Blindness Gain and the Art of Non-Visual Reading

This is the text of my inaugural lecture, 'Blindness Gain and the Art of Non-Visual Reading', which I delivered at Royal Holloway on 30 October 2018.

An image of me delivering my inaugural lecture

When we think of blindness in nineteenth-century-French literature, we think first of its presence in canonical texts. We think of Gustave Flaubert’s grotesque blind beggar who haunts Madame Bovary; we think of Charles Baudelaire’s “awful” and “vaguely ridiculous” Blind Men from The Flowers of Evil who are objects of scrutiny, speculation and pity. We think of the dramatic ending of the first volume of Eugène Sue’s monumental serial novel The Mysteries of Paris in which the enigmatic main character Rodolphe decides to blind the escaped convict and murderer known as the School Master as punishment for the grisly crimes he has committed.

Le maitre d’école aveuglé pour ses nombreux crimes, par Staal gravé par Lavieille dans les Œuvres illustrées d'Eugène Sue, 1850. (wikimedia commons image)

This mage is for the visually dependent amongst you; those of you who seek something to look at whilst you listen to me. Audio description is usually provided separately for blind and partially blind people via headsets in cinemas and theatres and through special tours in museums and galleries. I am going to provide audio description for everyone because as we will see, an awareness of the pleasures and pitfalls of audio description, and the language we use when putting the visual into words has immense benefits for non-blind people. Here I am showing an engraving from the 1850 illustrated edition of Sue’s novel: the School Master is bound tightly to a chair as Rodolphe sentences him with his pointed finger. Rather than hand him over to the French judicial system, where he would be sentenced to death, Rodolphe decides that blinding the School Master is a more fitting punishment.  This is indeed a fate worse than death: the once formidable criminal is now weak, defenceless and isolated: he has only his guilt and remorse for company as he lives out his days as a pitiful and dependant invalid.

It will come as no surprise to those of you who know me that I find this depiction of blindness both shocking and offensive. You will also not be surprised to learn that in French and English literature blindness has almost always been associated with a whole range of negative stereotypes – stereotypes which add up to what David Bolt calls The Metanarrative of Blindness. What is more surprising, and more worrying, is that most people (including some of you listening to me now) still believe that blindness is a dreadful affliction which reduces a person’s chances of a happy and successful life.

There is no doubt that blindness has its challenges. It is inconvenient, time-consuming and costly to be a blind person living in a non-blind world and sudden blindness, particularly in adulthood, can feel devastating. But blindness is not a tragedy and it is not a fate worse than death. Blindness is a valuable and important way of being in the world. As the protagonist of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night puts it, “I try to make blindness into an asset and I do not see it as a disability.”

My term "blindness gain" is inspired by the notion of “deaf gain” coined by Bauman and Murray as well as by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “disability gain” and Georgina Kleege’s reflections on “gaining blindness” rather than ‘losing sight’. Blindness gain is the idea that rather than thinking of blindness as a problem to be solved, we think of blindness as a benefit. Blind and partially blind people benefit from access to a multisensory way of being which celebrates inventiveness, imagination and creativity. Non-visual living is an art. But blindness gain is also about how blindness can benefit non-blind people.

The audio book is a powerful example of "blindness gain". Thanks to the activism of previous generations of blind people who worked to secure access to books in audio form, blind people now have access to thousands of audio books. As the audio book has become mainstream, non-blind people have gained access to the conveniences and pleasures of this new format.

Today I would like to share two other examples of blindness gain with you: close- reading and what that tells us about the non-visual text, and the art of creative audio description. When I read books rather than listening to them, I use magnification to make them accessible to me. This means that I read only a couple of words at a time.

Here I am showing an image of my kindle. The screen is set to maximum magnification and we read the following sentence: “They say - , you know, they say, ‘What’s the story? What’s the scoop with the blindness.” from Rod Michalko’s recent book Things Are Different Here.

This close-reading means that I focus on the details of a literary text’s use of language rather than its broader context or place in literary history. In his Literary Memoirs, nineteenth-century French writer Maxime du Camp divides literary description into two types, “the short-sighted school and the long-sighted school”. Camp’s formulation can just as easily be applied to reading. Indeed, his description of the short-sighted school is very like the way magnification mediates my own relationship with what I read:

Short sighted people see the tiny things, they study each contour, prioritize each thing because each thing appears to them in isolation; they are surrounded by a kind of cloud onto which each object is projected in apparently excessive proportions; it is as if they have a microscope in their eye which magnifies everything.

Camp’s description of the importance of detail to the short-sighted reader is an example of blindness gain because it encourages us to value non-normative ways of accessing information. French literature’s blind characters perform a similar function.

In Honoré de Balzac’s 1844 novel Modeste Mignon, the blind mother of the eponymous heroine announces to the family that she can identify a change in Modeste’s behaviour invisible to the novel’s non-blind characters. It is the mother’s detection and explanation of this change that allows the reader to understand why Modeste is suddenly behaving as she is. Without the perceptions of the blind mother, the story of Modeste’s secret passion for a Parisian poet would be unintelligible. Although Balzac’s use of the blind mother in this way mobilises two negative stereotypes of blindness – the blind clairvoyant and the myth of supernatural compensation - it also foregrounds the creative power of blindness by allowing a blind character to advance the novel’s plot with her non-visual observations. Nineteenth-century French realism, not unlike the French nineteenth century more generally, was a highly visual phenomenon. Balzac was France’s most prolific realist novelist and his work shares his country’s - and his century’s - ocularcentrism. Yet his novels are also a celebration of the power of non-visual reading. The eponymous hero of Facino Cane is also blind. His blindness makes him both more legible and more narratively interesting:

Imagine the plaster mask resembling Dante lit by the red glow of the oil lamp, and topped by a forest of silvery-white hair. The bitter and painful expression on this magnificent face was heightened by its blindness; for the dead eyes relived through thoughts; it was as if a burning light was emanating from them which was produced by a unique and incessant desire which was energetically inscribed on the bulging forehead criss-crossed by wrinkles resembling an old wall’s foundations.

The importance accorded by the narrator to Cane’s appearance, as well as his call for the reader to picture the figure in her mind’s eye, reinforces the ocularcentric notion that seeing leads to knowing. And because his pale face reminds him of a statue of Dante, the narrator assumes that Cane’s blindness has given him the talent for creative insight associated with the poet. Yet his words in fact undermine realism’s belief in the predominance of the visual by according the blind man a significance which the ocularcentric realist narrative should logically deny him. By inviting us to elevate the blind man to the position of author figure, Balzac paradoxically emphasizes that the ability to physically see is not a prerequisite for a realist narrator. By choosing to use a blind character as a fictional representation of himself, Balzac is erasing powerfully negative connotations of blindness. He is collapsing the gulf traditionally created by the hierarchical binary opposition which values seeing above not-seeing.

This description of Cane further challenges realism’s sight-based doctrine by suggesting that although Cane’s eyes do not function to gather knowledge about the visible world, they are not useless:  they have the power to communicate information about the hidden world. They can detect things which are inaccessible to the sight-dependant narrator and reader. This description of Cane thus reveals that blindness can represent a different way of thinking or even being, a way of gathering information which is more effective than the ocularcentric methods usually associated with realism. As the narrator points out: “I believe that blindness speeds up intellectual communication by preventing attention from wdering onto external objects”. By suggesting here that blind people can have a superior intellectual focus precisely because they are not distracted by the physical appearance of the world around them, this description undermines realism’s building blocks by questioning the detailed interest in appearance which is valued by both the narrator and by Balzac himself. Balzac’s blind man represents a different kind of narrator: he rejects straightforward seeing and instead offers us a celebration of the creative potential of the non-visual.

Victor Hugo’s late work The Man Who Laughs is an extension of this celebration of the creative potential of the blind narrator. Hugo tells the story of Gwynplaine, a street performer who was calculatingly disfigured as a child as a way of making money. Hugo’s representation of Gwynplaine’s blind love Dea again reveals that blindness can lead to more enlightened ways of seeing. At first glance, Dea conforms to a widespread nineteenth-century vision of the passive and malleable blind girl: she is beautiful, gentle, kind and utterly devoted to Gwynplaine. She also possesses some of the qualities of the traditional blind clairvoyant: she is spiritual and mystical and seems to have an uncanny connection with another world. Hugo uses a vocabulary usually associated with sight to describe Dea’s non-seeing eyes:

Her eyes, which were large and clear, were dull for her but strangely illuminated for others. Mysterious blazing torches which only lit up the outside. She gave out light, she who had none of her own.

By using the imagery of light to describe Dea’s blind eyes, Hugo challenges our understanding of the difference between light and dark. Familiar binary oppositions collapse as light becomes the concept most associated with Dea’s blindness. As well as reminding us that blind people are not necessarily engulfed in darkness, Hugo’s language suggests that Dea, like Balzac’s Cane, can both notice and communicate information not accessible to her non-blind peers.  Like Balzac’s blind characters, Dea fulfils the role of narrator-surrogate because she is able to provide information to her spectator-readers. Whilst non-blind people see things superficially and are thus first amused and then horrified by Gwynplaine’s deformed face, Dea sees below surface appearance to the elements of Gwynplaine which really matter and yet which most non-blind people remain ‘blind’ to: "Only one woman on earth could see Gwynplaine. It was this blind woman”. This reference to Dea’s second sight is yet another evocation of the myth of supernatural compensation as well as an example of the ‘seeing-knowing’ synonymy problematized by Bolt’s ‘metanarrative of blindness’. But Dea’s access to non-visual knowledge also emphasizes that the act of physically looking at someone is over-valued because it is not necessarily an effective way of gaining accurate information about them. For Victor Hugo, blindness is less about what a person does or does not see, and more about how a person exists in relation to other people. In a powerful foreshadowing of the social model of disability, Hugo recognises that blindness is a socially constructed phenomenon. Hugo’s novel, like my work, is a call for a redefinition of blindness which acknowledges its ability to both generate and communicate narrative.

Like Balzac and Hugo, Emile Zola is a very visual novelist. Unlike them, he does not include any blind characters in his work. But Zola unwittingly provides us with another example of ‘blindness gain’. Zola’s close friendship with Paul Cezanne gave him a passion for Impressionist painting. And this passion is translated in his novels into some of the best examples of creative audio description that I have ever found. Museums and galleries are increasingly providing audio descriptions for blind visitors. But their efforts are not always successful. Putting pictures into words is a difficult business. If every viewer looks at a picture in their own way, how can any description hope to capture not only how a painting looks, but also how it makes us feel? In his 1885 novel The Masterpiece, Zola describes fictionalized versions of some of Edouard Manet’s most famous paintings. His painter-protagonist Claude spends the early part of the novel battling to finish a version of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass. As Claude paints he becomes another narrator surrogate, as he provides a series of creative audio descriptions of his work. Claude is an accomplished describer because he can capture different ways of seeing his art. In this first description Zola uses free indirect style to capture the joyful novelty of the painting:

As a sketch, it was remarkable for its vigour, its spontaneity, and the lively warmth of its colour. It showed the sun pouring into a forest clearing, with a solid background of greenery and a dark path running off to the left and with a bright spot of light in the far distance. Lying on the grass in the foreground, among the lush vegetation of high summer, was the naked figure of a woman. […] while in the foreground, to make the necessary contrast, the artist had seen fit to place a man’s figure.

This description does not necessarily allow us to see the picture in our mind’s eye. But does this really matter? Creative audio description is an attempt to capture how a picture makes us feel. Here Claude appreciates the fresh colours of the ‘open air’ movement. But when the picture is exhibited at the salon des refusés, it is laughed at by the bourgeois audience. As well as reminding us that a picture’s reception is influenced by its surroundings, this second description captures Claude’s disappointment when he sees the painting displayed in public for the first time:

It looked yellower in the light that filtered through the white cotton screen; it looked somehow smaller, too, and cruder, and at the same time more laboured […]; the man in the black jacket was all wrong, he was over-painted and badly posed; the best thing about him was his hand, […]. The trees and the sunlit glade he liked, and the naked women lying on the grass he found so resplendent with life that she looked like something above and beyond his capacities, […].

When taken together, these descriptions provide a multi-layered account of the painting which provides both blind and non-blind readers with a detailed impression of it. Creative AD is an example of ‘blindness gain’ whose benefits should be embraced for all museum visitors. The kind of creative AD modelled in these examples from Zola encourages discussion and dialogue about art and about the language we use to describe it; it breaks down barriers between visitors and the art on display; it provides creative content for museums and encourages conversations between blind and non-blind people. Until creative AD is as ubiquitous as the audio book, we could do worse than turn to Zola’s prose for a sense of what looking at Impressionism feels like.

If Balzac, Hugo and Zola all illustrate the art of non-visual reading in different ways, my final example, Lucien Descaves, wrote the best French example of a non-visual novel. Descaves’ 1894 novel The Trapped is a detailed and carefully researched account of how blind people live. The novel is minute in its attention to detail and includes information about practical issues which non-blind people tend to be interested in (but afraid to ask about) such as how a blind person reads, shops, threads a needle, plays cards, earns money and gets around Paris. In keeping with my myopic approach to texts, it is Descaves’s non-visual style which interests me here. The novel tells the story of blind musician Savinien. In order to provide his reader with a detailed understanding of how his blind protagonist relates to the world, Descaves’ descriptions are much more focused on touch, smell, sound and taste than they are on sight. The description of Savinien’s future wife Annette demonstrates that the novelist has no need to refer to physical appearance in order to describe his characters. Rather than tell us what Annette looks like, the narrator focuses instead on a description of her voice because this is what Savinien first notices:

Annette’s voice, […] evoked those everyday natural white wines which have a bouquet of gun flint and sandstone. At first it was surprising and not very nice. But, in the ear which had gulped it down it left a ‘refrain’, a feeling of sharpish coolness which was so exquisite that a second mouthful was enough to render it eminently quaffable. The expression ‘To drink in someone’s words’ which sighted people used, at last made sense to Savinien: he was drinking in this voice and reveling in every last drop of it.

This description is striking for the layering of sense impressions which Descaves uses to capture the intensity of Savinien’s feelings. Once his sense of hearing has been mobilised by the sound of Annette’s voice, its effect on him is described through a synaesthetic allusion to the sense of taste whose impression is then evoked through references to the sense of smell. The playful meta-reference to language in the expression ‘to drink in someone’s words’ foregrounds the narrator’s knowing use of this kind of multi-sensorial layering to evoke an effect whose immediacy it is difficult to capture in words. As Savinien’s attraction for Annette grows, Descaves adds his sense of touch to the senses of smell, hearing and taste already evoked. By encompassing all four senses within this extended metaphor of the violin player he further captures the intensity of his feelings without recourse to the visual:

The young woman’s bow had thus far only made the strings of smell, hearing and by extension the E-string of taste resonate within him. As she touched him, it was the turn of his sense of touch to gently vibrate. And as if this human violin had been awaiting the decisive participation of this particular note before speaking, the perfect chord was reached at last in the minor key characterised by the agreeably tart traits shared by his impressions of smell, sound and taste. These impressions were then combined with the sensation caused by the touch of that small hand which was both dry and gentle, delicate and firm, tart, yes, like the bewitching combination of her voice and her lilac perfume.

We are never told what Annette looks like. But this hardly seems to matter. These powerful multisensory descriptions provide us with all the information we need. Like Savinien, we operate without the sense of sight. And like him we feel no sense of deprivation or loss. Quite the opposite. By gaining blindness we are gifted rich and sensual access to deeply evocative prose.

As well as celebrating non-visual reading in his descriptions, Descaves also celebrates it in the material production of the novel. Whilst reading the first edition of the novel in the Taylorian Library in Oxford I made a surprising discovery. At the novel’s climax, Descaves took the highly unusual decision to include a page of braille in the novel itself.

Here I am showing a picture of the page of braille 

which I found bound inside the first edition. 

At the climax of the novel, Savinien returns home to an empty house. When his non-blind wife fails to return for supper, Savinien cobbles together some leftovers and sits down to eat at his usual place at the table. As he is eating, his wandering hand comes across a piece of paper covered in braille. As first he ignores it, thinking it must be some old notes he had left lying around. But then his fingers return to it and read it more carefully: he is shocked and shaken by its contents. In the 1894 edition of the novel that I read, this crucial letter is reproduced in braille and inserted into the novel just before Savinien’s discovery of it is described. The placement of the letter is significant because its contents are not revealed in the body of the text until four pages after Savinien first reads it. So, at this crucial moment in the story only a braille reader has access to information which is deliberately denied the non-braille reader. Descaves’s decision to include this letter is intriguing. The rest of the novel is in print and thus inaccessible to a blind person except via the intermediary of a non-blind reader. A braille edition of the novel was published in the late nineteenth century, but blind readers at the time make no reference to the extraordinary presence of the letter – presumably because it is not noticeable if the rest of the novel is also in braille.  Perhaps Descaves’ decision to include a braille letter in the print edition of the novel is merely a quirky celebration of the medium of braille or a kind of tactile illustration to give his non-blind readers a sense of what reading braille feels like. But given the practical and financial implications of the letter’s inclusion, as well as Descaves’ commitment to changing non-blind people’s attitude to blindness, I think that his decision to include the letter demonstrates his desire to undermine his non-blind readers’ dependence on, and privileging of the sense of sight. Throughout the book, Descaves depicts blind people’s struggles for equality and fair treatment in fascinating detail. He is particularly interested in the opportunities provided for blind people to earn a decent wage and to live independently and he is especially empathetic towards those characters who fight for the rights of blind people by challenging the assumptions of ocularcentric French society. But the non-blind reader’s own reliance on sight – which allows us to read the book in the first place - necessarily also contributes to, and perpetuates, the ocularcentric society which Descaves is seeking to criticise. The non-blind reader can thus only really understand this unfair exclusion of blind people when she experiences it for herself by being put into an analogous situation of exclusion. Descaves cleverly uses the braille letter as a means of purposefully withholding crucial plot-related information from the non-braille reader. The non-blind reader is excluded from information – because it is in a format inaccessible to her – and thus frustrated in her attempts to make sense of Savinien’s reactions to a letter which she cannot read. In this moment the non-blind reader understands what it feels like to be a blind person in a society that is heavily reliant on print as a means of communication. As well as describing the unfamiliar experience of blindness, Descaves uses this letter to transport non-blind readers into the world inhabited by the blind protagonists of the novel so that they experience – albeit temporarily – what it feels like to be excluded from an essential piece of information through no fault of their own.

This evening we have met several blind characters who have all provided us with non-visual ways of relating to the world. Their blindness has given us multi-sensory accounts of the world that are not usually available to visually dependent people. We have seen how non-visual reading is indeed an art-form. I hope that these examples of ‘blindness gain’ have encouraged you to reconsider your own preconceived notions of vision and its place in the hierarchy of the senses. I hope that you can think of blindness not in terms of loss but in terms of gain. 

With thanks to the eminent French researcher and doyenne of blind history, Zina Weygand, who delivered a vote of thanks after the lecture.

Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction out now!

This image shows the front cover of Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction by Hannah Thompson. Above the title, a hand is shown reading a sheet of Braille. 

I am delighted to announce that my book Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction has been published by Palgrave in their Literary Disability Studies series.

In this work I show how and why French fiction is fascinated with visions of blindness by identifying and analysing the complicated relationship between writers, readers and fictions of blindness that permeates French fiction. Blindness is a mysterious phenomenon. It arouses curiosity and invites discussion. It is also a multi-layered and multi-faceted collection of narratives. Writers are drawn to blindness precisely because blindness itself is a collection of stories. The stereotypes, clichés and misconceptions which constitute what most non-blind people describe as “blindness”, have been described by David Bolt as a literary “metanarrative”. Whilst many French depictions of blindness reinforce and conform to the various strands of Bolt's mostly negative metanarrative, my work focuses on more positive depictions which question, undermine or deconstruct the prevailing myths of blindness. I re-view a selection of the most interesting, surprising and moving depictions of blindness in French fiction by authors including Brigitte Aubert, Honoré de Balzac, Georges Bataille, Tonino Benacquista, Maxime du Camp, Lucien Descaves, André Gide, Jean Giono, Hervé Guibert, Victor Hugo, Thérèse-Adèle Husson, Paul Margueritte, Guy de Maupassant, Marc Monnier, Maurice Renard, Didier Van Cauwelaert, Fred Vargas and Romain Villet.

Works by these authors contest and overturn received ideas of blindness through both the form and the content of their fiction. When blindness sheds its metaphorical meanings and exists as part of a narrative on its own terms, it becomes a positive signifier of change, desire, success and enhanced subjectivity.

Overview:

Chapter 1: Introduction
I begin my re-viewing of French fictional depictions of blindness by calling for a rejection of negative misconceptions of blindness. The most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which challenge stereotypes of blindness and the emerging field of Critical Disability Studies provides us with the theoretical tools needed to do this.

Chapter 2: The French Metanarrative of Blindness
I survey those literary depictions of blindness which reinforce the metanarrative of blindness discussed by David Bolt. Maupassant’s short story ‘The Blind Man’ evokes the blindness-ignorance and blindness-darkness synonymies whilst also using nominalisation and generalisation to dehumanise its protagonist. Blind male characters are represented as weaker, less active and less able to access language than their non-blind peers. Female blind characters, on the other hand, are often portrayed as meek and passive victims of their condition. Non-blind characters routinely trick, pity and manipulate blind characters in these typhlophobic fictions of blindness. The chapter ends with an analysis of André Gide’s The Pastorale Symphony which shows how myths of the blind mystic and of sensory compensation emphasise blind protagonists’ otherness.

Chapter 3: The Creative ‘Look’ of the Blind ‘Seer’
This chapter marks the beginning of  my sustained examination of the creative possibilities of blindness. Through close-readings of novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Thérèse-Adèle Husson, I show that the unseeing gaze of the blind protagonist often transforms him or her into a surrogate narrator who is paradoxically more adept at gathering information than the sighted narrators usually present in realist texts. In works which feature blind narrators, the process of information gathering and dissemination becomes an even more overt challenge to the traditional supremacy of the sense of sight.

Chapter 4: Non-Visual Language and Descriptive Blindness
This chapter considers works by Hervé Guibert, Jean Giono, Romain Villet and Lucien Descaves which use blind characters to sensitise the reader to the descriptive power of non-visual language. In Blindsight, Guibert uses visually impenetrable language to stimulate his readers’ other senses whereas in The Song of the World, Giono mobilises the presence of a blind character to signal his use of non-visual description throughout the novel. My detailed reading of Descaves’ extraordinary novel of blindness, The Trapped, reveals not only that non-visual description is a highly effective way of communicating with a non-blind reader, but that Descaves includes braille in his novel in order to temporarily exclude his sighted readers.

Chapter 5: Male Desire and the Paradox of Blind Sexuality
In the first part of this chapter, I use readings of scenes of castration and pornographic pleasure from Hervé Guibert’s Blindsight and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye to suggest that both authors undermine the traditional dominance of the voyeuristic male gaze. In the second part, I explore how the non-visual eroticism suggested by the blindness-castration association is manifested in the descriptions of blind male desire found in Lucien Descaves’s The Trapped and Romain Villet’s Look.

Chapter 6: Silenced Sexualities: Listening to the Voice of the Blind Woman
Unlike the examples of blind male desire discussed in the previous chapter, the voices of blind female characters are much harder to hear. Blind female protagonists often remain silent in their texts: they are frequently unspeaking objects of the sighted male gaze and when they do speak, their words are often filtered through the voice of the male narrator. Detailed readings of Thérèse-Adèle Husson’s Reflections and Didier van Van Cauwelaert’s Jules shows how it is possible for a blind woman to subvert many of the stereotypes of blindness in order to express herself.

Chapter 7: Blind Assassins

This is the first of two chapters to focus on a specific literary genre, in this case the roman noir. Close readings of detective fiction by Fred Vargas and Brigitte Aubert show how this traditionally ocularcentric genre can be subverted by the presence of blind characters who encourage both other characters and the reader to reconsider the assumptions they routinely make about blindness. By comparing how male and female blind detective figures relate differently to the crimes they are solving, I also show, in chapters 5 and 6, that blind men and blind women are treated differently by both friends and enemies.

Chapter 8: Science, Fantasy and (In)Visible Blindness

Science fiction’s fascination with invisibility tells us more about blindness than it does about vision. Taking Maurice Renard as my main example, my detailed readings of The Blue Peril and The Doctored Man show that rather than reinforcing the supremacy of vision in the hierarchy of the senses, narratives which present us with different ways of seeing can in fact be read as celebrations of the powers and possibilities of blindness.

Chapter 9: Conclusion
I use Tonino Benacquista’s critically acclaimed 1991 roman policier, La commedia des ratés to show how French fiction’s most interesting representations of blindness are those which draw attention to a range of stereotypes of blindness before using surprising imagery, plot twists, characterization or stylistic features to undermine the reader’s expectations. This novelistic subversion encourages the reader to look again – or re-view – his or her understanding of blindness. Blindness is best understood as a multi-faceted and multi-layered collection of narratives which, when re-viewed together, testify to the powerfully creative potential of blindness. 

Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction is available as a hardback or e-book from Palgrave or amazon. If you are interested in reviewing the book, please get in touch.  

My Love Affair with Audio Books

2016 has been a dark year for me. I'm not (just) using 'dark' here for its metaphoric (and ocularcentric) meanings of ''sad' and 'gloomy'. I also mean that my two cataract operations, not to mention the broken leg, obliged me to spend a lot of time lying in the dark. It is no coincidence that 2016 is also the year that I rediscovered the wonder of audio books. When I was a child, commercially produced audio books were hard to find. I had two: The Railway Children and Black Beauty and I listened to them both so many times that I wore them out. But not before I had learnt them off by heart. When my reading glasses were perfected, I abandoned audio books in favour of much more readily available print books. Five years ago I discovered kindle which let me read large-print even as my eyes were failing.

My love affair with audio books began again at Blind Creations when writer and musician Romain Villet introduced me to his electronic reader Victor. The Victor Stream is a pocket-sized machine which reads texts in almost any electronic format (except PDF) out loud using a pretty convincing text-to-speech voice. I find it particularly useful for reading long documents quickly: not only can I accelerate the reading speed, I can also skip material, make notes and highlight important passages. Listening to text will never be as quick as reading it, but I am getting closer. I read Jean Giono's Le chant du monde this way in May and it is perhaps for this reason that I noticed the novel's extraordinary non-visual, multisensory, prose, which I discuss here.

Blind people have listened to stories for as long as blind people have existed. But audio books have only very recently become widely and easily available to the non-blind public.. Libraries now use services like overdrive to deliver audio content electronically, and companies like Audible encourage busy people to multi-task by reading as they run, drive or cook.

I was sceptical about Audible's offering at first. I thought their books were over-priced, especially as the RNIB's talking book service gives me free access to books read by volunteers. Crucially though, it takes the RNIB a while to provide access to recently published books and they do not always have the books I want when I want them;  they also have next to nothing in French. Audible, on the other hand, often has books available at the same time as the print versions are published. This means that I can read the same books as my family and friends; now more than ever I feel like I am part of contemporary literary culture.

But for me the main advantage of Audible is the way their books sound. Their narrators are professional performers who deliver their texts in compelling and creative ways. They sound like they have thought about how to read the story; they adopt different voices for different characters, they change the tone, speed and volume of their voice to match the prose and they pay attention to dialects, accents and regional contexts. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wonderful Americanah is an excellent example of the difference a good narrator can make. The novel, which is about a Black woman's experiences in Nigeria and America, is read by Black actress Adjoa Andoh and produced by Whole Story Audiobooks. In what might be the audio equivalent of free indirect speech, I immediately felt a powerful connection with the narrative voice through the narrator's voice. In addition, when Adichie's narrator talks about the different accents she encounters in Nigeria, and how a person's voice does or does not reflect their personality or social situation, Andoh's voice cleverly mimics the different accents that her protagonist is describing. Because of its narrator,  I am convinced that listening to Americanah was a more immersive, enriching and fulfilling experience than reading it would have been.

To my great delight, Audible also offers audiobooks in French and I have been devouring Fred Vargas's Commisaire Adamsberg books this year. In the fifth book in the series, Sous les vents de Neptune (Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand), produced by Audiolib, Adamsberg and his colleagues travel to Quebec and spend time encountering, deciphering and discussing the impenetrable Quebecois accents and vocabulary of their Canadian colleagues. The narrator, Francois Berland has a lot of fun putting on Quebecois accents and there is no doubt that his different voices improved my experience of reading this novel.

Audiobooks are a great example of what disability studies would call 'blindness gain': they were first developed for blind people and have now become widely available to everyone. They used to be an assistive technology for a marginalised population; they are now widely and easily available. Non-blind people are now lucky enough to be able to access the wonderful world of audio, a world which was once the closely guarded secret of blind people.

Book Review: 'Jules' by Didier van Cauwelaert

Since I discovered his Goncourt-winning Un aller simple in 1995, I have always loved Didier van Cauwelaert's quirky, touching and gently ironic novels. But my heart sank when I learnt that his most recent work Jules (Albin Michel: 2015) tells the story of a blind woman whose sight is miraculously restored. I was worried that this would be a simplistic celebration of the cure whereby Alice's new sightedness would bring her all the happiness and hope denied her by her blindness.

The novel's opening page did nothing to allay my fears. When the sighted narrator Zibal first glimpses still-blind Alice, his lascivious gaze objectifies her by its insistence on her physical appearance:

Hauts talons canari, minishort rouge et top turquoise, elle ne risquait pas de se faire écraser par temps de brume. N’eût été le labrador qui la guidait au bout d’un harnais, ses grandes lunettes noires seraient passées pour un accessoire de star soucieuse qui son incognito se remarque. Les cheveux blond-roux maintenus par un chignon en broussaille, les seins libres sous la soie quasi transparente, un sourire de rendez-vous amoureux allongeant les bavures de son rouge à lèvres, c’était une aveugle particulièrement voyante qui faisait bien davantage envie que pitié. (Jules, Didier Van Cauwelaert (Paris : Albin Michel, 2015, p. 7)

Zibal’s emphasis on her physical appearance reduces Alice to nothing more than a collection of sexual attributes without taking any account of her personality, context or even name. She is nothing more than an anonymous ‘aveugle’ who is completely defined in relation not only to how she looks to him but also how she does not look at him. In addition, the form of the text further emphasizes Alice’s objectification. She appears to be defined according to the controlling gaze of a male first-person narrator whose words are motivated by his desire not only to possess her sexually, but also to possess her metaphorically by capturing her in and via his text. This dual act of possession is rendered possible precisely by the very thing which makes Alice attractive to the narrator, namely her blindness. Alice is unaware that she is being looked at in this way and is thus even further objectified by the silence of the controlling gaze and the conspiracy between the sighted gazer and the reader which it establishes.

Happily, this narrator-reader complicity is shattered by the irruption of Alice's voice into the text. As the narrative progresses, Alice and Zibal recount alternating chapters so that a dual first-person perspective is established which destabilizes what the reader thinks he or she knows about both blindness and sightedness. Unlike her friends and colleagues, Alice is not overjoyed when she regains her sight. Far from it. She is horrified by the world she can now see and feels abandoned and lost without her guide dog Jules:

L’enthousiasme autour de moi, l’émerveillement que suscite ma guérison me laissent un sentiment de solitude honteuse que jamais le handicap n’a provoqué. Le devoir de bonheur auquel je m’astreignais, par fierté et instinct de survie, est remplacé desormais par un simple code de décence. Je n’ai plus le droit d’aller mal. (pp. 86-7)

By regaining her sight, Alice has lost one of her defining features; she is no longer herself. It is almost as if she is in mourning for her blindness. She hates the person she has become almost as much as she hates the way her friends celebrate her cure. She sees every congratulation as a betrayal of her blind self, evidence that despite the fact that she was happy being blind, all her sighted acquaintances secretly thought she would be better off sighted.

Van Cauwelaert's sensitive depiction of Alice's reactions to her new state of sightedness is a startling reminder that blindness is not a tragedy. Through a fast-paced (if somewhat far-fetched) tale of love, loss and loyalty we meet a collection of wonderfully eccentric characters who encourage us to abandon our own misconceptions about beauty, happiness and the tyranny of appearances. Without giving too much away, this is a thought-provoking, surprising and engrossing tale about how we see each other and ourselves. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Look by Romain Villet

The image shows the front cover of Look by French author and musician Romain Villet which was published by Gallimard in February 2014. It has been reviewed in French on the vues interieures blog.

When Romain Villet discussed his work at Blind Creations, he made the point that it is difficult to talk in English about a book written in French. This made sense to me because since reading Look (in French) last year, I have been struggling to write about it in English here. This is because Look is not only written in the French language; it is also about the French language. French is not merely the medium through which the narrator - Lucien - expresses himself, it is also the subject of much of what he says. Lucien is a blind musician and avid reader who eschews visual description. Instead he recounts his life in Paris, his love affair with the elusive Sophie and their trek in the Atlas mountains through a mixture of clever word play, erudite literary references, poetic fragments and obscure allusions to musical scores. Whilst I found the novel by turns funny, moving and beautiful, I also found it frustratingly dense: there are so many intellectual references in it that I'm sure that I, like Sophie, don't properly understand everything the narrator is saying.

But as I listened to Villet discussing his work during the conference, I realised that this is the novel's point. A little like Herve Guibert's Des Aveugles [translated as Blindsight], Look uses deliberately difficult references to oblige the reader to question her relationship with the world. Just as Lucien often feels excluded from the sighted world in which he is forced to operate, so we feel excluded from his world of musical and literary references. And so we are forced to discover a wonderfully non-visual way of being in the world which is as rich, absorbing and stimulating as anything I've ever read.

As well as being a meditation on how blindness might create a different kind of writing, Look is also about how blind people read differently. (And as such it reminds me of my own way of reading in detail.) I particularly like the way the narrator describes how the digital revolution has changed his reading habits. Before text-to-speech software made some books accessible to blind people via the internet, Lucien would read Braille books borrowed from specialist libraries. Apart from never being able to own the books he loves, Lucien resents the fact that he can never annotate this reading matter with comments, underlinings or marginalia. He can neither personalise nor re-read but must commit every sentence to memory as if he would never encounter it again:

C’était, au fil des pages, la nécessité de se forger dans l’instant des souvenirs impérissables, c’était vivre chaque ligne avec l’intensité d’un adieu.

It turns out that Villet feels much the same. In a fascinating radio documentary (also in French), 'Victor et Moi' (available here), he demonstrates how his portable reader has changed his relationship with books. It feels particularly fitting that in the documentary he visits several places which provide accessible books, including the Association Valentin Hauy, where Blind Spot started.

Look is an important book - which deserves to be more widely known - because as well as these meditations on writing and reading blind, it offers a realistic, humorous and intimate portrait of life as a blind person. Lucien is wonderfully at ease with his blindness; he shares my belief that blindness is neither a drama nor a tragedy; it is just a (slightly inconvenient) way of being in the world. One example of his dry humour is his point that because blind people take longer to do certain things (like peel carrots), they should be given a third extra time in life as they are for their exams:

S’il y avait une justice, pour leur rendre le temps que leur volent leurs yeux, les aveugles auraient droit dans l’existence, comme pour passer les examens, à un tiers-temps supplémentaire.

But until Look is translated into English - an almost impossible task but one which I'd love to have a go at - its celebratory view of blindness will remain the preserve of the Francophone reader. Such readers will appreciate Lucien's thoughts on the intranslatability of blindness, a sentiment which the book's very existence ironically undermines:

Car la cécité est moins un enseignement dont j’aurais à tirer des conclusions, qu’une expérience indicible, intime, singulière, intraduisible dirais-je au risque d’enfoncer le clou, sinon en décrivant dans le détail ses manifestations. Il faudra, un jour, dépasser la noblesse du gâchis, il faudra raconter par-delà les brouillons invisibles, s’en donner la peine, s’en faire un devoir.

GUEST POST: Into the Woods

This morning I received an (unsolicited) guest post from one of the students on my new final-year course Blindness and Vision in French Culture. I am delighted to publish it below.

(this photo shows Christine Baranski as Cinderella's stepmother and Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch as her two blind sisters, complete with white canes and dark glasses, on set during filming of Cinderella's wedding at Dover Castle)

Into the Woods: A Review

A Guest Post by read_and_dream

While I loved Into the Woods on a superficial level for its fun songs, clever interweaving of various fairy tales, and its gentle mockery of Hollywood stereotypes; I found the sexual undertones of it interesting as well, and the implications of what “into the woods” actually meant. However, there was one thing that I found problematic, something that wouldn’t have bothered me before I started the course Blindness and Vision in French Culture: this was how blindness was presented. I was expecting the prince from Rapunzel to be blinded, as I already knew the original story, but I was not familiar with the Aschenputtel version of Cinderella, in which the two evil sisters are blinded by the birds that Cinderella has at her command. It is not so much that I have a problem with this (although considering blindness as a punishment is problematic), but it is the way in which the sisters are presented after they lose their sight. Their blindness is presented as comic, as they blunder around. Had they suddenly become deaf, or wheelchair using, we would not have felt permitted to laugh, so why laugh at blindness? I think it may lie in the theory that we laugh at things that make us anxious; in this highly ocularcentric world, most of us, deep-down, have a fear of losing our sight, as we perceive it to be our most important sense. Or it could be classed as dark laughter; laughter that comes from a sense of superiority over others who are suffering. Why do you think so many people watch Big Brother?  It is not because it is good television. Going back to the film, I definitely felt uncomfortable at the fact that people were laughing at the sisters. I also felt  uncomfortable at the tragic presentation of the prince’s blindness; yes, it is horrible to fall on thorns and have your sight removed in that way, but he still manages to find Rapunzel using his hearing, and yet we are hardly given time to appreciate this before she has healed him with her tears. He is not given the choice over whether or not he wants his sight back; just like Gertude in La Symphonie Pastorale, it is taken as a given.  For once I would like to see a film where someone is given the chance to regain their sight, but refuses. I think that this would challenge people’s perceptions about the tragedy of blindness and let them see that it is just another way of being. A way of being without seeing.

New Term; New Techniques

This academic year I am teaching two new courses which I have specifically designed to include Critical Disability Studies content. My new final-year option 'Blindness and Vision in French Culture' will use a range of texts, films and images to interrogate the French obsession with vision and the visual and what this might tell us about what 'blindness' means. I am also co-teaching a new first-year course, 'Decoding France: Language, Culture, Identity' for which I have designed my section around Jean-Dominique Bauby's fascinating memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

The introduction of these new courses seems a perfect time to make my teaching experience - and my students' learning experience - more blindness-friendly. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher is recognising my students and distinguishing between them. I know all my students' names but I don't know their faces. So in the classroom I hardly ever know who I am talking to. My face blindness means that I sometimes do not even recognise people - like my husband or my children - whom I know extremely well. So I've been thinking about strategies to help me put names to faces in my classes.

I always ask my students to tell me their names before they speak in class, but this, like shouting out instead of hand-raising - is a difficult habit for them to get into. So this year I am going to sit my students in alphabetical order and ask them to keep the same seat in each class. This way I'll be able to work out who is absent and who is present by clocking empty chairs and I'll know which students to call on for answers. I'll also be able to use the position of their voices to match them with names and hopefully once I've made the voice-name connection, I'll start recognising them when they talk to me outside class.

My aim in thinking more proactively about how to manage my blindness in the classroom is not purely selfish. I also want my students to experience blindness as a creative way of being and doing rather than as a tragedy. I want them to study blindness in texts, but also to think about how their habits and assumptions unintentionally promote the kind of occularcentric world which I'd like my courses to critique.

David Bolt; The Metanarrative of Blindness (2014)

The image shows a hardback copy of David Bolt's The Metanarrative of Blindness: 

A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Literature 

(Ann Arbor: Michigan U.P., 2014)

There is nothing quite like the combination of excitement and fear an academic experiences when they come across a book which is closely related to their current research. This is exactly how I felt when I heard about David Bolt's new book, The Metanarrative of Blindness. I was excited by the potential for new discoveries, discussions and connections which this book would provide, yet I was terrified that David's work would somehow duplicate or pre-empt what I am trying to say.

I am pleased to say that by the time I finished reading the book, my fears had vanished and my excitement had more than doubled. This is a fascinating and readable exploration of how a range of fictional and autobiographical texts represent ‘blindness’ and ‘the blind’. Its originality lies not so much in David’s discussions of the texts themselves, but more in his argument that fictional representations of blindness have created a set of myths and stereotypes of blindness which dictate how society treats the blind. Indeed David even makes the important point that blind people themselves have also been unwittingly influenced by such images. David’s book is different from much traditional literary criticism because it constantly compares his own experience of being blind with fictional representations of blindness in order to show the gap between reality and fiction.

Aside from this overarching argument, there are many useful elements in the book and I will certainly be using it with students in my new undergraduate course ‘Blindness and Vision in French Culture’ which I am teaching at Royal Holloway from September .The Introduction provides an excellent summary of the major trends and tensions in Disability Studies in general, with references to authorities including Goffmann, Garland-Thomson, McRuer, Davis, Mitchell and Snyder, and Chapter One explores the politics of blindness in particular. Here, David very carefully explains his somewhat controversial choice of terminology. Unlike many blind activists and scholars, including myself, David rejects the terms ‘the blind’ and ‘blind people’, preferring to use ‘those of us who have or do not have a visual impairment’. There are good reasons for him to do this, not least because his decision highlights the very problems of terminology he is trying to avoid, but I find his choice of words clumsy and at first I was frustrated by how much it disrupted the flow of both his prose and his arguments. Like Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen, I prefer to proudly reclaim terms like ‘blind’ and ‘partially blind’ as celebrations of a state of sightlessness usually considered negative. But David’s explanation of the reasons behind his choice do make sense. In fact they do a great job of revealing the advantages and disadvantages of the medical, individual and radical social models of disability, the potential pitfalls (or possibilities) of political correctness and the power of even apparently neutral language to influence and (mis)inform. Like myself, David is speaking at the Society of Disability Studies conference in Minneapolis next month: I'm looking forward to discussing his choice of terminology with him and others at the event.

In the rest of the book, David explains how three interrelated neologisms - ‘ocularnormativsm’, ‘ocularcentrism’ and ‘opthalmocentrism’ - both belong to and persist in creating a 'metanarrative of blindness', in other words, 'the story in relation to which those of us who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined, an overriding narrative that seems to displace agency' (p. 10). David's analysis of a wide range of texts shows the persistent presence of a number of myths of blindness which I have also found in some of my nineteenth-century French texts. The ‘seeing-knowing metaphor’ (p. 18), the ‘blindness-darkness synonymy’ (p. 21) and the odd idea that people are either fully blind or fully sighted (pp. 69-70), are particularly widespread. In Chapter Two he shows how the use of labels such as ‘the blind man’ and ‘the blind girl’, creates a belief in blindness-as-difference which sets blind characters apart from the (implicitly sighted) reader. Chapters Three and Four both deal with a range of misconceptions surrounding blindness and sexuality. One of the most interesting arguments in Chapter Three is the discussion of how the recurrent infantilisation of blind characters frequently rests on the misguided assumption that independence is more valuable than dependency. By challenging the independence-dependency hierarchical binary which underpins traditional notions of rehabilitation, lifestyle and progress, David is able to criticise dominant medical and social discourses of disability. This is just one example of how readings of fictional representations of disability can help to problematise current ways of thinking. This is something which I hope my own analyses of blindness in fiction have also been doing.

In the following chapter, David criticises positive stereotyping by showing how 'more than being inaccurate, cultural representations of extraordinary senses serve, at best, to render magical the talent and achievements of people who have visual impairments and, at worst, to justify the ascription of various animal-like characteristics' (p. 67). Chapter Five is an insightful survey of blindness’s association with contagion in science-fiction writing (including readings of key works like H. G. Wells' 'The Country of the Blind', John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids and José Saramago's Blindness) in which David challenges the recent tendency to read references to successful blind characters as a celebration of disability. Instead he argues that stories featuring blind communities tend to emphasise the differences between the blind and the sighted which in turn suggest that ‘the blind' are somehow inherently different from the sighted. Chapter Six uses the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault to criticise the hierarchical binary relationship between the sighted gazer and the blind object of the gaze whilst Chapter Seven calls the blindness-as-tragedy myth into question.

David’s discussion of a wide range of twentieth-century texts represents an impressive survey of representations of blindness and the blind. I find him most convincing when he compares his discussions of fictional depictions with the lived experience of the blind and the partially blind: his use of examples from his own life, as well as extracts from the autobiographical writings of Georgina Kleege, Stephen Kuusisto and John Hull is particularly informative and should teach sighted readers much about their own misconceptions of blindness. This emphasis on lived experience is important because it demonstrates that the 'metanarrative of blindness' occurs in society as well as – or perhaps even more so than - in fictional representations. David is an accomplished social commentator who uses evidence from twentieth-century fiction to demonstrate how 'the blind' are perceived in modern society.

The main problem I have with David’s book does not in fact have anything to do with blindness as such and it feels a little churlish to mention it here, particularly as it is related to my (in fact unfounded) worries about overlap with my own work. I find the subtitle of the book, ‘A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Texts’ misleading, perhaps even insulting. Whilst the majority of his texts were written in English, David also pays sustained attention to several French authors – Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Jacques Derrida - whose works were neither originally written nor published in English. I am worried by this refusal to acknowledge the linguistic and cultural identities of these texts: not only does this negate the huge influence that French literature and culture has had on the history of representations of blindness, it also reflects a wider tendency amongst anglophone academics, publishers and readers to ‘claim’ such texts for the dominant Anglo-American canon when it suits them to do so. I am pretty sure that my French friends and colleagues would be outraged to see French classics like La symphonie pastorale and Histoire de l’oeil described as ‘anglophone’!

This niggle notwithstanding, this book is a crucial contribution to 'Blindness Studies' and comes very highly recommended.

Blind Spot at Two

Happy 2nd Birthday Blind Spot Blog

When I started Blind Spot two years ago, I thought I would use it to chronicle my research project on blindness in French culture as well as my experiences as a partially blind academic. In my first post I promised to write about my research findings and I renewed that promise on the blog's first birthday. In fact when I look back at the 80 or so posts I have written since Blind Spot started, only a handful of them are overtly about my academic work. (See, for example, 'Reading in Detail'; 'Therese-Adele Husson'; 'Flaubert and the Medical Model of Disability'; 'The Taboo of Blindness' and 'Touching the Book'.) What started out as a research blog has gradually become a collection of writings on blindness, disability and the tyranny of the normal. My most popular posts, (which appear at the bottom of this page) are about Children in Need, audio description, the unwitting dangers of ableist society and blindness in popular film and fiction. My favourite posts are about my relationship with BBC Radio 4, the joy of public transport and learning braille. What all 80 posts tell me is that this blog has helped me both claim and celebrate my blindness, it has made me into a disability activist and it has introduced me to many new people and experiences.

I may not mention my research very often but it is still the driving force behind this blog. My thoughts on blindness in the modern world are always informed by the work I am doing on nineteenth-century French fiction (and increasingly the reverse is also true). Indeed the most interesting of the 40 or so novels featuring blindness I have worked on so far are the ones which challenge or critique some of the misconceptions about both disability in general and blindness in particular which still haunt modern society.

The figure of the passive blind beggar is a recurrent feature of nineteenth-century French literature. The way that he is often used as a symbol of failure or tragedy finds a sinister echo in contemporary images of blindness such as the offensive advert I wrote about last year. Such depictions insidiously emphasise that blindness is a disaster, a tragedy, almost a fate worse than death. But my research shows that not all nineteenth-century French writers were happy to accept this predominant stereotype. One such example is a 1892 primary school textbook by Vessiot which includes a short story in which two schoolgirls discover the hitherto unsuspected intelligence of their local blind beggar. Like another story which appeared in 1887, 'L'Aveugle' by Alphonse de Launay, this seemingly innocent tale in fact encourages a whole generation to rethink their preconceived notions of blindness by teaching them that appearances can be deceptive. One of the things I will argue in Visions of Blindness in French Fiction 1789-2013, the book which will eventually come out of my research, is that it is only by understanding how and why the blind were depicted throughout history, whilst also analysing the works which critique such depictions, that we can hope to finally rid society of its pervasive and devastatingly negative view of blindness.

The Taboo of Blindness

Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth Century France

(Oxford: Legenda, 2013)

(Cover image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London)

When I was a child, blindness was a taboo subject in our house. We never mentioned the word if we could help it and I remember a feeling of icy awkwardness descending if we ever encountered references to blindness or the blind on television. With the exception of The Little House on the Prairie I don't remember being read any books with blind characters in them and I suspect that my mum would rather not have read me the blindness episodes in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. When we had to talk about what I could and could not see, I referred simply to 'my eyes'. When asked, I might say that I was 'half-blind' or 'registered blind' (in fact I was quite proud of being 'different' or 'special' sometimes) but I did not see myself as 'blind'. This was why I would not carry a white cane and hated 'mobility training' with a vengeance.

It was this refusal, both by me and by those around me, to address my blindness directly which led to my ferocious desire to 'pass' as a sighted person and deny my blind identity. The taboo status of 'blindness' made it a negative notion which I could not relate to my own reality. But it was also this negativity which surrounded 'blindness', a negativity learnt from prevailing societal attitudes to it, which rendered it taboo in the first place. Rather than admitting that I was blind, it felt easier to ignore it and hope others would do the same. It is only in the last eighteen months or so that I have been able to happily embrace my blind identity, an identity which now sits in a sometimes easy, sometimes conflictual, but always interesting relationship with my sighted self.

When I started thinking about how taboo aspects of bodily reality such as female sexual desire, illness, sado-masochism, disability, impotence and incest are represented in nineteenth-century French texts, I had no idea that this project would lead to my own personal interrogation of the taboo on blindness. But in my book, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets in Nineteenth-Century France, published this month, I demonstrate that it is only by engaging with potentially difficult subjects that we can rid them of the negativity which surrounds them. As I argue in my Conclusion:  

'The taboo bodies which this study has uncovered are crucially important because they invite us to look again at our own misconceptions of what makes the body normal, beautiful, or perfect. Like the social model of disability, they urge us to rethink our understanding of how bodies relate to the world. [...] Exposure to the taboo is a necessary, though not always a comfortable, part of becoming an engaged and insightful reader. By discovering the form and function of the taboo bodies hidden at the text's heart, the reader is finally free to question his or her own misconceptions and thus begin to relate to bodies of any kind in new and enlightened ways.'

International Conference: The History of Blindness and the Blind

UPDATE: Read my account of the conference's impact here.

I have only recently realised that blindness is a subject worthy of academic research. My previous academic work focuses on the body first in the novels of Emile Zola, and then in the nineteenth-century novel more widely, but I have only 'come out' as a disabled scholar - and a scholar of disability -  in the last 18 months.

My work on blindness is both personal and professional. The wonderful writings of Cathy Kudlick and Georgina Kleege have inspired me to see my own blindness in a positive way, whilst the crucially important history of blindness in France, Vivre Sans Voir (The Blind in French Society) by the majestic Zina Weygand demonstrates how crucial it is that the blind are able to both write and read a history of our own. Thanks to Cathy, Georgina and Zina I can feel an urgency behind my own research into how blindness and the blind are represented in French culture which comes from both a need to change the way blindness is perceived and a desire to finally speak a history which has been neglected for far too long.

I hope that the International Colloquium on the History of Blindness and the Blind which takes place in Paris next month will change both public and academic  perceptions of blindness. As a member of the organising committee I have been able to put my new-found belief in the importance of blindness into practice by helping to organise a major historical and cultural event which pushes blindness to the forefront of the academic agenda. As a speaker at the conference I will have the chance to meet and talk with leading historians of blindness from around the world. Now all I have to do is write my paper.

Attendance at the conference, which takes place in Paris from 27-29 June is free but advance registration is essential by emailing: histoire.cecite@singer-polignac.org