Blindness by Jose Saramago//All the Names by Jose Saramago

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 48, Heft 4, S. 141

Abstract

No one should forget the quiet social democratic victories of the age. For the first time in history--to take just one example--Swedish physicians could not determine a child's social class on the basis of that child's state of health. But the nightmare images are bound to come first to mind. And many of the most frightening images of comprehensive order--the acme of which is totalitarianism--come not from political philosophers or from totalitarians themselves, but from a few novels: Franz Kafka's Trial, Eugeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984. Whether it was someone telling lies about Joseph K., or 'the mathematically perfect life of the United State' (Zamyatin), or a bio-engineered caste system of Alphas and Betas, or the ubiquity of Big Brother, all of these visions shared a family resemblance. In each, unaccountable power had come to penetrate virtually the whole of life. There was scarcely any ability to be alone: both Winston Smith in 1984 and D-503, the narrator, the I, of Zamyatin's We, become dissidents simply by virtue of keeping a diary. Whatever the dystopia's local color, it was a 'world of total integration,' as Irving Howe wrote in a small brilliant survey of the genre, that would seize and then incorporate you. ANEW AGE wants new imaginations, and in this light the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago's achievement becomes especially striking. Saramago, who joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1968, when it was still outlawed, has been a political novelist from the start, each of his first six novels skirmishing with Portuguese history. Saramago's politics can be playful or grave. In The Stone Raft, he whimsically detaches the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe, just as fascism had done, but this time, so he explained in his 1998 Nobel Lecture, in order for it to float 'South to help balance the world, as compensation for [Europe's] former and its present colonial abuses.' In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the dead poet Fernando Pessoa returns from the cemetery to visit one of his own creations, the alter ego Ricardo Reis, and the two trace arabesques of melancholy speculation on the air, Reis perfecting his aloofness and passivity while all around him--the novel is set in 1936--fascism assembles its world. This century, that century--it hardly matters. Everything depends on whether a book like Blindness is looking backward or ahead. Many readers saw this novel as an abstract of twentieth-century atrocities, and, true, the incarceration of victims of a contagious 'white blindness' in a disused mental asylum cannot help but recall the uses to which elementary schools and sports stadiums and churches (not to speak of the specially constructed facilities of the Nazis) have been put by various regimes. But Blindness affirms the very thing that Saramago's precursors in political allegory dreaded and wished to deny: the wholeness of society. For Saramago, blindness is a type of illumination, and what the white blindness, 'like the sun shining through mist,' reveals is the dependence of people on one another and the necessity of society's deliberate organization. Before long a gang of thugs and extortionists has taken over the asylum, reviving the old question: socialism or barbarism?