‘What is really killing us now is blindness.’
BLINDNESS by Jose Saramago is an extraordinary and disconcerting novel. The conceit that people go mysteriously blind may be lifted from the 1951 John Wyndham sci-fi classic, The Day of the Triffids, but forty years later, in 1995, the Portuguese Nobel Prize Laureate, Jose Saramago used a mysterious blindness, and the collapse of order that flowed from it, as a socio-political allegory for the rise of solidarity and hope amidst the collapse of civilisation.
And for the telling of a right good yarn.
BLINDNESS takes place in a mesh of power, appetites and fears. Many people hope. Some plan. Others panic. No one prays. An earnest acceptance comes through, more stoic than religious.
There are no names for characters and places. The era is contemporary. Computers and sophisticated organisations - civil, military, commercial and governmental - are involved. All fail, when the blindness, a loss of sight to ‘a sea of whiteness’, strikes randomly and then, as a contagion, affects all the city and country.
Being set in an Anywhere that could be Everywhere, BLINDNESS could be situated in the small and labyrinthine streets that rise and fall from the main square around the cathedral of St Cecilein Albi. Saramago was a Portuguese writer, who lived in the Azores for many years, working in light similar to that found in Albi, a small city in south-west France, during the Feast of St. John in late June.
The story line follows a small group held together by The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife. She is the most important character in the story and unique in the world of the book. She can see.
After the initial afflictions, the blind are quarantined in an old asylum. The novel recounts the collapse of order among the inmates in terrifying and gruesome conditions. The trading of women for food is the nadir that prompts stirring discussions of revolt against the men who have corralled the food. Violent action leads to the overthrow of the rapists and the destruction of the asylum by fire. The inmates break out and return to the city now devastated by the chaos wrought by blindness. They join the rest of the population in the search for food, shelter, home and lost loved ones in the midst of an apocalypse.
The First Blind Man and The Wife of the First Blind Man, members of the small group the reader follows,find their old flat up a narrow street, which could be in Albi, yes. Here Saramago unleashes one of the book’s great twists, whenthe fabulous meets the mundane to create something extraordinary – literature – in the sort of cameo-appearance Hitchcock made in his films.
In the final sections of the book, as people roam the streets searching for food and shelter, the small group led by The Doctor’s Wife, is joined by one of the dogs who roam the streets. It is a moment of mutual domestication and a rare instance of the appearance of ‘crusties’ in international literature.
The sequence where three women – Saramago relates them to the Three Graces – wash themselves and all the groups dirty clothes and footwear in a raging downpour of rain, is a relief and a benediction, full of pagan sensibility, ironic metaphysics and jocular folk phrases that deepen the joy of the women’s experience.
Later, The Old Man with the Eye-patch bathes alone. He experiences someone cleaning his back. His reason tells him it must be The Doctor’s Wife, but Saramago says that The Old Man with the Eye-patch does not believe in reason and thus joins the fabulous with the mundane once more, in lives no longer ordinary.
There are many such twists and turns of ardent beauty as the book courses to its end. It gallops through a scene in a church – the cathedral in Albi? - where acts of exultant blaspheming transform the tragedy of the world into a human ecstasy of the spirit, as Saramago writes ‘ultimately God does not deserve to see’.
All across Europe mid-summer fires have been lit for centuries. The fires at the feast of St. John are an example. The bonfires on 12thJuly in Northern Ireland are another example, slightly later than mid-summer due to the vagaries of papal calendars and the colonial depredations of Dutch and English kings.
In Albi, the fire isLe Feu deSt Jean, litin front of the great brick cathedral of St Cecile. She is the patron saint of music in the Christian tradition and there are musicians and dancers in the square, organised by devotees of the language and culture of Occitan. Albi is very much in modern France, but on this night an ancient pagan ritual of earth, fire, dark and water, with people eating and drinking in family and friendship groups, small groups as in BLINDNESS, is enacted to celebrate and to stimulate the sun.
Food stalls are arranged around the Cathedral square. We enjoy savoury pancakes and aligot, with local sausage. We drink wine and beer. A band plays and sings in Occitan, surprisingly vital for a dead language. The brick edifice of the Cathedral, both citadel and church, acclaimed by UNESCO as a beacon of world heritage, looms over us all, reddening further, then darkening as daylight leaves the scene to stars and an ill-formed milky-white moon.
The Cathedral towers above the square as power-over, but the Le Feu de Saint Jean event spreads out as power-with among the descendants of the men and women who fired the terra cotta bricks from Tarn river clay and gave us the built heritage we admire and preserve.
When darkness falls, a parade of children, each carrying a lighted brand, accompanied by parents and guardians, enters the square and make its way directly to the pile of pine branches and timber arranged in the classic teepee form. No more than three or four metres high, this is not the dangerously gigantic pyre seen in parts of Northern Ireland, built rigidly and squarely of stacked wooden pallets that create a furnace, often filled with tyres and old mattresses and topped with political images.
In Albi, the brazier is modest and sylvan, set in its own square sand-box and railed off by tape. A single fire-appliance is parked discretely under the entrance steps to the cathedral.
Did The Boy With The Squint from BLINDNESS step forward with the others to create the light?
Light is central to BLINDNESS; the absence of it in darkness and the vehemence of it in the contagion that has everyone unsighted in a sea of milky whiteness. Except The Doctor’s Wife, who sees through all. She is the one we follow in the book (and in the film). Why is she not blind? Why her, above everyone else? Perhaps it is as The Doctor says, that we were never blind, we just did not see. Is she some latter-day chosen one, like Mary and Cecile, virgins mysteriously elevated to motherhood and sainthood? The Doctor’s Wife is more of a secular angel, more nurse than nun, more earth-rooted than heaven-bent.
There is a portrait of a doctor by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in the museum that houses his work in Albi. He has the sedate countenance a reader might assign to The Doctor in BLINDNESS. The museum is housed in the brick palace built and rebuilt by Bishops to accompany the Cathedral. Both buildings are manifestations of religious and civil power melded together. Sited on the banks of the river Tarn, they were built as bastions against the heresies of the Cathars arriving from Carcasonne, Castres and Bezier. They present an illusion of order.
As the light from the fire of Le Feu de St Jean dies down, the Cathedral and the palace retreat into darkness. The people revel in the heat from the glowing embers and from each other. Sonorous pipes, thrilling flutes and resonant drums play melodies and rhythms that are ancient and timeless.
Is The Doctor’s Wife among the crowd, seeing more than all of us?
BLINDNESS is breath-taking. Jose Saramago is a stylist in the sturdy sense that a master bricklayer is. There is build, lift and height in the writing. There is great flow and pace as sentences race one into another to create ramparts, arches and walls of story. Dialogues run in and out of themselves as speakers debate, harangue, humour, absolve, love and frighten each other in extended sentences with no speech marks, only commas, to guide the reader, who is swept along as an angel might abseil down the curvedwall of Albi Cathedral to join the revellers in the square.
There are angels inside the Cathedral, a plaster horde of them, ranged above the seats in the choir, where prelates and priests sat. The plaster angels are colourfully painted, as befits their status. Now they gaze upon tourists, who sit in the seats that once held clerics, audio aids offering guidance to the history, architecture and clericalism of the Cathedral, glued to their ears.
The plaster angels are blind.
Film version:
