Blindness.

Sometimes I get hung up on a specific review, and end up going a few days between posts here because that one book or film is clogging the mental road and nothing else can come out until I figure out what I want to say. The most recent title to do this is Nobel Prize for Literature winner Jose Saramago’s book Blindness, a strange, hypnotic, disturbing-on-many-levels parable about an epidemic of “white blindness” that is unexplained and contagious, leading to the total breakdown of civilization in a matter of weeks.

Characters in Blindness don’t even get names, and throughout the book Saramago refers to them as the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses, the old man, and so on. The first man to go blind has it hit him while he’s driving in traffic, and he turns out to be Patient Zero, as the sight loss is highly contagious. The authorities move quickly to quarantine patients, and in their initial sweep they take in the wife of one of the first patients when she claims she’s gone blind as well – but she hasn’t, and lies just to be able to stay with her husband. The patients are thrown in a disused mental asylum (there’s some symbolism right there) and are told they’ll be shot if they try to leave. They’re given food, irregularly, and little else. The people in the asylum try to organize themselves, not realizing one of them can see, but the facilities are quickly overrun, and later waves of patients arrive, including a group that takes over the food supply, extorting first valuables and later women before they’ll release any food to the remainder of the prisoners. The one sighted woman eventually leads a rebellion, after which a few surviving patients leave the asylum to find the city in ruins, haunted by itinerant groups of blind people trying to find food and shelter any way they can. Through unfathomable hardships and privations, their little group – which includes a young boy who arrived at the hospital alone in the first wave, and a “dog of tears” who has followed them since their escape – becomes more than a means of survival, but a familial unit of people who continually sacrifice to help others, and who can thus persevere until the crisis ends.

Saramago was born in Portugal but lived the last portion of his life in exile in the Canary Islands, as his philosophies – he was a militant atheist, communist, anti-fascist, and humanist – ran afoul of the fascist Estado Novo regime in Portugal and later the country’s still-powerful Catholic Church, which objected strongly to his 1991 novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Blindness was published in 1995, after he’d left Portugal, and became his best-known work, one of the novels cited in his Nobel commendation, emblematic of his fabulist style and with his trademark meandering prose that eschews standard sentence structure for something that mimics the nonlinear, stop-and-start path of human thought.

Saramago despised religion and thought that human love and compassion were the solutions to many ills of modern society; Blindness, at its most literal level, takes this to an ungodly extreme. He puts his characters into a post-apocalyptic situation where they’re not dying, but could die from starvation, poor sanitation, or the cruelty of others. Some of the secondary characters are merely truculent or selfish; others are more sanguinary or malevolent. They’re all recognizably human, however, even in their stripped-down state. The one woman who can see – “the doctor’s wife,” in Saramago’s prose – turns out to be, or simply remains, the most compassionate of everyone, even though her sight means she can see the worst that’s happening around her. With her as an anchor, though, her band of vagrants coalesces around each other beyond just the need for survival, with real affection growing among them, and their empathy returning even as they encounter other blind people struggling to stay alive outside the asylum.

The metaphor of blindness lends itself to too many interpretations for me to ever focus on a single one while reading it. The idea of us not ‘seeing’ what’s happening to or around us is the most obvious one that came to me. After finishing, I also latched on to the idea of the blindness contagion as the popular reaction to autocracy, especially fascism, where people choose not to see the suffering of others as long as they are unaffected themselves – the ‘first they came for the Jews, and I said nothing’ idea, written from the perspective of the first group to be rounded up, who then serve as witnesses and victims to atrocities that come afterwards. This interpretation, which I think is consistent with Saramago’s personal beliefs, recasts the story as a parable of the power of caring for others, and how that is what defines us as civilized beings, more than our ephemeral institutions or customs could.

The one truly unbearable part of Blindness isn’t the violence or the deprivations, but Saramago’s excessive and almost puerile attention to bodily excretions. There is so much discussion of shit in this book that just isn’t necessary – yes, I get it, the toilets are going to back up, especially once the municipal water system goes offline due to the plague – but Saramago can’t stop discussing it, and urine, and semen, and menstrual blood, to the point of … what, exactly? Reminding us that we are still biological creatures, and thus subject to the same demands and needs of the flesh that other mammals have? If he were trying to point out how our reliance on the people and technology behind our sanitation systems are the only thing keeping us First Worlders from dying of cholera, then I’d understand his point. Instead, we just get imagery that detracts from any larger points Saramago was trying to make.

Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen the 2008 film version, and don’t plan to, given how poor the reviews were and how graphic the content of the novel could be. At least the images in my own head aren’t as indelible as those I see on a screen.

Next up: Somehow I’m in the midst of three books – Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Nudge by Richard Thaler (on the Kindle), and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (audiobook). They are, in order, the reigning National Book Award for Fiction winner, the most popular book by the reigning Nobel Prize for Economics winner, and a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction winner.