We all know, thanks to P. Diddy, that we should vote or risk death. But what if political apathy reached such great heights that no one cared enough to actually vote for a candidate? Seeing, Nobel Prize Laureate Jose Saramago’s ambitious follow-up to his 1995 novel Blindness, attempts to answer this question. But while the premise of the book is clever, Saramago’s delivery is frequently heavy-handed.
Set in an indistinct capital city of an unnamed western democracy, the philosophically-tinged political allegory opens with an election in which 13 percent of the population votes for the party on the right, 9 percent for the party in the middle and 2.5 percent for the party on the left. The remaining 75.5 percent of the population leaves their ballots blank, a silent rebellion which is duplicated when the election is restaged a week later, this time with 83 percent of the ballots left blank. The rest of the tale traces the election’s fallout as the government pulls out of the capital city to let the citizens stew in a mess of their own making and test the limits of the passive anarchism they have chosen. Behind the scenes, though, the government plants bombs and sows the seeds of discontent between neighbors, all in a quixotic attempt to discern who was behind the “blanker” election plot.
Seeing contains small jibes at contemporary political targets, such as “free and fair” elections and a hyper-aggressive minister of defense who lacks military experience. Still, the novel is intended more to question the systemic effects of democracy than mock specific attributes of any one democracy. It deals with many post-9/11 tropes of fear—terrorism, government censorship and surveillance—in raising the question of how much control citizens really have over the way they live. It’s all very Big Brother-esque, and indeed, like any modern political satirist, Saramago is doomed to live in the shadow of George Orwell.
Orwell’s allegories worked because he grounded them in engaging plots and memorable characters; Seeing doesn’t have a single character with a proper name. When Saramago finally does get around to characterization, it’s sharp and laced with acerbic insights into the relationship between the individual, his government, and his fellow citizens. Playing off the same ocular metaphor from his previous work, Saramago, a long-time member of Portugal’s Communist Party, asks: who is really blind in modern society? What constitutes “seeing” the truth? Can anything be done about that truth, once seen?
Saramago’s writing style is distinctive and calculated, adding to the slightly off-kilter atmosphere of the alternate reality he crafts. He consistently works proper nouns in lower case (sodom and gomorrah, cia) to rob them of their particularity and emphasize the abstract, almost hypothetical nature of the society he describes. He eschews quotation marks and many of the other reader-friendly conventions of grammar and occasionally interrupts the flow of the narrative to ruminate upon the relationship between author, reader, and text. It’s as if Saramago designed his prose as a crucible for his readers; if you can slog through the visual monotony of three-page-long paragraphs and run-on sentences thick enough to make even Faulkner wince, then you alone are worthy of his message. Though ultimately thought-provoking and challenging, it’s a message which is a long time coming.
The first half of the book is bogged down by belabored descriptions of the political machinations after the election. The one-dimensional plot doesn’t really begin to crackle until Saramago finally settles upon a hero of sorts, an unnamed police superintendent. He is the only member of the government whom the author infuses with any sympathy for his fellow citizens. It is precisely those humanizing touches which are painfully lacking from the bulk of the work. Though it’s a novel of ideas, Saramago is at his best when he lets the characters and the thrust of the plot suggest those ideas themselves. Yet for all his discussion of the relationship between the author and his audience, Saramago lacks that vital trust in the percetiveness of his reader and leans on the crutch of barely veiled pontification.
