H-Disability

Tweed on Bolt, 'Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of

Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing'
Review published on Tuesday, May 17, 2016

David Bolt. Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing.

Corporealities: Discourses of Disability Series. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2013. 178
pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-472-11906-6.

Reviewed by Hannah Tweed (University of Glasgow) Published on H-Disability (May, 2016)

Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

David Bolt’s The Metanarrative of Blindness is the nineteenth book in the University of
Michigan Press’s Corporealities: Discourses of Disability series. A lucid, wide-ranging, and
provocative text, it offers a careful critique of the cultural narratives surrounding—and
constructing—visual impairment in the twentieth century. Bolt
structures the text thematically and grounds it in Gordon Allport’s (1897-1967) model of prejudice,
alongside classic and contemporary disability studies theory. Allport’s “antilocution, avoidance,
discrimination, physical attack, and extermination” are all discussed with relation to visual
impairment. However, Bolt roots his discussion of antilocution in literary and cultural representation:
avoidance is linked to institutionalization and segregation; discrimination is connected to ableist
behaviors and language; and “visual violation” is presented as a sister to physical attack. Finally, Bolt
challenges the wealth of narratives that link visual impairment with suicide—what he terms
“culturally assisted suicide”—discussing those texts in conjunction with Allport’s final stage of
prejudicial behavior, extermination (p. 127). Presenting this metanarrative of blindness as an
essentially modernist concept, Bolt reiterates the essential value of critical approaches informed by
disability studies, especially with regard to experiential knowledge and the “disruption of
ocularnormativism” (p. 131).

With this agenda in mind, the text begins with an introduction titled “Embodied Introduction,”
seeded, in the disability studies tradition, with critically reflective personal accounts of cultural bias
toward individuals with visual impairments, and the metaphors and language of seeing. These
anecdotes are combined with a brief history of discrimination against individuals with visual
impairments, and disability rights more generally (Stuart Murray’s work on autism is introduced,
regarding the value of anecdotes, as is Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic
Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation [2007], in a useful engagement with
attitudes toward both physical and cognitive disabilities). Bolt then introduces his key terminology for
the volume: most significantly “ocularnormativism,” indicating “the mass or institutionalized
endorsement of visual necessity” (p. 5). This term works alongside the already established
“ocularcentrism,” where “perspective and ... subject position” are “dominated by vision” (p. 17). The
early section of the volume is particularly useful for researchers who are unfamiliar with the field;
Bolt’s careful unpacking of terminology, drawing on a wide range of other scholars (Georgina Kleege,
Lennard Davis, Donald Kirtley, Kenneth Jernigan, and Stephen Kuusisto, among others), provides a
concise and nuanced engagement with the origins and use of such terms as “blind,” “the blind,”
“sighted,” “unsighted,” and “visual impairments,” as well as disability studies approaches to the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tweed on Bolt, 'Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing'. H-
Disability. 05-17-2016.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/4189/reviews/125753/tweed-bolt-metanarrative-blindness-re-reading-twentieth-century
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

1
 H-Disability

literary representation of individuals with visual impairments. While much of Bolt’s original analyses
take place in the rest of the text, this section offers a useful introduction to the frequently
problematic history of the terminology surrounding visual impairment.

In “Character Designation: Normate Reductionism and Nominal Displacement,” Bolt presents

narratives of “the sighted and the blind” as binaries within a modernist framework, where characters
are named and identified, first and foremost, as “the blind girl” or “the blind man” (pp. 35, 37).
Using texts ranging from Rudyard Kipling’s “They” (1904) to Susan Sontag’s The Death Kit (1967)
and Stephen King’s The Langoliers (1990)—all of which feature later in the monograph—Bolt
demonstrates how the terminology of “the blind” and “the un/sighted” affects literary representation
of individuals with visual impairments across the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the
removal of individuality and subjectivity. This interest in subjectivity is continued in the analysis in
subsequent chapters: in “Come-to-Bed Eyes: Ophthalmocentrism, Ocularcentrism, and Symbolic
Castration,” Bolt critiques the long-established association between blindness, emasculation, and
castration. The characters in Bolt’s chosen texts are carefully analyzed as beyond normate sexual
desire, despite the sexualization and fetishization of the eye in Western literature. Similarly, in “‘A
Hand of the Blind Ventures Forth’: The Grope, the Grip, and Haptic Perception,” Bolt engages with
another prevalent cultural myth surrounding visual impairment: the concept of “extraordinary
senses” (p. 67). More than simply stating the inaccuracy and false expectations raised by this
stereotype, this chapter suggests that the specific language associated with extraordinary senses is
linked to more pernicious eugenicist trends. In particular, Bolt proposes that this association of
animal characteristics with individuals with visual impairments includes references to an “animalistic
lack of control” and explicitly discriminatory language (p. 68). His exemplar texts (H. G. Wells’s “The
Country of the Blind” [1904], James Joyce’s Ulysses [1918], John Wyndham’s The Day of the
Triffids [1951], and James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late [1994]) provide compelling evidence
of a cultural myth that any non-visual sensory experience is both abnormal and suspect. In particular,
the analysis of “the groping blind figure,” and the associations between touch, visual impairment, and
lechery—in the discourse of the primary texts—provides provocative ground, where eugenic concerns
permeate the representation of sexuality and physical connection (p. 76). The attention paid to
animalist language and compensatory gifts also seems fertile ground for analysis in representations
of cognitive disability, as well as portrayals of visual impairment specifically linked with touch.

Building on this cultural wariness of touch, the fifth chapter in the text, “Social Friction and Science
Fiction,” focuses on representations of visual impairment as contagious disease. Linking Allport’s
concept of avoidance as prejudiced behavior, Bolt suggests that avoidance of people with visual
impairments is linked to the idea of “contagious blindness”—as demonstrated in John Varley’s “The
Persistence of Vision” (1978) and José Saramago’s Blindness (1995) (p. 80). One of the key
commonalities in these texts, and others discussed thus far, is that they present visual impairment as
a binary, rather than a spectrum. Furthermore, in the portrayal of contagious blindness, the authors
perpetuate the use of animal motifs, “blurring the human-animal distinction” (p. 87), even as binaries
between sight and blindness are artificially reinforced, with the latter state held up as both
fascinating and fearful.

The final two chapters of The Metanarrative of Blindness concentrate more explicitly on extreme
negative representations of visual impairment. In “Visual Violation: Staring, Panopticism, and the
Unseen Gazer,” Bolt responds to Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s seminal work on staring, engaging

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tweed on Bolt, 'Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing'. H-
Disability. 05-17-2016.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/4189/reviews/125753/tweed-bolt-metanarrative-blindness-re-reading-twentieth-century
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

2
 H-Disability

with her discussion of the complexities of staring and subjectivity, while also delineating the violence
inherent in the ocularcentric presentation of sight as synonymous with knowledge, and the role of
spectacle. Bolt’s “unseen gazer” is fundamentally separate from Garland Thomson’s starer-staree
relationship (and the potentially destabilizing force of that interaction) (p. 109). Instead, what is
presented is an ocularnormative subjectivity that is fundamentally disempowering to the gazee. Such
a position of vulnerability aligns with the presentation of characters with visual impairments in Bolt’s
most provocative chapter, “Culturally Assisted Suicide,” where, in his primary texts, characters with
visual impairments are presented as firmly and detrimentally other, set apart from the normate
population. In many of the plays and novels in this chapter, cultural myths surrounding blindness
present both visual impairment and “cure” narratives as a logical prompt for suicide (implicit or
explicit)—a position that Bolt presents as cultural extermination. Finally, Bolt suggests that in
such texts as Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether (1902) and J. M. Synge’s The Well of the
Saints (1905), both “sight loss and sight restoration come to present the bearer with the same
disturbing sense of a chasm to cross,” concluding that the representation of sight and blindness as
binary oppositions is the defining problem behind the metanarrative of blindness (p. 125).

Given to social influence of literature, the cultural conditioning surrounding ocularnormativism is as

disturbing as it is pervasive. The Metanarrative of Blindness offers a provocative challenge to these
dominant literary and social discourses, and constructs a theoretical framework via which twentieth-
and twenty-first-century literature can be productively critiqued in order to demonstrate and alter the
pervasive ableist discourses surrounding visual impairment. Ria Cheyne describes the monograph as
“bridg[ing] the cultural, the personal, and the political”; as Cheyne states, one of the strengths of
Bolt’s text is the ways in which it presents cultural productions as political acts and renders ablelist
politics personal.[1] A lucid and provocative extension to disability studies and critical theory
alike, The Metanarrative of Blindness is a valuable text for scholars across literary and cultural
(disability) studies.

Note

[1]. Ria Cheyne, quoted in Centre for Culture & Disability Studies, “Our Books,” http://ccds.hope.ac.u
k/ourbooks.htm.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=43670

Citation: Hannah Tweed. Review of Bolt, David, Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of

Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. May, 2016. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43670

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License.

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Tweed on Bolt, 'Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing'. H-
Disability. 05-17-2016.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/4189/reviews/125753/tweed-bolt-metanarrative-blindness-re-reading-twentieth-century
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.