Blindness is not darkness

Although Jorge Luis Borges rarely articulated his experiences as a blind man, he marked out what he called the ‘pathetic moment’ in 1955 when, for the purposes of both reading and writing, he became blind. Far from sudden, in his essay ‘Blindness’ he claims this occurred as a ‘slow nightfall’ (1999a: 474) that allowed him time to reflect upon the irreversibility of his descent into darkness. In other words, Borges, when sighted, anticipated that irreversible dread rift in experience, his impending blindness. For the sighted reader, the blind subject often prompts complex and attendant empathic responses. But following Smith's (1995) distinction, as sighted readers how do we feel for, or with, a subject who is, like Borges, countenancing a blindness yet to come? This chapter critically examines the fascination with blindness, with its asymmetry of curiosity, the allure of articulations of blind experience by blind writers. Is the mechanism one of sympathy, the sharing of the feelings of another (feeling-with), or the more specific projective identification of putting oneself in the place of another, empathy (feeling-for)? Through autobiographical writing, ‘insider’ accounts of blindness or impending blindness, and biographical fragments, the ‘pathetic moment’ recurs in some form through a number of authors and timelines, from Homer to Helen Keller, via Sophocles, Cicero, Milton, and Borges, to the self-styled ‘Blind Traveller’ James Holman.

One argument for the pervasiveness of the trope is that empathy, rather than sympathy, is the primary mechanism at stake. As Knight says of empathy within fiction, ‘the sort of understanding we want to achieve involves us in the imaginative reduplication of how things are for someone else’, and so authors ‘employ the same folk psychology we use to understand and interpret the actions of others around us’ (2006: 272). But as readers of autobiographical accounts of blindness and becoming-blind, what kinds of empathic responses are produced? Rather than mere reduplication, it could be argued, any act of reading involves an asymmetric curiosity. Furthermore, if readers of fictional or autobiographical accounts of blindness and of becoming-blind are themselves sighted, does the inherent asymmetry not become heightened, almost to the point of salaciousness?