Reading Saramago during the collapse (Part 2: Blindness)

(Spoiler Alert: If you plan to read or see Jose Saramago’s Blindness and do not want the ending spoiled for you – do not read this post. I am full of plot spoilers.)

Have you ever noticed when winter sets in that people get a little bit meaner? Back in November, I witnessed the shift between mild and frigid temperatures in an Ottawa neighbourhood where I was boarded at a B&B. Between one and the other was a distinctive change in mood, as though someone had turned up the impatience and pushiness knobs on the social stereo set, and normally placid people were shoving each other out of the way to get into the warmth of the grocery store or onto a bus. A minor hardship really, minus ten, and yet the every-person-for-themselves mentality is the immediate response, at least in the initial days. This response mellows once winter reality settles in, because really, in Canada with radiant-heating and warm baths, the cold is to be got through one way or another. We know eventually it will be spring, and them summer and are comforted back into placidity with that hope.

But while that may be the case, it’s those small cracks that matter when we evaluate the meanness we are capable of, the desperate grasping that rears itself at the first sign of a more difficult mode of survival – and this is precisely where Saramago takes his characters in the book Blindness, though his situation is a tad more extreme than a change in temperature.

Blindness is the tale of a handful of unnamed characters in an unnamed city where everyone has gone blind through some act of contagion that strikes simply by looking into the eyes of one of those so afflicted. Not a dark blindness, it is described as a milky-white so as to plunge each individual into an endless light that impedes their ability to see what is just in front of them. One man, at first stricken while driving his car, then infects his eye-doctor and wife, who then infect two or five more and on it goes until the entire city, (and we surmise) the entire country and world goes slowly and madly blind.

Initially, the government corrals the ill into a former mental-hospital, but refuses to administer any services beyond dropping food at the front door at intervals several times per day. Soldiers monitor the entrance gates and are ordered to shoot anyone who tries to leave the wretched compound. In this initial group so delivered is one small grace – a woman who has not lost her sight but has faked her way into segregation with her husband (the eye doctor) to ensure his survival – though she is very careful not to reveal her sighted status to the other inmates lest she become a slave to them. Which is not to say she does not help them, for she is instrumental in the survival of a small band who she eventually leads from the asylum as conditions deteriorate around them.

I can not overstate the horrific elements of the rapid decivilising which take place over a period of a few short weeks. You only have to imagine the effects of an entire society losing their sight: their ability to run the systems that provide water and heat, drive trucks into the city full of groceries, clean up fallen bodies or blocked sewer lines. But more than that are the loss of social mores out of desperation survival, but also the pervasive sense that if one can’t see, then conversely they can’t be seen. This provides some cloak through which they obscure their basest behaviours. And while not everyone follows this path, it seems that the majority do descend into a meanness that in another life would have been unthinkable. They steal, claw, deny, assault, evade, kill and take over the homes of one another. Or they panic and die as a stupid mob rushing into a basement storeroom after the smell of food. As a reader, I thought many times that if I found myself in such a world the inclination to suicide rather than go on with this uncertain existence, possibly in perpetuity (because no one knows the root or solution to this blind plague), would be a strong pull.

To witness our world, it is not difficult to understand Saramago’s inspiration in examples of both starvation and mob mentalities that have lead to genocides, wars, mass killings, suicides and family murders, or wholescale thefts of lands and resources. The process of de-investment from others begins with an excuse that propels itself into a rapid self-justification of barbaric behaviour, a spell of sorts that once broken exposes those involved to the worst sorts of charges. Within the confines of the madness, all actions become acceptable, but by standing outside as the sighted woman does in Blindness we can see these things for what they inflict on others. And that challenges all of what we would like to believe about ourselves as compassionate, fair, and upright. It’s not simply that “those” people in another place – Rwanda, East Timor, Germany, Israel – are more “primitive” or less developed than “our society” (whichever that may be), but that given particular conditions, the pull to evildoing is strong enough to overcome all the social training and education we may have received. I would hazard to follow that by saying that in places where the social fabric has been torn and re-torn over several generations, the dividing seam is just that much weaker when a disastrous condition returns; this explains how a country like Colombia can have a veritable civil war raging almost unabated since the early 1900s with the exceptional atrocities its forces have produced.

Now, we are in the infancy of an economic collapse plunging nations into bankruptcy and the already-marginalized onto the streets. A combination of both market and environmental forces bringing the spectre of the dustbowl thirties back into public consciousness while countries like China encourage their educated youth to the countryside in order to disperse the possibility of social unrest. And despite the prognostications of quick recovery by some of the talking heads, all indications are pointing to a long road to travel before the global markets have some sense of restoration. A manufactured crisis, yes. A crisis hinged to the failed ideology of unlimited growth, definitely. But a crisis in the order of most people’s lives nevertheless, and one in which certain liberties are already at play among the elite. In countries with right-wing governments (the US until January, Canada) this has recently been pronounced with attacks on unions, cuts in public sector spending, and money being shoveled out of the treasury into the pockets of those who engineered events in the first place. (For a detailed analysis of “disaster capitalism” and the strategy implicit in Harper & Bush’s actions, please see The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.)

And on the private level, as desperation increased in late 2008 there was a marked rise in family-based multiple murders. This, at the beginning of things, and expected to be followed up with more of the same as foreclosures and job losses continue to rise. Given the way recessions have gone in the past we don’t have to be particularly imaginative to envision a rise in personal property crimes, the increased internal migration of people seeking work, an abandoning of family and community with the excuse of financial shortfall. A deepening crisis and it’s only a matter of time before some country manages its way out with a little old-fashioned scapegoating a la Germany 1936 (and if you think it can’t happen in this day and age just take a look at recent attacks in Palestine). And while that may seem a long way off, it might not be such a long slide down towards “depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery” as we might think if we don’t choose our alternatives carefully. In 1915, this argument was put forward by Rosa Luxembourg in the Junius Tract, written while she was imprisoned for objecting to World War 1 (which came out of a crisis in European imperialism). It is here she outlines the choices before Europe in the midst of what was truly a barbaric war – barbarism or socialism. Beyond that moment in history, these would forever be the choices, and as long as a callous ideological system existed it would forever experience ruptures of deprivation, plunder and bloodshed.

Which is precisely what I believe Blindness to be about: the choice between one state of being and another inside desperate circumstances. Because as bleak as the book becomes, and as hopeless as the fate of the main characters seems, they are rescued in the last two pages and freed from whatever atrocity you thought might be coming for them. In other words, they live through the hopeless circumstances of a few weeks when many hundreds if not thousands around their city (and probably millions around the world) have died at the hands of barbarism in the form of lawlessness, despair, and stupidity. These characters survive, not as some others will because of hapless luck, but because they discover early on that which keeps their selves intact, assisted at first by the sighted woman but then increasingly on their own. At first a group of isolated strangers, they learn to keep together as a tribe, offer emotional and physical support to one another, and protect themselves and those in the tribe from the violence that is raging in the dispossessed. This group is blessed with a sighted member, but as I mentioned above there is evidence that other small tribal groups without such a blessed individual are in existence, and are aiding in each others’ survival similarly.

Saramago gives us both the poison of human nature and the antidote to it; survival in difficult times succeeding in opposing forms but only one of those which can turn measures of desperation into a sustainable future for the individuals so affected. It is one of many parables we might turn to as the news gets bleaker by the day. Dismantling our compassion and positive humanity might seem the expedient course in ending the misery of economic turmoil. Scapegoating and theft might seem the only course of action when the individual or nation-state is bereft of internal coping mechanisms. But for those who survive through such tactics, the future, once alleviated of present affliction, is a shadowy one without much savour or success. And in many ways we are blind in support of social orders that would perpetuate such solutions. Instead, it’s up to every individual to examine what survival means and act according to the future as well as the present.