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.

Jacques Lusseyran colloquium

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

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

This image shows the poster for the colloquium

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

Blind Creations conference - CFP issued

I am very excited to be co-organising the Blind Creations conference with Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba, Canada). This three-day international conference, which will take place between 28 June and 30 June 2015, seeks to explore the relationship between blind people and artistic creation. Our definition of ‘blind person’ is broad, encompassing anyone who might be defined as having ‘non-normative vision’ and / or who relates to the world using senses other than sight. It welcomes interventions from blind and non-blind academics (with or without institutional affiliation), practitioners, advocates, writers and artists (also broadly defined to include musicians, dancers and sculptors as well as visual artists). It sees blind people not only as subjects in their own right, but also as active creators; as such it rejects the ‘medical model’ of disability which posits blind people as passive objects of medical investigation and rehabilitation. In so doing it hopes to challenge and reconceptualise the myths and stereotypes of ‘blindness’ which continue to circulate by recasting ‘blindness’ as a multi-faceted and positive creative force which might be usefully explored by both non-blind and blind people.

The conference will take place at Royal Holloway’s campus in Egham, Surrey, UK, We are pleased to announce that the conference will feature two plenary speakers: Prof Georgina Kleege (UC Berkeley) and Dr Zina Weygand (Paris). During the conference, we plan to host a number of cultural events, including a Blindness in Fiction Writers’ Roundtable (featuring novelist and poet, Naomi Foyle), a tactile museum tour, and an audio-described film screening.

The conference Call for Papers can be found here and more information about the speakers is available here. 

Sustaining Disability: Lessons from French History

This week I am honoured to be speaking at the Society for Disability Studies annual conference in Minneapolis. Below is a transcription of my paper along with some useful links and the French originals of the English passages I'll be quoting. (All translations are my own).

Sustaining Blindness in Literature: 

A Lesson From French History

The ideal of sustaining - indeed celebrating - disability for its own sake tends to be thought of as a post-modern notion which is still being explored and argued for by Disability Studies scholars and activists. But nineteenth-century French blind activist and teacher Maurice de la Sizeranne developed a project in Paris – the creation of a book collection devoted to representations of blindness and to books by blind or partially blind authors - which can be seen as a forerunner of twenty-first century attempts to positively sustain disability.

This collection, which is now housed, in far from ideal conditions, in a meeting room in the Association Valentin Hauy, 5, rue Duroc in Paris, France, is an invaluable source of information not only about how the sighted saw blindness and blind people, but also about how blind writers saw, and continue to see, themselves. In its scope and ambition it is comparable to the Jacobus tenBroek Library at the National Federation of the Blind, the Hayes library at the Perkins School for the Blind and the Migel Library which was once at the American Foundation for the Blind and is now at the American Printing House of the Blind. But unlike these American collections, the Valentin Hauy library is the only one of its kind to deal with works in French. Unfortunately, the present directors of the Association Valentin Hauy do not fully appreciate the importance of sustaining historical archives. Not only are the books not being carefully preserved, the library catalogue only exists in print and can therefore only be consulted in person in Paris by people who can access small typefaces or who can take a reader with them. One of my aims in my current research project is to create a digitised version of the catalogue and of the most significant books it contains.

Inspired by the work of Cathy Kudlick and Zina Weygand, whose reclaiming of nineteenth-century French blind writer Thérèse-Adèle Husson has drawn attention to the existence of Sizeranne’s Valentin Hauy collection, my work seeks both to exploit and to sustain Sizeranne’s collection for current and future generations of Disability Studies scholars and students. In my paper today I would like to provide an insight into the collection by discussing how two texts which I found thanks to the Hauy archive encourage us to rethink received notions of value, normality and tragedy, notions, in fact, whose problematic sustainability poses ethical and representational challenges to Disability Studies.

In their work on Husson, Kudlick and Weygand focused almost exclusively on her autobiographical writings. But Husson also wrote sentimental novels primarily intended for the moral instruction of young ladies. In contrast to the modern and something surprisingly enlightened way that Husson talks about blindness in her autobiography (which you can read in both English and French online - her novels often reinforce traditional nineteenth-century myths or stereotypes of blindness (some of which, as David Bolt’s 2014 work The Metanarrative of Blindness shows, still persist to this day) whereby blindness is a tragedy, even a fate worse than death, and the category problematically labelled ‘the blind’ are either sub or super human beings who should be praised, pitied, neglected or avoided.

Indeed this quotation from Simi Linton’s 1998 Claiming Disability shows how widespread this problem is amongst the non disabled:

’Representations of disability and the representation of disabled people’s place in society are largely in the hands of people schooled in a particular vision of disability, one that is saturated with deterministic thinking and characterised by maudlin and morbid sentiments projected onto disabled people’s experience. The insistence not just that disability is an unfortunate occurrence but that disabled people are, perforce, “unfortunates”, seeps into most reports on the disability experience.’

But in one little-known collection of short moral tales, Moral Distractions or Virtue in Action [Le Passe-temps moral ou la vertu mis en action (Paris: Belin, 1837 3rd edition)], Husson presents an intriguingly modern approach to disability which seems to at least in part alleviate Linton’s worries and foreshadow the concerns of this conference by seeking to celebrate disability for its own sake.

In the story ‘The Good Father’s Lesson’ [‘Leçon d’un bon père’], an eleven-year-old boy, Adolphe, is playing in the park when he sees a so-called invalid, later introduced as Jean-Louis Grossard, talking to Monsieur Dupré, his tutor.

The boy’s reaction to Grossard, who has a wooden leg, a patch over one eye and two missing fingers, is blunt but not unexpected given the prevailing attitudes of the time: ‘How I pity you, you poor man’ [p. 208: ‘Combien je vous trouve malheureux.’] And indeed this exclamation echoes Husson’s descriptions of her own plight which she often describes as ‘unfortunate’ ‘pitiable’ and ‘sad’.

But it is Grossard’s response which is revealing: ‘ "Poor man, you say", said the invalid, getting up proudly, "I’ll have you know I have three sons, the oldest of which is no older than you, and if they ever spoke to me like that I would surely disinherit them!" ' [p. 208 : ‘ – Malheureux, dites-vous? reprit l’invalide en se relevant fièrement, j’ai trios fils, dont l’aîné n’est pas plus âgé que vous ; si jamais l’un d’eux me tenait un pareil langage, je crois que je le désavouerais !’].

It transpires not only that Grossard is proud of his disabilities – which he received during his thirty-six years of military service, but also that he wants to expose his sons to the risk of sustaining similar injuries by encouraging all three of them to become soldiers. Adolphe struggles to understand Grossard’s point of view:

‘The fact that this unfortunate man does not complain about his situation shows a resignation I can well understand even if this kind of resignation is very rare, but that he wants to expose his children to the same dangers, indeed that he attaches a kind of glory to this, is, in my opinion, a sign that he is taking his own enthusiasm much too far.’ [p. 210 : ‘que cet infortuné ne se plaigne point de sa situation, c’est une résignation que je conçois très-bien, quoi qu’elle doive être fort rare ; mais vouloir exposé ces enfants à de pareils dangers, à y attacher toute sa gloire, c’est, à mon avis, pousser l’enthousiasme jusqu’ à l’extravagance’.]

Unlike Adolphe, who is clearly horrified by the idea that Grossard’s sons might voluntarily put themselves in a position where they become as disabled as their father, all three boys do in fact want to be soldiers, despite, or perhaps because of, being confronted with their father’s disabilities every day.

Although it is possible to read this story as nothing more than a sentimental celebration of national pride and the glories of war, I would like to suggest that Grossard’s desire for his sons to risk their own limbs and sight foreshadows the late twentieth-century Disability Pride movement and encourages the nineteenth-century reader, who, like Adolphe, may not have been exposed to such feelings before, to think carefully about the assumptions which are too easily and quickly made about the value and quality of life.

Husson’s attempt to celebrate disability is extended in a 1882 story ‘Amongst the Blind’ [‘Entre aveugles’] by nineteenth-century Franco-Italian writer Marc Monnier. In this story the author offers a striking argument in favour of the sustaining of disability. He uses a question and answer style dialogue reminiscent of Cara Liebowitz’s persuasive blog post ‘Explaining Inspiration Porn to the Non Disabled’on her That Crazy Crippled Chic blog: like Cara’s piece, this short story is deliberately didactic and as such is written in a persuasive and provocative way in an attempt to both enlighten and convince an audience who may not have encountered such views before.

Indeed, in this short story, Monnier does a great job of avoiding the ableist traps which Linton highlights in her book.

A painter has come to a rural town to decorate its church when he happens across an old doctor friend he used to know in Paris. The Doctor lives in an institution for the blind [‘hospice d’aveugles’] and takes the painter to visit it. What follows is a dialogue in which the doctor – in a fascinating deconstruction of the medical model - debunks a succession of myths and misconceptions about blindness and 'the blind' voiced by the painter. One example occurs as the painter admires the beautiful scenery and then exclaims:

- How sad it is!
- Why?
- The poor blind people here can’t appreciate it.
- Who gave you that idea?
- Can they see the river?
- No, but they can feel it. They love to come and sit, as you are sitting, on the edge of the balcony.

[p. 238 : ‘C’est triste!
Pourquoi?
Les pauvres aveugles qui sont ici n’en jouissent pas.
Qui te l’a dit ?
Ils voient la rivière ?
Ils la sentent. Ils viennent, volontiers s’asseoir comme toi sur le parapet.]

The Doctor goes on to explain how the blind residents appreciate the smell and feel of the breezes coming off the river and that they notice sounds that the sighted do not.

The painter functions in this text as a symbol of ocularcentrism – he has an unshakeable belief that sight is the most important and privileged of the senses and that anyone who does not have it is necessarily doomed to have a lesser experience of life and the world. The Doctor counters by explaining that Milton’s gradual sight loss opened him up to a wider world of experiences than sighted poets like Dante, and demonstrates how 'the blind' are better placed to appreciate the finer qualities of poetry, arguing that the newly blind are sometimes so pleased with their new appreciation of poetry that they do not just find consolation but positive joy and pleasure in being blind. Even when the Dr goes on to reverse the normal-abnormal binary by arguing that he knows blind children who see sightedness as a disability, the painter remains unconvinced. Despite the fact that this statement still relies on the binary opposition between disabled and non-disabled which can be problematic, it nonetheless demonstrates a positive approach to blindness which celebrates it for its own sake. The Doctor’s opinions thus hopefully encourage the non-disabled to rethink what they assume to be their own privileged position in the hierarchy of perfection and normalcy.

The twist in the story comes when the doctor suddenly stops referring to the blind using ‘they’ as he says: ‘our other senses become sharper : we learn to listen, something we hadn’t known how to do until now.’

The Doctor’s switch from ‘they’ to ‘we’ in his discussions of the blind is intriguing. At this point in the story we have not been told whether he is blind or sighted but because we are reading from the point of view of the implicitly sighted reader, and because he is a doctor, we assume that he is sighted and lives in the hospice as a professional rather than a patient. His use of ‘we’ challenges the distinction made throughout the text between the two disparate groups ‘the sighted’ and ‘the blind’: it argues that sight or lack of sight is not a defining characteristic but one amongst many elements and that there exists a continuum between people with different levels of blindness or non-blindness. In this way it is a forerunner of David Bolt’s use of the ‘those of us who’ formulation which emphasizes that blindness is not a marker of inherent and inhuman difference.

In fact as the doctor continues to refute the painter’s increasingly ocularnormative assumptions, we learn that the doctor lives in the hospice because his parents, who met in the hospice as blind children, still live there. Before revealing his true identity to the painter, the doctor describes the love affair between these two blind children who were eventually allowed to marry despite some peoples’ concerns over the consequences of allowing two blind people to marry and have children. When the painter asks if their child was born blind, the doctor replies, ‘no more than me’ before revealing that he is in fact the son in question. By refusing to clarify how much the son - and thus the doctor - can or cannot see, Monnier frustrates the painter’s – and indeed the reader’s - attempt to construct a hierarchical relationship between blindness and non-blindness. Instead he playfully calls into question the non-disabled person’s tendency to see disability as lack by rendering the blindness (or not) of the doctor unknowable and thus ultimately inconsequential, indeed irrelevant.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the presence of such enlightened ideas within texts written in nineteenth-century France reveals that current arguments about the value of disability have been around for much longer than we might have thought. These texts have, until recently, remained hidden, buried in archives, and ironically inaccessible to the very people who need to use them as evidence against the kind of reductionist views represented in these stories by the boy Adolphe and the painter.

Zina Weygand receives the Legion of Honour

Zina Weygand proudly sporting her decoration during her acceptance speech

I first met prominent historian and doyenne of 'Blind Studies', Zina Weygand in February 2012 and I was so impressed by our encounter that I wrote about it in one of my earliest blog posts here. Since that memorable meeting, I have spent many hours with Zina: we worked closely on the organisation of the International Conference on the History of Blindness and the Blind and enjoy catching up over tea and cake whenever I visit Paris.

Last week I was honoured and delighted to be invited to the ceremony in which Zina was awarded the Ordre de la Legion d'honneur. This honour, the highest that can be awarded to a French citizen by the French Republic, is hugely prestigious, and was bestowed on Zina by Jean-Louis Chambon, prefet honoraire, for the illuminating and ground-breaking work she has done to bring the history of blindness and the blind to international prominence. 

As well as being a renowned academic, Zina is also, and above all, a gifted people-person. She loves putting researchers in touch with each other and has built up an impressive network of contacts across the globe: indeed she has provided me with many invaluable contacts in the relatively short time I've known her. Everyone I talked to at the ceremony refereed to her generosity of spirit, the genuine pleasure she gains from meeting people working on blindness and the blind, and her unfailing ability to make connections, create projects, initiate and maintain lasting friendships and energise those around her. 

There is no doubt that my work on blindness would have been impossible without Zina's advice, guidance and support. The ceremony on 29 April was a moving and fitting tribute to her extraordinary life-work. 

History of Blindness Conference: Updates and Impact

The International Conference on the History of Blindness and the Blind which took place in Paris in June 2013 made a huge impact on me both professionally and personally. I learnt an immense amount about the history of the blind in various countries and at various times. I met a wonderful selection of interesting, intelligent and accomplished individuals and have already continued a number of conversations started there.

Below I list (in roughly chronological order) blog posts, webpages and recordings related to or inspired by the conference.

 - All the conference presentations are now available, both in English and in French, on the Singer-Polignac Foundation website.

 - My Blind Spot posts 'Guide Dogs for the Blind' and 'Where has (all the) Braille gone?' were directly inspired by the conference.

 - Author Mike Mellor wrote about his role in the conference for the National Braille Press Blog

 - Selina Mills' feature on the conference was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

 - Heather Tilley's 'Touching the Book' exhibition, which she discussed at the conference, has now opened in London. After I visited the exhibition I wrote a piece for the exhibition blog comparing the British and French approaches to the embossed book.

 - La Ligue Braille have conference reports on their website in French and in Flemish.

 - Selina Mills reports on the growing interest in the history of blindness in the September issue of History Today (p. 7).

 - Conference delegate Dr Brian Miller discusses the conference in Accessible World's Special Program Series (download and listen here).

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

Thérèse-Adèle Husson

As part of my research project into Disability Studies and French Culture I have been reading the novels of nineteenth-century blind writer Thérèse-Adèle Husson (introduced to me by Zina Weygand). Next week I will present my first findings on Husson's work in a paper entitled 'Monstrous Messages: Representations of the Disabled Body in Nineteenth-Century French Literature' at the 53rd Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies at the University of Exeter. In my paper I use contemporary Disability Studies to look again at depictions of blindness in French. I use examples from Baudelaire, Flaubert and Hugo to argue that blindness is almost always used in literature as a metaphor for something other than itself. The experience of blindness, how it feels to be blind and how it changes the blind person's relationship with the world, is rarely, if ever, touched upon.

Not all Husson's novels are about blindness but in Les Deux Aveugles et leur Jeune Conducteur (The Two Blind Men and their Young Guide), published posthumously in 1838, she tells the poignant story of blind brothers who are disowned by their family and forced to wander France trying to make a living. The story is told from the first-person perspective of one of the brothers. Late on in the narrative, the brothers unexpectedly encounter their neglectful father. As they suddenly realise who they have in front of them, the blind narrator utters the seemingly incongruous line: 'Son regard a rencontré le mien' (his gaze met mine). When I first came across this line I thought it must be there by mistake. Clearly a blind narrator, imagined by a blind writer, could have no understanding of the notion of the 'gaze' or the importance the sighted attach to eye contact. Surely his must be an authorial slip, a careless addition which Husson must have heard read aloud and unthinkingly transported into her text.

Contemporary Disability Study's resistance to the metaphorization of disability made me think again about this sentence. What if Husson was well aware of the incongruity of the phrase as she wrote it? What if she was trying to make her readers, both sighted and blind, think again about the alleged supremacy of sight?  Might we read this reference to the blind gaze as an insight into the way the blind relate to others in the world? The shock of this sentence invites us to separate blindness from its metaphoric baggage and put ourselves in the place of the narrator. As we do so we realise that the blind are not cut off from the world, living tragically in a bubble of isolation and self-pity. They are fully engaged and involved citizens who use their other senses to achieve the same kind of contact with others as the sighted manage (or think they manage) with their over-determined gaze.

Zina Weygand - the Blind in France

When I started working on French representations of blindness in late 2011, I kept encountering the name Zina Weygand. It is testimony both to Zina's international reputation and to her generosity as a scholar that several people recommended that I contact her directly. Zina responded immediately and with exceptional warmth and generosity to my queries. Since that initial e-mail she has sent me many suggestions of books and articles that I should read, and people that I should contact. She came to meet me whilst I was working at the Association Valentin Hauy earlier this month and we enthusiastically shared our thoughts on French blindness over lunch.

Zina in the Valentin Hauy library, with her book, Vivre sans Voir (Paris: Creaphis, 2003). Translated as: The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (Stanford U.P., 2009)

Here you can listen to an interview (in French) with Zina on France Inter in which she talks about the changing role of the blind in French Society, from the middle ages to the nineteenth century.

As well as being the leading scholar in the field, Zina is passionate about her subject and its importance. Thanks to her warmth and energy, she has created an international network of researchers on blindness who enjoy very rich and fruitful exchanges. Yesterday I felt honoured that she introduced me to many of them during a research meeting I attended at Paris 7. I am looking forward to more fruitful exchanges in the future.