Reflections
Reading Saramago . . . and of him
I read Saramago. The more I read Saramago the more I misunderstood, or did I understand his clarity of thoughts? I don't know. I realized that I was caught up, snarled, totally tangled, muddled up and confused. What was Saramago writing about? I read the big names in literature, Borges, Camus, Coetzee, Handke, Hrabal, Kafka, Schulz, Wyndham and Wells, with whom he is often compared. But then, he is not one of them. Nobody possibly writes fantastic novels, in one page long sentences with unmarked quotation for dialogues! And say 'Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.' Then, was I to do what I did? I got myself a copy of the book Blindness and heard a distant voice say: 'Go find your own Saramago.' So I read and re-read to realize and recognize some of Saramago's thoughts and heard him say: 'Human vocabulary is still not capable and probably never will be of knowing, recognizing and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.' Saramago was a hardcore leftist all his life. 'I am a person with leftist convictions and always have been. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social and political involvement. I am not a prophet, and the problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern but the left can't govern without ideas.' He was a communist, in 1969, at a time when the communist party was forbidden in Portugal under the military dictatorship. The country was taking orders directly from the USSR which wanted to make Portugal the Cuba of Europe. 'Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all the dictatorship and up to the revolution of 1974.' He notes that 'we are not short of movement proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can co-ordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these organizations.' In a summary statement, Saramago says: 'People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it is only the outer form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.' And in each of the South Asian countries do we find this example over and over again. On the election system his astute observation is: 'Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you are saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.' This is nearly what many of us feel! Further, 'it is difficult to understand that these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.' And this is happening all the time. Because of his political engagement Saramago is compared to Orwell, and in much the same way sees present day globalization as the modern image of the past mighty empire. He asserts: 'The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.' Moreover, 'as citizens we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved; it's the citizen who changes things.' Elaborating the global situation, this is what he says: 'It is economic power that determines political power and governments become the political functionaries of economic power. The world had already changed before September11. The world had been going through a process over the last twenty or thirty years. A civilization ends, another one begins.' Specifically on people he says: 'Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world has either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.' Furthermore, 'the attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationship Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.' Related to power and politics Saramago asks, ' Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there? And things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambition and the doctrines of the empire which regard this region as its backyard.' In 2002, after meeting Yasser Arafat, Saramago declared: 'What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz.' On current global conditions, it is his view that 'the world is governed by institutions that are not democratic: the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO.' Saramago's Seeing was the greatest condemnation of the power of the state. Saramago noted the domination by American militarism: 'The US needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.' He continues: 'I have always asked two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?' Saramago's ideas on social change and social control are: "Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.' On human relationships, Saramago states: 'This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows, to teach the one who does not.' And 'a human being is a being who is constantly "under construction" but also in a parallel fashion always in a state of constant destruction.' Saramago began work in a publishing house, Estudics Cor, as production manager, and not as an author, in 1950. He became friends with Portuguese writers. He took to translation work, of Colette, Cassou, Maupassant, Bonnard, Tolstoy, Hegel and others, which he enjoyed. He lost his job as deputy editor of Lisbon Diario de Noticias '… without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature. It was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer. Being fired was the best luck of my life as a writer. The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the revolution. But it was also a result of the counter revolutionary coup of November 1975.' He became a full time writer 1979, adding'I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.' 'The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.' Furthermore, 'a novel is not so much a literary genera but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.' Saramago, writing in the Portuguese language, combines myth, history and surrealistic imagination in his work. 'I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright or essayist.' With more qualification the writer adds, 'In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.' On characterization he says: 'I never appreciated positive heroes in literature. They are almost always clichés, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt uncertainty, not just because it provides a more "productive" literary raw material but because that is the way we humans really are.' The writer was born in 1922 into a poor peasant family in Azinhaga, a Portuguese village. Saramago, meaning a wild herbaceous plant, was accidently incorporated into his name at the time of his birth registration. At age twelve he moved into a technical school. Saramago achieved widespread recognition in 1988, at age 60, with the English translation by Giovanni Pontiero of Memorial de Covento as Baltasar and Blinda, a work that' made me fall in love with him,' says a reader. Tale of the Unknown Island is yet another short beautiful love story. The publication of O Evangel no Segundo Jesus Christo, as The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), presenting Jesus as a fallible human being, offended the Catholic community of the country. When the government officially banned the book and did not allow it to be entered for the European Literary Prize, Saramago left Portugal and settled in the Spanish island of Lanzarote with his journalist wife Pilar del Rio. Saramago won the Nobel Prize 1998. 'I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity. I have not modified my habits; I have the same friends', he made it a point to let you know. In his last book, Cain 2011, Saramago presents us with his vision of the New Testament. He comes back to the first book of the Bible, a new tale out of a story we all know. It is described as an ironic satirical journey that depicts an involuntary battle between the Creator and his creature. Journey to Portugal is a marvellous memoire. It is a non-fiction in straightforward narrative. Margaret Jull Coasta, in translating his work, The Cave, said: 'One wonders how Saramago can penetrate so deeply into the heart of a man, a woman, a family.' Saramago died on 18 June 2010, aged 87. His funeral was in the presence of 20,000 people. His body was cremated and the ashes sent to his birthplace. 'I cried when I heard he died. I don't care what his politics were. I feel privileged merely to have lived on the same planet as Saramago.' That was how a reader grieved. Farida Shaikh Is A Sociologist And Writer Of Non-fiction.
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