Enemy of the state

IN J.M. Coetzee’s political allegory “Waiting for the Barbarians,” an unnamed empire, curiously agitated over its frontier, assumes emergency powers, taking steps that lead to torture, a military campaign and accusations of treason against one of its own magistrates. Questioned about his brutal methods, an officer dispatched by the capital explains to the magistrate, “I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it ... first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure.... That is how you get the truth.”

That must be straight from the student handbook at Bureaucrat U, for similar ideas slip easily from the tongues of government ministers in Jose Saramago’s astringent new political allegory, “Seeing.” In an unnamed democratic state, the government, wary of conspiracy, also declares a state of emergency and turns on its people, spying on them, resorting to kidnapping and coercive interrogations, even effecting a siege against the capital (from which the leaders have fled in their black limousines), all in the name of vox populi.

“The declaration of the state of emergency, by allowing the government to assume the relevant powers and to suspend at the stroke of a pen all constitutional guarantees, removed that uncomfortable weight, that threatening shadow hanging over the heads of editors and administrators,” observes Saramago’s nameless narrator. In other words, the media are relieved of their responsibility to report on the situation (not that they were awash in investigative vigor beforehand).

The political parties -- the party of the right, which was in power; the party in the middle, which was the opposition; and the party of the left, marginalized but maintaining “bright historical optimism” -- prefer “not to take too many risks, in the spirit of trying to please everyone all the time, they say yes, but then again no.” So Orwellian doublespeak is still with us, and Big Brother has grown a little more sophisticated with age.

Saramago, Portugal’s only Nobel laureate in literature, commonly employs magical realist techniques, and a seemingly inexplicable event does drive the action in “Seeing.” But whether it is questionable seizure, holding people indeterminately without charge, conducting high-tech surveillance, utilizing techniques such as data mining, refusing to accept electoral results or conducting PR wars against public opinion, all the political tactics on display in this novel are to be found operating today in the globe’s democratic regimes, including our own, without resort to supernatural literary effects. That may be the eeriest aspect of “Seeing.”

Though Saramago’s allegory fits in a loose tradition of works from writers such as Coetzee and Orwell, it is heavily laced with humor as well, a lampoon reminiscent of politicized and slightly surreal tales as woven by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano. There is also a pivot midway through “Seeing,” as its focus shifts from the government’s ministerial infighting to follow three of its investigators on a secret mission, at which point the novel becomes a police procedural: a detective story.

Saramago’s books are usually hybrids of this sort, neither this nor that, and it is all part of the fun. Digressions abound -- the nature of language and fidelity of words is a recurrent concern, and characters often imagine at length scenarios that never occur as the plot proceeds. Literary allusions are scattered throughout: from detective fiction, Maigret, Poirot, Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. More than once a state of “disquiet” is mentioned, a slightly oblique nod to Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and his influential “Book of Disquiet.” After all, it is a disquieting tale that Saramago offers us, for when government of the people is not by the people....

The extraordinary event that, like the Big Bang, created the universe of “Seeing” was an ambiguous mass protest in an election, specifically in the nation’s capital. On the first ballot, the number of valid votes was less than a quarter of those cast, while more than 70% of the ballot slips were left blank. “Feelings of confusion and stupefaction, but also of mockery and scorn swept the country,” the provinces oozing disdain for the centralist triumphalism that usually marked the capital and its people.

The government called for reballoting the following week, and in the interim deployed high-definition video cameras and state-of-the-art microphones capable of divining “the emotions apparently hidden in the diverse murmurings of a group of people.” All to no avail. When the second poll took place, the party on the right received 8%, the party in the middle 8% and the party of the left 1%. “Abstentions, none, spoiled votes, none, blank votes, eighty-three percent.”

The blankers, as they come to be known, have thrown a scare into the state, but the government “considers, after due consultation with his excellency the president, that its legitimacy in office was not called into question.” Naturally, it will investigate. First, however, the state of emergency is announced, the prime minister “sure that is merely the government giving expression to the fraternal will of the rest of the country.”

The party in the middle wonders if it isn’t poor practice “to take away the rights of someone whose only crime had been to exercise one of those rights,” but other views prevail. The interior minister worries that what seems an insurrection “may have its real roots abroad”; the minister of foreign affairs raises that old shibboleth, the “domino effect”; the minister of defense claims “what we are facing today is terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and maintains that the people, “having shown themselves to be untrustworthy of trust, will be treated accordingly.” The prime minister favors “a gradual sequence of actions, of which the state of siege will be the first.”

Saramago wrote “Seeing” as a follow-on novel to “Blindness,” and it carries forward many characters from the earlier novel. Readers unacquainted with “Blindness” are put at little disadvantage, however, for the main connections are thematic, and while hindsight may not be 20-20, references in “Seeing” suggest the outlines of “Blindness” and explain rudimentary character relations. Briefly, a sudden plague in “Blindness” robbed people of their vision. Rather than experiencing darkness, however, they were “plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.” People saw a blank.

The government response in “Seeing” has its analog in “Blindness” too, for just as the capital is sealed off in a blockade now, those afflicted before were quarantined, in a former asylum. Whereas the situation in “Blindness” led to, well, bedlam, when the government removes itself from the capital in “Seeing,” the city remains peaceful, the people cooperative with each other.

When their national leaders withdrew in the dead of night, the citizens turned on lights but did not appear at the windows, “as if the official convoys were foolishly fleeing from nothing.” The Gandhian response of the people remained even after state agents set off a bomb, killing more than 34 (“a calculated risk,” said the interior minister). Such pacific behavior by the blankers “could only be the brainchild of some machiavellian mastermind,” concludes the president.

The question of linkage between events -- the plague of blindness four years prior, the plague of blank ballots in the present -- propels the detective portion of “Seeing,” in which the interior minister and his main investigator speak in code names as “albatross” and “puffin,” the most specific names in the book. Here, the wife of an ophthalmologist, the one person whose sight had remained, enabling her to save others, comes under suspicion as having fomented both rebellions, one of the body and the other of the body politic. “Your great crime was not going blind when the rest of us did,” the police supervisor tells her.

How does it end? The sardonic narrator confesses “he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city,” and for his part, the president asserts “an organized state cannot possibly lose a battle like this.” Through it all, the common television screen flashes with “the usual image of the flag flapping lazily on the flagpole, as if it, too, had just woken up, while the national anthem blasted out with its trombones and drums, with the odd clarinet trill in the middle and a few persuasive belches from the bass tuba.” *