Blinded by the Light – An overview of Jose Saramago’s novel “Blindness”

“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.”

These are the words of Jose Saramago from his novel “Blindness”. Saramago was one of the most distinguished, imaginative and ingenious writers of the recent past. With a spitting resemblance to Kafka’s works, his novels also begin with a mysterious, bizarre and rather appalling circumstances. The characters find themselves entrapped in unexpected situations thrust upon them, resulting in a kind of metamorphosis – with the exception being that in Saramago’s novels, the whole society, instead of an individual, undergo this metamorphosis. Kafka’s work deal with the inability of the modern man to cope with the monstrosity of the institutionalization, bureaucratization, atomization, alienation and capitalistic work ethics. He portrays a rather bleak notion of human agency and resistance, in the face of the juggernaut of modernity and capitalism- as he himself says “In a man’s struggle against the world, always bet on the world” deeming the world to be an “iron cage”. Whereas, Saramago believes in the collective resistance and re-invigorating the humanitarian values at a time when it is most difficult to hold on to humanity.

Written in 1995, “Blindness” has a spooky start with a man unexpectedly turning blind of a disease that ultimately turns into an epidemic. One by one, everyone contracts this strange disease and the government directs everyone to be quarantined by putting them into an empty building of a “mental asylum” –a very meaningful analogy indeed. This asylum presents a very uncanny resemblance to the concentration camps, and the people in there are treated likewise. The qualitative distinction of this blindness is that it is a “White blindness”. The twist of the novel rests with a character, who is named “the doctor’s wife”. The only character in the novel who can see and witness every horror with her eyes. Saramago puts her thoughts into words like this “the only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see.” It shows the agony of being alone with a curse of seeing what others cannot, and going through the travailing journey of leading and guiding them. In Sartre’s words, the woman is condemned to “See”.

The rest of the pages are filled with horrifying imagery and spine-chilling accounts of greed, murder, rape, filth and excesses of power. It is like listening to the Joker’s words reverberating throughout the novel “when the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other”. However, in spite of all this chaos, some of the characters find their humanity restored out of this suffering. Their condition epitomizes the notion of finding meaning in the suffering, of not succumbing to the tide of distress and the tyranny of time. Saramago firmly believes that these wretched of the earth, submerged in the alluvial filth, would find the pearls of freedom by sowing the seeds of their resistance.

Saramago’s writing style is also very unique and somewhat ambiguous. One has to put quite an effort to comprehend his text and decipher “who is who and what is what”. It seems as if he prefers speech over writing because of writing in a manner of speech with no punctuations except for full stops. It is as if to show us the absurdity, inability and banality of language in transforming thoughts and emotions into words. Hence, keeping the incessant flow of thoughts intact and urging the reader to interpret the tone, texture and the manner in which the words are spoken. It also seems that he has taken the Shakespeare’s words of “what’s in a name?” quite seriously deeming it to be an arbitrary label. The characters have no names and are identified by their profession or peculiar characteristics that they possess. Maybe, it is to convey the idea that the names tend to conceal something within us; the true nature of people is hidden under the labels that they identify themselves with. The idea is conveyed like this in his novel “Inside us there is something that has no name and that something is what we are”. We tend to put labels to things, concepts or abstract and complicated matters for simplifying and making it comprehensible – and that is exactly what we do with understanding human beings. In this case, perhaps the signifier does not signify to the signified properly. Because human beings are, after all, a very complex matter and the history of ideas is replete with an attempt to understand this so called “phenomenon”. One of the uttermost ludicrous attempt is the scientific method- trying to dumb down and pigeon-hole the complexities of “being” into mechanical jargons, treating it like objects while ignoring the subjectivity and the human agency. The science is blinded by the “cult of objectivity”.

The metaphor of “white blindness” is also very interesting. For me, Saramago incisively explores and trenchantly denounces the idea of “progress” entrenched in the enlightenment project. The light of enlightenment blinded people to the extent of ignoring and even disregarding its insidious, sinister and subliminal repercussions – which are not very subliminal after all these years. In Adrienne Wilder’s words “The light is a funny thing. We think it shows what we need to see. But in reality, it blinds us”. This experiment of enlightenment, as they call it, has wreaked havoc and is continuously subjecting the nature’s arrangement to disaster. With a slogan of conquering nature, this raving pursuit in the name of progress, has led the man to treat the nature like the conqueror actually treats the conquered; with brutality and relentless ferocity. However, Saramago puts the perspective of the Nature’s retaliation and striking back in the form of pandemics, epidemics, floods, storms and whatnot. It usually happens when something you deem powerless hits you back, incapacitating and exposing your delusion of being powerful and civilized. It is both to show the humankind its true self, testing the nerves, and an attempt to put a darker perspective to dilute the dazzling light of unquestioned optimism and their indifference towards the nature. In both of his novels, Death at intervals and Blindness, we see the nature reacting by death taking an interval in the former and the white blindness engulfing the humankind in the latter. In death at intervals Saramago represents death saying “We feel that we must mention that death, by herself and alone, with no external help, has always killed far less than mankind has.”

This peculiar “white blindness” is the white man’s burden and we, the others, are facing the music and getting our fair share for trying to emulate, idealize and follow the idea of this linear progression towards the dazzling ‘tunnel of light’ for meeting them at a place, in Orwell’s words, “Where there is no darkness”. It was written amidst the cacophonous era of Fukuyama’s claim of “The End of History” which tells us a lot, contrary to its connotative meaning, alluding to its denotation. The end of history, maybe, denotes the end of humanity, if the liberal democracy and capitalism truly prevail in the world, down to its core – facing no resistance.

However, there is always time to get disillusioned from this canard of sheer optimism that renders us sightless and it becomes essential to bring a pessimistic or a darker perspective, combining it as the optimism of despair. This is exactly what the nature brings our attention to, in the form of pandemics; the failure and the blindness of the system towards the subjects and the blindness of the subjects towards the naked violence that they face at the hands of the system. We have all witnessed this during covid 19. One of characters in the novel realizes this after everyone convalesces from the disease at the end of the novel and says: “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.” Let’s see that how much time do we need realize this?