In the strange and placeless world of José Saramago, there is no such thing as clear causation. People can spontaneously fall blind, cast a blank ballot in unintended complicity with 70 percent of the population, or collectively pretend history never happened, all without any reasonable explanation. With his latest novel, Seeing, Nobel laureate Saramago has transported us once again to the nameless, allegorical capital city that, in 1995's Blindness, fell prey to the terror of an inexplicable "white blindness." Set four years later, Seeing introduces us to a city that is the model of bureaucratic order; as the polls open on the day of municipal elections, the horrors of that near-universal blindness are now but an unspoken memory and city officials are expecting the election to proceed smoothly.

But this is a Saramago novel, and in a Saramago novel, nothing proceeds smoothly. As election day arrives in the midst of a torrential storm, the clerks at polling station fourteen wait nervously as, hour by hour, no voters appear. A sense of foreboding overtakes them, but they try not to lose faith in the voting populace. After all, as one official zealously proclaims, the voters "are the supreme defenders of democracy...without whom tyranny, any of the many tyrannies that exist in the world, would have long ago overwhelmed the nation that bore us." As it turns out, however, these particular voters have a strange idea of what it means to defend democracy.

When at last, as the rain dissipates, the citizens appear at the polls in unprecedented numbers, the ballot count reveals 70 percent of the ballots are blank. A re-vote ups the tally to 83 percent and with that, the city plunges into political upheaval.

It is no coincidence that the original Portuguese titles of the two novels translate, ironically, into "An Essay on Blindness" and "An Essay on Seeing"—Saramago is a writer who operates foremost on the plane of ideas. Yet where Blindness managed to mingle a chilling meditation on the barbarism lurking under the surface of civilization with a richly textured humanity, Seeing trades in abstractions. In an inversion of the classic rebel narrative, the first half of the book traces members of the government, watching their bumbling endeavors to restore order to the city. Unable to take the blank ballots at face value, the government reacts in extreme disproportion, declaring a state of emergency, then of siege as they flee the city in the hopes that the citizens will realize the extent of their dependence on the administration. Instead, however, life in the city continues without disruption, leaving us to wonder: are these really the same people that, four years earlier, were transformed into savages by the onset of blindness?

Although Saramago lodges his tale in allegory, the idea of a government that slides increasingly toward the authoritarian in the name of democracy can't help but feel familiar. And if the 2000 election didn't exactly involve blank ballots, the general voting-related havoc that ensues in Seeing carries with it some memory of chads and missing absentee ballots and all the stresses of that fateful November. Given how laden the novel is with the weight of the present, it is surprising how muted it is in its force. Even as the government reverts to terrorizing its own citizens in an effort to "restore" democracy, it is hard to find in Saramago's prose any genuinely felt sense of urgency. Rather, he keeps us at arm's length, preferring ironic distance to Blindness 's deeply felt tragedy. In a sea of characters as nameless as their city, the only voice that is immediately recognizable is that of Saramago's coy and sarcastic narrator, a sly presence who unabashedly exercises his control over the unfolding plot.

Lest the familiarity of this cautionary tale be taken too literally, it falls to this narrator to ensure (occasionally aggressively) that the novel remains within the realm of the fanciful. When at one point the narrator does suggest that his unknowable setting might, just might, be Portugal, he instantly hedges: "Men and women of Portugal, that last word we hasten to add," he disingenuously proclaims, "only appears due to the entirely gratuitous supposition, with no foundation in objective fact, that the scene of the dire events its has fallen to us to describe in such meticulous detail, could be, or perhaps could have been, the land of the aforesaid Portuguese men and women." These abrasive metafictional tangents, intended to reinforce the novel's allegorical underpinning, call attention to its suspended reality as nothing more than craft.

As a result, this uneasy unreality blunts the power of Saramago's ideas where, in Blindness, this same eerie unplaceability had leant the novel its universality. His landscape in Seeing manages to be simultaneously less mystical—it is a land of cell phones and televisions and the internet—and less recognizably our own, as Saramago never quite manages to resolve the inherent tension between allegorical generality and the necessary specificities of setting. What he wants to give us is not any real portrait, but a reduction of politics to its bare elements, the anatomy of a democracy at the height of its self-delusion. As three parties—efficiently named the party on the right, the party in the middle, and the party of the left—jostle for power (or, in the case of the former, struggle to maintain it) we, as readers, bear witness to the self-important blunders of a government in crisis. This gradual collapse of democracy should be worrying, but the government is too completely dislocated, geographically and otherwise, from the realities of the city, and so, as a consequence, are we. In a novel that seeks to penetrate the psychology of contemporary democracy, in its broadest, most universal incarnation, the plot is too insistently hypothetical to earn our investment as readers. The stakes just don't feel high enough.

As if sensing that he might be losing readers, Saramago exploits his narrator's willingness to exercise control over his readers to execute a massive authorial intrusion that sets the novel's second half on an abrupt new course—a retreat from the obscurity of allegory into the more familiar conventions of fiction. In violation of a tacit "national pact of silence" regarding the blindness of four years earlier, the minister of culture dares to draw a connection between the past blindness and figurative "blindness" of the blank votes. The analogy is as forced as it is arbitrary, but the government finds in it the political weapon they need to sink the population into shame over their actions. "[T]he comparison is crude and fallacious, as I would be the first to recognize" the president acknowledges, "and there are those who will reject it at once...but it is just possible that many people, and I hope they will soon become the overwhelming majority, will be convinced, will stand before the mirror and ask themselves if they are, again, blind."

Fittingly, it is only when Saramago revisits the plot and characters of his earlier, and more powerful work, that Seeing 's strained allegory is able to regain a degree of urgency. In an unlikely turn of events, and one whose narrative conceit Saramago, as usual, makes no effort to disguise, the doctor's wife from Blindness —the single person in the entire city not to lose her sight—becomes the government's chosen scapegoat when an anonymous letter reveals her secret (a letter, incidentally, that forces the narrator to be "unusually frank" and "confess that the had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale"—such are the manipulations to which this puppeteer of a narrator will subject his audience). With this new course appears a new character, the police superintendent, the closest Saramago comes to offering a traditional protagonist. The superintendent, like the doctor's wife in Blindness, becomes the novel's moral center—a pair of eyes in the this-time figurative blindness that grips the capital—as he strays from his duty in an effort to protect the doctor's wife from the schemes of the government. Why this sudden act of moral conscience? It comes in the form of a revelation without origin: "When we are born, when we enter this world," he explains, "it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf, well, I asked myself that question" (this sentence, like most of Saramago's sentences, is in fact half a page of dialogue running together without demarcation— his narrator seems also to have no problem demanding patience).

The arbitrariness of this proclamation gets at the heart of the novel's insufficiencies: the closest thing we get to "causation" is unapologetic narrative caprice. Saramago's project, it emerges, has as much to do with commenting on storytelling as it does on politics. In this regard, the superintendent's decision is his best weapon. By challenging the government's contrived attempt to force upon these blindnesses a common meaning, the superintendent issues a second, more significant, challenge to the allegorical construction of the story itself. He dismantles the possibility of false connections, of explanation, of any sense of meaning that might be derived from reading Seeing too heavily through the lens of the prior novel. It is a crafty device—this self-aware subversion of his own premise—but it is akin to narrative nihilism. Saramago knowingly exposes his allegory for being as hollow as we felt it to be all along, but provides nothing, other than the slightly more full-bodied moral integrity of the superintendent, in its place. If the title promises some form of concrete realization, a retreat from blind abstraction into the light, it turns out to be anything but. It ends with a smug bleakness that, rather than leaving us shaken, only leaves us cold.

 

Amelia Atlas '06 likes to pick fights about nineteenth century novels.