Blindness (Vintage classics)

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Douglas Silva as an onlooker. Silva has previously acted in many Meirelles films, including the 2002 film City of God.

Theme: Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy; Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience; Biological Needs and Human SocietyIn 1998 Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature with the prize motivation: "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." [21] We could certainly think of many other books that depict our troubled times. But Blindness goes beyond the experience of recent years to offer an incisive description of our human condition and shortcomings in general. It paints a vivid and disturbing picture of our reality and our attitude towards life on this planet, past and present alike, and especially when applied to the near future, when climate change will strike us mercilessly.

Like Benjamin, Saramago opens up an ongoing and never-ending process of deconstruction and re-construction of meaning, a continuum of translations and transformations. It is only in this way that we may call Blindness and Seeing allegories. They are allegories that deconstruct, and ultimately deny, any metaphysical meaning—a denial that, in turn, points us to Saramago’s atheism. As is the case with Sartre, as long as we don’t accept atheism as paradigmatic of Saramago’s works, we will never fully understand his thinking. Raimundo Silva inserts his “not” in a volume on Portuguese history because he decides to reject the official history that the Templars helped the Portuguese conquer the city of Lisbon in medieval times. He finds it necessary to introduce a mistake, or what can be considered a mistake from a certain perspective, because he wants to provoke a shift of attention. Turning in a blank ballot is a signal unfamiliar to most Britons and Americans, who aren't yet used to living under a government that has made voting meaningless. In a functioning democracy, one can consider not voting a lazy protest liable to play into the hands of the party in power (as when low Labour turn-out allowed Margaret Thatcher's re-elections, and Democratic apathy secured both elections of George W Bush). It comes hard to me to admit that a vote is not in itself an act of power, and I was at first blind to the point Saramago's non-voting voters are making. I began to see it at last, when the minister of defence announces that what the country is facing is terrorism. Bloom, Harold (2003). Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-52717-3. Saramago was a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, [10] and in his late years defined himself as a proponent of libertarian communism. [7] He ran in the 1989 Lisbon local election as part of the "Coalition For Lisbon," and was elected alderman presiding officer of the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon. [30] Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition in all elections of the European Parliament from 1989 to 2009, though he ran for positions of which it was thought he had no possibility of winning. [30] He was a critic of European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. [9]

His fledgling José Saramago Foundation is poised to move into new premises. Speaking through a translator, he says the aim is to "bring a new dynamic to cultural life in Portugal". The foundation's director is Saramago's wife of 20 years, Pilar del Rio, a journalist who is now his Spanish translator. This was, of course, a quest for a wider understanding of things, but it also had a political impact. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ had been censored by the Portuguese government of the time, which removed Saramago’s name from a list of nominees for the European Union Prize for Literature in 1992. In the aftermath of the following polemic, Saramago decided to leave Portugal and start a new life on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands—he would later describe Lanzarote as his personal “Stone Raft,” in allusion to his novel of the same name published in 1986. But in another essay, written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1988, Saramago had already made clear that this shift away, first from Portugal, then from Europe, had begun very early in his life. Accepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself "the apprentice", said: "The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures." The doctor and his wife invite their new "family" to their apartment, where they establish a mutually supportive long-term home. Then, just as suddenly as his sight had been lost, the driver – the first man to lose their sight – recovers his sight, indicating that the body had fought off the disease, and that the blindness is ultimately temporary. They celebrate and their hope is restored. a b "Nobel Writer, A Communist, Defends Work". The New York Times. 12 October 1998 . Retrieved 18 June 2010.

In 2007 the Drama Desk Award Winning Godlight Theatre Company [4] staged the New York City theatrical premiere of Blindness [ citation needed] at 59E59 Theaters. This stage version was adapted and directed by Joe Tantalo. The First Blind Man was played by Mike Roche. [5] [6] Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained a member until the end of his life. [17] He was a self-confessed pessimist. [18] His views aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. [19] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus and particularly God as fallible, even cruel human beings. Portugal's conservative government, led by then-prime minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, did not allow Saramago's work to compete for the Aristeion Prize, [9] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries. [20]Bloom, Harold (15 December 2010). "Fond Farewells". TIME. Archived from the original on 19 December 2010 . Retrieved 15 December 2010. At the same time, though, Saramago tries to avoid moralization and the creation of dogmatic doctrines. He was an admirer of Montaigne, but not of Francis Bacon; and like Montaigne, he lets his readers make their own associations and reach their own conclusions, enabling the development of their own thoughts and viewpoints. Finally, precisely because he was a political essayist, Saramago has always been severely criticized by conservatives and the church. Just as Montaigne’s essays were placed on the index in the 16 th century, an essayistic novel by Saramago was censored at the end of the 20 th century. Meirelles was drawn to Blindness (republished this month by Vintage) by the novel's vision of "how fragile our civilisation is, and how easily it can collapse". Yet for Saramago, "I don't see the veneer of civilisation, but society as it is. With hunger, war, exploitation, we're already in hell. With the collective catastrophe of total blindness, everything surfaces - positive and negative. It's a portrait of how we are." The crux is "who has the power and who doesn't; who controls the food supply and exploits the rest". Conditions degenerate further as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to violent assault, rape, and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees battle each other and burn down the asylum, only to discover 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. Pires, Filipe. “Os provérbios por detrás da escrita em In Nomine Dei, de José Saramago. / Proverbs Behind the Writing in José Saramago’s In Nomine Dei”. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs, 2 to 8 November 2020, at Tavira, Portugal, edited by Rui J.B. Soares, and Outi Lauhakangas, Tavira: Tipografia Tavirense, 2021, pp. 361-394.

Meritt, Stephanie (30 April 2006). "Interview: Still a street-fighting man". The Observer . Retrieved 30 April 2006. It is curious that the titles of some key Saramago novels have been domesticated in English translation: Essay on Blindness has become Blindness; Essay on Lucidity has become Seeing. Saramago once said that he would have liked to be an essayist, but that he didn’t feel prepared for the role. Still, all his novels are essayistic: they represent interventions in reality, seek to be paradigmatic, and do not seek refuge in allegory. Saramago suffered from leukemia. He died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life in Lanzarote, Spain. [23] His family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Río on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and died. [24] The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation", [23] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction". [5] Kelly, Brendan (2008-07-15). "Toronto unveils Canadian selection". Variety. Reed Business Information . Retrieved 2008-07-25. Saramago emphasizes that narratives can function as survival mechanisms and help people achieve freedom from oppression. In the hospital, the blind internees “pass the time” by telling stories, which allows them to reclaim their humanity and individuality in an environment where they otherwise seem homogeneous. Later, when the first blind man and the man’s wife visit their old apartment, they find a blind writer living there. This man goes on writing, even though he cannot read his own work, because this is how he preserves his “voice” and maintains his identity during the blindness crisis. While everybody else is desperately wandering the streets, focusing on little besides food and seeking meaning through religion and politics, the writer maintains his decency and composure inside, using narrative as a means of survival.Honeycutt, Kirk (2008-05-18). "Film Review: Blindness". The Hollywood Reporter. Nielsen Company. Archived from the original on 2008-05-17 . Retrieved 2008-05-20.