So why read Portuguese big-wig Josè Saramago’s book Blindness through the filter of myth and the beautifully cluttered and complicated story of The Lord of the Rings? What benefit is there in this reading? The Lord of the Rings serves as a story almost to end all stories in its scope, cast of characters, and detail. Blindness depicts a harsh world bereft of mercy and compassion, lacking in its very essence the structure of symbols and stories that Tolkien wished to weigh upon his readers. Blindness, through lack of geographic detail, lack of names specific to nation, city or physical features of Europe, creates a mythology for those without. The kind of bookwormish intricacy that Tolkien bestowed on Middle-Earth Saramago imparts in his monstrous and inexplicable phenomenon, “the white blindness.” This unholy marvel is best explicated in the terms of the mystical origins of The One Ring, created out of malice by one who wished to bend all of Middle Earth to his will. Blindness gifts the reader and its characters a new story to pass on as a shared cultural heritage.
          The proponents of Post-Modernism would say that myth is a throwback to the Grand Recit, master narratives of classic realism where reality appears at face value, everything is exactly what it seems to be. To a certain extent this is true because myth does not have the malleability of clever self-reflexive texts or meta-fiction, making commentary on the novel itself or the writer. The closest later writers have come to this is in Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, and The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount. All dabble in the mythical, and inevitably play with the idea and structure of narrative based on the simplest of stories, folktales. Calvino was obsessed with folklore and myth, but found it more fruitful to deal with the idea of narrative rather than the events in the story, or the development of characters within. In this he differs from the mythic tradition, where the characters either learn a lesson from their foibles, or meet some horrible end where the reader/receiver of the tale inherits wisdom from their folly (or triumph). So, in defense of the anticipated argument of myth being a meta-narrative, or a story that purports to speak above all others: in myth there are multiple paths of meaning, from the readers point of view, towards interpreting the tale as shown in The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Tarot cards replace the elements of the story as symbols, and symbols as interpreted by either the narrator or the reader branch out into infinite paths defying unified interpretation. Myth can be a tree with many branches and roots, rather than a dead post stuck in the earth.
          The Lord of the Rings and Blindness may both fall into a category wherein while interpreting the stories, we may stray away from drawing connections to any one current event, but rather assert that as myth they delineate certain societal or cultural issues that remain in flux. These stories remain capable of commenting on many seemingly parallel events, rather than ones surrounding the time from which they were written. This is to mean that the cultural, social, and historical lens for filtering these stories is not fixed to the point from when and where they were written, but continues to evolve with the reader rather than the writer (ala Roland Barthes’ "The Death of the Author".) In most instances and texts, I would usually refute Barthes’ theory that the intention and history of the author does not travel with the text. His argument is based on whether or not text is a series of signifiers, or if it is the signified. Essentially this is semiotics. Barthe’s theory works, according to structuralism, on the basis that language moves from signifier, (i.e. language in this instance) to signified-the concepts coded into the words. Barthes feeling is that that text is not a series of “signified”s, but a series of signifiers interpreted by the reader. Barthes examines this idea in his book, S/Z, “a text's unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination." And further he states that the reader is, “no longer the consumer of the text, but the creator.” This works to a certain extent, except that knowing where the signifier came from, how it was formulated and created helps to actualize and conceptualize the signified. Without knowing anything about Tolkien, his attention to detail, his invention of a language (Elven), and the vast depth of his knowledge in Anglo-Saxon history, the text loses some of its meaning for me. Just as Saramago’s quirky punctuation, distinct form of dialogue without annotating speaker tags or quotation marks, and his tendency to evaluate and reevaluate every possibility of a given scenario make it difficult to separate the author from the text in certain instances. However, navigating the issue of whether or not to allow the readers to create or recreate the text for themselves every time they read it must happen to a greater or lesser degree whether or not Barthes’ theory holds water. The reader uses a different-cultural, historical, and political lens unique to time and space every time they pick up the book, thus providing an avenue to reach new “signified” with each reading, or reader.