SARAMAGO's Blindness: Discussion Questions

Apocalyptic stories are always in demand. We are energetic fantasts of our own doom, endlessly fascinated by seeing it writ large (although we in the west require endings with salvation & hope). Note the enduring popularity of such works in literature & pulp alike, from McCarthy’s The Road to Will Smith’s revision of I Am Legend.

In fact, Atwood will help us end civilization as we know it again in May.

The son of illiterate pig farmers, Portuguese Jose Saramago began writing novels in earnest in his late 50s & won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He’s a notorious crank, a communist & an old world atheist. Like Rushdie (& the old man with the eye patch?) he married a beautiful woman 30 years his junior. His drunkenly bastardized surname means ‘wild radish’. His daughter (a biologist) is named Violante.

Spoiler warning.
The following reveals plot & character details.

Here's a good NYT profile by Fernanda Eberstadt. It has a section on Saramago's narrator (page 6), who is the reporting spectator in most of his books.

A movie of Blindness is coming out soon. How could they not? The scene in which they’re fleeing the burning asylum alone is sparking with cinematic promise. I’m encouraged to see it stars Julianne Moore & is directed by Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener).

This is still one of my favorite books & it was a pleasure to re-read it for the group this month. Enjoy!

~A. Campisi

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

All page numbers are from the paperback Harcourt Brace edition.

The WRITING

FORM. One of the great feats of this books is its stripped down form. It’s unpunctuated with chapter titles, white space or italics, few paragraph breaks or speaker tags (= “he said”), & for a book that is so heavily dialogue-based: no quotation or question marks, exclamation points, or line breaks for speaker shifts, separating adjacent speakers only by commas & capital letters. He does not even use character names. Amazing to me: he achieves this without stumble or confusion.

He makes similar choices in other works as well, notably the excellent & often-banned Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but there is no book better suited to this style than Blindness.

First, how did the formal choices affect your reading experience? Was there a learning curve? Any other observations of formal choices?

Second, how does the style specifically fit & add to the book’s themes?

TENSE. One of the techniques that impresses me the most is Saramago’s free flow of tense. Specifically, he’ll change without warning from past to present & then back again, often in the middle of a sentence, & he does it seamlessly. I’d be curious to know how many readers noticed this happening & what you thought of it when you did catch it. He does it on the first page, for example. Also p 202, 210, 274 (a nice close-up of the lamp flames), etc.

More elegantly he does it on p. 155, just for a moment, as a tool not only to shift & narrow our focus—functioning as a camera might do a close-up in a movie—but also for switching the point of view. This is masterful work.

Here’s that example (p 155):

The doctor’s wife has wandered out by the gate at night, a soldier outside it with a torch. We been for a long time in the doctor’s wife’s POV, she’s sitting, contemplating the scissors, then the next sentence begins:
“The soldier approached the gate, although he is standing against the light, it is clear that he is looking in this direction, he must have noticed the motionless shadow, although, for the moment there is not enough light to see that it is only a woman seated on the ground...the soldier points the beam of a torch at her, now there can be no doubt, it is a woman who is about to get up...in a flash he asks himself whether he should raise the alarm...as a precaution he points his weapon in her direction, but this means putting the torch aside and, with that movement, the luminous beam shone directly into his eyes...” from then on it's in past tense.

NARRATION. Who is the narrator do you think?
I ask because while totally reliable & omniscient, it often swoops in with an “I” or a “we”, & freely uses rhetorical markers (like: that is to say; in a word; so to speak; as we imagine it), which function as indicators of candor & authenticity, but also insert some distance in the reporting, making sure we see that it’s a mediated story, either written or told.

Sometimes it speaks inclusively, as if the narrator were there, too (even referring to “our blindness” (218)). Sometimes it appears to be looking on aloof, proposing thought experiments: “Let us put ourselves in the place of the soldiers....Let us remember the precedents...” (111) Is it the writer they meet later? Is it speaking as Humanity? Is it the author? What did you make of it?

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the STORY

STRANGERS. “Who spoke, It was me, Who is Me, Me” (99). Here’s the book of all books to talk about our theme. In a nameless city & country, they are strangers from beginning to end. Even “Names have no importance here.” (59) Why do they never give names & insist that the blind do not need them? When the women return from the orgy, they "are different women now". How instead do we know one another--or ourselves?

WHITE. Why do they see white, “a milky sea”, “like a light going on”, instead of darkness or nothing?

BLINDNESS. What’s being investigated here? This question comes up again & again throughout the book. It's answered differently by different characters. Why are they blind & what does it mean to be blind. What is “blindness”?

What do you make of this: “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, said the doctor.” (126)

Or this, “The blind are always at war, always have been at war” (193)?

DOCTOR’s WIFE. Surely one of the great heroines of contemporary literature. What did you think of her character? Why does she retain her sight? How do you interpret the last page of the book?

What did you think of her saying: “I shall become more and more blind because I shall have no one to see me.” (317)

The STUFF WE’RE MADE OF, “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference, half malice.” In the context of the book, do you agree?

COMMUNISM. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” (141) What do you make of Saramago using this Marx quote here? What other political statements does this book make? Organization. Leadership. Duty. Morality. Tyranny. Law. Equality. The Government. The Military. The People.

TYRANNY. Saramago grew up under the fascist Salazar dictatorship. Whether or not there are specific allusions to that history, however, there’s a stunning political allegory to be had in the mass dissent & then uprising against the armed thugs holding their food (163-164). Why does it fail when the numbers are on their side? What’s the larger story being told here?

WOMEN. So much to discuss here. The doctor’s wife’s leadership. Sexuality. The sexism of individuals. “No great shakes” Focus on the shattering order to present the women in exchange for food (beginning on 166).

Talk about the debate & moral discussion, how exactly the women volunteer & then prepare themselves in their own ward. Talk about their compliance, especially in relationship to their men & after their dissent when it was only money the thugs wanted. Why do they comply?

Later, what changes that allows for a successful group & individual (terrorist?) rebellion?

AFFAIR. Talk about the doctor’s affair with the girl with dark glasses, the wife’s & girl’s reactions.

DOG OF TEARS. Talk about the dog of tears. What might he represent?

CHURCH of the BLIND GODs. There’s a very powerful image at the end, when the doctor & his wife are taking shelter inside the church where she alone can see that all the statues, paintings & even the crucifix have had their eyes either bandaged or whited out. When others learn this is true, they panic. After which: the doctor & his wife take their food.

First, what might this mean in general that this has been done?

Second, go through the specific list of images (316-317) & see if you can make any closer analyses. Beyond the simplest image x = character y connections, let’s consider for starters how the character of the doctor’s wife deepens with the image that: “there was only one woman who did not have her eyes covered, because she carried her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray.” (that is a painting of Saint Lucia, by the way)

FREE WILL. Does Saramago's purported atheism make sense to you given what you’ve read? Does it affect how you interpret parts of the book?
Maybe he’s an atheist, but there’s a lot of spirituality here. There are persuasive arguments out there, too, that this book can be read through a Christian lens, even a Catholic message of using free will in a dark age. What do you think?

ALLUSION. Who recognizes this allusion? p. 158: the doctor’s wife is spying on the sleeping thugs. “The blind man was sleeping, his head resting against the door jamb, his stick had slipped silently to the floor, there was a defenceless blind man and with no columns to bring crashing down around him.” What do you think it means in this context?

PROVERB. “As the old proverb never tires of teaching us, while trying to cross himself the blind man only succeeded in breaking his own nose.” (17) Was anyone else reminded of Aadam Aziz, of Midnight’s Children, breaking his nose while bowing to God?

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A NOTE for approaching Gulliver's Travels

This classic isn't really long, but the language is old & so you'll want to give yourself some time. Remember what I warned you about with Rushdie? And did you listen? Start reading now.

Also, many versions of Gulliver's Travels come with introductory essays & contextual analysis. I don't recommend any one in particular, but the book & discussion may be more fun if you've read a little about the context. (Only because it's the one on my shelf) I'm going to use the Penguin Classics paperback & will refer to page numbers there. Have fun with it!