Thread by @mykola

My god is it Bloomsday already?

James Joyce #wasNotNeurotypical. I read him and his stand-in character Stephan Daedalus both as autistic+adhd.

His daughter was almost certainly autistic before we had words for it.

I need to write this paper.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a story of a kid who grows up as an outsider to his own culture. He is constantly seeking to understand what makes him unique, what makes him not fit - religion? values? He sets off to find himself.

Short answer: he's ND, without dx.

When he comes back to Ireland a few years later as a young man in Ulysses he's just as alienated, he's living in his own head.

The book gives him three chapters of attention and then sort of restarts with a different protagonist.

Leopold Bloom, ostensibly the "real" main character of Ulysses, is Jewish (but by way of his father, so he's not really jewish according to jewish custom), and as a result is somewhat of a social outcast in subtle ways.

Another character within Irish community but not of it.

Joyce was fascinated with the ways in which his characters existed within a context that never really quite had room for them. Society was just always a bit trickier for Stephen and Leopold than it seemed to be for other people.

They have unique values, experiences, thoughts.

That they find each other in the text and form a common bond is beautiful. It's @Harkaway's Gnomon, a union of outcasts reformed into its own collective, reborn with its own agency, plagued with its own problems.

Anyway, _especially_ if you're ND, pick up a copy of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man today and give it a read. I bet there will come points in that book where you're shaking with recognition and love.

Yes, this. The book is filled with this. His fascination with chiasmus is another one, repeating patterns forwards and backwards (I always did that as a kid).

https://twitter.com/RobHanna85/status/1405212374206926849