Notes from Jennifer Dawson's The Ha-Ha
On and Wittgenstein's language games...
Notes from novels are my personal approach to book reviews. Based on studies of quotes and critical articles I read. I pull out the lines I underlined while reading and use them as jumping-off points to explore what made a book stick with me. Sometimes there’s a clear theme, other times I just follow where the quotes take me. But here’s my rule: if I highlighted enough passages to fill one of these posts, the book earned at least 3 stars from me.
This week: The Ha Ha, Jennifer Dawson
I discovered The Ha Ha when reading this article as part of my Morning Coffee Reads series and knew I had to read it. I’ve always found it tragic when classics go out of print and are forgotten about, so I’m really glad Faber decided to republish this one. It deserves to be placed and recommended alongside Plath’s The Bell Jar.
In my mini review I wrote this:
What I liked was how fluid and absorbing Dawson’s narrative voice was. It was a stream of consciousness that mirrors the narrator’s mental state and fleeting thoughts in an almost peaceful way. It felt natural and not overwhelming, which I think being semi-autobiographical works in Dawson’s favour. She is able to portray what it meant to think and experience the world differently from the norm with natural subtlety and credibility. Thus you gain an intimate sense of the narrator’s interior life without ever feeling overwhelmed, or that her consciousness is being stylised beyond belief.
Reading the novel now, in the context of its republication, it feels almost dystopian. I was already aware of the historical stigma surrounding mental health, but encountering it from inside the narrator’s mind makes that world feel even more restrictive and unsettling. The title deepens this effect. “The Ha-Ha” refers to a concealed ditch used in landscape design but it also gestures toward the narrator’s inability to control her laughter in social situations—her difficulty “reading the room,” and the invisible barriers that separate her from others.
Almost every character in this novel is deeply unpleasant. The only person I felt any warmth towards was the narrator herself and I found myself growing fiercely protective of her as I read.
I wanted to do a deeper dive into the novel here and look at the lines that showcase the protagonist’s mental state and how under a modern lens this could be understood and diagnosed.
As mentioned in the review above, this is a semi-autobiographical novel. Dawson did go to Oxford to study and then was institutionalised. She was also, later, a social worker. Her parents were Fabian socialists so in general she was against the way mental health was treated at the time — the time being the 1960s.
In sum, the 1960s was a tumultuous time for mental health. It was a time that still leaned hard on institutionalisation. Psychiatric hospitals were overcrowded, underfunded and dehumanising — not sure this has changed much?!
In terms of diagnosis, categories were broad and blunt. The term schizophrenia was thrown around left, right and centre. In overcrowded hospitals, a schizophrenia diagnosis justified long-term institutionalisation, heavy medication, or invasive treatments. It was administratively useful. If someone didn’t fit neatly elsewhere, schizophrenia worked.
And it’s this very point I want to dwell on today. The summaries and reviews I’ve read of Dawson’s novel often say the protagonist has schizophrenia, but that’s not the way I read the novel. To me it felt like neurodivergence — autism particularly. One would say that neurodivergence does not warrant being institutionalised (in general) but given the time period it would still be seen as not the norm.
The neurodiversity movement emerged in the late 1990s, coined by sociologist Judy Singer. The idea reframed neurological differences (autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s) not as defects to be cured but as natural variations of the human brain.
I read this novel through this lens because over the years I have come to realise that I am most likely autistic. My nurse husband has said this over and over again and entering the corporate world I realised I couldn’t interact like others — and it wasn’t about confidence or shyness. So perhaps my reading of this novel is tinted by my own internal comprehension of my emotions but at the same time I don’t think it’s unrealistic.
“because I want so little of life. I assure you, there’s nothing I want to be cured of. I only want to be left to wander freely and independently of any rules.”
“Cured” and “rules” are the main points here. They both point towards norms and expectations. The protagonist is quite adamant about being herself in this vulnerable narrative and doesn’t want to change. She is happy with her life and the way she exists. In the novel, while she is institutionalised, she enjoys roaming fields and lying in the ha-ha. A ha-ha is, as The National Trust defines it:
“A ha-ha is a type of sunken fence that was commonly used in landscaped gardens and parks in the 18th century. The point of the ha-ha was to give the viewer of the garden the illusion of an unbroken, continuous rolling lawn, whilst providing boundaries for grazing livestock.”
The ha-ha in the novel is a double entendre. For one, the narrator is institutionalised because she cannot stop laughing in the wrong situations. But also because of this sunken fence that she finds so much peace and solace in.
I like this definition because I think it could also explain more about why Dawson chose this title and plot device. The idea of this ‘unbroken’ landscape — that everything is perfect and smooth. However, as the protagonist falls inside she has broken the illusion and shown that nothing is as perfect as the surface may show. The ‘boundaries’ are also interesting. What does the ha-ha separate? The conscious and the unconscious? The acceptable presentation of one’s personality and then the hidden different part? It seems Dawson put a lot of work into her title and it is clear she wants this ha-ha to be filled, to remove the illusion and for those who differ from the norm to roam freely without being subjected to oppressive rules, independent of others trying to dictate their lives.
“I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.”
Rules are an ever-present obsession for neurodivergent people. They are ever conscious of them and try to perform to ensure they are acting in a way that is socially acceptable. To ask how someone is when they ask you, even though you would rather just ignore them because small talk is unnecessary. As previously mentioned, the protagonist of this novel was happy with her life and existence, living with her eccentricities. But now she is aware that she is different, she wants to know how to properly exist.
I think a lot about Wittgenstein’s language games here. On his idea of rules as implicit normativity. Social life, Wittgenstein believes, operates through these implicit rules. They are not written but shared expectations. They are subject to change.
For neurotypical people these rules are absorbed tacitly. However, for neurodivergent people the rules are visible because they are not intuitive. The protagonist is not able to get the knack of existence because she is unable to access the language game. She does not know the rules.
“I know nothing about nervous and functional disorders.’ He frowned at the ground. ‘All I meant was that reflective, serious people like yourself respond best in small groups of people not in big galactic crowds where everyone is forced to be as empty as possible about everything.”
This was another key point in the novel that made me consider that the protagonist was neurodivergent. There are times when she goes to parties and is observed by a man who is also in the hospital and whom she meets up with in the ha-ha.
Often autistic individuals prefer smaller groups over larger ones as it is less overwhelming and provides greater processing time. I skip every single work party and if I do attend events like this I tend to just stare into space and dissociate. These small groups can allow neurodivergent people the space to talk more freely or to just sit and take in information.
What I found interesting was the critique of these big crowds. How the people in these crowds are empty and devoid of personality. But that this emptiness is also forced. They are able to conform to the societal rules that the protagonist is trying to understand, they are able to be empty and just exist.
Neurodivergence here is not framed as incapacity, but as misalignment with the social scale at which modern life operates.
“But now I see why–after going to the party I see what’s wrong. It’s because I don’t belong anywhere else. I don’t know the rules of life, and if I kept a phrase-book for twenty years I would not know the right answers. It’s a thing I shall never learn. I am odd, incorrect, illegitimate. You see, I’m …’ my voice was rising higher and higher, ‘I must be illegitimate.”
I think this realisation concludes the last two quotes succinctly. And I want to return to Wittgenstein again.
For Wittgenstein you cannot learn the rules by studying them, you have to learn them by being initiated into a practice. If you’re not invited, you will always be excluded because the rules are unwritten. It’s about shared practices and being kept from the real world and living in a world that separates her will inevitably keep her from learning.
“But I am real. I was born for joy, for so much joy, for love …”
Wittgenstein one more time. These are the protagonist’s rules. A form of life is the background of shared habits, reactions, rhythms, and expectations that make language intelligible. Belonging, therefore, is not emotional but practical.
I have used my Wittgenstein knowledge loosely here, but after writing this I want to go away and research further Wittegenstein’s philosophy and how it can be applied to neurodivergency.