Blindness by Jose Saramago
I guess we’re living some version of his story right now, in pandemic 2020. But in his telling, the feared and afflicted blind citizens are housed in an abandoned mental hospital. More and more arrive each day. Soldiers guard them with orders to shoot anyone who attempts to escape. Your basic concentration camp scene, infectious-disease variation. No doctors or nurses bravely rush in, despite the danger, to seek to aid or comfort the afflicted.
Saramago to my thinking stacks the deck in the most pessimistic way possible. There’s no sense that those isolated people maintain any relationships with those not yet infected. No loved ones bring packages, supplies, fresh clothes. No volunteers (except the doctor’s wife) provide succor. They plead successfully when they need a shovel to bury a blind inmate, but couldn’t they have petitioned for rope, to help them navigate the building? Soap? Fresh clothes? Working plumbing? They were initially rebuffed when they asked for antibiotics, but couldn’t they have asked louder? Prisoners in our world do that all the time. The story asks us to believe that the blind inmates were uniformly passive, cut off from those that might care about them.
The scene Saramago depicts feels much more like a concentration camp than a quarantine facility of the country’s citizens. He seemingly wishes to evoke a Lord-of-the-Flies stripping of civilization as quickly as he could. This becomes, to my mind, a narrative failure to ignore the other possibilities of the blind inmates organizing, or remaining connected to the outside world, or even the soldiers demonstrating any fellow-feeling with the afflicted. Saramago portrays the blind people with no sense of agency, victimized first by the state in the form of the soldiers, then by the gang of blind men inside the building. There’s some kindness shown to the boy, and some sweetness between the man with an eye patch and the young woman with the dark glasses, but it is hardly central to the story. Mostly, we see confined, greatly impaired people set against each other.
I particularly objected to the portrayal of the doctor’s wife, the central character. She can still see. She travels to the asylum with her stricken husband to care for him. Once it becomes clear how cut off these poor people are from everyone, how viciously they are incarcerated by soldiers, she in no way seems to feel any responsibility to help the stricken. Saramago has her dismiss any thoughts that she might improve sanitation, or distribute the food, with a sentence or two. Her husband doesn’t seem to mind that she conceals her enormous power to alleviate the suffering of others, seconding her sense that she would be bothered incessantly if she were to help organize and administer the daily life of the terrible place. Poor woman.
The reader might imagine a human being reacting in this manner. But the circumstances the writer describes create a gap between what the main character might accomplish if she tried, and her complete refusal to do any of it. The writer ought to explore this discrepancy, not simply assume that the reader will understand and accept her behavior.
This is particularly true of the rape scenes. It seems not to have occurred to the doctor’s wife to grab the gun when it was first displayed. She takes the scissors and stabs the bad guy only after her group’s and own violation. But we get no notion of what took her so long to react, or remorse that she waited when she had much opportunity. Again, we might imagine a human being paralyzed by fear taking that long to react, but her husband didn’t urge her to act to overcome the oppression, despite her being the only sighted person? The writer I believe, wants us to feel some connection to the doctor and his wife, rather than contempt for the ignoring of their privilege. Her cowardice doesn’t evoke sympathy.
I ended up feeling tricked by the story, manipulated to feel some phony sense of despair. Everyone goes blind, and the sense of connection, one to the other, or of human beings organizing to appeal to the humanity of others, or any courage or selfless action doesn’t even get considered. Many criticize storytellers if they distort human behavior to concoct a happy ending. We also ought to object if the storyteller manipulates the story to evoke despair.
I thought Saramago was writing in response to Camus’ The Plague. Rather than people organizing and acting with courage and selflessness, Saramago shows us a quick descent into a hellish world. He takes this riff as far as he can, and then tacks on an ending where everyone regains their sight, right at the moment when the little group realizes they and everyone else will soon run out of food and thus starve. By the end, the doctor’s wife did assume the role of protector for a small band, but maintains an indifference to all the others who are suffering and dying.
As a refutation to Camus, it doesn’t work. Rather than showing the reader how this-is-the-real-truth of humanity, Saramago eliminates anything that might contradict his portrayal. His story comforts those who insist there’s no ties that bind us, no virtue or possible compassionate or effective response to those who suffer. We might as well just party on. A reader might take comfort that there’s nothing that can be done if affliction strikes a populace.
Camus’ portrayal is far more expansive. The Plague encompasses both the smallness and the possibilities of courage and devotion. At the end, Camus offers as a statement of belief that, despite everything he’s told us, there is more in humanity to admire than to despise. It’s a challenge, certainly, since we’ve seen a lot of terrible things in Oran. Saramago shows us his people under duress so that we might acknowledge they all suck. Despair becomes a way to avoid responsibility, to deny the stirrings of the heart or of conscience, to strive to act or organize or work for a better world.
Saramago’s story wipes away the bravery and sacrifice of the healers who have suffered and died in our own pandemic. They don’t exist in his story. He tells us a person who possesses a way to eliminate some of the suffering, doesn’t tell anyone. Honoring such a storyteller reflects badly upon all of us.