Blindness
Portuguese author José Saramago is a titan of postmodern literature. His writing is unlike any other; sometimes employing allegory, sometimes satire, Saramago’s works tend to critique twentieth-century institutions of government and Church while attempting to scrutinize what it is that makes us human. Several years ago, I read my first Saramago novel, Death With Interruptions (2005, English translation in 2008), and was immediately taken with Saramago’s style and voice. Saramago plays with language and character in ways that recall James Joyce (whose work I have spent years of my life studying). Like Joyce, Saramago’s prose pushes boundaries and consequently faced censorship during his lifetime. Arguably, both writers put their country on the twentieth-century literary map, yet both lived and died self-exiled.
One of Saramago’s famous novels, Blindness (1995, English translation in 1997), explores the brutal fall-out of a world beset by a pandemic of blindness. This book has sat on my shelf, unread, for some time so a global pandemic seemed a fitting time pick it up. Blindness is certainly not a gentle read. It intimately articulates the complexity of the human spirit—both the good and the despicable. It reminds the reader that we are little more than organized animals. Blindness reveals the disgusting, beastly prospects of what might happen when society’s organization dissolves. Trigger warnings include sexual violence, murder, starvation, corpses, and plenty of human excrement. White blindness leads to a repulsive world, and yet, it is a world in which a small band of characters carve out community and, having been stripped of possessions and the trappings of humanity see the truth of human nature.
Saramago’s style is uniquely his own. Sentences sprawl on and on, littered with commas. Dialog does not include quotation marks (demonstrating another similarity to Joyce’s prose), but is often simply separated by a comma in the same long sentence. Saramago demands his reader pay attention, lest she be lost in sea of words and lengthy paragraphs. As with his later work, Death With Interruptions, Saramago presents a self-conscious narrator (who at times interrupts the narrative to reflect upon the telling) in Blindness. He also includes “the author” among the characters, who explains: “A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine” (292). This postmodern, meta-fictional style makes Saramago’s work all the more great by drawing attention to its craft.
Saramago opts not to name his characters in Blindness. As blindness descends on the unnamed city, in the unnamed country, characters are simply “the doctor,” “the doctor’s wife,” “the first blind man,” “the girl with the dark sunglasses,” “the old man with the black eyepatch” and so on. Typical to Saramago’s style, he inserts some element of rational within his narrative for this stylistic conceit, having one character contemplate the ways in which blindness obscures the import of names:
“[W]e’re so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognizes another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs” (57).
The unnamed characters who populate the novel are among the first beset by the inexplicable white blindness. Paradox punctuates the pandemic as the vector—”the first blind man”— spreads the illness in an optometrist’s office; the first to fall blind do so as they attempt to care for their sight. These characters reunite among the blind whom the government has rounded up to quarantine in an abandoned mental asylum. The asylum witnesses some of humanity’s most base urges and repugnant experiences. Saramago does not shy away from human waste, hunger, sexuality, and death. Reading Blindness feels something like agreeing to be washed over by a visceral filth, rolling through one wave after another of vile experience in the hopes that Saramago will provide some redemption by the novel’s conclusion.
Saramago’s work begs the reader to trust the author, the narrator, the characters; and ultimately, I believe Saramago deserves his reader’s trust. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, due in large part to this novel as well as works like his controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991, English translation 1993). As is common to literary Noble Laureates, Saramago shifts prosaic possibility forever more, a process which often leads to discomfort on the part of his reader. Blindness forces us to schlep through the reality that humans are beasts who have placed obstacles—social organization, property, art—in the way of seeing this fact. Saramago’s white blindness pandemic removes these obstacles, and the reader is left to see the blind in their beastly form. The reader, equipped with morality and social order, then judge the good and the bad inherent in the beast and the abandoned structures alike. As a character postulates in the novel, “human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good, such are the contradictions of this world of ours, some warrant more consideration than others” (213). The reader comes to appreciate the complexity of the human predicament amidst the wanderings of a band of lost, perhaps not entirely blind, characters.
While the government response to the growing pandemic in Blindness is frightening, it seems plausible and, consequently, the characters face one trauma after another. Yet there is indeed hope to be found in Blindness. Saramago explores the thought experiment of what might happen to society if a sudden pandemic were to strike, and by making that epidemic one of blindness, he plays with the metaphor of blindness as well as its physical reality. There is much, this novel suggests, to which society and humanity is blind. Fear and blindness walk hand-in-hand in this novel. Ultimately, though, the eight characters with whom Saramago’s reader experiences the white blindness most intimately (one of which is a dog), find community and even love. The reader, as I discovered upon completing Blindness, has the opportunity to continue Saramago’s thought experiment in its sequel, Seeing (2004, English translation in 2006), although it will be some time before I return to this world. While it arguably juxtaposes the base and the erudite, Blindness presents a revolting post-epidemic world, and one, I am relieved to say does not reflect my experience during the time of corona virus.
A Few Great Passages:
“According to the ancient practice, inherited from the time of cholera and yellow fever, when ships that were contaminated or suspected of carrying infection had to remain out at sea for forty days, and in words within the grasp of the general public, it was a matter of putting all these people into quarantine, until further notice. These very words, Until further notice, apparently deliberate, but, in fact, enigmatic, since he could not think of any others, were pronounced by the Minister, who later clarified his thinking, I meant that this could as easily mean forty days as forty weeks, or forty months, or forty years, the important thing is that they should stay in quarantine” (37-38).
“[T]he Government regrets having been forced to exercise with all urgency what it considers to be its rightful duty, to protect the population by all possible means in this present crisis, when something with all the appearance of an epidemic of blindness has broken out, provisionally known as the white sickness, and we are relying on the public spirit and cooperation of all citizens to stem any further contagion, assuming that we are dealing with a contagious disease and that we are not simply
witnessing a series of as yet inexplicable coincidences” (42).
“[W]e’re so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognizes another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other’s bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist [. . . ]” (57).
“The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality, Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried” (78).
“We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep” (96).
“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals” (116).
“From this point onwards, apart from a few inevitable comments, the story of the old man with the black eyepatch will no longer be followed to the letter, being replaced by a reorganized version of his discourse, re-evaluated in the light of a correct and more appropriate vocabulary. The reason for this previously unforeseen change is the rather formal controlled language, used by the narrator, which almost disqualifies him as a complementary reporter, however important he may be, because without him we would have no way off knowing what happened in the outside world, as a complementary reporter, as we were saying, of these extraordinary events, when as we know the description of any facts can only gain with the rigour and suitability of the terms used” (120).
“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind, Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied the voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here” (129).
“Fortunately, as human history has shown, it is not unusual for good to come of evil, less is said about the evil that can come out of good, such are the contradictions of this world of ours, some warrant more consideration than others” (213).
“We’re going back to being primitive hordes, said the old man with the black eyepatch, with the different that we are not a few thousand men and women in an immense, unspoiled nature, but thousands of millions in an uprooted, exhausted world, And blind, added the doctor’s wife” (256).
“[A]ll stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened” (265).
“A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine” (292).
“Now there is no music other than that of words, and these, especially those in books, are discreet, and even if curiosity should bring someone from the building to listen at the door, they would hear only a solitary murmur, that long thread of sound that can last into infinity, because the books of this world, all together, are, as they say the universe is, infinite” (304-305).
“I only mean that this is all we are good for, listening to someone reading us the story of a human mankind that existed before us” (305).
Bibliography:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1998/saramago/biographical/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Saramago
Saramago, José. Blindess. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc.: New York, 1999.
