Neurodiversity and normal people in Intermezzo.

Sally Rooney's language games

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which provides Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo with its epigraph, is a philosophical study of language. Against the traditional view that words name objects, that words stand for things, Wittgenstein shows that meaning is often the result of useage. We know what a word means not by what it corresponds to in the world, but in the varieties of ways in which it is used.

The same basic words—I love you, for example—have many intricate possibilities for meaning depending on the actions that accompany them. What words mean depends on how they work in the world.

Language has meaning as part of what Wittgenstein calls the language games we all participate in all the time. “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’.”

Games, like life, have rules. But in social interaction and human relationships the rules are often implicit. Language thus has its meaning in relation to our physicality. Meaning has to be deduced, inferred, sensed.

As many of her readers and admirers will already be thinking, this question of how people work out the rules of the game, and how the game unfolds, is central to Sally Rooney’s work. It is her central preoccupation. At the beginning of her third novel, Beautiful World Where Are You, Felix asks Alice, “What kind of people do you write about, people like you?” Alice’s response is a sort of statement of intent about the form of Rooney’s novels,

She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would even let him win it, as long as he played nicely. What kind of person do you think I am? she said.

Despite the differences of mode and style, all four of Rooney’s novels have been about this,—about the way characters do or don’t understand the game they are playing with each other. As Rooney said in her Ulysses lecture, this is fundamental to the tradition she works in: “In Jane Austen’s work, and in the Anglophone novel since, character is staged purely in relationship to other characters.” Life is a game we have to play, a series of language games that we have to decode.

In these games of interaction, communication takes place verbally and physically. Alice looks at Felix as if to tell him something. We certainly know what she is telling him, but does he? When the game of conversation is afoot, Rooney’s characters are often distinguished by how well they are able to communicate—to tell and to understand—without words. Her characters play language games in which glances and touches, looks and tactility, change all of language’s meanings. That is one reason why she is so interested in plain, ordinary language: Rooney tests and proves the varieties of meanings normal people can create with normal speech.

In Intermezzo, Peter is a good game-player. Both as a lawyer and a boyfriend, he can often find the right thing to say, and is adept at picking up on the clues and cues of body language.

Early on, we are introduced to Naomi, with whom Peter is sleeping, and to whom he gives money to cover her shortfalls. Naomi is a decade younger than Peter. It is a vaguely defined relationship: “from the legal-philosophical, socio-political point of view, a thing of nothing. Never told his father about her, for instance, even when asked. No, no one at the moment, he said. The idea of them meeting: too awful. No.”

Like Emma, the archetype behind Conversations With Friends, Intermezzo is thus a novel of equivocation. Peter conceals, as any adept player of a game does. His outer expression and inner thoughts do not neatly match. He is not merely a liar, though, but is confused about how he ought to relate to his father (now dead) and Sylvia (who he truly loves).

Could have told him there was someone: nothing serious, just a girl he’s been seeing. What difference would that have made? Quite literally none. Why think about it then? Why these regretful feelings, and for whom? His father, himself? Pointless. Depressed even thinking about it. Depressed in general probably. Thoughts rattling and noisy almost always and then when quiet frighteningly unhappy. Mentally not right maybe. Never maybe was. Small weightless hand on his arm.

Rooney has been derided for these sorts of syntactical choices. But they reflect, quite carefully, the way in which thoughts interact with the world. Mostly, it sounds colloquial. Could have told him there was someone. People talk like that. Imagine it with the phrase “couldn’t I?” at the end. Mentally not right maybe—yes this is how people speak. What’s wrong with him? Mentally not right maybe. And then, when he is fully distracted by his thoughts, Sylvia calls him back to the things of this world. Small weightless hand on his arm. Isn’t that what it feels like, when we are lost in our minds, first something small and weightless, which we then realise to be a hand?

She glances. Everything communicated. Enveloped in the depth of her understanding. I know what you mean, she says.

The language game they are involved in often requires no speech. The thoughts we have experienced as Peter’s internal monologue are implicit to Sylvia. She knows what he means. Of course, this won’t always be the case—as in Emma, equivocation creates misunderstandings that drive the plot—, but Peter is capable of making himself understood without always giving himself away.

Ivan, Peter’s brother, is the opposite. He lacks this implicit understanding of the world. Unlike Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, Peter and Ivan are not philosophically opposed, but they are very different psychologically. This is the core theme and core reason for the narrative styles of Intermezzo. They are unable to participate in each other’s language games for reasons of temperament. (James: “all philosophy is temperament.”)

In the opening chapter, Peter is unkind about Ivan. The opening monologue is Peter thinking about how inadequately Ivan dressed for their father’s funeral, thinking that he must have bought his suit in a charity shop, scrunched it in a plastic bag, and cycled home with it—that, he thinks, would make sense of it, “would align the suit in its resplendent ugliness” with Ivan’s personality. A few pages later, Peter says to Naomi,

Yeah, he’s a complete oddball. Really not your type. I think he’s kind of autistic, although I guess you can’t say that now.

You can, if he actually is.

This is the central question of Ivan’s character. In the past, Peter thought Ivan was a “creep”, a “fascist”, and an “incel”, based as much on sibling hatred as reality. Ivan was unpleasant, but temporarily. These words relate to a brief period of Ivan’s adolescence. But the whole novel is about his falling in love with Margaret and becoming an affectionate boyfriend. The Ivan on the page is not an incel, not a creep. (Ann Manov got this wrong in the TLS.)

It seems like Peter cannot see the real Ivan, but perhaps his casual remark about autism, rude though it was meant to be, unintentionally gets close to the truth.

Autism is a delicate issue. Some roll their eyes at rising diagnoses, though they are largely to do with improved clinical understanding, more widespread knowledge among professionals, and the availability of testing. Others will find it insensitive to speculate about Ivan in this manner. But Rooney directly raises the question—and to my knowledge no critic has yet taken it seriously—, is Ivan autistic?

Among autistic people online, Rooney’s characters are often talked about as autistic. An early reader on NetGalley wrote this: “As an autistic person, I found Sally's description of Ivan to be kind and thoughtful.” That doesn’t mean it’s true, of course. There was speculation about Elinor Oliphant being autistic, whereas the similarities between her situation and that of an autistic person are only that—similarities.

But here are some of Ivan’s traits that accord with traits on the autistic spectrum.

Ivan, like many autistic people, feels like a “frustrated observer of impenetrable systems”. His voice is “flat, affectless”; elsewhere Peter thinks it is strange to think of Ivan as a seducer, “Flat, monotonous voice on him.” He is very literal: when Margaret asks him “were you ever in trouble” he has to ask if she means in the chess game he just played. He has to work out what non-literal phrases mean (“What does it mean when people say that kind of thing, like ‘nice woman’? Is it a coded way of saying a person is attractive?”) Ivan’s mother talks about how “weird” he was as a child, unable to fit in or make friends. Ivan says she prefers her step-children: “They suit her more, with more personality. They’re both, like, super normal.” Rather cruelly, his mother says, “Maybe he’s not the type to fit in.” He thinks he is funny but others find him un-humorous. When talking about data analysis, he asseverates.

Ivan thought it was unkind for his mother to criticise his suit at his father’s funeral but needed Margaret to confirm it was harsh: “I thought that myself. But sometimes I pick things up the wrong way.” Interpreting body language is difficult. With his friends, Ivan is asked about Margaret and plays it cool and has to decode their body language: “He thinks about the way Sarah shoved his arm in the kitchen, and how stupid everyone was acting, because, he could tell, they were happy for him.” With Peter this would be intuited, but Ivan has to work through it—he could tell. That phrase belies the fact that he has to work to tell.

Peter’s insults to Ivan when they were children are typical of the insults people still use towards autistic people, intentional or otherwise: “I’m sorry but you don’t relate to people on a normal level. I’m trying to have a human conversation and you’re talking like a robot.” This is a classic distinction made between “normies” and “autists” — “robotic” is a longstanding insult towards autistic people. At this point we are shown several behaviours that suggest autism.

Ivan shouting at him, screaming, you’re not even smart, you’re actually fucking stupid, slamming doors in his face. Inside his own bedroom then, taking books from bookshelves and throwing them at the wall, just to relieve the feeling…

This is an example of a meltdown that autistic people experience when they are overwhelmed. Autistic people sometimes have shutdowns at moments of extreme emotional intensity and we see Ivan doing this too. Several times, when he speaks more intensely than he wants to, Ivan disengages and rubs his eyes. The root of the brothers’ hatred was Ivan’s inability to understand or respond to Peter’s crushing grief when Sylvia had her accident. Unable to properly interact when Peter said, at three in the morning, tears on his face, “I don’t have anyone to talk to”, Ivan walked away. As a child he had selective mutism.

Ivan also suffers from an inability, or difficulty, to properly express the emotions he feels. This is called alexithymia. It is present in one fifth of autistic people. For example,

A very strong feeling came over him then: something inside himself warm and spreading, like dying or being born. He has no idea what the feeling is, whether it’s good or dangerous. It’s related to her, the words she’s saying, his feeling about her words.

When Margaret meets Ivan, a Wittgensteinian discussion of what the word “passionate” means occurs in her internal monologue,

He’s still looking at her even now. Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. but is it like a small badge placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige. Where did it come from, then, this word ‘passionate’? She knows where. From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealing parts of her personality—without meaning to, without knowing how to. I know that you are a person of desires, and so am I, even if I am helpless to do anything about this knowledge.

This is the crucial difference between Ivan and Peter. Even though Peter is having a mental breakdown of sorts—googling “insomnia psychosis”, grieving to the point of despair, frequently reliant on prescription drugs and alcohol—it is externally imposed, it is a response to Sylvia’s accident and then his father’s death. Ivan’s problems are internal, the fact of his personality. So while they may not have the sort of philosophical differences of Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, they are similarly dyadic: inextricably linked, but with the stress on entirely different aspects of life and personality.

The question of labelling is never resolved. Peter’s remarks are never extended to diagnosis. Ivan is never actually labelled autistic. This is the central intent of the novel: to show us that people’s traits, whatever we call them in aggregate, amount to fundamental differences in individuals that cannot always be resolved. Whether he is diagnosed or not, Ivan has these traits: he is who he is and must find a place for himself in the world as another variety of ordinary person.

The two games that Peter and Ivan specialise in—law and chess—are zero sum: someone wins, someone loses. For one to prosper, another must falter. But life is not zero sum, or does not have to be. For Peter to be socially brilliant, Ivan does not have to be a creep or a robot. For Peter to be a successful lover, Ivan does not have to be an inhuman incel. Peter’s labelling of Ivan is not necessary to actually understand him.

The important question is not whether, as Naomi posits, Ivan “really is” autistic, but that he has a particular combination of traits and should be seen for what he is—a person, not a part of a zero-sum game in which his “weirdness” can become a low status alternative to Peter’s worldly success.

This temperamental difference between the brothers is seen in the narrative technique. Peter’s equivocation is written in fragmentary syntax to reflect not just his hidden grief, anxiety, and dependence on pills and alcohol, but his immersive relationship to the world. He thinks in a fluid, fragmentary style because he is capable of interpreting the world in that fast and flexible manner. For Ivan, who must break it all down, work it all out as it happens, a detached, classical narrative style is more appropriate. Here’s Ivan’s internal monologue after meeting someone he dislikes at a chess tournament.

He would personally go to great lengths to avoid ever encountering that guy again. Not that anything bad happened, but purely from the awkwardness. Then imagine being an attractive woman, and it’s not just one man you have to avoid, but almost all of them. Ivan accepts that it must be dreadful. At the same time, how to reach a mutually agreeable situation without one person making an advance on the other? which may turn out to be unwanted. It’s like the problem with the tables and chairs. In a haphazard and inefficient way, without any fixed method, solutions can be reached, and evidently are reached all the time, considering that someone like Olli is married.

Despite these differences, what ends up happening is that, as per her abiding obsession, Rooney shows us that you can have a neurodivergent person and a non-neurodivergent person who both struggle with the question of how to interact with other people. And in many ways, Ivan does a much better job of that—the resolution of the plot does not pick between the brothers.

Rooney’s constant challenge to her readers is to ask—but who really is normal? If you are continually looking at the external part of a person, as Ivan’s mother does to him and as he does to his mother, you won’t ever understand them.

Rooney’s narrative style owes another debt to Joyce, not just as a means of depicting Peter’s equivocation, but as a means of loving the ordinary world. Roy K. Gottfried, in The Art of Joyce’s Syntax in Ulysses, calls his syntax a “structure of opposites”, in which the syntactic order becomes a means of finding creative freedom. One of Joyce’s aims was to use disorderly-orderly prose to lovingly recreate ordinary life. What Ellmann said of Joyce can be said of Rooney: in her books the ordinary is extraordinary. Gottfried: “the most basic functions of the human body are valued and raised to the level of art by a language which lovingly reenacts them.” Rooney has “lovingly reenacted” what it is to be like a person like Ivan; her interest in Ulysses shows a marked overlap in Joyce’s interest in the “ordinary” even if she sees many sides to life he did not. That is also the role of sex in Intermezzo. As Gottfried said, it is the fundamental expression of the physical.

At the basic technical level, though, Rooney has been criticised for her sub-Joycean narrative. Ann Manov in the TLS even said it was more Yoda than Joyce. I’d emphasise that, according to the OED, it is a feature of Irish-English that “To emphasize an element of a sentence it can be brought to the front with the dummy verb It’s then starting the sentence, e.g., It’s to Dublin he’s gone today.” Intermezzo is full of sentences like Dublin he’s gone today. This has been received badly by British and American reviewers, who see it as sub-Joycean, but there is a colloquial strain to it as well. When Peter goes to the pub, his friend Gary speaks in a not dissimilar manner: “How long is that going on?”. Peter too: “The soul of decency you are.” So part of her stylistic choice is to capture these elements of speech. Look at the quotation from Peter’s monologue at the top again: it is colloquial as well as Joycean. Rooney is always writing the ordinary. (B.D. McClay pointed out to me that other Irish novelists writing in English do something like this too: Anna Burns, Eimear McBride.)

Still, it is possible to pull a few lines out of context and make them look lame. But here is a paragraph, during a fist fight between Ivan and Peter, where the technique works exceptionally well,

Seems to feel before he sees. The sensation, sudden, jarring more than painful, shoved backwards against the hearth, and he has to step back, find his footing. Ivan has pushed him, Ivan has raised his hands and pushed him back tripping hard against the fireplace, Ivan, standing there before him, breathing heavily, yes, he did it, he shoved him, hands to his chest. Heat of rage flaring inside him now, hot light, Peter reaches out and slaps him hard across the face with the back of his hand. Behave yourself, he says. Clutching his own jaw, Ivan retorts: Fuck you. And tries with his other hand to shove again, tries actually to push him, attempts, yes, and with a blind sort of pounding behind his eyes Peter grasps him by the sweatshirt, both hands, holding hard, and throws him down on the floor, where his body lands heavily. Crying out, and the dog up on all fours now lets out a high sharp yelp. Out of breath, blood filling his head, standing over him, to lay a hand on me, he did that, Peter feels himself draw back to put the weight of his body into his foot, ready to slam it into his ribs, who’s sorry now, you little worm, I’ll fucking kill you.

There is much of interest here, not least that we learn that while Ivan used to have unacceptable opinions when he was a lonely, troubled teenager, Peter still is quite nasty when he wants to be. Who is the socially elegant “normal” one now?

Then there is the question of perspective: sometimes this is told in real time (Clutching his own jaw, Ivan retorts), sometimes it sounds like the fight is being recounted afterwards, full of the wobbling syntax of high indignity (to lay a hand on me, he did that), and sometimes the splice commas give a good feel of the confusing rapidity we feel when undignified emotions overwhelm us (The sensation, sudden, jarring more than painful, shoved backwards against the hearth, and he has to step back, find his footing). The synesthesia of “hot light” shows us that Rooney does not have to write with cliché. But she preserves the effect of “hot light” in amongst the ordinary speech of the scene.

This sort of wobbling perspective is used a few pages earlier when Peter gets angry at Sylvia and throws a candlestick off the mantlepiece. It is the syntax of someone having a breakdown—a breakdown we have been watching slowly build since the opening lines. A few pages later the sort of inner turmoil that used to be characteristic of Ivan overwhelms Peter.

At the end, the brothers do not resolve their differences, but they accept the terms of each other’s personality—Ivan says he’ll try to be ten percent more like Peter, who replies no, no, you’re good as you are. They have found some way of understanding the game each other is playing. Though Rooney has been criticised for being sentimental, that is the essence of her writing, and it is not artless, but quite a careful picture of the many different ways of being normal.