stories can push back against the disadvantages of science, and how science can push back against the disadvantages of a story as forms of knowledge.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh, and then together they kind of push forward our understanding.
Ralph Savarese: Yeah, yeah. While also trying to be sensitive to the needs of readers.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: 'Cause, if the book is boring, it's not [00:37:30] going to work. Again as I told you, I want literature professors to read this book, but I want autistics to read this book. But, I really, really, really, really want high school, middle school teachers to read this book. I want guidance counselors to read this book, I want people to think it is perfectly natural for an autistic child to be in a language arts classroom, or a creative writing class.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: 'Cause, we've got a novel that if the only thing somebody's read [00:38:00] about autism, it's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, or they've seen the play. That stereotype has that kid being good at math, not understanding metaphor, not understanding irony, and sort of being mind blind. That's devastating.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: That book is incredibly ... Sold millions, and millions, and millions of copies, and I'm pushing back against that.
Ben Binversie: Yeah. Can you talk just a little bit about how autistic readers are in some way's kind of the ideal reader?
Ralph Savarese: Yeah.
Ben Binversie: And, maybe [00:38:30] what faults we have, neuro typical people have, that we're not able to really experience a book so viscerally?
Ralph Savarese: Yeah. A long time ago I had a background in Slavic studies, and actually lived in Poland. Just as the communists were falling. Before, during, and after. I remember reading the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz' line about the importance of poetry in the Warsaw Ghetto, when just the inconceivable [00:39:00] horrors that the Nazi's were inflicting on people. He said, "Poetry was as essential as bread."
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: When people were starving. I remember living in Poland, at the beginning I'd get on a bus. Someone told me, "Recite some lines by the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert," who was a solidarity poet. "And watch, the bus driver will say the next two lines no matter where you start in the poem." I'd do it, and I couldn't believe I was in a culture [00:39:30] where the bus driver knew this. But, within a year and a half, it stopped. They braced capitalism. As a friend of mine said, "Rimbaud, the French poet became Rambo." Suddenly the arts and literature lost some of their urgency. I don't wan to romanticize, because that urgency came at a terrible, terrible human cost.
The first point I'd like to make, and I saw it when I taught in the Literature in Prison Program here. You have folks who want to invest in [00:40:00] the experience of reading these books with everything they have. When I do a session with Tito on a Sunday morning, if I'm tired, if I'm fatigued, if I've got a million things to do, and a million papers to grade and I'm thinking, "I'd just like to drink coffee." And, I open, I turn on my Skype, and there he is. He's got all these notes, and all of these insights. I'm humbled.
Ben Binversie: Right.
Ralph Savarese: I'm just humbled by the nature of the investment. This [00:40:30] was true, even for Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin, I'd forgotten she had her own liberal art's undergraduate education. She's calling me on my cellphone and leaving me messages about all the things she remembered from 50 years ago in her lit. Class.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: These folks had invested. 51²è¹İapp students prepare, I love 51²è¹İapp students. But, there is something really unbelievable about folks who don't have as many other choices, and the way [00:41:00] they invest. That's really humbling and inspiring, so that's part of it.
The other thing I want to say is, and this comes back to some of the really intriguing research about autism. It's related to the kind of scientific argument of the book. Laurent Mottron's team at the University of Montreal, and he has a number of autistics on his team. He was one of the first people to notice that autistics tend to rely disproportionately on sensory cortices in the back of their brain. [00:41:30] Then, some of the work in cognitive literary study showed that for example, if I say to you the phrase, "Red barn." Not only are you using your traditional language centers, but you're going to use your visual cortex to process that. You're going to actually produce visual imagery of a red barn.
Ben Binversie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ralph Savarese: What is literature but language that disproportionately insists on concrete words that produce a range of mental imagery? Whether it's visual, auditory, motor. [00:42:00] There are some folks who can even produce gustatory, and old factory mental imagery. One of the things I noticed very quickly was that, autistic readers seem to be producing mental imagery at an intensity level that I had not seen.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: Even in some of the most intense non autistic readers. This really became clear in the chapter with Jamie Burke, where I read [00:42:30] Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony. It was unbelievable, the degree to which this novel became this Hollywood film with special effects in his head.
Ben Binversie: Uh huh.
Ralph Savarese: And, the ways he could do things to the novel in his head. He could manipulate the images on the page. In doing so, he really helped to explain the kind of spiritual geography in ways that [00:43:00] I had no idea I didn't understand. This was yet another example of how a different kind of brain brought to the business of reading, something that I decided we truly needed.
One other point about this, in reading Moby Dick with Tito, there's a key moment where Ahab confronts the carcasses of two giant dead whales, and he commands them to speak. [00:43:30] He's so disgusted by the fact that he can't get to the bottom of the mystery of these giant creatures. Tito, like my son, is a non speaking person. What I really gathered from reading that book with Tito was, never again do I want to teach Moby Dick without a non speaking person in that classroom. What he brought to the business of understanding the whales [00:44:00] perspective. Even the most sensitive, environmentally friendly, speaking kid could not fathom what that novel's doing with this tension between speech and a lack of speech.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: And all of this, we want as many different readers as possible. Diversity is good. It's not just good from some kind of ... As a neo-liberal sort of platitude. It's good because we learn more.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: I really believe that.
Ben Binversie: Yeah.
Ralph Savarese: [00:44:30] I've experienced it myself.
Ben Binversie: Yeah. Well Ralph, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. This is a truly wonderful book, and I can't recommend it enough to people.
Ralph Savarese: Thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate it.
Ben Binversie: (Singing).
Ìı
[00:45:00] Ralph Savarese is a Professor of English here at 51²è¹İapp College. His book, See it Feelingly, came out this winter and is available now. Links to the book, and some of his other work are available on our website, 51²è¹İapp.EDU/Podcast. His son DJ, also produced a documentary about his journey navigating from high school to college, for which he won a Peabody Award. All of the people with whom Ralph read books have some incredible stories of their own, and you can find out more about [00:45:30] each of them on the website.
Now, time for a little 51²è¹İapp music.
(Singing).
The song you just heard is from Seth Hanson's most recently album, [00:46:00] Not Too Deep. Which, he wrote and produced during the year after his graduation. Living in 51²è¹İapp, Seth settled into the next stage of life, while processing the previous four years. The album as a whole grapples with the tension of how we remember and say goodbye to a special place. Check it out at TheAdditionalSix.Bandcamp.com, or find a link to the album on our website. Additional vocals on the album come from Isabel Cooke, and Rachel Eber, two fellow [00:46:30] 51²è¹İapp musicians.
On future episodes we'll highlight some more 51²è¹İapp music, and I'll be sure to let you know whenever the sweet sounds you're hearing are courtesy of a fellow 51²è¹İappian. If you want your music to be heard, get in touch with the podcast. With that, we'll wrap up this week's episode.
Next time, we're going to take a plunge into the word of non-illusory theater, as we talk with Rob Neill from the class of 1991. Who was a founding member of the New York Neo Futurists. What's a Neo Futurist, you ask? [00:47:00] You'll just have to wait and find out. Or, look it up on the World Wide Web in the meantime, if it's really bugging you.
We'll also chat with Ellen Mease, Professor of Theater and Dance at 51²è¹İapp, whose directing this semester's production of Twelfth Night. A fitting choice, as she directed the same play 40 years ago, and this will be her last directing project before retirement. The play runs March 8th through 10th, so make sure you go out and see it if you're in 51²è¹İapp. If you can't make it, you'll hear about it here on the podcast.
( [00:48:30] Singing).
[00:49:00] Music for today's show comes from Brett Newski, Podington Bear, and Seth Hanson. For more information about the guest from today's show, check out the website, 51²è¹İapp.EDU/Podcast. If you liked the show today, [00:49:30] leave us a review and make sure to subscribe to the show, wherever you listen.
(Singing).
I'm your host, Ben Binversie. [00:50:00] Stay weird 51²è¹İappians.
(Singing).