Blindness Novel

In the last days of last February, I had the opportunity to read the novel "Blindness" by the creative Portuguese novelist, José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although the novelist does not leave the reader a breather while reading his novel; Because he did not resort to detailed titles, and did not divide the novel into sections, but rather took the reader in an endless narrative in the interesting worlds of the novel, but the genius of the text, the continuity of the momentum and vitality of events, and the acquisition of the recipient tempts you to stay in the circle of wonderful excitement.

The protagonists of the novel are all from the ophthalmologist, his wife, the nurse, the taxi driver, the first blind patient and his wife, the cross-eyed child, his mother, the girl with dark glasses and her sex, to the hotel administrators and the waiter, to the old man who is blindfolded...etc. None of them bore a name, not even their dog, which accompanied the doctor's wife after being released from custody inside the walls of an unnamed psychiatric hospital. However, Saramago keeps you track of the dark tragedy that stormed a city or country with an emergency disease he called "Blindness White".

Here the novelist did not give a name either to the city, or to the state, as if he wanted to imply to the recipient that the phenomenon of white blindness can occur in the absolute of a city regardless of its name, the identity of its state, and its cultural status, in order to suggest to you that blindness may afflict you like his heroes, Blindness spread among them to the extent that it affected all its residents without exception, including doctors, nurses, the army, the police, ministries, institutions, merchants and professionals.. and every resident of the city except for one woman who kept seeing and telling about her husband and his blind partners the process of events, and she is the doctor’s wife, and he did not try to give There is a reason for this, and he did not allow or allow the doctor himself, who is an ophthalmologist, to strive or offer his reading of this exception.

The novelist created with his fertile imagination a world or a kingdom for the blind or blind in the special section of the mental hospital, whose number reached about 300 people, women, men and children, distributed among the rooms of the section, and food was brought to them by the soldiers assigned to guard the work to prevent the blind from going out or approaching From anyone, including soldiers, sergeants, and officers, because disease is contagious, and as a result of terror and fear of blindness, they had to shoot many inmates, shoot them dead, ask the blind to bury their dead, and provide them with a shovel and excavation tools.

The situation in the psychiatric department, which was designated for the blind, was miserable to the point of drunkenness, there was no clean water, and the bathrooms were the product of general blindness, and became infested with foul odors, and excrement filled the noses, because it was spread in the rooms, on the beds and in the corridors, and a gloomy situation added to the blindness another blindness more miserable and cursed, It increased the darkness of the place. And things did not stop at this point, but the world of the blind witnessed the spread of bullying, with a group of blind people with pistols and sticks imposing fraternity on patients in other rooms through their control over food cartons that reach everyone, and they announced a clear statement that every room that wants to get food is required of its inmates. First: Gather all their money, gold, watches, and valuables; Then they added something more inferior when they asked the women in each room to go to their room to sleep with them in exchange for some eating crumbs, which later prompted some of them to commit murders against the gang leader and his companions, and the operation was led by the doctor’s wife through the scissors, which she found in her handbag by chance, then Later there was a general rebellion by the inmates of the rooms against the remaining bandits.

And by sheer coincidence, after the completion of that gang, the doctor’s wife discovered when she went to get food that there were no guards, because they were all blind, and there was no guard left, and they circulated the news, so the majority went out in their clothes and misery, revolving in the streets in search of food, and they found that all the city’s residents They are wandering on their faces scattered in the streets and alleys, each group of them looking for food and water, and the shops and markets are open and looted by groups of the blind, so the city and its streets have become a noisy area full of excrement, the dead on the roads, stray dogs eating their corpses, and the unpleasant smells, mold and dampness added to the scene A mythical reality of blind tragedy, even the houses were stormed by others and lived in them in search of food, and the model of the blind old woman, the neighbor of the girl with black glasses, and how she took control of her family’s house, and she was eating rabbits and chicken raw to stay alive, which when she felt that Her life is coming to an end. She went out to the street carrying the key to the owner of the glasses' apartment. Perhaps she would come back and find the key to her apartment. Her corpse was a feast for the dogs, which devoured half of her weak and miserable body. The doctor buried her in the garden of the girl's house.

Saramago gave us the example of the writer who occupied the home of the blind man first, and how he used to write his blogs about the experience of blindness, and when he learned that the doctor's wife saw her student to describe to him the reality of confinement in the lunatic hospital department. Then he presented the return of the doctor and his wife, along with the main group of seven people: the blind person first, his wife, the girl with black glasses, the cross-eyed child and the old man to their home, and how he filmed the moment when it rained and the three women took advantage of the order to bathe in rain water naked, and the old man eavesdropped on them even though he did not see them.

One of the important scenes in the last section of the novel is how the community of the blind became pulpits for the eloquent and the clergy, who are now talking to their masses about piety, faith and the end of time. And how the woman with the only eyes saw the pictures in the church without eyes, or with eyes covered in white, as if the priest, the servant of the church, wanted to blind the pictures of the saints so that she would not see like the people of the city.

Finally, one night, while the doctor’s wife was reading them from one of the novels, suddenly, the first blind person cried that he was seeing blackness in his eyes, and the white blindness had disappeared, but gradually he cried out again and I began to see, and then the others gradually followed him, and thus the townspeople regained their sight.

I think that the novel “Blindness” is of great literary and artistic value, in which there is a great fertility of imagination, and I think that it spoke of a phenomenon that can be assumed to infect a society like the “Covid-19” epidemic or other epidemics, and the life cycle in society is disrupted, and the development process stops, People go back to the squares of the first time. Nevertheless, man was able to deal with the vocabulary and phenomena of the dark moment, despite all the complications, the human loss of life, and the emergence of social phenomena that they were not familiar with in the past in their lives, coexisting with them, and overcoming them according to their new standards. And the ingenuity of the writer Saramago is that he left the doctor's wife with her eyes to tell the plots and scenes of the novel, and the link between the beginning and the tragic end. He created an unfamiliar fairy world with his genius.