Blindness by Henry Green

He got up and groping towards the window opened it. As he did so there was a sudden lull in all the noise, he could only hear the clop-clop of a horse receding into the distance, and then mysteriously from below there floated up a chuckle; it was a woman and someone must have been making love to her, so low, so deep it was. He was on fire at once. Love in the street, he would write of it, love shouting over the traffic, unsettling the policemen, sweeping over the park, wave upon wave of it, inciting the baboons to mutiny in the Zoo, clearing the streets. What was the use of his going blind if he did not write? People must hear of what he felt, of how he knew things differently. The sun throbbed in his head. Yes, all that, he would write all that.

John Haye is a senior at an English public school. He's a little lazy--as we learn from the first thirty pages of the novel, which are in the form of John's diary--but of a literary bent, and prone to childish pranks as well as bookish sentimentalism. But his life changes forever when, on his way home, a stone thrown by a child shatters his window on the train, and he's permanently blinded. John returns home to his stepmother, a sort of local busybody who struggles with the idea that her stepson might become a burden to her, and who is appalled when he strikes up an attachment to Joan, the daughter of a local drunk and defrocked priest. The match is no good, though; Joan cannot give John the kind of new beginning he desires, and in the end, he and "Mamma" sell their country estate so that John can find his way as a blind man in the sound and fervor of London.

Entirely by accident, I seem to be reading a lot of first works lately. There was Gallant, then Didion, now Henry Green, who wrote Blindness while he was still at Oxford. Like those other books, it seems awfully weak in comparison to more "mature" books, but the incipient forms of a great author's style are fascinating to see. One of the strange feelings Green's novels generate is the sense of Is that all?, the feeling that you've read something in which nothing happens and whose shape is untraceable, because it was in the accumulation of details you missed while you were waiting for grand gestures. In Blindness that means the little details of country life that John may or may not have access to any longer, and which "Mamma" must feel are distinctly at risk. 

The novel's three sections are called "Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly," as if to signal that Blindness is a novel not about loss, but of becoming and transformation. Joan, the undereducated, slovenly priest's daughter, is a kind of false start in that transformation. John indulges in fantasies that she will give him a new life, one that consists of walking with him to his old favorite viewpoints and describing the view--something which, as it turns out, disinterests and bewilders her. John has Joan all wrong, preferring the version he makes of her in his head; he even mishears her name at first as "June" and refuses to call her anything else. Their interactions give the novel some particularly Green-like moments of humor, the kind that can be difficult to catch. "They seem to me so lasting," John says to Joan, regarding trees, "so grave in their fat green cloaks, or in winter like naked lace." To which she replies: "There, an' I've forgotten to feed the chickens."

Only at the very end, with the arrival of John and his mother at London, does Green's modernism start to show. He seems actually quite resistant to describing the experience of being blind, preferring Mrs .Haye's viewpoint, or Joan's, to John's, until John is listening to the street noise below. This noise both frightens and excites him; for the first time he feels as if his subjectivity as a blind person has given him a way of knowing or understanding that might not be available to other people. He ends the novel in what you might call a "vision," if it weren't such an inappropriate word: a mysterious moment of ascent and elation that he calls, in the letter that ends the novel, "a fit." Green is cagey about what it is that John is seeing at last, and perhaps at the novel's end John is only beginning to see it himself, but he describes the feeling as one of true "joy."

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are, said the doctor. And what about people, asked the girl with the dark glasses, People, too, no one will be there to see them...

A man is stopped in his car at a red light when his vision goes suddenly white. A good samaritan slips in the driver's seat and takes him home, but instead of parking his car nearby, he decides on the spur of the moment to steal it, only to go blind himself moments later. The first blind man goes to see an ophthalmologist, who is baffled by the condition--and then he, too, goes blind. Soon dozens are stricken by the "white sickness," and the government panics. The doctor, the first blind man, the car thief, and several others--all of whom remain identified in this way, without names--are quarantined in a dilapidated mental hospital where they are guarded by armed soldiers but otherwise left to fend for themselves.

I didn't really think about the fact that Blindness, like Pale Horse, Pale Rider and The Plague, is a piece of plague literature. It captures something true about our own pandemic even better than those other books: the way contagion makes other people objects of fear and hatred, and how this fact threatens the stability of social bonds. The second man to go blind was first charitable, then predatory; his blindness is the result of his interaction with the first blind man but it cannot be said that he went blind because he treated him kindly or cruelly. A pandemic, as we know all too well, complicates our understanding of good and evil, and how link these to causality:

It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves and ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.

Blindness is as chilling a dystopian novel as I've ever read. The conditions under which the blind are quarantined are remarkably vile: food is dropped off in a distant hallway and left to the blind to retrieve and distribute; hygiene and medical care are not provided; the stumbling blind are shot indiscriminately by terrified soldiers; they must bury their own dead--how?--and they are told that, in the case of a fire, their lives will not be saved. You might call that last one Chekhov's match. It's sort of funny in the year 2021 to think of the government taking a pandemic this seriously, but the "plan" seems to be to put a bottle on the problem and hope it goes away. Yet there is no severing the ties that bind people, another lesson we learned well when supply chains began to fail and essential workers bore the brunt of our fear in the spring of 2020.

The quarantined are essentially left to starve and die in their own literal filth. (For obvious reasons, the quarters begin to fill with human excrement.) A gang of thugs manages to sneak in a gun and command the distribution of food; when valuables run out they demand to be paid in rape. To show this, Saramago makes a clever choice: he lets one character see, the doctor's wife, who has lied and claimed that she has gone blind in order to stay with her husband. She becomes, to the extent that she can, a kind of seeing angel, guiding the small band of protagonists through the horrible gauntlet of blindness and squalor. When the hospital burns down, she is the one who guides the survivors through the harrowing landscape of a world in which everyone has gone blind.

Blindness is an antidote to the idea that a book can't be both literary and have a thrilling plot. I never believed that, but a bunch of Young Adult fans on Twitter seem to think so. I was fascinated by Saramago's style, which does away with sentence breaks and punctuation in favor of long run-on sentences governed by commas. It's frenetic and effective, though I suspect it should not be tried at home, and does a good job in this book at least of capturing the sense of chaos in which the newly blind find themselves.

Postscript: One of my new goals is to be better about reading international literature. I recently tallied up the number of countries from which I can say I have read at least one writer, and while I think I probably have done better than most, there are so many holes in my reading history. Saramago is officially the first Portuguese author I've read, so that's one more for the list!