still, blind animals” (p.126). The morphing of a human body into that of
“blind animals” (p.126) has dehumanising consequences, yet Blindness
goes even further to construct a collective body for the blind that
appears entirely monstrous. Saramango removes the animal imagery
momentarily to reveal a something entirely different. It is one of the
sergeants guarding the asylum who first compares the blind to a beast,
advising that “It would have been better to let them die of hunger, when
the beast dies, the poison dies with it” (p.80). However this metaphor of
a blind beast becomes more present in the novel when the blind become
so crowded within the asylum that they “give the impression of being but
one body, one breath and one hunger” (p.208). Furthermore, those that
are trampled are “transformed into a formless, bloody mass” (p.205). In
addition to this, later in the novel the Doctor’s Wife and the other women
in the group are washing themselves when she comments that “we are
the only woman in the world with two eyes and six hands”, again creating
an image of one sub-human body. Such animalistic and monstrous
depictions have not gone without critique from the blind community who
protest that such an “offensive and chilling depiction […] could undermine
efforts to integrate blind people into the mainstream” (Nuckols, 2008).
There is no question that this distortion and animalisation of the visually
impaired body upholds the segregation of the sighted and the blind in
each narrative.
The association of moving along the contaminated ground, like ants,
sheep or pigs brings with it an association with dirt and filth. While the
unsanitary conditions of the asylum worsen, the Doctor, one of the first
to go blind in Saramago’s novel, states that he is “dirtier than he could
ever remember being in his life. There are many ways of becoming an
animal, he thought, this is just the first of them” (p.89). The spread of
filth is enhanced by the contamination motif and “the unkemptnesss and
uncleanness of the blind predicate the seemingly obligatory construct
of disease” (Bolt 2016, p.89). Furthermore, the abundance of dirt
takes on other stigmatisations as the conditions in the asylum come
to be considered hellish and therefore resonate with another type of
metaphorical blindness called in the text “some spiritual malaise” (p82).
The Doctor’s wife comments on the “unbearable filth of the soul. Of
the body […] It’s all the same” (p.264), therefore losing the distinction
between physical and spiritual filth and presenting the visually impaired
as tainted souls. Saramago continues this stigmatisation through the
description of the putrid conditions of the asylum on page 125:
52