A Blind Child's View of Children's Literature

Abstract

A Blind Child's View of Children's Literature Craig Werner (bio) Those who overcome fear and shyness often ask me questions about what it is like to be blind. "What is it like to read Braille?" they ask, or "What is your understanding, if any, of color?" I do not mind such questions, and I answer them as well as I can. Recently, I was asked, "Did you never wonder as a child what the pictures in the books read to you looked like?" I may have, but I cannot honestly recall ever inquiring. Certainly, the Braille children's books I read contained no raised-line drawing reproductions of the pictures in the print editions. The people who read to me did not describe the illustrations to me, perhaps believing their efforts would be fruitless. I grew up, then, nourished by words alone, and any images I gleaned from children's books had to be triggered by those words. Now, as an adult, I am teaching children's literature and must grapple seriously with this problem of the applicability of illustrations in children's books to blind children. I now realize that to make a story come to life for me I had to create pictures in my own mind. In pondering this problem, an even more provoking question arose: What kinds of images did I form? In other words, what was my childhood view of children's literature? Although my mental drawings were undoubtedly more tactile than visual, I assume my perception of literature shared ample common ground with that of my sighted friends. I need, though, to sound one note of warning before going on. I am trying to reconstruct memories of twenty-five or more years ago, memories of a congenitally blind boy, the only child of a devoted mother and father in Connecticut. Childhood speaks the language of emotions and feelings, not always of rationality, and these emotions are often elusive and ill understood by the child. The pressure on adults to stop acting and thinking like children facilitates and even encourages the erasure of such memories. Calling them into the present demands patience, thinking, and constant questioning. Even when we think we have them successfully conjured up, how can we be sure we are recalling them accurately? Once youthful innocence is lost, it is no easy matter to resurrect it. We can only [End Page 209] guess intelligently as to what it must have been like and rely for security on those relatively few unshakeable memories from childhood which will die only with us. It is hard, for example, to recreate exactly the feeling of a child when encountering for the first time the wicked fairy in "The Sleeping Beauty," the ogre in "Puss in Boots," or the glass mountain in "The Seven Ravens." To suggest that a blind child's perception of literature must be radically different from that of a sighted child is misleading. All of us, blind and sighted, read stories ourselves as children or had stories read to us, and all these stories were composed of words. Many words do not have visual connotations, and the sighted and the blind child should both arrive at the correct meaning of these words without difficulty. The wolf's "I'll huff and I'll puff" depends not at all on sight for proper comprehension. Indeed, perhaps more than any other subject, literature lends itself to the blind person's understanding with a minimal amount of intermediary aid. Consider geometry, physics, or chemistry. These disciplines cannot adequately be understood and learned without the help of raised-line drawings and modified equipment. Literature, on the other hand, needs no outside assistance before it can effectively enter the mind of a blind receiver. The blind child gets the words from the reader or the Braille book he is reading or the taped text, and then he processes them to the best of his ability. Admittedly, it is the processing of some of these words that is responsible for what must be termed a difference—the only difference, perhaps—between a sighted child's view of literature and a blind child's outlook. One of the...