Saramago After the Nobel

Acknowledgements

Any book is always a complex nexus of various promises and debts, gifts, hopes, and losses. This volume was a long time in the making, from the very first discussions held concerning the need for a more systematic approach to the works José Saramago published after he received the Nobel Prize, to its final stages of production. Along the way, we as editors, have had many moments of joy as well as of doubt. We are very glad for the positive reception of our idea from so many colleagues from the beginning and their willingness to dedicate some time from their busy schedules and other research to contribute to this volume. We are also grateful, in a very special way, for their patience and steadfast trust in the project. Naturally, as with any long-term process we also lost some by the wayside as they were called to other duties or simply moved on. A few essays we had initially thought of including in the end had to make way for others either to avoid duplication; or, in one case, the essay in question, a very important contribution to Saramago studies that had already been published, as it was republished in a recent volume of essays on Saramago and philosophy, while our volume was still far from completion.

Our intellectual debts are many, wide ranging, and every day that passes become more numerous. Even though we have our own individual trajectories we have at least one strong point in common: the community at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It was there that Paulo received his PhD in Comparative Literature; it was there that José practised for several decades and contributed to the formation of many new colleagues. And it was there that the first International Conference on José Saramago, which we both organized, took place, in 1996, two years before the Nobel Prize was awarded.

From all our debts we would like to single out the following: first of all, thanks are due to all of the colleagues whose contributions make this book. A very special word of thanks to all the librarians at both UMass and Warwick without whose perseverance in finding sometimes obscure ←vii | viii→publications our task would have become much more difficult if at all possible. To all the various colleagues at our institutions who nurtured us with their advice and suggestions, and especially to the Warwick Research Collective. We express our gratitude to Alfredo Cunha for his unique work registering and representing our age and the portrait of José Saramago that appears on this book’s cover. Also, we are enormously grateful to Cláudia Pazos Alonso whose unflinching support of this project through its less bright moments was crucial; to Laurel Plapp at Peter Lang for her indefatigable professionalism and seemingly endless patience, without whose steer this volume would never have gone into print. And to José Saramago, to whose memory we dedicate it all.

Introduction: Saramago after the Nobel

That Portugal has never had a writer as celebrated as José Saramago, that his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 was an honour bestowed not just on him but on the nation as a whole, that he was a communist, an atheist, a moralist, the last romantic, or a hopeless utopian – all that and more has been said of Saramago. Just as Günter Grass, awarded the Nobel Prize one year after, was often seen as the conscience of the nation and equally admired and despised for it, so with Saramago. Did his detractors disdain him because of his humble origins or his political convictions, or did they fear him? In any case there can be no doubt that Saramago was a transformative force, both as a writer and as a public intellectual. When he arrived at his place as a writer, already well into his 50s – the breakthrough Levantado do Chão [Raised from the Ground] was published in 1980 when he was 58 – he had already lived an intense life. But nothing in comparison to what was then still to come, and which, in terms of public exposure, reached a high point in 1998. Critical appreciation of Saramago was then already well on its way – among other manifestations, the first international conference on his work, which we had the privilege of organizing, was held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1996 and counted on a large number of both senior as well as beginning colleagues whose commitment and appreciation of Saramago’s work has remained constant. Saramago, who was present, presented us with a human example that remains indelible as he was not only towering as could be expected, as he was humble, a virtue all the scarcer today and especially in great writers.

The award of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998 to José Saramago was generally received as a great personal victory for a writer hailing from such humble beginnings as Saramago, and furthermore one who had only ←1 | 2→very late decided to dedicate himself to writing, after his youthful beginnings had been abandoned for decades. At the same time, it was also hailed as a sort of vindication for the nation as a whole that often felt, and feels, as if its contributions to literature and art are generally misrepresented, underestimated, or simply ignored. This dual victory, although far from uncommon in the case of countries such as Portugal whose political and economic impact in the world is small, also exposed many of the antinomies that can be said to accompany the processes of attributing value to any work of art or artist in a world structured at its most basic level by the flows of capital. Furthermore, perhaps also as to be expected once the initial euphoria started to fade away, a growing chorus of critical voices inevitably pointed to the Nobel Prize as the ultimate poisoned gift that, even if not solely responsible, certainly was a catalyst, in the process of Saramago’s writing losing any quality it might still have possessed before. Most were limited to brief, ephemeral reviews in the press whether in Portugal or other countries and as such quickly and rightly forgotten. This was made all the easier by the large number of critical studies that appeared in the time immediately after the award. And, even though most of these were in Portuguese, international scholars also contributed to a wide dissemination of his works worldwide. The unreserved praise bestowed upon Saramago by two of the most influential names in criticism, George Steiner and Harold Bloom, certainly helped establish Saramago’s international projection. In English, he certainly benefited from the work of great translators such as Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa.

Attention to the work of Saramago has also been expanding into other fields beyond the literary as scholars in legal studies and philosophy, for instance, have also been publishing critical studies of Saramago, especially focusing on some of his novels that address questions that clearly intersect with their fields of expertise. Nonetheless, and in spite of Saramago’s influence continuing to grow, the number of critical studies dedicated to his works published after the Nobel Prize, have been certainly less prominent than the ones that go back to some of the earlier works. It was with this deficit, whether real or perceived, in mind that we had started discussing the need to focus on the works from Saramago’s post-Nobel period, as we consider it to be as rich, at least, as the previous phase of his writing. ←2 | 3→Obviously, there is no clear separating line between one and the other; Saramago kept on evolving as a writer and experimenting further with both form as well as content, yet also kept very much true to his ideals, and to his goals as a writer. Perhaps no better example of this is the one provided by the two novels Blindness and Seeing, originally published in 1995 and 2004, respectively, as they form not only a clear pair, one picking up where the other had left off, but are involved in a clear dialectical relationship. As such the essays in this volume do not limit themselves strictly to the works published after 1998. To do so would not only have been unnatural but, in many ways, misguided, creating an artificial barrier where none exists. Yet, the focus lies clearly on the later novels as intended.

Besides attempting to expand on available scholarship on Saramago, our project also aims at anchoring readings of Saramago in the present, both ←3 | 4→by reading his work from a twenty-first-century perspective and reading it as contemporary. In other words, even though Saramago is still very close to us in all respects, it is now just over a decade since he died and indeed, in 2022 the centenary of his birth will be celebrated the world over. We should be pleased to see this volume contribute, however modestly, to that milestone. Yet we do not conceive of our work here as celebratory. Rather, and even though all essays attest in their various ways, to the intensity and forcefulness of all of Saramago’s works, our concern was much more directed at enacting a series of approaches and interpretative strategies that might facilitate our understanding of Saramago as a key figure for many of the present debates of our time. As such, these chapters, again, each in its own manner, looks at aspects of Saramago’s writing that present special key nodes of meaning, either in terms of their content or their form. And, as could not but be, special care goes to processes of resistance and dialectical thinking that were a hallmark of Saramago. Thus, none of us sees a rupture in the work before and after the Nobel, but rather a deepening of the concerns, a honing of writing strategies, and a constant sharpening of Saramago’s critical outlook on life, on humanity, and the material conditions shaping it.

Saramago did not restrict himself to the writing of novels and his essayistic interventions, his autobiographical writings, his poems, librettos, and plays, all deserve attention. This volume does not attempt full coverage and focuses primarily on the novel. This can be put down to contingency, to a general preference for the novel. But it also has very much to do with ←4 | 5→the fact that the novel not only is the form that Saramago most practised but also the one on which his legacy will most surely come to rest. A brief reflection on the question of form is not simply a way of trying to explain retrospectively how the volume came to be but rather a response to the challenge Saramago put before us all in his playful and distinctive use of the novel. By this we mean not only his freedom with orthographic conventions, his extended sentences, his seemingly endless paragraphs, or the way in which his books carry open metafictional reflections but also his privileging of allegory over other modes. Allegory today, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, is a ‘social symptom’: ‘Allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life.’¹ Indeed, as Jameson goes on to argue, allegory in the present always refers to problems of representation as well. We could easily apply this insight to Saramago’s breakthrough novel Levantado do Chão (Raised from the Ground) in which precisely what has become commonly known as Saramago’s unique narrative style first appears, and which, as the author himself recounted countless times, had to do with his search to register and represent the alienating reality of the rural workers in the Alentejo province. The form Saramago’s novels take thus both signals the profound problems at the heart of Portuguese society, grounded on structural inequality as it still is, and tries to critically expose them, all the while reflecting, and reflecting on, the radical inadequacy of our systems of representation.

We are reading Saramago at a conjuncture in time, in which the rapid acceleration of disasters, whether ecological, political, or financial, has exposed the enormity of the fissures in the social fabric of our world. The rapid spread of intolerance across Europe if not the entire world, the slippage into authoritarianism that has assailed even some of the strongest and most established western democracies, and the installation of the state of emergency with increased frequency and for longer and longer periods of ←5 | 6→time are all scenarios that Saramago warned us about. Indeed, many of his novels are urgent calls for us to rethink our mode of life and habits, our conformism, our blindness to the surrounding horror as long as it does not yet directly touch us. The current pandemic that has been so devastating in spite of our technological advances and all our resources certainly makes us read novels like Seeing in a different light, and what might have seemed far-fetched just a few years ago, such as the total confinement of an entire city by government decree has become all too real for all of us. This does not make Saramago clairvoyant or some kind of doomsday prophet. But it does mean that he had, in a heightened way, the finger on the pulse of History. Just as Theodor Adorno’s 1967 lecture at the University of Vienna on the spread and rise of what he termed ‘New Right-Wing Extremism’² has gained new meaning in the present, with the advance of a virulent and xenophobic far-right pretty much across Europe and the Americas, so with Saramago’s novels, whose importance has never been greater than now.

We can see Saramago as one of the great innovators of Portuguese literature, as a key figure in the transition of the Portuguese novel from the tired precepts of the long dominant neo-realism, and the more hesitant existentialism, to a kind of what might even be designated as a critical postmodernism. Literary period or movement labels as helpful as they can be in helping us trace evolutionary lines or come up with neater compartments in the end are also constricting and limiting. Saramago clearly managed to navigate through them as he saw fit, always reminding us of the importance of preserving human dignity. If there is something we might want to hold on as better designating his writing, we could do worse than to suggest that Saramago’s work is above all emancipatory, a writing that never fails to delight readers while also always reminding them that oppression, so easily spread, and so hard to overcome, can never be tolerated. Freedom, which he, as all fellow Portuguese experienced in 1974 when the nearly fifty years of the fascist dictatorship were finally over, constitutes a legacy that can never be taken for granted and must be fought for every day anew.