Literalism and Autism

[Belacqua]

It's about hearing a phrase such as "raining cats and dogs" and despite the context of that phrase being clear it was meant to be taken metaphorically, the person with ASD may fail to grasp this and actually think the person saying the phrase is insane (because clearly there aren't cats and dogs falling from the sky).

It's about being told to pick up the rubbish and not worry about emptying the bins for the day, and taking that very literally to the point that even if there happened to be a bin that is full to the top and the rubbish in it is about to fall out, you ignore it because you were told not to worry about it anyway. It's about being told to pick up all the rubbish you see on the ground around you and then ending up not just picking up all the rubbish in the area you're designated to clean but also outside of that. 

Thank you for clarifying these things for us. I have no experience with people on the spectrum (that I know of) so I don't know at all how it works. 

I'm curious about how this might work in regard to literature that isn't meant to be holy scripture. Here I don't want to quiz you on your own private tastes or experiences, because of course these are personal and none of my business, but just if you have information in general. 

For example, would someone with ASD have access to the pleasure in the non-literal reading of, say, Proust or Dostoevsky? This is not a matter of decoding metaphor so much as of applying very subtle fictional nuances to one's own experience. Unreliable narrators like Proust's, for example, demand that we look beyond his words to figure out what's really going on -- even though, since it's fiction, nothing is really going on. 

Likewise in poetry, which may or may not use non-literal tropes but certainly demands sympathetic readings of vaguely hinted information. 

I've been trying to remember if I ever encountered anyone who was both strongly anti-religion and also aesthetically enthralled by good fiction. Not stuff that makes you say "COOL!" like, say, good science fiction, but the classic novels where the act of reading them is a wonderful personal experience. Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert, George Eliot, Henry James, etc. etc. 

My experience has been that people who are deeply into the arts (and again, not popular media but the stuff that snobs like) tend not to have animosity toward religion. Atheists like Umberto Eco or Harold Bloom, for example, who are fantastically knowledgable about literature, tend not to avoid religious themes in their favorite books or in what they write. Bloom was raised strongly Jewish and became an atheist, but says "make Dante your textbook."