review
The City of the Blind (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira) is a novel by the Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. It describes the situation in a city where everyone is blind and shows how quickly civilization can fall away from people and what immense chaos can arise when people lose sight of each other and themselves. But a person can see, the ophthalmologist’s wife. As a guide for the blind, she suffers the most.
That’s how it begins
One day, in a certain city, a man stands at a traffic light and goes blind. It doesn’t turn black before his eyes, but white. The outside light goes out, as it were, and the inside light turns on. But nothing shows in the white light.
The man can no longer drive. The rest of the road users start to ring their horns angrily, until one of them approaches the desperate man and hears that he has become blind: “As if I am standing in the middle of a fog bank, or have fallen into a sea of milk. I see everything white.” He is taken to an ophthalmologist, but he is puzzled. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the man’s eyes. But after a while, the ophthalmologist himself becomes blind. More victims soon followed. The government fears an epidemic and decides to quarantine the sick and potentially infected people as soon as possible. The victims are taken to a former, and completely walled, insane asylum. The blind are placed in one wing, the possibly infected people in another wing. However, the number of blind continues to increase. The distinction between the wings has no meaning in the long run. The discharge to the insane asylum continues steadily. The government persists in this direction. Partly due to the overcrowding, very chaotic situations arise in the former madhouse.
Sober and with an iron logic
With iron logic and in a sober but ironic, reflective style, Saramago describes how civilization falls away from the people. In the madhouse, the toilets get clogged, but no one can or will fix them. The needs are being done everywhere and all the people are doing is making their way around the excrement. The food that is brought in is stolen by a group of blind people who soon get the name bastards. They want to be paid for the food. Not just with goods. Women, often on behalf of the group they are in, have to pay by presenting their bodies to the withers. Of course, too little food is always passed on. The people are weakening. Driven by hunger, horrific scenes arise. The dead are no longer buried and dogs feast on the rotting corpses. The guards’ only job is to keep the blind in. Commands are spoken through speakers. Everyone who ventures out is fired. The first person to die is the man who brought the first blind person to the ophthalmologist. After a kick in his shins by the girl in sunglasses, after bothering her, a stabbing wound occurred. At one point he runs out of pain and is shot. The actions of the guards, and therefore the government, are brutal. And completely pointless. The epidemic continues to spread, affecting the entire city. Over time, everyone in the city is bathed in a white milky light. People wander around blind in both the old madhouse and the city. Survival is the only goal. Nobody’s life is safe anymore.
No names
Saramago does not give names in his account. Everyone is identified by a short description: the ophthalmologist, the ophthalmologist’s wife, a squint, the girl with the sunglasses, and so on. He does not even distinguish between descriptions of a situation and the words spoken by people. There are no quotation marks in the book. A stylistic tour de force that works exceptionally well. It gives momentum to Saramago’s reflective style; it fits perfectly with the nature of the story. There is an eye for detail. The decisions people make are thoroughly described. Virtually nothing remains unexplained. They are philosophical considerations, but bound to the concrete and miserable situation in which people find themselves.
The ophthalmologist’s wife
The big exception in the story is the ophthalmologist’s wife. She is the only one who appears to be immune to the disease and retains her sight. As soon as she learns that her husband is going to be taken away, she feigns blindness to avoid leaving him. She succeeds and is taken away with her husband. She sees everything, even though the government does not know. Most blind people don’t know either. She jealously hides her secret. Only her husband and the few other people he and his wife were quarantined with together know. Below that is the first blind.
She soon becomes the guide of the group, but it does not bring her much luck. She sees the deterioration where others merely experience it. She does her best to save the members of her groups and tries to be humane where possible. However, the horrors she sees are so great that she herself wished to be blind. She also had to pay with her body for the food for her group. The second time that happened, she took measures. When the bastard came she stabbed him to death with scissors. Her sight had given her that power, but for her it also meant a descent into barbarism.
In the city
In the skirmishes after the murder of the bastard, the ophthalmologist’s wife and her group, which still consists of seven people, manage to escape the grip of the bastards. To their surprise, they discover that the madhouse is no longer guarded. They shuffle in the direction of the city and see enormous chaos there too. Wandering blind people wander among corpses in search of food, sometimes alone, sometimes as a group. Finding food is of course the main thing. Thanks to her still working eyes, her group finds a supermarket where a whole stock of food is still available. She’s dragging the food out. She descends on the street from fatigue and grief and cries. A dog licks up her tears. The dog will follow her throughout the story. But at least the group has to eat again afterwards. Eventually they end up in the house of the ophthalmologist, where everything is still reasonably in order. It will be a kind of home base.
The author
Saramago continues steadily and tells of countless barbarisms. Occasionally the group encounters someone who still has some humanity in them, but most have completely surrendered to the laws of survival. During their searches, the ophthalmologist’s wife arrives at the house of the first blind. It turns out to be a writer who, blind himself, writes about the epidemic and its consequences. The writer, Saramago himself, we may assume, tries like a blind man to understand the blindness, holding on to the facts of the epidemic, too; a clear reference to the structure and style of the entire book itself.
Everyone sees again
One day, out of sheer desperation, the ophthalmologist’s wife enters a church and is amazed to see that all the statues of the saints have a white cloth before their eyes. When she returns home afterwards, the first blind person regains his sight. The second to regain sight is the girl with the sunglasses. The rest will soon follow. Everyone can see again after a while.
With barely a word, Saramago mentions how people look back on what happened. He described the events like a blind man. Now that he sees it again, it is, perhaps, also impossible to understand what happened. During the story itself, the writer described not only the behavior of the blind, but also the reason for their behavior. Motivations and reflections on motivations are ubiquitous in the book. The ophthalmologist’s wife says towards the end of the story that people have always been blind. The fact that people can now see again, including the writer himself, does not really add anything to the story. What can be understood about blindness when one can see again?
Book details
- Title: The City of the Blind
- Original title: Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
- Author: José Saramago
- Date of original release: 1995
- Date of Dutch translation: 2011
- Dutch translation: Harrie Lemmens
- ISBN: 0-461-3022-3
- Publisher: JJ Meulenhoff, Amsterdam