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

"A Hand of the Blind Venture Forth" : The Grope, the Grip, and Haptic Perception

67 “A Hand of the Blind Ventures Forth” The Grope, the Grip, and Haptic Perception If we wish to be unprejudiced in our actions and attitudes, then we do our utmost to resist metanarratives that perpetuate negative stereotypes. That is an undeniable fact. Yet so-called positive stereotyping too frequently remains unchallenged or unnoticed. Extraordinary senses constitute the most obvious example of ostensibly positive stereotyping that, even in our own century, is often aimed at people who have visual impairments. That these lingering stereotypes appear as tropes in twentieth-century literary representation is illustrated in, for instance, James Joyce’s exemplary Modernist novel, Ulysses (1922), when Leopold Bloom ponders the blind stripling’s lack of visual perception: “Of course the other senses are more” (173).1 But despite the representational frequency of this assumption , as noted in Berthold Lowenfeld’s mid-twentieth-century investigation , “The Case for the Exceptional” (1946), not one of the studies that compare the sensory acuities of people who have visual impairments and people who do not have visual impairments reveals any superiority of the former (207). People who have visual impairments may well “learn to use such capacities more effectively,” states a later twentieth-century study, but “compensation is not automatic; rather, it is the product of persistent practice” (Kirtley 141). What the present book brings to this conversation is the contention that, more than being inaccurate, cultural representations of extraordinary senses serve, at best, to render magical the talent and achievements of people who have visual impairments and, at worst, to justify the ascription of various animallike characteristics. 68 • the metanarrative of blindness Drawing on notions of extraordinary senses in a way that parallels the stereotype of the piano tuner mentioned at the start of the book, another career-based assumption that illustrates the metanarrative of blindness is that those of us who have visual impairments will necessarily make good physiotherapists. Of course some people who have visual impairments might choose, or may have chosen, to follow this particular occupational path, and that is all well and good. But there is a real problem in the assumption that visual impairment is a necessary or indeed sufficient condition of the physiotherapist. Any such assumption is predicated on the stereotypical notion of extraordinary touch, tropological manifestations of which are far from subtle. I make this assertion because blind characters are often ascribed a sense of touch that is grotesque, a grope or even a monstrous grip, rather than simply a means of perception. Owing to the consequential connotations of lecherousness and fear, the implication is that more than being symbolically castrated, as Jacques Derrida points out, the blind have come to present “a sort of phalloid image, an unveiled sex from head to toe, vaguely obscene and disturbing ” (Memoirs of the Blind 106). This cultural construct resonates with concerns considered in chapter 3—namely, masturbation mania and the eugenic anxieties that were manifest in the strict policy of sex segregation in early twentieth-century institutes for the blind. The thing is that lurking behind the symbolic castration is a specter of hypersexuality, an animalistic lack of control that sometimes becomes manifest in extraordinary senses. Inexploringthebizarrenessofextraordinarysenses,especiallynotions around haptic perception, this chapter returns repeatedly to Ulysses but also draws on James Kelman’s more recent stream of consciousness, the vernacular variant found in How Late It Was, How Late (1994). Kelman provides a portrayal of blindness that is told from the perspective of the newly blinded protagonist, Sammy Samuels, and as such contrasts harshly with Joyce’s rendering of the blind stripling, a purely peripheral character framed in the internal monologue of Leopold Bloom. But common to both novels is the Modernist myth of independence: Joyce’s blind stripling is covertly slated for the kind of dependence from which Kelman’s Sammy strives to escape. This myth is entangled with the pseudo-science of eugenics, for the Sterilisation Law was developed by Harry Laughlin in 1922 and targeted, among others, the blind and economically dependent (Kühl 39). As the findings of the chapter become more malevolent, therefore, I also turn to a couple of classic science fiction texts, the famous eugenicist H. G. Wells’s short story “The Country “A Hand of the Blind Ventures Forth” • 69 of the Blind” (1904) and, what must be its best-known successor, John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951). Both works envisage societies in...