Blindness (novel)
Encyclopedia
Blindness is a novel
by Portuguese
author José Saramago
. It was originally published in Portuguese and then translated into English. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
and Baltasar and Blimunda
.
afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers on "the doctor's wife," her husband, several of his patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor’s wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, acts to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees do battle and burn down the asylum, only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor's wife, her husband, and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who still sees (though she must hide this fact at first). The breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food; violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new “family” eventually make a permanent home and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.
, where she is credited as the "Seeing Woman", and is viewed with mistrust and disdain by the other city dwellers, as no one knows how or why she retained her sight when the rest of the country was struck blind.
The Doctor A friendly ophthalmologist who becomes blind after attempting to treat the first patient who is infected by the "white blindness." He too quickly goes blind and is placed into quarantine with his wife, who can still see but together they hide this fact for fear that she may be forced into becoming a slave for the blind inmates. He resents the dependence he has on his wife after he loses his sight. He is elected leader of his ward and does his best to keep order and peace through diplomatic strategies, but quickly finds his compassion does him little or no good amongst the bands of ruthless detainees in the asylum.
Girl with Dark Glasses A beautiful teenage prostitute with a cold and unfeeling demeanor. She is struck blind after entertaining one of her clients in a hotel and is committed to the derelict asylum. Though by nature she is hard-hearted and icy, she develops love and warmth after caring for an orphaned boy with a squint. By the end of the novel she has reformed her uncaring ways and compliments the doctor's wife as being "beautiful", despite having never seen her, claiming that in her (the girl's) dreams, the doctor's wife is always beautiful.
King of Ward 3 A brutal and cruel tyrant who holds the rest of the blind in the asylum at his mercy by threatening them with a gun. He deprives them of food and supplies in exchange for their valuables, but when those assets are exhausted, he demands the women. The doctor's wife murders him with a pair of scissors which she found in her bag when she can stand for his evils no longer. Upon his death his assistant takes his gun and barricades the clique into their ward. This escalation starts a veritable war, which ends in a woman setting fire to the asylum and burning it to the ground, with the King's thugs and that woman perishing in the blaze.
Man with Black Eye Patch A kindly and mysterious old man who reacts calmly to the blindness that is infesting the city, and keeps the inmates of the asylum updated with news of the outside world with his radio. He is very spiritual, and after the blindness lifts from the country, he states that he hopes they have learned a very valuable lesson about human nature.
character names in Blindness is typical of many of Saramago's novels (e.g. All the Names
or The Cave
). The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem sharply ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses").
The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. Some signs hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal
: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese
employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular
verb form (a distinction which used to exist in English
as the now largely archaic pronoun thou
). The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety.
(Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. The new novel takes place in the same unnamed country and features several of the same characters.
An English-language film adaptation of Blindness
was directed by Fernando Meirelles
. Filming began in July 2007 and stars Mark Ruffalo
as the doctor and Julianne Moore
as the doctor's wife. The film opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival
.
Shortly before his death, Samarago gave German composer Anno Schreier the rights to compose an opera based on the novel. The libretto is written in German by Kerstin Maria Pöhler. Like the German translation of the novel, the opera's title is "Die Stadt der Blinden". It will see its first performance on November 12th at the Zurich Opera House
.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
author José Saramago
José Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom has described Saramago as "a...
. It was originally published in Portuguese and then translated into English. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is a novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. A fictional re-telling of Jesus Christ's life, it depicts him as a flawed, humanised character with passions and doubts...
and Baltasar and Blimunda
Baltasar and Blimunda
Baltasar and Blimunda is a novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago.It is a love story set in the 18th century with the construction of the Convent of Mafra, now one of Portugal's chief tourist attractions, as a background...
.
Plot summary
Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindnessBlindness
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...
afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers on "the doctor's wife," her husband, several of his patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor’s wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, acts to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees do battle and burn down the asylum, only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor's wife, her husband, and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who still sees (though she must hide this fact at first). The breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food; violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new “family” eventually make a permanent home and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.
Character Analysis
The Doctor's Wife A woman in her late forties, and the wife of an ophthalmologist, referred to as "the doctor's wife". When the plague of blindness first devastates the city and the infected are placed into isolation, the doctor's wife feigns the sickness to care for her husband. She constantly expects to lose her vision at any moment, yet somehow she is the only person immune to the contagion of blindness. This ultimately forces her into becoming responsible for the blind inmates, yet she admits that the pressures of caring for a band of helpless people exhausts her, and she even begins to wish she too were blind. She murders a sadistic inmate ("King of Ward 3") in the asylum where the blind are contained and helps the others escape the quarantine. She and her husband reappear in the novel's sequel, SeeingSeeing (novel)
Seeing is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago. It was published in Portuguese in 2004 and in English in 2006. It is a sequel to one of his most famous works, Blindness.- Plot summary :...
, where she is credited as the "Seeing Woman", and is viewed with mistrust and disdain by the other city dwellers, as no one knows how or why she retained her sight when the rest of the country was struck blind.
The Doctor A friendly ophthalmologist who becomes blind after attempting to treat the first patient who is infected by the "white blindness." He too quickly goes blind and is placed into quarantine with his wife, who can still see but together they hide this fact for fear that she may be forced into becoming a slave for the blind inmates. He resents the dependence he has on his wife after he loses his sight. He is elected leader of his ward and does his best to keep order and peace through diplomatic strategies, but quickly finds his compassion does him little or no good amongst the bands of ruthless detainees in the asylum.
Girl with Dark Glasses A beautiful teenage prostitute with a cold and unfeeling demeanor. She is struck blind after entertaining one of her clients in a hotel and is committed to the derelict asylum. Though by nature she is hard-hearted and icy, she develops love and warmth after caring for an orphaned boy with a squint. By the end of the novel she has reformed her uncaring ways and compliments the doctor's wife as being "beautiful", despite having never seen her, claiming that in her (the girl's) dreams, the doctor's wife is always beautiful.
King of Ward 3 A brutal and cruel tyrant who holds the rest of the blind in the asylum at his mercy by threatening them with a gun. He deprives them of food and supplies in exchange for their valuables, but when those assets are exhausted, he demands the women. The doctor's wife murders him with a pair of scissors which she found in her bag when she can stand for his evils no longer. Upon his death his assistant takes his gun and barricades the clique into their ward. This escalation starts a veritable war, which ends in a woman setting fire to the asylum and burning it to the ground, with the King's thugs and that woman perishing in the blaze.
Man with Black Eye Patch A kindly and mysterious old man who reacts calmly to the blindness that is infesting the city, and keeps the inmates of the asylum updated with news of the outside world with his radio. He is very spiritual, and after the blindness lifts from the country, he states that he hopes they have learned a very valuable lesson about human nature.
Style
Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader. The lack of properProper noun
A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity , as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities —for example, city, planet, person or corporation)...
character names in Blindness is typical of many of Saramago's novels (e.g. All the Names
All the Names
All the Names is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. It was written in 1997 and translated to English in 1999 by Margaret Jull Costa winning the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.-Plot summary:...
or The Cave
The Cave (novel)
The Cave is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. It was published in Portuguese in 2000 and in English in 2002.-Plot introduction:The story concerns an elderly potter named Cipriano Algor, his daughter Marta, and his son-in-law Marçal...
). The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem sharply ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses").
The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. Some signs hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular
T-V distinction
In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
verb form (a distinction which used to exist in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
as the now largely archaic pronoun thou
Thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
). The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety.
Sequel and adaptation
Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in 2004, titled SeeingSeeing (novel)
Seeing is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago. It was published in Portuguese in 2004 and in English in 2006. It is a sequel to one of his most famous works, Blindness.- Plot summary :...
(Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. The new novel takes place in the same unnamed country and features several of the same characters.
An English-language film adaptation of Blindness
Blindness (film)
Blindness is a 2008 English-language film that is an adaptation of the 1995 novel of the same name by the Portuguese writer José Saramago about a society suffering an epidemic of blindness. The film is written by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo...
was directed by Fernando Meirelles
Fernando Meirelles
Fernando Ferreira Meirelles is a Brazilian film director, producer and screenwriter.He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director in 2004 for his work in the Brazilian film City of God, released in 2002 in Brazil and in 2003 in the U.S. by Miramax Films...
. Filming began in July 2007 and stars Mark Ruffalo
Mark Ruffalo
Mark Alan Ruffalo is an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter. He starred in films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Zodiac, Shutter Island, Just Like Heaven, You Can Count on Me and The Kids Are All Right for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best...
as the doctor and Julianne Moore
Julianne Moore
Julianne Moore is an American actress and a children's book author. Throughout her career, she has been nominated for four Oscars, six Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and nine Screen Actors Guild Awards....
as the doctor's wife. The film opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
.
Shortly before his death, Samarago gave German composer Anno Schreier the rights to compose an opera based on the novel. The libretto is written in German by Kerstin Maria Pöhler. Like the German translation of the novel, the opera's title is "Die Stadt der Blinden". It will see its first performance on November 12th at the Zurich Opera House
Zurich Opera House
Opernhaus Zürich is an opera house in the Swiss city of Zurich. It has been the home of the Zurich Opera since 1891.- History :...
.
See also
- The Day of the TriffidsThe Day of the TriffidsThe Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1951 by the English science fiction author John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, under the pen-name John Wyndham. Although Wyndham had already published other novels using other pen-name combinations drawn from his lengthy real...
, a 1951 novel also featuring an epidemic of mass blindness. - NightNight (book)Night is a work by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father, Shlomo, in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War...
, a Holocaust memoir that begins in the context of similar atrocities.