José Saramago's
Blindness is a portrait of humanity's devolution following an epidemic of “white blindness” in which everyone's vision is lost to “a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.” The only person who continues to see is the doctor's wife, and the story is largely about her and the small group of characters she oversees through the ensuing chaos. It is an engrossing book laid out in an unusual style: there are very few paragraph breaks, sentences are long and dialogue is enveloped not in quotations but by commas. In one sentence we might get an entire conversation between three people.
What most struck me about this book, though, was its handling of trauma during one of the most traumatic scenes of the entire novel: the mass rape scene, in which the doctor's wife and the women of her quarantine ward are forced to submit to a group of men in order to eat and provide the men of their ward (in some cases, their husbands) with food. Saramago closely chronicles the events with sickening detail up until the doctor's wife becomes directly involved (when she is forced to perform fellatio on the leader of the group). The paragraph ends with the following sentence: “She moved her head forward, opened her mouth, closed it, closed her eyes in order not to see and began sucking.” The next paragraph then begins with day breaking and the women being allowed to go. “For hours they had passed from one man to another, from humiliation to humiliation. From outrage to outrage, exposed to everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive.” In effect, a veil has been dropped over this night for the reader, as it is for the men waiting for the women to return to them. The women never talk about the details of that night.
I found myself getting angry about this. Of course it is relieving, as a reader, to not have to bear close witness to such a horrific scene. But on the other hand I couldn't imagine the doctor's wife skimming over what amounts to the worst night of her life. We the readers do not know what happened, the men who loved them were not there, but the women had to endure this prolonged rape that was apparently so bad that if the rapists had done anything more, they would have killed the women. In fact the assault
does kill one of the women.
In contrast, there is another horrific scene in which the doctor's wife kills a man, the leader of the group that has just raped her. “The scissors dug deep into the blind man's throat, turning on themselves they struggled with the cartilage and the mebraneous tissue, then furiously went deeper until the came up against the cervical vertebrae.” The height of the act, the killing itself, is given the most visceral description possible. It is followed by a complete chronicling of what happens immediately following the death, the flurry of women fleeing, the aftermath, and beyond. Later in the novel, when the characters all feel the pressing need to relieve themselves, Saramago writes that “however reluctant we might be to admit it, these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered, when the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example,” … “but when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent.” Saramago is certainly not one to shy away from the rank physicality of violence, a description of baser needs, or any other 'unsavory' subject. In fact, this latter sentence is key to understanding the novel, because what Saramago is investigating so brilliantly is humanity itself: what it depends on to exist, or whether or not it exists at all. He must show his characters in all stages of debasement in order to explore where humanity breaks down, and where it continues to strive.
So why did Saramago make this choice to drop back, when for the rest of the novel he stays in the scene so intensely in order to make his points? Didn't the doctor's wife have thoughts running through her mind as she was being raped and tortured? What reserve of strength did she rely on? How was she able to endure the pain? Saramago seems to expect us to imagine the horror, and in fact touches on this later in the novel. In a passage near the end of the novel, a blind writer (likely a foil for Saramago himself) briefly makes an appearance and asks the doctor's wife about all that she has seen. He remarks “how horrible” when she intimates, without going into any detail, just how awful it has been to bear witness to all the things no one else can see. “You are a writer,” she replies, “therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible”.... And indeed Saramago keeps adjectives to a minimum throughout the novel, allowing us to feel the despair and horror for ourselves. Yet in the rape scene we
can't imagine the horror in the same way because we are never given the full journalistic description of the events. They are summarized, which feels dismissive to me; as if we as readers are "let off the hook" from having to experience this direct trauma as we do with all their other direct traumas.
It seems for every writer and every reader there is a limit to what can and/or should be described. For instance, I couldn't finish
A Clockwork Orange—I was too disgusted. And maybe for most readers the depiction of the rape would have been too much. Maybe for Saramago himself it was too much. Or perhaps, as the doctor's wife says to her husband after the rape, “we are no longer the same women as when we left here, the words they would have spoken we can no longer speak.” In other words, perhaps Saramago felt there simply weren't words to describe what they endured. Because he so ably depicts all the other traumas it seems clear he made a conscious choice not to depict the details of the rape scene. And perhaps it is more truthful to not try to describe the devastation in words. But it is the one point in the book where we as readers are shut out—the only point—and I'm not sure it works, especially considering the style and viscerality of the book as a whole. As chilling, as brilliant as this book is, the rape scene is the one place in which I felt truly blind.
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