Melissa Nicolas(UN)MARKING BLINDNESSIn José Saramago's novel, Blindness, the entire world, save for one character, succumbs to an epidemic of blindness over the course of a week or so. During this short time, the world devolves into post-apocalyptic chaos as the human race finds itself unable to find their own food, clean themselves, live in sheltered spaces, or act with much dignity. Many people give up on the world--on life--believing that all is lost. As the first blind man1 says, "If I have to stay like this, I'd rather be dead" (10). And later, the doctor's wife and the girl with dark glasses have the following exchange:2 "And suppose we were to stay like this for the rest of our lives, Us, Everyone, That would be horrible, A world full of blind people, It doesn't bear thinking about" (53). Throughout the novel, Saramago uses the blindness epidemic to explore the question: What happens when "normal" gets redefined as something that was once "abnormal?" In this essay, I explore a piece of Saramago's question by examining the ways in which the mental institution, so prominent throughout the novel, works as a site of inversion. As the novel opens, a man suddenly becomes blind. He calls his eye doctor and is examined on an emergency basis. Finding nothing wrong physically, the eye doctor sends the blind man home and spends the evening poring over his medical texts. The next morning, without warning, the doctor becomes blind. In quick succession, all the patients who were in the doctor's office when the blind man came in for the emergency visit become blind. As specialists and government agencies are called in to consult about these cases, the government decides it must isolate3 the already infected because they suspect the blindness–or "white evil" as it comes to be called (37)–against all common sense a medical knowledge, is contagious. As more and more people become blind, the frustrated government decides it cannot stop at isolation and institutes a mandatory quarantine for anyone who has come in contact with an infected person. Even though government agents decide that isolation/quarantine is necessary, they cannot bring themselves to confine the ill and soon-to-be-ill in a space that has any social or material value. Of the potential areas to house the detainees, the Minister4 and the President of the Commission on Logistics and Security quickly dismiss an army barracks, a building designed for a trade fair, and a supermarket (38). The army barracks, they believe, is too big to be monitored and secured, and the trade fair building has too much money invested in it. Using the supermarket would embroil them in "legal matters that would have to be taken into account" (38). In other words, the buildings that represent normal society–the army, trade and industry, and capitalism--cannot b e surrendered to those who, in at least the first days of the white evil, are still positioned as abnormal. The mental hospital, however, marked as a space for the abnormal in pre-blindness society, is agreed upon as an acceptable place to house the diseased. Historically, the mental asylum has been a place to hide people away from society, to punish those whose behaviors were not normal; to spare polite society from having to interact with those who were disagreeable, demented, or deranged in order to perpetuate normalcy for the benefit of the fortunate who got to control the narrative of what constituted mentally ill (see Foucault). Symbolically, in this novel, the placement of the infected and contagious blind people in the mental asylum is (yet) unaffected society's way of attempting to stay in control of the definition of "normal" in that society–i.e. being sighted. If those that are not sighted can be hidden away (thereby being unseen as well as being unable to see), the rest of society does not have to be confronted with the great horror an epidemic of blindness would mean. Using the mental asylum to manage and contain the blind allows society to conflate physical disability with mental disability, linking the physical and mental, implying that when the blind become blind they also lose some aspect of their ability to respond rationally, logically, and emotionally to their situation. Indeed, Saramago paints a grotesque portrait of what happens inside the mental asylum: people urinate and defecate wherever and whenever they want; corpses are left out in the open to rot; people steal food from each other; and, most heinously, the women are gang raped, and people are violently murdered. In other words, the mental asylum does become a space wherein normal behavior is upended and a new order based on fear and violence descends. In this way, the mental hospital becomes a liminal space where the rules of the sighted (read: normal) society are suspended and a new definition of "normal" based on the consequences of the white evil become the norm. Additionally, the segregation of the blind in a mental institution implies that the blindness might be all in their heads, a sort of group malingering, leading otherwise healthy people to suddenly become dependent, like infants. Of course, this dependency is not necessary. Rather, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the harsh conditions the government forces on the blind actually make the blind dependent, needy, and selfish, or worse. In one of the most chilling scenes in the novel, a violent all-male band of thugs gains control of the food delivery system in the asylum. At first they demand that all other inmates surrender what little valuables they have in exchange for a meager ration of food. Emboldened by their success in robbing their fellow inmates, the thugs next demand that all of the women be brought to them to be gang raped, sodomized, tortured, and otherwise sexually humiliated. While horrific in every way, the fact that these violent sexual acts occur in a mental hospital causes the detainees to rationalize the thugs' behavior as part of their new normal. After the first blind man starts to explain how surrendering the women for food is a loss of all dignity, he comes to despair,"[. . .] In reality he did not know what the point was, everything he had said earlier [about morals] had been no more than certain vague opinions, nothing more than opinions belonging to another world, not to this one [. . .] (170). Inside their new world of the mental institution, paradoxically, there is no organized system of policing or punishment. Instead, the blind must create, sustain, monitor, and police themselves without the benefit of societal structures that prop-up society outside the institution (under the old normal). This tension between the old normal and new normal is most evident in the character of the doctors' wife, the only character in the mental hospital who does not lose her sight. As such, within the asylum, she becomes marked, not because she is blind (old normal) but because she can see (new normal). Indeed, she spends much of her time in the hospital trying to "pass" as a blind person. When her husband the doctor, asks her why she is pretending to be blind (i.e trying to pass), they have the following exchange: "I'm staying here to help you and the others who may come here, but don't tell them I can see, What others, You surely don't think we shall be here on our own, This is madness, What did you expect, we're in a mental asylum" (40). The doctor and his wife acknowledge the absurdity of their situation when what was once considered normal–to be sighted–has changed positions with what is now a new normal–to be blind. The placement of the detainees in the mental asylum sufficiently removes the blind from the general population so that the blind do not have the ability to adapt to their new blind lives as people who are blind, nor do they have the ability to teach other newly blinded people what they have learned about being blind, nor can they start to rebuild a society based upon a new concept: blindness as the norm, sightedness as the marked category. In this way, the mental hospital both destroys and creates. The old world order, based on sightedness, is gone, and a new order, based on blindness is created. However, at least in the mental hospital, this new worlds is more terrifying than the old one, down to the most basic level of survival. In neither world, then, are the blind truly safe. At the novel nears its conclusion and the entire world has become blind, the detainees break free from the mental hospital. Once the world is blind, the mental hospital is no longer needed as a liminal space because a total inversion has occurred: the blind are now in charge; they will adapt and adopt to this new world order. However, just as soon as it seems possible that a new normal has been defined, people begin to regain their eyesight as quickly and as randomly as they lost it. When the last members of her group regain their vision, the doctor's wife goes blind. In the instant when she is about to become a member, again, of the dominant, unmarked group, her situation changes, and she once again becomes marked because of her difference. Saramago's use of marked and unmarked categories brings into sharp relief the ways in which the categories of dis/ability (both mental and physical) and ab/normality are both defined and reified while at the same time being liminal and fluid. The mental hospital, as a liminal space, is the site where the lines between what was, what is, and what might be become blurred as the detainees and the people who detained them wrestle with defining and accepting a new world order.
Works Cited Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965. Saramago, José. Blindness. Orlando: Harvest Book, 1995. Notes (1) None of the characters in the book are given formal names because, as the man who stole the car
explains, "we're so remote from the world that any day now we shall no longer know who we are, or even
remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us " (57).
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