We humans have a great propensity for getting habituated and taking things for granted. Sometimes the most cardinal things of our life. Probably this is what makes José Saramago's Blindness unique and succeed in jolting our senses.
An unnamed country is struck by an inexplicable epidemic of blindness, a blindness that is contagious. People stop seeing all of a sudden, but contrary to the usual darkness that envelops the blind their worlds turn all white. The government goes on high alert and quarantines the first batch hoping to keep the rest of the populace safe till a cure is found. But the medical world succeeds in finding no answers and steadily people keep turning blind across the country. Panic rises, chaos reigns, until a time when the whole nation goes blind and when it becomes a struggle for individual existence, basically a struggle to find food and live on from day to day.
Amid but aside from all these is a horrifying chain of events unfolding inside one of the quarantine camps. An abandoned mental hospital where the first batch of blind men and women had been sent. In that first batch is an opthalmologist and his wife. As inexplicable as the blindness is the opthalmologist's wife's retaining her vision. She is the only person known in the novel to thus remain unaffected. Initially she fakes blindness to be with her husband but later on as things escalate inside the hospital it is this lone woman – this eye-witness to the grotesque reality – who holds out some hopes of survival for a small group of people, the group which takes the core story forward.
The novel has some striking authorial touches. The country is unnamed and so are the characters. The first might only just facilitate placing the story in an universal context but the second really has a role to play. We have the doctor, the doctor's wife, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the old man with the eye patch and so on... but no names. Not once. In a world peopled by blind men and women, this is really significant. Names give us individuality. Names mark us out. But in the world of the blind, what means individuality and of what use such markings! The other marked stylistic peculiarity is the near absence of punctuation marks other than the comma and the period and the complete absence of quotation marks. The continued flow of dialogue without quotations sometimes blurs the difference between two speakers. A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters. With the demarcations between speakers removed, the reader has to grope his way forward just like the blind. This I consider a bit of an extreme reading. To me it seems more like an experimental ploy on the author's part. It definitely symbolises some of the confusion, but it does not go farther than that. Commas come at all the right pauses and once one gets into the flow of the story there are only a handful of places where one is brought to a confused halt.
"When the doctor and the old man with the black eyepatch entered the ward with the food, they did not see, could not see, seven naked women and the corpse of the woman who suffered from insomnia stretched out on her bed, cleaner than she had ever been in all her life, while another woman was washing her companions, one by one, and then herself."
Saramago's brilliance is in his leaps of imagination and his grasp of humanity. How often do we stop to think of what makes us humane, what bases our civilized state and how fragile is that basis? Saramago draws us deep down into an abyss where human dignity is crushed relentlessly. Robbed of the primary 'sense', life soon turns into an animalistic existence... living to eat and eating to live. But even in this world, polarities occur. Inside the hospital, we have the crooks who are still in the grips of greed and power-hunger and extort the other inmates and cruelly deprive them of food. In the end, when there is nothing of material worth left to be extorted, the women become victims of their base savagery. At the other end, we have the central characters who show true grit and sensitivity even when their world has been turned upside down. Thus even as Saramago keeps piling on the horror and accentuating the sense of nausea, he does not let the tragic circumstances spin out of control. The turn of events remain logical (even when stretched to their extremities), the horror remains believable, and instead of being paralysed by the grotesque spectacle, we are left shaken and stirred.
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