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.