Blindness (novel)
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| Blindness | |
|---|---|
| Author | José Saramago |
| Original title | Ensaio sobre a cegueira |
| Translator | Giovanni Pontiero |
| Country | Portugal |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | The Harvill Press |
| Publication date | 1995 |
| Published in English |
October 1997 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 288 pp |
| ISBN | 1-86046-297-9 |
| OCLC Number | 38225068 |
| Dewey Decimal | 869.3/42 21 |
| LC Classification | PQ9281.A66 E6813 1997 |
Blindness (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. It was published in Portuguese in 1995 and in English in 1997. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctor’s patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor’s wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, act to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees do battle and burn down the asylum, only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor and his wife and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who still sees (though she must hide this fact at first). The breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food; violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new “family” eventually make a permanent home and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.
[edit] Character Analysis
The Doctor's Wife A fifty-something woman living with her husband, the ophthalmologist. When the plague of blindness first devastates the city and the infected are placed into isolation, the doctor's wife feigns the sickness to care for her husband. She constantly expects to lose her vision at any moment, yet somehow she is the only person immune to the contagion of blindness. This ultimately forces her into becoming responsible for the blind inmates, yet she admits that the pressures of caring for a band of helpless people exhausts her, and she even begins to wish she too were blind. She murders two sadistic inmates in the asylum where the blind are contained and helps the others escape the quarantine. She and her husband reappear in the novel's sequel, Seeing, where she is credited as the "Seeing Woman", and is viewed with mistrust and disdain by the other city dwellers, as no one knows how or why she retained her sight when the rest of the country was struck blind.
The Doctor A friendly ophthalmologist who becomes blind after attempting to treat the first handful of people who are infected by the "White Blindness". He too quickly goes blind and is placed into quarantine with his wife, who can still see but together they hide this fact for fear that she may be forced into becoming a slave for the blind inmates. He resents the dependence he has on his wife after he loses his sight. He is elected leader of his ward and does his best to keep order and peace through diplomatic strageties, but quickly finds his compassion does him little or no good amongst the bands of ruthless detainees in the asylum.
Girl with Dark Glasses A beautiful teenage prostitute with a cold and unfeeling demeanor. She is struck blind after entertaining one of her clients in a hotel and is committed to the derelict asylum. Though by nature she is hard-hearted and icy, she develops love and warmth after caring for an orphaned boy with a squint. By the end of the novel she has reformed her uncaring ways and compliments the doctor's wife as being "beautiful", despite having never seen her, claiming that in her (the girl's) dreams, the doctor's wife is always beautiful.
King of Ward 3 A brutal and cruel tyrant who holds the rest of the blind in the asylum at his mercy by threatening them with a gun. He deprives them of food and supplies in exchange for their valuables, but when those assets are exhausted, he demands the women. After one woman is viciously murdered, the doctor's wife snaps and murders him. His death starts a war, resulting in the asylum being burned to the ground, with the King's thugs perishing in the blaze.
Man with Black Eye Patch A kindly and mysterious old man who reacts calmly to the blindness that is infesting the city, and keeps the inmates of the asylum updated with news of the outside world with his radio. He is very spiritual, and after the blindness lifts from the country, he states that he hopes they have learned a very valuable lesson about human nature.
[edit] Style
Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader. The lack of proper character names in Blindness is typical of many of Saramago's novels (e.g. All the Names or The Cave). The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem sharply ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses").
The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. Some signs hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction which does not exist in English).
[edit] Sequel and film adaptation
Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in 2004, titled Seeing (Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. The new novel takes place in the same unnamed country and features several of the same characters.
An English-language film adaptation of Blindness was directed by Fernando Meirelles. Filming began in July 2007 and stars Mark Ruffalo as the doctor and Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife. The film opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
[edit] Criticism
Following the increased notoriety of the novel upon the release of the 2008 film adaptation, the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) criticized Saramago's work. In a banquet speech at the organization’s annual convention on July 4, 2008, in Dallas, Texas, NFB President Dr. Marc Maurer criticized the novel and its film adaptation as negatively portraying the blind.[2]
A novel entitled "The Sight Sickness" by Christine Faltz Grassman, was published by Iuniverse in March, 2009. Written by a blind woman, it is a polemic "anti-sequel" to Saramago's book (ISBN 9780595531561), and contains Grassman's response to the age-old literal and figurative use of blindness in a negative manner in literature and other media.
In the novel, after the White Sickness has lifted from the city and society is rebuilt, the health officials who ruthlessly caged the infected blind people in the decrepit asylum are put to trial for their inhumane acts, yet are acquitted. Unsatisfied with this injustice, a group of formerly infected citizens who call themselves "the Cellmates" abduct seven people and subject them to the same horror they (the Cellmates) endured in the asylum when the White Sickness devastated the country as revenge for being locked up rather than taught how to cope with their newfound handicap.
[edit] See also
- The Day of the Triffids, a 1951 novel also featuring an epidemic of mass blindness
[edit] Notes
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: José Saramago |
- ^ Chang, Justin (2008-05-14). "Blindness Movie Review". Variety. http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=review&reviewid=VE1117937131&cs=1. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
- ^ Maurer, Marc (2008-07-04). "The Urgency of Optimism". Braille Monitor. http://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm08/bm0808/bm080807.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
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