Essay: Portugal's only literary Nobel Laureate, José Saramago, will be honoured in Dublin next week. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes looks at the work of an author who came late to creative writing
José Saramago, Portugal's first and only literary Nobel Laureate, is no stranger to controversy. Last week he poured scorn on a Portuguese government initiative to promote reading among children in kindergartens, saying: "Reading always was and always will be something for a minority", and that a love of books could not be stimulated by educational programmes.
Yet Saramago is part of the same Socialist government's honorary panel on the promotion of reading and literacy, and he himself has written a book for children, A Maior Flor do Mundo (The Biggest Flower in the World). The apparent contradiction in Saramago's position is perhaps best approached through a consideration of his numerous novels, which not only deal with grand issues of social responsibility, but do so by exploring the life of the everyday man in the street.
Saramago, who will be awarded an honorary doctorate at UCD this Bloomsday, has, in a wide-ranging writing career, turned his hand to poetry, drama, essays, journalism, travel writing and personal chronicles. But he is best known for his allegorical novels on universal human dilemmas - and for his Communist politics.
In delightfully sonorous yet beguilingly low-key sentences, he has in recent years led his readers through the twists and turns of contemporary debates about power and social relations (in his masterpiece Blindness), democracy and the State (in Seeing, newly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Secker, £11.99), the threats of late capitalism and globalisation (The Cave), and even obliquely the potential implications of cloning (The Double).
Before that his books, although reflecting on questions of history and national identity in the manner of postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, had more recognisably Portuguese contexts: life in the rural south before the 1974 revolution in Levantado do Chão, the problems of interpreting the past in The History of the Siege of Lisbon, or even the challenges posed by Portugal's accession to the European Union in The Stone Raft.
Born in 1922 in the small village of Azinhaga, Saramago seems proud of his rural roots and the fuzziness which surrounds his official identity. His registered date of birth, November 18th, is out by two days, as his parents were late with the paperwork and shifted the day to avoid paying a fine they could ill afford. And his surname should be Sousa, but the registrar recorded his father's nickname, Saramago, which means a small local plant resembling a radish. It was, Saramago says, only when he went to school that this came to light.
Given his impressive literary accomplishments, it might seem surprising that Saramago came late to creative writing. Although a good pupil, financial constraints forced him to leave school at 12, and he trained as a mechanic. This was followed by civil service, managerial, and editorial jobs. Switching to journalism in the early 1970s, he worked first on the Diário de Lisboa and, after the revolution, on Diário de Notícias. The period 1974-75, a particularly volatile but optimistic time for Portugal, would see him airing his outspoken politics. But in November 1975, when the revolutionary fervour was dampened by political moderates, he was dismissed from his post. It was only then, in his 50s, that Saramago turned full-time to writing.
In 1977 he published his Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, a narrative reflection on the process of writing, and by the time Balthasar and Blimunda appeared in 1982 he had secured his place among the new, post-revolution generation of novelists who still dominate the literary scene in Portugal.
The Balthasar book, a highly entertaining mix of history and fantasy reminiscent of García Márquez's magical realism (though it also has much of the comic deftness of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita about it) was pipped for the prestigious annual Portuguese Writers' Association Prize by José Cardoso Pires's magnificent "true crime" novel, Ballad of Dog's Beach.
Saramago remarked privately, without rancour, that he doubted he could improve as a writer. But he did, two years later, with The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a melancholy and highly-wrought novel which centres on the imagined return of Ricardo Reis, one of several literary heteronyms invented by Portugal's great modernist poet, Fernando Pessoa, to Lisbon in the 1930s.
In this impressively accurate depiction of the early years of Salazar's New State, set against the menacing backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of European fascism, Saramago even imagines himself in dialogue with Pessoa, exploring the realm of literary identities and their relationship to reality. But such is the attention to worldly details that Saramago consulted newspapers from the time to familiarise himself with the political scene, and even noted down the daily weather reports .
In 1992 he won the Portuguese Writers' Association Prize for The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a controversial, irreverent, poignant depiction of the life of Christ in the vein of Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son. Saramago's Christ is more human than divine, and - it's worth noting, given the Da Vinci Code phenomenon - as Mary Magdalene's lover.
Following the refusal by the Portuguese government to support the novel's nomination for the European Literary Prize, on the grounds that it was offensive to Catholics, Saramago left Portugal and settled in Lanzarote, where he still lives and works.
It was there that he wrote arguably his best books yet, Blindness (1995) and Seeing (2004). And in between, of course, came the Nobel in 1998.Blindness, a fable which echoes Camus's The Plague in its exploration of individual self-interest and social responsibility, begins from the simple idea that we are all metaphorically blind. The literal depiction of a plague of sightlessness afflicting the citizens of an unidentified country, leading the government to quarantine victims in a mental asylum, reveals the worst and best of humanity - aggressive brutality, but also unselfish concern for others.
Reversing the metaphor, Seeing presupposes that we are more enlightened and politically empowered than we think. The citizens of the same anonymous country deliberately return blank electoral ballots, stalling the democratic system to such an extent that the authorities react aggressively to force an acceptable electoral result.
Like the best of allegories, though, Saramago's fictions are subtly grounded in recognisable reality. When, in Blindness, the first victim loses his sight while stopped at traffic lights, the hooting of fellow motorists suggests an impatience we all know well. And for the Republic of Ireland, asked to vote twice, in 2001 and again in 2002, on the Treaty of Nice, governing the accession of the 12 newest member states of the EU, Seeing seems uncannily relevant.
José Saramago will be signing books in Hodges Figgis, Dawson Street, Dublin, at 6pm on Thursday. The following day he receives an Honorary Doctorate of Letters at University College Dublin
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in Hispanic and Lusophone Studies in the UCD School of Languages, Literatures and Film. She is currently an IRCHSS Research Fellow