Blindness, by Henry Green
Blindness, by Henry Green
There were so many things to do, all the senses to develop, old acquaintances of childhood to make friends with again. To sit still and be stifled by the blackness was wrong; he had done that long enough. The temptation was so great, the darkness pressed so close, and what sounds one heard could only at first be converted into terms of sight and not of sound. When a blackbird fled screaming he had only been able to see it as a smudge darting along, and he had tried in vain to visualise it exactly. Now he was beginning to see it as a signal to the other birds that something was not right; it was the feeling that one has in the dark when something moves, and when one jumps to turn on the light, and the light leaps out through the night. Why translate into terms of seeing, for perhaps he would never see again, even in his dreams? They might be of sounds or of touch, now.
When I was in high school, my English teacher told us to write an essay about Oedipus's "tragic flaw that all heroes of tragedies have". She further told us that his tragic flaw was pride. Marching to the beat of a different kazoo, I wrote my essay asserting instead that Oedipus suffered from "blindness", his inability to see the truth bearing down on him like a steamroller foreshadowing the physical blindness to come. I thought it was a decent effort, but the teacher, who knew the one correct way to skin a cat, scolded me for not having paid sufficient attention to her, and made me do the paper over.
I mention this because Henry Green's first novel also plays around with physical vs. intellectual and spiritual inability to see, and titles the novel accordingly. Protagonist John Haye's idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt turning point when an accident blinds him. In segments titled "Caterpillar", "Chrysalis", and "Butterfly" for those who need extra hints that this is a bildungsroman, Haye refuses to roll over and die, sharpens his remaining senses, and moves to London to find himself. Meanwhile, his horrible "How could you do this to me" stepmother, who still has two functional eyes, can't see a damn thing that counts. Her focus shifts between handwringing on what to do about John, and handwringing over whether to shoot the family's aging pet dog, drown a littler of kittens, and other ham-fisted analogies.
A subplot involves a spiritually blind parson, defrocked, drunk, abusive toward his insightful daughter, John's caregiver.
Green went on to write much better-known novels like Living and Loving. This is clearly a 'first novel' by someone who learned and grew as he went along (like John Haye, come to think of it), mostly playing with themes, not a 'great work', but worth the effort. And probably included in the 1001 list because his later books were so well-received that they felt the need to put most or all of his work on the list.
There were so many things to do, all the senses to develop, old acquaintances of childhood to make friends with again. To sit still and be stifled by the blackness was wrong; he had done that long enough. The temptation was so great, the darkness pressed so close, and what sounds one heard could only at first be converted into terms of sight and not of sound. When a blackbird fled screaming he had only been able to see it as a smudge darting along, and he had tried in vain to visualise it exactly. Now he was beginning to see it as a signal to the other birds that something was not right; it was the feeling that one has in the dark when something moves, and when one jumps to turn on the light, and the light leaps out through the night. Why translate into terms of seeing, for perhaps he would never see again, even in his dreams? They might be of sounds or of touch, now.
When I was in high school, my English teacher told us to write an essay about Oedipus's "tragic flaw that all heroes of tragedies have". She further told us that his tragic flaw was pride. Marching to the beat of a different kazoo, I wrote my essay asserting instead that Oedipus suffered from "blindness", his inability to see the truth bearing down on him like a steamroller foreshadowing the physical blindness to come. I thought it was a decent effort, but the teacher, who knew the one correct way to skin a cat, scolded me for not having paid sufficient attention to her, and made me do the paper over.
I mention this because Henry Green's first novel also plays around with physical vs. intellectual and spiritual inability to see, and titles the novel accordingly. Protagonist John Haye's idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt turning point when an accident blinds him. In segments titled "Caterpillar", "Chrysalis", and "Butterfly" for those who need extra hints that this is a bildungsroman, Haye refuses to roll over and die, sharpens his remaining senses, and moves to London to find himself. Meanwhile, his horrible "How could you do this to me" stepmother, who still has two functional eyes, can't see a damn thing that counts. Her focus shifts between handwringing on what to do about John, and handwringing over whether to shoot the family's aging pet dog, drown a littler of kittens, and other ham-fisted analogies.
A subplot involves a spiritually blind parson, defrocked, drunk, abusive toward his insightful daughter, John's caregiver.
Green went on to write much better-known novels like Living and Loving. This is clearly a 'first novel' by someone who learned and grew as he went along (like John Haye, come to think of it), mostly playing with themes, not a 'great work', but worth the effort. And probably included in the 1001 list because his later books were so well-received that they felt the need to put most or all of his work on the list.