1 WHY CAN’T YOU READ THE PANOPTICON AS AN RNIB TALKING BOOK?
The Panoptican is a novella which I have published on this website. It is based on my own experience of love and learning in a residential special school for the Blind some sixty years ago. It is not a conventional love story, though love figures strongly in the foreground of the book. It is rather a kind of ‘fictional history’ in which the setting of the blind school is realistically developed and the action works out under the ‘post-Victorian’ sexual mores which held us in thrall at that time.
Four of my school contemporaries who are all blind and a novelist who is not - read The Panoptican and said they found it very interesting. Thus encouraged, I published it on this web site for anyone interested in special education. I was very aware, however, that many blind people have no access to computers, or cannot stand listening to synthesised voices, or have no facilities to download The Panopticon and print it out in Braille. So I submitted the story for consideration to the RNIB Talking Book Library, which holds books recorded by professional readers for blind people to borrow.
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Their first response was not entirely discouraging. Given their limited resources their main aim, they said, must be to Provide a selection of ‘best sellers, prize winners and high profile books’, of interest to the ‘vast majority’ of their readers. However, they were willing to publish books not likely to be commercially published, if they ‘could be of special interest to people with a sight problem – e.g. written about living with blindness or has some kind of sight problem angle’.
I was very pleased by this as a statement of policy. By branching into a form of audio book publication, the Library seemed to be acting to open up a space for literature of particular interest to blind people and sighted readers with a special interest in blindness. I replied to the effect that my novella did seem to fit their second category. I pointed out that I had long been a published historian, with one of my books - In Search of Willie Patterson - already in the Talking Book Catalogue. This elicited a request to submit my manuscript for consideration by their reader panel.
Like any serious writer, I was quite prepared to have my novella rejected, but I was astonished at the grounds given, which, in the light of their policy statement seemed radically confused and self-defeating. The ‘publications manager’ had led me to believe that self-published and unpublished books of peculiar interest to blind people had a special claim to a place in the library’s catalogue. Yet The Panopticon was rejected even though, as her readers acknowledged, ‘there were some very interesting parts’. These were said to be: ‘how the children differentiated between partially sighted and totally blind’, how they ‘moved around the school, were taught and played sports’, how they were ‘treated by staff, the headmaster and parents’, and the expectations of the staff ‘for the future of the children as opposed to the pupils’ plans/expectations.
One would have thought that all this was about living with blindness. So why was The Panoptican unacceptable? Apparently because it did not measure up to the literary standards that would have made it acceptable by a commercial publisher. In other words self-published and unpublished books of interest to blind readers will only be ‘published’ by the talking book library if they are written in such a way that they could have been published by the commercial book trade.
This is the confusion that threatens to defeat the laudable policy of making a space for audio books that have not already been published and which are of special interest to blind people. Such books, to gain acceptance by RNIB Talking Book Library must be considered publishable quite apart from the interest of their subject matter. Yet, when it comes to consideration of such work, the criteria of the book trade may well be irrelevant and may operate to exclude from the Library books that many blind people would wish to read. Anyone with a working knowledge of the book trade knows that commercial publishers are fixated by genre. Successful execution of a romance or a thriller offers them a near guarantee of minimum sales. They are very unwilling to run risks on books that are written experimentally for an audience of uncertain or limited scope. Consequently they employ the conventions of genre criticism to ruthlessly suppress all kinds of interesting work that is not expected to yield a profit.
It was extremely disappointing to see RNIB Talking Book Library do something very similar to The Panopticon. Having acknowledged the interest of the subject matter, their reader panel of four judges went on to consider whether it was publishable as a short story. Judged from this angle it was easy to find fault. The love story ‘did not really engage the reader’ and ‘the sections regarding the sexual encounters was [sic] felt to need particular attention’, etc. etc.
There is inevitably something subjective about such comments. As to the love interest, I can only repeat that other readers have already found the story interesting. As to the ‘sexual encounters’, I marvel that they should be called in question, when any number of talking books are catalogued annually as unsuitable for ‘family reading’. What attention, I wonder, could the reader panel possibly have had in mind and why was the publications manager so coy about specifying it?
Readers of this website will be able to judge the literary value of The Panopticon for themselves, but the issue of literary quality goes well beyond subjectivity. What is at stake is the failure to recognise The Panopticon for the kind of book it is. It was never intended to be a short story cast in the mode of this or that fashionable genre. There are other criteria of literary value after all. Those I had in mind were pioneered by D.H. Lawrence. Just as he exposed the post-Victorian repression of love by class prejudice, I have exposed similar repression of blind people, which was widely prevalent in those days and may not have entirely disappeared today. This is a topic which I have often heard discussed privately between blind people of a certain age - with not a little resentment at the inhumane repression they encountered - but I have never seen it discussed in print.
As will be readily understood, there were good reasons to cast my account in the form of a novella or, as I call it, a fictional history. Perhaps the Talking Book Library cannot see the unique value of such a work and would have preferred a short story along the lines of the fantastical romances which the book trade serves up as ‘chick lit’. I believe that many blind people would prefer something more grounded in the reality of their own social-historical experience.
That is why I wrote The Panopticon. The Talking Book Library reacted like someone who is given a diamond and complains that it is presented in an old box.