Unsettling Epiphanies: Rereading José Saramago’s Blindness in the Time of Covid-19

Document Type : Original Article

Author

English Department, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt.

Abstract

As the entire world finds itself in the grip of Covid-19, interest in reading and rereading novels about pestilences, diseases and crises has become a shared endeavour. In many instances, it has even become a coping mechanism with a world that seems to be irredeemably disintegrating. A case in point is the Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s dystopian novel Blindness (1995). Blindness is particularly chosen for the way it offers an epiphanic insight, unsettling as it is, into humanity in times of adversity through the paradoxical implications of a blindness epidemic that illuminates more than it obscures. This paper thus seeks to present a hub for self-reflection on how personal experiences with calamitous situations can alter one’s outlook on oneself and the ambient world, and enhance one’s identification with fictional works. To achieve this end, it will endeavour to show that the historical meandering of infectious diseases one has read about in fiction is no longer in the realm of the distant and the impersonal. It is now transmuted to the realm of the present and the personal, making literary works about pandemics/epidemics more relatable, and making dystopian fiction, not only a theoretical framework for this paper, but also a most apt background against which one can reread Blindness in the time of Covid-19.

Keywords

Cairo Studies in English
Volume 2021, Issue 2
December 2021
Pages 101-123

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