Autism Vox

Tito Mukhopadhyay on Language in The Mind Tree

by Kristina Chew, PhD on December 30th, 2006

[The following is an excerpt from “Fractioned Idiom: Metonymy and the Language of Autism,” an essay I have written about poetry and autism that will be published in Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen (Routledge Press, forthcoming 2007).]

Tito Mukhopadhyay’s writing has been seen as exceptional due to the severity of his autism and his language disability–but what is particularly exceptional about it is his use of his language, the autistic idiom that he writes in. Mukhopadhyay’s use of language in his poetry and other narrative writings provide clues to his way of thinking.

While The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism (2000; 2003) is seemingly structured as a narrative—of the first-person narrator’s growth from self-absorbed autistic child to autistic author able to explain himself in language—Mukhopadhyay jumps from writing about himself as a child (of unclear age) to general observations about his difficulty to coordinate his mind and his body, his thinking and his verbal output. (p. 21) He intertwines a first-person and a third-person perspective, as in “The Window of my World,” the first section of The Mind Tree:

I think about the little boy who had a way of expressing himself, not through speech but through a frustrated temper tantrum. The language was known but it did not relate to anything. (p. 1)

The third-person perspective gives Mukhopadhyay’s writing an objective, distant quality, like that we tend to associate with a clinical report. Mukhopadhyay writes about himself as a character in a story, “the little boy”; the “little” indicating that he is looking back at a younger version of himself. He thus assumes the perspective on “the boy” in his book of an omniscient narrator. An abstract noun (”the language”) becomes the subject of a sentence; “the language” is a “known” and familiar entity that is not able to “relate to anything,” just as a person might not be able to relate to another person.

Mukhopadhyay, that is, describes “language” as not relating “to anything”—and whose language is it—–his only? another person’s? language in general?. The effect of this passage is that it is not the autistic subject of the text who has difficulties relating but language itself—-language conceived of as a separate, disembodied entity from its speaker, Mukhopadhyay. Language is written about as a thing foreign and external, separated and broken off, from its speaker. In Mukhopadhyay’s experience, language is such an alien being that he nonetheless must learn to use, to express his needs, and himself.

The Mind Tree’s narrator also describes himself as thoroughly disembodied, “separate” from his own body. Mukhopadhyay often seems almost surprised that a body part, such as his hand, is actually connected to his “self”:

The hand had made a strange relationship with its shadow, and he fluttered it and spent his hours, contented with the long company of his shadow. (p. 2)

Mukhopadhyay writes about his hand as a foreign entity that he has accidentally discovered. “The hand” is like “the language,” as Mukhopadhyay writes about both as disembodied and separate from his self. The lack of connection between Mukhopadhyay’s mind from his body leads to him cutting his fingers on a fan:

Once a table fan had attracted him and he went to touch it. He cut his fingers, of course, but could not caution himself, though he had full knowledge of current, electricity and the dangers involved with it.

The two stayed in their own selves, isolated from each other. (pp. 77-78)

The fact that a table fan can cut his fingers is described by Mukhopadhyay as an accidental phenomenon that he comprehends almost incidentally. His writing suggests that, had he not had the experience of touching the fan, he would not have known not to (and he does not indicate whether he has since stopped touching fans, only that he knows he is not supposed to). As he writes in one of his poems about how others perceive his difference:

Men and women are puzzled by everything I do
Doctors use different terminologies to describe me
I just wonder
The thoughts are bigger than I can express
………..
With the help of my imagination
I can go places that do not exist
And they are like beautiful dreams.
But it is a world full of improbabilities
Racing toward uncertainty.
(p. 201)

Mukhopadhyay’s understanding is metonymical or heavily associative in its reliance on the observation of chance occurrences that are elevated to truth. Investigating how poetic language works–through metonymy when metaphor is expected–can assist us in understanding Mukhopadhyay’s thinking, in understanding, perhaps, how an autistic person perceives the world with its many “improbabilities / Racing toward uncertainty.”

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POSTED IN: Asia, Autism Lit, Books, India, Language, Poetry, Sensory