Blindness |
The twentieth century was the era of comprehensive social organization, usually undertaken by a nation-state. In this sense, it brought to a culmination one of the main trends of modernity: Max Weber identified it as increasing “rationalization,” the Frankfurt School referred to it as “the administered life,” and Michel Foucault described it by suggesting that the sovereign’s old right to decree death was now complemented by an infinitely ramifying “power over life.” No matter the name, this new power could extend anywhere, including into the last redoubts of privacy. It was Soviet Russia that gave meaning and special ugliness to talk about the engineering of human souls.
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.
Zamyatin and Orwell may not have speeded the fall of the Soviet Union; Kafka’s great novel, which, as Primo Levi said, “predicted the time when it was a crime simply to be a Jew,” may not have delayed the Holocaust by a day; and Huxley’s vision of a smooth bio-apartheid may yet be realized in the rich countries. But all the same it is somewhat heartening that among the countless “volumes of disenchantment” (Howe again) that the failure of utopia produced, three or four novels achieved such intellectual currency that their circulation has been a small but real defense against some of the worst of our possible futures.
One of the last and best of such novels was J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. This 1983 novel is set in a South Africa of civil war and concentration camps, one that happily never came to pass. Coetzee excels at depicting the “coloured” Michael K’s desire to live free of categorization and control, hiding out from the world in a hole in the ground and sustaining himself on his pumpkin patch. But Michael K’s need to be left alone, literally to tend his own garden, verges on the autistic, and Coetzee seems thereby to illustrate, deliberately or not, one of the limitations of his chosen genre. The prison literature that is the dystopian novel naturally lays a heavy emphasis on escape, and it postpones all other discussions, as Coetzee writes, “for a day when we are not running away from the police.”
Now the twentieth century is over. If we take up Eric Hobsbawm’s suggestion of a short twentieth century, it ended ten years ago, in 1991. Although Big Brother, like the devil himself, will never retire, he is in retreat. And if throughout the twentieth century Russia embodied the hypertrophy of state power, now it is the exemplary sufferer of an opposite condition: the abdication of the state, the collapse of infrastructure, the nullity of the law. Russia is not unique in this way either. As John Gray writes in False Dawn, his polemic against neoliberal economics, we have left behind “an age in which totalitarian states were the chief threat to freedom and prosperity. Today human and social well-being is being threatened chiefly by collapsed or enfeebled states.” We have also witnessed the decline of social democracy, in which societies increasingly withdraw protection from and refuse awareness of a growing minority of citizens.
A NEW AGE wants new imaginations, and in this light the Portuguese novelist José 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.
Not until the 1990s did Saramago deterritorialize his work, as an academic critic might say. Written from the geopolitical peripheries of Portugal and communism, the novels published in the nineties are nevertheless innocent of all maps and as universal as anything in contemporary fiction. The events of Blindness and All the Names merely happen somewhere, which, Saramago seems to imply, should be all the claim on our attention they require. If the twentieth century ended in 1991, then Saramago has a good claim to being the greatest and, what is more, the most necessary political novelist of the twenty-first century, so far.
But 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?
In any case, the internment of the blind points up not so much the evil as the futility of quarantine. The internees escape the asylum when the soldiers guarding them also go blind, the epidemic proving, as in Camus’s The Plague, that no one really lives apart from the others. Saramago possesses such authority as a writer because, in spite of his outlandish conceits, his tone is always sane and capacious, at ease with grandeur and banality, and as happy to make use of a serviceable cliché as to coin a new and startling image. He is a writer to quote at length, since all manner of detail and comment join in the easy democracy of his long sentences. Here is the doctor’s wife—no one being given a name in this novel—returning from a looted supermarket in a rainstorm:
In a downpour like this, which is almost becoming a deluge, you would expect people to be taking shelter, waiting for the weather to improve. But this is not the case, there are blind people everywhere gaping up at the heavens, slaking their thirst, storing up water in every nook and cranny of their bodies, and others who are somewhat more far-sighted, and above all sensible, hold up buckets, bowls and pans, and raise them to the generous sky, clearly God provides the cloud according to the thirst. The possibility had not yet occurred to the doctor’s wife that not so much as a drop of the precious liquid was coming from the taps in the houses, this is the drawback of civilization, we are so used to the convenience of piped water brought into our homes, and forget that for this to happen there have to be people to open and close distribution valves, water towers and pumps that require electrical energy, computers to regulate the deficits and administer the reserves, and all of these operations require the use of one’s eyes. Eyes are also needed to see this picture, a woman laden with plastic bags, going along a rain-drenched street, amidst rotting litter and human and animal excrement, cars and trucks abandoned any old way, blocking the main thoroughfare, some of the vehicles with their tires already surrounded by grass, and the blind, the blind, the blind, open-mouthed and staring up at the white sky, it seems incredible that rain should fall from such a sky. |
Blindness is in this sense a plea for order, an illustration of our mutual dependence on each other, an interdependence that life in a neoliberal society conceals. Saramago has done something remarkable: his recent novels have reversed the terms of another generation and, in this post-totalitarian age, made a novelistic case for the virtues of order and information, when not long ago these would have sounded like the watchwords of the police.
The new novel, All the Names, beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a milder and, at first sight, more modest work than Blindness. But it is audacious enough—a fantasy of surveillance. Imagine this plot in the context of fifty years ago: without authorization, a lowly clerk at the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths begins to investigate the life of a private and obscure citizen. Senhor José is the clerk, a solitary bachelor who, lonelier than he knows, passes his free time collecting “clippings from newspapers and magazines containing news and photos of famous people purely because they are famous.” One night he steals into the Central Registry to inspect the certificates of these celebrities, in order to confirm that they really have lived and died, and in the process he accidentally retrieves the certificate of a nobody, a non-celebrity, “the unknown woman.”
This launches Senhor José on a quest to find, and find out about, this soul lost sight of by celebrity culture and the information age. The genius of Saramago’s plot is that as Senhor José increasingly resorts to illegal and clandestine methods, he becomes more and more afraid of being found out himself. The novel becomes “a question of one invisible being seeking out another,” and gradually Senhor José, touchingly clumsy, begins to suspect that his boss, the Registrar, may know what he is up to—and approve.
The tone of the book is light and sly, but for all his atheism Saramago is the most Christian of contemporary writers and what he has produced is nothing less than a version of the Last Judgment, of a perfect and final accounting. Ultimately it is necessary for Senhor José to visit the General Cemetery, its façade “the twin sister of the Central Registry façade,” to determine whether death may have beat him to the unknown woman. Because he enters the cemetery at the gate, where the most ancient dead are buried, our clerk must walk through three thousand years of monuments, the earliest made of “dolmens, cromlechs and menhirs,” to the freshly disturbed earth of the newest graves, where the cemetery abuts a new suburb of the living. Ever the clerk, José considers how much more efficient it would be “if the dead had been buried standing up, side by side, in serried ranks, like soldiers at attention”—waiting, one presumes, for their names to be called.
The afterlife of information may be the only survival we can hope for; meanwhile, the burden of Saramago’s tale is to conjure up the stories left out of the news, the individuals excluded from the state’s calculations, the neighbors left unknown in a society of mutual isolation. For this reason the story is generalized: there are no proper names in All the Names but the one, José, which the book would bear anyway, since it belongs to the author.
Of course the novel is not only a political one. Saramago’s allegories have a richness of overdetermined significance that places him more in Kafka’s company than in that of Orwell and the others. But what is unlike Kafka, and all of modernism, is Saramago’s lack of eccentricity. Nothing seems to distinguish his perspective but its wisdom. He doesn’t stand at a slight angle to the universe, as we value the modernists for having done, but looks at it straight on. Among the things he has faced most squarely are the new threats to the commonweal, those that come from ignorance and neglect rather than surveillance and capture.
As Elias Canetti notes in Crowds and Power, the awesome and frightful capacity of the hand is not only to be able to hold fast, but “the ability to let go of something instantly.” Kafka, Orwell, and the others, have schooled several generations of readers in the terrors of capture, of being held and then crushed. But it can be just as fatal to be let go of—as deadly to be abandoned as to be hunted. Not that we do not need to keep having the old nightmares. Their validity is permanent, something that José Saramago himself—if we are to judge by his friendship with Fidel Castro—appears not sufficiently to appreciate. It is also possible to have the worst of both worlds, for us to build new prisons as we trim the welfare rolls or for China to combine the features of totalitarianism and neoliberalism. But it is the sins of omission that we have a harder time imagining, after the era just past, and this is where Saramago comes in. Writing in the face of the global market, he wants us to see, as in Blindness, that the most solitary and apparently independent of us in fact depend on the invisible cooperation of the greatest number of others; and to remind us, as in All the Names, of those many people whom an information age fails even to baptize. A political novelist of our time can hardly do more.
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