By: Samir Chopra
Jose Saramago's Blindness is a very funny and a very sad book. It is a very sad book because it is about a cataclysmic event--an outbreak of blindness in an unspecified place and time--and the breakdown of social and moral order that follows; it is very funny because this apocalypse of sorts provides an opportunity for the novel's author--an omnipresent narrator--to deliver an ironic, caustic, hilariously satirical black commentary on the people--unnamed ones, all of them--and the culture affected by this mysterious outbreak.
This co-existence of the tragic and the comic is what makes Blindness into a wildly entertaining and thought-provoking read.
Of course, any novel about catastrophic, apocalyptic blindness, written by a member of a species whose overpowering sensory modality is sight, which so casually dabbles in homilies like 'seeing is believing', whose metaphors for ignorance speak of darkness and for knowledge as illumination, and one of whose central philosophical allegories is that of the Prisoners in the Cave, was bound to be philosophically provocative. We, the readers, wonder about the symbolic and allegoric value of the novel's characters being 'blinded by the light', the significance of their blindness leading to a world of overpowering milky white as opposed to coal-black, the relationship between moral, physical and spiritual blindness, about what may be 'seen' by those now blind, and what those who are not blind can no longer 'see', about what else, in a world no longer visible, becomes palpable and sensed and otherwise experienced. We wonder too, as readers, about our own blindness: what we might be blind to in the book and in our daily lives. (My first class meeting on Blindness was almost entirely taken up with a discussion of these issues and how the vehicle of blindness played into the author's larger political, ethical, and artistic vision; oops, can't stop dealing in these metaphors.)
In Blindness, there is ample description of the breakdown of social order that results from the epidemic of blindness, ample opportunity to shake one's head at the venality of man that becomes visible in desperate times--there is violence, filth, murder, sexual degradation. What makes these treatments of the aftermath of disaster distinctive is that Saramago's treatment is both kind and harsh: we sense an observer of the human condition whose heart breaks for the misery he can see around him, who feels the most exalted of human emotions, love, for those who suffer, and who yet, in moments of exasperation, cannot resist a cackle or two at the stupidity, crassness, and greed of the human race. But if the author is a cynic, one bursting to the seams with irony and witticism, then he didn't start out that way. This world and its peoples made him so. The disaster that has befallen them is not a punishment; it is not a judgment; it is merely an inexplicable event, like the ones this world specializes in, one that has produced this opportunity to carefully study, in some painful and revealing detail, the imperfect reactions of a kind of creature who is always, at the best of times, fumbling in the dark.
Note: This post was originally published--under the same title--at samirchopra.com.
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