José Saramago’s Allegories of the Human Condition

In this Delve, we will read Portuguese Nobel-laureate José Saramago’s breathtaking novel, Blindness (1995), focusing in particular on the concept of “community.” The novel posits the trope of community as an ethical imperative when the human condition has become utterly wretched. In a nameless city, contaminated by a sudden white blindness, the only inhabitant who is spared takes on the task of alleviating the suffering of her companions. By forming a new kind of community, she strives to give back their human dignity. At the breakdown of the social order, the author invites the reader to rethink community as a question, rather than a preconceived idea. You will explore Saramago’s dense, fascinating prose with his idiosyncratic use of punctuation, lack of character names, and an omniscient narrator whose voice conveys a dark humor and the tragic at the same time. Blindness has film, drama, and opera adaptations. Saramago wrote a sequel to this enigmatic allegory, Seeing (2004), that Ursula Le Guin coined as “the plague of blank ballots.” Although the latter starts as a political satire, it picks up the themes and actors from the earlier one. Here, too, we will discover, how Saramago investigates the human existence between horror and hope, evil and good. If our seminar frame allows, you might embark into reading the sequel after completing Blindness.

Texts
Blindness by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999.
Seeing by José Saramago translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.

First Assignment before February 6 meeting:

‘Blindness,’ pp. 1-50 (it includes 4 sections)

Access Program
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