Hannah Thompson

The French Metanarrative of Blindness

Thompson surveys literary depictions of blindness which reinforce the “metanarrative of blindness” discussed by David Bolt. She shows how Maupassant’s short story ‘The Blind Man’ evokes the blindness-ignorance and blindness-darkness synonymies whilst also using nominalization and generalization to dehumanize its protagonist. In a detailed and insightful analysis of a selection of French novels, she shows how blind male characters are represented as weaker, less active and less able to access language than their non-blind peers. Female blind characters, on the other hand, are often portrayed as meek and passive victims of their condition. Non-blind characters routinely trick, pity and manipulate blind characters in these typhlophobic fictions of blindness. The chapter ends with an analysis of Andre Gide’s The Pastorale Symphony, which shows how myths of the blind mystic and of sensory compensation emphasize blind protagonists’ otherness.

Silenced Sexualities: Listening to the Voice of the Blind Woman

Thompson shows that, unlike the examples of blind male desire discussed in Chap. 5, the voices of blind female characters are much harder to hear. Blind female protagonists often remain silent in their texts: they are frequently unspeaking objects of the sighted male gaze and, when they do speak, their words are often filtered through the voice of the male narrator. Thompson’s detailed readings of Therese-Adele Husson’s Reflections and Didier van Van Cauwelaert’s Jules shows how it is possible for a blind woman to subvert many of the stereotypes of blindness in order to express herself.

Non-visual Language and Descriptive Blindness

This chapter considers works by Herve Guibert, Jean Giono, Romain Villet and Lucien Descaves which use blind characters to sensitize the reader to the descriptive power of non-visual language. In Blindsight, Guibert uses visually impenetrable language to stimulate his readers’ other senses, whereas in The Song of the World, Giono mobilizes the presence of a blind character to signal his use of non-visual description throughout the novel. Thompson’s detailed reading of Descaves’ extraordinary novel of blindness, The Trapped, reveals not only that non-visual description is a highly effective way of communicating with a non-blind reader but that Descaves includes Braille in his novel in order to temporarily exclude his sighted readers.

The Creative “Look” of the Blind “Seer”

This chapter considers works by Herve Guibert, Jean Giono, Romain Villet and Lucien Descaves which use blind characters to sensitise the reader to the descriptive power of non-visual language. In Blindsight, Guibert uses visually impenetrable language to stimulate his readers’ other senses whereas in The Song of the World, Giono mobilises the presence of a blind character to signal his use of non-visual description throughout the novel. Thompson’s detailed reading of Descaves’ extraordinary novel of blindness, The Trapped, reveals not only that non-visual description is a highly effective way of communicating with a non-blind reader, but that Descaves includes braille in his novel in order to temporarily exclude his sighted readers.

Science, Fantasy and (In)Visible Blindness

In this final chapter, Thompson shows how science fiction’s fascination with invisibility tells us more about blindness than it does about vision. Taking Maurice Renard as her main example, Thompson provides detailed readings of The Blue Peril and The Doctored Man which show that rather than reinforcing the supremacy of vision in the hierarchy of the senses, narratives which present us with different ways of seeing can in fact be read as celebrations of the powers and possibilities of blindness.

Male Desire and the Paradox of Blind Sexuality

In the first part, Thompson uses readings of scenes of castration and pornographic pleasure from Herve Guibert’s Blindsight and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye to suggest that both authors undermine the traditional dominance of the voyeuristic male gaze. In the second part, she explores how the non-visual eroticism suggested by the blindness-castration association is manifested in the descriptions of blind male desire found in Lucien Descaves’s The Trapped and Romain Villet’s Look.

De simple malade j'étais devenu un handicapé: Interrogating the Construction of 'Disability' in Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le scaphandre et le papillon

Abstract: This article explores how Le scaphandre et le papillon combines reflections on life with Locked-In Syndrome and memories from Bauby’s “première vie” to create an evocative depiction of his shift in subject-position from ‘non-disabled’ to ‘disabled’. It argues that his autopathography challenges outdated notions of disability by celebrating its creative and intellectual potential.

Dirt, Disintegration, and Disappointment: Sex and the City of Paris

Abstract The flâneur is intrinsically associated with nineteenth-century Paris through the work of Baudelaire and Benjamin. But his antithetical relationship with the dirt and chaos which characterized Paris during Haussmannization distances him from the often sordid realities of the nineteenth-century city. Two other figures — the failed flâneur and the urban planner — have a more intense relationship with the physical and metaphorical dirt which embodies the nineteenth-century city. The Parisian wanderings of Frédéric Moreau and Aristide Saccard demonstrate that dirt functions as much more than an inconvenient by-product, or a marker of contingency. Instead, it is a means of both representing and commenting on the relationship between passion and place, between sex and city, which is mapped in the nineteenth-century novel.

Book Reviews and Short Notices

Pierre Bayard’s work is an examination of the reasons why the new way of reading invented by him some fifteen years ago – which he calls ‘la littérature appliquée’, whereby he attempts to use literature to illuminate our understanding of psychoanalysis – has irredeemably failed. Bayard begins his discussion with an analysis of the opening section of the Iliad in which he shows how the differing kinds of anger manifested by Achilles and Agamemnon can be read and analysed using the tools of psychoanalysis. According to him, psychoanalysis is used by scholars as a means of either attributing an unconscious meaning to a literary text or showing how the author of the text has somehow pre-empted modern psychoanalytic theories in his treatment of the characters and their desires. Bayard developed his theory of ‘la littérature appliquée’ as a reaction against precisely this kind of psychoanalytic reading. In this book, he endeavours to show how conventional psychoanalysis fails adequately to listen to what the text is saying about human psychology precisely because its imposition of an external model prevents the text from being appreciated as an original contribution to our understanding of the mind. Bayard’s critique of ‘la psychanalyse appliquée’ presents a useful survey of recent trends in (mainly French) psychoanalytic thought, which are ultimately rejected in favour of his own method. En route he offers astute readings of a wide range of writers including Laclos, La Rochefoucauld, Chrétien de Troyes, Maupassant, Henry James, Proust, André Breton, Sartre, Flaubert, Pascal, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Sarraute, whose texts defy psychoanalysis and yet attempt to map the workings of the human mind. Rather than adopting a progress-driven approach to models of reading in which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dominate, Bayard advocates an appreciation of other psychological models which are found in earlier texts and dismissed as inferior by the practitioners of literary psychoanalysis. To this end he conceives of his project as a symbolic death of the father, in which he rejects Freud’s influence on literary analysis. At times radical and always thought-provoking and entertaining, Bayard’s detailed investigation of why his notion of ‘la littérature appliquée’ works as a way of reading in theory but not in practice represents a fascinating meditation on the nature of academic enquiry, textual interpretation, the reading process and the problems of