"Seeing" By Jose Saramago
The New York Times/Book Review
April 9, 2006
Every Nonvote Counts
Review by TERRENCE RAFFERTY
JOSÉ SARAMAGO is 83 years old and a Nobel Prize winner, and therefore has some claim to be thought of as a wise man. He does not wear his wisdom lightly. The third-person voice of his new novel, "Seeing," has a lordly garrulousness, a self-assurance bordering on the pontifical and a willful capriciousness that God himself might envy. And it's just a shaggy-dog story.
Which, in a sense, Saramago's stories always are. His characteristic method is to take a fanciful, what-if? sort of premise, follow its possible ramifications for 300 pages or so and then, as if by fiat, declare the story finished. In the invigorating "Blindness," for example, Saramago imagines an epidemic of sightlessness that afflicts (with one exception) every resident of an unnamed city and then passes as mysteriously as it came. "Seeing" takes place in the same nameless city in the same unspecified country (which Saramago coyly suggests might even be his native Portugal), four years after the blindness plague, and begins, again, with the sudden onset of an inexplicable mass phenomenon — this time political rather than physical, but equally resistant, as it happens, to all known remedies.
The new ailment reveals itself rather gradually. On a rainy election day, practically no one goes to the polls until 4 in the afternoon, and then everybody seems to arrive at once; when the ballots are counted, almost three-quarters turn up blank; after a week of governmental consternation, the elections are held again, on a perfect sunny day, and the results are actually worse — 83 percent of the voters have not marked their ballots. This communal exercise of what the narrator calls "the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion" does not sit well with the authorities; one cabinet minister refers to the electoral blank-out as "a depth charge launched against the system." The collective silence of the electorate naturally suggests a conspiracy to the (right-wing) government, yet, maddeningly, no crime has been committed; and the protest movement, if that's what it is, resolutely refuses to turn violent, despite the state's frantic efforts at provocation and the news media's hopeful predictions of impending catastrophe.
It's a fairly witty conceit: a city full of Bartlebys, politely preferring not to do what is expected of them and generating, through simple negation, absolute panic in the corridors of power. For a while — a longish while — Saramago has bitter fun with the spectacle of a government raging impotently against the utter indifference of its subjects. Unlike "Blindness," which focuses on a small group of victims of the epidemic, "Seeing" in it
s first half concentrates on the official responses to the crisis. The ruling party declares a state of emergency, then a state of siege; it deploys agents of the secret police to spy on citizens, then to haul them in for interrogations and lie-detector tests; and when none of those measures work, the wily prime minister decides to pull the entire apparatus of government out of the capital and leave the people to fend for themselves, on the theory that the resulting anarchy will return the prodigal voters to their senses and ultimately to the stern but reassuring paternal embrace of the state. Again the populace fails to cooperate: life in the capital remains peaceful and orderly, as if no one had even noticed that anything was missing.
Saramago, crafty old lefty that he is, understands that ridicule is a terrifically effective political weapon, and in "Seeing" he makes it his business to turn repression into farce. Underlying everything is a nice mordant joke about the gamesmanship of Western democracy: the "blankers," as the stubborn nonvoters are called, are quiet and even docile, just the way a government ordinarily likes its citizens to be, but their refusal to pretend that the electoral process gives them a choice worth making is deeply subversive — an unpardonable sin, a flagrant foul.
The drawback to this brand of political humor is that it has a tendency to turn smug and self-satisfied, and Saramago, I'm afraid, is not immune to that affliction. (His superb translator, Margaret Jull Costa, nails his tone with a precision that verges on self-incrimination.) Although "Seeing" is full of cleverly constructed satiric set pieces — notably, a long cabinet meeting that brilliantly captures bureaucracy's intricate choreography of infighting, fawning and hairsplitting — the magisterial sarcasm of the narrator's manner is, not to put too fine a point on it, awfully tiresome. Readers might, in fact, be inspired by the novel to exercise some passive resistance of their own: to decline, that is, to go on with a story whose outcome seems somehow predetermined, even rigged.
As if sensing that the mood of the readership could be turning a little sullen, Saramago prudently rethinks his tactics halfway through the book. Earlier, the ex cathedra narrative voice had been interrupted, occasionally, by stutters of self-consciousness, like an aside acknowledging that his readers might be unhappy with his inattention to physical detail: "as if," he writes, "the characters in the story inhabited an entirely insubstantial world, were indifferent to the comfort or discomfort of the places in which they found themselves, and did nothing but talk." (It's perhaps worth mentioning here that, as in "Blindness," the people in "Seeing" have not been blessed with names.) This disarming admission earns Saramago some good will and may keep a few flagging pilgrims following him on the dry, dusty, featureless road we've been traveling, but inevitably our resolve begins to weaken again, and he finally recognizes that drastic measures may be called for. About midway through, he throws up his hands and starts to write a novel.
By this I mean a more or less traditional novel, with the bourgeois virtues of suspense and character development, and even a hero of sorts. Saramago announces this "change of direction" in a digression that awkwardly combines sheepishness and defiance, suggesting that the question of the inevitability of this new course is ultimately unanswerable: "Unless, of course, the narrator were to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale. . . ." (The sentence goes on awhile, as Saramago's sentences do, but that's the gist.)
What precipitates the shift is, appropriately enough, a change of strategy proposed by the increasingly desperate prime minister: "We will say that the blindness of those days has returned in a new guise, we will draw people's attention to the parallel between the blankness of that blindness of four years ago and the blind casting of blank ballot papers now" — a comparison he admits is "crude and fallacious," but thinks could be useful in manipulating public opinion.
It proves, in the event, extraordinarily useful to José Saramago, enabling him to reintroduce sympathetic characters from "Blindness," to invent a very likable police detective to investigate them and, not incidentally, to deconstruct any "crude and fallacious" metaphorical interpretations of either this peculiar novel or its more cogent predecessor.
A neat trick: only a canny professional like Saramago could pull it off. And maybe only an octogenarian Nobel Prize winner, racing to the finish line of his distinguished career, would be shameless enough even to try. He ends up with a much better book than he seems to have started out to write, but in the end "Seeing" is merely a sequel to a popular work — the sort of product that gives movie producers a bad name and does not generally win points for wisdom.
A wise man would have left most of the pages of the novel's first half blank. What saves Saramago in "Seeing" is not his righteousness but his low cunning. When that simple human quality appears here, it is — maybe to his own surprise, as much as to his readers' — a sight for sore eyes.
Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies."
April 9, 2006
Every Nonvote Counts
Review by TERRENCE RAFFERTY
JOSÉ SARAMAGO is 83 years old and a Nobel Prize winner, and therefore has some claim to be thought of as a wise man. He does not wear his wisdom lightly. The third-person voice of his new novel, "Seeing," has a lordly garrulousness, a self-assurance bordering on the pontifical and a willful capriciousness that God himself might envy. And it's just a shaggy-dog story.
Which, in a sense, Saramago's stories always are. His characteristic method is to take a fanciful, what-if? sort of premise, follow its possible ramifications for 300 pages or so and then, as if by fiat, declare the story finished. In the invigorating "Blindness," for example, Saramago imagines an epidemic of sightlessness that afflicts (with one exception) every resident of an unnamed city and then passes as mysteriously as it came. "Seeing" takes place in the same nameless city in the same unspecified country (which Saramago coyly suggests might even be his native Portugal), four years after the blindness plague, and begins, again, with the sudden onset of an inexplicable mass phenomenon — this time political rather than physical, but equally resistant, as it happens, to all known remedies.
The new ailment reveals itself rather gradually. On a rainy election day, practically no one goes to the polls until 4 in the afternoon, and then everybody seems to arrive at once; when the ballots are counted, almost three-quarters turn up blank; after a week of governmental consternation, the elections are held again, on a perfect sunny day, and the results are actually worse — 83 percent of the voters have not marked their ballots. This communal exercise of what the narrator calls "the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion" does not sit well with the authorities; one cabinet minister refers to the electoral blank-out as "a depth charge launched against the system." The collective silence of the electorate naturally suggests a conspiracy to the (right-wing) government, yet, maddeningly, no crime has been committed; and the protest movement, if that's what it is, resolutely refuses to turn violent, despite the state's frantic efforts at provocation and the news media's hopeful predictions of impending catastrophe.
It's a fairly witty conceit: a city full of Bartlebys, politely preferring not to do what is expected of them and generating, through simple negation, absolute panic in the corridors of power. For a while — a longish while — Saramago has bitter fun with the spectacle of a government raging impotently against the utter indifference of its subjects. Unlike "Blindness," which focuses on a small group of victims of the epidemic, "Seeing" in it
s first half concentrates on the official responses to the crisis. The ruling party declares a state of emergency, then a state of siege; it deploys agents of the secret police to spy on citizens, then to haul them in for interrogations and lie-detector tests; and when none of those measures work, the wily prime minister decides to pull the entire apparatus of government out of the capital and leave the people to fend for themselves, on the theory that the resulting anarchy will return the prodigal voters to their senses and ultimately to the stern but reassuring paternal embrace of the state. Again the populace fails to cooperate: life in the capital remains peaceful and orderly, as if no one had even noticed that anything was missing.Saramago, crafty old lefty that he is, understands that ridicule is a terrifically effective political weapon, and in "Seeing" he makes it his business to turn repression into farce. Underlying everything is a nice mordant joke about the gamesmanship of Western democracy: the "blankers," as the stubborn nonvoters are called, are quiet and even docile, just the way a government ordinarily likes its citizens to be, but their refusal to pretend that the electoral process gives them a choice worth making is deeply subversive — an unpardonable sin, a flagrant foul.
The drawback to this brand of political humor is that it has a tendency to turn smug and self-satisfied, and Saramago, I'm afraid, is not immune to that affliction. (His superb translator, Margaret Jull Costa, nails his tone with a precision that verges on self-incrimination.) Although "Seeing" is full of cleverly constructed satiric set pieces — notably, a long cabinet meeting that brilliantly captures bureaucracy's intricate choreography of infighting, fawning and hairsplitting — the magisterial sarcasm of the narrator's manner is, not to put too fine a point on it, awfully tiresome. Readers might, in fact, be inspired by the novel to exercise some passive resistance of their own: to decline, that is, to go on with a story whose outcome seems somehow predetermined, even rigged.
As if sensing that the mood of the readership could be turning a little sullen, Saramago prudently rethinks his tactics halfway through the book. Earlier, the ex cathedra narrative voice had been interrupted, occasionally, by stutters of self-consciousness, like an aside acknowledging that his readers might be unhappy with his inattention to physical detail: "as if," he writes, "the characters in the story inhabited an entirely insubstantial world, were indifferent to the comfort or discomfort of the places in which they found themselves, and did nothing but talk." (It's perhaps worth mentioning here that, as in "Blindness," the people in "Seeing" have not been blessed with names.) This disarming admission earns Saramago some good will and may keep a few flagging pilgrims following him on the dry, dusty, featureless road we've been traveling, but inevitably our resolve begins to weaken again, and he finally recognizes that drastic measures may be called for. About midway through, he throws up his hands and starts to write a novel.
By this I mean a more or less traditional novel, with the bourgeois virtues of suspense and character development, and even a hero of sorts. Saramago announces this "change of direction" in a digression that awkwardly combines sheepishness and defiance, suggesting that the question of the inevitability of this new course is ultimately unanswerable: "Unless, of course, the narrator were to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale. . . ." (The sentence goes on awhile, as Saramago's sentences do, but that's the gist.)
What precipitates the shift is, appropriately enough, a change of strategy proposed by the increasingly desperate prime minister: "We will say that the blindness of those days has returned in a new guise, we will draw people's attention to the parallel between the blankness of that blindness of four years ago and the blind casting of blank ballot papers now" — a comparison he admits is "crude and fallacious," but thinks could be useful in manipulating public opinion.
It proves, in the event, extraordinarily useful to José Saramago, enabling him to reintroduce sympathetic characters from "Blindness," to invent a very likable police detective to investigate them and, not incidentally, to deconstruct any "crude and fallacious" metaphorical interpretations of either this peculiar novel or its more cogent predecessor.
A neat trick: only a canny professional like Saramago could pull it off. And maybe only an octogenarian Nobel Prize winner, racing to the finish line of his distinguished career, would be shameless enough even to try. He ends up with a much better book than he seems to have started out to write, but in the end "Seeing" is merely a sequel to a popular work — the sort of product that gives movie producers a bad name and does not generally win points for wisdom.
A wise man would have left most of the pages of the novel's first half blank. What saves Saramago in "Seeing" is not his righteousness but his low cunning. When that simple human quality appears here, it is — maybe to his own surprise, as much as to his readers' — a sight for sore eyes.
Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies."
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