The city of the blind (novel)

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The City of the Blind (in the Portuguese original “ Ensaio sobre a cegueira ”, literally “essay on blindness”) is a novel by José Saramago that was published in 1995.

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The action begins at an intersection when a driver suddenly goes blind. Little by little, the same fate overtakes everyone who was in his immediate vicinity. There is no explanation for the sudden blindness of so many different people, let alone a cure for the disease.

As blindness worsens, the perplexed government quarantines the sick in an abandoned madhouse to prevent further spread. They are guarded by soldiers who have orders to shoot anyone who flies. Although there is neither clean water nor functioning sanitary facilities, the situation is initially bearable due to the small number of internees. But in the outside world more and more people are going blind and the institution is filling up. The filth soon piles up and aggression and violence prevail, culminating in a group of blind people taking control of the food supply in order to materially and physically exploit the other inmates.

In the middle of all this chaos, there is a woman who can see. She only faked the blindness in order to be able to accompany her husband, who is a doctor. But she does not reveal this for fear of being made a servant and helps in secret where she can. It is she who, after a period of oppression and exploitation, kills the leader of the criminal gang, which triggers a regular war that ends with the institution burning down.

At first, the blind fear for their own lives, as the soldiers guarding them have already shot several of them. But there are no more guards. The sighted woman gathers a small group with whom she goes back to town. In the meantime everyone has gone blind, inhuman conditions prevail, and dirt is piling up on the streets. There is no longer any electricity or running water, and crowds of blind people are desperately looking for food and shelter. Many of them perish. The woman succeeds in ensuring the survival of the group with her eyesight. Completely surprisingly, the first blind driver to get his sight back. Little by little everyone can see again.

Adaptation and continuation

Specialty in style

First of all, it is noticeable that direct speech is not indicated by quotation marks or otherwise, but is woven into the text (a procedure that the author uses in many of his texts).

The text is divided into a few chapters, these have no numbers or headings, the beginning of the chapter can only be recognized by the first words in bold. Paragraphs are very rare within the chapters. This creates a large continuous text area (it is equivalent to the large unstructured white area that the blind "see").

Situations and actions are described in a complex way: the obvious is questioned, motivations of the characters discussed, medals presented with their flip side, proverbs and folk wisdom used for explanation and description. With these means the text tries to approximate the description of reality (like a blind man who tries to understand what he is dealing with). In many cases, the author does not take a clear position, but leaves it to the reader to form an opinion about the people involved. Despite the very drastic, existential plot, Saramago also develops humor - sometimes a black humor, sometimes shrewd folk shrewdness. The purpose of the humorous sprinkles should be to balance the reader a little, after all, long stretches of the text in their drastic nature are hardly bearable.

The skillful play with the narrative perspective is striking. Large passages are characterized by a personal narrative perspective , preferably from the perspective of the only sighted person . If necessary, the narrator also slips into other people - for example, if they are closer to the scene than the doctor's wife. Further passages come from the first-person perspective, a few even from a we perspective. Then the reader is included in this "we". Finally, there is also space for an authorial narrator, whereby Saramago does not write as an “omniscient narrator”, the authorial narrator must explain to the reader why he knows some things and from which sources he draws his knowledge.

In addition, no name is mentioned in the entire novel, neither one of the persons, nor the city, the country, etc. This feature strengthens the anonymity of the blind compared to the other blind from the perspective of the reader. At the same time, the author's claim to want to tell a universal story is made clear.

Interpretative approach

The text can be read as a response from Saramago to The Plague by Albert Camus .

At Saramago, blindness is a metaphor for the inability of humans to distinguish between good and bad. Saramago speaks of the "blindness of the heart" several times. This becomes clear, for example, in this passage: "... please don't ask me what is good and what is bad, we always knew when blindness was still an exception ...". Saramago does not give an explicit answer to the question raised in the entire text, but takes a clear position in favor of the victims of arbitrariness and tyranny. A second component of blindness is the helplessness and defenselessness it emanates. Towards the end of the text, the doctor ponders that only "organization" will help: "... the body is also an organized system, it is alive as long as it is organized, and death is nothing but the result of a disorganization." The first blind people begin to think about some kind of social organization, but before one of the considerations has to prove itself in practice, all blind people are miraculously able to see again.

First edition

literature

Individual evidence

  1. "The City of the Blind" ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Bavarian Theater Academy @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.theaterakademie.de
  2. p. 335, José Saramago: The City of the Blind. 11th edition, Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2003 (Rororo 22467), ISBN 3-499-22467-4
  3. ^ P. 360, José Saramago: The City of the Blind. 11th edition, Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2003 (Rororo 22467), ISBN 3-499-22467-4