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José Saramago (1922-2010) |
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Portuguese writer, who combined in his work myths, history of his own country, and surrealistic imagination.
José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998. "In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be." (José Saramago, in Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006, New Press, 2007, p. 119) José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, in the province of Ribatejo, the son of José de Sousa, an artilleryman in the first world war, and Maria de Piedade. When Saramago was two, the family moved to Lisbon. Saramago's father took a job as traffic policeman and his mother worked as a domestic cleaner. During school holidays, Saramago returned to Azinhaga, where his grandparents, illiterate peasants, lived and took care of him. Saramago tells in Viagem a Portugal (1981, Journey to Portugal) that as a child, he was afraid of the chapel San Jóse: "there was a story that one night a huge beam appeared, blocking the road in front of the chapel, and nobody knew where it had come from. When a man returning home tried to climb over it, he found he couldn't, because something kept tugging at his leg, and when all of a sudden he heard a voice saying, "Nobody can cross here", he took fright and ran away." (Ibid., translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000, p. 285) At an early age, Saramago was forced to abandon school in order to earn his living. He was educated as a technician, and before becoming a journalist, translator, and writer, he did a number of manual jobs. Saramago married in 1944 Ilda Reis, then a typist with the Railway Company, who was to become a respected engraver. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1970. Saramago's first novel, Terra do Pecado (1947, Country of Sin) was originally named A Viúva. It was his publisher, Manuel Rodrigues, who suggested the new title. The sales were poor. Saramago disowned the book. In 1969 Saramago joined the Communist Party of Portugal; the party was
forbidden during the military dictatorship. Between April and
November 1975 he held the post of deputy editor at the Lisbon newspaper Diário
de Noticias. After the failed coup d'état on 25 November, Saramago and
some other Communist journalist were accused of being too radical and
they lost their jobs. "Being fired was the best luck of my life," he
lated said in an interview. "It was the birth of my life as a writer." ('José Saramago, the Unexpected Fantasist' by Fernanda Eberstadt, The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 26, 2007) Since 1979 he devoted himself entirely to writing.
In 1988
Saramago married Pilar del Río, a journalist. When Saramago won the Nobel Prize, the headlines in the Lisbon newspaper A Capital
hinted that he was not the best choice even by the author himself. A
two-page centrefold spread was entitled, "Não nasci para isto" (I
wasn't born for this). A headline in Record
read, "Vaticano critica escolha: Entregaram prémio a um comunista" (The
Vatican criticises choice: 'They have given the prize to a Communist').
Moreover, one paper published in the same page a small picture of
Saramago and a large picture of five strippers. Diário
de Noticias devoted a large number of pages to Saramago without much bothering to congratulate him individually in the main coverage. (Advertising and Identity in Europe: The I of the Beholder, edited by Jackie Cannon, Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta, Ian Robin Warner, 2013, pp. 103-05) After
government officials vetoed the nomination of his novel
O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (1991, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) for the European Award for Literature, Saramago left
Portugal and settled on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. (Christ is presented in the work as the son of a Roman soldier.) Usually Saramago's
political views did not make the front page. However, visiting in March
2002 Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah, he said: "What is
happening in Palestine is a crime
which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz, at
Buchenwald. Even taking into account the differences in time and place,
it is the same thing." (The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power by Melanie Phillips, 2011, p. 206) With this comment Saramago set off a storm of protests. The
Israeli writer Amos Oz reacted by writing
that the "Israeli occupation is unjust – but to compare it to the
crimes of the Nazis is like comparing Saramago to Stalin." ('The militant magician' by Julian Evans, The Guardian, 28 December, 2002) In his public appearances Saramago was always well dressed. He was tall, became bald on the top of his head, and wore thick eyeglasses. Saramago died after a long illness at his home on 18 June, 2010. His ashes were wee buried under an old olive tree that was brought from his hometown Azinhaga, to which he always remained attached. Saramago
published plays, short stories, novels, poems, libretti, diaries, and
travelogues. After the fall of Estado Novo, Saramago ended his silence
as a novelist with Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia (1977), in which the central theme is the genesis of the artist, of a painter as well as a writer. In Journey to Portugal Saramago searched for the idea of Portugal, when the dictatorship was gone. The journey (which took place in and through the
country, as Saramago emphasized in the preface to the English edition)
lasted nearly six months. To see his country with with
fresh eyes and fresh wonder, Saramago used the third person, observing
as much his surrounding as his own reactions: "Here he is forced to
recognise his own shortcomings, and admit he has everything to learn.
About miracles, as all else." (Ibid., translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, 2000, p. 5) Levantado do Chão (1980, Raised from the Ground) came out
when Saramago was 58. This three-generation saga of a poor sharecropper
family covered chapters in Portugal's history from the post-World
War I period through to the Carnation Revolution (25th April 1974).
Saramago first gained an international reputation with his satirical
novel Memorial do Convento (1982, Baltasar and Blimunda), set in the first half of the 18th century. The Italian composer Corghi based his opera Blimunda on the novel. O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (1984, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) revolves around the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) and his alternative authorial personality Ricardo Reis.The
story is set in 1936, the year of the onset of the Spanish
Civil War, and Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar.
"The passanger got out, glanced fleetingly at the café, which was named
Royal, a commercial example of monarchical nostalgia in a republican
era, or of reminiscenses of the last reign, here disguised in English
or French. A curious situation, one looks at the word without knowing
whether it should be pronounced rôial or ruaiale." (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, A Harvest Book, 1992, p. 7) Again,
Saramago diverges from traditional historical commitment to the
facts. Reis, the fictional narrator, is portrayed as a monarchist.
Taking a relativist stance, Saramago writes: "A word lies, with the
same word one can speak the truth, we are
not what we say, we are true only if others believe us." (Ibid., pp. 282-83) Symbolic A Jangada de Pedra (1986, The Stone Raft ) tells a story of Portugal's exclusion from Europe: a series of supernatural events culminates in the severance of the Iberian peninsula so that it starts to float into the Atlantic, initially heading for the Azores. Saramago's tone is ironic – he mixes different views from the Prime Minister and the US president to tourist officers and European Community. A group of people tries to find an explanation for the phenomenon, among them Joaquim Sassa, who threw a stone in the (Saramago outraged in 2007 his compatriots with his statement that it is inevitable that Portugal will end up joining with Spain.) Saramago's controversial novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,
was excluded from the European Union literary contest Ariosto by Sousa
Lara, Under-Secretary of State of Portugal, but after international
protest it was returned to the list of candidates. Like Nikos Kazantzákis in his novel The Last Temptations of Christ, or Norman Mailer in The Gospel According to the Son,
he interprets the key episodes from the Gospels from an iconoclastic point of
view, inventing new miracles and prophesies. In the novel God and the
Devil negotiate over evil, and Jesus questions his role and challenges
God. All this Saramago paralles with the creative process of a writer:
"The gaping mouth sends up a cry we shall never hear, for none of these
things is real, what we are contemplating is mere paper and ink,
nothing more." (Ibid., translated by Giovanni Pontiero, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994, p. 1) Maria Magdalene is a prostitute to whom Jesus gives his
virginity. Joseph's feelings of guilt lead to his crucifixion. Jesus
takes him down from the cross, helped by Maria. He repeats his father's
fate and realizes in his last moments, that his sacrificial death had
been planned in advance. " ... the human heart is never content, and
that doing one's duty does not bring peace of mind, though those who
are easily satisfied would have us believe otherwise." (Ibid., p. 279) Among Saramago's other later novels is All the Names (1995),
in which he pays homage to Kafka's bureaucrats. It depicts a minor
official, Senhor José, in the Central Registry of f births, marriages,
and deaths. He becomes obsessed with one of the names, called the
"unknown woman" and begins to track her down. By breaking the routines,
he defies the Registrar, the omnipotent god of the archives, who
nevertheless shows sympathy toward Sr José,a rebel by accident. The
reader realizes that behind the façade of order, there lies loneliness.
In Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (1995, Blindness: A Novel)
an epidemic of blindness starts to
spread in the capital of an unnamed country. An asylum or a
concentration camp, is founded to isolate the blind who see only white
light. An ophthalmologist's wife, who has not gone blind, follows with
a seeing dogher husband to the asylum, and soon around them forms a
small group of people who try to maintain some moral values among the
internees, when violence starts to escalate. ". . . blindness is the
good fortune of the ugly," Saramago wrote; actually the blind cannot
see the ugliness of the world. "Absurd to say it, but the blindness in Saramago's novel is an allegory for not being able to see. What exactly it is we should see, what Saramago -- with all his years as a man and a writer and having lived through dictatorship and revolution -- fears we cannot see, is present in the writing, present abundantly, but it is not to be paraphrased." (Andrew Miller in the New York Times, October 4, 1998) Blindness owes nothing to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), but, in their own way, both of these novels can be read as warnings of blindness to totalitarism. The Cave (2000)
is a story of a potter and his family, who are the "real" people,
living the life of Plato's famous allegory of the cave. O Homem Duplicado (2002)
played with an old literary cliché, the idea of a doppelganger.
Saramago's protagonist, a schoolteacher, asks the existential question, which is the original and which the
copy? One of them must die. Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (2004, Seeing), a political satire, was set in the same
nameless capital city that Blindness, where
a state of emergency is declared after voters cast blank votes in an election. Saramago's final novel was Caim (2009, Cain), in which the jovial character of his picaresque hero, Cain, is juxtaposed with God's coldness and tyrannousness. They misunderstand each other and at the end Saranago says, "one thing we know for certain is that they continued to argue and are arguing still. The story, though, is over, there will be nothing more to tell." (Ibid., translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011, p. 159) For further information: José Saramago: a literatura e o mal by Carlos Nogueira (2022); Saramago after the Nobel: Contemporary Readings of José Saramago's Late Works by Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas (2022); Pessoa & Saramago by Miguel Real (2021) José Saramago: rota de vida: uma biografia by Joaquim Vieira (2018); José Saramago: History, Utopia, and the Necessity of Error by Mark Sabine (2016); On Emerging from Hyper-nation: Saramago's "Historical" Trilogy by Ronald W. Sousa (2014); Dicionário de personagens da obra de José Saramago by Salma Ferraz (2012); Biografia José Saramago by João Marques Lopes (2010); Jose Saramago: El Amor Posible by Juan Arias (1998); Schreiben gegen Mythen: Die Romane von José Saramago by Andreas Schor (1997); José Saramago: aproximação a um retrato by Baptista-Bastos (1996); 'Saramago, Jose' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); 'Ebb and Flow: Place As Pretex in the Novels of José Saramago' by M.L. Daniel, in Luso-Brazilian Review (Winter 1990) Selected works: Os Poemas Possíveis, 1966 [The Possible Poems]
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