October 2, 2017 - 17:08
Though I assumed "A Portrait of the Artist by his Blind Daughter" would centrally feature a relationship affected by blindness, as obviously indicated by the title, I was surprised by the emphasis on audio. Often, blindness and deafness are thought of as inherently contradictory, yet, for Georgina Kleege, the lack of auditory exchange between herself and her father strikingly affected the relationship she chronicles. Kleege's father is described as being naturally concise, but one would assume that the loss of his daughter's vision would result in a change. I wonder if the absence of this change reflects an immobility in Kleege's father, or merely a commitment to not disabling her, as Kleege herself notes. Additionally, it was unclear to me whether or not Kleege resented this quiet; she describes phone conversations in which she felt like she interrupted her father, yet she also insinuates that the phone conversations continued, despite that feeling. Indeed, is it fair of me to describe a limited verbal relationship as a "deaf" one? Kleege's relationship with her father seems marked by a contradictory lack of certain sensory information and forceful presence of other types of sensory information, making it dificult for me to evaluate the described relationship as either positive or negative.