Jose Saramago

From Philosopedia

Saramago, José (16 November 1922 - 18 June 2010)

Saramago in 1998 became the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised Saramago “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony continually enable us once again to apprehend an illusory reality.”

A 1989 work, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, has an humble publishing house proofreader inserting a “not” into a history of Portugal, leading to the work’s affirming that the Crusaders did not help liberate 12-century Lisbon from Moorish occupation.

Critics have praised his use of the supernatural, the allegorical, the paradoxical, and the irrational in his questioning of faith and existence. In a satire, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), God mixes his seed with Joseph’s, resulting in Jesus’s decidedly nonvirgin conception. Further, God shows the innocent human Jesus how to create a religion that will spawn violence and intolerance. Using unusual punctuation and leaps in time, the story not only gives Saramago’s version of Jesus’s life but also refers to what has happened to Christianity in the interim.

“It is apparent,” Alan Riding has written, “that he knows his Bible, and he treats the figure of Jesus with compassion, as a victim of a power struggle between God and the Devil. But his underlying message is that religion has turned man against man in wars, massacres, exterminations, autos-da-fé, and the like, ‘all in the name of God.’ ”

The country’s center-right Government vetoed the novel’s choice as a 1992 European literary prize and called the work blasphemous. Furious, Saramago left Lisbon and moved to the Canary Islands with his wife, Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist. In Blindness (1998), blindness overcomes all the human population but one person, a woman. While anarchy and bestiality abound all around, the streets filling with filth, this one woman becomes a mother and a god to all around her. She helps guide. She illustrates how humanity is achieved through suffering. She uses tenderness to help the blind see again, the novelist implying that it is illogical for mankind to wait until horrors occur, that humans are fully able to see how to overcome their figurative blindness.

Saramago, who because of poverty left school to become a car mechanic, has a working man’s outlook. He was a member of Portugal’s outlawed Communist Party and was a journalist until the revolution of 1974. An atheist in a Roman Catholic and conservative land, he was temporarily amused when for the second year running the Nobel had gone to someone the Vatican perceives to be anti-religious. “Why does the Vatican get involved in these things?” he asked. “Why doesn’t it keep itself busy with prayers? Why doesn’t it instead open its cupboards and reveal the skeletons it has inside?”

When journalists approached, he told them, “If the Pope were on the jury, they [Nobel Committee] wouldn’t have given me anything. The Vatican is easily scandalized, especially by people from outside. They should just focus on their prayers and leave people in peace. I respect those who believe, but I have no respect for the institution.”

Saramago signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Critique by Harold Bloom

Literary critic Harold Bloom, according to Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times, considers Saramago "second only to Philip Roth" among living writers. However, Bloom disapproves of his notoriously hard-line Communist Party views, noting that Saramago delivers dull, pedantic speeches at international forums, denouncing the European Union or the International Monetary Fund. "It baffles me why the man can't grow up politically," Bloom has said. "In 2007, to be a Portuguese Stalinist means you're simply not living in the real world."

On 23 February 2012 Bloom reviewed Cain in The New York Review of Books. Some of his remarks:

José Saramago (1922–2010), a superb comic novelist, at his best was the peer of Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez. Cain, his last fiction, is a minor work, mostly valuable for its links to such permanent achievements as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1986), The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), The Stone Raft (1986), and most closely to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991).

Mark Twain would have admired Saramago; both novelists were anti-Christian savage humanists who depicted the fundamental ferocity of human nature and society. Saramago’s works scarcely are of the eminence of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but little else is, including the rest of Twain.

Saramago’s adolescence coincided with the early years of the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, where the Roman Catholic Church fused with a totalitarian nightmare, just as it did soon afterward in what became Franco’s Spain. My wife and I first visited Madrid and Barcelona in 1959, and were appalled by the desolate atmosphere brought about by the still ongoing fascist regime. Many years later we first visited Portugal, where Saramago graciously presented me for an honorary degree at the University of Coimbra. A warm acquaintanceship ensued, marked by an exegetical disagreement concerning The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which continued in correspondence and at a later meeting in New York City. Saramago’s will to power over the interpretation of his own texts was Nietzschean, and admirable in its comedic tenacity.

Cain is a deliberately farcical coda to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, whose God is very unpleasant indeed, being at once time and truth. He expresses his identity pungently in a conversation with his son Jesus:

For the last four thousand and four years I have been the God of the Jews, a quarrelsome and difficult race by nature, but on the whole I have got along fairly well with them, they now take Me seriously and are likely to go on doing so for the foreseeable future.

So, You are satisfied, said Jesus. I am and I am not, or rather, I would be were it not for this restless heart of Mine, which is forever telling Me, Well now, a fine destiny you’ve arranged after four thousand years of trial and tribulation that no amount of sacrifice on altars will ever be able to repay, for You continue to be the god of a tiny population that occupies a minute part of this world You created with everything that’s on it, so tell Me, My son, if I should be satisfied with this depressing situation.

Never having created a world, I’m in no position to judge, replied Jesus. True, you cannot judge, but you could help. Help in what way. To spread My word, to help Me become the god of more people. I don’t understand. If you play your part, that is to say, the part I have reserved for you in My plan, I have every confidence that within the next six centuries or so, despite all the struggles and obstacles ahead of us, I will pass from being God of the Jews to being God of those whom we will call Catholics, from the Greek.

And what is this part You have reserved for me in Your plan. That of martyr. My son, that of victim, which is the best role of all for propagating any faith and stirring up fervor. God made the words martyr and victim seem like milk and honey on His tongue, but Jesus felt a sudden chill in his limbs, as if the mist had closed over him, while the devil regarded him with an enigmatic expression which combined scientific curiosity with grudging compassion.

Bloom contends that what goes wrong in Cain is due to its incessant tendentiousness: "it has too palpable a design upon us. I regard Saint Augustine and Sigmund Freud as the most tendentious of authors, yet their drive to overmaster us is near the center of their strength. Michel de Montaigne, wonderfully free of any ideological position toward his reader, surpasses even Augustine and Freud at creating a supreme fiction of the self."

Bloom, although finding Saramago's final work weak, does so in order to point out that it is weak only in his desire to call attention to Saramago at his best, including The History of the Siege of Lisbon and The Stone Raft. "Saramago's gifts were elsewhere, and Cain was a mistake that should not lessen our sense of a departed splendor."

Death

Saramago died at the age of 87 in Lanzarote, on the easternmost of the autonomous Canary Islands.

According to The Guardian, his family said that he had breakfast and chatted with his wife and translator Pilar del Rio on Friday morning, after which he started feeling unwell and passed away. He was described as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation. Saramago's translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to him, describing his "wonderful imagination" and calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer." Saramago had suffered from pneumonia a year before his death. Having been thought to have made a full recovery, he had been scheduled to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2010.

Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction."

Portugal declared two days of mourning. There were verbal tributes from senior international politicians: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Bernard Kouchner (France) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), while Cuba's Raúl and Fidel Castro sent floral tributes.

Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wing President of Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva who holidayed in Azores as the ceremony took place. Silva, the Prime Minister when Saramago's name was removed from the shortlist of the European Literary Prize, said he did not attend Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him". Mourners, who questioned Silva's absence in the presence of reporters,held copies of the red carnation, symbolic of Portugal's democratic revolution.

Saramago's cremation took place in Lisbon, with his ashes being scattered in his birthplace of Azinhaga and in Tias in Lanzarote, his home until his death.

Obituaries:

British Broadcasting Company]

The China Post]

China Weekly

The Guardian

The Hindu

The New York Times

{CA; Fernanda Eberstadt, The New York Times, 26 August 2007); Tim Parks, “Sightgeist,” The New York Review of Books, 18 February 1999; Alan Riding, The New York Times, 9 and 12 October 1998 and 3 December 1998; The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/16537106}