Lecture Notes, Saramago:

1. Jose Saramago, brief bio.

Born: November 16^th, 1922 in Portugal

Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon, and he left high school early to work.

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998—first Portuguese writer to win the prize.

2. Fable, definition.

• a story that points to a moral
• a story where readers search out the meaning that exits beyond the (literal) story
• a story that often times uses personified animals
• a story, historically from an oral tradition, where wisdom is handed down

3. During his Nobel Prize lecture in 1998, he wrote:

“Blind. The apprentice ( Jose Saramago) 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.”

Saramago, Jose. “How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice.” Nobel e-Museum. August 16, 2004 http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1998/lecture-e.html.>.

4. General questions to consider while reading Blindness.

ü Is the story realistic?

ü Why is it important that the disease is blindness?

ü What is the relationship between the individual and society?

ü If the story is a fable, what are the moral implications of the story?

ü What is the wisdom of the story?

ü What is the purpose of asylums?

ü Does it matter that the reader never discovers the cause of the epidemic?

ü What does the novel tell us about how societies are formed? What different societies exist within the story?

5. Discussion quotes.

“The lights had already changed again, and the drivers further back who did not know what was going on, protested at what they thought was some common accident, a smashed headlight, a dented fender, nothing to justify this upheaval” (2).

“No need, intervened a third voice, I’ll take charge of the car and accompany this man home” (3).

“This zeal suddenly struck the blind man as being suspect, obviously he would not invite a complete stranger to come in who, after all, might well be plotting at that very moment how to overcome, tie up and gag the poor defenseless blind man” (5).

“What do you mean nothing, Nothing, I always see the same white, it’s as if there were no night” (9).

“The doctor will come up with some remedy, you’ll see, I shall see” (10).

“He took advantage of your confusion and distress and robbed us, And to think I didn’t want him in the flat for fear he might steal something yet if he had kept me company until you arrived home … I’d give a year of my life to see this rogue go blind” (11).

“…he congratulated himself amidst his despair that he was still capable of formulating a rational thought” (12).

“On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was nothing more that obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone knows, are the two best traits of human nature” )16).

“…this blindness is white … a white darkness” (20).

“…if we consider the circumvolutions of the human mind, where no short or direct routes exist, these same words end up by being absolutely clear, what she meant to say was that she had been punished because of her disreputable conduct, for her immorality, and this was the outcome” (27).

“In fact, a blind ophthalmologist is not much good to anyone, but it was up to him to inform the health authorities, to warn them of this situation which might turn inot a national catastrophe” (28).

“…if is should turn out to be an epidemic, measures must be taken” (30).

“She took him firmly by the arm and said, Come along, love” (31).

“This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice” (32).

“Agreed there is no proof of contagion” (33).

“The woman calmly replied, You’ll have to take me as well, I’ve just gone blind this very minute” (36).

“The suggestion had come from the minister himself…all the people who had turned blind, as well as those who had been in physical contact or in any way close to these patients, should be rounded up and isolated so as to avoid any further cases of contagion” (37).

“The word Attention was uttered three times… we are relying on the public spirit of cooperation of all citizens to stem any further contagion …The Government is fully aware of its responsibilities … leaving the building without authorization will mean instant death … the internees must organize themselves as they see fit” (42-3).

“The girl with dark glasses said, I meant well, but frankly, doctor, you are right, it will be a case of everyone for himself” (46).

“And they were carrying no luggage” (59).

“…he knew that the poor devil was badly injured in one leg, he was generous enough to add, He’s been punished enough” (61).

“He’s a doctor, an eye-specialist, That’s a good one, said the taxi-driver, just our luck to end up with the one doctor who can do nothing for us, We’re also landed with a taxi-driver who can’t take us anywhere, replied the girl with dark glasses sarcastically” (62).

“The blind internees all turned their heads in the direction of the door and waited. They could not see, but knew what was about to happen within the next few minutes. The doctor’s wife, seated on the bed beside her husband, said in a low voice, I had to be, the promised hell is about to begin” (67).

“All their watches had stopped, either they had forgotten to wind them or had decided it was pointless, only that of the doctor’s wife was still working” (71).

“I’ve heard that’s what they do to those condemned to death, if they’ve got appendicitis they operate first and execute them afterwards, so that they die healthy” (72).

“It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt” (78).

“The blind learn quickly how to find their way around, the sergeant said confidently” (80).

“The army regrets having been forced to repress with weapons a seditious movement responsible for creating a situation of imminent risk, for which the army was neither directly nor indirectly to blame…We were not to blame, we were not to blame” (84).

“…but who can say that this white blindness is not some spiritual malaise, and if we assume this to be the case, then the spirits of those blind casualties have never been as free as they are now, released from their bodies, and therefore free to do whatever they like, above all, to do evil, which, as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do” (85).

“Moreover, some of the inmates from the second ward, with more than reprehensible dishonesty, tried to give the impression that there were more of them than there actually were” (88).

“We have buried our dead, Well, if you’ve buried some, you can bury the rest, replied a man’s voice from within” (90).

“We shall go mad with horror, he thought” (92).”

“There are many ways of becoming an animal, he thought, this (becoming dirty) is just the first of them. However, he could not really complain, he still had someone who did not mind cleaning him” (93).

“If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals, words she repeated so often that the rest of the ward ended up by transforming her advice into a maxim, a dictum, into a doctrine, a rule of life” (116).

“Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind” (129).

“Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of blindness” (133).

“They will eat whatever the others decide to give them, as the saying rightly goes, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (141).

“Well, I’m not entirely convinced that there are limits to misfortune and evil” (144).

“And so from bed to bed, the news slowly circulated round the ward, increasingly distorted as it was passed on from one inmate to the next, in this way diminishing or exaggerating the details, according to the personal optimism or pessimism of those relaying the information” (150).

“No great fortunes were discovered, but some watches and rings came to light, mostly belonging to men rather than women” (165).

“After a week, the blind hoodlums sent a message saying that they wanted women” (166).

“It wasn’t mush of a loss, she was no great shakes, said the doctor’s wife” (186).

“The blind are always at war, always have been at war” (193).

“[I]t is clear that here no one can be saved, blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone” (209).

“I cannot say, wait patiently, there are groups out there, if anyone tries to come in, tell them the place is occupied, that ought to be enough to send them away, that’s the custom now” (224).

“Come in, come in, make yourselves comfortable” (249).

“You cannot hope to guide or provide food for all the blind people of the world” (252).

“Especially if I don’t look for it in the grocer’s, she thought, surprising herself that she was still capable of joking even in this situation” (273).

“If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls” (276).

“Now nobody can read them, it is as if they did not exist” (290).

“It is a great truth that says that the worst blind person was the one who did not want to see” (298).

“The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s understanding them, said the doctor” (301).

“The were extolling the virtues of the fundamental principles of the great organized systems, private property, a free currency market, the market economy, the stock exchange, taxation, …, prisons, the penal code, the civil code, the highway code, dictionaries, the telephone directory, networks of prostitution, armaments factories, the armed forces, cemeteries…” (310-11).

“The doctor’s wife said to her husband, You won’t believe me if I tell you what I have in front of my eyes, all the images in this church have their eyes covered, How strange, I wonder why” (317).

“The doctor’s wife got up and went to the window. She looked down at the street full of refuse, at the shouting, singing people. Then she lifted her head up to the sky and saw everything white, It is my turn, she thought. Fear made her quickly lower her eyes. The city was still there” (326).