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.
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.
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.
