Ross Recommends: Blindness by José Saramago
You’re sitting in your car at a red light, patiently waiting for ambling pedestrians to reach the safety of the other side. It is an entirely unextraordinary day. The next instant, you go blind. Not blind in a shroud of darkness way but in a way that fills your vision with impenetrable and unending, dazzling whiteness. The cars around you scream their horns at the nuisance you are causing now that the traffic light, completely unknowable to you, shines green. Everything visual has gone. Your connection to the world through light has vanished seemingly without cause or reason. Are you scared? Are you horrified? This is how Blindness by José Saramago starts. I hope this explains to you why this book has sat on my bookshelf for over a year as I have slowly, very slowly, built up the mental courage to open it and step into this terrifying world. I have though; I have finally committed and I am not the same as I was 309 pages ago.
Over the course of the next day, all those who came to the aid, or supposed aid, of the first blind man also go blind. Panic follows and the government of this nameless fictional country is quick to round up all those it believes to be blind or contaminated with this newly coined “White Evil” and contain them, imprison them, in a disused asylum. This decision, whilst doing nothing to curb the spread of the blindness epidemic, leads to unimaginable suffering amongst the detainees. Power struggles over who controls the limited food, water and hygiene supplies that are delivered each day, for the time being, erupt and chaos fills every corridor, room and ward. Tensions build and build until breaking point; someone sets fire to the building and the blind spill free into a city they will never see again and a world permanently changed.
I’ve painted a gloomy picture of this story so far but no matter how awful the events of the tale became I could not put it down; I was fully enraptured. Saramago’s writing is sensational and I shouldn’t have expected anything less given that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and is Portugal’s most celebrated writer. Cleverly, the wife of a blind ophthalmologist seems to be immune to the spreading blindness and it is through her, now, invaluably rare sight that Saramago, with exacting and precise prose, conjurors up vivid and tangible horrors of the living conditions our unlikely gang of blind victims are subjected to. I am in awe of his sentences, long and winding like country lanes but with the directness and force of a motorway. However, it is his choice of writing style when shifting to the perspective of the blind that really cemented this book for me as a world class classic. When we enter the world of a blind character, we lose all structuring and grammatical clues as to who is speaking. Run on sentences, delineated by speaker through the use of a solitary leading capital letter are the only way we, as the reader, are able to understand the evolution of the conversation around us. This capital letter then adopts an incredible symbolism, representing a change of speaker that our blind characters can only identify by voice. Names, physical appearance, clothing, body language, all these ways of communicating who we are have no place in this changed, blind world.
Saramago during his life was, as well as a writer, a voracious political activist, condemning the Catholic Church, the World Monetary Fund, The UN, EU and many, many other international organisations he claimed were operating not for the greater good of humanity but according to the profit-hungry capitalist agenda. Throughout Blindness, Saramago uses the repetition of everyday phrases and idioms to show the absurdity of human life and the illusion of control created by society. Power and what humans do with it is a central theme and a fascinating discussion, with Saramago ultimately concluding it is only by coming together with others, in sharing what we have, that humans can carve out a pocket of somewhat tolerable existence in a dark, or more accurately blinding white, uncaring universe.