Blindness by Jose Saramago -- review, part 1

I'm reading a book called "Blindness" by Jose Saramago. It has a kind of apocalyptic sci fi premise, a city in which people start going completely blind suddenly, a blindness where they see all white all the time. And the blindness is apparently highly contagious -- the first known victim appears to infect everyone he comes near, and it spreads through the whole city. But most of the book takes place in an asylum where a few hundred of the first sufferers are locked away, for the protection of the public. Things are very difficult for those inside, they are not used to being blind, so the basic necessities of life like eating and going to the bathroom become hugely complicated and troublesome. There is one sighted person who accompanies her husband to the asylum by pretending to be blind, but it isn't until near the end that she tells others.

Inside the asylum, things get very ugly very fast. First there is one gentleman who acts thuggishly, who gets hurt and then ends up getting killed by the guards on the outside, who are petrified that one of the infected will escape and cause them to go blind. There follows one of several incredibly sad scenes where the blind have to struggle to bury their dead with minimal tools and no outside assistance. Later, some real criminal types come in and begin to steal all the food, and all the valuables, and later force all the women to submit to depravations in order for anyone to eat. It's pretty graphic, and totally sickening. I haven't finished the book, but I thought I would write a little about it to get me thinking, and to keep it fresh.

Now this isn't some kind of cheap sci fi book -- it's written by Jose Saramago, who won the nobel prize for literature in 1998. This is serious literature, a great, great book. It's written in a highly stylized manner, no quotation marks, no punctuation except commas and periods. It can be rather confusing, because whole multi-way conversations are sometimes expressed in single run-on sentences. But this would be familiar to anyone who's read any latin american literature or i guess faulkner or others. Another interesting literary device is that no names are give. Each character is referred to descriptively, e.g. the girl with the dark glasses, the doctor's wife, the first man to go blind, the first man's wife, etc. This somehow goes along with the whole disorder of the story, the inability of everyone to know anything because they can't see anything. The inmates, when they first arrive, know this intuitively, and don't introduce themselves.

Reading this book has been hard going at times. It goes by pretty fast, there's beautiful writing, even if it's sometimes a little unclear who is speaking. But the scenes it depicts are so bleak, especially when things get violent in the asylum. You just can't believe it, it's so awful that these men (men, of course!) who had been so strucken themselves, would not have more empathy for everyone else who had been equally strucken. No matter what, they would take advantage of the situation to dominate and overpower as much as possible. Stealing food from the starving and forcing women to submit to gang rape to secure food. Very hard to stomach.

But even the petty deprivations are hard to take. The fact that basic sanitation had not been provided was kind of stomach-churning. Basically people had to resort to shitting just about everywhere. And because they were blind, and not used to being blind, it was hard for them to know where they were shitting. Showers were unavailable, and there was only fetid water, so washing clothes wasn't a possibility. And so these middle class people rapidly became dirty and smelly and bug-ridden, forced to step in shit trying to find someplace to shit. Meanwhile, the sighted, rather than helping, fire at the blind if they step too far in the direction of the exit.

I don't know if you'd call this book an allegory, a parable, or what. (I should really look those terms up!) To me, more than anything, it illustrates our vulnerability. The book makes painfully clear how devastating the loss of a simple (okay, complex) physical capability can be, how it can reduce us so much, putting so much of our previous lives out of reach. Even the most basic aspects of life, eating, drinking, excreting, these become incredibly challenging.

Another theme of the book is our dependency once weakened. The blind in the asylum could do nothing to feed themselves, they had to wait for outsiders to deliver food, which they did according to their own schedules. This sense of dependency in those who had previously been doctors and policemen and generally functional adults was just devastating to read.

And of course there is the cruelty, the will to power and the urge to dominate and take advantage of those weaker than us. There was something so raw and basic about how this was portrayed which made it very vivid. After all, the dominating thugs were blind themselves. They just armed themselves with metal rods removed from the beds, and possessed one gun, and weren't hesitant to use them. And so you have the nearly comic spectacle of a bunch of blind men threatening a much larger group of blind people by waving and jabbing metal rods blindly in the air, and shooting blindly once in a while. Now that I think of it, there may be a little Kafka-esque humor in this story, though it's certainly overshadowed by the surface brutality and suffering, all of which is rendered very elegantly and with a good deal of compassion in the prose.

I still have some 50 pages or so to read before I'm finished, but I had some time just now and thought I'd write these thoughts down while I could. More to come.