Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 2005]
Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind
Edmund Hardy
The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men
stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On
the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new
day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our
sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside,
where the other people are.” The six men narrate as
“we”, although one of them, Ripolus, is also guide, because
he can reportedly see a little. “Ripolus, what can
you see? Simply describe for us what you can see?”
The answer is usually, “Not much.”
The novel covers the day when these six men are
to be painted by Pieter Breughel, “the Painter”, who
wants them to follow each other and fall down into a
ditch, the image familiar to us as ‘The Parable of the
Blind’, a rural recreation of ‘Matthew XV’, 14: “If the
Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
In the painting, the blind men are about to fall. The
painting is tense, as the eye follows the chain of men
towards the ditch. What we see is about to collapse.
Hofmann’s novel is also tense; not because the six
narrators may collapse but because the novel as viable
form may do so. It doesn’t.
BUY Gert Hofmann books online from and
The novel’s frame is this: the six men speak a strangely
unified monologue, wandering around the village, on
the green, in the woods, eating lunch. Each man has a
story about how he came to be blind. As readers, we are
never given more information than the six possess nor
any hints with which to see out of the monologue; there
are times when the six may be the subject of practical
jokes – being told they are in a secluded toilet when
they may be on the village green – but we don’t laugh,
because we don’t know if it’s funny. We don’t see from
the outside. We read thoughts and speech. We are blind
because we’re stuck like narrative threads in the novel’s
mass, just as the blind men seem trapped in the telling
of their own story.
This is why worries over the inaccurate presentation
of blindness are beside the point. Do blind people feel
themselves all over to work out who they are, first
thing in the morning, as these do? No. But this is the
Parable Of The Blind, and the parables are multiple.
Imagine a page with six tiny figures stumbling around
in it; they can’t see the perimeter of the page, and they
can’t see out into the world. The page is a room, or a
273
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z