‘Beyond Representation? Mapping a Neurodivergent(ized) Aesthetic in Graphic Novel Accounts of Musical “Genius”'

From the ‘Golden Age’ onwards, comics have been marked by a ‘doubling’ of neurodiverse protagonists: either as socially-othered antagonist, or as super-hero (Smith and Alaniz) – in the latter case, frequently depicting “a kind of disabled body or neurodiversity that reads as inspirational in ways that do not map on to most disabled experience” (Nijdam). Simultaneously, though, the graphic novel retains the potential to “recognize disability as an engine of innovation and rhetorical invention” (Dolmage/Jacobs). This chapter explores the forms this “rhetorical invention” takes, analyzing three graphic novels depicting Beethoven’s life: Mikael Ross’s Goldjunge: Beethovens Jugendjahre; Moritz Stetter’s Mythos Beethoven; and Deutsche Gramaphon’s The Final Symphony. The chapter first considers how these works treat the trope of the neurodivergent ‘musical genius’, with its problematic echo of earlier forms of ‘superhero’-exceptionalism. It then outlines the visual strategies the novels develop for representing non-neuronormativity, with particular reference to the experience of music and non-neurotypical/crip temporality. It closes by focusing on elements of formal innovation, and the way in which a consideration of form moves discussions importantly beyond the level of representation. In so doing, it thus models a neurodivergent(ized) aesthetic – one that is not simply about the visualisation of neurodivergent subjects/experience, but rather rooted in visual/formal strategies that demonstrate how meaning is generated beyond traditionally-demarcated spaces of cognition, perception, and temporality. These strategies, it ultimately argues, give expression to non-normative modes of neurocognitive perception, but also enable new reading strategies which gesture towards a more radical dismantling of neurotypical modes of reading