Ensaio sobre a cegueira: José Saramago, the herald of the world in pandemic

Abstract

The main idea of this article is to promote a reading of very specific points present in the book Ensaio sobre a cegueira (2008), by the Portuguese wri­ter José Saramago (1922-2010), and the recent book by the Portuguese professor and researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos, A cruel pedagogia do vírus (2020), to dialogue with aspects that Saramago’s work would have anticipated in relation to a possible pandemic situation, especially the inability of some managers and the inevitability of confinement and its effects. In the context of the work, it is an epidemic of white blindness. It is remarkable how some situations that Saramago produces in his essay can be perceived in relation to the pandemic and social isolation due to Covid-19. The cut made for this approach intends to discuss, in Sarama­go’s work, the perception that the characters were under an epidemic of blindness, their contagion and the outbreak of the state of isolation to which they were subjected. Thus, aiming at an interaction between fic­tion and the contextual reality that we are going through, this article is justified. Therefore, it is intended to preferentially relate the initial situ­ations imagined by Saramago in his novel-essay to a sociological reflec­tion, in loco, of the phenomenon of the real pandemic, carried out by the Portuguese professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos.