The previous
posting stared to relate why it is Hercules that I am offering as the focus of
my activities for autistic children. Here, I run further with Hercules, including
why this hero, unpleasant for some, favourite of others, is the one I have picked
as source of autistic hope – hope, that, is as I have been defining it in these
postings.
I have written recently
about an autistic world – from where autistic people look into the non-autistic
world. But I am not saying that there is one single autistic experience. I am
hardly saying anything striking here. There have been a saying going around for
a while along the lines of ‘if you know one autistic person, you know one
autistic person.’[1]
This fits with one move in recent autism pedagogy, which concerns finding a way
to negotiate how on the one hand, being autistic involves a particular way of
experiencing and being – and on the other that each person is a distinct
person.[2]
I am going to
explore this further by sharing two things which I have heard about – each two
to three years ago, when I was starting to come to the view that Hercules would
be a suitable choice for the activities. Both of these deal with hardships, and
with hope in some way. And both concern the Hydra, a monster that seems
especially appealing in relation to autism.
 |
| Something violent: Hercules getting ready to club - though not here behead - the Hydra. 16th century CE bronze fountain figure from Northern Italy. Image details here and here |
One experience
was from a librarian at a library I regularly visit (‘regularly’ sometimes
meaning ‘once a term’ to be honest). Chancing to learn that a visitor to the
library was the grandmother of an autistic young child, she told the visitor
about my work and mentioned that I was looking, particularly, at the myth of
Hercules as a subject for resources for autistic children. The visitor responded
that she very much hoped that I would not be including anything particularly
violent, like the Hydra’s heads being cut off.
This is
precisely one of the features of Hercules’s adventures that I was, then,
planning to work on: as one instance where Hercules, journeying into a fantasy
land, encounters hardships which he overcomes against the odds. Conversely, in
the mundane world, he is often an outsider, who gets things wrong – because the
behaviour that is suitable in a fantasy realm is not such in the everyday
world.
I am aware that
I need to treat the episode with care, including because it is not necessarily
possible to control how someone will engage with any aspect of mythology
presented to them. For example, the encounter with the Hydra might appear an
instance of how to engage in problem-solving to one person. Yet it might be
taken as uncomfortably violent by someone else, especially perhaps if the user
empathises with the monster rather than the monster’s slayer. Stories of
Hercules tend to be presented form the perspective of the hero, but what if a
participant in an activity for autistic children identifies with the Hydra
instead?
There are
various possible solutions here. One is to shake up the question of ‘who is the
hero’ and ‘who is the victim,’ perhaps by focusing on how the Hydra deals with
the violence of Hercules by growing new heads.
 |
| Baby Hercules strangling - or playing with? - snakes. From Verona after 1506 (poss. cast 19th century CE) now in the Metropolitan Musuem and Art. Details here |
The second Hydra story comes from another colleague, a classicist who spent a few years working as a
teaching assistant with preschool children. The colleague has shared with me an experience she
had when reading a picture-book telling the adventures of Hercules with one of
her pupils – a pupil whose behaviour is commensurate with autism. This book
included the episode where Hercules cuts off the Hydra’s heads. It also
includes another serpentine incident: the strangling of the snakes sent to attack
the baby Hercules in his cot. The pupil would repeatedly ask to go back and
forwards from the picture of the Hydra to the picture of the cradle. She
regarded the snakes in the cot as little “Hydra babies” and wanted to go back
and forth between the two images in order to reunite the babies with “their
mummy.”
One thing to
take from this, I’d say, concerns just how open classical myth can be to varied
responses: contradictory ones indeed. The little girl in my colleague’s
preschool class found a story often seen as violent to be concerned with
babies and their mother. There is huge potential for classical myth to engage
the imagination of a given user – for them to make their own interpretations
and to work though various things in their lives as they make sense of the
world – this can include things like family values, and the mother-child bond. Solace
can be found in unexpected places, including what is usually regarded as a
story of an act of violent killing by a monster-slaying hero. Hercules can
be received in many ways. Monster, as here the Hydra can received in many ways too, including by autistic children.
Last year, I was involved
in a pilot study of the initial version of my activities for autistic
children with a group of children aged 8-11. It was the Hydra that they especially
liked. I need to think more about the Hydra. I also need to think about how Hercules
and the monsters he encounters are presented in books for children. Some of my
Myths and Mythology students at Roehampton have been examining how mythology is
presented for children – often with violent episodes sanitised or even erased.
They have been thinking about the ethics of this, and also at how far this
creates a skewed image of classical myth.
All this raises
questions including what the role of retelling classical myth should be – should
one seek to keep as close as possible to ‘the original’? What - if so - even is the ‘original’?
At some point soon, I’m going to review the books on Hercules discussed to date
in the Our Mythical Childhood survey, including to see what patterns emerge,
and to go deeper into various issues raised in this posting. This will include looking into how children
respond to monsters and to heroes, and contemplating what the lessons might be for me as a
develop my activities. for children.
I advised a
student just this afternoon that an ideal maximum length for a blog posting is
1000 words – I’ve gone over this, so I’ll stop for now. More soon: where I go
down one of the Herculean paths that will emerge out of this posting.
[1] See, for example, “Understanding
Autism,” Autism Empowerment, online
at https://www.autismempowerment.org/understanding-autism/
(accessed
July 21, 2019) (“If you’ve met one person with autism,
you’ve met one person with autism.”)
[2] See, for example, Rita Jordan, “Preface,” in Rita
Jordan and Stuart Powell, eds.,
Autism and Learning: A Guide to Good Practice, London and New York:
Routledge, 2012 (updated edition; first edition: 1997).
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