Neurodiversity in Literature #1: Noah Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath"

This is the first of what might become an occasional series, focusing on characters in novels who are really obviously (what would now be recognised as) autistic or otherwise neurodiverse, but were written either before such concepts were recognised or by authors who were probably unaware of them. It might even foray into possible neurodiversity in authors, but that would probably require a separate format (for this i'm mostly going to post quotes from novels, and add a bit of commentary).

Noah Joad is the brother of Tom Joad, the main protagonist of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. He is introduced on page 90 (in the Penguin edition), when Tom returns to his family home after 4 years in prison:

Behind them, moving slowly and evenly, but keeping up, came Pa and Noah - Noah the first-born, tall and strange, walking always with a wondering look on his face, calm and puzzled. He had never been angry in his life. He looked in wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people look at the insane. Noah moved slowly, spoke seldom, and then so slowly that people who did not know him often thought him stupid. He was not stupid, but he was strange. He had little pride, no sexual urges. He worked and slept in a curious rhythm that nevertheless sufficed him. He was fond of his folks, but never showed it in any way. Although an observer could not have told why, Noah left the impression of being misshapen, his head or his body or his legs or his mind; but no misshapen member could be recalled. Pa thought he knew why Noah was strange, but Pa was ashamed, and never told. For on the night when Noah was born, Pa, frightened at the spreading thighs, alone in the house, and horrified at the screaming wretch his wife had become, went mad with apprehension. Using his hands, his strong fingers for forceps, he had pulled and twisted the baby. The midwife, arriving late, had found the baby's head pulled out of shape, its neck stretched, its body warped; and she had pushed the head back and molded the body with her hands. But Pa always remembered, and was ashamed. And he was kinder to Noah than to the others. In Noah's broad face, eyes too far apart, and long fragile jaw, Pa thought he saw the twisted, warped skull of the baby. Noah could do all that was required of him, could read and write, could work and figure, but he didn't seem to care; there was a listlessness in him toward things people wanted and needed. He lived in a strange silent house and looked out of it through calm eyes. He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.

A couple of pages later, Tom's first verbal exchange in the book with Noah:

Noah stood on the step, and he faced Tom, and his wideset eyes seemed to look around him. His face had little expression. Tom said, "How ya, Noah?"

"Fine," said Noah. "How a' you?" That was all, but it was a comfortable thing.

I think there's a hell of a lot in there to make a case, if this was a description of a real person, for this person being on the autistic spectrum - so much so, in fact, that i can't help wondering if Steinbeck based this character on a real person he had met who was, in fact, autistic. Steinbeck's work gives such a strong feeling of being grounded in real life, of being the dramatised but still real story of the displaced people of Oklahoma and California in the Great Depression, that it just seems natural that his characters were, if not based on individual real people, then on composites of real people. It seems likely to me that Steinbeck had met someone like Noah.

Noah is a minor character - he plays no vastly important role in the plot, and, while he goes with the rest of the Joads on their exodus to California, is only referred to pretty much in passing for most of the journey, and where he is referred to, there is nothing to imply that, despite his obvious neurological difference, he has anything other than the "normal" role of a member of the Joad family. He is one of the men of the family, in a society in which men and women within a family have very strictly defined gender roles - he does the "men's work", along with his father, uncle and brothers as an equal member of the working team.

There isn't really an obvious plot-related reason why Noah is in The Grapes of Wrath - if he had been omitted as a character, the plot would not have been significantly different. So, why did Steinbeck "create" him? I like to think that Steinbeck included him because he had known such a person in real life, and thus wanted to show how such a person would have been accepted and included, completely naturally, within a family in the pre-proletarianisation agricultural society of the 1930s American Midwest.

This reminds me of Mike Oliver's analysis of how disability developed as a social category in the transition from rural, agricultural feudal society to indistrial capitalism (in The Politics of Disablement, one of the foundational works of Disability Studies, published in 1990 - chapter 3, "Disability and the Rise of Capitalism") - in pre-Industrial Revolution British society (which the rural parts of the USA in the first half of the 20th century resembled pretty well in social organisation), individuals contributed what they could to small-scale agriculture and cottage industry, and individual impairments or differences could much more easily be accommodated than in the large-scale, mechanised and standardised workplaces that developed in the Industrial Revolution, and as a result of the development of the factory (or factory farm, as replaced the smallholdings of tenant families in The Grapes of Wrath) and its need for a standardised factory worker, the concept of "disability" in its modern form arose along with the segregation of those individuals whose impairments or differences made them "unsuitable" for such standardised, high-speed, high-pressure work - no individial "curious rhythm" permitted.

In this context, Noah's decision to leave the family before they reach California - abruptly deciding to walk off down a river that they camp by, after which he isn't seen again, his final fate unknown - makes a poignant kind of sense (perhaps not even intended by the author) - he knows that he is not capable of fitting into the new society, that in a standardised, proletarianised world he would be a liability to his family, and decides that, as there is no future for him that he can foresee, isolation and the uncomplicated sensory world of nature, even without any plan for personal survival, is a better choice than being forced into it.

The only part of his characterisation that seems unrealistic to me is the assertion that he "had never been angry in his life" - if he was based on a real person, I would probably submit that that person did actually feel anger, but perhaps did not express it in a way that was comprehensible as such to the neurotypical people around him. And there seems, to me at least, to be a kind of sublimated anger as well as sadness in his departure: as he says to Tom when he leaves: "You know how it is, Tom. You know how the folks are nice to me. But they don't really care for me." The "listlessness", too, could well have been a matter of perception by others rather than reality - a lack of the "normal" affective cues for caring about things rather than a lack of actual caring, or the "economy of energy" that many autistic people show in positioning their bodies in the most comfortable/least resistant position rather than prioritising showing alertness, or some form of the inertia often mistaken for laziness; yet despite these possible misperceptions, Noah is portrayed as a character who is not (intentionally) discriminated against until the old society is completely destroyed by the process of proletarianisation.

On a personal level, the description of Noah's birth deeply interests me; as a first-born son whose birth was premature, traumatic and required forceps myself, I have long believed that, although autism is unquestionably primarily a genetic condition, there is also a link between traumatic births and the extent to which the genes for an autistic neurology are expressed. I have seen many other autistic people on blogs and forums saying that they had complications of one sort or another immediately before, during or immediately after birth, and forceps births seem to be especially common. While my parents both have traits that i recognise as being autistic spectrum traits, neither of them has anywhere enough of the traits regarded as diagnostic for autism to merit a diagnosis; however, i seem to have both their traits added together and amplified, and i think it's possible that the forceps birth was what pushed me over the line into actually being in the diagnosably-autistic part of the spectrum. (I also seem to have an unusually narrow skull, which could also be as a result of the forceps birth.)

I identify strongly with the description of Noah "[leaving] the impression of being misshapen... but no misshapen member could be recalled", in relation to the way that many autistic people including myself, while not being visibly disabled as such (or at least not being interpreted as "disabled" at first glance by most people), are percieved by neurotypical people as subtly "off", or having something "wrong" with them in some undefinable way, often generating a feeling of unease in neurotypical people that the neurotypical person would find hard or impossible to exactly define or justify, but might describe the autistic person as something like "creepy" or just "odd". (I touched on this here, and am still intending to return to it in a "part 2" to that post.)

It's amazing how much i find myself wanting to write about a character who gets no more than a couple of pages in total written about him in a 500 page novel... well, for now this will have to do. I don't know how much i am going to write about characters who are actually among the main protagonists of the novels that they are in... :o