Nicolas Cole breaks down José Saramago's Blindness, a Nobel Prize-winning novel that ditches quotation marks, uses comma splices instead of periods, and signals dialogue only through capitalization. Saramago's rule-breaking is deliberate craft, not carelessness.
I'm reading this book called Blindness— it's by José Saramago! This won the Nobel Prize for Literature... In 1998. It's a fascinating novel. This novel breaks every single grammar rule you have ever learned about writing, ever. The entire novel is what my fourth-grade English teacher called "a bunch of comma splices," which is tons of incomplete sentences; and it's a lot of strung-together sentences with no break—and it either grammatically should've been period or maybe semicolon, instead it's just commas. Just coma-comma-comma. Comma-commas? Comma, comma, comma. In addition to that, it breaks the rule of dialogue, where when there's dialogue, there's no quotations. And the only way that you know a sentence has shifted into dialogue is that the first letter becomes capitalized. So it breaks the rules of grammar and sentence structure, it breaks the rules of dialogue, and the way that it combines the two is like— I've never really read a book like this before. What's my point in sharing this? My point is that all of this was a choice. It's not just that Saramago is a competent writer, it's that what makes it art is also intentional choice. Nicholas Cole.
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