Context N°13
by Zulfikar Ghose
The first of José Saramago’s novels to be published in English translation came out in 1987, and it is gratifying to reflect that a Portuguese writer was accorded this well-deserved recognition eleven years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, especially in an age notorious for neglecting authors suspected of not conforming to the conventional forms that govern marketable mediocrity, but instead are obsessed with the foolishness of trying to discover the forms of those impressions in their brains that signify a unique envisioning of reality. Eight more of Saramago’s novels have appeared in English, the Nobel Prize no doubt encouraging the publishers to keep the books in print.
Upon publishing her eleventh book, The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary: “. . . I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds,” and added with a sense of retrospective despair at the long travail and of grateful relief that it was over, “What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!” What is astonishing about Saramago’s nine novels is that unlike Woolf he seems not to have needed to experiment to discover the forms embedded within his brain, for he hit upon his own unique vision with the very first one, Baltasar and Blimunda. In it he established a singular voice and style and then proceeded to sustain his method through eight succeeding novels without the voice ever losing its freshness and the style its distinctive power. Where other writers evolve, he seems to have begun with a big bang. He is like a composer whose ninth symphony has a strict structural resemblance to the first, and yet the variation in the orchestration and the new sources of melodies—from the collective memory of a people in one book, from a prevalent universal motif in another—create a variety in each of the works, so that, stimulated by the new content and its internal surprises, what one really enjoys is the music, or in the case of the writer, the voice, because we hear his theme as it could be expressed by no other sound.
Each of Saramago’s novels has a thematic core based on an intellectual premise or some historical fact or on an outrageous but surprisingly credible proposition—as in The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off at the Pyrenees from the European continent and drifts off to sea. Baltasar and Blimunda is grounded in history, begins precisely in the year 1711, but it is as if a text by Herodotus had been thoroughly, and with some mischievous interpolations, revised by Boccaccio, and ends up having little to do with the fictions of history and everything to do with the timeless verities associated with love and suffering. The Portuguese title, Memorial do Convento, refers to the building of a monastery in fulfillment of a promise made to the Franciscan order by King Dom João V if God granted him an heir; an important theme of the novel is the human cost mindlessly expended by the vanity of monarchical wishes. Here, as well as in other novels, Saramago’s compassion for common people comes through strongly in lively dramatic scenes, which are humorous even as they depict intense suffering, without his ever becoming didactic. His stance at times seems that of a spirited socialist, at others of a wise old philosopher, at others of a coarse peasant telling a smutty joke, and he transmits all these attitudes without ever offending the reader’s taste because he never stops being a novelist who has a complicated, and intensely absorbing, new version to tell of a timeless story: behind the several intellectual masks, there is only one voice.
But the lovers Baltasar and Blimunda are central to the story of Memorial do Convento, and the English publisher’s romantic retitling of the book is not too improper a liberty. Together with their patron Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço, who is a historical figure famous as a pioneer of aviation, Baltasar and Blimunda are the focus of that imaginative invention of reality that is truer than the received, but often subsequently discredited, truths of history. Baltasar has only one hand, the other having been lost when he was a soldier, and yet he is the builder of Padre Bartolomeu’s airship; Blimunda has the capacity to see inside a person’s body, and it is she who creates the fuel for the ship, the wills she has collected from two thousand people that then become the will that powers the airship. And off they go, the three of them, in a beautiful scene that is both magical and wholly credible without being another mechanical reformulation of magical realism. It is a metaphorical ascendance of love when, climbing towards the sun, Baltasar and Blimunda embrace and the priest joins them; it is a sacred, holy moment filled with pagan joy. Now truly holy, Padre Bartolomeu is no longer of the Church. Even as he is in the air, the Inquisition is seeking him on land, for he has converted to Judaism. And so he flees to Spain.
Appearing in several of Saramago’s novels, the iniquities of the Church is another important theme in Baltasar and Blimunda. There are many hilarious and satirical passages mocking the pompous pretensions of the princes of the Church; sometimes uttered as a mocking aside, these passages are often one long, flowing sentence which starts seemingly innocuously (as in, “The Cardinal’s procession includes a carriage that travels empty as a mark of personal esteem. . . .”) and leads several lines later to an accumulation of ceremonial details that become increasingly absurd (“. . . the King receives the Cardinal’s biretta from the Papal Legate and places it on the Cardinal’s head who is naturally overcome with Christian humility . . .”) with the absurdity giving way to farce (“. . . the Cardinal goes off to change his vestments and when he reappears he is dressed all in red . . .”), and so on, ending with a big sigh of relief and a final stinging phrase from the author (“. . . Praise be to God, who has to endure such ceremonies”). Such fragmented quotation of a sentence forty-two lines long cannot convey its imaginative force or show how it provokes in the reader an impulse to laugh aloud.
Though Baltasar and Blimunda is a delightful introduction to his work, a reader new to Saramago could start with any one of his novels and become charmed by the voice and be captivated by his style, for his prose retains its peculiar force throughout his work. He writes in sentences that are long but uncomplicated and contain these elements: the immediate descriptive matter of the plot; the dialogue, if any, that doesn’t set off a character’s speech by placing it within inverted commas and often without stating who the speaker is; observations that can be a reflection in the mind of one or more characters or possibly in the mind of the author himself and that underscore elements of human comedy and tragedy; intrusive comments on the nature of fictional forms or a question of grammar; sudden remarks that are unrelated to the action but are an important philosophical association suggested by the idea just represented in the previous phrase. Composed of these elements, the entire long sentence is really a lot of separate sentences strung together with commas and ending with a period, the only two punctuation marks Saramago uses, and if there is an exclamation or a question or a piece of dialogue, one hears these without needing the expression to be signaled by a punctuation mark. It looks like a headlong rush of words, but the whole seems perfectly natural, as if one sat across the table from Saramago, hearing him tell the story and sometimes having the impression that he is talking to himself.
Sometimes a Saramago novel’s core idea generates imaginative and historical content by combining two realities, that of an abstract puzzle posited by an intellectual hypothesis and that of an observed concrete world in which the story advances. This is best exemplified by The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which the main character is one of three manifestations of the Self projected as his heteronyms by the poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Since the Ricardo Reis invented by Pessoa has a similar sort of existence in the reader’s mind as Borges’s Pierre Menard—that is to say, he is historically real because his inventor has successfully lodged him in our minds and yet we know him to be only an idea—Saramago can engage the reader in a perception that is simultaneously authentic and duplicitous, a reality that dissolves in the very moment it is seen to be solid: now Reis is there, whose carnal affair with Lydia and a platonic one with Marcenda pull the narrative towards the telling of an old-fashioned romantic story, and now Reis is only a consciousness being visited by the dead poet and the narrative suddenly shifts to the expression of transcendental ideas, and this sudden falling from solid reality as through a trapdoor into a world without gravity where one floats in the exhilaration of ideas is one of the finest pleasures of reading Saramago.
Blindness is Saramago’s most powerful novel. It is a grim story of the barbarity, degeneracy, and overwhelming despair that overtakes a society in which every persom but one goes blind, and all are trapped in some extreme political malevolence and transformed into brutish beasts floundering in the horror of that awful darkness of total blindness that visits all humanity held in some totalitarian vise. None of the characters in Blindness is given a name. There is the doctor and the doctor’s wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the old man with the black eyepatch, etc., written just like that, without even the dignity of initial capitals. Saramago pushes his characters to the limits of endurance to suggest that there is no bodily degradation that a person will not submit to in order to survive, and he spares no details in the accumulation of horrors that become unbearably painful to observe—e.g., a woman must suck the dripping penis of a man who has just withdrawn it after raping another because the women’s meager ration of food is in his criminal control. The scene is created with such physical force that the reader is made to suffer the woman’s excruciatingly revolting sensation—and though it’s a world in which people cannot see what they’re doing, it could not be projected on each imagination with sharper clarity. In creating such a world, Saramago has created a novel with a searing vision, and its meaning is not exclusively political (how a nation falls into a common blindness) or anthropological (how quickly people abandon civilized control) or philosophical (why the conditions of life are so intolerable, and what, after all, is life?), but includes all of these ideas and then goes beyond them to become that poetical vision which is intuitively experienced by the reader as the distinguishing characteristic of a timeless work of art.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon is another work for which Saramago fabricates an ingenious intellectual context: a proofreader, checking a historical work that bears the same title as Saramago’s novel, decides to introduce an error into the text, thus giving rise to the question, If the representation of historical truth can coincide with a distortion of reality, what then is knowledge? Sometimes the error already exists, having been committed in years past and then evolved into a commonly held belief, and the proofreader, who ought to be like a supreme court justice in his pursuit of truth, becomes instead an advocate of a lie that he does not perceive because the error has gone unchallenged for generations. We have books, then, which, the proofreader thinks, are “like a pulsating galaxy, and the words, inside them, form another cosmic dust hovering in anticipation of that glance which will impose some meaning or will search therein for some new meaning . . . ,” and suddenly the proof-reader observes that the words “offer another interpretation, the possibility of some latent contradiction, the evidence of his own error”—and thus, too, the reader looking at the words of the novel and arriving at a surprising interpretation or worrying if his assessment of an earlier chapter was not mistaken.
What the historian presents as a brief fact in a single sentence becomes in the proofreader’s imagination a dramatic chapter in a fiction, and Saramago presents that event not as an association in the distracted proofreader’s mind but as a narrative in his own text, so that the scene generating itself in the proofreader’s imagination becomes a chapter of the novel in the reader’s hands. This results in high intellectual entertainment, with the impressive parade of ideas alternating with an absorbing human drama. For the drama, Saramago turns to romantic interest—the proofreader’s affair with a female editor—and makes that the dominant story in the book’s second half without, however, diminishing the philosophical interest.
In several of his novels, Saramago confronts the facts of history with a questioning and ironical imagination and recovers from a remote time those passions of ordinary humans that make them our contemporaries. This may be seen in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which, while telling in a marvelous wealth of details the story of Jesus, presents theological and philosophical controversies with the irreverence of one taking delight in telling smutty jokes—e.g., “Anyone wishing to see [Jesus’] foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the amusement of curious atheists.”
Some readers might be offended by this, but everyone will find something to enjoy in The Stone Raft, with its hilarious spectacle of the floating Iberian Peninsula, or All the Names, in which a man working for the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, for whom people are only names in the files, makes a random selection, thus converting the seminal ink-marks in a file to a person of flesh and blood. Finally, there is The Cave, in which humanity has been reduced to shadows in a shopping mall, seeming at first as though Kafka had elaborated upon a thought from Plato that had then been edited by Orwell, but in the end it is pure Saramago, with his typically independent-minded characters—four hardy artisan-types of peasant stock—who abandon the corporate fantasy of reality as a theme park and set out for the unknown, prepared to suffer the hazards of capricious nature because, compared to urban entombment, any life is preferable in which the soul is not dead.
SELECTED WORKS BY JOSÉ SARAMAGO IN TRANSLATION
All the Names. Trans. Margaret Costa. Harvest Books, $14.00.
Baltasar and Blimunda. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $13.00.
Blindness. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $14.00.
The Cave. Trans. Margaret Costa. Harcourt, $25.00.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $14.00.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $14.00.
The Stone Raft. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $14.00.
The Tale of an Unknown Island. Trans. Margaret Costa. Harcourt, $16.00.
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Harvest Books, $14.00.
