This vast and varied category of visual impairment is seldom represented
in twentieth-century writing, the general rule being that characters are
either sighted or blind. In other words, unlike the majority of people
who have visual impairments, literary representations accord with the
binary logic that is emblematic of modernism.
Characters therefore fall into two distinct groups which immediately
negates any kind of middle ground that would most fairly represent
visual impairment in our society. The idea that individuals are either
wholly sighted or strictly blind is not accurately representative of visual
impairment, and puts a barrier between the two groups, creating an “us”
and “them” scenario. This further projects what Bolt identifies as a “need
for division” within society and furthermore a desire for “distinctions
between them and us, Other and Self, out-group and in-group, abnormal
and normal, and so on” (ibid, p.83). This resistance between the sighted
and the blind dehumanises the visually impaired in the texts, and is
reinforced through both writer’s rhetoric of contagion, animalisation and
moral deprivation that comes to be closely connected to blindness.
In both texts this grouping of the sighted versus the “normal” is initially
shown through the spaces which each group occupies. Even though
in both narratives vision becomes a minority state, the environments
which the blind live are nevertheless presented as sub normal which, if
it is assumed that visual impairment is a disability, “necessarily positions
the disabled person as outsider” (Stokoe 2016, p.116). Bolt (2016, p.84)
adds that, “Blindness is always experienced in the midst of sightedness”
and so blindness in this case is arguably prescribed from the authors
experience and understanding of vision. In H.G. Wells’s The Country of
the Blind the community of blind people live in a “mysterious mountain
valley, cut off from the world of men” (p.97) which is “dim with haze
and shadow” (p.118). In contrast to this, the sighted mountaineer Nuñez
descends from his “great free world” (p.117) of normality, of vision where
the mountains surrounding him are comparatively “things of light and
fire” (p.118). Nuñez symbolically travels from the sublime and bright
landscape, “the world that was his own” (p.117) into the darkness of
the blind. By connecting sight to light and blindness to darkness Wells
supports what Bolt calls a “fearsome motif” of the visually impaired as
somehow corrupt which is “at the very least perpetuated by blindness-
darkness synonymy” (2016, p.92). Nuñez therefore crosses the
threshold from the land of the sighted into the dark valley of the blind. In
a similar way, Saramago speaks of individuals being “transported into
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