The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing

Culturally Assisted Suicide: The Mourning and Melancholia of Blindness Deconstructed

111 Culturally Assisted Suicide The Mourning and Melancholia of Blindness Deconstructed Many self-help books are written to explain how people can “endure” or “triumph over” impairments, observes Michael Davidson, and several figures are deemed exemplary in this respect—as illustrated in chapter 5 with reference to the fictional community named after Mary Keller. This ableist ideology serves both to shape a “fragile sense of embodiment” and to erase the work of those of us who have impairments from birth, not to mention those of us who struggle for “changes in public policy and social attitudes”; it also reinforces the binary system that “divides the world into lives worth living and those that are not,” a division that provokes much debate about physician-assisted suicide (Davidson xvii). The focus in this chapter is the same damning division, but the aspect of ableism under consideration is more specifically ocularnormative. The metanarrative of blindness is underpinned by a binary system that divides the world into lives worth living and those of people who do not perceive by visual means. Implicit in this division is, to employ the terms of Gordon Allport’s model of prejudicial behavior, a kind of extermination, the idea that death is the best way forward for people who have severe visual impairments. Thus, in accordance with Davidson’s definition of a critical disability aesthetics as one that defamiliarizes the entrenched binary system, I deconstruct the tragic suicidal figure who lurks beneath explanations of how people “endure” or “triumph over” impairments. The coinage of the critical term culturally assisted suicide is grounded 112 • the metanarrative of blindness in a multidisciplinary array of sources including autobiography, psychosocial research, and literary representation. For the purpose of this chapter , the traditionally tragic rendering of blindness can be illustrated sufficiently with reference to Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether (1902), a seafaring novel that takes Captain Whalley’s struggle with blindness to the extreme. Yet the suicidal mode of depiction is disrupted by J. M. Synge’s contemporaneous play, The Well of the Saints (1905), which renders not blindness but visual restoration unbearable for the central characters , Martin and Mary Doul. Though explicitly very different, when compared and contrasted, these literary texts both serve to illustrate the complexities of culturally assisted suicide. The outcome is grave not only when Captain Whalley journeys into blindness but also when Martin and Mary escape from sightedness. Such representations illustrate how a chasm is constructed between the blind and the sighted that suggests those of us who have visual impairments are fundamentally distinct from those of us who do not. The Mourning and Melancholia of Blindness As we might say of pretty much any narrative, a transitional phase is included in the metanarrative of blindness, the noteworthy implication being that people end up mourning the loss of vision. There are, according to Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), four “distinguishing mental features” of mourning: an end of interest in the “outside world,” a loss of the “capacity to love,” a general “inhibition” of “activity ,” and “profoundly painful dejection” (252). The trope of blindnesscastration synonymy alone would be enough to align these features with the metanarrative of blindness, as illustrated in chapter 3, so the idea to which we now attend, profoundly painful dejection, only underscores that relevance. An autobiographical rendering of painful dejection can be found when John Hull remembers mourning his loss of vision for four and a half years, “like a long, slow and lingering death” (114). Even after the proposed phase has passed, Hull is “sometimes still afflicted by a sharp sense of grief and loss,” especially in the presence of his children, and anticipates that “many of these feelings will recur,” that he “shall lapse into mourning again and again” (113–14). Such feelings are also documented in the work of a number of twentieth-century social scientists .1 For example, mourning is implicit in the way that some people Culturally Assisted Suicide • 113 who have visual impairments are said to refer to their “dead eyes” (Blank 11). Indeed, the state is sometimes likened to grieving for the death of a loved one: “We may always miss the deceased, but nevertheless we go on living, eventually to regain a reasonable degree of happiness” (Kirtley 35). We might think of the contagiousness motif considered in chapter 5 when reading that, as part of an adjustment process, the mourning is for...