Jose Saramago – Blindness

I took Jose Saramago’s Blindness with me to read in an airport. I always try to look smart in airports, and highbrowish literature is an excellent accessory toward that end. Plus, the harder a book is to read, the more readily it will distract me from the possibility of plummeting to my death.
It worked, more or less: The book was such an intrusion into my existence that I barely remembered to board the plane.
Blindness opens on a man driving a car and suddenly finding himself blind. No medical cause can be found, and soon his wife becomes blind, and soon the ophthalmologist, and soon everyone in the ophthalmologist’s office. It’s an epidemic, and the government of this theoretical country opts to quarantine the blind and everyone who has had contact with the blind in an abandoned asylum under military guard.
The narrative closely follows the ophthalmologist’s wife, who did not fall blind, but faked it in order to stay with her husband in quarantine. She has to decide how to use her sightedness to the advantage of the group, how to shoulder the burden of sightedness, which becomes difficult when people begin to flood the asylum as the epidemic descends on the entire known world.
The prose is nice; it moves like a constant, close-panning camera, lots of commas, not so many periods, and feels like a dream. At some point, I realized that – other than the doctor’s wife, who is set up obviously as a kind of Liberty leading the people – I didn’t especially admire any of the main characters, although I didn’t dislike them, exactly. They aren’t heroes or villains. They’re human beings thrust facedown into their basest humanness, and they behave exactly as such.
And I think that was the goal of the book, to show what loss and despair and bare-bones survival do to us as individuals and as a society. The back cover hails Blindness as “a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit” and “a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century” – the Auschwitzes, the comfort women, the aftermaths of hurricanes and earthquakes and wars.
Corruption comes swiftly: Midway through the book, a group of criminals steals all the food rations and demands everyone’s valuables in exchange for a few days’ food supply. When there’s nothing left to offer the criminals, they demand the women. And what follows is a rape-orgy scene so disturbing that I felt the need to self-medicate with a giant oatmeal cookie when I deplaned in Memphis.
In the next sequence, the doctor’s wife finds a pair of scissors, sneaks into the criminals’ ward – in the midst of a second rape – and slashes the throat of the lead criminal, the gun-wielder, killing him. Bad men in my head are always completely bald, with the palest skin and cruel, ice-blue eyes, a roll of head fat stretching from the back of one ear to the back of the other, and in my mind I saw him, white-skinned and angrily bleeding, although somehow not quite dead, and I don’t think I had ever felt so happy.
And this made me question everything I believe about violence.
I say it all the time: Treating violence with violence only causes it to spread, like the lesions of a skin disease. And yet, within the world created for me by Saramago, I felt that the criminals had to be stopped, and that violence was the only way to bring an end to the evil they had committed and would commit again. When the lead criminal was killed, it felt right.
If I were being honest, though, I would say that this right feeling had more to do with vengeance than real justice. More Inigo Montoya than the Sermon on the Mount. (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” And then Mandy Patinkin – the least likely Spaniard in the history of white people – slays Christopher Guest.)
I wanted to see blood on the ground, damn it. And I’m not sure that kind of rage should ever be indulged, and I don’t know if the violence that might try to restrict evil can ever avoid slipping into that kind of rage. I just don’t know.
Near the end of the book, the ophthalmologist and his wife, having fled the burning asylum with the other six main characters (one of the women torched the criminals’ ward in the middle of the night, in the process igniting her own funeral pyre and burning down the entire structure), pause to rest in a church alongside other blind refugees. The doctor’s wife looks around and notices that someone has covered every pair of eyes in the artwork of the sanctuary with a white bandage – doves are blind, angels are blind. Jesus, on the cross, is blind. She marvels about this to her husband, and someone overhears, and soon the entire enclave of blind men and women stampede out of the church in terror.
And maybe this scene is the most telling in the book; maybe it represents a problem larger than never-violence versus sometimes-violence. Maybe larger than violence, tied closely to violence, is this very fear: that God too is blind.