On Clarity and Suffocation

We met in a cafe in Lisbon that Saramago had chosen, a place with tiled walls and ceilings so high the cigarette smoke — if anyone had been smoking — would have gathered in a stratum up there, a private weather system. Orwell sat with a pot of tea he hadn’t touched, his back very straight, turning a spoon over in his fingers the way other men might fidget with a coin. He was thinner than I’d imagined. Not ill-looking, exactly, but pared. As if someone had taken a man of normal proportions and removed everything that wasn’t load-bearing.

Saramago arrived ten minutes late and did not apologize. He sat down, ordered coffee in Portuguese, looked at Orwell, looked at me, and said, “So. A surveillance state.”

“That’s the combination,” I said. “Your Blindness. His Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian regime, but one that feels less like a machine and more like — ”

“A fever,” Saramago said.

“I was going to say a dream.”

“Fevers and dreams are not the same thing. A dream you can wake from. A fever is the body disagreeing with itself. The body in rebellion against its own systems. That is what a surveillance state is, no? The society running a fever, the state as the temperature that will not come down.”

Orwell set the spoon down. He placed it parallel to the saucer with a precision that seemed involuntary — the alignment was too exact to be casual but too habitual to be deliberate. “A fever implies illness. Illness implies a body that was once well. I’m not sure I believe in the healthy state that preceded the sick one. The tendency toward tyranny isn’t a corruption of politics. It’s the default. Democracy and decency are the aberrations. They require constant maintenance. Totalitarianism is what happens when you stop maintaining.”

“We agree on the destination,” Saramago said. “We disagree on the vehicle.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

Saramago drank his coffee in one motion — not a sip, a completion. “You write about totalitarianism as a machine. Telescreens, Thought Police, the Ministry of Truth — each piece is identifiable, labeled, placed where the reader can see it and name it. This is your great strength. You make the machinery visible so the reader cannot pretend it is invisible. But.”

“But.”

“But machines can be broken. That is the hope you embed in the architecture of your nightmares, even when you do not intend to. If the telescreen is a device, it can be smashed. If the Thought Police are officers, they can be eluded. If the Ministry of Truth is a building, it can burn. Your readers finish your book terrified but also, secretly, reassured. Because you have shown them the parts. And parts can be disassembled.”

Orwell picked the spoon up again. I watched his thumb run along its edge. “And your alternative?”

“I do not show parts. I show a condition. Blindness is not a machine. You cannot smash it. You cannot point to the device that produces it. It arrives, and everyone is inside it, and there is no outside from which to observe it. My readers do not finish my book reassured. They finish it aware that they, too, are already blind, that they have been blind for years, and that the blindness is not a thing that was done to them but a thing they have been doing.”

I said, “So the question is whether the regime in this story is a machine or a condition.”

“Both,” Orwell said, quickly enough that I knew he’d been thinking it. “A machine that has been running so long it’s become a condition. The telescreen was installed. Someone wired it. Someone manufactured the glass. But after forty years, the telescreen is simply part of the wall. You don’t see the surveillance because you grew up inside it. You adapted. Your language adapted. Your thoughts adapted. The machine became the weather.”

Saramago smiled. It was a small, private expression, not for us. “Now you are talking like me.”

“God forbid.” But Orwell almost smiled too. Almost.

I asked about language — specifically, the destruction of language as control. Newspeak in 1984, the way Orwell imagined a vocabulary deliberately shrunk until rebellion became literally unthinkable. “Can we use that here? A regime that doesn’t ban words but dissolves them?”

“Dissolves,” Saramago repeated. He seemed to taste the word. “Yes. My prose already does this. I do not use quotation marks. I do not separate one voice from another with the neat fencing of punctuation. When my characters speak, their words run into the narration, into each other, until you cannot always tell who is speaking or whether anyone is speaking at all. This is not a trick. This is accuracy. In life, we do not know where our own thoughts end and the thoughts of others begin. The regime you are describing — it would understand this. It would use it.”

“Newspeak was a blunt instrument,” Orwell said. “I wrote it as a philological project — committees sitting in offices, systematically removing words from the dictionary. Very British, very bureaucratic, very visible. But the real corruption of language doesn’t happen in committees. It happens in the mouth. In the daily speech. The euphemism you repeat until it loses its euphemistic quality and becomes simply what the thing is called. You don’t need a Ministry of Truth if every citizen has already internalized the revised vocabulary. The ministry can close its doors. The work is done.”

“And when the work is done,” Saramago said, “the machine disappears. Not because it has been destroyed but because it has been absorbed. The body has absorbed the fever. The temperature is now normal — but normal has been redefined upward.”

We were quiet for a moment. A waiter came and refilled Saramago’s coffee without being asked, which suggested either excellent service or a long relationship. Saramago didn’t acknowledge it. He was looking at the tiles on the wall — blue and white azulejos, old ones, hand-painted, each slightly different from its neighbors despite clearly representing the same pattern. I wondered if he was seeing them or thinking through them.

“The non-linear structure,” I said. “I’ve been given a constraint — the story has to move through time out of order. Not as a gimmick but as architecture. The arrangement of scenes has to create meaning that wouldn’t exist in chronological sequence.”

Orwell frowned. “I distrust formal experimentation for its own sake. Chronological narrative is honest. It respects the reader’s sense of causation. First this happened, then this, then this — and because it happened in this order, the outcome was inevitable. That inevitability is the horror. You don’t need to scramble the timeline to make a totalitarian state frightening. The linear march toward the boot on the face is the most terrifying structure there is.”

“You are wrong,” Saramago said. He said it without heat, the way you might correct a factual error in a document — not arguing, just amending. “You are wrong because totalitarianism does not experience itself as linear. The citizen inside the regime does not think: first they came for the language, then they came for the memory, then they came for me. The citizen thinks: this is how it has always been. The regime’s greatest achievement is not the control of the present but the rewriting of sequence. Things happened in whatever order the regime says they happened. Time is not a line. Time is a room with no windows, and the regime decides what the clock says.”

I said, “So the non-linear structure isn’t a device — it’s the experience of living inside the regime.”

“Yes,” Saramago said.

“Maybe,” Orwell conceded. He looked uncomfortable, which I was learning meant he was thinking honestly rather than arguing a position. “I’ll grant you this: Winston’s trouble in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that he cannot trust his own memory. He remembers a time before Big Brother, or thinks he does, but he cannot verify the memory because all records have been altered. The regime hasn’t just controlled the present — it has made the past unreliable. And if the past is unreliable, then sequence collapses. You cannot say ‘first this, then this’ if you don’t trust the ‘first.’ Perhaps the fragmented timeline is the only honest representation of consciousness under totalitarian control. You can’t tell the story in order because the protagonist doesn’t have access to the order.”

“Now you are talking like yourself at your best,” Saramago said.

Orwell ignored this. “But the clarity of the prose must not be sacrificed. If the timeline is fragmented, the individual scene must be precise. Concrete. The reader must know where they are even if they don’t know when.”

“Agreed,” I said. “What if the prose style itself shifts with the timeline? Earlier scenes — when the protagonist can still think independently — are written in clear, declarative prose. Your prose,” I said to Orwell. “Precise, unadorned, each sentence a clean window. But later scenes — or scenes from deeper inside the regime’s influence — shift toward something more like —”

“Like me,” Saramago said.

“Like you. Flowing, unpunctuated, voices bleeding into one another, the protagonist’s thoughts indistinguishable from the regime’s language. The form itself showing whether the character can still think clearly or has been absorbed.”

Orwell was quiet for a long time. He turned the spoon again, slowly. “That’s clever. I’m not sure clever is what we want.”

“It is not cleverness,” Saramago said. “It is what happens. You are describing a person whose mind is colonized. In the early stages, the colonization is visible — there is a border between the person’s thoughts and the imposed thoughts, and the person can see the border. They can write in your clean sentences because they can still distinguish between their own thinking and the regime’s thinking. But colonization proceeds. The border dissolves. The person no longer knows which thoughts are theirs and which were installed. At that point, my sentences are the accurate form. Not because they are better than yours — do not flatter yourself that I am conceding quality — but because they are what consciousness sounds like when it has been invaded. The commas keep running, the voices merge, the individual I cannot find where it begins or ends.”

“And the non-linear structure,” I said, feeling my way toward it, “means the reader encounters these two modes out of sequence. They read a late scene — Saramago’s fog — and then an early scene — Orwell’s clarity — and the juxtaposition shows them what was lost. Not told, shown. The form performs the loss.”

“Or the reader encounters the clear scene after the foggy one and thinks: was this ever real? Was the protagonist ever this coherent, or is this a false memory, a clean past the regime has invented for them?”

That was Saramago. He said it looking at Orwell, and I realized he was not just proposing a structure. He was describing what regimes actually do to history — make it so clean it can’t possibly be true, and so suspect that the citizen no longer trusts any version, clean or dirty.

Orwell set the spoon down again. Same alignment. Same parallelism to the saucer. “What about the blindness? How does that enter?”

“As metaphor,” I said. “The Blindness premise — sudden, collective loss of sight — maps onto the regime’s effect on civic awareness. People go blind to what the state does. Not because it’s hidden but because they’ve been given reasons to stop looking.”

Saramago shook his head. “You are making it too neat. In my novel, the blindness is white. Not darkness. The blind see only a brilliant, featureless white. Everything is overexposed. This is important. The totalitarian state does not plunge its citizens into darkness. It floods them with light. So much information, so much transparency, so much visibility that the citizen drowns in it. They become blind from excess, not deprivation. Every surface is illuminated. Every corner is visible. And in all that light, nothing can be seen.”

“Bright compliance,” Orwell said quietly.

“What?”

“Bright compliance. The state demands that everything be visible, well-lit, transparent. And in that demand, it achieves the opposite. You comply so brightly that you disappear.”

We sat with that for a while. The cafe had emptied around us without my noticing. The waiter was stacking chairs at the far end of the room, not hurrying us but making clear that time had passed, that we had been here longer than we thought. Saramago ordered another coffee. Orwell finally drank his cold tea.

“There is one more thing,” Saramago said. “The story must not resolve. Your Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with Winston loving Big Brother. It is devastating because it is complete. The resistance is extinguished. The individual is destroyed. Total victory for the regime. It is a perfect ending. I hate it.”

“You hate it.”

“I hate it because it is a mercy. The reader closes the book and knows what happened. They can grieve. They can say: this is what tyranny does. They have a clean horror to carry. My endings do not allow this. In Blindness, the sight returns. Just like that. No explanation. And my characters must go on living in a world where they know what they did when they were blind. That is worse than Winston’s fate. Winston forgets. My characters remember.”

“So the ending of this story,” I said.

“Should not end,” Saramago said. “Or should end in a place where the reader does not know whether to grieve or to continue.”

“That’s the same thing,” Orwell said.

Saramago finished his coffee. He did not disagree.