Towards a Multisensory Aesthetic: Jean Giono's Non-Visual Sensorium

Next week I am delighted to be travelling to Montreal to speak at the International Visual Literacy Association Annual Conference. Along with my Blind Creations co-organiser Vanessa Warne, and Blind Creations speakers Georgina Kleege, Florian Grond and David Johnson, I am presenting some of the work from my forthcoming book Visions of Blindness in French Fiction in a panel organised by Piet Devos and wonderfully entitled: 'The Distorting Mirror of Blindness: Visual Literacy and Non-Sighted Aesthetics'. Whilst I am in Montreal I am also looking forward to exploring some of the places evoked by Jacques Semelin in his recent blind travel journal Je veux croire au soleil and I will be presenting some of the highlights of the Blind Creations conference at a talk (in French) at the Institut Nazareth et Louis Braille. (Click here for more details about this event and how to watch and listen via videoconference).

Below is a sneak preview of part of my work on Jean Giono which I will be presenting at the IVLA conference:

La nuit. Le fleuve roulait à coups d’épaules à travers la forêt, Antonio avança jusqu’la pointe de l’île. D’un côté l’eau profonde, souple comme du poil de chat, de l’autre côté les hennissements du gué. Antonio toucha le chêne. Il écouta dans sa main les tremblements de l’arbre. (Night. The river was shouldering its way through the forest, Antonio went as far as the tip of the island. On one side was deep water, as supple as a cat’s fur, on the other side the whinnying of the ford. Antonio touched the oak. He listened with his hand to the quivering tree.)

These opening lines from Jean Giono’s 1934 novel Le Chant du Monde, are a characteristic example of the kind of sensuous prose description Giono has become famous for using to describe his beloved Provençal landscapes. Giono’s descriptions have long been celebrated by critics for their power to capture the beauty of southern France. But if we look closely at this passage, we notice that it somewhat unexpectedly rejects the kind of visual description we expect from the realist novel in favour of a sensorium more overtly focused on a powerful combination of touch and sound. This challenge to the usual hierarchy of the senses is in fact announced in Giono’s decision to begin the novel in the dark. The novel’s opening words, ‘la nuit’, tell us that because the sighted protagonist Antonio - through whose consciousness most of the third-person narrative is filtered - does not need sight to navigate, the reader is also asked to imagine the setting without recourse to visual elements. Instead of telling us what the river looks like, Giono evokes it through Antonio’s perception of it, that is, by how it feels (as supple as a cat’s fur) and how it sounds (the whinnying of the ford). The surprising use of words associated with animals to describe a body of water adds to our sensory immersion in the scene by combining different sense impressions in vivid and evocative ways whilst reminding us that we are in a profoundly natural setting. The ford does not really sound like a whinnying horse: through the noise it makes, which is impossible to capture in language, it reminds Antonio of the unpredictable power of a skittish foal. The combination of touch and hearing is continued in Antonio’s relationship with the oak tree. The phrase ‘il écouta dans sa main’ (he listened with his hand) uses a synesthetic combination of the sense impressions of touch and hearing to capture the strength of Antonio’s feeling for the tree. 

Passages of this kind are found throughout Giono’s oeuvre. But their relevance only becomes clear when they are read alongside Giono’s depiction of the blind character Clara whom Antonio encounters later in the novel. Antonio and Clara are mutually fascinated by each other’s relationship with the senses. When they talk about blindness and sightedness the usually visually reliant reader is invited to rethink their preconceived notion that blindness is a kind of lack.

When Clara asks Antonio to describe night, day and light to her, Antonio struggles to evoke darkness without recourse to visual language. Like blindness, darkness is here unspeakable because it exists outside the limits of ocularcentric language, a language whose very existence depends on a celebration of sight and thus a negation of sightlessness. Antonio emphasises this link between darkness and blindness by evoking the one in relation to the other, and by paradoxically using a vocabulary of seeing to describe this non-sight. Clara, on the other hand, is not hampered by the constraints of ocularcentric language. Her insistent questioning of Antonio’s language encourages not only Antonio but also the reader to analyse what lies beneath the words non-blind people too often take for granted. She can thus combine sense impressions in creative and liberating ways. In an echo of the description of the river at the novel’s start, she merges two distinct sense impressions, (non)sight and smell, in her assertion that for her, ‘day is smell’.

Later, Clara offers us a more immersive and sustained experience of her impressions of the countryside. Rather than detecting spring through its visual clues, she can tell its arrival by its smells and sounds. As she explains: « Ça sent […] et puis ça parle » («It smells and also it speaks ».). Clara tries to explain how she experiences the world. She recognises flowers but does not give them the same names as everyone else. According to her it is not the names of the flowers which are important, but the multi-sensual way in which she experiences them: 

Toutes les choses du monde arrivent à des endroits de mon corps (elle toucha ses cuisses, ses seins, son cou, ses joues, son front, ses cheveux) c’est attaché à moi par des petites ficelles tremblantes. Je suis printemps, moi, maintenant. (Everything in the world comes to a place on my body (she touched her thighs, her breasts, her neck, her cheeks, her forehead, her hair) it is attached to me by tiny trembling threads. I am spring now.)

Clara’s relationship with the world is intense, multi-sensorial, corporeal and all-encompassing. She combines sense-impressions to create highly evocative and sensual descriptions of nature in a way which reminds us again of the novel’s opening lines:

Dans toute la colline il y a des pattes, des ongles, des museaux, des ventres. Entends-les. Des arbres dures, des tendres, des fleurs froides, des fleurs chaudes. Là-bas derrière, un arbre long. On entend son bruit tout droit. Il fait le bruit de l’eau quand elle court. Il a de longues fleurs comme des queues de chats et qui sentent le pain cru. (All over the hill there are feet, claws, muzzles, bellies. Listen to them. Hard trees, soft trees, cold flowers, warm flowers. Over there a long tree. We can hear its noise straight ahead. It sounds like running water. It has long flowers like cats’ tails which smell of uncooked bread.)

These descriptions are striking because they evoke the landscape with no need for visual references. But importantly these descriptions do not alienate the ocularcentric reader. Clara’s evocation of nature is so powerful that we are immediately immersed in it without even noticing her lack of reference to visual elements. It is only because Giono foregrounds her blindness that we notice her non-visual language. By describing her non-visual acquisition of knowledge as ‘seeing’, Clara rids the verb of its associations with eyesight and thus disentangles notions of perception and detection from their persistent association with physical looking. Giono is thus using Clara to destabilise the hierarchy of the senses,

The ease with which Clara discusses her multi-sensual way of not seeing, together with the way in which non-visual descriptions of nature are incorporated into the novel’s prose even when recounted via the consciousness of a sighted character, invite us to read both Clara and Antonio as authorial figures whose discussions function as reflexive comments on Giono’s own non-visual creative processes. In addition, Clara’s non-visual relationship to nature functions to overturn sight’s expected place at the top of the hierarchy of the senses whilst celebrating the creative potential of the non-visual senses. Giono’s prose thus redefines notions of ‘sight’ and ‘seeing’ by detaching them from the physical act of looking, in order to encourage his reader to rethink her own relationship with the visual.

Book Review: 'Je veux croire au soleil' by Jacques Semelin

Jacques Semelin, Je veux croire au soleil (Paris: les Arènes, 2016)

Part travel journal, part guide to living creatively with blindness, Jacques Semelin’s humorous description of his stay in Montreal is a charming and honest account of the day-to-day annoyances and joys of life as a blind academic.

Readers familiar with Semelin’s first memoir, J’arrive où je suis étranger (which I write about here) will remember that his gradual journey from sightedness to blindness was not an easy one. Semelin's internalised ableism meant that he spent many years doing his best to 'pass' as a sighted person before finally 'coming out' as blind. In Je veux croire au soleil he celebrates the new creativeness which his blindness has given him and reflects on how to make sense of his non-visual life for a sighted reader:

Je me suis mis en quête d’un autre vocabulaire, de métaphores, de mises en scènes, bref, de tous les moyens de mieux saisir le réel par l’imaginaire.

I found myself identifying particularly strongly with Semelin's description of the 'saut psychologique' (psychological leap) he had to make from independence to dependence. Like him I spent years finding ingenious ways of doing things for myself. And like him I resisted asking for help for as long as I could:

Se faire aider conduit bien plus tôt à reconnaître un effondrement de soi. On ne peut plus faire ceci ou cela. […] Se faire aider revient ici à devoir admettre son infériorité physique en quelque chose, une infirmité en somme.

Whilst the wealthy willingly pay for assistance as a way of asserting their dominance, Semelin recognizes that asking for - and knowing how to graciously accept - help is one of the hardest things a blind person must do. Having to be helped can feel like a loss of personhood and an acknowledgement of inferiority. But knowing when to accept help can feel like a liberation. I recognise in Semelin's references to pride and honour my own (sometimes unhelpfully stubborn) reluctance to ask for help. Perhaps this explains my dislike of taxis and my preference for public transport.

Il faut trouver la force de se pousser dehors. Quand on n’y voit pas il est toujours tentant de rester bien au chaud dans un lieu clos. L’extérieure reste angoissant. Mais la volonté de se prendre en charge et la curiosité de la découverte peuvent aussi vous attirer vers l’inconnu de la rue.

As well as learning how to fight his natural urge not to ask for help, Semelin also describes how he forces himself to leave his cosy flat and explore Montreal. His description of his solitary adventure down the busy rue Saint-Denis is a powerful illustration of the appeal of the sensual world he inhabits. His descriptions of snippets of conversation, cooking smells and the changing feel of the air on his face provide a non-traditional - but equally valuable - visitor's guide to one of Montreal's most famous streets. Semelin's sensual appreciation of Montreal is an evocative celebration not only of non-visual travel but also of the unexpected pleasures of being blind and alone in an unfamiliar environment. Semelin's wanderings are often punctuated by encounters with strangers and these chance meetings, and the stimulating and rewarding conversations which ensue, are a reminder that blindness's enforced dependence on others is a gateway to a shared humanity which is often denied the more self-reliant sighted traveller.

Les personnes qui n’ont pas l’habitude de côtoyer des non-voyants ont souvent tendance à craindre le pire pour leur sécurité à tort.

One of the most appealing aspects of Semelin's memoir is that it is not unremittingly cheerful. He is frustrated and annoyed by his landlady's pessimistic prediction of the problems he will have with dustbins and domestic appliances. Whilst appreciative of the new technologies which make his academic work possible, he is also right to point out that screen readers and talking smart phones are hampered by their reliance on sight-dependent software:

Ce sont les instruments quotidiens d’une dictature qui ne dit pas son nom et qui transcende les régimes politiques, celle de l’image.

In both Montreal and Ottawa Semelin was disappointed that museums - especially those dealing with the persecution of minorities - were largely inaccessible to him. I wonder what he would make of Canada's new human rights museum which recently opened in Winnipeg and which I write about here.

Pourtant une certaine amertume ne m’a pas vraiment quitté. Cette promenade a-t-elle ravivé la mélancolie que je sais toujours au fond de moi comme une nostalgie pour ce monde dont j’ai dû abandonner les rives voici bien longtemps ? Cela fait des années et des années que j’en suis exclu mais quoi que je fasse, une vieille douleur se réveille de tems en autres, comme en ce moment.

Semelin's work made me both smile and cry out in recognition. But it also made me nostalgic. Unlike him, I do not miss the sighted world, but I do miss the time when I too was a lone traveller in a francophone land. Maybe I'll go alone to Montreal one day. And maybe like Semelin I'll do battle with a recalcitrant microwave, relish the sounds and smells of the rue Saint-Denis and explore the wonderfully multisensory Cour des Sens at the Jardin botanique.

Jacques Lusseyran colloquium

I have recently been reading the work of blind academic Jacques Lusseyran in preparation for the one-day colloquium about him which I am honoured to be speaking at along with several friends and colleagues. The day is taking place at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris on 28 June 2016 (coincidentally, and rather wonderfully, the first anniversary of Blind Creations at which Zina Weygand spoke so eloquently about him).

Although I do not necessarily agree with everything he says about blindness, I would argue that Lusseyran's celebration of 'inner vision' paradoxically celebrates the non-visual senses. He also advocates a no-nonsense approach to physical activity for blind people which echoes my adventurous approach to skiing.

This image shows the poster for the colloquium

The colloquium is free to attend and is open to all, but pre-registration is required. Click here for more information.

Jacques Semelin

In November 2014 I was pleased to give a keynote lecture at the French Autopathographies conference organised by Dr Steven Wilson at Queen's University, Belfast. As well as discussing Thérèse-Adèle Husson's Reflections (1825), and Le scaphandre et le papillon by Jean-Dominique Bauby, I talked briefly about Jacques Semelin’s 2007 autopathography, J’arrive où je suis étranger. Semelin’s account of his gradual acceptance of his own blindness touched me deeply when I read it because it resonated with my own experiences of denial, dissimulation and eventual celebration. To coincide with the publication of his second book about blindness, Je veux croire au soleil (which I review here), I share below some of my thoughts from the Belfast talk.

Unlike Husson, Semelin did not go blind as a child. He grew up completely unaware of his degenerative eye disease which was only discovered during some careers counselling he had in high school. At the age of 16 he was told that his sight would soon start to weaken and that he would go completely blind at an unknown and unspecified point in his life. Semelin is a renowned and well-respected historian and political scientist who is a researcher at the CNRS and a lecturer at Sciences-Po. His successful career might suggest that his story could be interpreted as a typical ‘triumph over tragedy’ narrative about how he battled to overcome his disability to lead a ‘normal’ life. But Semelin’s story is far from being the kind of cloying and self-pitying ‘inspiration porn’ which some non-disabled people enjoy. Instead he offers a practical, humorous and thoughtful account of how he has come to appreciate the kingdom of the blind in which he now finds himself:

Maintentant que j’y ai mes repères, je dirai que ce pays a du charme, qu’il est quelque part envoutânt, que vous pouvez y découvrir de nouvelles Muses.

Semelin’s frank descriptions of his early diagnosis emphasize the dangerous and degrading objectification which is one of the unpleasant effects of the medicalisation of disability: 

Jamais je n’avais encore eu la sensation d’être considéré comme un cobaye, une variété exotique d’une espèce pathologique. Désormais c’était fait. En quelques seconds ils m’avaient transformé en une chose clinique.

 Unlike Husson and Bauby, Semelin is at first able to hide his disability from those around him. His narrative charts his increasingly unsuccessful attempts to ‘pass’ as non-disabled and his eventual decision to ‘come out’ as partially blind by using a white cane and asking for adjustments to his working environment. Semelin’s desire to ‘pass’ demonstrates the extent to which he has internalised the widespread view that disability is a negative, undesirable state which should be hidden rather than celebrated. As he points out when describing his years of eco-activism:

 C’est bien plus tard que j’ai pris conscience de la gêne que mon attitude avait suscitée autour de moi. En fait, j’étais alors engagé dans deux batailles, l’une certes aux côtés des paysans du Larzac, et l’autre contre moi-même, contre celui que je redoutais de devenir et que pourtant j’étais déjà.

 Alongside Semelin’s recognition of his ableist desire to deny his own disability, we also find in this quotation a surprising reference to others’ feelings which he seems to prioritise over his own. Semelin’s desire not to embarrass his non-disabled friends betrays a concern for ‘normality’ which sits uneasily alongside his celebration of blindness. In the early stages of his journey, Semelin has a somewhat contradictory or conflicted view of his own disabled subjectivity which reminds us that even the most proudly ‘out’ disabled people sometimes struggle to reconcile their position with the ableist views they are continually exposed to by non-disabled society.

For me, one of the most striking things about Semelin’s story is the honesty with which he interrogates his at times knowingly ‘ableist’ perspective. Shortly after he has become officially registered blind he says:

Je ne parvenais pas à me définir comme handicapé. Le mot handicap me mettait mal à l’aise.  [...] il me pesait terriblement, comme si on m’avait mis un boulet au pied. D’ailleurs, handicap par rapport à qui ? à quoi ? Chacun n’est-il pas handicapé quelque part ? Il y a simplement des handicaps plus ou moins visibles, plus ou moins « handicapants ». Le mot n’exprime t-il pas avant tout un jugement normatif, pour se mettre à distance de la différence ?

This quotation illustrates the conflict which characterises Semelin’s work. He seems to agree with the negative connotations attached to disability whilst at the same time acknowledging that these connotations are nothing more than constructs of a resolutely normative society.

Because Semelin is never completely at peace with his disabled status, his narrative invites us to question are own internalised ableism. And as the book goes on, he does begin to celebrate his blindness for its own sake, as an positive feature which helps him relate to the world in different and perhaps better ways:

 La perte de la vue n’est pas une tragédie en soi, elle peut même être une puissante source de renouvellement et d’enrichissement.

Regular readers of this blog will recognise how Semelin's assertion that blindness is not a tragedy echoes my own approach to blindness.