Blindness by José Saramago

“The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.”

The opening lines of Blindness by José Saramago, as translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Can one imagine anything more orderly and regular than the flow of traffic at a controlled intersection? Think of the time-lapsed films we’ve all seen, the metronomic stop-go, stop-go of the traffic even more evident when accelerated, pulsing regularly as the day and night advance around it. What better opening could there be for a novel about the breakdown of human organizations and systems?

The first light shown is amber—the caution light. As the novel will show, there will always be some people who will try to take advantage of these transitional periods; rather than exercise caution, rather than abide by the agreed-upon rules, they will rush ahead to try and “get theirs.” By constantly trying to push the limits for their own advantage, these selfish beings may overwhelm a system that is based on agreement and cooperation.

But here at the beginning, at least, the regulatory system is robust enough to handle the work required of it, and the pedestrians cross in their turn when the signal to do so appears. All these regulatory signals, by the by, being visual cues, so that when the titular blindness strikes a few moments later, the long breakdown of system and order will begin.

But first the novel pauses, as it will often do, for a brief aside about language, remarking the oddness of referring to crosswalks as “zebras,” but then simply declaring it part of the order of things and moving on, reminding us that in language everything is called what it is because “that is what it is called.” Language is the great and perhaps original example of an order imposed arbitrarily on the world by humans, functioning in a particular way simply because we all agree it will do so. Green means go, red means stop, and white stripes mark road crossings only because we all agree that it is so.

(And where does “zebra” come from, anyway? Is there any language or culture that truly refers to crosswalks as zebras? As an American, I am unfamiliar with the term. Is it a Portuguese thing? A European thing? Or did the author create it out of whole cloth?)

And then in the next paragraph, the long, slow unraveling of the social order begins.