Since Descartes, most discussions of blindness have been in terms of what Kleegecalls ‘the Hypothetical Blind Man’, a blank-blind figure, rendered mute. In contrast, the twentieth century offered a number of personal accounts of blindness and the process of going blind, at once furthering the fascination by the sighted reader of what the blind supposedly ‘see’ whilst also personalizing the testimony. We start with what Jorge Luis Borges terms the ‘pathetic moment’ of his own becoming blind (1973) along with other first-person accounts of going blind, including the so-called ‘Blind Traveller’ James Holman, RN, Helen Keller’s celebrated autobiographies, and Oliver Sacks’ recent account of progressive blindness through ocular cancer.
Invited commentary on … Word use in first-person accounts of
schizophrenia