Saramago’s Blindness Review

Introduction

The catalyst for the end of the world according to Blindness is an epidemic of blindness. This contagious infection differs from the common pandemic plague in apocalyptic literature. Unlike the bubonic plague in Camus’s La Peste, blindness does not kill the infected. It merely cripples.

Nevertheless, the result of this defect is still horrific. When blindness begins to spread, there is a pandemonium of men trying to avoid the contaminated and of men trying to cope with not seeing. In order to prevent blindness from spreading, a vague governmental figure isolates the contaminated people in a derelict mental asylum. Subsequently, the blind who are forced to live inside the mental asylum have to organise themselves. As the number of contaminated people increases, the frail governance inside the asylum descends into anarchy. Eventually a group of thugs, with the advantage of a gun and a blind man (he was blind before the epidemic), manages to take control of the food supply. They oppress the others, giving out their rations only if they manage to pay them. As the blind start to run out of material goods, the women are forced to sell their bodies. Under the thugs’ authority, the mass rapes recur.

This situation summarises the fall of civilisation in Blindness. It paints the worst in humanity as established systems, including morality, fall apart. The asylum, however, is only a part of it. The blind internees will eventually escape the dystopian madhouse. Unfortunately what they discover in their freedom is a chaotic shambles. Everybody is blind, unbeknownst to them for how long. The world they know before their quarantine does not exist anymore. This indicates the convergence of dystopia and apocalypse in Blindness. The quarantine narrates a dystopian society while the world outside is apocalyptic.

The Portuguese writer José Saramago (b. 1922 – 2010) employs these literary genres at a seemingly misplaced time in history. Although Blindness shares similar themes with Camus’s La Peste (1947) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the book was published in English roughly 45 years later in 1997 (1995 in Portuguese). The peculiarity in publication year serves to underline the distinctiveness of Portuguese history in comparison to the rest of Europe. Geographically, Portugal is rather isolated and located in the periphery of Europe. She was by no means affected by the world wars, imperialism, and nationality, but the progress might be slightly different.

The context of Blindness stretches from a time under the dictatorship of Salazar to the modern globalising Portugal. It is still a postwar literature, a fact that influences the apocalyptic and dystopian nuances. According to J. A. Cuddon, postwar apocalyptic literature tends to be science fiction and usually focuses on the aftermath of post-apocalyptic catastrophe, exploring humanity “without the support – or constraints – of civilisation as we know it” (2012, p. 47). That is why postwar apocalyptic writing draws a close connection with dystopian literature. The failures of mankind to create an eutopia, a Greek word that means a “place (where all is) well” (2012, p. 751), culminate in imaginary construction of a place where all is abysmal.

The white evil – the name of the blindness – is precursor to this apocalyptic dystopia. Saramago does not indicate the scope of white evil, nor does he signify the location of the story. It is a nameless city with nameless characters. The narrative flows in a series of commas, disregarding quotation marks and paragraph breaks. The resulting effect is similar to that of white evil, for the blindness caused by this disease is not pitch-black, but murky white. It still allows the readers to see a stream of words but forces them to grope for its meaning. One of the aims of this paper is to explicate these literary choices and contextualise the situations in Blindness with the political situations in Portugal.

Postcolonial Reading: A Metaphor

There are two semblances of government that appear in Blindness: one is the government that corrals the contaminated blind into the mental asylum and the other is the rule of the thugs. The main difference between them is their appearance to the citizens. The former is a faceless governing body, diplomatically speaking through the radio and acting through soldiers. The latter has a face and a gun. The cruelty they evoke is equally brutal. The government’s unpremeditated action of disposing the blind in a quarantine leads to starvation, sickness (no medical care or antiseptic), discomfort (broken sewage system with dirty water and dysfunctional toilets), and even death (letting soldiers shoot citizens). This government claims to care for its citizens, but it is so distant from them that what happens to them is often considered as inconsequential in the face of pragmatism. An example of this is demonstrated in the general’s callous remark regarding the blind interns: “If they end up killing each other, so much the better, there will be fewer of them” (p. 132). On the other hand, the decisions made by the thugs impacts the citizens personally. Compliance means food; disobedience means gunshot. The ochlocratic selfish demand appears also more debased. Saramago’s similes portray the bestiality of their action. The thugs rate the women “like hyenas around a carcass (p. 171) and when they rape them, they “panted like a suffocating pig” (p. 172). After the mass rape, the insomniac woman suffers a cardiac arrest. Her death evokes pity and outrage, depicting the most abject humiliation on a human being. This makes the mob rule inside the asylum viler than the government outside, but the scene of the mass rape ends with the doctor’s wife’s looking outside the window and seeing that “the soldiers were there” (p. 173) and they did nothing to prevent what happened. Thus it is implied that the mob rule is a result of the government’s negligence and the government is not absolved of the mass rape.

There is a connection between the aforementioned governance with Portuguese history. However, it is first crucial to establish the history and myths of Portugal. As a marginal nation in the periphery Europe, the Portuguese national pride is rooted in its age of exploration and “discoveries” from the 14th centuries (Arenas, 2003, p. 10). The Portuguese Empire’s distinguishing feat includes colonising areas in Asia and Indian Ocean (16th century), Brazil (17th and 18th centuries), and Africa (19th and 20th centuries). The most successful colony was Brazil, and up until now there still remains a saudade, a longing, for the envisioned Brazilian Portugal. The reality is, the exalted era of maritime expansion was short-lived. Portuguese colonialism was tenuous and the imperialism even more so. Portugal lacked the armada and economic resources compared to other colonial powers such as France and England. The British Ultimatum in 1890 demonstrates this vulnerability: their ambition to expand Portuguese colonies in Africa from coast to coast was easily stopped by this ultimatum. Moreover, the world wars led to a series of anti-colonial independence. Avoiding the world wars, Portugal also lacked diplomatic relations. The real Portuguese history was a series of decolonisation and governmental revolutions.

One aspect of Portuguese decolonisation is demonstrated through António Salazar’s Portuguese African Policy. According to Alan K. Smith, “under António Salazar Portuguese colonial policy was altered from one which envisaged the ultimate growth and development of the African colonies to one which emphasised colonial stability” (1974, p. 667). The main reason was to make Portugal the sole beneficiary of the exploitation of the African colonies. Hence, between 1928 and 1930 Salazar worked to reduce the role of foreign participation in the colonies and the colonial autonomous rule. The result of this policy is a shift in Portuguese official thinking. Previously, the idealism was the development of Angola and Mozambique as Portuguese national resources and pride. However, as the new policy limited the role of the motherland citizens in the colonies, the metropolitan Portugal began to lose interest in the colonial affairs, so much so that “Portugal was unique in the degree to which even the government ignored its colonies” (Smith, 1974, p. 656).

The nature of Portuguese governance in the African colonies is reflected in the distant government of Blindness universe. Under the pragmatic decision for national economic stability, Portugal abandoned the needs of her colonies. The repercussion of this action is not unlike the ones that the blind internees suffer. There is the lack of food in the form budgetary relegation that dwindled as Portugal suffered economic recession. There is the isolation of the colonies from foreign help for fear of ‘de-nationalisation’ of the colonies (Smith, 1974, p. 657). Fear causes the government from enacting a humane and sensible action. “Fear made the soldier’s blood freeze, and fear drove him to aim his weapon and release a blastoff gunfire” at an unarmed and injured blind man (Smith, 1974, p. 72). There is something to be said about the Portuguese government’s attitude toward its citizens in comparison to the Blindness’s post-apocalyptic governing body that cages, undernourishes, and occasionally executes the powerless blind men.

On the other hand, the state of the asylum does not seem to be limited to Portugal. If the distant government were Portugal itself, then the chaotic mob rule points to the events in the colonies. Nevertheless it could apply to any horrific authoritarian rule. What signifies the events in the asylum is the intimate portrayal of the worst of humanity to the readers. The downfall of civilisation in the asylum is a small isolated event, yet its horror is so poignant that the chaos outside of the asylum pales in comparison. The asylum is a microcosm of the world wars, a space where violence is a personal affliction. It should be a relief for the blind internees to discover that the asylum is no longer guarded. But escaping that dystopian reality only leads to a bigger, messier reality: “the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city, where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there” (p. 206).

Modernist Reading: A Manifesto

The previous passage marks the deterioration of meanings and values that were once rational. Saramago uses the word “labyrinth” for life both inside the asylum and outside. It connotes reality as a complex pathway with no clear direction neither in the future nor the past. Blindness speaks of a modernist contemplation. It can also be indicated in his unusual prose-writing that lacks punctuation marks. Experimenting with prose is part of the modernist characteristic, so are fragments and the search of meaning in something other than the European thought. Yet unlike Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, Saramago’s search of meaning is not in a distant, foreign culture. Saramago proposes a humanist insight much like the Irish modernist author James Joyce, who pays homage to the common Dubliners by weaving their mundane thoughts into an epic poetry. Saramago pays his tribute to humanity by gifting them with blindness, a crippling epidemic that forces them to redefine themselves and others. He uses extreme anonymity to demonstrate the literal filth (for the blind are incapable of properly disposing their waste) that humans produce. He humbles humanity, and at the same time, he shows them their capacity to see each other without eyesight and to love one another from the goodness of the heart. Saramago’s modernist search of meaning lies in the heart of a person. By the end of the story, even though the characters are blind, they are Seeing.

The meaning of Seeing is as ambiguous as the meaning of being Blind: “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” (p. 309). The only person throughout the whole book who never turns blind is the Doctor’s wife. Judging from her behaviour compared to the other blind internees’, she seems to have more humanity in her, to care more both for her husband and strangers alike. It is inferred that the Doctor’s wife has always Seen. Seeing denotes the ability to see a person’s soul, to comprehend that everyone is equal, and to acknowledge the need for help and compassion for whomever it is. The distinction of Seeing suggests that blindness might not have been a fictional epidemic after all. It is likely a criticism to the ignorance and irresponsibility of people in general. It echoes the negligence of the Portuguese government regarding its colonies. Colonisation might be a crucial aspect of Portuguese history and while its time frame fits that of Saramago up to his publication of Blindness, the events surrounding Portuguese colonialism are felt only by a small section of the Portuguese, mainly those living in the colonies. Saramago is likely detached from Portuguese colonial actions. Taking into consideration the year the book is published, blindness most likely refers to the negligence of the privileged population in a globalised world.

The message of Blindness is humanistic. Blindness encourages people to start noticing what is happening across the geography and acting against oppression and injustice out of man’s innate common sense of beneficence. His movement to take stand is related to his outspoken anti-religion ideology. For if there is an “empire” that Saramago is vehemently opposed to, it would be the Catholic Church. Saramago has reiterated in his blog that religion is the cause of wars and misery: “Hence, whether you like it or not, we have God as a problem, God as a rock in the middle of the road, God as a pretext for hatred, God as an agent of disunity” (Saramago, 2010, p. 41). As he strongly opposes the Catholic Church, he is defying the Portuguese empire by proxy because as the saying goes — “to be Portuguese is to be Catholic”. The enmity between the Portuguese and the Muslim Moors throughout the mediaeval history has made a mark in Portuguese Catholic national identity. Catholicism and nationalism are intertwined to the point that Portuguese myth sometimes blends in with Christianity. An example would be the mysterious disappearance of King Sebastian in the battle of Alcácer Quibir, whose return is prophesied to bring ultimate salvation of Portugal against the Moors. This myth parallels the second coming of Jesus Christ as saviour. It is often said that this aspiration for a better Portugal explains the saudade of Portuguese nationhood. Saramago, however, wrote at a time where nationality had blurred. Pride in nationality reminds one of a dark time in the 1940s. However, since Portugal did not participate much in the world wars, their national pride thrived longer than other European countries. The lack of acknowledgement of Portuguese identity in the novel suggests Saramago’s opposition against national-religious identity. That is why his idea of government is separate from religion and nationalism.

The universe of Blindness is transnational. It connects with the Zeitgeist of globalisation. The aspect of colonial empire and colonies in Blindness exists because of its similar nature to capitalism and consumerism. The colonial body that exploits stands as a substitute for a mere individual with his selfish demand of consumerism. The damage in the colonies reflects the damage felt in the developing countries. Therefore, the breaking down of society in Blindness hardly reflects the decolonisation of Portugal, especially when Saramago’s anti-religion belief is taken into consideration. However, the damaging nature of both colonialism and capitalism draws a flimsy nexus between the colonial history of Portugal and the contemporary history of Saramago’s time. The damage of capitalism and colonialism is not directly felt, which is why the asylum is an important phase of the novel, as it introduces the intimate cruelty to the literal and metaphorical blind.

The small community of the Seeing blind at the end of Blindness portrays the utopia that Saramago aspires to achieve. It is a simple governance, not bound by the mob rule or the quarantine of the government. He proposes self-governance, free of the Church and the State. “We are not immortal, we cannot escape death, but at least we should not be blind” (pg. 280). Saramago’s Blindness is a story of a journey toward the ideal society. It is the fictional, artistic prose of a utopian dream. As the Portuguese title suggests, Ensaio sobre a Cegueira [Essay on Blindness] is a contemplative work on the human condition, of blindness and seeing, and an analysis of how society should be rebuilt for a better life. The English title misdirects the analytical nature of the book, urging the readers rather to depict Blindness as the science fiction novel that speculates what humanity might be like under such life-threatening situations. On the contrary, Blindness is a manifesto whereby the disease is a metaphor for a real defect in a global, consumerist world. It is a denationalisation essay, urging to abolish corrupt system of capitalism/colonisation and take responsibility of any harm done, especially when it is unintended. After all, the effects are real.

Conclusion

The historical context of Blindness is hard to detect as the novel takes place in an anonymous setting. In order to establish a link between the situations in Blindness and Portugal, we must treat Blindness as an allegory. We have analysed the two forms of government in the novel. The first is invisible and the latter not, but they both rob the blind of their lives, either literarily or metaphorically. The first quarantines the blind and gradually leaves them to starve and walk in their own waste. This could represent the colonial Portuguese treatment towards her colonies. As the African policy demonstrates, during a time of economic crisis, Salazar decided to strengthen Portugal’s economy and the negative effect of this decision is the abandonment of the cares for the colonies. On the other hand, the other form of government, the mob rule, unveils a type of crime that is personal, whether it is between the coloniser and the colonised in Mozambique or between soldier and soldier during the second World War. In any case, the inhumanity caused by the mob rule speaks of desperation and horror that the World War seems to contain. The unspeakable crime, however, is the result of neglect. This would be the postcolonial reading of Blindness.

The modernist reading of Blindness takes into consideration the scramble for lost meanings in the postwar world. Saramago seeks his meaning in the reorganisation of self-governance, placing altruism in the centre of human motivation. He advocates the removal of religion and state as the sources of identity. Instead, people should learn to See each other and help one another through compassion that exists beyond sight.  Blindness is Saramago’s dissertation about the solution to the world problem as a result of globalisation and consumerism. He believes in action rather than prayers: “It’s time for impatience to make itself felt in the world, to teach a thing or two to those who would prefer to feed on hopes” (Saramago, 2010, p. 20). Blindness is a manifesto for a change in attitude influenced by globalisation and Portuguese nationalism. For the core message of Blindness is a reaction against the belief in nationalism and religion.