They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.

Psalm 115:5-8 

Dystopia is one of the most fascinating genres in world literature. The fact that humans are able to imagine a post-apocalyptic state of agony and injustice proves that fear plays a significant role in artistic creation. We often believe that we live in dystopian times, but when you think about it, there has never been a peaceful time in history. As someone once said, if there is world peace, it means we’re all dead.

When the Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago thought of writing a dystopia, he immediately imagined an unusual epidemic that makes people lose one of their five senses. Interestingly enough, the pandemic we are still facing also affects people with a loss of senses. However, if losing taste and smell doesn’t seem that scary, Saramago had a real spine-chilling idea. The characters in the 1995 novel are stricken by the same misfortune: they go blind one by one. As you can imagine, this leads to more adversities: living conditions start degrading as there is a lack of food, hygiene, and order.

When reading Saramago, the first thing you can notice is the absence of punctuation. For instance, instead of using a period or paragraphs, he preferred using commas. At some point, you don’t know who is talking. Some people might find this confusing, but the Nobel laureate had an explanation:
“Punctuation … is like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you traveled.“
Lack of punctuation also symbolizes the disorientation blind people feel in the story. While reading, somehow, you can feel their distress too.

And indeed, my first thought when I finished the first chapter was: there must be a movie inspired by this novel. You know those books that are so well written that you immediately imagine a movie adaptation? Well, this is one of them.

The blindness that destroys the whole society is unexplainable. When people go blind, they see white.
Saramago begins the story with a description of a traffic jam. All colors are included. Red, yellow, and green for the traffic light. Black and white for the crosswalk. The reader knows it from the very first page – this story is about colors. 

This is how Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer that became completely blind by the age of 55, describes blindness:

“People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world. There is, for example, Shakespeare’s line: “Looking on darkness which the blind do see.” If we understand “darkness” as “blackness,” then Shakespeare is wrong. One of the colors that the blind-or at least this blind man-do not see is black; another is red. I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind. I wanted to lie down in darkness. The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine.

What makes ‘Blindness’ dystopian?

From the very first chapter, Saramago shows us what a blind world would look like. The first man that goes blind in a traffic jam is being helped by a man who offers to drive him home. Realizing that the man is blind, he steals his car. As the epidemic starts raging, people become more anxious, hot-tempered, and violent.

Finally, Blindness is a thought-provoking, philosophical novel about moral depravity that associates ignorance with a loss of the most valued sense. Blindness only confirms the secret once revealed by The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

@painting: Yashashri Rao – Mute and blind to the world (2019)

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