Cair fora do mundo. Peste e distopia em Ensaio sobre a Cegueira

The essay examines José Saramago’s Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira) as a threshold text between the classical tradition of plague narratives and the modern genre of dystopia. Drawing on the literary history of epidemics (from Homer and Lucretius to Thucydides, Manzoni and Camus) and on Auerbach’s theory of realism, the article interprets the “white blindness” as a figure of an internal collapse of civilization, caused not by an external catastrophe but by the loss of a constitutive human faculty. The epidemic is thus read as a device that produces a “creatural” regression, in which biology, violence and the breakdown of social bonds disclose a primary anthropological condition. From this perspective, Blindness connects the topos of the plague with a dystopian reflection on the crisis of language, the impoverishment of experience and the inadequacy of words in the face of radical evil, implicitly dialoguing with Primo Levi and with Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of the collapse of experience in the twentieth century. A central role is assigned to the system of proverbs, understood both as a repository of cultural memory and as a narrative device that intertwines orality, anthropological knowledge and temporal montage, shaping the novel as a form of encyclopedic synthesis in which history, myth and the present are condensed within a stratified and non-linear temporality.