José Saramago, 1922-2010

Speaking of blindness... the great Portuguese novelist and controversial polemicist José Saramago died on 18 June, and if the announcement of his departure shocked me it wasn’t because of his age—he was 87—but his sheer productivity right up to the end. How many examples in literature do we have of authors who created such a bold, challenging and prolific body of work at an age as advanced as Saramago’s during his last two decades of robust busyness? (I’m sure Borges would have an answer.) Like many Anglophone readers I discovered Saramago with his Nobel Prize-winning Blindness, published in translation in 1997 and written when the author was already a septuagenarian. I’ve read everything since, which is a lot, and not much that was written beforehand, something I look forward to remedying. Blindness concerns a plague that renders nearly all of humanity blind, and its sentences that go on for pages, with several exchanges of dialogue mounting atop one another so that it can become difficult to discern who’s speaking, struck me as a brilliant way of making the reader almost feel as blind, in some sense, as the characters. When I first read Blindness I hadn’t yet realized that pretty much all of Saramago’s fiction is written in the same style. Yet this style lends itself to a seemingly infinite number of uses.

Saramago’s prose, exalted in structure, colloquial in word choice, seem simultaneously carved in stone and transcribed from the most intimate conversations. His ongoing critique of consumer culture, which was perhaps most eloquent and compelling in The Cave, which will forever change how you look at West Edmonton Mall, was often aligned directly with his mercurial Marxism, and his fantastical conceits were often regarded, or at least marketed, as allegories. Yet Saramago’s best stories were far too humane, spontaneous, organic, and mysterious to be neatly summed up in any sort of one-to-one metaphorical framework or reduced to didacticism. My experience with his novels has usually gone like this: I enter immediately engrossed and fascinated; halfway through, the seemingly endless digressions are wearing me out; by the end, the grand conclusion arises as though from a fog, my mind is sufficiently blown, and I treasure every page, even the ones that frustrated me, and feel like I’ve genuinely been through something, something that has caused me not to feel closer to Saramago’s world view, but to rigorously question my own. As our world continues to rumble forth his contentious, often poetic voice will be missed, but his texts remain, and thanks to the inherent sluggishness of translation, it seems we still have some new ones to look forward to.

The world upside-down: Zizek's Violence

Through countless cinematic detours in his enormous body of critical theory he has become one of the sharpest, most engaged writers on movies we have, so maybe it’s no accident that the theoretical tool he employs with relentless perfectionism is the very same tool most often used by the crack screenwriter: the good old-fashioned reversal. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes both dynamically and profusely, and he’s never met an assumption he didn’t feel the urge to overturn, a paradox he didn’t desire to give a thorough workout. He isn’t a shrewd contrarian so much as an intellectual showman—and I say this with the deepest admiration. The “Elvis of critical theory” tag he’s been given is not unearned.

Far too playful with Marx to convincingly be labeled a staunch Marxist, Zizek’s philosophy remains grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis—and this should itself impart upon his audience an emphasis on process rather than tidy results. With Zizek we are always on the couch, always left dazzled and maybe perplexed when our session has expired. To turn to his work for hard conclusions will inevitably frustrate, but more importantly will blind you to what he really places on the table, which is a feast of thoughtful, sometimes audacious stimulation, blending flavours well known, even vulgar in their appeal, with others that are exotic and in other settings would be intimidating. At the end, knowing hunger will return, you find yourself at the very least fortified, pleasured, and well fed.

That’s certainly the case with Violence (Picador, $15.50). In his contribution to the ‘Big Ideas/Small Books’ series, Zizek breaks his subject into three categories: subjective violence, such as crime and terror, the most visible form and one whose fascination we’re urged to resist; objective violence, which is symbolic and based in language; and systemic violence, the form addressed most enthusiastically, which lies in social structures and is the least visible and most dangerous. Zizek’s dissection of systemic violence starts coolly, drawing attention to such familiar phenomena as pleas for charitable donations that thrive on “fake urgency,” before building up to the hypocrisies of billionaires who claim to “give back,” in effect contributing funds to agencies attempting to alleviate a humanitarian crisis that in part was exacerbated by these same billionaires. Not to mention the hypocrisies of we who are outraged by the torture of individuals while virtually ignoring the overwhelming humanitarian crises of entire nations, ie: the Congo.

But things get more interesting once the groundwork’s disposed of—or, in some cases, trampled over in the heat of Zizek's spastic mental prowess. In examining terror, Zizek usefully distinguishes between “authentic fundamentalists,” like the Amish or Tibetan Buddhists, who convey “an absence of resentment and envy” and a “deep indifference toward the non-believers’ way of life,” with “so-called Christian and Muslim fundamentalists” who “in fighting the sinful Other” are merely fighting their own temptation. He later makes an intriguing parallel distinction between ideological governments who ostensibly offer sweeping freedoms while tacitly condemning the use of these freedoms and oppressive governments who tacitly encourage the bending of rules, leading to one of the most memorably succinct twists of common assumption in Violence: “totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing, and cheating are conditions of survival.”

Among the most substantial stances taken in Violence concerns Israel and Palestine, two nations who, Zizek argues, should recognize how a diasporic existence is essential to their identity rather than fruitlessly claim rights to a holy land. Intriguingly, he calls for the renunciation of political control of Jerusalem, making it a neutral zone, an “extra-state place of religious worship” that would ultimately have a liberating effect for both parties. And I mean it as no slight to the gravity of this proposal when I compliment Zizek on his ability to move fluidly in just a page or two from this to a parallel proposal that US Congress officially change the name of French fries to Muhammad fries.

It is among Zizek’s strengths that irreverence and the utmost seriousness are never rendered mutually exclusive, just as culture high and low are employed with equal relish. There are citations from Walter Benjamin, George Orwell and Elton John. There are analogies that unexpectedly unite the themes of M. Night Shyamalan's widely panned The Village with Alfonso Caurón's Children of Men. And let me stress this: the guy gets mileage from movies like no social commentator I’ve ever heard of. He discusses the unspoken sub-cultural order explored in A Few Good Men as a pretty brilliant lead-in to his insights into hazing rituals, the homophobic dualities of military life, and the abuses of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib: “in being submitted to humiliating tortures, Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” And he offers a striking reading of Taxi Driver that illuminates the essentially inwardly directed violence of Travis Bickle.

Alas, after a couple of hundred pages of stimulating riffing, Violence does finally have to draw to an end. Of sorts. Things get muddy. Zizek has us reject “false anti-violence” and endorses “emancipatory violence.” He writes how “to chastise violence outright… is a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” Okay. But equally mystifying is his appropriation of the central conceit of José Saramago’s visionary novel Seeing, in which a government in thrown into panic over an epidemic of blank votes submitted in a federal election. Zizek clearly sees Saramago as a Marx brother, and his admiring assessment of Seeing leads to Violence’s final, enigmatic statement: “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” I’m mystified because casting a blank ballot is actually far from “doing nothing.” I’m mystified by Zizek’s peculiar and rather hazy conditional sanctioning of violence—we really need to get clearer on this “emancipatory violence” thing, no? But I’m also mystified by how such a bracingly curt, even puzzling finale can still leave me kinda satisfied, re-engaged in certain political arguments, and mentally invigorated in general. Perhaps it’s better for us to look at any single book by Zizek as just another edition in an ongoing grappling with irreducible ideas, and enjoy the ride.

Ways of not seeing

The original Portuguese title of Blindness, the 1995 novel that prompted José Saramago’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, or Essay About Blindness. I think it’s worth mentioning here because those unfamiliar with Saramago’s work might glean from this specification some sense of this extraordinary novel’s tone, which, characteristically, is digressive, allegorical, and basically unconcerned with character development or the well-measured escalation of drama—the sorts of elements that conventionally make for engaging movies. It’s equally worth mentioning that Blindness the movie, as adapted by Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles, is clearly uninterested in being a conventional sort of movie. Yet in its attempts to carve out its own identity while making select concessions to the basic form and structure of a dramatic feature, the film seems to lose out in both gambits. Blindness is a deeply intriguing movie that can’t fulfill its promises, a strangely flat apocalyptic drama that rarely shows signs of knowing what it’s about.

It begins, boldly, and not unlike a horror movie, with the first victim of the mysterious disease of “white blindness” becoming afflicted while waiting behind the wheel of his car at a traffic light in the middle of an unnamed large city, the attack thus accompanied by a thunderous chorus of car horns and hollering, intensifying the sense of some terrible pestilence raining down on the masses from an angry god. The disease goes airborne, and we follow a chain of others who catch it: the thief who steals the first blind man’s car (played a little too obviously mercenary by McKellar), the doctor who treats the first blind man (Mark Ruffalo), the patients who shared the doctor’s waiting room with the first blind man (Alicia Braga’s tough, dignified prostitute, Danny Glover’s one-eyed wise man), and so on. Following the measures decided upon by a panicked government (helmed by Sandra Oh), the blind are quarantined, and much of what follows plays out in the characters’ increasingly decrepit confinement.

Saramago’s formally rigorous prose style, with its extensive, multi-page paragraphs with scant punctuation, serves Blindness more perfectly than any of his other novels because, with so few signifiers to help break up dialogue, you actually feel sort of blind while reading it, trying to keep track of who’s talking, depending largely on the nuances of their individual printed voices. Since McKellar’s script resigns itself to simply dramatizing the novel’s action and does little to evoke its refrain of philosophizing and consideration of motives, Meirelles, perhaps as a countermeasure, seems to be trying to build up a like sense of blindness in the viewer through the repeated use of rack focus, white-outs, and the blurring of the frame’s edges. Yet the white-outs look uninterestingly synthetic—imagine if that “milky whiteness” were evoked by using actual milk!—and the strategy feels like an affectation, partly because it makes no sense as a way of creating a subjective point of view: the characters are either blind or not blind, never anything in between. At the same time, the entire visual world of Blindness is so cold and steely, filtered so as to suck all warmth out, that there’s no sense of the richness of the visual world that’s been stolen from the victims, no nostalgia either suggested or displayed that might pierce the emotions.

Over the course of Blindness the quarantined exhibit both the most base and vile of human tendencies—Saramago’s Marxist leanings can be detected here in the pathetic trading of food for utterly material goods—and the most ennobling and moral. The hero of the story is the doctor’s wife (Julianne Moore), the sole character to retain her sight, a fact she wisely holds secret. In a journey not unlike those of other characters that Moore has played over the years, she seems initially to be fairly vacuous and only through crisis reveals herself as resourceful, maternal, valiant and wily—though this transformation feels a matter of course, rarely becoming something we’re able to identify with. So on one hand, Meirelles is trying, unsuccessfully, to put us in his characters’ shoes, while on the other hand the characters, each of them as anonymous as the world they inhabit, fail to assume the specificities and interior lives that might draw us to them. Where literature, which only need supply the data it desires and nothing more, can function quite well in a world without specifics, it is a tremendous challenge to create a movie, particularly one shot on location, that exists in an everyworld full of everymen.

I can’t help but wonder if the movie might have worked better if Meirelles simply opted to maintain a detached, clinical approach, a la Michael Haneke in the similarly inexplicable apocalypse wrought in his underseen Time of the Wolf, allowing us to gradually develop our own empathies through a distinctive, vivid, stark visual world in which trauma and negotiation play out fully. Indeed, how oddly appropriate it might have been if the perspective through which we watched Blindness unfold was strictly observational.