Blindness by Jose Saramago

“If you can see, look.  If you can look, observe.” 

The Book of Exhortations as quoted by Jose Saramago

“Blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone.”

Jose Saramago

“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…”

Jose Saramago

I just finished reading Jose Saramago’s Blindness (Mariner Books, 1995).  I am tired of the destruction-of-society-and-culture narratives.  Real life is terrifying enough; human behavior is too violent in reality.  Fictional narratives can only heighten the trepidation and fear we are now experiencing every day.

In Saramago’s novel, a pandemic of blindness grips the world.  The white haze comes on with devastating suddenness, and as the plague spreads, chaos ensues.  There are no answers as to what this is or why it is spreading so fast.  The military funnels victims into an abandoned mental hospital in a vain attempt to prevent the spread.  The soldiers guard them from a distance and are not afraid to gun down the sightless as they approach the fence to demand food and water.  The imprisonment is a colossal failure, the virus spreads, even to the soldiers, and the result is mass hysteria and human destruction.  Inside the hell of the mental hospital, the patients brutalize each other—rapes, food hoarding, outright murder—and this violence becomes commonplace.  Excrement accumulates in the halls and bathrooms; the people track it around the complex on their feet and clothes until every person is shit-smeared and defiled.  Human degradation is the rule, not the exception.  Of course, none of the victims are fully aware of what they are subjected to because of their blindness, but they are aware enough to know the dire jeopardy in which they find themselves.  Only one character has sight, the wife of a doctor, a former ophthalmologist no less, who claims to be blind so she can stay with her husband in the asylum.  It is through her eyes that we see the terrible conditions and dire circumstances within the various wings of the hospital.

Saramago writes in blocks of text without paragraphing of new ideas.  The dialogue among the characters is linked together in single sentences and paragraphs with only commas separating the speakers, resulting in long passages of voices where it is sometimes uncertain who is speaking.  No characters are given names.  Instead, Saramago uses their occupations or roles in the story:  “the doctor,” “the girl with dark glasses,” “the doctor’s wife,” and “the boy with a squint.”

The novel remains sickening and haunting, but it is a strange horror story that hits all too close to home right now.  Exploring fictional sociological disintegration is not something to delve into during this time of real danger and crisis.  Some may enjoy this, and certainly, Jose Saramago does cut down to the bone of human animalistic behavior.  But he also fails to answer the fundamental question:  what are we to learn from this novel?  It is certainly not escapist fare, and philosophically, Saramago offers us the fragility of the human condition and Man’s inhumanity to Man, but he spares us no words of comfort or resolution—there is a sequel, Seeing (Harvest Books, 2007).  Characters are simply trapped in this hellish landscape unable to regain their sight or equilibrium.  It is a horrific world terrible in its scope and devastation.