‘Que cherchent-ils au Ciel?’: Seeing with the Blind in Bruegel, Baudelaire and Maeterlinck

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines depictions of blindness across painting, poetry and theatre. Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting, The Parable of the Blind, strongly resonates with Baudelaire’s and Maeterlinck’s portraits of the blind in mid- to late-nineteenth-century France and Belgium. I argue that Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Aveugles’ and Maeterlinck’s one-act play Les Aveugles used the motif of blindness to undermine the power of sight, encouraging the reader/spectator to cultivate a synaesthesia of the senses. Here, blindness becomes emblematic of the condition of the poet/seer in modernity, the blind embodying the tension between the poet’s plunge into darkness and his upward glance toward the eternal.