Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789–2013

200 Pages·2017·1.39 MB·English

by  Hannah Thompson (auth.)

IMAGE
REVIEWING
BLINDNESS IN
FRENCH FICTION,
1789—2013
HANNAH THOMPSON
Literary Disability Studies
Series editors
David Bolt
Faculty of Education
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK
Elizabeth Donaldson
New York Institute of Technology
New York, USA
Julia Miele Rodas
Bronx Community College
City University of New York
Montclair, NY, USA
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Hannah Thompson
Reviewing Blindness
in French Fiction,
1789–2013
Hannah Thompson
School of Modern Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Royal Holloway, University of London
London, UK
Literary Disability Studies
ISBN 978-1-137-43510-1 ISBN 978-1-137-43511-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43511-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937726
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A
cknowledgements
This book is dedicated to all those who attended the conference and
micro-arts festival Blind Creations (https://blindcreations.blogspot.
co.uk/) which took place at Royal Holloway, University of London in
June 2015. Thank you for contributing to this extraordinary, life-chang-
ing, life-affirming and unforgettable event.
Je dédie ce livre à ceux et celles qui sont venu(e)s à Blind Creations:
ce rendez-vous extraordinaire que j’ai adoré, qui a changé ma vie et que
je n’oublierai jamais.
Many people have helped me with this book in many ways. My
warmest thanks go especially to Tammy Berberi, Marion Chottin,
Ruth Cruickshank, Nancy Hansen, Georgina Kleege, Cathy Kudlick,
Luc Maumet, Selina Mills, Noelle Roy, Céline Roussel, Matt Rubery,
Rebecca Scales, Jacques Semelin, Henri-Jacques Stiker, Heather Tilley,
Kate Tunstall, Soline Vennetier, Romain Villet, Vanessa Warne and Zina
Weygand. Thanks too to all my friends and colleagues in the School of
Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, to my
FR 3124 students and, of course, to Simon, Raffy and Zak.
v
A Note on Translations
All the analysis in this study is based on close readings of the original
French texts. Where published English translations of the texts are read-
ily available I have used them to provide translations directly after the
quotations from the original and listed them in the References. At the
end of each quotation, the page number of the original French is fol-
lowed by the page number of the English translation, if applicable. All
other translations are my own.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 The French Metanarrative of Blindness 17
3 The Creative “Look” of the Blind “Seer” 41
4 Non-visual Language and Descriptive Blindness 57
5 Male Desire and the Paradox of Blind Sexuality 89
6 Silenced Sexualities: Listening to the Voice
of the Blind Woman 117
7 Blind Assassins 145
8 Science, Fantasy and (In)Visible Blindness 165
9 Conclusion 187
Works Cited 191
Index 197
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
(Re)Viewing Blindness
Tout être humain, pour humble qu’il soit, n’est-il pas un monde mysté-
rieux, digne d’exciter la curiosité d’un conteur d’histoires?
(“Is not each human being, however humble, a mysterious world worthy
of arousing the curiosity of a teller of tales?” Prévost 21)
French literature is fascinated by visions of blindness. When the narra-
tor of Marcel Prévost’s 1905 novel L’Accordeur aveugle (The Blind
Piano Tuner) meets the eponymous Saint-Florent, he is immediately
intrigued by the narrative potential of this mysterious figure. His fasci-
nated reaction to the blind man, which is demonstrated in the combi-
nation of curiosity and creativity found in the above quotation, testifies
to the narrator’s interest in both hearing and retelling the blind man’s
story. But it can also be read as a broader comment on the complicated
relationship between writers, readers and fictions of blindness, which
will be the subject of this study. Blindness is a mysterious phenomenon.
It arouses curiosity and invites discussion. It is also a multilayered and
multifaceted collection of narratives. Writers are drawn to blindness pre-
cisely because blindness itself is a collection of stories. The stereotypes,
clichés and misconceptions which constitute what most non-blind peo-
ple describe as “blindness” can be understood, following David Bolt, as
a “metanarrative” which permeates literature. For Bolt, this metanarra-
tive of blindness is defined as “the story in relation to which those of us
© The Author(s) 2017 1
H. Thompson, Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789–2013,
Literary Disability Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43511-8_1
2 H. THOMPSON
who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined, an overriding
narrative that seems to displace agency” (The Metanarrative of Blindness
10). According to Pierre Henri, these stereotypical visions of blindness
are so powerful and so convincing that they contaminate non-blind peo-
ple’s view of what blindness is, even when empirical evidence, such as
contact with an actual blind person, works to prove them wrong (32).
Whilst many French depictions of blindness reinforce and conform to
the various strands of the mostly negative metanarrative analysed by Bolt,
this study will focus primarily on those more positive depictions which
question, undermine or deconstruct the prevailing myths of blindness. In
what follows, I look again at—or re-view—a selection of the most inter-
esting, surprising and moving depictions of blindness in French fiction.
I show that writing about blindness differently is no easy matter. Like
many of the writers I discuss in this study, Prévost’s narrator is initially
taken in by his own preconceptions of blindness. When he first meets
the piano tuner, a man whose very profession is in itself a stereotype of
blindness, he assumes that he is what he appears to be: a man whose
blindness is his defining feature and who is thus deserving of pity; a man
whose blindness has heightened his senses of hearing and touch and
made him particularly suited to the job of piano tuner; a man, in short,
who has lived a lonely and isolated half-life because of his blindness. But
as the narrator listens to the blind man’s extraordinary story of love, loss
and devotion, he comes to realize the error of judging people, and espe-
cially blind people, by their appearance:
Certes, personne n’eut supposé que ce buveur affaissé, insignifiant, qui
dégustait l’eau-de-vie avec tant de gravité, était le héros de l’aventure qui,
tout à l’heure, m’avait touché jusqu’à me tirer presque des larmes—et que
le pauvre Saint-Florent s’était naguère abreuvé aux deux sources les plus
enivrantes de l’émotion humaine: l’art et l’amour.
(“Certainly no one would have suspected that this insignificant and
hunched-up drinker, who was savouring his brandy with such seriousness,
was the hero of the adventure which had earlier moved me almost to tears,
and that this poor Saint-Florent had once quenched his thirst at the two
most intoxicating fountains of human emotion: art and love.” 222–223)
Prévost’s tale encourages us to listen carefully to the stories told by and
about blind people. It urges us to explore beneath the superficial and
stereotypical visions of blindness which populate fictional depictions of it.