Blind Process: Maeterlinck's The Sightless

Blind Process: Maeterlinck's The Sightless ASHLEY TAGGART I intend to look at Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Sightless (Les Aveugles, J 890) as a work which explores the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer . Spencer was "in at the birth" of evolution, as was acknowledged in Origin ofSpecies, and his interpretation of evolutionary ideas (he invented the phrase "survival of the fittest")' had, by Darwin's own admission, a profound effect on their "originator."2 In May Daniels' analysis of Maeterlinck's drama, one work in Spencer's voluminous output is pinpointed as the source of ideas which surface, mutatis mutandis, in the tragicomic one-3cters of Maeterlinck. "Towards 1890 Herbert Spencer's ideas on the Unknowable, set forth in his First Principles, were becoming popular in France.'" This hint, for it is taken no further, may help to resolve what had so antagonised and bewildered that arch-rationalist Max Nordau, namely the inclusion by the symbolists of Darwin and Spencer amongst those whose work influenced their own.4 The situation depicted in The Sightless has a characteristic simplicity: six blind men and six blind women have been led out from their asylum for the day by an old priest. At a clearing in the forest, they stop, and unknown to the others, the priest dies in their midst. Meanwhile, the blind await his return (from what they think is an excursion in search of bread and water) with mounting anxiety. In keeping with Maeterlinck's minimalist principles, opening premise and final denouement prove to be identical. On the one occasion we see the isolation of the blind broken, their calls for help turn out to have been answered by a dog. The "action" consists almost entirely of the group's discovery of the dead man, the dramatic distance travelled being purely ironic. Time and place are circumscribed only to the extent that they remain"open, "A ve,) ancient northern/orest, eternal ofaspect"5 and the eventual "conclusion" (they hear, or imagine that they hear, [rescuing?] footsteps nearby) is left unresolved. Model'll Drama, 37 (1994) 626 Maeterlinck's The Sightless 627 Although there is much anguished debate about whether the footsteps belong to a woman or even a group of searchers, no revelatory clue is afforded us. The blind face an unanswering silence broken only by a child's cry. The prefatory directions to the play go to considerable lengths to place the central group relative to its natural surroundings. Maeterlinck arrays the pieces of the drama as it is to unfold taking care to indicate that, qua symbol, the rocks and animals, the trees of the forest, are here accorded an equal status with the human "protagonists.'~ Of course, the focus of the piece is not "alive" at all, save in the bewildered minds of those who await him. If the priest's "eyes ... no longer gaze at the visible side of eternity" (169), aliI' eyes are drawn to the "ancient northern forest" as revealing forces vastly more durable, and of greater complexity, within which this drama of human incomprehension is embedded. Nevertheless, as the play unwinds one is forced to rcalise that Maeterlinck's natural symbols, despite their prominence, offer no compensatory certainties. His natural phenomena resist any concise metaphorical values we may wish to assign them. For all that, the human agents will remain an incidental and short-lived aspect of the total Gestalt. The "intent silence of the gloomy forest" (169) swallows up the peevish objurgations of the species lost within it, mutes their helpless cries, and resists their desperate efforts to make sense of natural process . Though it emerges later that the priest separated the men from the women, our initial impression is of the set (that is, the ecostructure of the island) as an all-pervasive and determining power, active even in this. To the right, six old blind men are seated upon stones, the stumps a/trees, alld dead leaves. - To the left, separatedjrom them by an uprooted free andfragments of rock, six women, blind a/so, are seatedfacing tire old men. ,.. Grear funereal trees, yews, weeping willows. cypresses, enwrap tllem ill theirfail/iful slradows. Notfar from the priest, a cluster of...