Disability Studies Quarterly
Fall 2004, Volume 24, No. 4
<www.dsq-sds.org>
Copyright 2004 by the Society
for Disability Studies


"Window Offices" and Commentary

Adrian Spratt
Email: A.Spratt@att.net

Window Offices

1.

It was in a solemn mood that Jonathan contemplated the two views from his room. He'd just learned that the newly elected administration wanted him to move out of his corner office. With the emphasis on new initiatives and new names to promote them, Jonathan and his staff were about to be relegated to the floor's nether regions.

The west-facing windows of his familiar office presided over an old church and the headquarters of a financial powerhouse. Converging in the distance through his north windows were lines of office buildings, those with glass facades from the previous two decades and those mostly brick from an era much longer ago. He guessed back then the brick buildings had been rough-hewn, dusty structures with none of the manicured look of the preserved relics along Pearl Street and off Hanover Square. He'd noticed their addresses in nineteenth century biographies and novels and had no doubt they'd show up through the Twenty-First, hyperlinks and all.

The scene outside changed often, but in patterns. In the morning, light was a burst of brightness glinting off the reams of glass, while on the downtown street came a constant four-lane stream of vehicles. At noon crowds raced around the few canopied street vendors the police hadn't yet driven away. As evening approached, depending on the season and how its rays played on the buildings' materials, reflected sunlight ranged from white to salmon to Edgar Allen Poe red. If severe storms threatened, the atmosphere turned green. On ordinary rainy days, the area assumed the suffocating, inward look that had been Bartleby the Scrivener's New York.

When Jonathan's mind drifted to the teeming life and history spread out below, the windows would momentarily distract him from the case reviews and planning sessions he held in his office. Blindness didn't require him to make leaps of imagination. Some version of what he pictured did exist. He knew from the sheer predictability of events outside his windows, confirmed by the casual observations his colleagues made several times a day, day after day.

The order to move was brought to him by Maria, a young political hire who now controlled the work lives of the experienced staff.

"We're creating a department to implement our new policy initiatives," she said, speaking below comfortable audible level from the other side of his desk. "We're giving the department head this corner office, which means we need to ask you to move to Room 97."

"That department already has rooms upstairs," Jonathan pointed out, as if she didn't know. Those upstairs rooms had been built just three years before, when the previous Administration had announced the very policy now touted as new, albeit with another name.

"We've had to make a number of hard decisions. This is one of them."

A manager himself, Jonathan recognized the approach. Faced with a difficult personnel issue, she'd show sympathy but remain firm.

"And what about the rest of my staff?"

"There are rooms over there they can move into, but they'll be dispersed for a while. We've got several moves going on at once. First we need to know how soon you can be out of here."

To say when was to consent. "I'll get back to you."

"When?"

She knew his tactics as well as he knew hers. "By Friday."

Five minutes later, he learned from a casual remark by someone in a neighboring office that the new department head had been standing silently inside his door, surveying her domain-to-be, the entire time Maria had been spelling out his fate. They must believe nothing seen, no harm done. He wanted to race to the elevators, ram the button for her floor, burst into her office and demand she explain how she could have done something so unconscionable. But in an office that prized decorum, such conduct would be contemptible. It would be contemptible in his own mind. He was so angry he resolved to resign.

2.

Fourteen years earlier, at a law enforcement agency a thousand miles away, Jonathan was the first law student to arrive for his summer clerkship. He'd never set foot in the Midwest before, his hiring having been negotiated by telephone and letter. His office's window looked out onto parking lots and other state government buildings, a view his reader, whom he'd found through a newspaper ad, described in an indifferent voice. But Jonathan recognized that even an uninspiring view made the room more than the sum of its four walls.

Over the next two weeks the other summer law clerks filtered in. The last was Rich, the only Easterner beside Jonathan. By then, the other law clerks had staked out their rooms, and everyone had a window. The only room available for Rich did not.

An attorney named Virginia assigned work to the law clerks. She was renowned for keeping a drawer full of bow-ties and a jacket she hooked on the inside of her door, accessories that transformed her from casual of choice to professional of necessity any time court or some other formal situation called. She had the personality to carry it all off. Though a non-smoker, her convictions were libertarian and she opposed the state's new law mandating smokeless areas in public places. The day it went into effect, early in June, she appeared at a local restaurant for lunch, swept her arm toward the smoking section and regally demanded to be seated with "The really interesting people over there."

The story preceded her return to the office that afternoon, when Jonathan asked, "Aren't you afraid you might have to enforce the anti-smoking law one day?"

"They wouldn't make me if I didn't want to." It was that kind of office, enforcement with a heart. She added, "But I wouldn't turn down the case. I'm an advocate."

It was Virginia who brought Jonathan the news that he was to switch offices with Rich.

"I am? I like it here."

"That's what Hal wants, and what Hal wants, Hal gets." Hal was the department head.

"Why me, do you know?"

"You'll have to ask him."

Jonathan was surprised to find that the pending loss of the window office upset him. True, he could no longer distinguish shadows from light, but he still experienced daylight in a room as airiness, while a dark room could feel as if it were closing in on him.

He recalled views from other windows. There'd been the woods beyond his first college dorm window. In law school, his window had given out onto a driveway and fueled his visitors' speculations about who was driving past. The changing images had allowed his mind to look beyond himself.

But if he could stretch out his imagination in a window office, why not stretch it farther in one without a window? Rich would have the advantage of looking out without need of anyone's mediation. Jonathan had worked in many windowless offices before, usually in a school library, and it had never occurred to him to complain. Maybe the room exchange made sense. Besides, the window was sealed, so it wasn't as if he were benefiting from fresh air.

A blind lawyer named Robbie had worked at the agency for many years. Virginia offered to introduce them. As Jonathan and she walked over to Robbie's area, an interior part of the floor near the elevators, he was struck by its stillness. After the lively interactions in the hallway occupied by Hal's staff, it had the air of a crypt.

"Hi," Jonathan said, from the threshold. He wondered whether to hold out his hand.

Behind his desk Robbie stood and boomed his reply. Virginia excused herself with unaccustomed softness.

"What kinds of cases do you handle?" Jonathan asked, his elbow against the door jamb.

"It's my job to make sure our contracts are shipshape." In a gravelly voice, Robbie added, "It's a decent gig."

Jonathan said, "I'm down the end of the hall, with Hal."

"And you -- what cases have they got you working on?" Robbie sat down.

Jonathan slouched into the door. "I'm looking into a public right of way question."

"If I can ever help out, just holler."

"Thanks, I will." But Jonathan already doubted he would. That troubled him, so he explained the issue and asked Robbie for his ideas.

Robbie expatiated on lessons he was clearly recalling from law school. "Probably nothing you don't already know," he concluded.

He was right, and Jonathan regretted pursuing a subject outside the older man's expertise. Pushing away from the door jamb, he said, "Thank you for your time."

Next morning Jonathan got himself admitted to Hal's office. "Can we talk about the office moves?"

"Here, sit down." Hal thumped the back of a chair and returned behind his desk.

Jonathan made sure he was seated securely before going on. "I'm concerned about what people will think about me."

"How's that?"

"Being the one to move into a windowless office."

"Yes?"

"Well, it's going to look like more than coincidence."

"Oh, oh." Hal rose to his feet.

Later that afternoon, Virginia's larger-than-life personality filled Jonathan's room. "My man, you've done something unique in human history."

"Is that so?"

"You've changed Hal's mind."

Jonathan beamed. Then he thought about the other person affected. "How does Rich feel?"

"I'm here, too," Rich said. "I told Hal I agree with you and I'm happy where I am."

Jonathan thanked him. "Are you okay with it, Virginia?"

"I get it, sure."

Not so sure, Jonathan thought. Her libertarian convictions apparently led to conflicting views. But he mustn't worry about convincing her. He'd won.

3.

"Thank you for your time," Mike, a second year law student, said. Armed with copies of two court decisions Jonathan had given him, he sprang to his feet, eager to go and make the call they'd just rehearsed.

Jonathan turned to the keyboard and readied himself to draft a message to Maria. It was Thursday, four days after her visit. He hadn't yet given notice of his decision to resign. He was about to test how it would feel to tell her, instead, that he'd move to Room 97.

His computer was set up to read aloud the text on a screen. At his right the speaker hummed, as if to tell him it was waiting. He composed a single sentence, and the synthetic mannish voice recited each word as he typed. Then he pressed the insert and "8" keys on the numpad to hear the sentence as a whole: "I have checked out Room 97 and will move in at the end of next week." The man in the speaker read it aloud with the same ironic detachment that he displayed whether speaking legalisms or curses. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but acquiescent.

Acquiescent or not, the note would need refinement if he were ever to send it. It would also need the human touch of his part-time assistant, Becky, who'd worked with him long enough to calibrate her reading of his sentences with his intentions. A false note in her reading usually meant a false note in the message. Pity she wasn't due in today.

His thoughts jumped back to the pre-computer summer twenty years ago that had come to mind last night. What was that lawyer's name? Robbie. Robbie had been about as old then as Jonathan was now. He'd been cast into a hallway with no other attorneys and only one other person, a typist. Room 97 was nowhere near as remote, and it did have a window.

A year after his summer at Robbie's office and following graduation from law school, Jonathan had returned to his native New York and begun his career at his present government agency. No window offices had been available. That was fine; he was the most junior lawyer. Afterwards the only window offices that became available were set up for two lawyers, and his work with readers required he have his own space. He was patient, dropping only the occasional query to ensure his supervisor understood a window office mattered to him. He got it the year he married. Later still, appointed supervisor in his own right, he got this corner office. After all that, he loathed having to give it up.

He rose and stood before the north window. Mid-afternoon, most of the food stand canopies would be gone. People would be racing along and cars jamming the streets, but it was too early for rush-hour. The sun wouldn't yet be performing its kaleidoscopic tricks.

His staff, perhaps out of loyalty, perhaps believing their boss's office gave them an umbrella prestige, were also upset. They'd checked out Room 97 and reported back to him. Its window looked out onto a tall building across a narrow street. It was so dark that the fluorescent light, which here annoyed his readers and visitors at night and during cloudy winter days, would be on even when the summer sun glared strongest. He'd blend back into that "Bartleby, the Scrivener" world of which his corner office windows gave only a glimpse.

He sat back down. He had work to do, but kept mulling over the draft message on the screen. How tempting to write Bartleby's refrain, "But I would prefer not to." However, real life Bartleby's got precious few occasions to assert themselves. More often they were making orderly retreats. Bartleby's own obstinacy had led to his ruin.

The beep announcing the arrival of new e-mail shattered his reverie. He deleted the "To" line on the message he was writing to make sure he didn't accidentally send it upstairs, then saved it to his drafts folder.

"From: Raymond L. Miller," the arriving e-mail announced. Jonathan arrowed through the message so the voice synthesizer would read it to him. The head of another department, Ray was asking for suggestions on how to comply with a Freedom of Information query. Someone from the public had contacted him to demand a slew of statistics. "I don't have an accountant on staff to make all these calculations," Ray wrote.

Indeed, no staff had been designated to check the records, do the photocopying, collect the twenty-five cents per page fee and mail out the responses. Antipathy toward FOIL, as the law was known around the office, had nothing to do with concealing corrupt actions or horrible mistakes and everything to do with the aggravation of assigning someone to do the grunt work.

Using keystrokes in lieu of the mouse, Jonathan pressed the "reply to sender" option and wrote: "The critical thing is that you don't track these stats. I recommend you say we don't maintain the type of records he seeks."

He normally added something personal to an email message, but in the past Ray had put out Jonathan's analyses as his own. Resentment made Jonathan terse. He read over the reply and sent it on.

Within moments he got Ray's "reply-reply," as the subject line put it: "Thank you. I always value your wisdom."

The trademark thud of shoulder against door heralded the arrival of Lou, his friend and colleague, too proud to knock and too considerate to catch Jonathan by surprise. Jonathan spoke without looking away from the computer. "People should realize that giving compliments is as much a privilege as getting them."

"What's up, Jon?"

Jonathan swiveled in his chair. "Let me ask you something. If a guy thanked you for your wisdom because you gave him directions to the men's room, how would you respond?"

"I'd run as fast as a pit bull from a barking Chihuahua."

"Look at this." Jonathan rotated the screen.

Lou leaned across the desk to read, then sat down. "This is about a FOIL query?"

"Yes."

"That's all? Maybe the time has come to have a talk with Ray."

"I know he's trying to do the right thing."

"So tell him, and tell him why it's not."

"I don't know. If he'd written something vicious, I could be funny about it and we'd become best buddies. But there's no joking with Ray. Imagine if I asked him if he'd say something like this to any other manager."

"There you go. He'd see that was sucking up."

"But I'm not the one who hired him and I won't be the one to promote him. He has Maria to count on for that."

"What's wrong with telling him straight out that going on about wisdom for a dumb little FOIL request is all out of whack?"

"He'd figure I'm super sensitive and avoid me completely, which would take me out of a loop I need to be in."

Lou yawned and stretched. "You're fighting too many battles, Jon."

Jonathan didn't respond. Why was it so difficult to explain? Likewise Maria. She knew it would be offensive to do her dirty work by phone and not inform the person she was calling that his replacement was listening in. Why wasn't it obvious that having someone listen in right there in his room had been a thousand times worse?

He'd considered a discrimination case, but the new administration was neither firing nor demoting him. The pending loss of his corner office wasn't the kind of discrimination the law recognized. It was about rewarding your own people. To Maria and her cohorts, he was a mere hanger-on from the previous administration to whom no debts were owed. If loss of his office made him a victim of anything, it was the passage of time, and that was something you just took.

He sighed. "Lou, I think I have to go along with the move."

4.

Leaning with both elbows on the dining table after his wife, Michelle, and he had cleared the dinner dishes, Jonathan said, "Maybe the window's about status and nothing more."

She was also sitting at the table, but far enough away to maintain some detachment.

"I mean," he went on, "how many people do we know have corner offices? How many people have offices with no windows at all?"

"That doesn't matter. They're taking yours away."

"They're also not firing me."

"They'd be too afraid. Imagine if it made the news that they'd fired a disabled lawyer for no reason except to put their butt girl -- in your place?"

"All that means is if I resign, I'd never get a new job. No one would hire a lawyer who comes with so much legal baggage."

"Whatever you do, don't leave."

"I know -- health insurance."

"And sitting around at home feeling sorry for yourself."

They were her two standard arguments, both convincing, which was annoying. She'd be willing to carry him even on her fluctuating architect's income, but her health insurance plan was pitiful.

He said, "I read about someone the other day who threw over his job, sat around on a beach for a couple of months and came up with a great money-making idea."

"You hate the beach."

"So I'll sit in the park."

"You're more likely to sit at home. Listen, I don't think it's just about status. You didn't ask for the corner office. Remember?"

"Funny how I couldn't make up my mind when they offered it to me."

"Maybe you had some inkling where it would lead."

He drummed his fingers on the table. "Sometimes I think all I want is to be understood. Isn't it amazing how we go through life looking for something so simple?"

"'Understood' or 'respected'?"

With Michelle, he had to be as careful with words as he was at the office. "Aren't they the same?"

"I don't think so. I can understand why a homeless person might rob someone, but I wouldn't respect him for it. And I respect the Dalai Lama, but I can't say I understand him."

"You're right, I'm not making sense."

"Which would you rather have: Understanding or respect?"

"It's easy for a disabled guy to get respect. All you need to do is put on a tie or open a door for yourself. So I vote for understanding."

"A window on your soul?"

"Very funny."

"Me, I don't care if people understand, so long as you do -- and a few other people. What I want is respect -- the corner window offices of this world."

"Touché. I guess I'm looking for respect, too."

Michelle sang, "R-E-S-P-E-C-T."

He grinned as her tune-challenged voice reached up for the second "e" and hurled itself back down the last two letters. "I think you have to be Aretha Franklin to pull that off."

"You don't like my singing?"

He reached for her hand. "Your singing is what first made me love you."

"Like all those other things that first made you love me?"

He had a new thought, or a thought that newly came back to him. "Remember me telling you about Robbie?"

"You only spoke about him and that summer clerkship for an hour at 2:30 this morning."

"I won't disturb you tonight, promise."

"Better believe you won't."

"Do you know what one of our interns said today when he was leaving my office?"

"Let me guess. 'Thank you for your time.'"

"How the hell did you know?"

"That's what you said to Robbie after that awful conversation. You felt sorry for him, buried away in that deep and dark dungeon and putting on a brave front. One way you're torturing yourself is by comparing how you talked to him with how people are treating you now."

"I mean," Jonathan said, "Mike -- my intern -- was being completely polite and, you know, respectful. He's still new enough to be formal. Anyway, do you know what it made me think?"

"No."

"That my corner office marked the next level after what Robbie accomplished. It's like a stage in a progression, one generation of the blind picking up from where the previous one stalled and laying the foundation for the next. Robbie got his foot in the door of government employment and I pushed it open a little farther. Maybe the next guys will get their feet in the doors at private law firms."

"Come on, that's what they write when you're dead. You're not done yet."

"I'm not?" he said reflexively, and then, "No, I'm not done yet."

5.

It was Friday, the deadline. Becky recited the current version from the screen. "'I've had a chance to check out Room 97. I'll need time to pack, but I can make the move by Wednesday.'"

"Sounds right to me now," Jonathan said, in front of the north windows, his back to her.

"I think so."

A professional modern dancer, Becky was one of those New Yorkers who devote most of their talent and intelligence to artistic ventures and the rest to better paying part-time jobs.

"You don't find it too abrupt?" he said.

"Nope." She was still leaning toward the screen.

"Or too ingratiating?"

"You mean like too saccharine? No. It's simple, strong. I wouldn't change a word."

He turned around. "So, Becky, ready for Room 97?"

"It'll be a little dismal."

"So it needs your pretty smile to jazz it up. You'll have to work full-time."

She laughed. "The room will be fine."

He left the window and sat down at the computer. To send the message, he had only to press the "alt" and "s" keys, but that would feel akin to cooperating in his own execution, as if laying his head on the block or standing immobile before a firing squad. Except this was different. He was cooperating, yes, but if he was the one pressing the decisive "alt-s" combination, it wasn't his execution.

He held down the alt key, then jabbed at the "s." "There it goes."

Sitting back, he imagined the complex machinery that was zinging his dimensionless message to its recipients, twenty floors above: Electricity, copper wires, servers, switches, electrons, data bits, zeros and ones. One day they'd get it.

THE END


The Case for Fiction:
Commentary on "Window Offices"

1.

Jonathan, a blind lawyer and protagonist of "Window Offices," worries his career has played out its string and that bromides about inner strength and beauty will prove empty. These and other quandaries in the story go to the human condition. But will general readers get past his disability? What issues do telling the story through a blind character present for the writer?

With the wider world strangely unaware of the disabled people in its midst, acceptance of our artistic endeavors is elusive. The literary establishment shows no interest in fiction whose protagonists are blind but whose stories are not primarily about blindness. That is distressing because fiction portrays characters as individual, three-dimensional human beings.

2.

For many people, blindness exists solely as a metaphor: blind faith, blind love, blind justice. Often when blind people are depicted, as Georgina Kleege observes in Sight Unseen (1999), their blindness represents loss of virility, as in the biblical story of Samson, or sexual distortion, as in several movies she analyzes. The word's connotations are depressing and demoralizing, even inhuman, and turn individuals who are blind into abstractions of morality and misfortune. But stripped of these associations, while blindness remains a complex issue, it ceases to carry the weight of archetypal passivity.

Against this symbolic background, sighted writers have portrayed blind characters as either exceptional or dependent. An arbitrary example of the former is Liza in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (published in four volumes between 1957 and 1960), a woman who reportedly displays none of the awkwardness associated with blind people and who has fantastic powers of memory and perception.

At the other extreme is a blind man who every day helps a vendor transport her wares to the Berlin market and spends the remaining hours doing nothing except endure her abuse until she is ready to take him home. This character is observed by the narrator of E.T.A. Hoffman's tale, titled in English "My Cousin's Corner Window" (1822). This depiction reflects the attitude expressed in the last line of Milton's sonnet "On his Blindness": "They also serve who only stand and wait." This apologia for resignation derives from biblical parables about the blind and no doubt made sense to a Civil War-ravaged England that also gave us Thomas Hobbes' summary of life without law as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (The Leviathan, 1651).

In the 20th century some blind writers acknowledged their disability only as a footnote. The Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, talked about his disability, as in a 1977 lecture entitled, "Blindness," but never elevated his writings on the subject to art, and they are too abbreviated for memoir. James Joyce and James Thurber also wrote with failing and eventually failed eyesight and are not known for their writing about it. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus character has poor vision, but in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published serially in 1914 and 1915) his struggle to read a newspaper headline is only a nod to the issue.

Other blind authors have made disability their subject, but their best-known works are all memoirs. They include John M. Hull's Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990), Stephen Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind (1997), Robert Russell's To Catch an Angel: Adventures in a World I Cannot See (1962) and Ved Mehta's numerous autobiographies, such as Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986).

These memoirs read rather like the accounts by the 19th century's great explorers. Touching the Rock describes how the author, a theologian, lost his vision in his 30s and navigated into a world the sighted do not inhabit. Stephen Kuusisto journeyed through youth pretending away his deteriorating vision to arrive at self-acceptance in a job working at a guide dog center. (Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen is a partial memoir that also depicts a blind author struggling through denial.) Robert Russell, who became a college professor before the age of personal computers and portable tape recorders, was also a wrestler and got around without a cane. Equally intimidating is Ved Mehta, who left a comfortable home in India for the Arkansas School for the Blind and proceeded almost on a straight line to The New Yorker.

Russell and Mehta represent the apogee of the "super blink," as Kuusisto humorously calls exceptional blind people. I read their works with a lingering sense that much is missing. What compromises did they make? Did they really accomplish so much so smoothly? Perhaps they did. If so, their stories belong more to a pre-accident Christopher Reeve movie than to the story-writing tradition of Poe, Chekhov, and Maupassant.

To any generalization, there are exceptions. In a pair of articles cited in the references, Deborah Kent Stein discusses three novels by blind authors that have blind characters. Two are fictional memoirs, and all are obscure. While both Kleege and Stein note progress in the portrayal of blind people in works by sighted writers, they are understandably ambivalent. Better developed characters in contemporary fiction still do not resonate as real blind people and continue to serve largely metaphorical ends.

It seems no coincidence that published writing by blind authors about blind characters is almost exclusively memoir. Literary agents, editors and publishers, seeing us as novelties, look at our work the way journeyman archeologists fit artifacts into preconceived theories. In a work with a disabled protagonist, marketplace wisdom dictates that disability will preoccupy readers regardless of the larger subject.

The problem is illustrated in a thoughtful column entitled "Powers of Perception" that Judith Shulevitz wrote in 2003 for The New York Times. Analyzing Helen Keller's early writings, Shulevitz states:

Keller violates a cardinal rule of autobiography, which is to distinguish what you have been told from what you know from experience. She narrates, as if she knew them firsthand, events from very early childhood and the first stages of her education -- neither of which she could possibly remember herself, at least not in such detail. She puts what she has been told on the same epistemological plane as what she has learned through direct observation.

Shulevitz admits, "Keller had a defense. Her ability to experience what others felt and heard, she said, illustrated the power of imagination, particularly one that had been developed and extended, as hers was, by books." By contrast, Shulevitz praises Hull's Touching the Rock because "... it consists entirely of direct observation, both of sensory perceptions and of internal reactions to the condition of being blind."

Shulevitz does disabled writers the credit of subjecting us to the rigorous analysis she gives all writers. Her premise that autobiographies should reflect immediate experience is indisputable. But beyond Hull's arguably more accurate depiction of his experience of blindness is the divide he perceives between the two worlds of sight and blindness. This ought to be more troubling than Keller's effort to convey her experience through analogies to color and music. Indeed, Keller's analogies point to a desire to participate in a united world. Shulevitz's focus betrays a preoccupation with the condition, as if writing by blind people should be aimed at satisfying sighted readers' curiosity about not seeing, as opposed to portraying fully realized human beings. This may well be unfair to Shulevitz who, after all, was writing a short essay on a narrow theme. Moreover, Hull's book invites this narrow assessment. But if our writing is evaluated only for its insights into non-visual experience, our scope is severely circumscribed.

John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoonist, has won an audience for his work with disabled characters through humor. The marketplace understandably favors humor as a device for introducing disabled people into the mainstream. However, humor is only one form of expression. By design it can be stark and two-dimensional, which is to say cartoonish.

At best the literary marketplace requires a book with a blind protagonist to be about coming to terms with disability, along the lines of Kuusisto and Hull. Our other options are to ignore disability in our art, as Borges, Joyce and Thurber did, or to confine any blind character to a supporting role, like Liza in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

The literary world must allow for disability to be only one of many factors in our characters' lives, as we aim for it to be in our own. Blind people's lives and attitudes are as diverse as those in the general population. For some, blindness is an inconvenience, while others feel it as a dividing wall. There are those who applaud society's efforts at accommodation. Others contend it is society that is disabling and deem the root of the problem to be vision-dependent transportation systems and subjugation to print. Some welcome offers of assistance across the street, others resent them. Some descriptions of the present and predictions for the future will prove accurate; others wishful thinking, still others misguided. Meanwhile some blind people are Canadian, some Indonesian. Some are tall, some short. There are questions about how much limited vision to encompass in the definition of blindness.

This huge diversity of experiences and opinions requires that blindness be cast off from metaphor and generalization.

Having mapped the topography and political divisions of what was until lately terra incognita, we are no longer heroic explorers. With a growing sense of belonging in the wide world comes the capacity to speak not just as disabled people, but for all humanity. In literature that is a role not for memoir, but fiction. Unencumbered by constraints of privacy, fiction can hew closer to truth than any set of facts.

3.

Blind writers who ignore visual expectations will find it difficult to win over a wide audience. The question is how to handle these expectations.

Although entitled to the entire verbal palette, we do well to recognize that words with visual connotations can be jarring when spoken by or referring to blind characters. In everyday life blind people say "see" for "understand," "meet," and "notice." But how about this sentence: "He looked at her"? Or: "He looked in her direction"? On the one hand "look" implies vision; on the other, it indicates turning toward someone or something.

Blind writers who ignore visual expectations are also at a practical disadvantage. Literature is replete with observations by sighted characters, and writers, like all artists, filch from the body of work that has gone before. One who disregards the visual starts with an almost clean slate and will need an extraordinary imagination to conjure up a feel for characters and places. But blind writers are not precluded from conveying visual impressions. For one thing, many blind people who once saw continue to conceptualize visually, and it is realistic to have such characters absorb visual information. More important, as the following examples demonstrate, a writer need not give visual specifics to create visual effects.

A traditional story is told from a single point of view, commonly in the third person or by a first-person narrator. Even the third-person omniscient perspective is told one character at a time.

This aspect of story writing creates particular issues when the point of view is that of a blind character. Take the moment when we meet Virginia in "Window Offices," narrated throughout from Jonathan's perspective. Without someone telling him about her or Virginia implausibly describing herself when they meet, I cannot have him say much about her appearance. How, then, give readers an impression of her without compromising verisimilitude?

A possible solution is to tell the reader what Jonathan picks up through his other senses. When she speaks, he could talk about her voice. The problem here is that descriptions of voice quality tend to be either stale or obscure. Our everyday vocabulary for it is small, while musical terminology is too specialized. What if Jonathan bumps into her in the hallway? Perhaps he notices if she's fat or thin. He might even surmise what she's wearing. But here the narrator would have to admit to too much guesswork, which would bring the story to a crashing halt. I am already concerned that readers will ask why so much space is devoted to Virginia. But though she makes only a brief appearance, her role is central.

This is how "Window Offices" introduces her:

An attorney named Virginia assigned work to the law clerks. She was renowned for keeping a drawer full of bow-ties and a jacket she hooked on the inside of her door, accessories that transformed her from casual of choice to professional of necessity any time court or some other formal situation called.

Readers will recognize that Jonathan has gleaned this information from conversation with acquaintances. Or possibly he brushed against her jacket when leaving her office and she volunteered why she kept it there. Otherwise he has no specific information about her looks, and yet readers will not only form an image of her; I predict a lot of readers will form a similar image. For example, I doubt she's terribly overweight, if for no other reason than that someone would have told Jonathan. Is she pretty? Not movie pretty, I suspect. Again, someone would have said so in Jonathan's hearing. But beyond that, Virginia is reckless in her choice of clothes. That could suggest a woman so beautiful that it does not matter how much she neglects her appearance. But bow-ties? Unless Jonathan has heard otherwise, they imply an effect at odds with traditional notions of feminine beauty.

A visual impression can also be suggested through a telling gesture:

The trademark thud of shoulder against door heralded the arrival of Lou, his friend and colleague, too proud to knock and too considerate to catch Jonathan by surprise.

Lou's diamond-in-the-rough manner of entering Jonathan's office creates the germ of a picture that readers will complete on their own.

These methods for creating visual effects turn out to be mainstream. Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty (1990) and numerous other vivid novels and stories, published an article for The New York Times on July 16, 2001 in which he urges writers to "Avoid detailed descriptions of characters." He elaborates:

In Ernest Hemingway's 'Hills Like White Elephants' what do the 'American and the girl with him' look like? 'She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice...

It makes sense to let readers picture characters for themselves. How often do people voice regret that an actor's face in the movie adaptation has spoiled the mental image they took away from the novel? Other writers give meticulous descriptions of their characters. But here's a question to ask. After reading Hemingway, Leonard or any number of other authors who emphasize action over adjectives and adverbs, did you feel the absence of description?

Images can also be conveyed through dialogue. Take the only scene in "Window Offices" where we meet the department head at Jonathan's summer job:

Next morning Jonathan got himself admitted to Hal's office. "Can we talk about the office moves?"
"Here, sit down." Hal thumped the back of a chair and returned behind his desk.
Jonathan made sure he was seated securely before going on. "I'm concerned about what people will think about me."
"How's that?"
"Being the one to move into a windowless office."
"Yes?"
"Well, it's going to look like more than coincidence."
"Oh, oh." Hal rose to his feet.

Jonathan tracks Hal's movements from his voice, but has no other direct information that translates into the visual. Putting aside that the subject of this conversation would be different, suppose he were sighted? When telling a friend about it afterwards, would he say Hal's hair was dark or fair, his nose Roman or broken, his lips sensual or half concealed by a moustache? No. Those details would not be essential to the story as told to a friend, just as they would distract a reader of "Window Offices."

Then what visual memories would he take away from the encounter? First, there is Hal standing by the guest chair and making some motion toward it, and then assuming his seat behind the desk. When he says, "How's that?" I picture him as puzzled, not yet sure what to make of this visit. His face expresses curiosity, but little tension. Jonathan takes the next step into his explanation, to which Hal says, "Yes?" His expression has turned grave but remains kindly, encouraging Jonathan through his difficulty in expressing himself. At last Jonathan arrives at the problem, and Hal gets it. I can see his face tense with the recognition of his blunder. He jumps up, saying, "Oh, oh."

Few of these details are given by the narrator, and yet readers will interpret what Hal is thinking and conjure up his facial expressions.

None of this is to suggest that a blind writer is barred from incorporating visual description. In fiction as in real life, blind people get to know the salient visual characteristics of the people in their lives. Recalling the participants in a course I took two years ago, I picture the woman with long gray hair who wore colorful scarves in our teacher's living room, the lanky white-haired man who groaned from back problems when he got up from a chair, the blond man whom all the women said the other women would fall for, and the woman who came directly from work and alone among us wore a business suit. These images pieced themselves together in my mind from my own observations, what the friends I made in class told me and comments people made in class discussion. So when writing fiction, I can pick up on this much detail and more and still be true to a blind character's point of view.

There are times when the devices of visual description are helpful. For example, a novel with two prominent women characters is likely to have one be fair-haired and the other dark. Their taste in clothes might also differ, along with their character traits, speech patterns, and so on. In another scenario, the author might describe the height and bulk of a certain male character to suggest a powerful presence. These descriptions function as tags to aid the reader recognize the characters each time they appear. They can be as muted or outlandish, as brief or extended, as the author wishes. They do not require visual sophistication. Indeed, in many cases they need not be visual.

Writers have similarly direct and indirect methods at their disposal for conveying descriptions of place through their blind characters. In the opening scene of "Window Offices," Jonathan imagines what is going on beyond his office's windows. Even a reader skeptical of his reconstruction of that landscape will grasp how the windows inspire him to think outside himself.

The good news for blind authors is that too much visual detail impedes narrative. It is the rare writer who approaches F. Scott Fitzgerald's talent for vivid and timely description.

4.

A story's dependence on characters grounds it in specificity, no matter what larger purpose the author may have. Jonathan is not every blind person. Not every blind person projects the view outside a window. Not every blind law student would protest a move to a windowless office. For that matter Robbie, the story's other blind character, is not every blind person. But as the drama builds, readers become anxious to know what will happen. They develop a sense of identification with the character who is the object of this anxiety, so that for the time it takes to read the story, they are that character. A story thus enables readers to absorb ideas and unfamiliar situations on their own terms in their own time.

If the character is disabled, readers might gain a greater understanding than from any manual, textbook or legal opinion. Moreover, when disability is just one trait of a story's protagonist, they will understand more than if the story's principal subject is disability. They may realize, among other things, why disabled people can appear overly sensitive. There is that pesky question of patronization. Disabled people are as likely to be maddened by good intentions as ill will. We are told it is unsafe to go out, spared onerous tasks and given extra large portions of food. Every disabled person feels it in their bones. But how convey it to the world at large without coming across as rude and angry?

Fiction has a miraculous capacity to engage without confronting. Jane Austen describes the insensitivity of stock characters like the egocentric rich neighbor, the meddlesome mother, and the crass suitor without offending readers, though many are likely to fall into one or other of these types. If the reader glimpses herself there, she will do so through identification with Austen's protagonists. It is a glimpse that might just inspire a process of discovery.

Sighted readers of "Window Offices" may or may not empathize with Jonathan's disgust when Ray sends the fatuous email that concludes, "I always admire your wisdom." After all, the underlying subject of that email exchange is the arcane logistics of handling a Freedom of Information request. Such lapses almost always occur over mundane matters. Patient readers will suspend judgment and wait for clarification. That patience is rewarded when Jonathan explains his frustration to his trusted colleague, Lou. Does Lou get it? Partly yes, but apparently mostly no. However, experiencing events through Jonathan, readers just might, or begin to, because everyone, disabled or not, has been patronized: students by teachers, teachers by principals and deans, store clerks by customers, bosses by their bosses, parents by their children.

It turns out the situations disabled people deal with on a daily basis are the stuff of fiction and make for absorbing reading with or without personal experience of disability. Through identification and lured on by the accretion of details, readers of "Window Offices" will grasp why disabled people care about their work settings. After all, disabled people are no different in desiring the perks of space that other deserving employees look for as they struggle along the workplace ladder. And once in the corner office, how often does a CEO look up from the desk to study the view from the windows?

References:

Note: All of the fiction and memoir titles in this list are available on cassette and some in Braille at the Library of Congress's National Library Service, whose search page is: http://www.loc.gov/cgibin/zgate.nls?ACTION=INIT&FORM_HOST_PORT=/prod/www/data/nls/catalog/index.html,z3950.loc.gov,7490&CI=083300.

For the other texts, I have listed websites.

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1977). "Blindness." In Eliot Weinberger, ed. and translator. (2000). Selected Non-Fictions, pp. 473-483. New York: Penguin.

Durrell, Lawrence. (1991). The Alexandria Quartet. New York: Penguin.

Hobbes, Thomas. (1651). The Leviathan. Chapter XIII. Reproduced by the Philosophy Department of Oregon State University at: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html. For links to the several web pages of this text, see www.thomas-hobbes.com.

Hoffman, E.T.A. (1822). "My Cousin's Corner Window." In Ritchie Robertson, ed. and translator (1992). The Golden Pot and Other Tales, pp. 377-401. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hull, John M. (1990). Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. New York: Random House.

Joyce, James. (1964). Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Louisville, KY: American Printing House for the Blind (with permission of Viking).

Kleege, Georgina. (1999). Sight Unseen. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Kuusisto, Stephen. (1997). Planet of the Blind. New York: Bantam Dell.

Leonard, Elmore. (1990). Get Shorty. New York: Delacorte Press.

Leonard, Elmore. (2001). "Writers on Writing; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle," New York Times July 16, Section E, p. 1, col. 1. Available online for a fee at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0612FC3B5F0C758DDDAE0894D9404482&incamp=archive:search.

Mehta, Ved. (1986). Sound-Shadows of the New World. New York: W. W. Norton.

Milton, John. (1655?). Sonnet XIX "When I Consider how my Light is Spent." Reproduced by Representative Poetry Online, a service of the University of Toronto Libraries, at: http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1457.html.

Russell, Robert. (1962). To Catch an Angel: Adventures in a World I Cannot See. New York: Random House.

Shulevitz, Judith (2003). "The Close Reader; Powers of Perception," New York Times April 20, Section 7, p. 31, col. 1. Available free of charge at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E.

Stein, Deborah Kent. (1990). Review of Snakewalk, by Charles Wheeler, The Braille Monitor December, 1990, at: http://www.nfb.org/bm/bm90/brlm9012.htm

Stein, Deborah Kent. (1991). "Shackled Imagination: Literary Illusions about Blindness," on the "Literature" web page of the National Federation of the Blind, May 29, 1991, at: http://www.nfbnet.org/files/nfb_literature/