Saramago was a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, [10] and in his late years defined himself as a proponent of libertarian communism. [7] He ran in the 1989 Lisbon local election as part of the "Coalition For Lisbon," and was elected alderman presiding officer of the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon. [30] Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition in all elections of the European Parliament from 1989 to 2009, though he ran for positions of which it was thought he had no possibility of winning. [30] He was a critic of European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. [9]

Tokyo International Film Festival | "BLINDNESS" Press Conference with Director Fernando Meirelles, Actresses Julian Moore, Yoshino Kimura and more!!".Tokyo International Film Festival | Exclusive Interview with Director Fernando Meirelles of "BLINDNESS"!". At the same time, though, Saramago tries to avoid moralization and the creation of dogmatic doctrines. He was an admirer of Montaigne, but not of Francis Bacon; and like Montaigne, he lets his readers make their own associations and reach their own conclusions, enabling the development of their own thoughts and viewpoints. Finally, precisely because he was a political essayist, Saramago has always been severely criticized by conservatives and the church. Just as Montaigne’s essays were placed on the index in the 16 th century, an essayistic novel by Saramago was censored at the end of the 20 th century.

There is, of course, a lot of scepticism and dystopian pessimism in Saramago’s work. In part, this has to do with a certain melancholy aspect of the Portuguese mentality. But it is also related to the fact that Saramago became a writer in a very difficult, even hostile, context: he began writing under a fascist regime; had no academic education; didn’t belong to the cultural, bourgeois elite; and found it difficult at times to make a living. All this surely contributed to his increasingly pessimistic character. When we think of someone, when we hear their name, we always conjure an image in our head; a picture is formed before our eyes. Here we are with a bunch of people who no longer can rely on their sight so, in not giving them names, Saramago also puts us in the dark, forcing us to rely instead on personal characteristics and descriptions given to conjure these characters ourselves. “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.” José Saramago will be 84 this year. He has written a novel that says more about the days we are living in than any book I have read. He writes with wit, with heartbreaking dignity, and with the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom.The cast and crew included 700 extras who had to be trained to simulate blindness. Actor Christian Duurvoort from Meirelles' City of God led a series of workshops to coach the cast members. Duurvoort had researched the mannerisms of blind people to understand how they perceive the world and how they make their way through space. Duurvoort not only taught the extras mannerisms, but also to convey the emotional and psychological states of blind people. [9] One technique was reacting to others as a blind person, whose reactions are usually different from those of a sighted person. Meirelles described, "When you're talking to someone, you see a reaction. When you're blind, the response is much flatter. What's the point [in reacting]?" [23] Filmmaking style [ edit ] Director Fernando Meirelles alludes to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind in the film Blindness. Raimundo Silva inserts his “not” in a volume on Portuguese history because he decides to reject the official history that the Templars helped the Portuguese conquer the city of Lisbon in medieval times. He finds it necessary to introduce a mistake, or what can be considered a mistake from a certain perspective, because he wants to provoke a shift of attention. The doctor’s wife, who takes the law into her own hands in Blindness, and Raimundo Silva, whose anarchical action literally rewrites history in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, find their counterpart in the police commissioner in Seeing. All these protagonists break with the status quo and make free choices that transcend their individuality while also taking others into consideration, and they all assume responsibility for their actions in their social and historical context. In Seeing, the idea of freedom manifests in the form of a liberating political action, whether practiced individually by the protagonist or as a collective by all those who cast blank ballots. Saramago suggests that any ethical and moral orientation can only be deduced from an understanding of freedom that expresses itself in action. Still, as I already said, Saramago denied being a writer of historical novels, maintaining that his sole commitment was to “reinventing history,” in the sense of bringing to the forefront what has been excluded or silenced. He compared the novelist to the historiographer because he couldn’t conceive an apprehension of the world that was not fictional—just as neuroscientists and cognitivists today maintain that our memory is both highly selective and far from being objective. In one of his most crucial essays, “History and Fiction,” published in 1990, he said that both the writer and the historical researcher are “choosers of facts” and “makers of history.” In his last Notebook of Lanzarote, only recently discovered and published in 2018, Saramago says that after Blindness, something changed in him, especially regarding literature and its importance in life. He said that he was no longer interested in talking about literature, that he even doubted if it was possible to talk about literature at all. He left those reflections unexplained. But perhaps he felt that writing was no longer enough. Before, during, and shortly after the Portuguese Revolution, writing had certainly been a “desire for freedom” on his part, an act of liberating humanity. But after Blindness, I think he began to feel that literature was excessively strangled by the regime of genres, narratives, clichés, personal vanities, commercial and cultural politics.

Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wing President of Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who was holidaying in the Azores as the ceremony took place. [25] Cavaco Silva, the Prime Minister who removed Saramago's work from the shortlist of the Aristeion Prize, said he did not attend Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him". [8] Mourners, who questioned Cavaco Silva's absence in the presence of reporters, [8] held copies of the red carnation, symbolic of Portugal's democratic revolution. [25] Saramago's cremation took place in Lisbon, [25] and his ashes were buried on the anniversary of his death, 18 June 2011, underneath a hundred-year-old olive tree on the square in front of the José Saramago Foundation (Casa dos Bicos). [26] José Saramago's ashes burial place Lost novel [ edit ]

An easier way to establish context for Blindness would be to analyze Saramago’s life as well as the historical events surrounding it. On November 16, 1992, José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, Portugal in the Ribatejo province to a poor farming family. His father had served in the French military during World War I, and he decided to pursue a career in law enforcement in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. Their way of living had greatly improved because of his new job, but they remained poor regardless of a new home. Saramago’s parents sent him to grammar school, though, they could not afford the tuition long enough for him to finish his studies. As a result, Saramago attended a technical school to become a mechanic while studying literature during his free time. Before marrying his first wife Ilda Reis in 1944, he began working as an administrative civil servant for the Social Welfare Service. Three years later he published his first book, The Land of Sin, though his initial literary endeavors were not very successful. He wrote more novels, but he failed to publish his projects. Saramago describes his early attempts at writing in his autobiography, “The matter was settled when I abandoned the project[s]: it was becoming quite clear to me that I had nothing worthwhile to say… For 19 years, I was absent from the Portuguese literary scene, where few people can have noticed my absence” (Saramago, “Autobiography”).