In Saramago’s novel, characters remain nameless and are known only
by description and previous occupation, their individuality fades when
they become blind, they are now “poor contaminated creatures” (p.110)
transported in “van-loads” (p.103) and “driven like sheep” (p.64). The
presence of their illness overtakes their identity as individuals and their
bodies are reduced to their blindness which is seen to have colonised
them. Cynthia Davis asserts that such rhetoric was initially reinforced by
the medical discovery during the Cold War that “viruses are not parasitical
– that they instead seem to appropriate the very life force of their hosts”
(2008, p.100). This then “made available images of “infiltrating” and
“colonising” that took on allegorical implications,” (ibid.) In Saramago’s
text then, the disease itself becomes a live agent travelling through
contaminated fluids; “the blood wending its way sinuously on to the
tiled floor where it slowly spread, as if it were a living thing” (p.81). The
image of blood silently swelling, moving as though lurking “sinuously” is
sinister, and as with AIDS, personifies the contagion rendering it “more
animated and agentive than the human beings they so differently infect”
(Davis 2008, p.98). It is also interesting to note that blindness does not
kill characters in Saramago’s novel, but that death is a result of their
unsanitary environment, lack of nutrition, or violence within the asylum.
However, due to the rhetoric of contagion blindness is blamed as the
fatal killer; one of the blind individuals states that “illnesses may differ
from person to person but what is really killing us now is blindness”
(p.280). Similarly, AIDS was also often depicted in this way, as although
is not a fatal in itself AIDS is still demonised as a killer virus, although
death only occurs due to sicknesses contracted resultantly. Blindness
thus becomes a symbol of invasion and disease against society’s
ideal and ocular-normative body, adding further connotations to those
binary groups of the sighted and the blind, now also the healthy and the
unhealthy, the sick and the well.
The threat of contagion is entertained differently in The Country of the
Blind, as although the “plague of blindness” originates from a “strange
disease” (p.98) Nuñez is not at risk from biologically contracting
blindness as in Saramago’s novel. However, Nuñez is presented as still
at risk from a form of cultural or sociological contagion as described by
Davis (2008, p.199), when it is insisted upon that his eyes be removed
in order to remain in the valley. The culture of the blind is therefore seen
as incompatible with and in fact imposing upon Nuñez’s vision which
again separates the blind from the sighted. The blind people of the
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