‘In the Country of the Blind
the One-Eyed Man is King’
Blindness and Vision in
Saramago’s ‘Blindness’ and H.G.
Wells’s ‘The Country of the Blind’
A first-class essay submitted for ENGL403: Literature, Science and Science Fiction, by Mary Crotty
Science Fiction is known for transporting us into alternative worlds and
realities, unusual spaces in which the atypical is subverted or altered in
some way. According to Samuel R. Delany (1984, p.34), this provides
us with tools that “help us think about the present” by interrogating
the structures and values of these alternative worlds. Both H.G. Wells
and José Saramago construct realms distanced from our own, spaces
where the majority of the characters are blind within a population and
bodily sight becomes a minority. Through both writer’s use of language,
blindness is constructed as opposite to the supposed normality of
vision. Furthermore this is perhaps more widely reflective of an overall
perception towards people with different abilities as an isolated “other”.
By drastically separating blindness from sight a binary is created which
often compromises the humanity and integrity of the visually impaired
characters by posing them as “other” to the accepted normalcy of sight.
As visual impairment is of course not a creation born of Science Fiction,
implementing a narrative of blindness which tends towards categorising
blindness as “sub-normal” has problematic repercussions for the visually
impaired in our society. As Naomi Schor notes, “blindness is bound up
with rhetoric” (1999, p.79), yet this rhetoric may be built upon damaging
assumptions or historic stigmatisations of disability that take advantage
of visual impairment and its metaphoric potential.
In both Saramago’s Blindness and H.G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind,
characters are either wholly blind or sighted. This binary offers no room
for partial sightedness which makes up the majority of the population
with visual impairments. As David Bolt (2016, pp.69-70) notes:
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