depravity problematically lends itself to stigmatisation of real blindness.
Furthermore, this equation of sight with intellect is implied in The Country
of the Blind when Nuñez considers the blind community as “fools” (p.102),
“creatures who stand upon a different mental basis” (p.109) to himself.
The implication in both instances then is those more reliant upon touch
as opposed to sight also embody a moral or mental deficiency akin to
animal behaviour. Using blindness as a metaphor for moral blindness
or even societal corruption relies on pre-existing assumptions about
the senses and visual impairment, and so can still dangerously become
attached to a real life individuals. This has been contested by visually
impaired individuals themselves, the National Federation of the Blind
strongly objecting “to being depicted as an allegory for everything that is
depraved and base in human nature” (Pierce, 2008).
As well as describing groping, in Blindness Saramago uses an abundance
of other animalistic metaphors when describing the movement of the
visually impaired. The narrator tells us that “with one arm held out in front
and several fingers moving like the antennae of insects, they can find
their way everywhere” (p.78) and later in the novel “they were constantly
bumping into each other like ants on a trail” (p.214). Interestingly,
this imagery coheres to the rhetoric of contagion, as the movement
of small insects reimagines the movement of microbes and bacteria
commonly associated with contagious disease. Additionally, the idea
that they can “find their way everywhere” (p.78) recalls the images of
contaminated water, blood and “poisonous miasmas” (p.82) spreading
and contaminating the whole space. Furthermore, evoking the image of
insects also implies an aspect of attack and invasion that we observe in
a swarm, this is illustrated when the narrator describes the asylum, “each
ward is like a beehive inhabited by drones, buzzing insects” (p.200).
Saramago moves then from swarms to herd imagery that depicts the
visually impaired to be like cattle, transported in “van-loads” (p.103)
and “driven like sheep” (p.64). This is further emphasised through the
insistence that they move on all fours “their faces practically touching the
ground as if they were pigs” (p.97), “most of them on all fours, sweeping
up the filth on the floor with their hands” (p.214).
In the same way that Well’s suggests that he needs to “educate” the
blind, Saramago invokes herd imagery to imply the need for a shepherd
or physical guide through the doctor’s wife, who suggests that “unless
we come to their assistance, (they) will soon turn into animals, worse
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