From the beginning the construction of the illness had depended on
notions that separated one group of people from another – the sick
from the well, people with ARC from people with AIDS, them and us
– while implying the imminent dissolution of these distinctions.
Linking the concept of visual impairment with contagion makes
blindness synonymous with disease which, as Krista Brune similarly
comments, can “often demonise the physical impairment similar to
the representation of Cancer and AIDS” (2010, p.97). Saramago’s
novel therefore adopts elements of the subgenre “outbreak narrative”
by posing visual impairment as a highly contagious disease spreading
throughout his unnamed city. The motif of contagion manifests itself in
images of the infiltration and contamination which gives the disease an
overwhelming and sinister presence in the novel. The emergence of the
unknown disease is mirrored by images of water rising and filling up
spaces which emphasises its immediate threat; throughout the asylum
we see “drains overflowed with the dirty water that spread outside the
wash-rooms, soaking the floorboards in the corridors, infiltrating the
cracks in the flagstones” (p.128). The contaminated water occupies and
drenches all that it touches and completely submerges those infected,
those whose eyes become “suddenly drowned in that hideous white tide
inundating the corridors, the wards, the entire space” (p.108). The image
of tainted water is frequent and helps create the image of the disease as
an inescapable plague:
Blindness was spreading, not like a sudden tide flooding everything
and carry all before it, but like an insidious infiltration of a thousand
and one turbulent rivulets which, having slowly drenched the earth,
suddenly submerge it completely. (p.116)
In a similar way, blood also becomes a symbol of contagion and even
the bodies of the dead represent a threat. The narrator tells us of the
“danger lurking in those lifeless bodies, above all, in that blood” (p.82)
as well as the “vapours”, “emanations” and “poisonous miasmas” (p.82)
that could “already be oozing forth from the open wounds of the corpses”
(p.83). Again, this bears resemblance to Sontag’s (2002, p.103) findings
on the rhetoric surrounding AIDS:
When the focus is transmission of the disease, an older metaphor,
reminiscent of syphilis, is invoked: pollution. (One gets it from the
blood or the sexual fluids of infected people or from contaminated
blood products).
48