- Regarding seeing and observation, I found the text to capture a fascinating and relevant pluralism. On the one hand, Hoffman reveals the potential of seeing as a mutually dignifying act for both the viewer and the viewed. Rather than dwell on his lost health and mobility, the narrator’s cousin proclaims, “this window is my comfort; it is here that life in all its colour has been revealed to me anew, and I feel at home with its incessant activity” (379). In order to transcend his infirmity, the narrator’s cousin, as viewer, forms a relationship with external life that is almost theological in nature; his corporeal pain is transient, and the world outside the window is what is real, what feels like “home,” just as, in christianity and specifically pre-modern European christianity, the afterlife is what is real or of value. Additionally, in the case of the blind man, for instance, viewing has the function of imparting humanity, via narrative, upon an individual for whom such is typically denied. Although the blind man receives alms from all who pass, these interactions, the narrator's cousin has observed, are seldom interpersonally gratifying. One young girl always gives a generous sum but refuses to look at the blind man as she does so, stripping potential for emotional reciprocity; one woman goes to great lengths to give a sum that falls just in the range of appropriateness and congratulates herself for giving it, engaging in the charity as a transaction. Nobody in the marketplace appears to really see the blind man nor grapple with the weight of his tragedy – which, to the narrator’s cousin, is utmost.
Still, on the other hand, it is very possible that nothing the narrator’s cousin says about the blind man is necessarily true to the blind man’s experience. Perhaps the money does do him good; perhaps he and his mistress are wonderfully happy in their arrangement; perhaps he would not like to be pitied. The narrator and his cousin thus demonstrate not only that the transposition of narrative onto image is powerful but that this power can be dangerous. As the narrator remarks concerning an earlier observation of his cousin’s, “It may be [...] that not one word of all your conjectures is true, but as I look at the old women your vivid description sounds so plausible that I am compelled to believe it, willy-nilly” (383). Although the signifier is objective, the signified cannot be; but, in an occularcentric society, we take visuality to be truth and thus are often complacent in separating the plausible from the reality. Video propaganda, for example, can tout false validity by presenting real, un-doctored footage alongside a narrative of what is happening in the footage that is plausible but not true. Like Hoffman’s narrator, we, as viewers, are “compelled to believe [the narrative], willy-nilly,” as questioning what appears to objectively exist before us would be counterintuitive. Of course, with the preponderance of AI deepfakes and whatnot, this danger is ever more convoluted today.
Returning to the blind man, there remains the question of whether, even if the viewer’s assumptions are false and mode of voyeurism in some sense perverse, what occurs in the seeing nonetheless bears a reciprocal humanism that the not-seeing lacks. The narrator’s cousin certainly looks down upon the people of the marketplace – both literally and figuratively – but is his attention – at once empathizing and exploitative, dignifying and degrading – not in itself an act of love? And, moreover, would this qualification make a difference?
2. Though perhaps triggered by the segment on flower-selling, Hoffman’s text vaguely brought to mind Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In a sense, I feel that what Hoffman’s characters dialogue regarding exteriority is what Woolf enacts via interiority – a common consciousness between strangers who share seemingly nothing other than a particular time and a particular place. Also, the two sides of the narrator’s cousin – his corporeal reality, infirm, and his life through the window, boundlessly vicarious – resonate in the respective tragic and triumphant conclusions of Septimus, confined by his inner life, and Clarissa, enraptured by the outward.