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Pritchett’s “Blind Love” metaphorically displays the idea of “concretization” of a literary text against which deconstruction reacts. Deconstruction refers to the act of reading as a “voluntary blindness” without any visualization of the text involved. In this regard, one can make sense of what Blanchot defines as “reading without knowing”. In “Blind Love” the blind man Armitage has a “system” of living: “They lived under the fixed laws: no chair or table, even no astray must be moved. Everything must be in its place.” (p. 47) For Mrs. Johnson, it was a terrible thing to destroy one of his systems (p. 50). Armitage’s systemization of the objects around his house connotes the concretization of a literary text which in fact lacks visual representation. There is no difference between an ordinary reader and Armitage for the ways in which both is blind (the reader is carrying on an act of voluntary blindness while reading) and concretize the non-visual. Hence Armitage is obsessed with remembering everything, and building up a dream-like system of which he constantly dreams; as a matter of fact he’s dreaming a dream (p. 69).

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However, a crucial twist in the story occurs when Mrs. Johnson and Armitage go to Italy; their quarrels and struggles come to an end since as the author asserts that “his system has broken down completely in Italy.” (p. 80) Armitage claims that since Mrs. Johnson is his eyes, everything sounds different from now on. He gives up trying the “spiritual” treatment for his blind eyes, and discards his wish to gain access to the “potential reach” of the objects instead of the “actual reach” of them in his blind state. Blanchot would have certainly liked this twist, since Armitage transforms into a person – as Blanchot would suggest – “who no longer knows how to read”, thus capable of undertaking the mission of “voluntary blindness”.
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Besides, literary blindness might be understood as follows: When one reads one page of a literary text, he/she doesn’t know about the other. There is an “actual” touch in the act of reading. However, if one reads the summary of a literary text, he/she gains a “potential reach”. In spite of his blindness and actuality of reaching due to his non-sightedness, Armitage’s system of concretization eradicates the possibility of actual reaching since he knows exactly where every object in the house stands. Eventually, he becomes a potential reacher but with a difference from the sighted people; firstly, he has to remember and secondly he has to enable the continuation of his system which provides him with the possibility of a potential reaching. In doing so, Mrs. Johnson helps him to keep up the system and in the end they fall in love with each other. Armitage is satisfied, since love peacefully enters the realm of the system. However the love becomes the very tool which brings the system to an end. All in all, Mrs. Johnson becomes the provider of the non-existence of the system by which Armitage gets rid of his obsession about remembering and his effort regarding enabling the continuation of his partial potential reach. Hence Armitage, voluntarily committing himself to blindness, explores his real self; similar to the reader who, as Blanchot underlines, requires “ignorance” rather than “knowledge”.
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By abandoning to remember everything, Armitage metaphorically actualizes “the self-ignorant” reader who is at the same time “self-forgetting”.
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Pritchett, V. S. “Blind Love” Selected Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1978. 41-80.
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