posted on 02 Nov 2019

Blindness by José Saramago

The Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died in 2010 aged 87, is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the late-twentieth century.

He was born to a family of landless peasants and was a lifelong communist, his politics rooted in the clandestine revolutionary movements of Salazar’s Portugal and the failed revolution following Salazar’s overthrow. Many regarded Saramago as a Stalinist, certainly a hard-liner; he said of Fidel Castro, for example, whom he considered a personal friend, “he has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams”. Saramago clung to communism, he said, because he had found no better ideas, but one critic has described him as living his communism almost as a spiritual, philosophical and moral condition. Certainly, it is not in evidence in the novels of his that I have read or attempted to read.

He was also a modernist, an avant-gardist, even, described as having a prose style based on “continuous flow” and a “seamless narrative voice”. What this means in practice is that his sentences are long and extremely sparsely punctuated – generally nothing more than commas and full stops, perhaps an occasional hyphen, and there are no speech marks – dialogue (whether that of his characters, his narrator or his own authorial voice) separated only by commas, sometimes (but not always) commencing with a capital letter. What one reads seems to be a chorus of voices, a consciousness at work rather than a collection of novelistic characters. I hear echoes of Beckett but perhaps this is more to do with Saramago’s sometimes unflinching pessimism, his willingness to consider human cruelty and awfulness without looking away, even while maintaining a wry, sardonic humour and the blackest of irony. His authorial voice has a chastened wisdom – without illusion or sentimentality or the comfort of easy answers – but coupled with an innocence that is both vulnerable and somehow ruthless.

Note that earlier I said “attempted to read”, because Blindness is the third Saramago I have attempted but the first of his novels that I have been able to finish. But I have been looking for a ‘way in’ to his work for the past decade. Suffice it to say that Saramago is an important and often profound novelist – but in my view not an easy one to read. His uncompromising prose style (as intransigent, one imagines, as his politics) cannot but be reckoned a barrier for some, despite the fact that over the years he has been served magnificently by several translators who made his life’s work also theirs.

The reason that Blindness  finally offered me a way to approach Saramago’s work successfully is two-fold. First, although I don’t know this for certain because I have read too little of his work, I suspect it may be his masterpiece; and second, because it is a gripping, exciting, horrifying story that rises above any difficulties that might be presented by its prose style.

In an unnamed city a man is driving his car. He stops at traffic lights. Suddenly, there is a clamour of car horns: the lights change to green but he is slow to pull away; in fact, he does not pull away, he cannot; an observer outside the car would see a man in utter panic, his arms waving, his mouth open, mouthing three words over and over: “I can’t see. I can’t see.” This is what an observer would see if they themselves had not also suddenly become blind. What follows is the story of this outbreak of “white blindness” in the population of this unnamed city, perhaps even of the entire unnamed country – perhaps even of the world. It is white blindness because unlike ‘normal’ blindness the eyes of those who cannot see are sealed not by darkness but by a milky all-enveloping whiteness, like a descent into a milk-white sea.

We never quite find out how widespread the epidemic is and paradoxically this makes the story more horrifying, more claustrophobic. In a sense we don’t need to know how widespread the illness is: what Saramago wants us to see (and the novel is rich in linguistic puns and paradoxes regarding seeing and not seeing, sight and blindness) is the terrifying microcosm: the government’s appallingly inhumane internment of the blind – how else can a contagious blindness be contained? – the ensuing social breakdown, a descent into moral squalor and human cruelty and greed, and the courage, compromises and anguish of those who resist this descent into the abyss.

The novel follows the lives of a group of around ten people, who come to be ‘led’ by the wife of a blind ophthalmologist. She has not become blind and her sight amongst the millions of blind is both impossible to explain and of mixed fortune: she alone will both experience and see the horrors of their existence.

Saramago has been described as a writer of allegories, of speculative fiction, but this should not be taken as placing him in the company of fantasy or science fiction writers. One critic has said of him that his ideas may be fantastical but they are executed with “severe realism”. And Saramago has said of his own work, “[it] is about the possibility of the impossible. I ask the reader to accept a pact; even if the idea is absurd…[its] development is always rational and logical.” This seems an absolutely accurate description, certainly as far as Blindness is concerned.

I was fascinated to read a piece about Saramago by Ursula Le Guin, renowned for her own speculative fiction, in which she says that when she first attempted to read Blindness she hurriedly put it aside because it was too frightening: “Before I’d let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he’d have to earn my trust,” she wrote.

This may seem over-dramatic language: we don’t often hear that a writer must earn our trust before we submit to his or her world-view. But believe me, in the case of Blindness, it is not hyperbole. It was exactly the feeling I had as I read the opening pages.

And in a sense it is only the final resolution of the novel that illustrates whether or not Saramago deserves the reader’s trust. As I say, I have read too little of his work to be able to say whether he does in every instance deserve that trust, but in the case of Blindness he does. It is a novel of extraordinary and sometimes awful power that you will never forget. It is profound and profoundly humane, both great story-telling and a novel of the utmost seriousness of purpose and intention. I have never read anything else quite like it.

But whether I will now “put myself through a course of Saramago” (as Le Guin says she did), I’m not sure. Literature as formidable and as uncompromising as this often has to wait for the right moment and I’m still not sure whether I have arrived at that moment.

 

Alun Severn

November 2019