After blindness, lucidity... Could it be?
No I don't know if lucidity will actually come after blindness. But for the universe created by Saramago, it did.
E if we were aware that power is in our hands? What if we understood that we could take care of absolutely everything that involved our interests? What if one day we didn't vote? Have you ever about it?
¨Bad time to vote, complained the chairman of the electoral assembly number 14¨. Yes, he was right. Bad time to vote.... This is the first sentence in the book that is both literal and metaphorical.
In simply put, the story tells of the political class of a certain city the population voting blank for the second time in an election. attempt at an election. The first attempt had taken place a week a week earlier, on a day of torrential rain, when no one went to vote. This same political class abandons the town, closing its borders and isolating it place without any public services. Even garbage collection is suspended. What's more, it will inflate the 20% of the population against the 80%. Familiar? Let's move on. The story will develop in the reflections of this panorama.
But what do Essays on Blindness and Lucidity have in common? We can we can say that the latter is a continuation of the former, which we can only the second half of reading Lucidity. Another interesting these stories is that, although they make very few references to time, without references, without showing the reader when they happen, we know that that Essay on Lucidity takes place four years after White Blindness.
In the continuation, Saramago presents a society of a city, which he does not name, of a country, which he also does not name. a country, which he also doesn't name, that is completely exhausted by a government from a government that is oblivious to the needs of the community and that only a process of of lucidity could save that society. Can we give names? As José Saramago liked to say, words are not innocent. And I say this to show that the absence of place names and the the absence of time are strategies to show the reader that this is a timeless story story and that we can democratically imagine any place for it to happen. happen.
In Lucidez, there's less drama, more sarcasm and a very cartoonish political class, divided between left-wing, center and right-wing parties. The blank should certainly be understood as an active political reaction on the part of the citizen and not as an omission.
In in Essay on Blindness, we learn about an extremely dramatic story of a white blindness that has led us into political and social chaos.
A Saramago's narrative always imprints a poetic rite, and we see that here too.
Highlight how "whiteness" in the two stories can be antagonistic and how "whiteness unsettles Saramago.
*Watch the two videos I made about these books on the Livros da Bela channel.
Essay on blindness
Essay on lucidity
*If you want to buy one of these books, follow the links on Amazon:
Essay on Blindness
Essay on Lucidity
Responses