BLINDNESS: SIGHT BY BLOOD

By

Katie Belonus

ENGL 303
 Disability is a part of the human condition. It pervades the lives of almost all people

every day. Disability also weaves itself into and throughout literature to reveal truth and

understanding of what it is to be human. Like other characters that represent the marginalized

and the forgotten, characters with disabilities tend to offer rich insights into the human

experience that normates fail to see or understand. But disabled characters take these insights one

step further in that they expose and explain not simply different perspectives, but different ways

of being in the world and experiencing its fullness. In the book entitled, The Keywords for

Disability Studies, Adams, Reiss and Serlins essay, Disability, defines disability by saying

that, disability refers to a subjective state, the condition not only of identifying as disabled but

also of perceiving the world through a particular kind of lens (Adams, Reiss, Serlin 8). This

definition helps to see disability as it is within the constructions of the world and the multiple

and colorful perspectives of the world through disability. Characters with disabilities provide an

outlet for this understanding and can serve as vehicles for alternate and new ways of thinking

about human existence and how life is lived.

Author D.H. Lawrence is an example of a writer who uses disability in his work in order

to convey ideas regarding forms of embodiment that are not the accepted norm while also

rejecting those accepted understandings of being. This is evident in his short story, The Blind

Man through the main character of Maurice, who lost his vision as a result of being wounded in

the First World War. The character of Maurice Pervin in D.H. Lawrences The Blind Man and

his embodied experience as a blind man serves as a channel through which Lawrence expresses

his ideas of blood-consciousness and the connection between the mind and the body. The

disability that is a part of Maurices person allow for Lawrence to work within a character whose

body is the extension of his beliefs about the mind being an extension of the body that directly
refutes Cartesian dualism. The key to Lawrences understanding of blood-consciousness and his

ability to use Maurices disability in order to portray it is the embodiment that is unique to being

blind and living in the world. In her essay entitled Embodiment, Wilkinson explains how to

approach the concept of embodiment through the perspective of disability. She writes:

Disability scholars have tended to use the term in relation to phenomenology, the

philosophical study of conscious experience from an individual persons

subjective perspective. This approach to the concept of embodiment is intended to

serve as a corrective to Cartesian dualism, the historic Western legacy derived

from the French philosopher Rene Descartes that posits a strict dichotomy

between mind and body in which the former assumes rational control over the

latters messiness and irrationality. (Wilkerson 67-68)

As Wilkinson puts it, a persons embodiment is meant to be looked at in terms of a wholistic

consciousness and engagement with the world that shapes personal understanding and truth. It is

impossible to understand a subjective lived experience that is not ones own. Feelings, emotions,

and thoughts can only be described and discussed in terms of shared concepts but are still

fundamentally altered by each persons life and physical engagement with living. It is only

through characters like Maurice that sighted normates can catch a glimpse at a life and

experience that is not ruled by sight and by the assumed connection between sight and intellect

that has dominated Western thinking.

This is something that Lawrence vehemently disagreed with. He was completely against

visual consciousness as the dominant force in experiencing the world. He felt that the mind and

the body were one in the same thing with the concept of the mind or the intellect as an extension

of the body. It was the body that actively engaged and interacted with its surroundings by
utilizing the entirety of the sensorium at its disposal. By allowing sight dominate the sensorium

of the body and influence knowledge, one immediately dismisses the other senses and

information gained from those senses. This only allows for a narrow and fragmented body of

knowledge or enlightenment and makes for an incomplete being in the world. In a letter to Ernest

Collings in 1913 he writes, My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser

than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says,

is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want

is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, of moral, or what-not

(Lawrence 96). For Lawrence, the mind got in the way of the full living of ones life. The

instincts of the body could tell someone much more than agonizing over the perceived reality of

what one sees or thinks she sees. Sight ties the body down and turns it into a clumsy vehicle for

the partially, sight-informed intellect. Lawrence refused to be dominated by this and uses

Maurice Pervin to personify his ideas of living by the body rather than by the mind.

Maurice, being blind, is automatically removed from the company of normates, and by

extension, their sight-dominated intellects and perspectives. This removal from what is

considered to be a normal, and even essential, element of living and experiencing creates the

assumption on the part of sighted readers that Maurice is fundamentally incomplete. Caeton

expresses this sentiment well in her essay Blindness in which she explains, Sighted culture

accepts only a total, plenary blindness, a stark binary of presence/absence. One either sees

nothing or one sees everything (36). The typical sighted person cannot conceive of a person

functioning in the world if she cannot see. There is not even consideration that an individual may

only be partially blind because any impairment to vision is total and immediately limits, if not

totally stops, activity of the body that cannot see. But for Maurice this is not the case. In fact, his
lack of sight permits him to be and utilize his body in a way that exemplifies Lawrences

understanding of the bodys use of its sensorium.

When first describing Maurices person, Lawrence writes, Pervin moved about almost

unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the

presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world

of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience (Lawrence 57). In that first sentence,

the concept of sight guiding action is immediately dismissed. Maurice moves unconsciously;

he does not think about his actions or have sight in order to guide them. Rather, he lets his body

move as it will and trusts his body to know how to move in his environment. His knowledge of

the placements of the surrounding objects is instinctual, just as his knowledge of the general

world around him is instinctual, based on his other senses as they take in the world. Additionally,

blood-consciousness is directly referenced. In this instance, Lawrence writes of it as blood-

prescience where the body has the gift of foresight or foreknowledge, as it is the body that

sees for Maurice since his eyes can no longer see and inform.

This instinctual action, removed from thought, would not be well expressed through the

body of a normate. There would be too much incidental reliance on sight and it would be much

more calculated and manic in its movements that Lawrences concepts would be lost. The

presence of disability, especially of a visual disability in the case of the blind Maurice, that

permits the body and consciousness to see through other means. Seeing is replaced with being;

total immersion in the bodys senses constructs a physical world that connects to the body in a

mutual existence.

Lawrence continues in his description of Maurice and how he interacts with his

surroundings. He writes, He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer
immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention

of visual consciousness. In this state there was a rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture

(Lawrence 57). This suggests a deep sense of understanding the world and his connection to it.

This reflects Lawrences thoughts in his letter about reliance on the blood and the body to know

or feel the world and intuit the immediacy of that sensory knowledge. To see something is not to

know it as it is and as it is to the individual. There is a need for a deeper understanding, or

feeling, of another person or objects existence and how its actuality is connected to the individual

and relates to her own existence. Lawrence challenges his audience to imagine themselves in a

state of being removed from the visual world and exists in the experiential world of an altered

and amplified sensorium. Would there be a deeply rapturous contentment with the world and

ones place in that world that Lawrence expresses at the end of the passage? Or would a normate

simply be incapable of imagining a disabled or blind existence as being anything other than

miserable?

In Blindness, Caeton emphasizes a binary approach to vision that is dominant for

normates and the equation of lack of sight with passive misery. She says, This may explain why

sighted people still experience both trepidation and wonder at imagining phenomenological

dimensions of blind peoples existence, stemming largely from the belief that the blind body has

only limited access to the world through a pitiable, incomplete sensorium (Caeton 36). Like the

character of Bertie, people who live in a normate culture view any alteration that is not normal

to be a defect that lowers the value of an individuals life and lived experience. A complete

sensorium, for people like Bertie, consists of the use of all five senses, with sight being the

dominant sense that directs the use of the other senses. To live in a world without sight is to live

in a world that is profoundly incomplete in its foundations. The idea of maneuvering within a
fractured body that is less than a fully functional fetishizes normate concepts of blindness and

disability and general and automatically creates a hierarchical structure of being, discounting the

subjective experience of living and being in the world as mentioned earlier.

But in actuality, Maurices embodied existence as a blind man is one that is enjoyable and

full. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things

darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and

possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new

way of consciousness substituted itself in him (Lawrence 57). There is a purity that is described

in his interaction with his environment. The loss of sight caused by war has in a way caused the

renewal of Maurices sensorium as is it has shifted and self-corrected in order to preserve his

body and his engagement or connection with his world. The physiological changes within his

body have created the conditions for a sort of sixth sense to emerge in the form of the blood-

consciousness or blood-contact that tethers Maurice to the world.

Without sight to obstruct his interaction and engagement with people and objects,

Maurice can experience the pure, physical essence of the thing itself. This gives him a richer

understanding of the world and of himself and his place within the world. This is also reflected in

his relationship with his wife. His blindness allows him to connect with his wife in a way that

borders on psychic connection, reading and feeling her emotions as she does with him so that

their emotional bond is that much stronger. This is also true in their physical relationship as their

engagement as two essential bodies leads to a deeper intimacy that they had not experienced

when sight dominated their collective everyday sensorium.

 Lawrence felt very strongly about the sense of sight dominating and subjugating the other

senses to as to limit the body in the world. He explicitly expresses this in his 1913 letter to Ernest

Collings by using metaphor to explain himself:

I conceive a mans body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright

and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things

around. And I am not so much concerned with the things aroundwhich is really

mindbut the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how

from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that

it lights up. (Lawrence 96)

By using the metaphor of the flame to represent the human body, Lawrence reifies the ethereality

of the body and its ability to exist in and of itself without the direct contact of what is around it.

The essence of an individuals being recognizes the essence of what is around it and does not

require visual consciousness that comes from sight in order to interact with the world. The

bodys grounding comes from the blood, the life force that brings consciousness into the

physical. It is this very embodiment that Maurice experiences and demonstrates to show the truly

subjective nature of experience and embodiment. It is when sight is introduced into his world

that there is a disruption in his conscious experience and a chasm of loss introduced.

In The Blind Man, Bertie is the personified representation of sighted culture. As soon

as he enters into Maurices home, he immediately constructs a sight-centered environment that

disrupts Maurices sense of self in addition to his sense of co-existence with his wife, Isabel.

Berties impending arrival and ultimate presence removes Maurice back into the binary category

of blind as it is understood as lacking or being less than. After dinner, Bertie makes the

comment to Isabel in reference to Maurices blindness and says that, It is a great

deprivation.Something lacking all the time (64). This sentiment is, word-for-word, the exact

normate definition of blindness and of disability more generally. Rather than experiencing

Maurice and learning what it is to experience his physiological makeup, Bertie places him within

a category that is directly below his own. His vision of Maurice in his blind state ultimately

obstructs his really seeing Maurice a being within an embodiment that is different but not less

than Berties own embodiment. But Berties interjection of sightedness ultimately turns on him

and he becomes the blind man in the physiologically altered world of the Pervins; he fails to

see or feel the intimacy of life that comes from Maurice and Isabel creating their own blood-

conscious world free from what Lawrence would consider the shackles of sight-consciousness.

This is echoed in Isabels response to Berties comments regarding her husband in his

state of blindness. She says, There is something else, something there, which you never knew

was there, and which you cant express (Lawrence 64). In this response, Isabel is also calling

attention to the blood-consciousness that pervades her and her husbands existence. Unlike the

sighted Berties view of there being something missing, Isabel and Maurice express an awareness

and an intuition that replaces sight and even supersedes it in some aspects of their joined lives.

This awareness comes in the form of physical contact and interaction that transcends the faade

of constructed sight.

Bertie is made to feel this awareness and connection when me physically touches and is

touched by Maurice in the dark barn. He is described as being in physical and emotional agony

as he is forced to come into contact with Maurice without the protection of sight and its false

projections. For the first time, Bertie experiences the blood-contact that Maurice feels in every

moment of his life as flesh touches flesh to feel the blood flowing beneath it. Bertie is suddenly

ripped open to experience his own physiological change that comes from connecting with
another human being through a differently structured sensorium centered on the body and its

truth. For the first time, Bertie is exposed to a pure human connection that breaks through his

carefully constructed visual-consciousness. This is contrary to Maurices reaction to their shared

experience, after which he exclaims, we shall know each other now (Lawrence 68). The way

that his body takes in information and connects with others is directly tied to his embodiment as

it does not rely on sight to communicated and exchange thoughts and emotions. Maurice is left

with a positive and joyful understanding while Bertie, the normate, leaves the experience

changed in a way that goes beyond adequate language due to his having glimpsed into the

sensorious state of being of a disabled individual. While there is uncertainty as to what Bertie

will do with his new understanding but there is a sense at the end of the short story that his being

is fundamentally altered in relation to Maurices altered being.

 WORKS CITED
Lawrence, D. H., and Bruce Steele. The Blind Man. England, My England and Other Stories,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 4869.