José Saramago - Seeing

SEEING

By José Saramago

The new ailment reveals itself rather gradually. On a rainy election day, practically no one goes to the polls until 4 in the afternoon, and then everybody seems to arrive at once; when the ballots are counted, almost three-quarters turn up blank; after a week of governmental consternation, the elections are held again, on a perfect sunny day, and the results are actually worse -- 83 percent of the voters have not marked their ballots. This communal exercise of what the narrator calls "the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion" does not sit well with the authorities; one cabinet minister refers to the electoral blank-out as "a depth charge launched against the system." The collective silence of the electorate naturally suggests a conspiracy to the (right-wing) government, yet, maddeningly, no crime has been committed; and the protest movement, if that's what it is, resolutely refuses to turn violent, despite the state's frantic efforts at provocation and the news media's hopeful predictions of impending catastrophe.

It's a fairly witty conceit: a city full of Bartlebys, politely preferring not to do what is expected of them and generating, through simple negation, absolute panic in the corridors of power. For a while -- a longish while -- Saramago has bitter fun with the spectacle of a government raging impotently against the utter indifference of its subjects. Unlike "Blindness," which focuses on a small group of victims of the epidemic, "Seeing" in its first half concentrates on the official responses to the crisis. The ruling party declares a state of emergency, then a state of siege; it deploys agents of the secret police to spy on citizens, then to haul them in for interrogations and lie-detector tests; and when none of those measures work, the wily prime minister decides to pull the entire apparatus of government out of the capital and leave the people to fend for themselves, on the theory that the resulting anarchy will return the prodigal voters to their senses and ultimately to the stern but reassuring paternal embrace of the state. Again the populace fails to cooperate: life in the capital remains peaceful and orderly, as if no one had even noticed that anything was missing.

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