the land of the blind” (p.116) which he calls the “harsh, cruel, implacable
kingdom of the blind” (p.127). In Blindness, those who have contracted
the unknown and contagious disease resulting in blindness are initially
quarantined by order of the government into a disused mental asylum.
Entering into one of these spaces for both Saramago and Wells involves
crossing a boundary which physically separates these two worlds which
are presented as resistant and fearful of one another. Although in each
text one sighted person crosses this boundary it is not in an effort to
integrate the blind and the sighted groups, but alternatively it allows
the sighted character to consider themselves as a “guide” or “educator”
within a helpless community. Nuñez perceives the blind community to
be a “simple strain of people” (p.99) whom he would “teach” (p.104) and
bring “to reason” (p.107).
Alternatively, the Doctor’s wife in Blindness, who remains able to see,
becomes a leader figure among the blind individuals who are initially “as
dependent upon her as little children on their mother” (p.213). In addition,
her vision as described by one of the blind, acts as “the thread that links
us to that human mankind” (p.288), blindness then is approached as a
barrier to humanity. Furthermore, being surrounded by blindness in each
text is merely a temporary state for the sighted characters who are able
to escape it. However, at the close of each text both sighted characters
remain fearful of the blindness that they have metaphorically conquered.
Nuñez eventually climbs out of the valley and is thankful for his sight while
the epidemic of blindness in Saramago’s novel is as quickly reversed as
unexpectedly and unexplainably as it started. In both instances then, the
“kingdom of the blind” (p.127) is “somewhere to pass through, to visit as a
tourist, a sightseer, not somewhere to reside or remain” (Bolt 2016, p.83).
This is ignorant of the fact that for many individuals visual impairment is a
permanent reality. Therefore, presenting visually impaired communities
as non-sustainable for the sighted may, as Kayte Stokoe notes, reveal
internalised “ableist assumptions” that lead writers to categorise disabled
futures as “inferior or non-viable” (Stokoe 2016, p.114).
Both writers use rhetoric of contagion in relation to blindness which
additionally supports the binary already set up by the “blind” and “sighted”
distinction. As noted by Susan Sontag (2002, pp.116-117), the threat of
contagious illnesses such as AIDS also rested on a similar premise:
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