Origingally published Ensaio sobre a cegueira, Editorial Caminho 1995 published in English as Blindness, Harvill Press 1997, by José Saramago
I sometimes acquire a propensity to read the right books at the most histrionic moments. Often, I dismiss it as happenstance; read enough novels and Kairos will unwittingly intervene on some of their behalves. Pennywise and I met on a rainy Saturday when I was a teenager. I spent the first night in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel as snow piled up outside my bedroom window.
As thick as the air has become in 2020, the risk will possibly, or hopefully, never be higher for a written work to send tremors through our already-frayed sensibilities. From the first pages of José Saramago’s 1995 novel Blindness, I felt that tremor being carried on by the furor of this present year. As such, this is not the novel to read in 2020, but one to be read for its invaluable benefit to our cultural and personal posterity.
Saramago is a discerning purveyor of a hypothetical sociology, as he infects the novel’s city with a contagious but physiologically and psychologically inexplicable blindness. The terror of the pandemic (that inherently loathsome word now the most despised in 2020 vernacular) is eclipsed by the terror of witnessing what depths humanity will descend if stripped of eyesight. Far from straying into just the metaphorical, Saramago surveys the functional and operational elements of a physically blind society. His meticulous rendering is often a disagreeable one, as it is cringingly explicit and unfiltered. How do the blind find food? Where do they go to use the bathroom once utilities shut down? And how much blood will flow from the instinct to survive? The answers to all those inquiries are found in this novel.
Revolving primarily around the handful of initial characters to be struck blind, Saramago’s plot follows them into a government-issued quarantine. The most manifest theme from their collective experience is how brittle and superficial society’s social structure is, and how one variable can demolish it. Designations and titles have lost all validity. Through a shared incapacity, a doctor, prostitute, pharmacist, hotel worker, an elderly veteran, and an orphaned child are bonded together. All are anchored by the doctor’s wife, the only person known to have not lost her sight. A telling liberty taken by Saramago is the absence of their names. Not even the setting, city or country, is graced with a name. In a world gone blind, the answer to “What’s in a name?” could only be frivolous.
The genius of his work is that at no times does the reader find the depravity of his characters, or of the society as a whole, as unbelievable outcomes. The criminality that ensues, the sordidness of living conditions, the evaporation of formal authority and order, none are interpreted as hyperbole. What makes this work outright terrifying is that a reader has no other choice but to subscribe to even its darkest elements as inevitabilities.
Thankfully, through both the physical and metaphorical darkness of his novel, Saramago does not forsake his reader of all hope for the goodness of the human heart. Instead, he acts more as a comforting companion helping us to absorb this distressing hypothetical, rather than being the objective mind creating it. If he had opted for the latter entirely, the terror of it would have been overwhelming. Instead intuitions such as “…we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one’s courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species,” guides us through the hard pages.
As if this companionable narrator wasn’t enough comfort, the English major and book fanatic in me was flattered that Saramago was accommodating enough to include an ode to the written word, and its transcendence even as civilization buckles. After over 300 dispiriting pages, I needed that scene of the doctor’s wife reading to her companions by the soft light of an oil lamp.
Finally, I acknowledge the tacky irony of reading a novel titled Blindness in the year 2020, and the perversion of coming across in 2020 a 1995 novel about a pandemic. But isn’t it true that the most transcendent works gain potency by being prophetic as years pass? Brave New World and 1984 resonate more today than when they were published. Blindness does the same.