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Ludwig Wittgenstein asks in his Remarks on Colour
if it would be possible to explain to a blind person what it is
like to see. “Certainly,” he thinks, but then he reconsiders,
and concludes that the question was “badly put: as if seeing
were an activity and there were a description of it.” Of
course seeing is an activity and there are (scientific) descriptions
of it; but for Wittgenstein the question is badly put because
under ordinary, non-scientific circumstances we do not ask what
it is like to see. We may ask what it is like to see a given object;
but we are most likely to ask what the object itself looks like.
We ask, that is, for a description of the object, and from that
description we learn both what that particular thing looks like
and what it was like to see it.
Now suppose we turn Wittgenstein’s question around: would
it be possible to explain to someone who can see what it is like
to be blind? Notice that it has become a very different question:
the transitive verb to see has been replaced by the intransitive
to be blind, because blindness is always understood as a condition,
a state of being (or maybe I should say non-being), and not as
an activity: indeed, it is the condition brought about by the
permanent inactivity of the visual sense. So, we think, we cannot
possibly find out what blindness is like in the same way we find
out what seeing is like.
Blindness is sightlessness, we say; and when we treat it that
way, and not as a perceptual system which is complete in itself
(though organized quite differently from the visual system to
which most people are accustomed), two results follow. First,
any act of perception on the part of a blind person will inevitably
be treated as a magical and therefore inexplicable phenomenon;
second, the blind person will seldom if ever be asked to describe
anything external to himself, for without perception there can
of course be no description. There are other results as well:
persons who have never been asked to describe anything will be
unable to do so when, eventually, they are asked to do it: they
will not have developed a descriptive vocabulary, a process which
takes much time and collective effort. Thus the blind person attempting
to explain what blindness is like will generally end up explaining
what it is like not to see instead of detailing the sounds, textures,
tastes and odors of his or her experience.
Most importantly of all, the person who cannot describe his or
her experience will seem in some crucial way not to exist: description
doesn’t simply tell me about an object out there, it tells
me about the consciousness of the person describing the object
as well. “Tell me what the artist is,” says Henry
James, “and I will tell you of what he has been conscious.”
Turn this sentence around, and the implications are devastating:
if you cannot tell what a person has been conscious of, you cannot
tell what that person is.
When I first read Ved Mehta’s Face
to Face in l979, I was acting on the assumption that autobiographical
narratives by blind individuals would provide the fullest and
most reliable accounts of the experience of blindness. But Face
to Face was as disappointing as most other narratives of its
kind. There was a great deal of circumstantial detail about life
in India during the period immediately before and immediately
after Independence, and there was a good deal of talk about what
it was like not to see; but there was very little about what blindness
was like.
I did not put it that way at the time; nor did I understand that,
for the reasons I have outlined above—for lack of a language
adequate to the task of describing his experience—Mehta
could not have said what blindness was like. I had yet to realize,
too, that he probably would not have done so even if he had been
able to. Like other autobiographical narratives by blind persons,
Face to Face tries to satisfy
two contradictory desires: the desire on the one hand to justify
Mehta’s belief that his blindness makes him special, makes
him interesting enough to justify his writing his autobiography
at the age of twenty; and the desire on the other hand to make
the reader perceive him as a normal human being, whose blindness
makes no difference.
As I say, I understood none of this in 1979; I merely lumped
Face to Face in with the
other books that had disappointed me and forgot about it. My interest
revived several years later, however, when I learned that Mehta
had returned to the task of autobiography, and found that his
newer work was very different than Face
to Face. As I shall explain in the following pages, Mehta
has come to a new understanding of his medium and its resources,
and this in turn has led him to a new apprehension of both his
blindness and himself.
Mehta has produced four new autobiographical volumes since Face
to Face was published in 1957, all of them explicitly conceived
as part of a “large autobiographical work” on which
he expects to be engaged “for many years” to come.
These new books do not form a kind of extended sequel to Face
to Face. The first two—Daddyji
(1972) and Mamaji (1979)—are
devoted to the lives of his parents in the years before and immediately
after Mehta’s birth, and both books end with the attack
of meningitis by which Mehta was blinded in 1937, when he was
three-and-a-half years old. Vedi
(1982) covers a two-and-a-half year span between the ages of five
and eight to which Face to
Face devotes about fifteen pages, while The
Ledge Between the Streams (1984) covers a seven-year period,
beginning where Vedi leaves
off and ending where the second section of Face
to Face had ended—with Mehta, at the age of fifteen,
about to depart for America and the Arkansas School for the Blind.
In this context, Face to Face
becomes what Mehta calls it in the preface to The
Ledge Between the Streams—a “sort of outline”
to be fleshed out by newer work. For Face
to Face was written, Mehta says in the preface to Vedi,
“before I had quite found my voice as a writer and before
I had acquired even the rougher implements of the craft. It was
also before I had realized that memory expands by some kind of
associative process, so that a remembered scene that at first
seems hardly worth a line grows in the act of thinking and writing
into a chapter, and this full-blown memory uncovers other memories,
other scenes, which in turn expand and multiply” (Vedi,
n.p.).
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
