Indirect Discourse: On representing autism

Indirect discourse (also known as “indirect statement”) is a grammatical construction that is taught to students who have just passed the halfway mark in their study of Latin grammar. To use indirect discourse is to relay (indirectly) someone else’s words. So, an example of direct discourse is my son Charlie saying:

I need a break

And an example of indirect discourse is:

Charlie’s mother says that he needs a break.

That is, in the second sentence (the example of indirect discourse) I am relaying—repeating—representing what Charlie says. It can be said, that is, that I have taken Charlie’s words (”I need a break”) and put them into my own mouth (”Charlie’s mother says that he needs a break”). Note that, in indirect discourse, Charlie’s “I” has had to be substituted for with the third-person pronoun, “he.” (Else one ends up with a nonsensical sentence: “Charlie’s mother says that I need a break.”)

The students in my Elementary Latin class have not yet started to study indirect discourse (we are just finishing our study of the passive voice of verbs) but I have been thinking of this Latin grammatical construction today as a result of some recent exchanges on Autism Vox and on Autismland regarding my attempts to phonetically convey what Charlie’s speech sounds like (for instance, my writing of him saying “Mahm” instead of “Mom”), and of my representation of Charlie in my online writing in general. Amanda Baggs of Ballastexistenz noted to me that

“I had a lot of articulation problems growing up. I would not have liked it if someone had spelled everything I said phonetically because other people thought it was cute or personal.”

and also that

“I do not see you describe other people in your life from as far outside as you describe Charlie.”

These two observations of Amanda’s capture the main issues that I find myself, the parent of an autistic child, facing when I try to represent my son in writing. How to be honest? How to be true? How to be ethical? How to present him as he “real-ly” is? Can I ever step out of my perspective of being Charlie’s non-autistic mother and ever get through so many levels of biases and presumptions and even the blinkers—the rose-tinted glasses—of a parent’s feelings for her child as I write about him?

My feeling is that I cannot. I can describe and narrate, I can speculate and apply what I have learned about autism from autistic persons and books and blogs, but it is important to me to acknowledge that I do not know how, indeed, Charlie would wish for me to represent him. And it is also important to me to acknowledge that, when I write about what Charlie says, or rather about what I hear him saying, that I am writing in indirect discourse. And from a grammatical perspective—a Latin grammatical perspective—something interesting happens when using indirect discourse.

Consider these sentences, all Latin translations of the examples above.

Desidero quiescere. I need [desidero] a break [=to rest, quiescere]

In this sentence—an example of direct discourse—Charlie is the subject of the sentence, the “I” (indicated by the -o ending of desidero; there is a Latin word for “I,” ego, but it is not necessary to use it); he is the agent, the doer, the speaker of these words; he is self-advocating. Note what happens when his words are put into indirect discourse:

Mater Caroli dicit eum quiescere desiderare. [Charlie's mother says that he needs a break.]

This sentence contains an example of indirect discourse, as the mater Caroli is doing the speaking (dicit) THAT he (i.e., Charlie/Carolus) needs or wishes to take a break (or, to translate quiescere more literally, “rest”). It can further be noted that eum, which is the word for “he,” is in the accusative case, in accordance with the rules of writing a statement in indirect discourse in Latin: The subject of the indirect discourse is in the accusative case and the verb is in the form of an infinitive (desiderare, “to need, desire”).

Latin is an inflected language which (to make a very long story short) means that, in order to indicate how words function in a sentence, one changes the endings of the words, rather than changing the word order (as is the case in English, as indicated by the sentences “dog bites man” and “man bites dog”). So eum being in the accusative case means that it is a direct object, that is, it is the recipient of the action of the main verb of the sentence (dicit). And the subect of that verb—-the person doing the talking and the representing—is in the nominative case; it is the mater.

This is to say: When it comes to me, autism mother, representing my autistic son, Charlie, it has so far been the case that I am the person who does the action (speaking, representing) and Charlie is at the receiving end of things: He gets spoken of, he is represented. And a good example of this is my attempt to phonetically convey his particular pronunication of words. While my intent in doing this has been to present Charlie “as he truly is,” I recognize that what I intend in writing and what the effect is, can be two quite different things. What Amanda Baggs’ observations enjoin me to do is to help Charlie learn to move into the position of the nominative case and to see him do the talking about himself in direct discourse, without any “his mother says that he…..” preceding his own communication.

Further, the discussion today regarding how I represent Charlie also brought up the point about how Charlie might feel about what I have written about him, especially in regard to various details of his life. As he is getting older, does he really wish to have so much about his life, about himself, presented publicly?

A few years ago, I remember reading novelist Jennifer Weiner noting that she would not be writing online about the details of toilet-training her daughter, lest those webpages be secretly cached or somehow cut-pasted-and-saved on someone’s hard drive and her daughter (when grown up) discover some very personal, and very private, information that who knows who had read. Weiner, who uses words like “vomity” to full humorous effect, nonetheless know when enough of this sort of thing has been said, in contrast to a tendency among some parents of autistic children who seem to think that the only way to convey what life with autism is “really” like is to describe all things awful and kaka; all things bad. One has to wonder, how will these children feel to read their parents’ accounts of these personal, messy matters?

Perhaps my rule in writing about Charlie should be, if it does not sound right and dignified in direct discourse, don’t write it.

I will close by noting how two fathers of autistic children have referred to their children reading their autism books. “‘because thne bhook is wbout me abnd i havenot6rread it [sic]‘” types DJ Savarese in “Read the Book,” ch. 6 of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (forthcoming May 2007). DJ had had an “outburst” (p. 161) and, in response to his father Ralph Savarese’s asking him why this has happened, DJ responds that he thinks “‘you werwe making fun of me [sic]‘” (p. 162). DJ has heard Saverese read some of the book outloud and, as Savarese notes,

having been introduced to the story of himself, DJ wanted more. Just how badly he wanted more would become apparent as he pestered me throughout the summer and fall, querying, “do you have ready the biook foer me? [sic].” It was as if the book might not only awaken him but also guide him into the future, as in a tale by Borges……………. With DJ starting to represent himself, my conception of the book was beginning to change. I knew I wanted to incorporate his words into the story of his life. (p. 162)

“It’s My Story,the final chapter of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption is by DJ himself; Savarese’s book—the Savereses’ book—can be seen as moving from indirect to direct discourse. As Savarese himself notes, DJ’s starting to write and to represent himself, changes the very form and shape of Reasonable People. The books becomes not only “a memoir of autism and adoption” but also, as DJ’s voice emerges, an autobiography.

The final two sentences of Roy Richard Grinker’s Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism also note how the author has written his book in full awareness—-in full expectation—of his child reading his words about her. Of Isabel, “the reason I wrote this book in the first place,” Grinker writes:

One day, when she can read this book, I hope she recognizes herself and sees how much she’s grown. (p. 306)

Consider this as the standard—the benchmark—for any and all books written about autism from now on. They have to be acceptable, to ring true, to an autistic person: If an autistic person cannot recognize her or himself in a “book about autism,” the book is not really about autism—is not a true representation of autism.