ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representation of blindness in short fiction in relation to ideas about empathy, intimacy and touch. It considers some examples from the wealth of twentieth-century short stories about visual impairment, introducing debates about competing understandings of blindness and processes of reading and writing about it. The focus is on two stories in particular: D.H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man” (1920) and, “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver’s 1981 re-writing of Lawrence’s story. These stories deal with everyday encounters, domestic settings, and understated marital tensions which might seem initially insignificant yet both ask fundamental questions about the imaginative relationship between blind and sighted characters, readers and writers. For sighted readers they raise questions of whether we feel for, or with, the blind writer. As Paterson asks: “is the mechanism one of sympathy, the sharing of feelings of another (feeling-with), or the more specific projective identification of putting oneself in the place of another, empathy (feeling-for)?” (95).
