Jose Saramago – In the Land of the Blind, the Man With the Pen is King

As the epidemic spreads, the government’s response is venal and fruitless –- not too surprising, since Saramago is hardly one to put a government in a good light. Mobs of people wander the streets, reduced to acting on basic instincts. We follow one such group, who are the good guys of the story. Or, they try to be. They are an oddball mixture, including the doctor who first encountered the blindness and his wife who can see, a prostitute and a thief. They end up in an asylum now commandeered by the government in an effort to quarantine the blind. They are guarded by callous soldiers who ultimately have no superior position as they, too, fall blind. The asylum is a harrowing place. Most of the inmates are too pathetic to do more than try to survive, as the doctor’s wife watches. She can manage to manipulate small successes for her group, but in the crowded building her power is much less than the reader hopes. A gang of cruel men learn to hoard the little food and exchange it for the rewards of power. They sleep where they will. And at the core of the story’s most awful moments, these men take the women they desire and rape them, repeatedly. And they are on to the doctor’s wife – they know she is hiding the truth of having sight. Ultimately the doctor’s wife takes morally ambiguous action to save her band – raising the ancient question: is violence done in the face of violence a morally justifiable act? Not pausing too long to consider, the small band makes its way out of the asylum, which is burning down. They wander the streets, where they encounter people as vicious as they must be to survive. Ultimately the small family-substitute manages to find an apartment and semi-reliable sources of food and water and are settling in to a demimonde life of perennial darkness and bare-bones survival when the blindness is cured, city-wide. Now what? For readers who first encountered Blindness, the most common response was no doubt disgust and despair. What lessons can we learn here? Why did Saramago bother? Is his point simply that without a thin patina of civilization, we will all be utterly cruel to each other? I think not. Note that the story is after all the tale of a group of people trying to make their way while preserving their self-respect and compassion. They have to compromise those noble intentions along the way, but they do come out more or less intact. Ultimately, this is an endorsement of the potential for good in human beings, although we have to wade through a great deal of the bad, told in stomach-churning detail, to appreciate just what the good must endure. But the tale doesn’t exactly end there. In 2004, Saramago published Seeing. It’s not exactly a sequel to Blindness, but it does overlap it. Blindness and Seeing are like bookends of hope and despair – but it’s not always clear which book is which. Seeing takes place in the same city where the blindness epidemic raged four years earlier. Order has been restored – perhaps too well. It’s election day, and the surprising results are that more than 70% of the voters have cast blank ballots. Conspiracy theories flourish left, right and center. The right-wing government orders a second vote, which this time yields 83% apathy. This is a democracy, and refusal to participate is perhaps the greatest threat the citizenry can inflict upon the government. Remember the doctor’s wife – the one who could see when the others were blind? Well, you’re not the only one. Her secret past now comes to light and is interpreted by the government as sinister. Why? Why does government ever view its citizens as sinister? Because they threaten its power. This cannot be tolerated. Saramago spends most of the novel making people in power looking both small-minded any yet logical, a nifty and accurate portrayal. The government is sure there is a movement against it, although there is no evidence. Unable to locate ringleaders, they round up 500 citizens at random, citing the catch-all excuse of suspicion of terrorism. This doesn’t produce any useful results, so the government decides to withdraw from the city and put it under siege. We’ll show them how much they need us, is the thinking. When this doesn’t work, the government resorts to its best refuge – violence. I won’t entirely ruin it for you, but suffice it to say that the reader is left wondering what was a greater threat to the citizenry – the blindness epidemic, or the government. Pick up a book by Saramago today. You won’t finish quickly. You’ll have to struggle to get used to his unconventional ways. So what’s the reward? Merely getting to read the most insightful, most intelligent, and most courageous living author. If you have read Saramago’s works, I’d love to