In this dystopian novel, the inhabitants of a certain city are one after the other struck by a pandemic of sudden blindness. As the disease is contagious, the sufferers are isolated by locking them up in an old asylum, but that can’t prevent that society completely breaks down.
"Blindness" is a truly frightening account of what happens to so-called civilized values when a mysterious affliction strikes.
Although this is a dystopian novel, it lacks the bleakness associated with the genre, on the one hand thanks to the warmhearted style and black humor of José Saramago, and on the other hand because of the central presence of a loving and close married couple.
[Saramago, 1999]
The novel is an allegory, where neither persons nor places have names. A certain city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness:” people one after another start going blind and only have a white haze before their eyes. It starts when a driver waiting at the traffic lights goes suddenly blind. A man helps him by driving him to the doctor, but then steals his car, only to go blind himself, too. The friendly doctor – an ophthalmologist – tries to diagnose the distinctive “white blindness,” but is himself affected before he can look it up in his medical handbooks. The illness seems to be contagious, spreading thorough the unnamed city – bringing the SARS or Ebola scares to mind (not to speak about Corona) –, so the authorities quarantine the blind in an empty mental asylum, hoping to contain the disease, but they are in fact helpless, for in the end everyone will be affected. The sudden onset and unknown reason for this blindness cause widespread panic, there seems to be no cure, and the measures the government takes are both repressive and inept. In the end social order totally unravels and the result is mayhem: no government, no order, no food, no water, no safety.
Everyone falls ill except one person: miraculously, the wife of the doctor, a woman in her late forties, keeps her eyesight. Out of love for her husband, to care for him, she follows him into quarantine – despite the danger of living among persons carrying a highly contagious disease –, pretending to all outsiders that she is also blind (this is out of prudence, for she fears the blind inmates might want to take advantage of her). Although she expects to loose her vision at any moment, for unknown reasons she remains immune to the disease. That enables her to help her husband (and while reading the novel you will realize what a difference eyesight makes!), including a small group of others mainly consisting of a few of his patients, banding together among the large mass of detainees in a family-like unit. Besides the initial driver, these include a girl with dark glasses, in fact a prostitute who was struck blind while having sex in a hotel room with a client, whose icy demeanor gradually melts into a naturally warm and loving nature; an orphaned boy with a squint, who is cared for by the girl with the dark glasses; and a mysterious old man with a black eye patch, who keeps the group updated with news of the outside world with his radio, and lifts their spirits with his wisdom.
Order in the asylum soon breaks down. Of course, there are no doctors and no nurses, the blind are completely on their own. Several inmates are killed by the soldiers guarding the gate, and their corpses lie rotting in the courtyard; nobody cleans the toilets which are soon overflowing, and some inmates just relieve themselves in the hall. Food is severely rationed, and only handed over in a strict procedure by the soldiers, who are afraid to catch the disease if they come too close. Eventually, the worst in human beings comes out: selfishness, thievishness, cruelty. On top of that, in one of the other wards, a group of sadistic blind criminals has taken charge and they start monopolizing the food rationing. These ruthless thugs are armed and bully the other inmates – even going so far as to demand sex from the women before they will hand over any food to the other wards.
[Poster of film based on the book (2008)]
The doctor’s wife will also solve this problem – I will not divulge the whole story here – and in the end the small family-like band escapes from the asylum which is destroyed by a fire – the soldiers have disappeared as they all have fallen ill as well, but so has all trace of civilized society. Outside the asylum it is now just as bad as it was inside: throngs of helpless blind people wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge desperately for food.
Here starts the second part of the story: the trek through the dysfunctional city to the apartment of the doctor and his wife, where the small family-like group will create an island of safety in the mayhem around them, like a “new family.” Of course this is only possible thanks to the eyesight of the doctor’s wife, and she is also instrumental when they go out to find food. They are busy establishing a new order to their lives, succeeding marvelously, when the blindness suddenly lifts from the city just as inexplicably as it struck. Everyone can see again, the nightmare is over...
A beautiful, warmhearted novel that shows how fragile our social conditions are.
José Saramago (1922-2010) was born in poor economic conditions and was self-educated. He published his first novel when he was 25, but then stopped writing and only became a full-time writer at age 55 – until his death at the advanced age of 87 he would write more than 15 novels plus nonfiction work, such as personal memories and a travelogue, on such a high level that already in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Saramago’s work harbors strong stylistic idiosyncrasies: he skips quotation marks, dialogue is only indicated by a comma followed by a capital letter. His rambling sentences run on and on and he uses paragraphing only sparingly. Saramago also frequently digresses from the story, giving ample authorial philosophical comments on the significance of situations encountered in the story. Due to a dispute with the Portuguese government over his criticism of religion, he lived since 1991 on the island of Lanzarote in the Spanish Canaries.
English translation: 1997, Giovanni Pontiero, Vintage.
Note: A later novel by Saramago, Seeing, also features the characters of the doctor and his wife.
In 2008, the book was filmed (in English) by Fernando Meirelles, starring Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife and Mark Ruffalo as the doctor.
A somewhat similar story has been told in the genre novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham - here, too, we find societal collapse following widespread blindness. An ironic (and intercultural) take on the subject is formed by the short story "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells.