The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
José Saramago · Ensaio sobre a Cegueira · a novel · Editorial Caminho, Lisbon, 1995 · scored on Saramago’s Portuguese, read from knowledge, with Giovanni Pontiero’s English (1997) for sense; no text in hand, and Portuguese quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Allegorical novel: a parable of a plague worked through with realist consequence; philosophical tale, catastrophe narrative and ethical fable in one narration
Mythos
A visitation on a nameless city: the one who sees as servant and guide, the asylum as an inferno, the city as a waste land, a church whose images have covered their eyes, and a return of sight with no god in it
Phase
From a car stopped at a green light, through the internment in an empty asylum under armed guard and the burning of the building, to the blind city and its search for food and shelter, and sight returning in the order in which it was lost
Presentation
Fiction; told in the third person by an ironic narrator who addresses the reader; no character has a proper name; dialogue without quotation marks, speakers divided by commas and each new voice begun with a capital; paragraphs that run for pages; an epigraph from an invented Book of Counsels
Register
From the level, ironic narration and its proverbs to the plain speech of the blind, the terror of the forecourt and the ward of the gun, and the grace of the balcony in the rain
Scale
Seven or eight people, a whole city with no name, and the ministries, army and quarantine of a state that confines it
Governing Proposition
A man waiting at a traffic light goes blind at the wheel, and his blindness is white; it passes from person to person until a whole city has lost its sight, and the state confines the first cases in an empty mental asylum under armed guard, where one woman, the doctor’s wife, who has kept her sight and has said she is blind to go in with her husband, watches a ward of blind men with a gun seize the food and demand first the inmates’ valuables and then the women. The wager of the novel is that a fable with no names, no dates and no country, followed with realist consequence, can show what the civil order rests on and what remains when it goes: a tyranny that copies the state on a smaller scale, and the care that forms around the one who sees and stays.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens at a crossing in a city that is never named. The light turns green, and the car in front does not move: its driver has gone blind at the wheel. His blindness is not dark. He sees white, a luminous milky field, as if his eyes were open on a light with nothing in it. He is the first blind man, and he is never called anything else. Before the story begins the book has set down its epigraph, from a Book of Counsels that the author invented: “Se podes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara.”
“If you can look, see. If you can see, notice.” The counsel is the book’s argument in two sentences: to look is not yet to see, and to see is not yet to notice.
No one in the book has a proper name. The people are named by condition or relation: the first blind man and his wife; the doctor, an ophthalmologist, and the doctor’s wife; the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the old man with the black eyepatch; the car thief; and later a dog, the dog of tears. The city has no name, nor the country, nor the year. The blindness passes from the first blind man to others, and from them to more, and no cause is given for it. A reader meets these people as the blind come to meet one another, by voice and by what they do, and each becomes what the catastrophe makes of them.
The voice that tells all this is the narrator’s, ironic, humane and present, and the sentences it tells it in are long. Clause follows clause joined by commas; speech, thought and narration run in one current; a proverb, a correction or a question to the reader is set into the same stream. Dialogue carries no quotation marks. Speakers are divided by commas, and each new voice begins with a capital letter, so that the reader must listen to know who speaks, and sometimes cannot tell. Paragraphs run for pages. The page itself withholds the rest of white space, and the reader enters the book as its people enter their condition, sorting voices without the marks that would sort them.
Movement II
The blindness spreads, and the state acts. Its first act is confinement. The first cases, and those who have been near them, are taken to an empty mental asylum and held there under armed guard, and the ministries and the army keep them from the city they came from. The doctor is among them. His wife has not gone blind, and to go in with him she says that she has. From then on she is the one witness inside the building: she can see what the others cannot, and she must decide what to do with what she sees.
The soldiers outside fear the contagion. When the blind come too near, they fire, and the dead lie in the forecourt. The wards fill. Food comes, and it is short; the inmates go hungry, and there is filth that no one can clear, and there is waiting. The order the state has made for the blind is an order of fear, enforced with guns on people who cannot see them, and it is the first thing the book shows the state do.
The asylum is long, and its length is the book’s argument. The degradation has to be endured in time, through the filth, the hunger and the waiting, before what follows can carry its weight. Here the narrator’s proverbs and asides are at their densest, commenting on what the reader is made to sit through, and some of them say more than the scene needs. Here too the form does its closest work. Without names and without the marks that set speech apart, the reader is in the ward with the blind, sorting voices in a dark that is white.
Movement III
A ward of blind men with a gun takes the food. They set a price on what they hand out. First it is the inmates’ valuables, weighed against rations, jewellery and money given up for bread; then, when the valuables are gone, it is the women. The tyranny the state set up around the asylum is set up again inside it, on a smaller scale, by the strong among the weak, with food as its currency and women’s bodies as its tax. What the soldiers do at the gate, the men with the gun do in the ward.
The women decide together to go. Their night in the ward of the gun is told with a restraint that makes it nearly unbearable: the sentence does not look away from what is done, and it refuses spectacle without refusing the facts. Then the walk back, and the women washing one another. Here the book’s counter-law first appears, in the middle of its worst: care, given by those who have themselves been used.
The doctor’s wife goes to the ward of the gun with a pair of scissors and kills its leader. She kills once, and the book holds the act as what it is, the right to kill claimed by the one who sees. Then the building burns. The blind feel their way out through the fire into the forecourt and the street, and find that no one is guarding them any longer, because there is no one left who can. The whole city is blind. The asylum had been the state’s answer to the blindness, and the state has gone the way of everyone else.
Movement IV
Outside, the city is a waste land. The blind look for food and for somewhere to sleep, in streets where no one keeps order. The doctor’s wife leads her small company through it, a family of strangers formed around a guide, and she carries what she sees as a burden. In a supermarket she finds the door to a basement storeroom, goes down into the dark and comes back with food. Later that basement is found full of the dead.
She weeps, and a dog comes and licks the tears from her face; the narrator names it by that act, the dog of tears. In the rain, on a balcony, three women wash in the downpour, and the scene rises to a kind of joy, the first the book has allowed. The company reaches shelter, and then the doctor’s flat. In the first blind man’s flat they find a writer living, who has gone on writing in the dark.
In a church every image has its eyes bandaged. The saints have been blindfolded, so that the sacred order the city kept has covered its own eyes. The church is the book’s crux. The proverb says that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king; the book’s one sighted woman is no king but a servant, and the images that were to watch over the city cannot see it.
Movement V
Sight returns as the blindness came, without a cause given, and in the order in which it was lost. It is told quickly, after so much patience. The city that can see again is the same city it was, and the people in it are those who did what the book has shown. Whether the restored city has learned anything, the book does not say.
Near the close its last proposition is said aloud: they did not go blind, they are blind. “Cegos que, vendo, não vêem.”
“Blind people who, seeing, do not see.” The sentence answers the epigraph. The Book of Counsels asked the reader to pass from looking to seeing and from seeing to noticing; the white blindness made the failure of the first step visible, and the return of sight restores the looking without promising the rest. The moral is stated here, not found, and it is the book’s own judgment on what it has shown.
The last image is the doctor’s wife at the window. She looks up and sees only white, and fears that the blindness has come for her at last; she looks down, and the city is there. The book gives its last look to the one who kept her sight through all of it, who saw what was done and did not look away, and it leaves open whether the white overhead is a threat or a release. The first blind man lost his sight among the instruments of an ordered city, and the doctor’s wife keeps hers above a ruined one, and both obey the same law.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the design resists it. The premise is one proposition worked through in order: a city goes blind, the state confines the first cases, the confinement becomes a tyranny within a tyranny, and the city outside, once all are blind, is a ruin that a few must learn to live in. Each stage is required by the last. The asylum is long, and its length is the argument: the filth, the hunger and the waiting must be endured in time before the women’s night with the ward of the gun can carry its weight. The dog of tears, the church and the writer in the first blind man’s flat each make one turn. What holds the axis is the narrator: some of the asides and proverbs, and some of the city’s middle passages, add commentary rather than necessity, and a few could go without the knowledge changing.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the civil order rests on an attention that can be withdrawn in days; when it is withdrawn the state’s first act is to confine the weak and shoot them, and the strong among the weak set up the same order again on a smaller scale, with food as the currency and women’s bodies as the tax. The book shows it by action: soldiers firing on the blind who come too near, the ward of the gun weighing rations against jewellery and then against women, the women deciding together to go. It discloses the counter-law as well, care, in the one who sees and stays and in the women who wash one another. The pandemic of 2020 made its first half literal. Held below the top because that half was known before, and the moral blindness is stated more than found.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The dreadful sublime, frequent and high, with a second register of grace. The first blind man at the green light, seeing only white. The soldiers’ volleys into the forecourt. The women’s night in the ward of the gun, told with a restraint that makes it nearly unbearable, and the walk back. The scissors. The fire in the asylum, and the blind feeling their way out into a city where no one guards them. The basement storeroom of a supermarket, and later that basement found full of the dead. The church, where every image has its eyes bandaged. Against the terror, three women washing in the rain on a balcony, which rises to a kind of joy, and the dog that licks the tears from the doctor’s wife’s face. Held off the summit because the narrator’s irony and the long, level sentence keep the heights at a slight distance, by design, and the return of sight is told quickly.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The book is a parable in the old sense: a visitation, like a plague of Egypt, falls on a city with no name and on people who have none, so that each becomes the figure of a condition. The proverb that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king is turned inside out: the one who sees is a servant and a guide, a woman who leads the blind out of the house of bondage and through a wilderness, carries what she sees as a burden, and kills once. The asylum is an inferno with its circles, the city a waste land, and the church with its blindfolded saints is the crux, a sacred order that has covered its own eyes. The return of sight is a resurrection with no god in it. The particular stays particular, in the numbered wards, the bread, the shoes. Held short of the top because some of the archetype is pointed to by the narrator rather than found in the action.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the plague narrative, from Thucydides and Defoe to Camus’s La Peste, the philosophical tale of Voltaire, and Saramago’s own manner, formed fifteen years before: the long sentence, the dialogue run into the narration and the ironic narrator who speaks to the reader were already in Levantado do Chão (1980) and Memorial do Convento (1982). The turn is real, and it is a turn within his own work: from the historical novel, Portugal’s past rewritten, to an allegory of the condition with no names, no dates and no country. The stake was real too: a novelist of history staked his next book on a bare fable of degradation. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the instrument was already his and the allegorical road had already been travelled, so that the turn is of matter more than of means.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Without names, each person is what the catastrophe makes of them, and the reader must learn them by voice and relation, as the blind learn one another. Without quotation marks the voices run together, and the reader must listen, sort and sometimes fail to tell who speaks: the form puts the reader in the ward, in a dark that is white. The long paragraph refuses the rest of white space, as the inmates are refused rest. The narrator, ironic and humane, sees what no one inside can, and stands where the doctor’s wife stands, the one witness who can see and must decide what to do with it. Given names, inverted commas and a chaptered realism, the book would be a well-made catastrophe novel. Held off the top because the method is Saramago’s general method, not invented for this knowledge, and some of the commentary sits outside the form’s work.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and thirty-one years of it. The readings multiply without cancelling: a political allegory of the state of exception and the camp, read beside Agamben; a book of women’s labour and women’s bodies, in which the women carry the care and pay the tax; a parable of the memory of the Portuguese dictatorship, or of no country at all; an ethics of witness; a text of the medical humanities; and, after 2020, a book of contagion and quarantine reread around the world. Its questions stay open: why she alone keeps her sight; what the blindness is and why it ends; whether the restored city has learned anything; whether the last look, up at the white and down at the city, is a threat or a release. Held below the top because the allegory states its moral, so some of its yield lies on the surface, and three decades are a short test.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the novel in Portuguese and, beyond it, the late twentieth-century novel in translation. The force is limited: the book did not reorganise the possibilities of the novel, since its means were Saramago’s already and its allegorical form had been Camus’s. What it did was show that the philosophical fable could still hold a large readership at the end of the century, in a manner that refused realism’s names and dates. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the most widely read of Saramago’s books, followed three years later by the Nobel Prize; translated into many languages, filmed by Fernando Meirelles in 2008, staged and taught; a template for the novel of contagion and collapse that has recurred since; and a world readership for Portuguese fiction it had not held since Pessoa. Reach is the larger part, and it is a reach of reading more than a redirection of how novels are written.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is shown over thirty-one years. The text survives whole, as published. Its presence has been continuous and international, in print in Portuguese and in translation throughout, and it was renewed in 2020, when readers around the world returned to it and the book showed that it had outlived the conditions that produced it. Its surface is as little fixed to its moment as that of any book of its years: no brands, no technology to date it, no named country or decade. What holds the axis is the span alone. Three decades demonstrate less than four, and far less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen. It stands at the bar of the gate, the figure its span and its undated surface together carry.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Saramago’s Portuguese, whose structural means Pontiero’s close English carries whole. The command is of the long sentence: clause on clause joined by commas, speech, thought and narration in one current, the narrator turning in mid-sentence to a proverb, a correction or a question to the reader. It is load-bearing: the reader must hold the thread as the blind hold a rope. The dialogue without marks is managed so that voices are almost always told apart by manner alone. The set scenes are built with restraint, above all the women’s night, where the sentence refuses spectacle without refusing the facts. Three charges hold it below the top: a sententiousness of proverbs and ironic asides that over-explain; a uniform register, in which the doctor, the thief and the old man sound alike; and the return of sight, hurried after so much patience. The sound of the Portuguese is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the whole: a single impossible premise followed with realist consequence. Take the two most distant elements, the first blind man at the green light and the doctor’s wife at the window at the close. The first loses his sight among the instruments of an ordered city; the last keeps hers and fears its loss above a ruined one; both obey one physics. The ward of the gun and the balcony in the rain are one law seen from opposite sides, the power that blindness frees and the care it calls out. The narrator’s irony, at the asylum’s worst, stays within the law, as the voice of the one perspective that can see. Charged: two exemptions the book does not explain, that she alone keeps her sight and that the blindness lifts as it came, which a parable may claim but which cost something in a book that has kept its consequences so strictly.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders are many, and one condition holds them. The state: ministries, the army, the quarantine, soldiers who shoot. The economy: food as power, hoarding, the storeroom. The body: excrement, hunger, wounds, sex, death. Gender: the women’s night, the women’s care, a marriage tested and held. The family, broken and remade as a company of strangers around a guide. The sacred, in the church and its blindfolded images. Ethics: the right to kill, the duty to stay. Art, in the writer who writes on in the dark. The natural order, in the rain and the dog. They are integrated, not listed. What holds the axis, second from the foot of the twelve, is what the allegory abstracts away: history, nation and class are erased by design, labour stops, and a whole city is seen through seven or eight people. Abstraction holds less than a world.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.9, then The Living Form at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep and The Inner Law at 8.7. A disclosure that holds, that the civil order rests on an attention that can be withdrawn in days and that the tyranny of the ward copies the tyranny of the state, shown by action, with the counter-law of care beside it; a form without names or marks of speech that puts the reader in the ward; a parable in which the one who sees is a servant and a guide; and one impossible premise followed with realist consequence from the green light to the window.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 8.2 and The Encompassed at 8.3. The first is held because the instrument, the long sentence, the speech run into the narration and the ironic narrator, was Saramago’s fifteen years before, and the allegorical road had been travelled; the second because the allegory abstracts away history, nation, class and labour, and sees a whole city through seven or eight people. Next above them, The Sublime at 8.4: the dreadful sublime, frequent and high, held at a slight distance by the narrator’s irony and the long, level sentence, with the return of sight told quickly.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis: The Unconcealment at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, published by Editorial Caminho, Lisbon, in 1995. It is scored as one novel, as first published in Portuguese, from the car that stops at the green light to the doctor’s wife at the window, with its epigraph from the invented Livro dos Conselhos, which is part of the work. Its sequel, Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (2004; in English Seeing), which returns to some of the same figures, and Fernando Meirelles’s film Blindness (2008) are separate works and not part of it. Saramago received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The book is in copyright and no text of it, Portuguese or English, was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis, The Made and the verbal part of The Inevitable included, is judged on Saramago’s Portuguese. Portuguese is quoted only where its words are certain, in the epigraph and in one sentence near the close, with the desk’s own literal English beneath; no published translation is quoted, and everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Giovanni Pontiero’s Blindness (Harvill Press, London, 1997), read for sense. It was used because it is the only English translation, and because it is close: Pontiero, Saramago’s principal English translator from Baltasar and Blimunda onward, keeps the commas that divide the speakers and the capital that marks a new voice rather than normalising them into quotation marks, so that the structural means of the style reach English whole. No shortfall of the translation is charged to the work. The sound and cadence of Saramago’s Portuguese sentence are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. The book’s three movements on this page, the spread and the internment, the asylum, and the blind city, are the desk’s division, not the book’s. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the number of chapters and the chapter in which each event falls, the share of dialogue, the date of the American edition, the circumstances of the translator’s last years and of the author’s move from Lisbon, are not given.