In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.
In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.
Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.
And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in
Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human.
--Alix Wilber
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
It has already become a cliche to say that Saramago's 'Blindness' is a disturbing novel. However, that is really what it is--a disturbing novel. Why? Because it makes us ask if, indeed, we have to become blind to see the way things are and to understand what it means to be human. As one of the characters in the novel says: 'So num mundo de cegos as coisas serao o que verdadeiramente sao' ('Only in a world of blind people would things be what they truly are'). Another says: 'Dentro de nos ha una coisa que nao tem nome, essa coisa e o que somos' ('Inside us there is something that doesn't have a name, that something is what we are'). More than a novel, I see 'Blindness' as a disquisition on human values. Its title in Portuguese, 'Esaio sobre a cegueira' (literally, 'Essay on blindness'), gives us a clue as to what Saramago is up to in the novel. There are terrible acts of violence and beautiful acts of solidarity; there are jokes on the way we use our language, so centered in our sense of sight; there are asides among characters, revealing, in many instances, the need for companionship and, at the same time, the ultimatately unknowable nature of everyone next to us. In many ways, 'Blindness' is reminiscent of Sartre's play 'Huis clos'. In Sartre's play, our eyes represent the hell everybody has to live with because it is through them that we base our opinions of others, particularly those next to us; in Saramago's novel, our eyes interfere with our attempts to know things and each other better because we become so easily prejudiced by the looks of things and people. One dialogue between two of the characters close to the end of the novel--the old man with a band on one of his eyes and the girl with the dark glasses--exemplify this last point beautifully. People complain that Saramago didn't do anything new in 'Blindness'. To be sure, the story of descent into darkness and pain and the knowledge obtained from the experience has been told too many times. However, Saramago deals with the subject in a very original way in his singular writing style. After so many centuries of writing, I guess that few, if any, subjects are left untouched under the sun. The true test of a good writer is to say things with a unique, personal voice, to depart from the masses and make us see our inconsistencies and absurdities in a creative yet familiar way. Saramago has accomplished that task convincingly with 'Blindness', and he deserves to be congratulated at least for his effort. I originally read 'Blindness' in English. This second time, I read it in Portuguese. The English translation by Giovanni Pontiero (who, unfortunately, died while completing the job) is superb, keeping the idiosyncrasies and power of Saramago's original Portuguese. English readers will be delighted with the translation, and will definitely find considerable food for thought and discussion.
