| May 22nd, 2006 |
In the course of José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, a euphorically pessimistic novel about a sudden and unexplained epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city and country, he makes some remarks about blind people which, in the context of a plague which has left all but one individual without sight, make a lot of sense. His essential argument has to do with solidarity making human society possible, so it seems reasonable to speculate that in a situation where nobody could actually see the Other, human feelings would take second place to a feral need to survive at any cost, which is what we witness throughout the novel.
There are, however, a couple of moments in the book where he seems keen to take it a little bit further and actually state quite baldly that the only reason that blind people have any feelings at all is because we are there to help them out. Which seems a little harsh, and perhaps a bit rich seeing as he himself wears a particularly thick pair of spectacles.
I don’t know if many blind people have read the novel. I did find one comment from a ‘visually impaired’ person who felt that ‘blindness operates in his text as both an intertextual sign and as a referent’, which is of course helpful, but may as far as I know not actually mean very much. Anyhoo. For it to be read widely in the, ahem, ‘blind community’ it would have to be published in Braille, and I don’t think it has been. Maybe, if it ever is, he might one day face a Salman Rushdie-style Fatwah, with copies of his and probably other books being burnt in obviously carefully controlled environments and our TV screens filled with the faces of angry blind people holding up photos of camels and Paris Hilton and proclaiming with fury ‘THIS MAN MUST DIE!’.
I digress. Here, in all it's not-really-worth-reading-if-you-haven't-read-the-book entirety is an essay I recently wrote about the novel, upon reading of the which (?!) they agreed to let me back into University, which is where I’ll be from October and hopefully up until the end of my life in, ooh, dozens of years’ time. I would particularly appreciate hearing any constructive comments from any blind readers out there, but unfortunately my experimentary attempts to make it easier for them by simply writing <'Braille'> <'/Braille'> have sadly proved as fruitless as, erm, my daily diet.
Alors je me tais.
( Read more... )
|
|
|
|
| Top of Page |
Powered by LiveJournal.com |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rwillmsen's journal