The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It is a clever, moving and deeply imaginative book and a worthy winner. But if the judges had read the shortlisted books by ear rather than by eye it would not have won.
This year I listened to all 6 shortlisted books and chose my own winner based on what I heard. I was using the same literary-merit criteria as the judges, but I added another element that sight-focused readers couldn't take into account: how the audio version of the book contributed to the reading experience.
Audio books used to be the preserve of bind people. When I was a child, they were a rare and precious thing. Now they are mainstream. Publishers routinely produce downloadable audio books alongside kindle and paper versions and a lot of (sighted) people prefer them; audible is a thriving amazon company and public libraries are finally making audio books available to download via apps like overdrive and Libby. And with popularity come production values. The audio books of my youth were little more than a voice on tape. Now publishers go to great lengths to create a memorable reading experience. They carefully choose a narrator (or narrators) whose voice matches the feel of the story. Sometimes they even add music. Yet despite the popularity of audio books, they are still not taken seriously by 'serious' (aka sighted) readers. When I tell my literature students and colleagues that I read books by ear they are skeptical. 'Audio books send me to sleep,' they say. 'How do you remember what you read?' they ask. This cynicism is insulting because it implies that blind people cannot engage with literature to the same extent as sighted people. More worryingly, it misses one of the points of prose. All the writers shortlisted for the Man Booker care deeply about how their prose sounds. The content of their book is important, but so is its form. They are all writer-poets who crafted their words for rhythm and rhyme as well as sense. Their audio books are the perfect place to experience the beauty of this prose. Yet they are still seen as less 'authemtic', less 'proper' than the printed 'original'.
Lincoln in the Bardo would not have won an audio Booker because it was almost impossible to follow by ear. Apparently the printed format of the book is 'disconcerting': this is even more the case for the audio version. So much so that I gave up listening twice before I finally got through it. According to audible, the book's 'dazzling chorus of voices' was captured by a '166-person full cast featuring award-winning actors and musicians, as well as a number of Saunders' family, friends, and members of his publishing team'. This may sound impressive in a press-release but it leads to a wholly unfeasible listening experience. Even if I were endowed with the mythical super-hearing erroneously attributed to blind people, I would not be able to recognize and attribute 166 different voices. When I listened I only got the vaguest sense of who was speaking, and I learnt more about the story from audible's synopsis than from what I actually heard. This audio book probably works brilliantly as an accompaniment to or adaptation of the printed novel. But if audio is your own way of accessing this text, then you will be frustrated and alienated by it.
The other 5 shortlisted books all make the much more sensible decision to stick with just one audio narrator. Of these, History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and Elmet by Fiona Mozley are first-person narratives told by adolescents and both are read by audio-narrators whose voices have the age, gender and accent of their book's narrator: a young North American woman (Caitlin Thornburn) for Wolves and a young Northern English man (Gareth Bennett-Ryan) for Elmet. The fit between fictional and audio voices creates a close bond between listener and storyteller because both audio-narrators do an excellent job of capturing the tone of their protagonists. I am sure that my listening experience of these two novels was more captivating and immersive than that of my sight-reliant peers.
Ali Smith's Autumn is written in the third person, but much of the story is told from the perspective of the novel's protagonist, 32-year-old Elisabeth Demand, using free indirect style. The audio-narrator, Melody Grove, sounds close to Elisabeth in age and provenance, but she also manages to capture other key characters such as 8-year-old Elisabeth, Daniel, and Elisabeth's mother using changes in tone and inflection. Autumn works as an audio book because it has several underlying thematic threads which hold it together; it felt like the audio-narrator understands this and cleverly emphasizes them in her reading.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is also written in the third person but it is less successful than Autumn because it has not one but two protagonists: Nadia and Saeed. The presence of two characters of different genders makes the choice of audio-narrator difficult. If a male narrator is chosen, there is a risk that the listener feels closer to Saeed's story, whereas a female narrator will create a bond which favours Nadia's perspective. In the end, anglo-Indian actor Ashley Kumar was probably cast as audio-narrator because his voice resonates with both the novel's context and the author's persona. Despite the captivating and timely story, and the characters' powerful portrayals, I felt a distance between audio narrator and listener in this book which I did not experience in Autumn.
At 37 hours long, Paul Auster's 4321 takes about as long to listen to as the other 5 put together, and what a delight it was. 4321 is the only shortlisted book entirely narrated by its author. (Apparently George Saunders is one of Lincoln's 166 voices but I couldn't tell which one). When it is done well, as it is here, author-narration works brilliantly. No-one understands how a book should sound better than its author. I was seduced by Auster's narration of Ferguson's lives from very early on in the narrative. Not only did his voice match the main character's personas, his intimate knowledge of the text added a dimension of fluency and connection which brought another layer of emotion and understanding to the reading experience. For this reason, 4321 would be my audio Booker winner, with History of Wolves, Elmet and Autumn close behind.
As more and more people choose audio books over print versions, it seems crucial to include an audio reader among the Man Booker judges. I would happily volunteer.
Showing posts with label library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label library. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 October 2017
Thursday, 7 September 2017
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
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.
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.
Friday, 13 June 2014
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).
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:
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:
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.
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.
Tuesday, 16 July 2013
Where has (all the) Braille gone?
The Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles (INJA) in Paris was the first recorded school for the blind and it is still operating today. The Institut, which was founded by Valentin Hauy in 1784, moved to its current location on Blvd des Invalides in 1843. Louis Braille was a pupil, and then a teacher, at the Institut and developed his famous reading and writing system there between 1821 and 1825.
Given the crucial role played by the Institut in blind history, it seemed fitting that the opening evening of the History of Blindness and the Blind Conference would be held there. After spending the afternoon learning about the tactile inventions of Hauy, Braille and Foucaud at the neighbouring Musee Valentin Hauy (rue Duroc) it was a real pleasure to be shown around this venerable institution. I have walked past the Institut many times en route to the Valentin Hauy archive but this was the first time I had found my way inside.
As I admired the original architecture, peeked through the door of the classroom where Braille taught, and flicked through books in the library, I wondered how much has changed at INJA since the British aristocrat Sir Francis Head described the School in 1851. In his charming collections of sketches of Parisian places, A Faggot of French Sticks (available to read on googlebooks) Head describes his visit to the Institut in absorbing detail. He is particularly taken with the Braille writing and reading system which the boys are proud to demonstrate and he is very interested in the music lessons which he overhears. Even though his unseen observations of the blind girls at work has something voyeuristic about it, I like his description because it is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Unlike many nineteenth-century writers I have come across, he does not linger over the pitiful afflictions of the pupils or the tragedy of their condition. Instead he recounts how they get around the school unguided with an admirable absence of condescension or astonishment.
Head's comments are memorable because they reveal an approach to the blind which is more enlightened than many present day attitudes. It would never occur to him to ask 'are you coping?' for example. Part of this positive attitude may come from the fact that Head had recently been diagnosed with an eye condition: 'blephamphthalie' for which he was receiving treatment in Paris. But perhaps part of it also comes from the happy and healthy atmosphere of the Institut itself.
During my visit to INJA I was struck most of all by the absence of Braille. In our local mainstream secondary school which my (sighted) children will probably attend when they are older, there are Braille labels outside all the classrooms. But I found no such helpful signage in INJA's buildings. I came across no Braille books in the library and the only tactile objects in the classrooms were maps and globes. I was expecting INJA to be a haven for Braille users, a place where Braille proliferates, but instead it was, for all its blind history, an oddly Braille-free zone. The teachers were vague about its absence. They cited lack of funding and the fact that after a few weeks at the school students find their way around just fine. It also seems that advances in computer technologies mean that children are less willing to learn Braille because they no longer rely on it to read and write.
But that is hardly the point. Braille is still the universal language of the blind. If we want to see Braille used in the sighted world as a matter of course in public places like restaurants, museums and hotels, then surely the first School for the Blind should lead by example. Surely an Institut devoted to the education of the blind should have a political investment in the proliferation of Braille?. As I felt for the Brailled number 7 button in my dingy hotel lift, I wondered what Head would have said if he could have returned to INJA today.
Given the crucial role played by the Institut in blind history, it seemed fitting that the opening evening of the History of Blindness and the Blind Conference would be held there. After spending the afternoon learning about the tactile inventions of Hauy, Braille and Foucaud at the neighbouring Musee Valentin Hauy (rue Duroc) it was a real pleasure to be shown around this venerable institution. I have walked past the Institut many times en route to the Valentin Hauy archive but this was the first time I had found my way inside.
As I admired the original architecture, peeked through the door of the classroom where Braille taught, and flicked through books in the library, I wondered how much has changed at INJA since the British aristocrat Sir Francis Head described the School in 1851. In his charming collections of sketches of Parisian places, A Faggot of French Sticks (available to read on googlebooks) Head describes his visit to the Institut in absorbing detail. He is particularly taken with the Braille writing and reading system which the boys are proud to demonstrate and he is very interested in the music lessons which he overhears. Even though his unseen observations of the blind girls at work has something voyeuristic about it, I like his description because it is refreshingly matter-of-fact. Unlike many nineteenth-century writers I have come across, he does not linger over the pitiful afflictions of the pupils or the tragedy of their condition. Instead he recounts how they get around the school unguided with an admirable absence of condescension or astonishment.
Head's comments are memorable because they reveal an approach to the blind which is more enlightened than many present day attitudes. It would never occur to him to ask 'are you coping?' for example. Part of this positive attitude may come from the fact that Head had recently been diagnosed with an eye condition: 'blephamphthalie' for which he was receiving treatment in Paris. But perhaps part of it also comes from the happy and healthy atmosphere of the Institut itself.
During my visit to INJA I was struck most of all by the absence of Braille. In our local mainstream secondary school which my (sighted) children will probably attend when they are older, there are Braille labels outside all the classrooms. But I found no such helpful signage in INJA's buildings. I came across no Braille books in the library and the only tactile objects in the classrooms were maps and globes. I was expecting INJA to be a haven for Braille users, a place where Braille proliferates, but instead it was, for all its blind history, an oddly Braille-free zone. The teachers were vague about its absence. They cited lack of funding and the fact that after a few weeks at the school students find their way around just fine. It also seems that advances in computer technologies mean that children are less willing to learn Braille because they no longer rely on it to read and write.
But that is hardly the point. Braille is still the universal language of the blind. If we want to see Braille used in the sighted world as a matter of course in public places like restaurants, museums and hotels, then surely the first School for the Blind should lead by example. Surely an Institut devoted to the education of the blind should have a political investment in the proliferation of Braille?. As I felt for the Brailled number 7 button in my dingy hotel lift, I wondered what Head would have said if he could have returned to INJA today.
Monday, 13 May 2013
On Giving Directions to the Blind
Last week I visited the RNIB to use their research library. I had found a couple of promising nineteenth-century texts through their online catalogue and as I had to be in London on Friday anyway, I made an appointment and requested the materials.
As this was my first visit to Judd Street I was looking forward to seeing how visiting an overtly blind-friendly environment differed from my usual experiences. I find going to unfamiliar places challenging and disorienting and usually need some help to find my way around at first. But surely the RNIB would be different?
I planned my route from King's Cross using the excellent map I found on the RNIB website. As well as giving street names in large print, it has useful landmarks like shops, traffic lights and post boxes marked on it too. Even though I'd never been there before I easily found my way to the well-signed entrance.
But once I was inside things were less clear. At a desk which I took to be Reception I gave my name and asked directions to the research library. The response I received was not quite what I was expecting: 'Just through there' said the receptionist, pointing vaguely. As I don't find visual gestures very enlightening, I asked for a bit more detail: 'It's just down there' wasn't quite the response I was hoping for.
Nonplussed by this less-than-helpful welcome, I headed into what I now know is the shop and asked the next person I came across for directions. He didn't appear to know that the RNIB had a research library, but his colleague helpfully told me to walk round to my left until I came to a low desk. Finally a set of directions that I could relate to! I collected my documents and spent a happy couple of hours reading about Victorian visitors to the Institute for the Blind in Paris.
But my mind kept wandering back to my disappointing welcome. How was it that the UK's leading charity for blind people was so resolutely reliant on the visual? I had been expecting tactile floor guides, Braille notices and an abundance of aural clues. Instead I was given a welcome that compared pretty unfavourably with the help I get in most 'sighted' environments.
At first I was shocked and upset that the RNIB of all people weren't doing more to challenge the hierarchy of the senses. But then I had a thought. One of the main aims of the RNIB is to help those with sight loss come to terms with their condition. They believe in 'rehabilitation' 'adaptation' and 'quality of life'. So perhaps their unhelpful welcome was not a result of ignorance or lack of imagination. Maybe it was a rather abrupt way of reminding me that it is my responsibility to adjust to the resolutely visual world in which I find myself.
As this was my first visit to Judd Street I was looking forward to seeing how visiting an overtly blind-friendly environment differed from my usual experiences. I find going to unfamiliar places challenging and disorienting and usually need some help to find my way around at first. But surely the RNIB would be different?
I planned my route from King's Cross using the excellent map I found on the RNIB website. As well as giving street names in large print, it has useful landmarks like shops, traffic lights and post boxes marked on it too. Even though I'd never been there before I easily found my way to the well-signed entrance.
But once I was inside things were less clear. At a desk which I took to be Reception I gave my name and asked directions to the research library. The response I received was not quite what I was expecting: 'Just through there' said the receptionist, pointing vaguely. As I don't find visual gestures very enlightening, I asked for a bit more detail: 'It's just down there' wasn't quite the response I was hoping for.
Nonplussed by this less-than-helpful welcome, I headed into what I now know is the shop and asked the next person I came across for directions. He didn't appear to know that the RNIB had a research library, but his colleague helpfully told me to walk round to my left until I came to a low desk. Finally a set of directions that I could relate to! I collected my documents and spent a happy couple of hours reading about Victorian visitors to the Institute for the Blind in Paris.
But my mind kept wandering back to my disappointing welcome. How was it that the UK's leading charity for blind people was so resolutely reliant on the visual? I had been expecting tactile floor guides, Braille notices and an abundance of aural clues. Instead I was given a welcome that compared pretty unfavourably with the help I get in most 'sighted' environments.
At first I was shocked and upset that the RNIB of all people weren't doing more to challenge the hierarchy of the senses. But then I had a thought. One of the main aims of the RNIB is to help those with sight loss come to terms with their condition. They believe in 'rehabilitation' 'adaptation' and 'quality of life'. So perhaps their unhelpful welcome was not a result of ignorance or lack of imagination. Maybe it was a rather abrupt way of reminding me that it is my responsibility to adjust to the resolutely visual world in which I find myself.
Friday, 16 November 2012
Blindness in Fiction 3: Ratburger
I have always loved being read to. Recently I have got into the habit of snuggling up with my boys as their Dad reads their bedtime story. We are going through a bit of a David Walliams phase at the moment. I was sceptical at first, after all, celebrities do not always make good writers, but I've been delighted with all his books, and so have my boys. They are inventive and exciting tales which are suffused with a gritty realism which makes them thought-provoking as well as entertaining. We were the first people to borrow Ratburger from the local library and were soon gripped by its appealing mixture of comedy and yuckiness.
Spoiler alert!
As its title suggests, the novel features an evil fast-food seller-cum-pest control operative who turns rats into burgers (and cockroaches into ketchup). He is a horrible character who oozes filth, grease and murderous nastiness. He is also completely blind.
When the novel's heroine, Zoe, first discovers the rat-catcher's secret blindness, which he successfully conceals until chapter 24 (promisingly entitled 'Childburger'), my first reaction was anger. I thought that in a cheap trick borrowed from the horror film genre, Walliams was using blindness as shorthand for evil. There are hardly any blind characters in fiction, and almost none in children's literature. Most children who read Ratburger will never have met or even seen an actual blind person. All they know about blindness is what they learn from books, films and tv. And children's television is not exactly brimming with positive blind role models. So I worried that this association of blindness with evil will plant a seed of suspicion and terror in the minds of children. Blindness will forever be associated with sinister, creepy characters who are out to hurt innocent little girls. Burt's blindness stuck me as a gratuitous slur on the blind, particularly as it is not necessary to the plot. True, his uncanny sense of smell does make it harder for Zoe to hide from him in the warehouse, but he would have had just as much impact had he been sighted.
It would be easy to leave my critique there. But I'm not a fan of the kind of political correctness which demands that disabled people are always presented in a positive light. Of course there are evil blind people just as there are evil sighted ones. And Burt does shatter at least one myth of disability: there is no way that he can be described as a victim. He is neither passive nor self-pitying and has not let his blindness prevent him from pursuing his somewhat unsavoury career. He navigates exclusively through his sense of smell and even drives a van (albeit with sometimes disastrous results). If children are influenced by the images of disability they are exposed to, at least they won't grow up thinking that the disabled are helpless and should be pitied.
Burt is a deeply unattractive character. For me, his most unappealing characteristic is neither his questionable food hygiene nor his violent streak but the fact that he is ashamed of his blindness. He hides his empty eye sockets behind dark glasses and does everything he can to 'pass' as 'normal'. As Zoe points out, he refuses traditional trappings of blindness like a white cane or a dog. Burt hates his own blindness so much that he goes to considerable lengths to hide it. In fact his own self-loathing might well explain why he is so horrible to everyone he meets. By killing off this blind blindness-hater, Walliams is actually doing something remarkably positive for blindness. He is saying that hiding one's difference, being ashamed of one's own physicality is an easy route to misery and self-destruction. Burt does not die because he is blind, but his death is caused at least in part by his unhealthy attitude to his own blindness. By letting this character die in such a gruesome way, I'd like to think that Walliams is implicitly criticising a society whose occulocentrism is such that sight loss becomes something to be ashamed of, denied or hidden. Maybe in a future book, Walliams will give us a character who is proud to be blind. Now that really would be a book I'd like my children to hear..
Friday, 20 July 2012
Clash of the Canes
Clash of the Canes:
Old Cane goes right to left, New Cane left to right.
So on my most recent visit to Paris I decided to treat myself to a new white cane. It felt good to be taking the decision to buy one (as one might buy a new handbag or hat), rather than having one thrust upon me at the taxpayer's expense and with no discussion of accessorisation. Fellow cane user Cathy Kudlick had told me that the Association Valentin Hauy sold some remarkably stylish French canes, and she was right. I tried three different ones and settled on a thin, sleek and lightweight model with a nifty folding device and a comfortable, yet attractive handle.
The following day I was walking home from the library. As I passed a particularly busy pavement cafe, something black and person-shaped zoomed out in front of me and I heard an oddly familiar sound. My new cane makes a comforting rattle as it goes along and the sound I heard was of another, similar, rattle, colliding with my own. Another cane user had come out of the cafe and our two canes had clashed. I didn't know whether to laugh or apologise so I clumsily did both. He grumpily accepted my apology as i would grudgingly accept an apology from someone who had carelessly walked into me because they weren't looking where they were going. I realised then that he hadn't noticed that I too had a cane. How embarrassing to be mistaken for an unobservant sighted person! I can't imagine what the beer and kir drinkers in the cafe must have made of our bizarre encounter.
In the heat of the moment I didn't explain his mistake, but gathered my wits and my cane and moved out of his way. Off he went down the pavement, oblivious to my own blindness and the things we might have had in common. I wish now that I'd gone after him and introduced myself. But I like to think that maybe one day he'll come across this blog and recognise himself.
Monday, 4 June 2012
Reading the White Cane
What does my white cane mean? I have enough sight to notice the sideways glances my cane attracts. (This post by another 'blind blogger' gives a great idea of what cane users can see). I don't use my cane all the time and quite often carry it neatly folded in my bag. So it must look odd when I unfold it and transform from sighted to blind.
So why do I only use it sometimes? And what does my using it signify?
After dark or around steps and other obstacles I use my cane to feel my way around. I sweep it in a wide arc in front of me to find kerbs, bollards, puddles and lamp posts. This is the kind of cane-use most readily associated with the blind but it is not the most important way I use my cane.
I have a long cane but mostly I use it as a symbol cane. (You know that a cane is being used in this way when it is carried so that it does not touch the ground). When held like this my cane has no practical function: it is purely symbolic, a sign saying "I don't see as well as you so you might like to move out of my way / use non-visual ways of communicating with me / expect me to step off the pavement in front of you if you are a car or bike / tell me who you are even if I know you really well or we had a conversation this morning." I tend to use my cane like this in busy or unfamiliar places and / or when I'm on my own. I'll always have it with me at conferences, in stations, airports, supermarkets and busy city streets. Once I took it with me to the library. This turned out to be pretty confusing for the librarian who couldn't quite grasp the fact that I needed help finding a book but that I was more than capable of reading it. I can see why my cane might cause a kind of interpretive panic: after all, I clearly have some sight (otherwise why bother with bifocals?) Stereotypical images of the blind always feature a white cane but actually only about 5% of cane-users have no sight at all. So a symbol cane says "I am happy to acknowledge my blindness to the world and in return you can feel free to talk to me about it."
It is a kind of visual shorthand which not only signals blindness, but also signals a willingness to talk about it. It is an offer of a conversation as well as permission to offer help. The problem is that the general public don't always know what my cane is trying to say. So every time I take my cane out and about I try and tell someone what it means. And now you know too.
So why do I only use it sometimes? And what does my using it signify?
After dark or around steps and other obstacles I use my cane to feel my way around. I sweep it in a wide arc in front of me to find kerbs, bollards, puddles and lamp posts. This is the kind of cane-use most readily associated with the blind but it is not the most important way I use my cane.
I have a long cane but mostly I use it as a symbol cane. (You know that a cane is being used in this way when it is carried so that it does not touch the ground). When held like this my cane has no practical function: it is purely symbolic, a sign saying "I don't see as well as you so you might like to move out of my way / use non-visual ways of communicating with me / expect me to step off the pavement in front of you if you are a car or bike / tell me who you are even if I know you really well or we had a conversation this morning." I tend to use my cane like this in busy or unfamiliar places and / or when I'm on my own. I'll always have it with me at conferences, in stations, airports, supermarkets and busy city streets. Once I took it with me to the library. This turned out to be pretty confusing for the librarian who couldn't quite grasp the fact that I needed help finding a book but that I was more than capable of reading it. I can see why my cane might cause a kind of interpretive panic: after all, I clearly have some sight (otherwise why bother with bifocals?) Stereotypical images of the blind always feature a white cane but actually only about 5% of cane-users have no sight at all. So a symbol cane says "I am happy to acknowledge my blindness to the world and in return you can feel free to talk to me about it."
It is a kind of visual shorthand which not only signals blindness, but also signals a willingness to talk about it. It is an offer of a conversation as well as permission to offer help. The problem is that the general public don't always know what my cane is trying to say. So every time I take my cane out and about I try and tell someone what it means. And now you know too.
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
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.
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