Among the Blind, Chaos is King

Beads of sweat break out on your forehead and slowly travel down your face, into your nose, stinging your eyes. Your hands tremble and fumble with the pages. Yet still you remain transfixed. You read without a sense of yourself--aware only of the feel of paper and the putrid smell of filth and excrement clinging to the words. Occasionally the pages, white and luminous, drag you so deep inside their parameters that for brief moments, you literally imagine you are one of the victims, one of the inhuman, one of the blind. A cold fear clings to each word. You look up startled from the book and thank God that world isn't real. You tell yourself again and again "I can see. I can see. I can see."

1998 Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's most recent novel, Blindness, tells the horrifying story of an epidemic of blindness that spreads across the world, destroying families, social institutions and, eventually, every shred of recognizable civilization. The blindness begins when one man is suddenly and inexplicably struck with a strange, dazzling white blindness. Helplessly seeking to find an explanation and cure, the man infects everyone he meets. The blindness does not discern between good and evil--it infects a car thief as easily as a doctor, a prostitute as easily as a child.

The government quickly takes action against the infection, forcing those already blind and those thought exposed to the virus to quarantine themselves within a mental hospital. Within the wards the inmates struggle to retain their humanity in an atmosphere in which hygiene is not an option, food is scarce and raw, and instinct threatens to rule their passions and actions. A militant group of inmates soon takes command of the wards, raping the women and killing anyone who disobeys them. Excrement, garbage, blood and corpses slowly fill the hospital as, with horror, the inmates feel themselves sinking further and further away from humanity, helplessly approaching the degradation and raw violence of rabid animals. "Perhaps humanity will cease to live without eyes," an inmate claims, "but then it will cease to be humanity, the result is obvious, which of us think of ourselves as being as human as we believed ourselves to be before."

After the entire world goes blind, the inmates escape from the hospital. They travel homeless throughout a desolate, rotting city clothed only in excrement-covered threads, their hearts heavy with the knowledge that humanity has no hope, no future. The government falls apart shortly after the outbreak, and hopes of future organization are not positive. "If there is [a government], it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness."

Saramago expertly crafts this intricate and horrifying allegory with a style as striking as it is sparse. The language is never intricate, extremely metaphorical or descriptive; rather, Saramago relies on the sharp edge of spare, pointed prose to pierce the fragile shells of human decency and social stability. Images of rape and death are told with the same distanced tone as scenes of strength and love, melding tone and image into a grand, constant conglomerate of uncomfortable fear and hopelessness.

The characters are never given names, an obvious choice on Saramago's part to emphasize the slightly ridiculous nature of the idea that humans are distinct. Individuality crumbles when self-survival becomes the primary objective and everyone eventually realizes that, at their core, they are profoundly, horribly, the same. "Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are," one inmate claims with horror. Saramago's use of dialogue mirrors this loss of individuality. The words of the blind meld together without paragraphs, quotation marks or periods. Separated only by commas, the statements of the blind become a confused mass of speech. Language loses its personal nature and the horror of the situation melds into one voice, one breath, one cry of profound despair.

Behind the absorbing plot and images, Saramago crafts a profoundly cynical allegory for the condition of humanityand the fragility of the comforts we take forgranted. At the root of the story is not anexplanation for humanity's existence or diagrammeddirections on how to live virtuously: Saramago isnot constructing a sermon on the merits ofobservant, moral living and rational governments.Rather, at the heart of the novel lies a deeplydisturbing hunch that perhaps, in the end, life isblind. We depend on life having a purpose, adirection. The truly disturbing question Saramagoposes is, what if life really means nothing? Thisquestion is not a new one, but it never ceases toprofoundly affect us.

The real horror in Blindness is therealization that humanity is not in control ofitself--that at the root of all hope, ambition anddreams lies an apathetic demon shrouded in ablinding white nothingness. This stale emptinessis unnoticed by the seeing. Eyes allow one tocover oneself in images, to construct oneselfcomfortably out of the things one sees--to blindoneself, in essence, to the true nature ofhumanity. When sight is gone, and the eye isforever turned inward, the horrifying epiphanythat life is white, pure nothing becomes, inBlindness, the deepest horror imaginable

The real horror in Blindness is therealization that humanity is not in control ofitself--that at the root of all hope, ambition anddreams lies an apathetic demon shrouded in ablinding white nothingness. This stale emptinessis unnoticed by the seeing. Eyes allow one tocover oneself in images, to construct oneselfcomfortably out of the things one sees--to blindoneself, in essence, to the true nature ofhumanity. When sight is gone, and the eye isforever turned inward, the horrifying epiphanythat life is white, pure nothing becomes, inBlindness, the deepest horror imaginable