6: Blindness

José Saramago, Blindness

Saramago is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The book is about a blindness-plague that spreads through a city. The victim of the plague are quarantined and as the city becomes more and more affected, the quarantined people experience increasingly harsher conditions. A group of the blind finally venture out into the city, which has stopped functioning due to its residents being struck by blindness.

A center of focus in all the chaos is the doctor’s wife, who retains her ability to see and her grace throughout the book. She declared that she was blind so that the ambulance taking her husband into quarantine in an unused insane asylum would take her as well. Then, she uses her eyesight to aid the other people in quarantine and to help them as much as possible, without anyone figuring out that she isn’t blind. As conditions worsen and a rebel group begins to hoard the food delivered by soldiers who are desperately afraid of catching the blindness from their charges, the doctor’s wife keeps her eyesight and her grace.

This book is an example of dystopian fiction – the world struck by blindness is nightmarish and the things that people do in their desperation and the lack of governing authority are also nightmarish. As people lose their ability to see, their aims in life converge, quickly, to simply surviving. Many no longer care about starving strangers or cleanliness or order – they are in survival mode.

There are many things that are remarkable about the book, which have become fodder for thought, and the most special thing is that the city could be any city. There are no names anywhere. The characters are “the doctor”, “the doctor’s wife”, “the accountant”, “the girl with the dark glasses”, “the boy with the squint”, etc. There are also no descriptions of any traits that might identify the city. No one is described as blond or dark-skinned. It could be Madrid or New York or Bombay or Beijing.

I used to think about this a lot. Because I am Asian, all throughout high school, teachers forced upon me books by Asian authors, whom they thought I must relate to more than Dumas or Tolstoy (which I loved at the time and even now). It is something that stings today, even after all these years. And those books were not well-written nor were they very deep. Whenever I tried to think more about some facet or another of the story, it just fell apart at the seams. The books were so preoccupied with the culture differences that they had no attention left for the actual story. I didn’t relate to those characters – why could a story not be about just a person, divorced from race and culture? What if a writer just wants to tell a story about a society that he/she has assimilated into? This is like the criticism aimed at Irène Némirovsky because she was of Jewish descent and there is not one Jewish character in Suite Française, which she wrote during the German occupation of France in WWII.

Saramago’s story is very universal. Despite the lack of names of cultural identifiers, his city is very real.