PROFILE: THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING WRITER JOSE SARAMAGO UNIQUELY BLENDED THE SURREAL WITH THE PRAGMATIC, MANASH BHATTACHARJEE PAYS TRIBUTE TO THIS LEGEND
The death of José Saramago (1922-2010) doesn't escape its sombre irony. It is a final punctuation mark in the life of a writer who wrote in unpunctuated, seamless sentences. The man who designated the writer as an apprentice and his characters as masters, was ultimately forced to quit his training at the ripe age of eighty seven. Nevertheless, in tune with his working-class roots, Saramago kept his tryst with productivity as diligently as his respiratory illness worked against him.In his meditative, 1998 Nobel Prize speech, Saramago began by paying tribute to his illiterate grandfather, Jerónimo Meirinho, calling him the wisest man he ever knew. Why was the grandfather so wise? Because he could tell stories endlessly, recounting, what Saramago called, “an untiring rumour of memories”.
This early exposure to oral story telling helped Saramago incorporate its skills in his writing. He urged the reader to “hear” his novels by reading them aloud, rather than silently. His prose demanded the recognition of the oral as much as the written techniques of language. Saramago himself used the term “written orality” to signify the language he deployed. It opens up an interesting horizon in our understanding of writing's aural character, apart from the visual. It also grants a twofold meaning to the narrator: as a voice and as a signature.
This must have immediate repercussions on Roland Barthes' contentions regarding the death of the author.
Unifying effects
Unlike what Barthes pointed out, in Saramago's writing, the “hand” is not “cut off from any voice”. Saramago makes hand and voice work together, where the voice feeds the hand, the way hearing precedes (hence, dictates) writing. The author (in) Saramago thus exists between two disparate credentials, that of the writer and of the oral narrator. The dissemination of language occurs through this process of reciprocal translation between voice and hand, body and mind, memory and invention.
The other contention of Barthes, about the difference between reader and writer, gets blurred as Saramago's writing itself emerges as a kind of reading. Saramago is known for committing mischief with religious and historical texts. A task he owes to both, a reading and a counter-reading of canonical texts to produce new, critical versions by a reader. The author (in) Saramago is a reader beyond recognition.
In novels like Balthazar and Blimunda and The History of the Seize of Lisbon, Saramago reads between the lines of history and legend, and produces a counter narrative. In The History, the main protagonist, Raimundo Silva, is a proof-reader who tampers with a small but vital fact of Portuguese history and creates a scandal. In Balthazar the event of the Inquisition in 18th century Portugal, is read through powerfully marginal characters, who secretly challenge the mad dictates of power.
Saramago also spoke of inviting the reader (speculatively, including himself) to “accept a pact”, where he would transform an “absurd idea” into a “logical” stream of thought. He called this, “the possibility of the impossible”.
This is particularly evident in novels like Blindness, Seeing and Death with Interruptions, where improbable events take place in a believable language. The events serve as an allegorical device by Saramago to bring to focus his deepest concerns of the human world. The language is believable because Saramago's plots exaggerate on the oldest anxieties of human beings. Having heard stories with an almost folk-like quality, Saramago re-works old questions in the light of contemporary concerns, where the bizarre clashes against the everyday. It is a deliberate subversion of reality, where uncanny events emerge from the heart of the mundane. There is a constant tendency in Saramago to fuse the surreal with the pragmatic. Born to landless peasants, and brought up in a working class neighbourhood, the writer was vigilant about the contradictions of life.
Saramago spent his formative years under Salazar's fascist dictatorship. This had a deep impact on his working class sensibilities. Saramago became a card carrying member of the Communist Party of Portugal since 1969, when the party was illegal. His relationship with the movement was however, always critical.
In the 1980s, Saramago sided with the reformist rebellion within the party. Fidel Castro was a friend who invited him many times to Cuba. Yet in 2003, Saramago disowned him by saying, Castro “has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams”. In 2004, during his visit to Columbia, Saramago designated the two guerrilla groups in that country as “armed gangs”.
There have been polemical attacks by communist intellectuals against Saramago on these issues. What is however missing in these attacks is the old question, post-Stalinist, communist politics needs to ask itself: How does the movement and the party understand the relationship between writers and politics?
For Saramago, like Garcia Marquez, being a writer and being part of politics sometimes uncomfortably came to mean divided loyalties. Despite the de-individualised form of such a writer's identity, involved in the larger dream of historical transformation, clashes can occur with the vagaries of political expediency and its justificatory, ideological logic. Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist” and yet added, he wouldn't “make excuses for what communist regimes have done”.
This is a post-Sartrean distinction between ideology and criticism where a writer refuses to suffer the paranoia of an indoor-collective to prove his commitment. Caught between a coercive symptom and ethics, the honest writer will choose to voice himself. To the disgrace of political regimes, such writers have been violently punished by disciplining bosses in the shadow of ideological excuses. Saramago was lucky.
Rigours of politics
Both literary temperament and politics work within certain constraints. The rationalist logic of politics cannot hope to forcibly restrain the more intense logic of literary imagination. Imagination is political, but on its own grounds. This quarrel needs to be studied not only by re-reading the Frankfurt School and other intellectuals, but by also re-reading the (auto)biographies of poets and writers under communist regimes.
What Saramago owed to communist ideas is best exemplified in his novels. A modern fabulist, he set the mythical vis-à-vis the historical, and the moral vis-à-vis the political. The materiality of Saramago's imagination never failed to assert its concern of how class divisions work in historical contexts.
In Balthazar and Blimunda, Saramago used the baroque style to perfection, capturing the violent contrasts between the excesses of the royalty and the Church on the one hand and the simplicity of common people on the other. His description of elaborate grandeur which surrounds royal and religious formalities gets constantly tampered by his sense of bitter irony and irreverence. The story pays homage to the courage of poor, neglected but talented heroes and heretics who don't give up the audacity to dream and love in the midst of an impending auto-da-fé.
In other novels, like The History of the Seize of Lisbon and All the Names, Saramago also showed his keenness towards certain minor figures of society like the proof reader and the clerk. These figures, alluding to Saramago's own journey through these crafts and positions, gain extraordinary prominence due to their progressive insights of history.
Saramago in his last published book of essays, The Notebook, severely criticised the new global, economic order. He called George Bush, “the high priest of all liars”, and severely took the United States to task. He enraged the Jews by comparing Israel's barbarities with the Holocaust. Saramago's interest in the Middle East and his siding with the Palestinians is an important shift for a European writer. Apart from its political honesty, this move can also be compared to the way Saramago demarcated the importance of his various identities: “First of all I'm Portuguese, then Iberian, and then, if I feel like it, I'm European,”. To prefer linguistic and geographical autonomy over larger frames of cultural self-reference shows Saramago's proclivity towards understanding political contexts outside the rhetoric of grand narratives. His attitude towards communist politics can also be read through this register. In a world besieged by religious nationalism, neo-liberal fascism and murdering of the poor, Saramago's voice is a warning from the future. It is very different from the way Hollywood imagines the future in the form of colonising, technological fantasies. Saramago tried to persistently tell us, the future is disappearing before our eyes.
(The Literary Review)
(The author is a poet and a political theorist, from New Delhi)
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2010/Dec/9/fabulist-among-the-communists-40.asp
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