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Beth James
posted 23 June 2006

Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s writing is spare, lyrical, self-referential and elegant. There is a certain style to his writing that makes it recognisably his - and not just because he favours pages-long paragraphs and eschews any punctuation beyond commas and full stops.

The premise behind Saramago’s latest novel Seeing is also spare and elegant and it is certainly self-referential. In an unnamed capital city of an unnamed country, over seventy percent of voters cast blank ballots in a municipal election. When the authorities re-run the election in keeping with election law, the rate of blank ballots soars to 83%.

In each of two of his prior books, Blindness and The Stone Raft, Saramago set up a natural disaster of supernatural proportions – in the former an inexplicable plague of blindness and in the latter, the detachment of the Iberian Peninsula and its drift into the Atlantic Ocean – and then followed the reaction to it from those in positions of authority and ordinary people. In Seeing, a sequel and counterpoint to Blindness the situation is presented as similarly catastrophic but man-made rather than natural.

In true Saramago style the three parties are called the party of the left (p.o.t.l.), the party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and the party in the middle (p.i.t.m.). The reaction of the parties to the blank votes seems predicated less on ideology than on their relative electoral standing amongst the population when normal voting occurs. The p.o.t.l., which normally runs a distant third, seizes on the opportunity to claim the blank voters as their own supporters. The p.o.t.r., the ruling party in both the municipality and at national level, has the most to lose and comes out with all guns blazing. The p.i.t.m., which is the main opposition party, seems automatically to oppose the government’s zealotry but without losing the ability to claim that they are taking the situation seriously.

In the latter part of the book, Saramago revisits most of the central characters from Blindness. Using this device, he provides an account of the effects of the ‘plague’ of blank ballot papers through the eyes of individuals the reader has grown to care about from their travails in the earlier book. It also allows him to draw parallels and show the differences between the government’s reaction to the plague of blindness and the new situation. Saramago spends the larger part of the book discussing the official reaction to the ‘crisis’, and when he turns to the effects of the situation on ordinary individuals, he eschews character development almost entirely by relying on the characterisation he developed in the previous book.

However, in the first half of the book, Saramago fundamentally fails to convey the source of the sense of urgency that fills government officials as the scale of the blank ballots becomes apparent. The contrast Saramago draws between the literally violent over-reaction of the government and the near indifference of the population is striking but ultimately confusing.

The reality of governments increasingly treating citizens like potential terrorists is clearly recognisable as a comment on Western governments’ recent political stances. But at the same time it is hard to believe that a democratically elected government would spend so little time trying to understand the disenchantment of its population and turn to repressive and punishing measures so quickly. Perhaps observation of the current British government has led to me to have heightened expectations that the government will pander to the majority of the people rather than obviously oppress them. If over 80% of the population are demonised, who is left for the government to pander (or even just appeal) to? It is one thing if the government can convince the majority that the so-called terrorists are dangerous and represent a threat to the country’s values and way of life. But how could a government even think about this strategy if the so-called terrorist element encompasses the overwhelming majority of its citizens?

The reality of voter disengagement is also recognisable as a growing trend by anyone who lives in a Western democracy. Outside of countries such as Belgium and Australia where voting is compulsory, turnout rates have showed a more or less steady decline over the past 20-30 years. In Britain the decline has been particularly steep over the past 15 years with a small blip upwards in the last general election.

Commentators have suggested many, sometimes contradictory, explanations for the decline. For every commentator who bemoans low voter turnout as a sign of the death of democracy, another commends the fact that people feel secure and happy enough not to feel an urgent need to vote. A more convincing explanation can be found in the lack of real choice offered by the major political parties in most Western democracies and the disillusionment and disconnection increasing numbers of people feel towards the mainstream political system.

In the book, Saramago makes it clear that ‘turnout’ has not suffered but that voters have seen fit not to favour any of the three parties with their support. He never clarifies however, what the cause of the blank votes is (if indeed there is a single cause). Thus, like most of Saramago’s novels – Blindness and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ being major exceptions – the book has an unsatisfactory ending. It also suffers less from self-referential intrusions by the omniscient narrator and is less riddled with meta-narrative than most of his other books. But it is vintage Saramago and a compelling read, with some passages of spare writing that can only be described as beautiful.