Reviewed by Gustavo Perez Firmat
Sunday, June 4, 2006; BW04
SEEING
A Novel
By José Saramago
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
Harcourt. 307 pp. $25
When is a revolution not a revolution? It's a rainy election morning in the city that, only four years earlier, had been afflicted by an epidemic of blindness, and no one has shown up at the polls. Although election officials worry that a boycott is underway, by late afternoon the voters begin to trickle in. Once the ballots are counted, however, more than 70 percent of them are blank. A week later, the election is repeated, with even more alarming results: Now 83 percent of the ballots are blank. Smelling an insurrection, the prime minister and his cabinet go into emergency session. What follows in this, José Saramago's 12th novel, is an often hilarious and sometimes gripping exploration of the inept (but brutal) workings of power, as well as of the almost accidental capacity for heroism of simple men and women.
A sequel to his earlier novel Blindness , Seeing is less explicitly allegorical than its predecessor. In the first novel, as the city's sightless residents descend into thuggery and rape, the blindness of unreason reveals the savagery beneath the crust of civilization. In this novel, blindness is replaced by blankness, a paradoxical form of civil disobedience that does not disturb the peace or break any laws. The people have simply expressed their will not to choose.
From the government's perspective, however, the number of blank ballots amounts to an assault on the foundations of democratic rule -- "a depth charge launched against the system," as the minister of defense puts it. Since neither surveillance nor interrogations get to the bottom of the rebellion, the prime minister declares a state of siege in the city. Soon after, white flags begin to appear everywhere. Normally they would signal capitulation, but in the trompe-l'oeil world of Seeing , the banners betoken yet another act of defiance (in Portuguese, "blank" and "white" are the same word). An even more draconian measure follows: To punish the protesters, the government withdraws from the city, anticipating that chaos will erupt. But no: People go about their business as usual -- and this (paradoxically again) reinforces the government's belief that something is terribly wrong. As one official puts it: "A city like this, with no one in charge, with no government, no security, no police, and no one seems to care, there's something very mysterious going on here."
Readers of Saramago will find much here that is familiar: the notion that truth is nothing more than the lies of the powerful; the small, piercing insights into human nature (in one delicious moment, an underling thrills at being allowed to use his boss's toilet); the hard-won wisdom that says life is what it is, but we don't have to like it. As in his other recent novels, Saramago tells the story in massive, sparsely punctuated paragraphs that blend description with dialogue and do not mark off one speaker from the next -- a mode of narration that, as he has pointed out, is meant to be heard rather than read but that sometimes can be disconcerting.
The first two-thirds of Seeing , with its endless councils of craven ministers and aloof bureaucrats, cannot but remind one of Kafka, to whom Saramago has often been compared. (The difference is that Saramago is a lighthearted Kafka, one more likely to make us laugh than grimace.) Yet once we leave the halls of power to follow an anonymous policeman back into the city, Kafka gives way to Capra as the narrative shows us how, in extraordinary times, ordinary people can find within themselves untapped reservoirs of courage. Asked why he refuses to go along with the plan to turn an ophthalmologist's wife into the scapegoat for the blank ballots, the policeman replies with words he read in a book somewhere: "When we are born, when we enter this world, 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."
Although Saramago's dense, garrulous prose -- masterfully rendered in Margaret Jull Costa's translation -- may not be to everyone's taste, the clarity and compassion of his vision make Seeing worthy of its name and its author. ·
Gustavo Pérez Firmat is David Feinson Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of "Scar Tissue," a memoir in prose and verse.
