Blindness (Jose Saramago)

My lovely friend Pam quoted an excerpt from this book on her blog that immediately hooked my interest and then was kind enough to lend me her (hardcover) copy, despite my history of dropping books in hot tubs. And I am incredibly grateful: for her recommendation, for this delicious prose, for Saramago’s talent and for the elation I always experience when I read a 5-out-of-5-star book, which hasn’t happened since the last time I read a Pam recommendation.

Like most kids, I used to wonder what it would be like to be blind. I’d close my eyes and see if I could make it to the kitchen, to the bus stop, just by counting steps. Losing my sight, that plunge into emptiness and infantile helplessness, is the scariest of all disabilities for a book-junky like myself. But never did I take the fantasy as far as to imagine that the blindness could be contagious, that when everyone has gone blind, there are no good samaritans to help you across the street or to teach you braille, no one left to reorient you to the world, no one with the eyes to look into a microscope and find a cure. In this novel, Saramago takes that blind world to its inevitable destination: a world where other people don’t really exist unless you bump into them, where names no longer matter and homes are forever lost, where shame for your actions is a thing of the past and inhibitions fly out the window. In this dark world, it’s difficult if not impossible to perform the most basic human functions of eating, cleaning onself and even shitting — get used to the word, readers, because you’re in for a heap of shit here.

Through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, the one unfortunate person who keeps her vision in the novel, we have this pure helplessness and chaos thrust upon us. The rape and murder, the theft and betrayal, the starvation. But mostly the filth, of unwashed bodies and excrement-slick city streets and rotting corpses and putrid food. While she’s not the narrator of the story, the doctor’s wife leads the reader along much like her husband and the other blind people in her care, taking us by the hand and guiding us through this vile and primitive place that was once a civilization.

It is this feeling of being guided and herded, just like those afflicted with the white blindness, that leads me to shout out, “DON’T go see this movie.” Boycott it now and pretend it was never made, folks, because there is no way in hell or Hollywood that the frightening, feral world of this Nobel Prize-winning novel can be reproduced visually. I’ve never before perceived that as readers, we are essentially blind. It is only through other’s words — through the artform of storytelling — that people, places and situations are painted in our minds. But Saramago obviously grasped this concept of the reader as sightless, and he uses the idea like a sharp weapon to make the book a searing experience. And with odd formatting — little puncuation, fewer paragraph breaks and no quote marks — he furthers that feeling of unfamiliarity, of strange newness and disorientation. Staring at a white page dotted with words really does feel like the white blindness, the doctor’s wife our only point of reference and we hang on tight for fear of becoming lost. How, tell me, could this feeling of blind terror of words on paper ever, ever be reproduced on the big screen?

[W]e went down all the steps of indignity, all of them, until we reached total degradation, the same might happen here albeit in a different way, then we still had the excuse that the degradation belonged to someone else, not now, now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please, don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter, forgive this moralizing speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it and that’s enough of this dissertation, Let’s go and eat. No one asked any questions, the doctor simply said, If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their souls, asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, is was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, that the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

I know, I know. I’m a maudlin reader, forever falling in love with books about difficult subjects. And I’m also a literature snob, reveling in complex and unique writers, all dense sentences and poetic license. So of course this book is right up my alley. But all that aside, I can’t imagine anyone taking this literary journey and not being shocked at the new human experience Saramago plucked from his imagination and made real. Hip-deep in this book, you can not help but be amazed — as I constantly am — at the power and the art of words on a page.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover