N.E.A.R. Review: Blindness, by Jose Saramago

*N.E.A.R. = Not Exactly A Romance

I was asked ages ago to lead a discussion of this book with a group of medical professionals who get together regularly to talk about fiction. The discussion is this evening, and since nothing focuses my thoughts like writing a blog post, I thought I would share some reflections in preparation.

Saramago is a Portuguese novelist, born in 1922, and Nobel Laureate. A fairly prolific author, not only a novelist but also a journalist, short story writer, and playwright, his first novel, Manuel de Pintura e Caligrafia, (Manual of Painting and Calligraphy) was published in 1977. Blindness was published in 1995.

The plot is easy to summarize. The book begins with a man at a traffic intersection, who suddenly, and for no reason, goes blind. We follow him home — he is helped by a kind stranger — to his wife, who takes him to see his ophthamologist. In short order, the “kind stranger” (who turns out to be a thief), the wife, and the eye doctor all go blind, as well as several others connected by chance to this group. These 7 or so individuals are rounded up by the government and put in an abandoned mental asylum. they are given food, but otherwise left to fend for themselves. Armed guards monitor the exits, shooting on sight anyone who tries to leave.

Most of the book takes place in the asylum. As the “white sickness” spreads, numbers quickly swell. As conditions deteriorate, anyone who has read Camus’ The Plague, or Golding’s The Lord of The Flies can predict what ensures. Factions develop, scarcity, violence, and mayhem ensure, and the little group we have been following becomes a stronger, almost family-like unit, led by the doctor’s wife, who can still see, a fact she conceals, but uses to the group’s advantage, for most of the novel.

This is a post apocalytpic novel, with hallmarks such as panic, fear and despair, breakdown of socioeconomic structures, followed by a return to some kind of civilized aftermath. It is surely no accident that a 20th century novelist chose an epidemic for his apocalypse, what with HIV/AIDs, Ebola, SARS, technological viruses that infect computers, and even terrorist threats.

But it would be unfair to say this is just an experiment in a Hobbesian state of nature. Despite being very objective and matter of fact in presentation, it’s clear Saramago has great affection for his characters, most obviously the doctor’s wife, who is the heart and moral core of the story, indeed of humanity. at several points, we are meant to be touched by the strain of human kindness, goodness, or purity of human connection that remains. For example:

‘The blind man and the blind woman were now resting, apart, the one lying beside the other, but they were still holding hands, they were young, perhaps even lovers who had gone to the cinema and turned blind there, or perhaps some miraculous coincidence brought them together in this place, and, this being the case, how did they recognize each other, good heavens, by their voices, of course, it is not only the voice of blood that needs no eyes, love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own.’

Eventually, the group escapes the asylum, only to discover that everyone else has gone blind, including the guards who have left their posts. The last section follows them in a kind of post-apocalyptic world as they try to find sustenance, while attempting to return to their homes.

Saramago uses no proper names in the book, at all, and characters are referred to as “the doctor”, “the doctor’s wife”, etc. One says, “Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters…”. This makes the book read like a myth or fable. Sometimes the identifiers are ironic, as in “the girl with the dark glasses”, or “the boy with the squint”. He doesn’t use quotations, further distancing us from the characters, instead capitalizing the first word the new speaker speaks. He writes in long sentences, with little punctuation, long paragraphs, and chapters that have no names or numbers. This gave the reading an arduous and monotonous feel (others have said it helped them breeze through the narrative at breakneck pace). Sometimes I panicked that it was never going to end, because I had no sense of where I was in the narrative or on the page: he wants readers to experience some of the dislocation of the blinded characters.

Saramago never gives us the big picture, unless it is something one of the characters experiences. As a reader, I wanted to know what was going on outside the walls of the asylum: was everyone going blind? Was help coming? But he resolutely kept his focus on the individual – the doctor having to grope his way to the bathroom, and the indignity of getting excrement on his pants, for example. again, I think this choice had the effect of bringing the reader into the experiences of the characters. I also think he was making a point:

In looking at other reviews, there is some disagreement about whether to read this book as a literary allegory or as speculative fiction. I think knowing Saramago’s oeuvre would help: apparently he has written other books that clearly situate him in the speculative fiction category, and he even transports one “character’, a dog, from The Stone Raft to Blindness. Of course, it could work as both at once, and that’s probably what he was going for.

Did I like it? No, it didn’t work for me either as a novel of ideas (because the ideas have been done elsewhere and done better), nor as speculative fiction (in part because of its telescopic focus and certain of the author’s obsessions for example, with excrement, got in the way of telling a gripping story).

Here are a few themes worth noting:

1. Blurring of the lines between human and animal. The blind people in the book are typically indifferent, selfish, or even vicious.

(a) Saramago uses animal metaphors to capture these human evils.

–The doctor’s wife says, “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.” (p. 75)

–The blind move and emit sounds like animals, crawling “on all fours”, moving “like crabs”, etc.

–the doctor, filthy, thinks to himself. “there are many ways of becoming an animal, and this is just the first of them” (p. 93)

–when some internees take more than their share of food, they are called “thieving dogs” (p. 105)

–”It would not be right to imagine that these blind people, in such great numbers, proceed like lambs to the slaughter, bleating as is their wont…” (p. 109) (the narrator, in my view, is often speaking ironically. In this case, he goes on to describe them doing pretty much that)

–When the inmates are eating, it is describes as “two hundred and sixty mouth masticating” (115)

–”they were curled up in their beds like animals who have been given a sound thrashing” (p. 178)

–”listen, men, these fillies are pretty good. the blind hoodlums whinnied, stamped their feet on the ground…” (p. 179)

–”like hyenas around a carcass” (p. 179)

–”…fifteen women sprawled on the beds and on the floor, the men going form one to the other, snorting like pigs…” (p. 187).

–”His cry was barely audible, it might have been the grunting of an animal about to ejaculate. “(p. 189)

–”No one dares go out into the corridors, but the interior of each ward is like a beehive inhabited by drones, buzzing insects…” (p. 211)

–”they were constantly bumping into each other like ants on the trail” (p. 225)

–the doctor’s wife thinks, “people get used to anything, especially if they have ceased to be people, and even if they have not quite reached that point…” (p. 225)

(b) A developing compensatory sense of smell is frequently mentioned in the text.

When the doctor’s wife wonders if she should reveal her sightedness, her husband cautions her against it, saying she will become their “slave, a dogsbody”.

The term “dogsbody” is interesting, since later in the book we meet the “dog of tears”, who licks the doctor’s wife’s face when she cries, and sticks with the little group for the remainder of the novel. This dog is basically a character in his own right: he is anthropomorphized by the author, who writes, “the dog continues to be the dog that he is, an animal of the human type.” (p. 268)

(c) Hygiene — the blind humans become increasingly unclean, and their world becomes filled with trash and human excrement. To the extent that rituals around bodily excretions mark human civilization, the process of becoming filthy in the novel, and losing all sense of propriety around privacy in elimination, is a process of becoming more animal like and less human. (Of course, if you own a cat, you are aware that there are nonhuman animals who are quite fastidious in their elimination habits, so I am not sure how well this point holds).

2. So what is it about? I think the novel is open to a lot of interpretations, something you either love or hate about it. Here’s what Saramago himself said accepting his Nobel Prize:

Blind. The apprentice thought, “We are blind,” and he sat down and wrote Blindness
to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate
life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the
universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself
when he lost the respect due to his fellow creatures.

I think the “white sickness” in the novel is a metaphor for our times: current and very real breakdowns in respect, empathy and restraint of selfish impulses. We are diseased.

I think he is trying to say things about the connection of our fleshly bodies, our excrement, our sex, our five sense, with social and political organization as well (but I don’t have time to explore them): what is the relation of the community of sight — of seeing the other both literally and figuratively — to moral and social and personal and political relations, and to community or indeed our humanity?

A few quotes:

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
Blindness
The Doctor.

I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

In 2008, a film adaptation of Blindness was released, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, and Sandra Oh. I have no earthly idea how anyone could think film would work for this novel, and most reviewers agreed. The director was Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardener fame. Those two movies I really liked, and I can absolutely see why a director who works with the tension between self interest and social interest, egoism and altruism, was attracted to this project, but I don;t see how one could retain the abstractions that make this novel work with recognizable actors (or any real humans).

Both the novel and film were criticized on political grounds, criticism which I think is quite apt:

1. US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) criticized Saramago’s work. In a banquet speech at the organization’s annual convention on July 4, 2008, in Dallas, Texas, NFB President Dr. Marc Maurer.

Blind people are depicted as unbelievably incapable of everything, including finding the way to the bathroom or the shower. Saramago wants a world view that serves to offer an allegory for the worst description he can possibly imagine. He selects blindness as his metaphor for all that is bad in human thought and action. He describes the blind as having every negative trait of humanity and none of the positive ones. He argues that this is an allegory for a picture of the reality of the world today. …

The depiction of the blind in this movie is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. First, blindness does not denote the characteristics the author attributes to it. The capabilities of those who become blind remain essentially the same after they lose vision as they were before they lost it. Although the loss of any major asset (including vision) will bring a measure of sadness to some and despair to a few, it will also stimulate others to assert their will. Blindness can be a devastating loss, but it also has the power to galvanize some to action. The reaction to blindness is not the least bit one-dimensional. Therefore the description is false.

In addition to this, the viciousness attributed to the blind is inconsistent with the assertion of incapacity. Viciousness demands both venality and ability–at least organized viciousness does. To say that the blind are completely incompetent and to assert that they have the ability to organize for the pursuit of vice is a contradiction in terms.

But leave the internal inconsistency. The charge that loss of vision creates a personality alteration of sordid and criminal character is in itself sordid and defamatory to an entire class of human beings. …

The description in Blindness is wrong–completely, unutterably, irretrievably, immeasurably wrong. That such falsity should be regarded as good literature is revolting and amazing. We know the reality of blindness, we know the pain it can bring, we know the joy that can come from correcting the misinformation about it, and we are prepared to act on our own behalf. We will not let José Saramago represent us, for he does not speak the truth. He does not write of joy or the optimism of building a society worth calling our own. We do, and we will.

2. From an article in Natural Health:

A number of people have asked if what the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is so angry about is more a matter of political correctness than anything else, and I suppose that if blindness were not already so stereotyped, it might be. It has even been said that we are overreacting because Seramago intended blindness, because it so often represents darkness, to be a metaphor for all the evil that resides in human nature. He intended to show how trying circumstances could bring out the evil in people. However, what would happen if a movie was produced wherein having blonde hair was a metaphor for stupidity. Every blonde in America would be incensed and protesting because the film stereotyped them as being stupid. Blindness is a physical characteristic, no more significant than being blonde or left-handed; why should it being used as a metaphor for evil to go uncontested?

The blind community has a rate of unemployment or underemployment of over 70 percent. Much of this stems from the bureaucracy that makes it nearly impossible for us to obtain the proper blindness skills and from the stereotype that blind people are unemployable and that their abilities are less than those of their sighted counterparts, which is patently untrue.

3. From “Saramago’s BLINDNESS: Humans or Animals?” by David Bolt, in The Explicator (2007) (click here for PDF).

Saramago’s blind humans are more than doglike; they are inhumane. Humanity “will manage to live without eyes,” says the narrator, but “then it will cease to be humanity” (241). The expected retort is that the reading has missed the whole point of the novel, that the representation of people who are visually impaired is purely allegorical. The trouble is, however, that the tenor of the allegory relies on the stereotypical assumptions of its vehicle, meaning that people who are visually impaired must be perceived as helpless if their portrayal is to represent the metaphysical bewilderment of humanity convincingly. In other words, the
allegory will not bear scrutiny because it is grounded in the mythology of blindness as opposed to the facts about visual impairment.

A literary response, an “anti-sequel” to Blindness, “The Sight Sickness” by Christine Faltz Grassman, an attorney and mother of two who has been blind since birth. Synopsis:

Faced with an epidemic of “the white sickness” — an apparently contagious plague in which random citizens become blind — the government rounds up those afflicted, caging them like animals in lawless and inhumane quarantine facilities in this novel. When the crisis finally subsides, the officials in charge of this government response are put on trial — and acquitted. Unsatisfied with the verdict, a vigilante group responds by kidnapping seven people and keeping them blinded so that they can experience the fears of those blinded in the plague.

I’m sorry I don’t have time to be more organized here or to say more – and believe me, I have more to say. I just chatted with a colleague about it, and it didn’t work for her either. It feels good not to be alone. Anyway … off to the meeting!