Blindness: The Eye of Henry Green
[In the following essay on Blindness, Brothers examines the themes of the work, concluding that the novel "is a dramatization of the individual's poignant, failed quest for meaning and understanding."]
Henry Green's first novel, Blindness, begun while he was a student at Eton and published at twenty-one while he was still a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, relates the story of a young man of seventeen, John Haye, who aspires to be a writer. On his way home from school John is blinded, his eyes pierced by glass from a window broken by a boy tossing a stone at the train in which John is traveling. Green's critics, reading Blindness through the model of the modern psychological novel, have interpreted the meaning of John's accident as a pivotal point in the interior drama of the self: through his blindness John develops, in Robert Ryf's words, "spiritual sight."
That Green's critics would perceive the interior journey into the self as the structure which yields a coherent meaning for the novel is not surprising. Little happens in the novel: John is frustrated equally by the fussing, awkward attempts of his stepmother, his nurse, and his nanny to care for him; he seeks the company of Joan, a girl of his own age, but their romance, which consists of several walks together, fails because of differences in education and class; John and his mother move to town where John hopes to begin again. Midway through the novel there is a long digression in which Joan's story is told, but little happens to her within the time frame of the novel. Just as the event that was most significant for John is placed "outside" his story—his accident is reported in an excerpt from a classmate's letter, which is set between Parts I and II of the novel—just so, those events which seem most to shape Joan's life occur "offstage" in the historical time that precedes the beginning of the novel. Joan recalls her life with her father in the vicarage before her mother died and he had been defrocked for drunkenness, muses about her life now, and daydreams about the future. The emphasis in the narration of her story as in John's falls not on the events but on her reflections on the events in her life. The light and dark symbolism that pervades the novel, the watery imagery—the novel ends with John "rising through the mist, blown on a gust of love, lifting up, straining at a white light that he would bathe in"—seem also an obvious (rather too obvious for some of Green's critics) signal that the unfolding development in the novel is of the self, climaxed by its rebirth.
Such a reading of Blindness receives further support from the allusion of Crime and Punishment. John writes in the last two of his diary entries (Part I of the novel covers a span of nearly two years during which John is a student at Noat) of the "profound effect" his reading of Crime and Punishment has had on him. The superior attitude that John expresses throughout his diary toward his fellow students and masters at school coupled with the emphasis given to Crime and Punishment suggests that John's blindness is intended to be an agent through which John's pride is chastened and his imaginative eye is opened to a more charitable and empathetic view of his fellow man. The literary device of the diary, like the one of Stephen Dedalus with which A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concludes, gives credence to John's intention to explore himself and his world through his own language. As if to confirm that he intends us to read the narrative as tracing the inner journey that leads to discovery of the creative, autonomous but empathetic self, Green progressively labels the parts—"Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly." Both Kingsley Weatherhead and John Russell, two of Green's earliest admirers and critics, have presented detailed readings of Blindness as a Künstlerroman.
My purpose in this essay, unlike that of many essays which seek to offer a reinterpretation of a work of art, is not to demonstrate that John's life cannot be read as Weatherhead, Russell, and Ryf suggest. Their readings, however, seem to me "blind" in the same sense that Blindness demonstrates all interpretations are "blind"; their interpretations are presented as "privileged" readings. But Blindness dramatizes that there is no way to stand outside of time and space, self and event, to render a statement of meaning that is "true." Because of the ironic questioning of sign and meaning that recurs throughout the novel, readers must remain unsure if, in asserting that John has come through his spiritual initiation or any other statement of thematic development, they have not imposed rather than discovered the schema of the novel. While the interpretative stance I have taken is commonplace today among reader-response and deconstructionalist critics, Green was considered critically naïve when he told his readers in "The English Novel of the Future" in 1950 that "there can be no precise meaning" in novels; novels will, of necessity, mean different things to different readers.
Rather than perceiving Green's statements on novel writing as indicating a new direction for his novels—in the future his narratives would be deliberately ambiguous and inconclusive, I believe they are better perceived as a commentary on the novels he wrote. In Blindness, Green had, in fact, written a novel which, both through the creating of the tale and through the credo of his artist-hero, had announced to his readers that the ways in which they make sense of their world—finding meaning in repetition and in symbol and image, plotting life as a journey with an unfolding meaning, or perceiving character as explicable through a psycho-historical schema—are, after all, fictions, the individual's subjective ordering of event and image. Blindness focuses on the relationship between I and eye, person and perception, belief and interpretation, reader and text. Meaning is circular, beginning and ending in the self, it is nonverifiable. The process of reading a novel, as Green tells his readers in the essay, is like the process of finding answers to life's mysteries, the creation of patterns from the clues but finding no one to tell us if they mean what we think they mean: "Narrative prose in [the] future must be diffuse and variously interpretable as life itself." Further on in the same essay, he says, "The reader of a novel somehow or other must be encouraged by the writer to extend his imagination over the whole of all the questions that have been asked in life and can never be answered if we are to continue to die without a convincing communication between the dead and the living."
John, Green's surrogate in the novel, shares Green's stated view that a story has no meaning except the one we create. John ponders the fact that different perspectives will produce different meanings. In thinking about his blindness, John compares what a blackbird "screaming" in flight means to him as an auditory impression with what it means to him as a visual image. To see a blackbird in flight is to identify its shape and color, but to listen to it is "to see it as a signal to the other birds that something was not right." For a moment he rests on the assurance that "sight was not really necessary; the values of everything changed, that was all." Then he goes on to question if there may be "nothing in all these." He becomes aware that "meaning" is itself an "illusion"; yet, as he thinks about his own fantasies—that his dead "Mummy" is near, that June (whose real name John knows is Joan) and he have a romantic relationship—he recognizes the necessity of such fictions to sustain life.
He decides to "write about these things…. And perhaps the way he saw everything was the right way, though there could be no right way but one's own. Art was what is created in the looker-on, and he would have to try and create in others." Art for John, as for Green, is to awaken the sensitivity of the reader to the act of seeing, which is an "act of conscious imagination." The distorting desire, common to all John's illusions, is for a shared presence; the suggestion is that John is like all men in his desire and differs only to the extent that his fantasies are peculiar to his own situation and that he is aware he is inventing rather than discerning meanings.
An observer, responsive to the sensory riches of the world and of art, John has been an "outsider" at school, aware of the discrepancies between appearances and interpretations of them. In the diary which describes his experiences at Noat, John views with disfavor the lack of sensitivity of both adults and fellow students. He rebels against those "who sink their whole beings in the school and its affairs, and are blind and almost ignorant of any world outside their own." He is critical of society's materialistic mentality, which would "label and ticket everything so that the world is like a shop, with their price on all the articles" and would dismiss "youthful introspection" and the world of feelings. He calls for a Carlyle, a "prophet one could follow," who would decry the present tendency to replace "art" with "photography." He records Van Gogh's rejection of the concept of verisimilitude: "If you take a photograph of a man digging, in my opinion he is sure to look as if he were not digging," and he ponders: "What is it that is so attractive in the sound of disturbed water? The contrast of sound to appearance, perhaps. Water looks so like a varnished surface that to see it break up, move and sound in moving is infinitely pleasing." His comments reveal that he finds shallow so-called physical representations; such "realistic" representations are "unreal" in that they reflect little of the feelings of the observer.
Later in the novel, John questions, "What sense of beauty had others?" He recalls that both Herbert and Egbert, two of the servants who were in Salonica during the war, have different memories of the place. The only thing Herbert "remembered afterwards was that a certain flower, that they had here and that was incessantly nursed by Weston in the hot-house, grew wild and in profusion on the hills above the port"; Egbert, "the underkeeper … had seen a colossal covery of partridges." John also reflects on the fact that Harry, who is in charge of the horses, "looked upon the country from the hunting standpoint, whether there were many stiff fences and fox coverts." Like John's mother, who spends hours in the flower garden "weeding" and "cutting off the heads of dead roses," each of the servants has his own sense of beauty, John links the idea of the varying perceptions of beauty with the differing preoccupations of individuals in their daily activities. He finds no meaning in his mother's endless hours with affairs of the village nor with her becoming upset when the Church Parochial Council votes against her proposal that there be music at matins on Christmas day. The conclusion that John reaches is that memory and beauty are distinctive for each individual because memory and the beautiful arise from what the individual attends to.
John is also acutely aware that meaning lies not in understanding the words that another speaks because he knows that what people are not saying is a part of what they are saying. He listens for hints of what the speaker is concealing: "Voices had become his great interest, voices that surrounded him, that came and went, that slipped from tone to tone, that hid to give away in hiding," That the language of conversation is like the Freudian language of dreams, a complex play of condensation and displacement, Green will dramatize much more effectively in his later novels. In them Green will rely more on passages of dialogue than on summaries of the reflections of the focal characters (which make up much of the narration of Blindness) in order to show the reader the characters' attempts to hide their fixations while interpreting all that they hear and see in light of those concerns.
Fantasizing about the mother he has never known, John thinks:
For she [Mummy] would have seen things by the light of intuitions, often wrong, but no less enchanting, and by discovering things in other people she would have shown herself. How silly people were to think a grey day sad; it was really so full of happiness, while the sun only made things reflect the sun, and so not be themselves.
The objective, the acceptance of the external public image as all, is only another fiction. But the pretense that life is just a "varnished surface," the facets of which can be "labeled" or "ticketed," is a more distorted representation than the impressions produced by the imagination. To accept life as spectacle is to be blinded by the sun. In one scene, John sees "figures, like dolls and like his friends, striking attitudes at the sun they had made for themselves, till sinking he lost sight of them, to find himself in the presence of other dolls in the light of a sun that others had made for them." The literal is an inanimate representation, for it denies the feelings of men and the inexplicableness of life.
John's observations and reflections both before and after his accident focus on the subjective nature of perceptions. His blindness does not change his sense of life. But it is not just through John's thoughts that Green calls attention to the ideopathic nature of perception. He dramatizes over and over that no two characters share the same sense of what a situation is or means. John's live-in nurse, for example, dismisses him as a very uninteresting case since for her he is "not really suffering." In her eyes "he was quite healthy, he was really healing very quickly, and he hadn't a trace of shock." How she perceives him seems to be shaped on the one hand by the measures she has developed for pain through her training and, on the other hand, by her own self-casting of the romantic heroine: "Suffering made you a great well of pity, and that of course was love." Perhaps it is because John is a boy to her rather than a man that she waits for her dream—"a case of delirium tremens" in which she will fight along with her patient to save him. Perhaps, though, it is only that she is practical and officious, devoted to the concrete; she has placed John's eyes "in spirits on the mantelpiece of her room at home in the hospital" along with her souvenirs from other operations, toes and a kidney. Green provides, of course, no omniscient narrator to tell us which explanation to choose for why she fails to be the comforting companion for whom John yearns.
Nor does Green unravel for the reader the mystery of the character of John's mother. In fact, Green deliberately heightens the discrepancies in interpretations of her personality and thus reminds the reader that "character" is itself an abstraction produced by a "reading" of another or of oneself through a chosen model. Nan, John's aged nanny, is John's only link with his mother, who has died at his birth. Nanny has told him how his mother played the piano and whistled; "beautiful" is the descriptive word John recalls Nanny using. Nanny's reveries reveal, however, that she believes in a less idealized picture of the first Mrs. Haye than the one she has presented to John. She suspects that the first Mrs. Haye may have been unfaithful—"whistling, never going to church, and so happy with all her men friends hanging around and the master too simple to notice or suspect." Unmarried, Nanny has spinsterish, prudish, and fearful misgivings about sex. Whether her feelings about Mrs. Haye mirror her own envy of a life she has been too timid to experience—"She had been near to marrying Joe Hawkins before she went out into service"—or whether her suspicions reflect those of servants who knew Mrs. Haye, the reader cannot determine. Nanny had, after all, only seen Mrs. Haye on her deathbed and knows her only through the "stories" of the servants. Did they actually say that Mrs. Haye "was too free altogether," or is it Nanny who writes the dialogue—"You can never trust men not even your husband's best friend but there it was!"? John, of course, has further embroidered the picture of his mother: "they had all loved her so"; she responded to life through her "intuitions." He has mementos of his mother. But Green will not even allow these objects to be unambiguously perceived: "And now that he was blind he had come to treasure little personal things of her own, a prayer-book of hers, thought that, of course, was mistaken; a pair of kid gloves…." Since the awareness of each character is shaped by his own personal vision, the reality he knows, present or past, is a highly selective story comprised of fantasy and fact. Green's reminders that characters are often mistaken about the facts and his refusal to differentiate the validity of the characters' visions emphasize the impossibility of man's unraveling life's mysteries of personality and event.
Each character in Blindness reads and writes the script of his life through his own interests and needs. Green makes the point that all narrators are unreliable not just through Nanny's and John's reveries of the past and the women they never knew but through Joan's recollections of her life at the vicarage as well. That her life there may not have been as untroubled and beautiful as she feels it to have been Green has suggested through entitling the chapter in which she relates that life "Picture Postcardism." Her version of her life is just as selective—"They had been lovely those days"—as "those beautiful picture postcards" she remembers Mrs. Donner having in her window. In addition, Green punctuates her thoughts with details that echo a seamy "twopenny" romance rather than the idyllic children's story she creates. Her mother had eyes for the Postman, John. Was her mother driven to the affair because Mr. Entwhistle was as ineffectual a husband as he was a minister, paying more attention to his roses than his duties, or because she was unsuited to life in the country, preferring the town and its liveliness? Did Joan's father always drink, or did he become an alcoholic, hiding his open bottles throughout the house, because his wife was a nag who even found fault with the money he spent for manure for his roses? Green leaves the reader to rewrite his own version of the story of the Entwhistles.
The tale of the Entwhistles echoes the tale of the Marmeladovs, which Green had called attention to in John's comments on Crime and Punishment in his diary. Joan, like Sonia, is passive and submissive; she looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. Rev. Entwhistle, like Marmeladov, has an inflated view of his genius:
He was so clever that he had always been bottom at school—all great men had been bottom at school. Then he had lost his way in the world. No, that wasn't true, he had found it—this, this gin was his triumph. It was the only thing that did his health any good, and one had to be in good spirits if he was to think out the book, the great book that was to link everything into a circle and that would bring him recognition at last, perhaps even a letter from the Bishop.
Entwhistle is also like Marmeladov in indulging himself in empty railings against an unjust world and in seeking solace from a bottle. Full of self-pity, he lacks the fortitude to shape a different destiny for himself.
Green's parody of the Marmeladov story and the characters' glossing of their lives remind the reader that one's version of the tale results from one's idiosyncratic sense of life. Both what one perceives and how one interprets it are the result of that sense of life. The eye perceives what the I would have it perceive. For example, what John notes about the tragic death scene of Marmeladov are the comic discrepancies: "[Sonia] in the flaming scarlet hat, and the parasol that was not in the least necessary at that time of day. With the faces crowding through the door, and the laughter behind." Readers, like narrators, are unreliable. They create meaning from what they attend to.
Emotional, sensory responses, rather than reason, guide the meanderings of the mind. An incongruous association suggests to John the punishment he would like to give the boy who has blinded him. Before the scene with the nurse in which John fantasizes himself choking the child, he has been talking with his mother, who has objected to the third housemaid's wearing her hair in a pigtail. John has protested that he likes the pigtails, which remind him of Browning's "Porphyria's Lover," and he has confessed to his mother that he would like to strangle a white neck with a "soft, silken rope." His expressed desire is most likely a manifestation not of sadistic tendencies but of frustrated sexual desire. When the nurse tells him about his accident and about the fate of the small boy who has thrown the stone, she smooths his pillow and tucks him in and he recalls the slight sexual thrill he has experienced the other times when she has done this. The boy displaces the female figure in John's imagination as he pictures himself sensually taking hold of the boy and strangling him.
The desire of human beings to make contact brings the private constructions of the characters into comic juxtaposition, for it is not just in their daydreams that they rewrite their lives. When John and Joan go for a walk, John sees himself as a medieval hero and Joan sees herself as the abandoned girl of a cheap novel, though not so "stupid" as to commit suicide. But John feels finally that she is "lamentably stupid"; she is unable to play her role as he has cast it. She thinks he is foolish for calling her June when her real name is Joan.
Another romanticism she fails to catch is his complimenting her on her "lovely blue" eyes. No, she tells him: they are dark brown and do not match her dress. Then he suggests, "Maybe they are burning now?" Joan, however, thinks not. John tries to continue by saying that his eyes "had they not been removed, would have burned so ardently." But Joan doesn't know what "ardently" means. "You know, hotly, pas—No." John has to give up: "This was awkward." He finds it just as awkward when he tries to suggest to her that he may be another Milton and write about the great themes of caring and war, since she really does not understand what it means to write. In his attempts to impress her, he has not said what kind of writer he really wants to be, nor has he chosen the right words to express his feelings for Joan.
In Green's dramatization characters shape whatever meanings experiences have for them. Unlike the psychological novelists, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, he does not trace the psychohistory of a character. Green's characters do not become; they are. That which resides in the real world is so transmuted by them that events lack meaning apart from the moment. Events are "adventitious" rather than necessary; that is, their "interior resonance" is bestowed upon them by the character's own mind and they do not effect a change in him. Neither are they self-supporting links in plot development. Instead of an event deriving its meaning from its placement in a sequence of causalities, an event in Green's novel derives its meaning solely from a character's investing the immediate and contiguous with significance. The fortuitousness of events makes Green's characters hapless victims, though not ones of plot sequencing.
The frame of Blindness, its progressively labeled parts and its final epiphany, suggests, as has been pointed out, a linear pattern of metamorphic growth for John. But that larger frame is at odds with the episodic development of the novel. The novel does not treat the change wrought in John by his accident. His self-consciousness produces only an ironic awareness of his self-consciousness and does not lead to the development of a reintegrated personality able to orient itself anew to the world on the basis of that knowledge. Instead, the novel explores how "seeing" is related to John's artistic sensibility. One of the problems of Blindness is the clash between that structure and John's perception that it is the individual's interpretation which gives events that meaning they have, a perception Green has attempted to validate for the reader through the labeled parts and John's vision. The weakness in the novel is a result of the fact that the depicted equivocal nature of experience rests uneasily with the straightforward "Progression" of John to a positive and comfortable commitment to his writing. These two opposing views of the nature of experience may be a source of some confusion to the reader as he tries to respond to the felt life of the novel.
Green's ending is, however, ambiguous rather than conclusive. When John thinks about Raskolnikov's regenerative vision, he remarks that epileptic fits are "much the same things as visions really." In John's letter to a friend, which forms a short epilogue to the novel, John tells B. G. that "I have had some sort of fit, but it has passed now. Apparently my father was liable to them…." The earlier association of epileptic fits and visions may suggest to readers that they are supposed to assume John has had an epileptic fit, but Green does not state that that is the case. The reader knows how he has arrived at such a conclusion, but he is not told if it is the right one.
One could also build a case for John's "vision" being the climax of his sexual fantasies. Earlier he had tried to maneuver closer contact between himself and Margaret, the housemaid. When he touches her hand, she withdraws hers quickly: "But your hand is burning. Well, I never … I must be going." He asks her to move the lily as a means of detaining her, listens to her deep breathing as she struggles to move the stand, and then gropes about as if to help her, "bathing in her nearness." After she leaves he feels as if he would suffocate and goes to the window. Below he hears a chuckle. "[I]t was a woman and someone must have been making love to her…. He was on fire at once…. He drew back into the room, his face wet with the heat." Sitting in the chair he hears bells: "the wild peal of them … had loosened and freed everything…. He felt a stirring inside him … in a minute something was going to happen. He waited, taut, in the chair." His last thoughts before losing consciousness are: "A ladder, bring a ladder. In his ears his own voice cried loudly, and a deeper blindness closed in upon him."
The variant readings of the ending that Green sets up undercut each other and remind the reader that not even John can explain what has happened to him. "Why am I so happy today?" he asks at the end of his letter. The effects of the vision, whatever kind it was, may indeed last no longer than "to-day," though, unlike Ryf, I do not doubt that John is actually happy today. Oddly enough, while Ryf thinks that John may be "simply putting up a good front" for his friends, he affirms a reading of Blindness that denies life is an enigma—the vision is a true epiphany. On the one hand Ryf asserts more than he is told, and on the other hand he disbelieves what he is told.
Ryf's reading of the conclusion reminds me of Green's story about the readers of Loving who asked how soon the husband died. He told them "Whenever you think,' although when writing the book I had no idea but they were to have anything but a long and happy life thereafter" (the novel ends on the words "Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after"). Green tells the story to illustrate his point that a reader believes no more "of what he is told in narrative than he ordinarily believes, in life, of what someone is telling him." Idiosyncratically, blindly, we each insist that we know how to read (interpret) that which we feel lies beneath the surface or between the gaps, the metaphor one chooses depending not so much upon one arbitrarily adopting a critical vocabulary as upon one using a metaphor that fits one's sense of life.
What Green's novel does is make us aware that all our models are fictions. Ryf's symbolic reading of the ending is the very one Green's presentation in the novel disallows: there are no epiphanies to be had. Throughout the novel Green has mocked the idea of symbolic meaning. If one examines the patterns of imagery, one finds that there are none or, perhaps more accurately, that there are contradictions within the patterns that destroy the coherence of the pattern. John calls his diary "a sort of pipe to draw off the swamp water." Then he says it "rained all the past week." Next he comments on the "water fight" two classmates have in his room. In two consecutive diary entries, he mentions first a student throwing a stone at his window; and in the next a dizzy spell—"I saw waving specks in my eyes…. I suppose my blood pressure was disturbed" and notes that "For those in danger on the sea" is at the moment being sung at House prayers. The repetition of references to water in its various forms and the linking of water with an incident that foreshadows John's accident suggest to readers accustomed to the conventions of the modern psychological novel that they will find the meaning of the novel through unraveling the pattern of the references to water to discover its symbolic meaning. Yet surely the list of references already sounds discordant. John's final comment on Crime and Punishment focuses on the setting of the concluding scene: "by the edge of the river that went to the sea where there was freedom, reconciliation, love." Thus his diary begins and ends with water. Part II begins with, "Outside it was raining" and rain is falling again at the beginning of Part III. But his hyperbolic metaphor of the sea as "freedom, reconciliation, love" is, in fact, undercut not only by the mocking tone of the statement but also by the clearly unmetaphoric statement of scenic description which follows on its heels.
In the concluding scene of the novel, John is metaphorically bathing. The exaggerated quality of the metaphoric conclusion for Blindness and the one John supplies for Crime and Punishment make them into self-parodies. The self-deprecating tone of John's water metaphor for his writing in his diary (Green used a similar metaphor to speak of his novel writing in an interview with Nigel Dennis) functions like the reminder at the conclusion: John's vision, whatever its physical causes, has only the meaning that he or the reader chooses for it. The meanings of symbols like the interpretations of events is idiosyncratic, not founded on essence. Rather than suggesting through his repetition that there is a common cluster of meanings for water, Green has made evident that meaning in each case is contingent. Gray days or sunny days, as John has stated before, have no meaning other than the one the individual chooses, just as the meaning of the blackbirds in flight varies according to the system one supplies.
Through the comic devices of exaggeration and discrepancy, Green rewrites the realistic and modernist novels of the past. He overinflates the symbolic meaning of the prosaic and juxtaposes the trivial with the poetic. The arbitrary nature of meaning and the dependence of meaning upon the associative, nonlogical processes of the mind is highlighted when he draws attention to the way in which Crime and Punishment may, in fact, be an antecedent for Blindness. John says that Crime and Punishment "cuts one open … like a chariot with knives on the wheels." On the next page Green describes John's accident as occurring when the train entered "a cutting … the broken glass caught him full, cut great furrows in his face." In a hack writer one might assume that such a repetition was the result of the writer's inattention to language. But insensitivity to the language is not a criticism even those who dislike Green's novels level against him. Quite the opposite. They say Green is too conscious of language; he places too much importance on style. They say he is an aesthete, unconcerned with subject matter.
Green plays further with the "cut" John receives. Joan like John bears a scar from a cut she has received from a broken bottle tossed at her by her father. And it is through a cut from a sardine can she opens for her father's lunch that she meets John, Mrs. Haye bringing her to the house to dress the thumb. One thing leads to another, one explication suggests another. But there is neither a logical relationship nor a linkage which reveals a common core of meaning. As in a pun, the emphasis of Green's repetition is on the difference. The donnée of Blindness seems to be that in this difference lies the essential comedy and absurdity of life. And life is clearly a comedy to Green—a comedy of errors.
Through his self-mocking wordplay on cut, Green makes questionable the significance of those events identified and linked by the word—John's blindness, Joan's abuse by her father, Joan and John's meetings. These are events the reader would normally perceive as pivotal points in an interpretation of the novel. Though John's blindness brings him pain and suffering, much of the novel focuses on the mundane details of living as a blind man. His mother worries about his marrying and having children, and most of John's energies are directed to satisfying his desires for female companionship. Musing in his room a short time after the accident, John thinks that it "was now so ordinary to be blind." Later in talking to Joan, he again dismisses the significance of his blindness when he claims nothing ever happens. Joan reminds him of his accident, but he says:
"What, you mean going blind like that? Yes, I had forgotten. Except for that, then, nothing has happened. Sometimes I see a pool shut in by trees with their branches reflected in the stagnant water. Nothing ever moves, the pool just lies there, day and night, and the trees look in. At long intervals there is a ripple; the pool lets it die. And then the trees look in the same as before."
John's thoughts undercut the importance of the story as event. Instead the emphasis is on the act of telling a story which is situated by Green in man's sense of the void, that all is trivia and without meaning. A story is man's attempt to give meaning to that which, in fact, has none and is therefore more a reflection of unconscious desires than of the observable.
John and Joan's boredom is so great that they find relief in melodramatic, tragic daydreams. In an incident mentioned earlier in which John imagines himself choking the child who threw the stone that hit the railway train window, he indulges himself in playing the role of the Byronic hero: "One's fingers would go in and in till they would be enveloped by pink, warm flesh…. It would be a kindness to the little chap, and one would feel so much better for it afterwards. He would be apprehended for murder, and he would love it." He goes on to sentimental projections of the warden's reading the headlines to him:
BLIND MAN MURDERS CHILD—no, TORTURES CHILD TO DEATH. And underneath that, if he was lucky, WOMAN JUROR VOMITS, something really sensational. Mr. Justice Punch, as in all trials of life and death, would be amazingly witty, and he would be too. He would make remarks that would earn him some famous title, such as THE AUDACIOUS SLAUGHTERER. All the children in England would wilt at his name. In the trial all his old brilliancy would be there.
His fatuous yearning for the dramatic dissolves in his realization that he will be "long-suffering and good"—and "How dull" all this will be.
In her daydreams, Joan becomes a romantic heroine. When she cuts her thumb on a sardine can she imagines herself dying from blood poisoning: "Think of the headlines in the evening papers…. 'UNFROCKED GENIUS AND HIS BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER FOUND DEAD'." Their tragic, emotional sentimentalizing of themselves is necessary for Joan and John, since their actual situations provide only the mundane (their projections also, of course, mock the tragic mode). The reaching for stoic grandeur, typical of the adolescent mind, is countered in John's case by his being aware that his projections are indeed fantasies. John understands the difference between who he is and who he pretends to be as he simultaneously struggles to shape a life out of his feelings and imagination, to endow the fact of his blindness with meaning, and to satisfy his sexual urges with a love affair.
Through de-emphasizing event both in the consciousness of the characters and in the reportage of the story, while emphasizing the adventitious and metamorphic nature of events, Green has made problematical the very basis of the novel, the use of narration to translate human experience into a structure of meaning. What is more, Green demonstrates to his readers that events are "unreal"; he foregrounds them as constructions. He begins his scenes by a description in the past tense and then, as if to announce that the play has begun, he shifts to the present tense. For example, he gives the setting—"Outside it was raining…. The walls were a neutral yellow"; and he notes the action that proceeds the rising of the curtain on John in his room—"He lay in bed…. There came quick steps … Emily Haye came in." Then the play begins: John "turns his head on the pillow, the nurse rises, and Mrs. Haye walks firmly into the room." A much longer introduction is given for the scene in which Joan wakes up her father.
What is more, Green's foregrounding of the act of exposition in relating the circumstantial particularities of his scenes calls attention to them as conventions of the realistic novel. These conventions are based, as David Lodge points out in Language of Fiction, on the novelist's attempt "to disguise the fact that a novel is discontinuous with real life"; that is, the realistic novelist attempts to blur the distinction between real life and fiction by using "a context of particularity much like that with which we define ourselves in the real world" (place, names, and the details of empirical observation). Thus through emphasizing the artificiality of labeling and describing, Green has, even more importantly, called into question our use of such surface details to claim a knowledge of that world. His telling of the tale parallels John's disdain for such so-called objective art forms as photography and John's critical attitude toward society's penchant for the concrete and measurable.
Like an impressionistic painter, whose use of color and form remind the viewer that he is looking at a painting, Green's highlighting the process of narration, the creating of event, and the selecting of contextual details make evident that a story is a schema imposed upon life and that all representations are interpretations. Furthermore he disrupts the sense of an unfolding internal and external sequence by creating self-enclosed scenes. Probably one of the most beautiful of these vignettes, set off by asterisks, occurs in the chapter entitled "Walking Out." The scene opens and closes with a description of Nanny seated by the fire, a cup of tea before her, the only sounds those of the kettle hissing and her own hoarse breathing. Shadows "jump out of the room," set in motion by the flames from the fire which gives warmth and color to the room. The lack of dramatic action and the effect of a self-sealed circle, created by the repetition of the details of Nanny's appearance and of the room in which she sits, make the scene seem like a photograph. Green even repeats a phrase from the second of the beginning paragraphs—"the whalebone in her collar kept the chin from drooping"—as the concluding phrase in the final paragraph. Behind the still exterior, Nanny's troubled mind frets about the inappropriateness of John's walks with Joan: "And that her boy should go out with that thing, him that she had brought up since he was a squalling baby, it was not right." Deaths, births, marriages, her family of brothers and sisters and offspring, and the one she has become a part of through raising John, spin together into the tapestry of her life and its impending passing. They are frozen now into a varnished surface. Such scenes emphasize not only that narration is a composition, an arrangement, but also that life is not a plotted structure. These scenes in Blindness thus emphasize that life as surface is nothingness—Nothing to be the title of a later Green novel.
Another such self-enclosed scene occurs earlier in the novel. Stretched in the lawn chair, near dozing, John is made to seem the center of his snapshot. Those who might have been present in the portrait are fixed offstage by the description with which Green begins and ends the scene. A slight movement of the figures is noted, but it is only a continuation of their opening gestures, leaving the reader with the strong sense of being brought full circle. Jenny, the laundry cat, who is "very near the sparrow now," is "two inches nearer the sparrow" at the end of the scene. The other figures—Nan, "left … to take a cup of tea"; Mrs. Haye, "gone up to the village to console Mrs. Trench"; Herbert, "leaning on the sill of the kitchen window … making noises at Mrs. Lane"; Weston, "lost in wonder, love and praise before the artichokes"; Harry, "hissing over a sporting paper"; Doris, "in an attic … letting down her hair … about to plait the two soft pigtails"—are reintroduced in the parting view, emphasizing the enclosed separateness of the moment that has been recorded:
Mrs. Haye crushed grass on the way to Mrs. Trench. Herbert stretched out a hand and made clucking noises, while Mrs. Lane giggled. Weston shifted his feet slightly, and put his cap further back on his head, before the artichokes. Harry began hissing his way down another paragraph, and Doris was fondly tying a bow on the end of one pigtail. Jenny, the laundry cat, was two inches nearer the sparrow.
Nan put down her cup with a sigh and folded her hands on her lap, while her eyes fixed on the flypaper over the table.
The figures are transfixed in self-expressive gestures. Like the pigeons whose sounds John listens to fondly, they are "cooing, catching each other up, repeating, answering, as if all the world depended on their little loves." Physically such gestures seem trivial, not worthy of attention; that is, no changes are effected, no desires culminated. The gestures are self-mirroring, as are John's fantasies which depict his emotional sensitivity to the quotidian. His daydreams are of fishing and of writing a story telling of a man's "strange passion for tulips."
In an interview, Green said that his novels were "an advanced attempt to break up the old-fashioned type of novel." As usual Green is vague about precisely what kind of novels or which writers he had in mind, though he does express his distaste for the descriptive novels of Dickens and Tolstoy. Most critics, however, in assessing Green's experiments as a novelist have addressed only his permutations of sentence structure. They have written about his prose style—his dropping of definite and indefinite articles, his omitting expletives and sometimes verbs, and his rearranging syntactical structures. They have not addressed themselves to his experiments with the larger structures of the novel.
But Blindness is evidence of the fact that Green's experiments with the novel went much deeper than matters of prose style. He parodies conventions of both the realist and the modernist novel in order to call into question the means by which we make sense of the world in which we live. He has made problematical the very act of narration by dramatizing it as structure imposed upon experience. Nor does he provide a coherent structure for experience through his symbols, images, and leitmotifs.
The "blindness," then, that is depicted in the novel is not just the physical blindness of John Haye. What the novel makes us aware of is that the world and the people in it are, so-to-speak, blind. Fate is a purblind doomster. Characters fail to see because they accept labels that society has affixed to actions and because they assume that what is visible is what is real. They lack an awareness of others because they are blinded by their own egos. They are self-deluded by their own fantasies. Yet those fantasies project and embody the feelings, which are for Green the most vital aspect of man's existence. His novel is a dramatization of the individual's poignant, failed quest for meaning and understanding.
In Blindness, Green suggests that the act of reading and responding to a literary text is like the act of interpreting and experiencing life: both require the responding subject to create meaning from the interplay of situation, character, and symbol. Interpretation reflects the interpreter; the story, the storyteller. Neither interpretation nor story is verifiable except as process. The artist's eye perceives not truth but the impossibility of knowing it; it is focused on nothingness—the gap between image or word and signification—from which emerges another text.
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Henry Yorke and Henry Green
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