Portuguese Literature: A strangely optimistic sense of claustrophobia prevails in Nobel laureate José Saramago's recent works.
Whilst in Blindness this was exploited to magnificent effect in an allegorical story of contemporary social apathy and a lack of concern for others, in All The Names and The Double the results are more low-key. The former work deals with the activities of a petty clerk in a registry office who seeks to add faces to the names he deals with, but whose attempt to inject humanity into a methodical, paper-pushing job draws him into the unpredictability of human affairs. The latter novel narrates the intriguing tale of a man who, while watching a film, sees in one of the secondary actors his exact likeness. Plunged into an existential crisis, he proceeds to seek out the man who is his duplicate - or could it be the other way around? Their meeting and its consequences bring this extraordinary story to an unexpected conclusion.
Saramago spends much of The Double exploring the psychological reactions of his hero, the grandly named Tertuliano Máximo Alfonso, to the discovery of his double. The narrative proceeds in the author's customary rambling sentences, which twist and turn with every thought that passes through the protagonist's mind. We follow Tertuliano's attempts to grapple with his existential crisis in almost forensic detail, although this can, at times, try the reader's patience and strain their sense of empathy with the hero. In the pacy dénouement, the consequences of the hero's actions, and indeed his inaction at certain moments, are played out with surprising deftness. If one can fault Saramago's plotting, it is for a certain imbalance between the intense psychological focus of the main body of the book and the roller-coaster ride of these final events which, in themselves, might have made an excellent subject for a short story.
The potential implications of Saramago's story are immense. The premise of this book seems to connect it directly to our contemporary world, in which cinema and television are all-pervasive and in which cloning has become a topic for discussion. Indeed, the author has remarked that the idea for the book occurred to him one morning in 2001 whilst he was shaving, and was raised in his mind by debates on the possibility of human cloning. In the novel there are sporadic references to the possibility of a complete DNA identification between the hero and his double, but these are not followed up. Nor are contemporary discussions about identity as either a genetic or a social construct explored. More significantly, the issue of cinema's relationship to reality (is it mere imitation of life on the silver screen, the usurpation of reality by a man-made simulacrum, or some mixture of both?) is not addressed. Given that Saramago has long been fond of alluding to the writing process in his fiction, this would seem to be an obvious matter to consider.
Saramago's disinterest in the issue of cinema as a visual approximation to life is all the more disappointing given the strongly cinematic quality of his descriptions and dramatic vitality of his dialogues. It is surprising that Blindness, which offers a highly visual depiction of a society in which solidarity breaks down under the weight of individual selfishness, has not been made into a film. Likewise, The Double would seem to lend itself to easy adaptation, all the more so because the very medium which caused the hero's crisis in the first place could be turned in on itself in an exploration of art's imitation of the world.
The answer may lie with the author's politics, which emerge in his insistent and minute focus on the thoughts and actions of heroes from a particular social class that our neo-liberal world, immersed in its own ideological blindness, finds of little interest.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in the Department of Spanish at UCD. Her book, Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident, will be published by Tamesis next year
The Double By José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Harvill, 292pp. £15.99