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village, and we, the reader, are there too, wondering
what room, what enclosed world we are in. The six
men remember the past. They wonder where they are.
They have banal conversations with strangers about
food and the weather and which is the best way to
go. They argue with each other and nearly fight. Hofmann’s
prose is so concentrated and unrelenting that
claustrophobia turns to terrible awareness. There is no
need to explicate. No need for laboured, ‘author’s message’
moments, because we begin to read everything
into the parable; the leaner in description or the more a
narrative moves in circles or repetition the greater the
force accumulated. How does a book like this pierce
through to us, when there was no vivid description of
something we recognised, no witty or psychologically
fascinating dialogue, no grand sweep of history, no
denouement?
One answer is that those very elements begin to seem
ornamental to literature’s work, part of which (let’s be
reductive!) is to wonder how communication in language
might be possible and, if it isn’t, to fail instructively.
How can six blind men stumbling around, speak
to us? Do they speak for anyone else as well? They are
six men in a painting, here made to fall into the ditch
over and over for the Painter to make his sketches.
Sight is most often the sense connected to knowledge,
as in, “I see it”, “I can’t see round it”, “in this light”, and
also the various distinctions between the visible and
BUY Gert Hofmann books online from and
invisible. Sight is also linked to reason; if we can see it
properly, we can be rational about it. These traditions
find their dissection in the contemporary philosophies
of ‘the gaze’. In The Parable Of The Blind, it is hearing
that relates the realistic details of interaction, that is,
speech. Without sight, the most pushy of senses, one
of the things the novel does is to bring sound and touch
back to a narrative, to embody a world not predicated
on the eyes, as Aristotle seemed to think was necessary
when he wrote ‘On Sense And Sensible Objects’, “of
those who have been deprived of one sense or the other
from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf
and the dumb.” Hofmann’s novel is a joke on metaphor
– which, classically, bridges the inward mental activity
to the world of appearances, left in this novel as a swing
bridge hanging over the water – making the parable, ‘in
this light’, a parable of the parables.
Standing before a painting, we may well ask a work
to speak to us, and a number of novelists have taken up
the extra-critical task of elaborating this speech or else
making up a story – one thinks of a pearl earring – following
the irritating trope that we might ‘walk inside’ a
painting. Hofmann has taken this thought and actually
pushed our faces so far into the oil and brush-strokes
that we cannot see back out, and we cannot see within.
The prose, inhabiting a world of sound and intuited objects,
is spare and clear, like a radio transmission which
has been tuned in after an interfering hiss.
274
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