Abstract
‘Neurodivergence’ defines an umbrella of conditions such as ADHD, autism, and others. These conditions involve differences in communication styles, sensory processing, and impairment with functioning. However, these conditions also possess strengths such as frequent monotropism, which is found in autistic individuals, sensory acuity, an intense sense of social justice, and an extreme attention to detail. If we retrospectively diagnose authors with neurodivergent conditions, we risk diminishing the author’s dimensions – including their biography, the content of their work, and the messages they wished to convey. If we look at neurodivergence from an angle not of deficit, but of difference, it can prove to be beneficial and ultimately, fruitful.
My study will primarily derive its hypotheses from form – my reading is formalist and structuralist – my focal point is the stylistic, lexical, and syntactic levels at which the author’s text operates, and subsequently how this style can reflect thinking which diverges from traditional prose styles.
As scaffolding for my essay, I will examine the use of free indirect discourse in modernist writers’ works, such as my findings in Virginia Woolf, as well as radical poetics and subversive poetic styles in mystical poets, such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson, and how they emerge in direct opposition with the status quo of their contexts. I will analyse closely how, at a sentence level, syntax reflects atypical cognitive styles, lexical choices modulate the authors’ understanding of the world, and how their overall style mirrors, or is suggestive of, a neurodivergent foundation when devising fiction – prose and verse.
William Blake’s Mystical Mode and Subversive Cosmology
For example, William Blake, the eccentric Romantic English dissenter poet who wrote in the 18th and 19th centuries in London possessed an intense visionary imagination, and his poetry is built around eidetic imagery. Blake’s work fundamentally rejects empiricism and the Enlightenment values of the era, focussing on the paramount importance of nature, natural impulse, and individual mysticism and what particularly stands out in his corpus of hybrid work is his non-linear pattern of thinking. His poetic style moved more associatively rather than logically or pragmatically – his hybrid style of artwork reflects this – the actual labour that went into his art materially reflects his philosophy and hints at an autistic tendency of special interests. In Blake’s work, images recur in almost obsessive loops, his symbols mutate across texts, and categories begin to collapse into each other – this can almost resemble autistic hyper-associative thinking and ADHD-style cognitive jumping. Blake also possessed an intense fixation on a self-conjured system of belief and philosophy – with figures such as Urizen (who represents reason) and Los emerging. To me, that level of sustained mythopoetic system/world-building resembles what psychologists now might call monotropic attention: a type of cognitive organising around intensely focussed channels of interests. Blake privileges perception itself – the concept of divine imagination is sovereign to him. His rapid symbolic density of ideas devised over his lifetime reflects a neurodivergent paradigm of thought. Additionally, Blake’s writing is infused with formal experimentation such as his capitalisation of abstract nouns to reinforce their significance and his subversion of linear structure. For a critic “inhabits a radically different perceptual economy”. His subversive way of creation and devising verse can be reflected in maxims such as “without contraries is no progression”.
Furthermore, encapsulating all of my arguments, Blake famously stated “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s” – this radical opposition to authority reflects a neurodivergent confusion that emerges when trying to navigate a puzzling, hostile and unaccommodating world, but also the inability to read or analyse hierarchies or people’s assigned roles within society. Moreover, Blake’s syntax resists hierarchical ordering and for him, “meaning accumulates laterally”. Blake utilises pattern recognition rather than formal deduction – he externalises an unfiltered associative cognition, which can resonate with neurodivergent audiences within contemporary reception. Within Blake’s work, text and image operate simultaneously rather than hierarchically. This mirrors his radical anti-establishment stance, and thus, reading Blake now becomes a type of multi-modal processing. Blake’s work has significant features which stand out as potentially neurodivergent: his visual symbolism, typography, mythic references, and poetic rhythm all contribute to an atypical textual style.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis as an Allegory of Executive Dysfunction
Franz Kafka, an Austrian writer of the early twentieth century, often examines the themes of social estrangement and pathological isolation and disillusionment from a hostile modern world. Especially in his famous novella The Metamorphosis, which follows a salesman named Gregor Samsa and his transformation into a large insect as he wakes up one morning. The novella discusses implicitly topics such as alienation and depression with the use of the formal techniques of anthropomorphising and allegory. Kafka’s prose can be identified as formally controlled, but the outside world, for the author, is oftentimes unintelligible,which is reflected in his allegories of a confusing society and its systems, his lexis, and his syntactic structures on a formal level. The world is inaccessible to Kafka’s characters, narrators, and narratorial voices. Within the prose, consciousness cannot stop pathologically tracking and correcting itself. Kafka’s novella is permeated with failed communication, failed intimacy, failed authority, failed embodiment, and failed social timing. For a critic, in Kafka, “shame becomes spatial entrapment”. A quote which aligns with the reading of The Metamorphosis as an allegory for executive dysfunction is “what if he slept a little more and forgot all this nonsense” – this avoidance and delay of facing everyday existence mirrors the autistic experience of neurological burnout, as shown through the usage of a model or societal system which doesn’t accommodate an autistic individual. In his letters to Felice, Kafka states “I have no literary interests, I consist of literature” – this absolutist view on identity inextricably linked with the interest he is most devoted to resembles an autistic hyper-intensity and focus for their chosen field or interest, in contemporary terms.
Furthermore, he states “sleep does not help if the soul is tired”, signalling at a deeper spiritual exhaustion one that exists on a different dimension to simply tiredness – this resembles a kind of autistic non-functionality when in shutdown or burnout mode. It is useful to apply this lens of neurodivergent executive dysfunction onto Kafka’s novella because it produces a space in which neurodivergent readers can feel understood through the prose. Kafka’s characters are primarily hyper-compliant – this dynamic almost resembles the neurodivergent concept of social masking. His protagonists constantly monitor themselves and correct themselves – for a critic “the syntax itself enacts cognitive self-surveillance”. The concept of executive dysfunction is mirrored by the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a gigantic insect because his mobility and physical liberty becomes restrained, reduced or even impossible. For example, he cannot get out of bed, open doors, speak intelligibly and navigate sensory spaces. This description mimics depression or burnout – the stagnation of it and social disablement. Kafka, according to a critic, was “unusually attentive to bureaucratic cognition” – his shifting criteria make his fiction uncanny, dreamlike and puzzling.
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: The fluidity of prose
Virginia Woolf, the great modernist, feminist writer could be identified as one of the most important and significant of the early twentieth century. Her prose style often mirrors the fluctuations of consciousness and she utilises a non-linear sentence pattern. Her sensory sensitivity is directly mirrored in her prose with intricate and extended descriptions of the natural world and material objects. Her syntax is often prepositional, and she often uses syndetic listing when building her sentences e.g. she often employs associative parataxis within her prose.
On a syntactic level, there is minimal explicit subordination, because the use of “because”, “therefore”, and “so” is rare. There are also frequent shifts in subject matter mid-sentence or mid thought. This almost resembles non-hierarchical attention mapping. For example, there are clearly unstable subject boundaries in The Waves. In this novel, narration behaves like a shared cognitive field – identity is almost unequally distributed across fragments of speech – there is fluid self-other demarcation within her discourse. Woolf prefers sensorial nouns over interpretative verbs. She uses what scholars call ‘phenomenological lexis’ – language that records perception and noticing before categorisation – her use of free indirect discourse aligns with my thesis stated in my ‘Abstract’ section of this essay. In The Waves, one of the speakers says, “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me”. This idea of having multiple personalities depending on who is talking or who you are talking to, resembles the idea of autistic masking and camouflaging – the constant fluctuation of identity, only based on who is perceiving you. Another aspect of potential neuro-atypicality within Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel is this quote: “When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me, I am in darkness, I am nothing”. This reliance on the “physicality” and materiality of words to give meaning to experience as well as the black and white dichotomous thinking strongly resembles a neurodivergent cognitive style. Furthermore, one of the speakers in The Waves states: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”, and “let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself” – this declaration and desire for stasis can be frequently found in the autistic need for sameness and predictability. Ultimately, viewing Virginia Woolf’s use of parataxis, modernist fragmentation, unstable pronouns and recursive self-correction through a neurodivergent lens can be useful but ultimately, it is important to note that during her lifetime, autism wasn’t even recognised as a condition and thus treading with such reading reveals that it can only be ultimately hypothetical and extremely speculative.
Emily Dickinson: The Reclusive Queen of Broken Syntax and Dashes
A neurodivergent reading of Emily Dickinson’s revolutionary verse becomes persuasive not because of retrospective diagnosis alone, but because her poetry repeatedly formalises altered perception, sensory extremity, recursive thought and atypical lexis and syntactic formation. Her verse almost structurally reproduces a disrupted processing style and sensory acuity. She pervasively privileges abstract nouns, charged with metaphysical weight – such as capitalising “Light’, “Death”, ‘Difference’, ‘Zero’ and ‘Infinity’. The capitalisation places emphasis on her spiritual relationship with emotions, principles and abstractions. Her famous use of dashes interrupts grammatical continuity and creates pauses that feel cognitively charged rather than decorative. They often indicate delayed processing which often happens to a neurodivergent individual. Biographically, Dickinson’s isolation and reclusiveness can be read differently. Her withdrawal may not simply be an indicator of eccentricity or feminine fragility but rather an attempt to regulate overwhelming sensory and social environments. McNaughton’s point about Dickinson possessing “an intense awareness of the detail of any phenomenon in which she was vitally interested aligns strongly with what contemporary autism theorists describe as monotropic attention: sustained cognitive immersion in narrow but deeply elaborated perceptual or conceptual interest. Syntactically, Dickinson frequently omits connective tissue that conventional prose would require. Articles, explanatory clauses, and transitions disappear, and the result is elliptical compression: “A Quartz contentment, like a stone –”. The noun phrase feels both precise and inaccessible – emotional states are translated into mineral imagery rather than psychological or mental exposition. Dickinson thus often records perception before social interpretation stabilises it. That is why the dashes matter so much – they are not random eccentric punctuation – they formally enact suspended cognition – moments where perception exceeds syntactic or sentence-level containment. The pause is most evident here: “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me –”.
Bibliography:
Franz Kafka. Letters to Milena. Edited by Willy Haas, translated by Tania and James Stern, Schocken Books, 1953. Originally published 1952.
Kafka, Franz. Letters to Felice. Edited by Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, translated by James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth, Schocken Books, 1973. Originally published 1967.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. 1915.
Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Originally published 1926.
Virginia Woolf. The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1931.
William Blake. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. 1794.
Blake, William. Auguries of Innocence. Written c.1803, first published 1863.
James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. B. W. Huebsch, 1916.
Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems. Faber & Faber, various editions. Original poems largely written 1850s–1880s; first collected publication 1890.
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