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Well’s story, “The Country of the Blind” depicts a “reversed” relationship between the sightedness and blindness. In the country of the blind where blind populations make their living, Nunez is the “other” and his otherness is defined by his ability to see. Unlike many other stories in which the sighted individuals define and constitute the otherness of the blind individuals, Well’s story, by deconstructing this established dichotomy, reveals a story whose plot consists of constitution of otherness not by the sighted but by the blind people.
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In this regard, Nunez represents the “enlightened” individual, whilst the blind people represent the ones who believe in and make living on the basis of “myths”. In the blind society whose social contracts are established on the basis of myths, the words such as “seeing”, “sight” and “looking” don’t exist. These words are unintelligible to the blind people and they do not correspond to particular signs or referents. On the one hand, it is the natural condition (not being able to see from birth) which determines the structure of language. On the other hand, the utterance of the language reproduces the ongoing relations in the society on the basis of not-seeing.
In the story, Nunez tends to “teach” the notion of seeing to the blind people. For him, the blind society has a “lack”. On the other hand, the society considers him a mad person whose lack is “the obsession about seeing” and “the disability of blindness”. In terms of a deconstructive approach on “literary blindness”, one might suggest that the blind people represent what Blanchot puts forth as “a person who doesn’t know how to read”. However, this interpretation would be problematic. The blind people in the story actually know how to read; they don’t see but concretize, they substitute the act of seeing by smelling and hearing. Besides, they have medical experts and scientists who diagnose Nunez’s sightedness as a mental disorder. They’re neither self-forgetting nor self-ignorant; they know very well about their descendants and they constitute their language in a way that it would enable the continuation of the life style based on blindness. They don’t tend to forget; contrarily their discourses and utterances constantly remind them about themselves.
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Nunez falls in love and once he considers becoming blind by a surgical operation in order to marry his blind beloved. In this regard, Medina-sarote symbolizes the psychoanalyst, whose analysand (Nunez) engages to a transference at the end of which he “heals” and “reconciles” by falling in love to the analyzer. However, different versions for endings of the story disallow one to complement this psychoanalytical allegory with further interpretations. In one version, Nunez tries to escape and dies eventually. In a different one published in 1939, he manages to escape with Medina-sarote after a disastrous event which destroys the whole country, and they live happily ever after. Different versions of the story endings signify the author’s ambivalence and points out that the author cannot control his text. In other words, the author cannot master his own creation.
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All in all, the story represents the sighted and the blind both of whom know how to read. In the meantime, it is the author who cannot master the text. In addition to the deconstructive act he accomplished about the reversal of “the sighted” and “the blind”, once more he deconstructs literature as his story cannot finish with an absolute, proper ending.
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H. G. Wells. “The Country of the Blind”, in “Selected Stories of H. G. Wells”, Ed. Ursula LeGuin. New York: The Modern Library, 2004. p. 365-395.
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In order to read “The Country of the Blind” and other stories, http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/hgwells/Country-Blind.pdf
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