It is known, each era reconstructs the interpersonal story, the way in which affects are handled, its ethics. Today, blind love is more the one that hides the other person's defects from us than the blind one that drives Ariosto's Orlando crazy. What are we talking about when we talk about love then? Pritchett asks where Carver asserts, placing his answers as far from his pessimistic irony as he is from the pink cliché of soap operas. His response moves in the circuit of mystifications, prohibitions and miseries that lead to denying the desire to perpetuate hypocrisy in good manners. Around this hypocrisy assumed with intimate objections, he weaves the plots with voices that speak of a threatening but precarious universe, as if at some point they understood that the intimidation of hierarchies is not so terrible.

Victor Sawdon Pritchett, (Great Britain, 1900-1997) worked in his youth in a tanning warehouse, was a commercial traveler and photographer's assistant in Paris. A true self-taught man, his career includes among other things being a short story writer, novelist, critic, biographer, globetrotter, Hitchcock consultant, making propaganda and scripts for the allies. It was his stories - which he began to publish in "The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories" (1930) - that contributed to his fame.
Blind Love was originally published in 1969; a year earlier the Beatles had released their movie Yellow Submarine. With the world wars the center of the world had shifted from London to Washington. Innocence had been lost at Auschwitz.

Apart from being aesthetic objects, both Yellow Submarine and Blind Love are archaeological pieces that reflect what happened in those years. While in the film, the music of the Beatles battles the Blue Meanies - evil creatures that oppress the planet turning it into a boring place -, in his stories Pritchett does not fall into Manichaeism, so the invisible monster that intimidates the character of "El saint ”- and that could well be interpreted as a relative of the adversaries of the four from Liverpool - is simply there, and far from frightening, it is rather internalized in the characters, making them doubt their faith:“ the ape who only He was following me, he was already inside Mr. Timberlake, eating his heart ”. The dream of reason produces monsters, Goya tells us. Pritchett adds: “Life was a dream, I thought; no, a nightmare, because the ape was there, by my side ”. That is why he tries to keep reason clear, awake. That probably makes the protagonists clumsy. If these stories were a comedy program on English TV, their protagonists would be the successors of the well-known character of Mr. Bean who would try to hide their empty trials with bureaucratic indeference. In a world in which others move with the comfort of knowing that they are following pre-established codes, Pritchett's characters allow themselves to doubt without finding answers and to continue living in a dignified way. In the search for this new meaning they are alone and are forced to hide their attempts from others. Imagine an episode of Mr Bean in which the others are Benny Hill: Benny's winks would find no complicity in Mr Bean, who would look at them with utter perplexity and hilariousness.

This deep faith in conscious reason, this ethical vision of the world, is accompanied by a prose nurtured in descriptions, as if he wanted to make us understand in this way the eventualities of each character and justify his procedures. Perhaps this provokes its protagonists to wait for the outcome of their conflicts calmly, resigned to the context of their existence. It is not positivism that it proclaims. He believes in man.

Carl Schmitt argues in The Concept of the Political that the idea of ​​friend / enemy is born from the expression of the need to differentiate. The contrast between us / them establishes a principle of opposition and complementarity. We build ourselves from differences. Those same differences turn another to the enemy, and serve as an alibi for extermination, for slavery.
With his narrative, Pritchett tries to bring us closer to the experience of the other as similar: he invites us to recognize him in his humanity without particularizing him. "How unreal people seem under sodium lamps" he says in "The Beauty of Camberwell." It must be seen with all the lights of day. He tries to form in his readers a reason of the senses, a reason that is not blind, that does not allow itself to be blocked. That is your hope. As he makes him say in "The Return" to a former combatant: "while we considered the war as a misfortune that had happened to us and to our side, he considered it a misfortune that had happened to all of them." You have to see before you judge. It is this attitude that leads the narrator of "Sense of Humor" to feel proud of the death in an accident of his opponent in the love of a young woman. Being proud of someone's death is weird, right? The meaning of the word pride for the Royal Academy is "arrogance, vanity, excess of self-esteem, which is sometimes concealed because it is born of noble and virtuous causes." The character is not proud of death, he is proud because both his opponent, the desired young woman, and he himself did things well.

Fortunately, this didactics is accompanied in writing by simple arguments, without morals, so that the ethical claim passes hidden. Pritchett wants to teach us to see, not give us glasses. The tale that gives its name to the volume can be summed up in a housekeeper who hides a horrible birthmark and who falls in love with her boss - a blind person who secretly wears blindness to maintain her dignity - hers. The metaphor is woven between the blindness of the eyes and the blindness of the actions when the housekeeper sees her deceit threatened by her when the blind man turns to a healer to restore his sight.

When you start reading any of these stories, you get caught. Barthes pointed out two elements regarding photography: the studium and the punctum. The studium has to do with the universal meaning of a photograph. The punctum, on the other hand, is personal "it can fill the whole photo" (....) although "very often it is only a detail".

It is the details that give intensity to these stories, so much that they are disturbing.