BLINDNESS

Author: José Saramago
Year: 1998 (1995)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

In Olga Tokarczuk’s short story “Seams” (in the short story collection “Tales of the Bizarre” reviewed in January 2020) a man wakes to discover subtle but uncanny alterations in his world. Socks that suddenly have seams, stamps that are now round instead of square, the familiar blue ink in his pen inexplicably replaced by brown. Socks aren’t supposed to have seams, are they? These small deviations from the expected unravel his sense of stability. He is bewildered, but those around him find nothing unusual. For them, round stamps and brown ink are the natural order of things. Through these quiet distortions, Tokarczuk exposes how fragile the category of “normality” really is, how dependent our sanity and social coherence are on countless unnoticed details that we assume to be permanent. If such trivial shifts can destabilise us, how deep are our roots in what we call reality? How thin is the membrane separating order from chaos?

José Saramago’s “Blindheten” (“Blindness”) poses this question on a catastrophic scale. Whereas Tokarczuk’s protagonist falters before the dissonance of socks and stamps, Saramago strips his characters of sight altogether, and with it, the entire apparatus of modern life. The sudden epidemic of blindness tears through an unnamed city, dissolving the seams that hold civilisation together. Law, government, decency, even the simplest routines of cleanliness or trust collapse within days. If Tokarczuk reveals the precariousness of order in miniature, Saramago demonstrates its total implosion. Civilisation, it seems, is not an edifice of stone but a scaffolding of habits, agreements, and illusions that threatens to collapse at the slightest tremor.

Among the many who stumble through the blindness, two figures form the novel’s most striking contrast. As all other characters they remain nameless: the doctor’s wife and the girl with the sunglasses. They appear at first as opposites. The doctor’s wife embodies middle-class respectability, a figure of family stability and conventional decency. The girl with the sunglasses, a part-time sex worker (not by financial necessity but by sexual promiscuity) belongs to the margins, shielding herself from social stigma behind her tinted lenses. Yet in the moment of disaster, their paths converge, and in their juxtaposition Saramago reveals two poles of human response to catastrophe: one grounded in responsibility and altruism, the other in intimacy and rediscovered dignity.

SPOILER ALERT

The doctor’s wife, uniquely spared from blindness, steps out of her prominent husband’s shadow and becomes the group’s reluctant leader. Her immunity to blindness is never explained. It is allegorical, a reminder that to see is not only to perceive but to bear responsibility. She becomes a kind of inverted panopticon. In Foucault’s famous image, the one who sees from the central tower exerts power over the many who are seen. Yet here, the doctor’s wife does not discipline but suffers. Her vision is a burden. She alone must clean the excrement-covered ward, lead the group through chaos, bury the dead, and carry the memory of all she witnesses. Seeing, for her, is not empowerment but an ethical wound, an obligation to act when others cannot. For this reason, she keeps her ability a secret from the others.

The girl with the sunglasses undergoes a transformation of another sort. Stripped of the markers of her profession, she is no longer defined by society’s hypocrisy. Her beauty, once a commodity, becomes irrelevant; her sunglasses, formerly a mask against judgment, lose their function in a world where no one sees. In their place emerges a person of compassion and tenderness. She nurses the old man with the black eyepatch with a love that is untainted by transaction, discovering an intimacy that had eluded her in her previous life. If the doctor’s wife embodies the pain of clarity, the girl with the sunglasses embodies the possibility of moral vision even within blindness.

Together, they lay bare the thinness of the veneer that Thomas Hobbes diagnosed centuries earlier. In “Leviathan” (reviewed in April 2022) Hobbes warned that without strong institutions, life reverts to a brutish war of all against all. Saramago stages this collapse with merciless precision. Within days, the quarantine asylum devolves into violence, hoarding, and sexual exploitation. Food becomes currency, women are traded like rations, cruelty and cowardice reign. Western civilisation, so confident in its legal codes and humanitarian principles, is revealed as the emperor’s new clothes. It rests not on unshakable foundations but on such invisible seams as agreements, routines, shared perceptions, and as Hobbes would argue, the fear of repercussions. Once sight is lost, the seams disintegrate.

And yet, the novel resists cynicism. For even within this Hobbesian nightmare, solidarity flickers. The doctor’s wife shoulders responsibility without succumbing to domination. The girl with the sunglasses discovers dignity in love rather than passion. Together, they sketch the possibility of a different humanity: one not guaranteed, but latent beneath the collapse. Saramago suggests that civilisation’s scaffolding may be fragile, but within the rubble there are still gestures of recognition and care that refuse to be vanquished.

The ending offers no easy redemption. Sight returns arbitrarily, just as it was lost. We may assume that civilisation will be rebuilt. The city remains there. But whether it will be less blind than before remains doubtful. The doctor’s wife, still sighted, has seen too much to trust in renewal. The girl with the sunglasses, by contrast, carries the fragile hope that love discovered in blindness might persist into sight. Between them, they frame the paradox of the human condition: responsibility and compassion, burden and intimacy, clarity and fragility.

Saramago’s novel may be a provocative accusation against the weakness and baseness of man, but it is without a doubt a triumph for literature. His prose flows like an unbroken current, lyrical, ironic, and humane, where his long sentences carry profound truths, while his short ones either prick or punch in just the right spot as is necessary. And it seems that when one looks at the world of today, one may feel a little like Tokarczuk’s protagonist wondering about abnormal seams. We used to berate liars, didn’t we? Fascism used to be a bad thing, didn’t it? One would be forgiven for entertaining the idea that in order to open certain minds to the truth, they first need to be gently pricked… or in some cases, forcefully punched.

THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

Author: Salman Rushdie
Year: 1999
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)

Not long ago I found myself in a conversation with a friend on the subject of Salman Rushdie. She confessed with the charming candour which is the privilege of the truly well-read, that although she had cultivated a respectable level of acquaintance with post-colonial literature, she had not as much as brushed against a single page of Rushdie’s writing. My own first encounter with the author’s name was in 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a bitter old fart with a singularly unamused temperament, issued a fatwa, a vengeful prize on Rushdie’s head, thinly veiled as a religious obligation.

I was then thirteen years old and recall* that Sweden’s indignation, apart from condemning the cleric’s barbarous decree, was triggered by the meek response by the Swedish Academy, which is the college of intellectuals who, among other duties, elect the yearly Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Some years later, at the questionable intellectual maturity expected from an Upper Secondary School student, I finally came across the book that had vexed the ayatollah to the point where he reduced himself to a petulant child: The Satanic Verses. I bought it, read it, and I loved it.

Those acquainted with my reading habits, will be aware that I am a most unfaithful reader. Even with the authors I profess to adore, I rarely commit to more than one or two titles before curiosity of new ideas and new minds fling me onto the hunting path for the next name. Rushdie, however, is one of the rare exceptions of writers that I gladly read again and again. After conversing with my friend on the subject, I was overcome by a craving for Rushdie’s writing. I reached for “Marken under hennes fötter” (“The Ground Beneath her Feet”) which had been collecting dust in by bookcase long enough and merely a few pages in concluded, that it was bound to meet with all of my expectations.

Rushdie is one of the most erudite writers in the post-war era who comfortably commands the particulars of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, music, literature, and art among many other fields. To imbibe his prose is to experience that rare sensation of learning while one admires, and admiring while one rejoices. Not merely a man of infinite knowledge, but equally importantly of a magical ability to craft his characters and tell his story.

“Marken under hennes fötter” dramatises the instability of identity in a postcolonial world where the ground beneath the self is perpetually shifting. Through the intertwined lives of the introvert artist Ormus Cama, the extrovert diva Vina Apsara, and the melancholic observer Rai, the novel stages how colonial histories and global cultural flows fracture, hybridise, and creolise personal identities.

Ormus Cama embodies the diasporic artist who cannot be contained by national or cultural boundaries. Born in Bombay yet perpetually oriented toward elsewhere, he channels songs from a parallel world, suggesting that his creativity itself is transnational and borderless. His identity is never rooted in one cultural context but always fluid and in motion, making him emblematic of the postcolonial subject who finds both possibility and alienation in cosmopolitanism.

Vina Apsara is constructed as both a person and a mythic icon. Her fame and sexual charisma transform her into a commodity of global culture, consumed through images and stories. For her, identity is a performance staged across multiple audiences, from India across Europe to the Americas, each demanding a different version of her. She epitomises the postcolonial predicament of being seen not as a coherent self but as a projection of the desires of others, whether they stem from colonial fantasies, mythic archetypes, or pedestrian clickbait journalism.

Rai, the narrator-photographer, wrestles with identity through mediation. As a Parsi in India and later as an exile in the West, he experiences marginality and unbelonging, which he manages by constructing narratives and images. His photographs reveal that identity in the postcolonial context is always framed, never raw, captured through lenses shaped by history, politics, and personal longing, personalised, although not necessarily internalised.

Together, these three figures show that in Rushdie’s postcolonial universe, identity is not essence but fabrication: a shifting collage of myths, histories, and performances, precariously balanced on unstable ground. Rushdie’s depiction of fluid, fabricated identities resonates with Anthony Giddens’ account of identity in late modernity. For Giddens, the self is no longer grounded in tradition but must be “reflexively” constructed through ongoing choices, narratives, and relationships. Similarly, Rushdie’s characters live without essentialist anchors, improvising selves from fractured cultural inheritances and unstable geographies. Where Giddens emphasizes the individual’s responsibility to “keep a coherent story going,” Rushdie complicates this with myth and tragedy, suggesting that personal identity, though fabricated, is also subject to forces—earthquakes, media spectacles, colonial legacies—that resist individual control.

By bowing to Rushdie’s compelling argument and acknowledging the malleability of the terrain wherein we so desperately try to set our roots and feign stability, we must realise that the ground is moving not only under her feet, but also under our own.

It is my humble proposition, that the sole reason that the Nobel Prize in Literature has not yet found its way into Salman Rushdie’s prize cabinet, which already contains the Booker Prize, The PEN Golden Award, The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, several honorary doctorates, and a knighthood, is the Swedish Academy’s embarrassing history with the author. It is not unreasonable to suspect, that bestowing this honour on him now would bring back to the limelight the obeisance to the Iranian ayatollah as unbecoming to men of taste as their silence was to men of wit. The Academy’s recent scandals surely reinforce their hesitation. How much more splendid then, to seize the occasion to right an unfortunate wrong and to save itself from the eternal disgrace of having ignored one of the finest writers of our age.

 

* I furthermore recall Margaret Thatcher saying in an interview that she did not even find the book particularly well-written.