Visions of Blindness

I was surprised when a former student complained about being forced to read porn. Porn? In my class? Porn is not my field. I have no memory of assigning porn in any class ever. What could she be thinking?

"That Saramago book, Blindness" she explained. "That one part."

Ah yes, that one part. It's graphic all right, but is it porn?

First, some background: Blindness by Jose Saramago takes place in a large European city suffering from a sudden plague of contagious blindness. The first people so stricken are quarantined in a vacant hospital, their needs tended by those who still have sight--until everyone in the city is struck blind except one woman who sees and remembers what happens, first inside the hospital and then out in the city. The blind people in the hospital quickly develop ways of coping with problems both mundane and unusual: How will they eat? How will they know whether scant resources are distributed fairly? Where will they sleep? Where will they defecate? What will they do with the inevitable dead bodies?

It's a novel both gentle and gruesome, lyrical and brutal. The most intense section explores the inevitable power struggle between those who are willing to mistreat fellow human beings and those who are not. The ruthless ones control the food supply, and they will kill, maim, and rape to maintain their power. The weak must choose: submit or starve. They do a little bit of both before finding another way out.

"That one part" occurs during the submission phase, when the men in power raise the price of food until the cost of a Happy Meal is brutal rape. Women's bodies become legal tender in a nightmarish scene of violence and degradation.

But is it porn? In its gruesomeness the scene is the opposite of sensuous, the antithesis of desire. It could arouse carnal lust only among those who lust after degradation, decay, and death. Are those people out there? In my class?

"That one part" of Blindness may be the most sexually graphic scene I have ever taught, but if I had to label it I'd call it anti-porn. Porn portrays people as bodies without minds, fragmenting human beings into pieces and parts designed for the titillation of others; Blindness, on the other hand, cries out for human beings to see beyond the body and treat each other as whole people. The pandemic failure of vision prompts the characters to become either more human or less human, but it is always clear which option Saramago prefers.

I don't see porn when I read Saramago, but my student sees something different. Is one of us blind, or are both visions valid? Whose vision of Blindness should prevail?