Seeing
When seventy percent of the electorate cast blank votes on election day, national law decrees the election should be repeated eight days later. But the results of the second election are even worse: eighty-three percent of the votes are blank. This is the opening premise of Seeing, by Jose Saramago, a premise which briefly reminded me of a comic short story by Robert Coates in which “the law of averages” breaks down, leading to a lot of innocent confusion and pandemonium, such as uncontainable hordes swarming into a supermarket one day, but not a single customer the next. It's a mildly amusing concept, but not in Saramago’s hands. The week following the second failed election sees a totalitarian crackdown by the incumbent right wing government. The city is cordoned off with barbed-wire, the government decamps, and an investigation undertaken to discover the causes of the "plague of blank ballots." The investigation gets nowhere, until a tip-off draws the attention of the authorities to a woman who, four years ago, was miraculously unaffected by the epidemic of contagious blindness that swept the city. (To this extent Seeing is something of a sequel to Blindness, though the old characters have minor roles). The Interior Minister fronting the investigation, desperate for answers, right or wrong, decides that the woman is somehow responsible for the blank votes. He does not try to prove that a connection actually exists. Her guilt is presupposed, and a hit man, wearing a blue tie with white spots, is sent to eliminate her. All this is completely absurd, but whatever comic possibilities inhere in the bungling logic of the Interior Minister’s investigation (not to mention the irony of launching a totalitarian crackdown in defence of the democratic process) are chilled by the brutality that ensues. George Orwell once said that goose-stepping (that preposterous cancan-on-the-march where jackbooted soldiers throw their legs up at right-angles to the ground) is the ultimate symbol of totalitarian oppression because, “it is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.” So, in Seeing, is the absurdity made terrifying by crushing authority... There are a few faint embers in all this darkness (some ministers who resign, a humane superintendent of police) but they are soon extinguished. Unlike Blindness, the ending of Seeing is unremittingly dark; about as dark and bleak as Orwell's vision of the future as, "a boot stomping on a human face—forever."
I've heard a few people say they want to read Saramago but are put off by the way he writes. Anyone who has picked up one of his novels knows that he has an unusual prose style. Among other things that irk, he uses a comma followed by a capital letter where most writers would begin a new sentence, resulting in page-length “sentences” of concatenating comma-splices. It's hard not to see this as a literary affectation, a frivolous distraction that the reader has to patiently get around. But I guess Mr Saramago has his reasons. In her review of Seeing, Ursula Le Guin complained that, "It's hard not to gallop through prose that uses commas instead of full stops." Or is that the whole point, Are the commas intended to accelerate the narrative, Does he want us to read faster, Does he want us to feel the wind on our face? As it happens, I have noticed that it doesn't take me very long to finish his novels. And even if that doesn't explain his punctuation, it recommends his storytelling. |