O visível e o invisível em Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira, de José Saramago

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the novel Blindness (1995), by the Portuguese writer José Saramago. In this plot, a sudden and inexplicable (white) blindness attack becomes an epidemic among the inhabitants of a big city. With the loss of a sense organ (sight), the characters – who are unnamed, representing anyone – live a mutation process and, then, modify the world around them, that is, this novel presents the importance of the senses in the process of relation and comprehension of the world. In this context, the concept of aesthesia of body by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, presented in Phenomenology of Perception (2005), The Visible and the Invisible (2007) and Eye and Mind (2004), comes as a relevant theme to be considered in Blindness analysis, because both Merleau-Ponty and Saramago invest in a philosophy of body, focusing on perception through the senses, getting away from the rationalism and avoiding the classical dichotomies. Therefore, this paper presents three chapters: the first discusses in a general way the relationship between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Saramago’s novel, confronting the transformations and sense perceptions of reality presented in the novel with MerleauPonty’s aesthesia of body, aiming to show the importance of this theory to comprehend this Saramago’s work. The second chapter analyses the perception processes in the novel in a more specific way, discussing about each sense (sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste), as tools of perception, using the studies of Ozíris Borges Filho (2009; 2007) and Harvey Richard Schiffman (2005); authors who present more minutely the functions of such senses in the perception process, once the concept of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthesia is not enough to treat of such specificities. Finally, the third chapter tries to interpret possible allegories contained in Blindness, considering body and perception as metaphors, which also represents a strong criticism against the modern individual’s behavior, who, with the globalizing processes, becomes more and more individualist, not noticing and sympathizing with the Other nor the world anymore. In this approach, it will be used mainly the studies of Coelho (2006), Lima (2008) Deoud (2010), Horkheimer (2007) and Giddens (2002). Thus it is presented the symbolic dimension of the blindness, what appears both as representation of a blind of reason from this individual and as a reconstruction or an awareness process.