Chaos, Perseverance, Redemption: José Saramago’s “Blindness”

Cars line up at a traffic signal while their drivers wait for the light to turn green. When it does, one car does not move. Horns honk, epithets are muttered, drivers waiting behind the stationary car finally get out to investigate, then pound on the driver’s side window.

There, they behold a man waving his arms and turning his head side to side. Then they open his door to hear him exclaim, “I am blind.”

So begins “Blindness,” the late Portuguese writer José Saramago’s powerful, wholly original 1995 novel that explores a dystopian world in which blindness descends first on the driver depicted above but in short order engulfs all but one other inhabitant of an unnamed country at an unspecified, though modern time in human history.

At base, the hearty band of seven people we follow through to the story’s conclusion stand as a towering—if humbled to the nth degree—testament to human solidarity and perseverance.

Notable, too, is that all the characters remain unnamed, Saramago using descriptors for them throughout—“the doctor,” “the doctor’s wife,” “the girl with dark glasses.”

The clear implication: these people in this country represent the entire, becoming-blind world.

Terrifyingly, the blindness descends on everyone (save the doctor’s wife, wherein lies its own tale) with great suddenness, most always in the presence of an already blind person, leading authorities to deduce it is highly contagious.

Drastic measures are thus called for to try to limit its spread, including an immediate quarantine of all those already blinded and those with whom the blind have interacted.

Parallels with our own time? But of course, as in this line, too, when enough government officials still had their sight to offer the following:

“On the second day there was some talk of a reduction in new cases…and this led the government to announce at once that it was reasonable to suppose that the situation would soon be under control.”

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Meanwhile, authorities had hastily opened an abandoned mental hospital to where the blind and their potentially infected contacts are shepherded and placed in separate, locked wards, neither group permitted even the most minimal contact with the outside world.

With contagion fear running rampant, a military unit guards the inmates under draconian conditions that involve shoot-to-kill orders for a variety of infractions, no matter how innocent. Sleeping arrangements for the quarantined are army-style, but there are not enough cots. (Plainly, the government had been caught without a pandemic response plan firmly in place…)

The confusion is only heightened by an appalling lack of sanitary facilities, no medical care, and food provisions that are left in bags by soldiers in a kind of no-man’s land of the compound, “social distance” run amok as the guards fear contamination from inmates.

Dehumanization ensues. A few blind emissaries from the larger group must grope their way to the food bags three times a day under the verbal direction of guards who bark at them from a distance all the while. (“Come forward, come forward…move over to the right, your right, your right, fools!”)

Things only get worse from there—much worse, actually.

For one thing, the soldiers eventually abandon their posts because they, like all the rest of the world, soon go blind themselves. This leaves the central characters to battle their way out of the compound against a violent, voracious band from another ward that has subjugated them and taken control of their food supply.

A truly harrowing few pages describing the transactions leading up to the ultimate battle make for tough reading by any measure.

But lest you think you can’t run fast enough away from what might appear to be one of the darkest novels in literary history, it should also be said that “Blindness” is a brilliant, almost hypnotically readable work that projects an understated but dogged grace from the handful of main characters that we follow and get to know from its first pages.

The whole human drama is here, in extremis. The good and the bad, the capricious and the methodical, the woeful, the wary and the wise, the generous and the hard-hearted.

The human, the all-too-human, the sub-human.

Also bearing mention: the incredibly adaptable survivalists that all living things are, looking to fulfill their genetic programs to flourish as best they can. And in the case of humans, an ultimately spiritual overlay that has them sifting through their experience and contemplating what, if anything, it means.

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Sight being so fundamental to most all life, the almost inevitable breakdown of social and political order with a suddenly sightless population creates a vacuum that oppressors have an easier time stepping into with their hard, sure hands than do good people with their hands open, groping to join it with others.

But grope the good people do, against monumental odds. The assertion and maintenance of human dignity—and its slippery slope down to the animal selves we are at the very base of our being—is a haunting theme underscoring nearly every page of “Blindness.”

The protagonists are helpless against the loss of basic sanitation, no one escaping the stench that they are and have inadvertently stepped into in a world with scant if any running water or functioning toilets. Here is the doctor, having negotiated a bathroom journey:

He knew he was dirty, dirtier than he could ever remember having been in his life. There are many ways of becoming an animal, he thought, this is just the first of them.  

As the doctor and everyone else soon learns, mishaps that initially occur to everyone’s embarrassment soon become just the reality of everyday life, the bar for what constitutes personal hygiene progressively lowered as people come to accept they simply can’t be who they previously were.

Or can they?

At base, the hearty band of seven people we follow through to the story’s conclusion stand as a towering—if humbled to the nth degree—testament to human solidarity and perseverance.

Saramago, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature three years after this tale’s publication, romanticizes not one stitch of it in his unflinching fidelity to the spectrum of human tragedy, personality and behavior. But neither does he turn away from what makes us fully, most expansively human.

This includes the relationships we cultivate and need, along with the inner resources we come to learn are far deeper than we could ever have thought, and which we rely on to help pull each other through.

In a world turned upside down, co-dependency takes on a different meaning as a fundamental fact and requirement of existence. We need each other, plain as day. Not in a way that makes individuals weaker, but quite the opposite.

Yet we are often stubbornly, tragically blinded to that fact, as we are to so much else.

There are many forms of blindness, after all, not all of them sudden, or even having to do with eyes and retinas and such.

So too, are there deeper visions and gifts than mere sight, a premise that Saramago probes to shattering, ultimately redemptive effect in this uncommon tale.

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In case you weren’t among the nearly 38 million people who have thus far viewed last Sunday’s Easter Concert by Mr. Bocelli, here’s a more than worthy snippet…

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