Saramago the outspoken

April 6th, 2008 | by Vijayaraghav |

 

 

Saramago the outspoken

I’m not delivering any news if I tell you that the world is a piece of hell for millions of people. There are always a few who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the worst, but you can’t change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism — the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace — no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is already here.  

Saramago is outspoken like this.  An atheist, he maintains that religion is to blame for most of the world’s violence. I liked his way of thinking and got fascinated by his writings. 

Born on 1922, Saramago grew up in a small village about 60 miles northeast of Lisbon. His maternal grandparents were landless peasants who raised pigs, and Saramago’s early years were spent hoeing, chopping wood and hauling water from the pump. When Saramago was 2, his parents, searching for work, moved the family to Lisbon.  Despite his academic promise, his parents could not afford to keep him in grammar school. At 13, Saramago was shunted into a vocational school, where he trained to be a car mechanic. For the first two years out of school, he worked as a mechanic at a garage. Over the next three decades, he worked in a welfare agency, as a locksmith, at a metal company, as a production manager at a publishing house. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist.  At 22, he married a secretary at the state railway company. In 1947 — the same year as the birth of his only child, Violante, now a biologist living in Madeira — Saramago published his first novel that has never been translated into English. It would be 30 years before his next work of fiction (also not translated) saw the light of the day. During this time, his marriage fell apart, and he was fired from various jobs for political reasons. 

He was assistant editor of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975. After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer. 

Pilar del Rio is Saramago’s second wife — they married in 1988 — and is nearly 30 years younger than he. They met in the mid-’80s, when she was lecturing in Lisbon. 

Saramago’s permanent residence is in the Spanish Canary Islands, where he has been living in symbolic exile since 1992, when the Portuguese government, apparently under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked his supposedly heretical novel, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” from being nominated for a European literary prize.  

Latin American literature rose to prominence during the second half of the 20th century, largely thanks to magical realism (Magical realism expands the categorizes of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience which European realism excluded) . Latin American literature has become increasingly available to a worldwide audience. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Carlos Onetti, Juan José Arreola, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vergas Llosa, Jose Saramago and Miguel Angel Asturias have been internationally recognized for their contributions to world literature. The often chaotic political atmosphere of contemporary Latin America continues to generate writing that is both artistic and activist in nature. 

From his peasant roots, Saramago acknowledged, he has derived a certain fatalistic pragmatism. The narrative sensibility that runs through his fiction was described by the critic Irving Howe as “caustic and shrewd.” In one book, a character whose viewpoint the reader suspects lies close to the author’s says, “Unless I can see things with these eyes of mine that the earth will one day devour, I don’t believe in them.” The joke implicit in Saramago’s fiction is that he has placed his sober, mistrustful protagonists in a world of magic, where countries detach themselves from the mainland and float out to sea, cities are struck by epidemics of blindness and an 18th-century renegade priest escapes the Inquisition in a flying machine whose means of locomotion is the human will.  This folk-tale sensibility is what differentiates Saramago’s novels from the middle-class, urban mainstream of American and Western European literature.  

Saramago’s ripely inventive fiction began pouring out while he was in late 50s. Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, wherein the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails about the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of “white blindness”. In his 1984 novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis  Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Using such imaginative themes, Saramago succinctly addresses the most serious of subject matters with boundless wit and keen insight.  

Saramago first won fame in the English-speaking world two decades ago (1987) with the publication of his novel “Baltasar and Blimunda,” a love story set during the Portuguese Inquisition and written in a fantastical vein that drew him comparisons with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  

His subsequent novels earned him a reputation for profound versatility.  

“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.” which was published in 1984, is a work of richly layered ambiguity. It is also the book in which Saramago deals directly with the dictatorship under which he spent most of his life. Like all Saramago’s fiction, “Ricardo Reis” plays on notions of reality and nonreality, being and nonbeing. 

His first big success was “Balthasar and Blimunda” in 1987. Set in 18th-century Portugal, Saramago’s novel tells the story of a trio of misfits caught up in the Inquisition: a priest bent on constructing a flying machine and the two lovers who serve him — a one-handed ex-soldier named Balthasar, and Blimunda, a sorceress’s daughter. The novel is eccentric, rambling, humorous and touching.   

“The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” published in 1991, is Saramago’s most acclaimed work. The novel’s starting point is the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod, the Roman king of Judea, learns that the future king of the Jews has just been born in Bethlehem and orders that all the baby boys in that village be slaughtered. In Saramago’s telling, Joseph, husband of Mary, overhears the collective death sentence by chance and manages to hide his own son while leaving the others to perish. It is therefore in atonement for his earthly father’s sin in indirectly colluding with Herod’s iniquity, as well as for God’s in allowing the massacre to occur, that Jesus is later forced to give his life. On the cross, Saramago’s Jesus asks humankind to forgive God his sins. “The Gospel” polarized readers, both in Portugal and abroad, and led to Saramago’s self-imposed symbolic exile in the Canary Islands.   

“Blindness,” a tale of a city, which is reduced to savagery by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses-and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit. 

When I read Blindness 6 years ago, I experienced a strange feeling.  This book was truly disturbing and amazing at the same time. Though I had somewhat similar feelings when I read Kafka’s metamorphosis and Dostoyevsky’s crime and punishment, Blindness gave me sleepless nights. I couldn’t sleep properly on that particular night as the scenes in the novel were moved in my mind one after another making me think about the fragility of life and the civilization. It has a stunning display of man’s will to survive against all odds. A unique craft that really touched my heart.   

The Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles has made a film on this book. Blindness is a must read according to me. 

He wrote “Seeing” in 2004 in Portuguese and it got translated to English in 2006 which is a sequel to blindness. In this he has created the politician’s disillusionment, not with one party, but with all, thereby rendering the entire democratic system useless.  Seeing explores the possibilities of how easily this could be brought about and how devastating the results might be.  He writes with his wisdom “As the days passed, it became noticeable, in a way that was, at first, imperceptible, that the word blank, as if it had suddenly become obscene or rude, was falling into disuse, that people would employ all kinds of evasions and periphrases to replace it.  A blank piece of paper, for example, would be described instead as virgin, a blank on a form that had all its life been a blank became the spare provided, blank looks all became vacant instead, students stopped saying that their minds had gone blank, and owned up the fact that they simply knew nothing about the subject, but the most interesting case of all was the sudden disappearance of the riddle with which, for generations and generations, parents, grand parents, aunts, uncles and neighbors’ had sought to stimulate the intelligence and deductive powers of children, you can fill me in, draw me and fire me, what am I, and people, reluctant to elicit the word blank from innocent children, justified this by saying that the riddle was far too difficult for those with limited experience of the world.” Which I felt is truly remarkable.  "Seeing" depicts how easily we accept a habit of routine and how rarely we notice the habits that come to define our lives.  

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago signed a statement together with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn, condemning what they characterize as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation". 

His greatest asset as an author is his empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. Harold Bloom has stated that he considers José Saramago the "most gifted novelist alive in the world today".