Is there any point in summarizing Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon? I feel like it has so much pop-culture cache that everyone knows the story. If not, here’s the idea: Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. Disowned by his family for almost twenty years, his teacher at his special school pushes for him to be part of an experimental surgery that improves his IQ. He works at a bakery and after the surgery he comes to realize that his coworkers are pretty awful towards him, he has memories of an abusive childhood, and then he becomes a genius that outpaces the doctors that conducted the experiment. He gets frustrated being under their care and frees himself and the mouse that was the precursor to his experience. He sets up an apartment in New York and continues his studies, has a dating life, and visits members of his estranged family before losing his intelligence and returning to his former life.
The novel has a central flaw that I’ll explain with reference to theory. In History and the Novel, Irving Howe presents the thesis that the foundation on which novels stand—history—erodes as we increase our distance from it. As such, our ability to access and interpret older novels similarly fades. I would make the case that Flowers for Algernon shows its flaws in the light of the modern day. The most glaring issue is that the core of the novel relies on the idea of IQ, a much-discredited measure of intelligence. The history of science imprints itself on the book, but takes it further away from us at a foundational level, beyond the teeth-grinding repetition of the R word. The premise is compelling, but the historically problematic nature of the book breaks the immersion somewhat.
What Keyes does well, in his way, is to present the story with moral conscience and emotional core. Charlie is treated with a great deal of sympathy, with a common refrain being that he is a human being and was even before his surgery. Keyes does a lot to show the torments Charlie Gordon goes through—more on this momentarily—and to expose the evil lurking in the supposedly moral hearts of the “smart” and “normal” people in his life. Everyone treats Charlie as a child and exploits him; his mother shows him no compassion for being different and no one extends any care of him. Keyes does a wonderful job at what is arguably the novel’s climax of juxtaposing Charlie’s treatment with his own mother, who by the end of the book has clearly developed Alzheimer’s—yet people refuse to put her away into a care facility. Keyes shows the limits of peoples’ sympathy and the different treatment of people who have “proven” themselves to the rest of society.
Keyes inserts a diatribe in the middle of the novel, noting that people would never “take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes—how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence” (139). It’s a surprisingly progressive stance for the 1960s to target ableism in this way, and I can’t fault Keyes for extending sympathy, even if it is misguided by modern standards. Charlie notes that even when he had low intelligence how he knew he was inferior: “Other people had something I lacked—something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too” (139). He notes that “even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men” (139). At his best, he shows the moral core that treats people well. At his worst, he succumbs to some of the same infantilization that the people in the book subject Charlie to; he draws the parallel to children directly: “A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger” (139). He then speculates on what could happen if all people could receive the same treatment: “If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally ******* in the United States? What about the countless millions all over the world, and those yet unborn destined to be *******? What fantastic levels might be achieved by using this technique on normal people. On geniuses?” (139). We see Charlie replicating the same standardization and borderline-eugenicist philosophy that led to his treatment in the first place, not extending sympathy to people for how they are, but instead creating a plan to make others “normal” too.
Now, I can somewhat forgive this seeming flub in Keyes’ philosophy because the novel specifically makes a distinction between intelligence and compassion. After Charlie’s intelligence takes off, he becomes patronizing, unkind, unsympathetic, and so on. People regret that Charlie’s free and easy kindness and warmth disappears as his intelligence emerges. Eventually Charlie learns that lesson, too, and says that there is no direct connection between being smart and being a good person. Consequently, some of Charlie’s views might be discounted as part of his evolution towards having a heart again.
Weirdly, though, Keyes’ narrative seems to place a lot of blame on women. A number of them are vilified or have inappropriate relationships with Charlie. His mother is the worst, alternating between insistence that he is normal and abusing him for being what she perceives as a pervert. His sister is equally malicious. The traumatic and abusive things they do to him could have been plucked from A Child Called It. Meanwhile, his teacher Miss Kinnian is largely compassionate, but I can never accept relationships between teachers and students. There’s also some strange character development in her towards the end of the book that feels inconsistent—the love story doesn’t quite earn its payoff. The other woman Charlie gets involved with, Fay, is seen as a messy free spirit artist who is regularly nude and feels like she’s paraded around as an unintellectual piece of eye-candy for the male gaze. Sidenote: it’s weird that Charlie’s low intelligence is paired with a kind of hypersexualization that he then has to recover once he becomes smart. Even women at the science conference are presented mostly as incompetent and scared of a mouse. Given how much sympathy Keyes extends to people with intellectual disabilities, it’s odd that he does not seem to offer much sympathy to the inner lives of women.
There are some wonderful elements to the book. The way it reads as a kind of Frankenstein story, even referencing Paradise Lost as a shared intertext, is a great way of exploring the premise. It deals with similar questions of responsibility towards one’s creation. Flowers for Algernon adds a spin, though, that the creation does not accept the creator’s role. To explain a little further, in Frankenstein, the creature accepts Frankenstein as his creator and wants to place demands on him. In this case, Charlie refuses to accept that the doctors ‘created’ him—he insists that he was a full person before they ever intervened, which is a great subversion of the trope.
It’s also a nice touch to see the evolving style Charlie uses to express his ideas. The book starts with a number of chapters with poor vocabulary, incorrect spelling, lack of punctuation, and so on. These emulate his inability to express himself properly and then as he learns and grows more intelligent, the style becomes sophisticated. It’s a little hackneyed but still an appropriate choice that helps to emulate the experience.
I do think, too, that the cruelty of the characters is emotional and heart wrenching. It’s most painful that Charlie doesn’t understand. His narration of his coworkers’ behaviours is clear to anyone that they are ridiculing him, but he feels like he is part of the team. It’s also hard to listen to his mother’s tirades against him and his sister’s abuses. When he goes to visit his father and his father doesn’t recognize him, it’s a sad scene and when he goes to visit his mother it’s even worse—she doesn’t recognize him at first, then does, and is so proud of his intelligence and finally accepts him—yet that hits hard. For one, we know that he is going to lose his intelligence and that these benefits are temporary. His need for acceptance is never quite fulfilled, since he has realized that he deserves acceptance and compassion regardless of contingencies. Then, because her own understanding is so fleeting, and her desperation for a normal son that she can show off so great, it’s a painful moment that brings not catharsis but shadowed saccharinity. Like his relationship with Miss Kinnian, his reconciliation with his sister feels a little unearned.
Flowers for Algernon began as a short story that was then expanded into a novel. I have to say, the book likely could have been about 50 pages shorter. There’s some extensive repetition in the middle of the book—flashbacks to a younger Charlie looking through windows (symbolism that is a little on the nose, if you ask me). I feel like a lot of the romance storylines could be cut down or omitted to focus on the central concerns of the book—not that emotional connection isn’t one of the central concerns, but it’s one that does not land as well.
As I mentioned at the start, Flowers for Algernon is a product of its time. Its didactic message is necessary, albeit marred by some historically-rooted flaws. It’s funny: I imagine that the book will have a similar parabolic structure as Charlie. Charlie begins from nothing, has a meteoric rise, and then faces an inevitable decline. Flowers for Algernon, I imagine, will follow a similar path—it began from nothing, became an icon in popular culture, but will face a swift decline as we become more knowledgeable about the science of intelligence and become more progressive in our treatment of people alienated from society.
For now, it’s a nice little book. Happy reading!
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