Indian Holocaust My Father`s Life and Time- Three Hundred Ninety Eight
Palash Biswas
http://indianholocaustmyfatherslifeandtime.blogspot.com/
Jose Saramago, who became the first Portuguese-language winner of the Nobel Literature prize although his popularity at home was dampened by his unflinching support for Communism, blunt manner and sometimes difficult prose style, died Friday.Saramago was an outspoken man who antagonized many, and moved to the Canary Islands after a public spat in 1992 with the Portuguese government, which he accused of censorship.
His last comment on the site Fundação José Saramago:
"I think in today's society we need philosophy. Philosophy as space, place and method of reflection which may have a specific objective as science, which advances to meet goals. We lack reflection, thinking, we need to think and work. It seems to me that without ideas, we are not going nowhere. "
Exiled from Homeland, the Rebel SARAMAGO died at last!He voiced the Predestined Persecuted Suffering Humanity!I may feel his Heart and Mind LIVE!The Jose Saramago Foundation says the Nobel-winning Portuguese novelist's body is being flown from his home on on the Spanish Canary Island of Lanzarote for a funeral to be held in Lisbon.The foundation says Saramago's body will be cremated at noon on Sunday.
"The writer died in the company of his family, saying goodbye in a serene and placid way," the foundation said.
Humanist, defender of poor, those struggling for a dignified life, José Saramago, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, who led their struggle with his words, using his pen, left the Portuguese-speaking world and the world of literature missing a lively and courageous voice.His 1998 Nobel accolade was nonetheless widely cheered in his homeland after decades of the award eluding writers of a language used by some 170 million people around the world.
Saramago's body was put on a Portuguese air force C130 transport plane at Lanzarote airport and is being accompanied on a final journey home Saturday by his widow and son, Portugal's culture minister, the novelist's biographer and several friends and other relatives.
His death today, Friday, at 87 years of age, caused a wave of consternation around the world and led the authorities in Lisbon to pronounce a two-day national mourning. A militant in the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, Saramago was a revolutionary in Intervention Writing, his works evoking social causes and raising insightful questions, reflecting on the direction that our world followed.
Saramago, 87, who won the 1998 Nobel literature prize and whose work is internationally admired for the clarity of its ideas despite a complex prose style, died Friday at his Lanzarote home after a long illness.
"People used to say about me, 'He's good but he's a Communist.' Now they say, 'He's a Communist but he's good,'" he said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said Saramago was "one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer."
Born Nov. 16, 1922 in the town of Azinhaga near Lisbon, Saramago was raised in the capital. From a poor family, he never finished university but continued to study part-time while supporting himself as a metalworker.
His first novel published in 1947 — "Terra do Pecado," or "Country of Sin" — was a tale of peasants in moral crisis. It sold badly but won Saramago enough recognition to allow him jump from the welder's shop to a job on a literary magazine.
But for the next 18 years Saramago published only a few travel and poetry books while he worked as a journalist.
"I suppose I came to the conclusion I had nothing worth telling," he said of that period.
He returned to fiction only after the four-decade dictatorship created by Antonio Salazar was toppled by a military uprising in 1974.
International critical acclaim came late in his life, starting with his 1982 historical fantasy "Memorial do Convento," published in English in 1988 as "Baltasar and Blimunda."
The story is set during the Inquisition and explores the battle between individuals and organized religion, picking up Saramago's recurring theme of the loner struggling against authority.
That kind of conflict surfaced in the heated clash Saramago had in 1992 with Portuguese under-secretary of state for culture Antonio Sousa Lara, which prompted Saramago's move to the Spanish islands off northwest Africa.
Sousa Lara withdrew the writer's name from Portugal's nominees for the European Literature Prize. Lara said Saramago's 1991 novel "O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo" ("The Gospel according to Jesus Christ") — in which Christ lives with Mary Magdalene and tries to back out of his crucifixion — offended Portuguese religious convictions and divided the heavily Roman Catholic country.
Saramago was outraged and accused the government of censorship.
Saramago often found himself going against the tide of popular opinion. Portugal's membership of the European Union is overwhelmingly appreciated in his homeland, a country of 10.6 million people which despite EU development aid is still western Europe's poorest country.
Saramago, however, disagreed.
"First of all I'm Portuguese, then Iberian, and then, if I feel like it, I'm European," he once told the AP.
From the 1980s Saramago was one of Portugal's best-selling contemporary writers and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.
But he never courted the kind of fame offered by literary prizes and his bluntness could sometimes offend.
"I am skeptical, reserved, I don't gush, I don't go around smiling, hugging people and trying to make friends," he once said.
His outspokenness set off a storm of protest in 2002 when during a visit he compared Ramallah, a Palestinian city blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including left-wing doves who were highly critical of the Israeli government's policy toward the Palestinians, condemned Saramago's statement as false and anti-Semitic.
In 1998 he said his book "Blindness" was about "a blindness of rationality." In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society's fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues.
"We're rational beings but we don't behave rationally. If we did, there'd be no starvation in the world," he said.
Such compassion and anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his enduring sympathy toward the Communist Party.
He was frequently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American mysticism, particularly for his technique of confronting historical personages with fictional characters.
Portuguese critic Torcato Sepulveda said Saramago successfully "sought to reconcile the rationalism of his materialistic world view with the richness of his baroque style."
Others disagreed, saying Saramago was too intellectual and that his storytelling pace often slowed to a dreary plod, or that his sparing use of punctuation and speech marks confused the reader.
Saramago had a remedy: "I tell them to read my books out loud and then they'll pick up the rhythm, because this is 'written orality.' It is the written version of the way people tell stories to each other," he said.
Historical and literary mischief were Saramago's trademarks.
In "The History of the Siege of Lisbon," from 1989, a Lisbon proofreader mischievously inserts the word "not" into a text on the 12th century capture of the Portuguese capital from the Moors, thereby fictionally altering the course of European history with a stroke of his pen.
In his 1986 book, "The Stone Raft," the Iberian peninsula snaps off from the rest of the European continent and floats off into the North Atlantic — apparently in a metaphorical search for identity away from the standardizing nature of the EU.
He left a wife, Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, and a daughter from his first marriage.
Pilar del Rio, wife of Portuguese Nobel literature laureate Jose Saramago, pays her respects during his wake at a library in Tias on Spain's Canary island of Lanzarote Friday, June 18, 2010. Saramago died at his home in Lanzarote at 87. (AP Photo/Carlos Moreno)
Portuguese novelist, playwright and poet Jose Saramago died Friday at his home in Spain's Canary Islands of chronic leukemia, sources close to his family told Efe. He was 87.
With the Nobel laureate at his death was his wife and translator, Pilar del Rio.
Saramago had had a peaceful night's rest. After eating breakfast as usual and talking with his wife, he began feeling ill and shortly afterward passed away, the sources said.
The writer's body is to be taken Saturday to Portugal, with the flight scheduled to leave Lanzarote at around 10:00 a.m. local time.
The late author's mortal remains will be cremated in Portugal, with some of his ashes to be placed in his native town of Azinhaga and the rest buried next to an olive tree at his final home in Lanzarote, his relatives told Efe.
Saramago's funeral chapel was opened at 5:00 p.m. local time Friday at the library of the Jose Saramago Foundation's headquarters in Tias, a town on Lanzarote.
The Portuguese government, meanwhile, has declared a period of national mourning.
Born on Nov. 16, 1922 in Azinhaga, Saramago was 2 years old when his family moved to Lisbon.
Before dedicating himself fully to literature, Saramago worked as a locksmith, mechanic, editor and journalist, but it was in 1947 that he realized his dream of becoming a published author by releasing his debut novel, "Terra do pecado" (Land of Sin).
Affiliated with the Communist Party since 1969, Saramago ended a long drought between published works when he released a series of poetry collections between 1966 and 1975: "Os Poemas Possiveis" (Possible Poems), "Provavelmente Alegria" (Probably Happiness) and "O Ano de 1993" (The Year 1993).
After publishing several novels and plays, Saramago gained international acclaim in 1982 with the historical love story "Memorial do Convento" (Baltasar and Blimunda).
He later cemented his literary status with titles such as the 1986 novel "A Jangada de Pedra" (The Stone Raft), the 1987 play "A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis (The Second Life of Francis of Assisi), the 1989 novel "Historia do Cerco de Lisboa" (The History of the Siege of Lisbon) and the 1991 novel "O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo" (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ).
In that latter work he stirred up controversy by telling of Jesus having sexual relations with Mary Magdalene.
In 1993, he took up residence on the Spanish island of Lanzarote.
Saramago won the Camoens Prize – the most prestigious literary award for the Portuguese language – in 1995 and that same year began writing an acclaimed trilogy made up of "Ensaio sobre a Cegueira" (Blindness), a work that depicts the breakdown of society after all the inhabitants of a country go blind; "Todos os Nomes" (All the Names); and "Ensaio sobre a Lucidez" (Seeing).
An avowed atheist, he gained notoriety in religious circles for his attacks on the Bible; he also was harshly critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
Three years later, in 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his complete body of work.
In 2008, he began publishing a blog titled "O Cuaderno" (The Notebook and last year released his final novel "Caim" (Cain). EFE
On the Death of José Saramago
Statement by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Portuguese Communist Party
The death of José Saramago represents an irreparable loss for Portugal, for the Portuguese people, for Portuguese culture.
José Saramago's intellectual, artistic, human, and civic stature makes him a major figure in our history.
His vast, remarkable, and unique literary work -- which was recognized through the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 -- will remain a milestone in the History of Portuguese Literature, in which his is one of the most prominent names.
José Saramago helped to build the April 1974 Revolution as an active participant in the resistance to fascism. He continued this activity after the Day of Liberation with his engagement in the revolutionary process that profoundly transformed our country for the better, creating a democracy that had as its prime reference the defense of the interests of the workers, of the people, and of the country.
José Saramago was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969 and his death represents a loss for the entire Communist Party collective -- for the Party which he chose as his own until his final days.
The Secretariat of the Central Committee of the PCP wishes to express its profound sorrow and its enormous pain for the death of comrade José Saramago -- and expresses its heartfelt condolences to his companion, Pilar del Rio, and to his remaining family.
The Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Portuguese Communist Party
18 June 2010
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1998
José Saramago
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Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1998
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How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice
The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife. My mother's parents lived on this scarcity, on the small breeding of pigs that after weaning were sold to the neighbours in our village of Azinhaga in the province of Ribatejo. Their names were Jerónimo Meirinho and Josefa Caixinha and they were both illiterate. In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful. Many times I helped my grandfather Jerónimo in his swineherd's labour, many times I dug the land in the vegetable garden adjoining the house, and I chopped wood for the fire, many times, turning and turning the big iron wheel which worked the water pump. I pumped water from the community well and carried it on my shoulders. Many times, in secret, dodging from the men guarding the cornfields, I went with my grandmother, also at dawn, armed with rakes, sacking and cord, to glean the stubble, the loose straw that would then serve as litter for the livestock. And sometimes, on hot summer nights, after supper, my grandfather would tell me: "José, tonight we're going to sleep, both of us, under the fig tree". There were two other fig trees, but that one, certainly because it was the biggest, because it was the oldest, and timeless, was, for everybody in the house, the fig tree. More or less by antonomasia, an erudite word that I met only many years after and learned the meaning of... Amongst the peace of the night, amongst the tree's high branches a star appeared to me and then slowly hid behind a leaf while, turning my gaze in another direction I saw rising into view like a river flowing silent through the hollow sky, the opal clarity of the Milky Way, the Road to Santiago as we still used to call it in the village. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories and the cases my grandfather told and told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time gently lulling me. I could never know if he was silent when he realised that I had fallen asleep or if he kept on talking so as not to leave half-unanswered the question I invariably asked into the most delayed pauses he placed on purpose within the account: "And what happened next?" Maybe he repeated the stories for himself, so as not to forget them, or else to enrich them with new detail. At that age and as we all do at some time, needless to say, I imagined my grandfather Jerónimo was master of all the knowledge in the world. When at first light the singing of birds woke me up, he was not there any longer, had gone to the field with his animals, letting me sleep on. Then I would get up, fold the coarse blanket and barefoot - in the village I always walked barefoot till I was fourteen - and with straws still stuck in my hair, I went from the cultivated part of the yard to the other part, where the sties were, by the house. My grandmother, already afoot before my grandfather, set in front of me a big bowl of coffee with pieces of bread in and asked me if I had slept well. If I told her some bad dream, born of my grandfather's stories, she always reassured me: "Don't make much of it, in dreams there's nothing solid". At the time I thought, though my grandmother was also a very wise woman, she couldn't rise to the heights grandfather could, a man who, lying under a fig tree, having at his side José his grandson, could set the universe in motion just with a couple of words. It was only many years after, when my grandfather had departed from this world and I was a grown man, I finally came to realise that my grandmother, after all, also believed in dreams. There could have been no other reason why, sitting one evening at the door of her cottage where she now lived alone, staring at the biggest and smallest stars overhead, she said these words: "The world is so beautiful and it is such a pity that I have to die". She didn't say she was afraid of dying, but that it was a pity to die, as if her hard life of unrelenting work was, in that almost final moment, receiving the grace of a supreme and last farewell, the consolation of beauty revealed. She was sitting at the door of a house like none other I can imagine in all the world, because in it lived people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.
Many years later, writing for the first time about my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa (I haven't said so far that she was, according to many who knew her when young, a woman of uncommon beauty), I was finally aware I was transforming the ordinary people they were into literary characters: this was, probably, my way of not forgetting them, drawing and redrawing their faces with the pencil that ever changes memory, colouring and illuminating the monotony of a dull and horizonless daily routine as if creating, over the unstable map of memory, the supernatural unreality of the country where one has decided to spend one's life. The same attitude of mind that, after evoking the fascinating and enigmatic figure of a certain Berber grandfather, would lead me to describe more or less in these words an old photo (now almost eighty years old) showing my parents "both standing, beautiful and young, facing the photographer, showing in their faces an expression of solemn seriousness, maybe fright in front of the camera at the very instant when the lens is about to capture the image they will never have again, because the following day will be, implacably, another day... My mother is leaning her right elbow against a tall pillar and holds, in her right hand drawn in to her body, a flower. My father has his arm round my mother's back, his callused hand showing over her shoulder, like a wing. They are standing, shy, on a carpet patterned with branches. The canvas forming the fake background of the picture shows diffuse and incongruous neo-classic architecture." And I ended, "The day will come when I will tell these things. Nothing of this matters except to me. A Berber grandfather from North Africa, another grandfather a swineherd, a wonderfully beautiful grandmother; serious and handsome parents, a flower in a picture - what other genealogy would I care for? and what better tree would I lean against?"
I wrote these words almost thirty years ago, having no other purpose than to rebuild and register instants of the lives of those people who engendered and were closest to my being, thinking that nothing else would need explaining for people to know where I came from and what materials the person I am was made of, and what I have become little by little. But after all I was wrong, biology doesn't determine everything and as for genetics, very mysterious must have been its paths to make its voyages so long... My genealogical tree (you will forgive the presumption of naming it this way, being so diminished in the substance of its sap) lacked not only some of those branches that time and life's successive encounters cause to burst from the main stem but also someone to help its roots penetrate the deepest subterranean layers, someone who could verify the consistency and flavour of its fruit, someone to extend and strengthen its top to make of it a shelter for birds of passage and a support for nests. When painting my parents and grandparents with the paints of literature, transforming them from common people of flesh and blood into characters, newly and in different ways builders of my life, I was, without noticing, tracing the path by which the characters I would invent later on, the others, truly literary, would construct and bring to me the materials and the tools which, at last, for better or for worse, in the sufficient and in the insufficient, in profit and loss, in all that is scarce but also in what is too much, would make of me the person whom I nowadays recognise as myself: the creator of those characters but at the same time their own creation. In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have been but in the end could not manage to be.
Now I can clearly see those who were my life-masters, those who most intensively taught me the hard work of living, those dozens of characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink, those people I believed I was guiding as I the narrator chose according to my whim, obedient to my will as an author, like articulated puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the burden and the tension of the strings I moved them with. Of those masters, the first was, undoubtedly, a mediocre portrait-painter, whom I called simply H, the main character of a story that I feel may reasonably be called a double initiation (his own, but also in a manner of speaking the author's) entitled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, who taught me the simple honesty of acknowledging and observing, without resentment or frustration, my own limitations: as I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition. It's not up to me, of course, to evaluate the merits of the results of efforts made, but today I consider it obvious that all my work from then on has obeyed that purpose and that principle.
Then came the men and women of Alentejo, that same brotherhood of the condemned of the earth where belonged my grandfather Jerónimo and my grandmother Josefa, primitive peasants obliged to hire out the strength of their arms for a wage and working conditions that deserved only to be called infamous, getting for less than nothing a life which the cultivated and civilised beings we are proud to be are pleased to call - depending on the occasion - precious, sacred or sublime. Common people I knew, deceived by a Church both accomplice and beneficiary of the power of the State and of the landlords, people permanently watched by the police, people so many times innocent victims of the arbitrariness of a false justice. Three generations of a peasant family, the Badweathers, from the beginning of the century to the April Revolution of 1974 which toppled dictatorship, move through this novel, called Risen from the Ground, and it was with such men and women risen from the ground, real people first, figures of fiction later, that I learned how to be patient, to trust and to confide in time, that same time that simultaneously builds and destroys us in order to build and once more to destroy us. The only thing I am not sure of having assimilated satisfactorily is something that the hardship of those experiences turned into virtues in those women and men: a naturally austere attitude towards life. Having in mind, however, that the lesson learned still after more than twenty years remains intact in my memory, that every day I feel its presence in my spirit like a persistent summons: I haven't lost, not yet at least, the hope of meriting a little more the greatness of those examples of dignity proposed to me in the vast immensity of the plains of Alentejo. Time will tell.
What other lessons could I possibly receive from a Portuguese who lived in the sixteenth century, who composed the Rimas and the glories, the shipwrecks and the national disenchantments in the Lusíadas, who was an absolute poetical genius, the greatest in our literature, no matter how much sorrow this causes to Fernando Pessoa, who proclaimed himself its Super Camões? No lesson would fit me, no lesson could I learn, except the simplest, which could have been offered to me by Luís Vaz de Camões in his pure humanity, for instance the proud humility of an author who goes knocking at every door looking for someone willing to publish the book he has written, thereby suffering the scorn of the ignoramuses of blood and race, the disdainful indifference of a king and of his powerful entourage, the mockery with which the world has always received the visits of poets, visionaries and fools. At least once in life, every author has been, or will have to be, Luís de Camões, even if they haven't written the poem Sôbolos Rios... Among nobles, courtiers and censors from the Holy Inquisition, among the loves of yester-year and the disillusionments of premature old age, between the pain of writing and the joy of having written, it was this ill man, returning poor from India where so many sailed just to get rich, it was this soldier blind in one eye, slashed in his soul, it was this seducer of no fortune who will never again flutter the hearts of the ladies in the royal court, whom I put on stage in a play called What shall I do with this Book?, whose ending repeats another question, the only truly important one, the one we will never know if it will ever have a sufficient answer: "What will you do with this book?" It was also proud humility to carry under his arm a masterpiece and to be unfairly rejected by the world. Proud humility also, and obstinate too - wanting to know what the purpose will be, tomorrow, of the books we are writing today, and immediately doubting whether they will last a long time (how long?) the reassuring reasons we are given or that are given us by ourselves. No-one is better deceived than when he allows others to deceive him.
Here comes a man whose left hand was taken in war and a woman who came to this world with the mysterious power of seeing what lies beyond people's skin. His name is Baltazar Mateus and his nickname Seven-Suns; she is known as Blimunda and also, later, as Seven-Moons because it is written that where there is a sun there will have to be a moon and that only the conjoined and harmonious presence of the one and the other will, through love, make earth habitable. There also approaches a Jesuit priest called Bartolomeu who invented a machine capable of going up to the sky and flying with no other fuel than the human will, the will which, people say, can do anything, the will that could not, or did not know how to, or until today did not want to, be the sun and the moon of simple kindness or of even simpler respect. These three Portuguese fools from the eighteenth century, in a time and country where superstition and the fires of the Inquisition flourished, where vanity and the megalomania of a king raised a convent, a palace and a basilica which would amaze the outside world, if that world, in a very unlikely supposition, had eyes enough to see Portugal, eyes like Blimunda's, eyes to see what was hidden... Here also comes a crowd of thousands and thousands of men with dirty and callused hands, exhausted bodies after having lifted year after year, stone-by-stone, the implacable convent walls, the huge palace rooms, the columns and pilasters, the airy belfries, the basilica dome suspended over empty space. The sounds we hear are from Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord, and he doesn't quite know if he is supposed to be laughing or crying... This is the story of Baltazar and Blimunda, a book where the apprentice author, thanks to what had long ago been taught to him in his grandparents' Jerónimo's and Josefa's time, managed to write some similar words not without poetry: "Besides women's talk, dreams are what hold the world in its orbit. But it is also dreams that crown it with moons, that's why the sky is the splendour in men's heads, unless men's heads are the one and only sky." So be it.
Of poetry the teenager already knew some lessons, learnt in his textbooks when, in a technical school in Lisbon, he was being prepared for the trade he would have at the beginning of his labour's life: mechanic. He also had good poetry masters during long evening hours in public libraries, reading at random, with finds from catalogues, with no guidance, no-one to advise him, with the creative amazement of the sailor who invents every place he discovers. But it was at the Industrial School Library that The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis started to be written... There, one day the young mechanic (he was about seventeen) found a magazine entitled Atena containing poems signed with that name and, naturally, being very poorly acquainted with the literary cartography of his country, he thought that there really was a Portuguese poet called Ricardo Reis. Very soon, though, he found that this poet was really one Fernando Nogueira Pessoa, who signed his works with the names of non-existent poets, born of his mind. He called them heteronyms, a word that did not exist in the dictionaries of the time which is why it was so hard for the apprentice to letters to know what it meant. He learnt many of Ricardo Reis' poems by heart ("To be great, be one/Put yourself into the little things you do"); but in spite of being so young and ignorant, he could not accept that a superior mind could really have conceived, without remorse, the cruel line "Wise is he who is satisfied with the spectacle of the world". Later, much later, the apprentice, already with grey hairs and a little wiser in his own wisdom, dared to write a novel to show this poet of the Odes something about the spectacle of the world of 1936, where he had placed him to live out his last few days: the occupation of the Rhineland by the Nazi army, Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, the creation by Salazar of the Portuguese Fascist militias. It was his way of telling him: "Here is the spectacle of the world, my poet of serene bitterness and elegant scepticism. Enjoy, behold, since to be sitting is your wisdom..."
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ended with the melancholy words: "Here, where the sea has ended and land awaits." So there would be no more discoveries by Portugal, fated to one infinite wait for futures not even imaginable; only the usual fado, the same old saudade and little more... Then the apprentice imagined that there still might be a way of sending the ships back to the water, for instance, by moving the land and setting that out to sea. An immediate fruit of collective Portuguese resentment of the historical disdain of Europe (more accurate to say fruit of my own resentment...) the novel I then wrote - The Stone Raft - separated from the Continent the whole Iberian Peninsula and transformed it into a big floating island, moving of its own accord with no oars, no sails, no propellers, in a southerly direction, "a mass of stone and land, covered with cities, villages, rivers, woods, factories and bushes, arable land, with its people and animals" on its way to a new Utopia: the cultural meeting of the Peninsular peoples with the peoples from the other side of the Atlantic, thereby defying - my strategy went that far - the suffocating rule exercised over that region by the United States of America... A vision twice Utopian would see this political fiction as a much more generous and human metaphor: that Europe, all of it, should move South to help balance the world, as compensation for its former and its present colonial abuses. That is, Europe at last as an ethical reference. The characters in The Stone Raft - two women, three men and a dog - continually travel through the Peninsula as it furrows the ocean. The world is changing and they know they have to find in themselves the new persons they will become (not to mention the dog, he is not like other dogs...). This will suffice for them.
Then the apprentice recalled that at a remote time of his life he had worked as a proof-reader and that if, so to say, in The Stone Raft he had revised the future, now it might not be a bad thing to revise the past, inventing a novel to be called History of the Siege of Lisbon, where a proof-reader, checking a book with the same title but a real history book and tired of watching how "History" is less and less able to surprise, decides to substitute a "yes" for a "no", subverting the authority of "historical truth". Raimundo Silva, the proof-reader, is a simple, common man, distinguished from the crowd only by believing that all things have their visible sides and their invisible ones and that we will know nothing about them until we manage to see both. He talks about this with the historian thus: "I must remind you that proof-readers are serious people, much experienced in literature and life, My book, don't forget, deals with history. However, since I have no intention of pointing out other contradictions, in my modest opinion, Sir, everything that is not literature is life, History as well, Especially history, without wishing to give offence, And painting and music, Music has resisted since birth, it comes and goes, tries to free itself from the word, I suppose out of envy, only to submit in the end, And painting, Well now, painting is nothing more than literature achieved with paintbrushes, I trust you haven't forgotten that mankind began to paint long before it knew how to write, Are you familiar with the proverb, If you don't have a dog, go hunting with a cat, in other words, the man who cannot write, paints or draws, as if he were a child, What you are trying to say, in other words, is that literature already existed before it was born, Yes, Sir, just like man who, in a manner of speaking, existed before he came into being, It strikes me that you have missed your vocation, you should have become a philosopher, or historian, you have the flair and temperament needed for these disciplines, I lack the necessary training, Sir, and what can a simple man achieve without training, I was more than fortunate to come into the world with my genes in order, but in a raw state as it were, and then no education beyond primary school, You could have presented yourself as being self-taught, the product of your own worthy efforts, there's nothing to be ashamed of, society in the past took pride in its autodidacts, No longer, progress has come along and put an end to all of that, now the self-taught are frowned upon, only those who write entertaining verses and stories are entitled to be and go on being autodidacts, lucky for them, but as for me, I must confess that I never had any talent for literary creation, Become a philosopher, man, You have a keen sense of humour, Sir, with a distinct flair for irony, and I ask myself how you ever came to devote yourself to history, serious and profound science as it is, I'm only ironic in real life, It has always struck me that history is not real life, literature, yes, and nothing else, But history was real life at the time when it could not yet be called history, So you believe, Sir, that history is real life, Of course, I do, I meant to say that history was real life, No doubt at all, What would become of us if the deleatur did not exist, sighed the proof-reader." It is useless to add that the apprentice had learnt, with Raimundo Silva, the lesson of doubt. It was about time.
Well, probably it was this learning of doubt that made him go through the writing of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. True, and he has said so, the title was the result of an optical illusion, but it is fair to ask whether it was the serene example of the proof-reader who, all the time, had been preparing the ground from where the new novel would gush out. This time it was not a matter of looking behind the pages of the New Testament searching for antitheses, but of illuminating their surfaces, like that of a painting, with a low light to heighten their relief, the traces of crossings, the shadows of depressions. That's how the apprentice read, now surrounded by evangelical characters, as if for the first time, the description of the massacre of the innocents and, having read, he couldn't understand. He couldn't understand why there were already martyrs in a religion that would have to wait thirty years more to listen to its founder pronouncing the first word about it, he could not understand why the only person that could have done so dared not save the lives of the children of Bethlehem, he could not understand Joseph's lack of a minimum feeling of responsibility, of remorse, of guilt, or even of curiosity, after returning with his family from Egypt. It cannot even be argued in defence that it was necessary for the children of Bethlehem to die to save the life of Jesus: simple common sense, that should preside over all things human and divine, is there to remind us that God would not send His Son to Earth, particularly with the mission of redeeming the sins of mankind, to die beheaded by a soldier of Herod at the age of two... In that Gospel, written by the apprentice with the great respect due to great drama, Joseph will be aware of his guilt, will accept remorse as a punishment for the sin he has committed and will be taken to die almost without resistance, as if this were the last remaining thing to do to clear his accounts with the world. The apprentice's Gospel is not, consequently, one more edifying legend of blessed beings and gods, but the story of a few human beings subjected to a power they fight but cannot defeat. Jesus, who will inherit the dusty sandals with which his father had walked so many country roads, will also inherit his tragic feeling of responsibility and guilt that will never abandon him, not even when he raises his voice from the top of the cross: "Men, forgive him because he knows not what he has done", referring certainly to the God who has sent him there, but perhaps also, if in that last agony he still remembers, his real father who has generated him humanly in flesh and blood. As you can see, the apprentice had already made a long voyage when in his heretical Gospel he wrote the last words of the temple dialogue between Jesus and the scribe: "Guilt is a wolf that eats its cub after having devoured its father, The wolf of which you speak has already devoured my father, Then it will be soon your turn, And what about you, have you ever been devoured, Not only devoured, but also spewed up".
Had Emperor Charlemagne not established a monastery in North Germany, had that monastery not been the origin of the city of Münster, had Münster not wished to celebrate its twelve-hundredth anniversary with an opera about the dreadful sixteenth-century war between Protestant Anabaptists and Catholics, the apprentice would not have written his play In Nomine Dei. Once more, with no other help than the tiny light of his reason, the apprentice had to penetrate the obscure labyrinth of religious beliefs, the beliefs that so easily make human beings kill and be killed. And what he saw was, once again, the hideous mask of intolerance, an intolerance that in Münster became an insane paroxysm, an intolerance that insulted the very cause that both parties claimed to defend. Because it was not a question of war in the name of two inimical gods, but of war in the name of a same god. Blinded by their own beliefs, the Anabaptists and the Catholics of Münster were incapable of understanding the most evident of all proofs: on Judgement Day, when both parties come forward to receive the reward or the punishment they deserve for their actions on earth, God - if His decisions are ruled by anything like human logic - will have to accept them all in Paradise, for the simple reason that they all believe in it. The terrible slaughter in Münster taught the apprentice that religions, despite all they promised, have never been used to bring men together and that the most absurd of all wars is a holy war, considering that God cannot, even if he wanted to, declare war on himself...
Blind. The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Then the apprentice, as if trying to exorcise the monsters generated by the blindness of reason, started writing the simplest of all stories: one person is looking for another, because he has realised that life has nothing more important to demand from a human being. The book is called All the Names. Unwritten, all our names are there. The names of the living and the names of the dead.
I conclude. The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don't have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
Translated from the Portuguese: Tim Crosfield and Fernando Rodrigues
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/lecture-e.htmlContext N°13
Context
Return to the full description| Reading José Saramago Zulfikar Ghose The first of José Saramago's novels to be published in English translation came out in 1987, and it is gratifying to reflect that a Portuguese writer was accorded this well-deserved recognition eleven years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, especially in an age notorious for neglecting authors suspected of not conforming to the conventional forms that govern marketable mediocrity, but instead are obsessed with the foolishness of trying to discover the forms of those impressions in their brains that signify a unique envisioning of reality. Eight more of Saramago's novels have appeared in English, the Nobel Prize no doubt encouraging the publishers to keep the books in print. Upon publishing her eleventh book, The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary: ". . . I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds," and added with a sense of retrospective despair at the long travail and of grateful relief that it was over, "What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!" What is astonishing about Saramago's nine novels is that unlike Woolf he seems not to have needed to experiment to discover the forms embedded within his brain, for he hit upon his own unique vision with the very first one, Baltasar and Blimunda. In it he established a singular voice and style and then proceeded to sustain his method through eight succeeding novels without the voice ever losing its freshness and the style its distinctive power. Where other writers evolve, he seems to have begun with a big bang. He is like a composer whose ninth symphony has a strict structural resemblance to the first, and yet the variation in the orchestration and the new sources of melodies—from the collective memory of a people in one book, from a prevalent universal motif in another—create a variety in each of the works, so that, stimulated by the new content and its internal surprises, what one really enjoys is the music, or in the case of the writer, the voice, because we hear his theme as it could be expressed by no other sound. Each of Saramago's novels has a thematic core based on an intellectual premise or some historical fact or on an outrageous but surprisingly credible proposition—as in The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off at the Pyrenees from the European continent and drifts off to sea. Baltasar and Blimunda is grounded in history, begins precisely in the year 1711, but it is as if a text by Herodotus had been thoroughly, and with some mischievous interpolations, revised by Boccaccio, and ends up having little to do with the fictions of history and everything to do with the timeless verities associated with love and suffering. The Portuguese title, Memorial do Convento, refers to the building of a monastery in fulfillment of a promise made to the Franciscan order by King Dom João V if God granted him an heir; an important theme of the novel is the human cost mindlessly expended by the vanity of monarchical wishes. Here, as well as in other novels, Saramago's compassion for common people comes through strongly in lively dramatic scenes, which are humorous even as they depict intense suffering, without his ever becoming didactic. His stance at times seems that of a spirited socialist, at others of a wise old philosopher, at others of a coarse peasant telling a smutty joke, and he transmits all these attitudes without ever offending the reader's taste because he never stops being a novelist who has a complicated, and intensely absorbing, new version to tell of a timeless story: behind the several intellectual masks, there is only one voice. But the lovers Baltasar and Blimunda are central to the story of Memorial do Convento, and the English publisher's romantic retitling of the book is not too improper a liberty. Together with their patron Padre Bartolomeu Lourenço, who is a historical figure famous as a pioneer of aviation, Baltasar and Blimunda are the focus of that imaginative invention of reality that is truer than the received, but often subsequently discredited, truths of history. Baltasar has only one hand, the other having been lost when he was a soldier, and yet he is the builder of Padre Bartolomeu's airship; Blimunda has the capacity to see inside a person's body, and it is she who creates the fuel for the ship, the wills she has collected from two thousand people that then become the will that powers the airship. And off they go, the three of them, in a beautiful scene that is both magical and wholly credible without being another mechanical reformulation of magical realism. It is a metaphorical ascendance of love when, climbing towards the sun, Baltasar and Blimunda embrace and the priest joins them; it is a sacred, holy moment filled with pagan joy. Now truly holy, Padre Bartolomeu is no longer of the Church. Even as he is in the air, the Inquisition is seeking him on land, for he has converted to Judaism. And so he flees to Spain. Appearing in several of Saramago's novels, the iniquities of the Church is another important theme in Baltasar and Blimunda. There are many hilarious and satirical passages mocking the pompous pretensions of the princes of the Church; sometimes uttered as a mocking aside, these passages are often one long, flowing sentence which starts seemingly innocuously (as in, "The Cardinal's procession includes a carriage that travels empty as a mark of personal esteem. . . .") and leads several lines later to an accumulation of ceremonial details that become increasingly absurd (". . . the King receives the Cardinal's biretta from the Papal Legate and places it on the Cardinal's head who is naturally overcome with Christian humility . . .") with the absurdity giving way to farce (". . . the Cardinal goes off to change his vestments and when he reappears he is dressed all in red . . ."), and so on, ending with a big sigh of relief and a final stinging phrase from the author (". . . Praise be to God, who has to endure such ceremonies"). Such fragmented quotation of a sentence forty-two lines long cannot convey its imaginative force or show how it provokes in the reader an impulse to laugh aloud. Though Baltasar and Blimunda is a delightful introduction to his work, a reader new to Saramago could start with any one of his novels and become charmed by the voice and be captivated by his style, for his prose retains its peculiar force throughout his work. He writes in sentences that are long but uncomplicated and contain these elements: the immediate descriptive matter of the plot; the dialogue, if any, that doesn't set off a character's speech by placing it within inverted commas and often without stating who the speaker is; observations that can be a reflection in the mind of one or more characters or possibly in the mind of the author himself and that underscore elements of human comedy and tragedy; intrusive comments on the nature of fictional forms or a question of grammar; sudden remarks that are unrelated to the action but are an important philosophical association suggested by the idea just represented in the previous phrase. Composed of these elements, the entire long sentence is really a lot of separate sentences strung together with commas and ending with a period, the only two punctuation marks Saramago uses, and if there is an exclamation or a question or a piece of dialogue, one hears these without needing the expression to be signaled by a punctuation mark. It looks like a headlong rush of words, but the whole seems perfectly natural, as if one sat across the table from Saramago, hearing him tell the story and sometimes having the impression that he is talking to himself. Sometimes a Saramago novel's core idea generates imaginative and historical content by combining two realities, that of an abstract puzzle posited by an intellectual hypothesis and that of an observed concrete world in which the story advances. This is best exemplified by The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which the main character is one of three manifestations of the Self projected as his heteronyms by the poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Since the Ricardo Reis invented by Pessoa has a similar sort of existence in the reader's mind as Borges's Pierre Menard—that is to say, he is historically real because his inventor has successfully lodged him in our minds and yet we know him to be only an idea—Saramago can engage the reader in a perception that is simultaneously authentic and duplicitous, a reality that dissolves in the very moment it is seen to be solid: now Reis is there, whose carnal affair with Lydia and a platonic one with Marcenda pull the narrative towards the telling of an old-fashioned romantic story, and now Reis is only a consciousness being visited by the dead poet and the narrative suddenly shifts to the expression of transcendental ideas, and this sudden falling from solid reality as through a trapdoor into a world without gravity where one floats in the exhilaration of ideas is one of the finest pleasures of reading Saramago. Blindness is Saramago's most powerful novel. It is a grim story of the barbarity, degeneracy, and overwhelming despair that overtakes a society in which every persom but one goes blind, and all are trapped in some extreme political malevolence and transformed into brutish beasts floundering in the horror of that awful darkness of total blindness that visits all humanity held in some totalitarian vise. None of the characters in Blindness is given a name. There is the doctor and the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the old man with the black eyepatch, etc., written just like that, without even the dignity of initial capitals. Saramago pushes his characters to the limits of endurance to suggest that there is no bodily degradation that a person will not submit to in order to survive, and he spares no details in the accumulation of horrors that become unbearably painful to observe—e.g., a woman must suck the dripping penis of a man who has just withdrawn it after raping another because the women's meager ration of food is in his criminal control. The scene is created with such physical force that the reader is made to suffer the woman's excruciatingly revolting sensation—and though it's a world in which people cannot see what they're doing, it could not be projected on each imagination with sharper clarity. In creating such a world, Saramago has created a novel with a searing vision, and its meaning is not exclusively political (how a nation falls into a common blindness) or anthropological (how quickly people abandon civilized control) or philosophical (why the conditions of life are so intolerable, and what, after all, is life?), but includes all of these ideas and then goes beyond them to become that poetical vision which is intuitively experienced by the reader as the distinguishing characteristic of a timeless work of art. The History of the Siege of Lisbon is another work for which Saramago fabricates an ingenious intellectual context: a proofreader, checking a historical work that bears the same title as Saramago's novel, decides to introduce an error into the text, thus giving rise to the question, If the representation of historical truth can coincide with a distortion of reality, what then is knowledge? Sometimes the error already exists, having been committed in years past and then evolved into a commonly held belief, and the proofreader, who ought to be like a supreme court justice in his pursuit of truth, becomes instead an advocate of a lie that he does not perceive because the error has gone unchallenged for generations. We have books, then, which, the proofreader thinks, are "like a pulsating galaxy, and the words, inside them, form another cosmic dust hovering in anticipation of that glance which will impose some meaning or will search therein for some new meaning . . . ," and suddenly the proof-reader observes that the words "offer another interpretation, the possibility of some latent contradiction, the evidence of his own error"—and thus, too, the reader looking at the words of the novel and arriving at a surprising interpretation or worrying if his assessment of an earlier chapter was not mistaken. What the historian presents as a brief fact in a single sentence becomes in the proofreader's imagination a dramatic chapter in a fiction, and Saramago presents that event not as an association in the distracted proofreader's mind but as a narrative in his own text, so that the scene generating itself in the proofreader's imagination becomes a chapter of the novel in the reader's hands. This results in high intellectual entertainment, with the impressive parade of ideas alternating with an absorbing human drama. For the drama, Saramago turns to romantic interest—the proofreader's affair with a female editor—and makes that the dominant story in the book's second half without, however, diminishing the philosophical interest. In several of his novels, Saramago confronts the facts of history with a questioning and ironical imagination and recovers from a remote time those passions of ordinary humans that make them our contemporaries. This may be seen in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which, while telling in a marvelous wealth of details the story of Jesus, presents theological and philosophical controversies with the irreverence of one taking delight in telling smutty jokes—e.g., "Anyone wishing to see [Jesus'] foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the amusement of curious atheists." Some readers might be offended by this, but everyone will find something to enjoy in The Stone Raft, with its hilarious spectacle of the floating Iberian Peninsula, or All the Names, in which a man working for the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, for whom people are only names in the files, makes a random selection, thus converting the seminal ink-marks in a file to a person of flesh and blood. Finally, there is The Cave, in which humanity has been reduced to shadows in a shopping mall, seeming at first as though Kafka had elaborated upon a thought from Plato that had then been edited by Orwell, but in the end it is pure Saramago, with his typically independent-minded characters—four hardy artisan-types of peasant stock—who abandon the corporate fantasy of reality as a theme park and set out for the unknown, prepared to suffer the hazards of capricious nature because, compared to urban entombment, any life is preferable in which the soul is not dead. SELECTED WORKS BY JOSÉ SARAMAGO IN TRANSLATION All the Names. Trans. Margaret Costa. Harvest Books, $14.00. |
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Remembering José Saramago: 5 Most Fascinating Facts About His Life
Saramago is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his 1995 best-selling novel "Blindness," which was adapted into a 2008 movie featuring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. It tells the story of a sudden epidemic of spontaneous loss of sight that strikes most of the inhabitants of an unnamed city, leading to societal collapse.Today, Friday, June 18, Jose Saramago passed away at 12:30 hours at his home in Lanzarote, at 87 years of age, as a result of multiple organ failure after a long illness.
The writer died while accompanied by his family, saying goodbye in a serene and tranquil manner.
His most famous work, however, is "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," a controversial interpretation of the Christian savior's formative years that includes graphic depictions of sexuality, violence and religious doubt. It was published in 1991 and promptly censored by the Portuguese government upon religious pressure from the Catholic Church in the country.
In 1998, Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "idiosyncratic development of his own resonant style of fiction. ... His oeuvre resembles a series of projects, with each one more or less disavowing the others but all involving a new attempt to come to grips with an elusory reality." (The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for an author's entire body of work, although certain works have been highlighted as particularly noteworthy in some cases.)
As avid readers around the Web mourn his loss, Surge Desk rounds up the most fascinating facts about Saramago's life:
1. His family faked his own birthday. According to Saramago himself, in his Nobel Prize autobiography, "Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time."
2. He was an ardent Communist. "Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction," The New York Times writes today. "In later years, Mr. Saramago used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy's failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations." His political views were shaped immensely by growing up during the period of time when the fascist militias and secret police were active in Portugal.
3. He was a blogger, too. As mentioned in a 2008 Guardian profile of the author: "In September ... the octogenarian author began a blog on his foundation's website, with a 'love letter' to Lisbon. He used to write for newspapers, he says, 'but now I'm writing every day, and there have been a million visits -- which I find astonishing -- but I'm doing it all for free.' His topics range from the credit crunch to advice for divorcing couples on how to divide a library."
4. He wasn't so popular in his native city. Even though Saramago considered himself "first of all Portuguese," a separate New York Times profile of him in 2007 noted that many of his fellow Portuguese citizens thought ill of "Saramago's own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as 'cold,' 'arrogant,' 'unsympathetic.' When my interpreter inquired at a DVD store if a documentary about Saramago was in stock, the young salesman, startled by the request, replied, laughing, 'I hope not!'"
5. He wants Morgan Freeman to play him in a movie. As he told the Financial Times last year when asked who he would want to portray him in an biographic film: "A good black actor. Morgan Freeman, for example." Saramago was white.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST
By Jose Saramago. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero from the 1991 O EVANGELHO SEGUNDO JESUS CRISTO.
377 pages
New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-136700-9
Comments of Bob Corbett
May 2001
This is the gospel according to Jose Saramago and it is an irreverent, profound, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provocative and compelling work.
The opening third of the novel is dominated by the question of guilt and features a brilliant tactic of Saramago's, the construction of a coherent historical tale surrounding the traditional Biblical story which becomes more compelling than the sketchy gospel account. As we meet them Joseph and Mary are a young married couple, he barely 20 she in her mid-teens. Joseph is deeply religious, interrupting his work of carpentry to sit at the temple of Nazareth as often as he can. He fills his days with the traditional blessings for virtually every act one can imagine and stays in frequent discourse with his God. I was reminded of the character Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof.
Throughout much of this first third Saramago seems reluctant to allow miracles to occur in any obvious fashion. Since the primary form they take in this early part of the synoptic gospels is of angels appearing, Saramago allows there are angels, but disguises them as beggars or other more human forms, even as Herod's soldiers. The tone is light, even humorous and Saramago indulges himself in some linguistic jokes which he so loves. He tells us that "Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not to blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious."
We follow them on the trip to register for the census and to the town of Bethlehem where the manger turns out to be in a cave on the outskirts of the small town. Saramago's first major theme enters with the slaughter of the innocents. Herod is the king and is dying. His mind is going and he is extremely paranoid seeing a plot to overthrow him at every turn and lashing out viciously at any suspected enemy. Herod knows the prophets and Saramago has him aware of Micah's prophecy that a child shall arises in Bethlehem who will become king. But Herod doesn't take the prophets very seriously. The marvelous problematic which Saramago presents us with is why would Herod, or any ruler for that matter, pick exactly NOW to slaughter the tiny handful of innocents who might exist in the small village of Bethlehem at any given moment. The prophecy had been given centuries earlier. What sets off Herod's paranoia is a dream. He dreams of the prophecy, wakes in a sweat and decides he'd best take action, thus he orders the deaths of all males children under the age of two.
Continuing with this more compelling and logical reconstruction of this history Saramago presents us with a second problem: how do Joseph and Mary eat? Jesus is feeding at the breast, but Jewish law requires a 33 days laying-in period for the woman followed by an animal sacrifice in the temple for purification. Joseph and Mary are quite poor and young with no savings. Joseph must find work and Saramago puts him to work in the reconstruction of the temple in near-by Jerusalem. The angel messenger turns out to be a disgruntled soldier talking with his buddies about this crazy job Herod has given them. Joseph overhears this complaint of the madness of Herod, the horror of having to kill these young children, but the impossibility of resisting his order without getting themselves killed. When Joseph hears that the slaughter is to be in Bethlehem he races off to save Jesus and hides Jesus and Mary deeper in their cave.
Then Saramago drops his first major bomb: the question of Joseph's guilt. Whether one uses the traditional Biblical story of the angel of heaven as messenger or Saramago's fiction of the overheard soldier, the point is Joseph was informed and then took action to save Jesus. But why in the world didn't he warn the people of Bethlehem. Saramago is simply astonished by this silence and the awful consequences of the death of these 25 children in this tiny village. His Joseph is consumed for the rest of his life by this profound moral guilt and even manages to pass the guilt on to Jesus at his own death.
In this first third of the novel Saramago is constantly concerned to reconstruct the story to call attention to odd gaps in the synoptic gospels' account, like the curiosity of what moved Herod to worry about this ancient prophecy at just this moment in time, and how did Joseph earn his living while Mary was honoring Jewish law by the period of laying-in for purification. I found this treatment fascinating, thus when it leads us to the moral argument for Joseph's guilt for the deaths of the children by his silence the arguments comes at us with tremendous force.
By delving into both the known historical facts of the time and what we know of human psychology and adding touch of common sense, he creates a "more likely story" than any of the four gospels. The surprise is that a very different story emerges, one that doesn't have the religious significance of the gospels.
This is typical Jose Saramago at his best developing the theme of limited skepticism and the creation of knowledge. He presents us with a post-modern sense of history and value as human creations, not out of nothing, but not objective either. The human, the author in this case, is limited by the known facts, yet must essentially create reality as best he can. There is no single reality which can arise, yet not every reality is as plausible as every other.
It is also fascinating in this early section, and especially given the role he will give to Joseph's guilt in Jesus' formation, that given the relative place of men and women in the society Saramago is at pains to paint the CENTRAL parent child relationship to be between Joseph and Jesus, not Mary and Jesus. This especially fits with his preparing the ground for Jesus' appearance in the temple since he's been painted as an astute student in the synagogue school, and a child who often discusses scripture with his father.
Of course Saramago's historical reconstruction is, in an important sense, circular. The logic is possible only since he makes the assumption that most of the miraculous is exaggerated spiritualism. Thus the question becomes, what REALLY happened without the miraculous to fall back upon. Yet without the anti-miraculous assumption, Saramago's account is superfluous and counter historical, or at least counter Biblical
Joseph has never recovered from the devastation of not warning the people of Bethlehem of the coming slaughter. He has constant nightmares concerning the death of the innocent children whom he condemned to their death by his silence. He finally redeems himself, and like his son later, he dies at the age of 33 trying to rescue his neighbor. He fails, but in the process his nightmare finally disappears. He is crucified by the Romans as a revolutionary even though he is completely innocent. But is his son later on?
After Joseph's death Jesus leaves home at about the age of 12, presents himself at the temple of Jerusalem and dazzles the elders with his questions about -- ah yes: guilt. They are amazed at this child's depth of understanding of this decidedly adult problem. Jesus then is taken in by Satan who has disguised himself as a shepherd and he spends several years tending sheep in the rugged and isolated countryside. Saramago is setting up a major transition and the last two-thirds of the novel is concerned with the questions of who is God and why does he allow such evil, misery and suffering in the world. Closely connected with this question since Saramago is furious with God because of all this suffering, is the question of just how close is the relationship between Satan and God.
Jesus' life is played out in much the fashion that we know it in the traditional tale, but there are some strange and startling twists along the way, most notably his adult life-long sexual partnering with Mary Magdalene and his eventual attempt at rebellion against God.
Saramago's image of God is of an absolute power who hold humans as slaves. The human notion of merit, choice, even goodness is just human nonsense. An angel tells Mary that God says "no" much more often than "yes." But Jesus eventually meets his God in the desert, appearing to him in a cloud, but speaking with him. He seems to learn that he is the son of God, but he's not too sure. He is forewarned, but vaguely, of what is in store for him, but he does realize he is to die soon and after his death with become famous and powerful. Jesus doesn't really understand this all, but, after all, God is God and so he accepts his fate and as a symbol of this he is asked to sacrifice his favorite lamb to God. Once Jesus does this to show his submission and obedience his terrible guilt which he inherited from his father finally goes away and the novel moves toward its denouement.
Jesus had already begun working his famous miracles and most of them are told in a rather straight forward manner not much differently that in the synoptic gospels though in greater detail. Two notable exceptions are tied to Mary Magdalene. She is Jesus' significant other and they are never separated. When Jesus curses the fig tree for not having fruit, she jumps all over him. Why would you do such a thing, she challenges him, it isn't the season for the tree to bear fruit and you're behaving quite stupidly and badly. Jesus is shamed, sees what a dumb thing he expected, but is startled to discover that while he had the power to kill the tree in his anger, he doesn't have the power to bring it back to life. Saramago mocks the gospel stories in this tale, often done in a quite humorous fashion as in his simply hilarious story of the driving the demons out of the possessed man and into the herd of pigs. The astonishment and fury of the pig farmers when their pigs all go racing off the cliff requires Jesus and his disciples to have to beat a hasty retreat into the lake to escape the irate pig farmers.
Mary Magdalene's second interference is much more touching. Jesus and Mary Magdalene have returned to her home. Jesus becomes a dear friend of her brother Lazarus and actually cures him of his serious heart trouble, then, while Jesus is away on some miracle run, Lazarus dies. When Jesus returns he is deeply saddened and knows he now has the power to undo death, which he didn't at the time of the cursed fig tree. He is ready to do it, raises his hands in preparation and Mary Magdalene stops him. Don't, she admonishes, don't. It is enough for a person to have to die once, don't make him have to die twice. Since the gospel story, on Saramago's view, only needs it that Jesus could have raised Lazarus, he honors Mary Magdalene's wish and they bury Lazarus.
Saramago is moving more and more bitterly to reveal a mean, angry, power hungry God who will cause all the cruelty he needs to get his way. After Jesus and Mary Magdalene have returned to Martha and Lazarus' home, Martha becomes deeply in love with Jesus and his message. This love is completely platonic, but she craves his approval and is astonished that she, a completely virtuous woman would only be his dear friend, while her ex-prostitute sister would have Jesus as her lover. Jesus doesn't help matters when, in trying to reassure Mary Magdalene at one point, he tells her of his profound love for her, but does it in the presence of Martha. Saramago says: "These final words were intended for Mary Magdalene, but Jesus forgot that they would only aggravate Martha's distress and desperate loneliness, this is the difference between God and His son, God does it on purpose, His son out of carelessness which is all too human."
The final theme, the evil of God, is finally revealed in detail during the second meeting of Jesus and God which takes place in Satan's presence. This is meant to retell and replace the forty days in the desert and the temptation. Jesus wakes one morning to discover that the lake is covered in a deep mist. The fishermen are terrified to go out on the lake, but, in silence, Jesus takes a boat and rows out. When he gets to the middle of the lake the fog lifts a bit and he discovers God sitting in the bow of the boat. Moments later they hear a swimmer coming and it is Satan, the same shepherd with whom Jesus spent his many years of youth as a shepherd. A discussion which is both hilarious and profound begins in which God reveals in detail to Jesus who Jesus is -- the son of God, and what his plans are for him. Jesus presses for details and is quite surprised to discover that this is much more than the promised Messiah. Jesus is to become not just the king of the Jews and lead his people to power, rather Jesus is to die in order that God will be able to use his death (no mention of the resurrection) as a stepping stone to a single world religion. The stakes are much higher than becoming king of the Jews. But, God allows under careful interrogation from Jesus and at Satan's prompting, that this will take thousands of years to achieve and will be achieved only with huge amounts of bloodshed. Jesus is utterly horrified at this prospect and quite shocked. Satan cuts in: "One has to be God to countenance so much blood." Jesus presses this issue and eventually God reveals much of the horror that will follow. At one point Saramago just lists in short phases the deaths of selected martyrs such as: (just to choose a random sample)
"…Maginus of Tarragon decapitated with a serrated scythe, Mamas of Cappodocia disemboweled, Manuel, Sabel, and Ismael, Manuel put to death with an iron nail embedded in each nipple and an iron rod driven through his head from ear to ear and all three beheaded, Margaret of Antioch killed with a firebrand and an iron comb, Marie Goretti strangled, Marius of Persia put to the sword and his hands amputated…"
and on and on and on, about 7 pages of alphabetized horrible deaths.
Then God makes a tactical mistake. When Jesus, who is just astounded beyond belief, keeps pressing him on this issue, he tells him of much of what will follow: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the untold numbers of religious wars and on and on. All for the purpose of bringing God the religious domination that he wants. Again it is the voice of Satan who reveals the ultimate evidence of God's evil: "… the end justifies the means." Jesus presses on and is increasingly disturbed by God's evil and is quite curious of the close relationship with Satan. God tells him: "… unless the devil is the devil, God cannot be God." The interview eventually ends and when Jesus rows back to shore his is amazed to discover that he'd been on the lake for 40 days and that this fog and storm which kept all others off the lake has drawn people from all over the region to see this phenomenon.
It's all too much for Jesus and he decides to rebel against God's plan. He tries, and those last pages are too filled with surprises to tell here, but in the end, of course, God gets his way and Jesus is tricked into fulfilling his role in the whole sordid story of bloodshed in the name of the Christian religion.
The Saramago of the last chapters is an angry and raging author reeling from the evil, misery and suffering brought to the world in the name of spreading and maintaining Christianity. In the process Saramago challenges, startles, amuses and even shocks most of us. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is simply not to be missed. It takes its place alongside such challenging works a Nikos Kazantzaksis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew as alternatives to the standard accounts of the gospels which have entered into popular culture and consciousness.
Some follow-up discussion of the novel with LJ Lindhurst and another review of the of the novel from Bob Galloway
Bob Corbett corbetre@webster.edu| Becoming | Reading | Thinking | Journals |
Bob Corbett corbetre@webster.edu
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/saramago-gospel.html
Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder. Something's Changed.
By PAUL BERMANFears that only yesterday seemed absurd or silly begin to seem reasonable and more than reasonable. Thoughts that might have seemed inconceivable even two months ago become not just conceivable but spoken out loud. Crowds chant utter wildness on the street. In this way, the clouds grow blacker before our eyes. Very small clouds, you may say. Still, the transformation takes place at stupendous speed. Not everyone notices. The failure to notice constitutes a small black cloud in itself.
In Washington last month, a crowd of demonstrators gathered to celebrate the modern protest rituals of the anti-globalization movement. Only, this time, the radical opposition to globalization turned into radical opposition to Israel. A portion of the crowd chanted, "Martyrs, not murderers." I suppose that many of the individuals in that part of the crowd would have explained that, in mouthing their Ms, they intended only to promote the cause of Palestinian rights, which is surely a worthy cause. But their chant was not about Palestinian rights. It was about mass murder.
I doubt that the streets of Washington have ever seen such an obscene public spectacle, at least not since the days of public slave auctions, before the Civil War. Three months ago, I imagine, the demonstrators themselves would never have dreamed of shouting such a slogan. I don't want to suggest that everyone at the anti-globalization demonstration shared those sentiments. But everyone at the anti-globalization demonstration willy-nilly ended up shoulder to shoulder with people who did feel that way. Anti-globalization protests have never been like that before.
That same month, in New York, the annual Socialist Scholars Conference assembled at the East Village's venerable Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches. The Socialist Scholars Conference is an annual meeting of a few thousand people, most of them intellectuals of some sort. The conference has always resembled an ideological bazaar, with every ridiculous left-wing sect selling its sacred texts, side by side with sober European social democrats and American liberals.
But this year a novelist from Egypt sat on one of the panels and stated her approval of the suicide bombers. To be sure, most people at the Socialist Scholars Conference would condemn random mass murders. But there is nothing new in condemning mass murder. This year, the new event was that someone supported it, and the rest of the participants, the rank and file Socialist Scholars, sat in comradely assemblage as the argument was advanced, and someone even spoke out in the panelist's defense. The newness in this event has to be remarked.
II.
I could cite a dozen other instances where, in the last few weeks, someone in a city like New York or Washington, London or Paris, has argued or chanted in favor of mass murder — someone who has never done such a thing in the past, in settings that have never heard such arguments before, or at least not in many years. What can explain the sudden development? It is a consequence, of course, of the Israeli incursion into the West Bank — or, rather, a consequence of how the Israeli incursion has been interpreted by an immense number of people all over the world.
One of the most prominent of those interpretations has looked on the incursion as Nazism in action, which is to say, as an event of extreme and absolute evil, requiring the most extreme and absolute counter-measures. In the last few months, Israel itself has been routinely compared to Nazi Germany, and Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler. Exactly why large numbers of people would arrive at such a comparison is not immediately obvious. In its half-century of existence, Israel has committed its share of serious crimes and even a few massacres (though not lately, as it turns out). But the instances of Israeli military frenzy or criminal indiscipline are not especially numerous, given how often Israel has had to fight.
There has never been a hint of an extermination camp, nor anything that could be compared in grisliness with any number of actions by the governments of Syria, Iraq, Serbia and so forth around the world. Israel's wars have created refugees, to be sure; but Nazism's specialty was precisely not to create refugees. If Israel nonetheless resembles Nazi Germany, the resemblance must owe, instead, to some other factor, to some essence of the Israeli nation, regardless of the statistics of death and displacement.
The notorious old United Nations resolution (voted up in 1975 and repealed in 1991) about Zionism and racism hinted at such an essence by saying, in effect, that Israel's national doctrine, Zionism, was a doctrine of racial hatred. But why would anyone suppose that, like Nazi Germany, Israel has been built on a platform of hatred? The founding theorists of Zionism in the 19th and early 20th centuries did not escape the prevailing doctrines of their own time, but their theories were chiefly theories of Jewish national revival and self-defense. They were not theories about the inferiority or hatefulness of anyone else, not even Judaism's worst enemies of the past, the Christian churches of Europe. Why, then, the accusation about hateful essences and Zionist doctrine? This is something that is very rarely explained.
In these last weeks, though, one of the world's most celebrated writers did stand up to discuss the hateful essence and its nature. The writer was José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998. Saramago was part of an international group of writers who traveled to Ramallah to observe the Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat's compound. And, having observed the situation, Saramago came up with the same comparison as Breyten Breytenbach and any number of other people, lately. (It is fairly amazing how many otherwise serious writers have ended up choosing the same tiny set of images to apply to the Jewish state.) The situation at Ramallah, in Saramago's estimation, was "a crime comparable to Auschwitz." To the Israeli journalist who asked where the gas chambers were, Saramago gave his much-quoted reply, "Not yet here." But he also explained himself more seriously and at length in the April 21 issue of El Pais, a Madrid newspaper read and respected all over the Spanish-speaking world.
III.
Israel, in Saramago's view, has pursued immoral and hateful policies during its entire history. And why has Israel done so? Perhaps for the same reasons that other countries have pursued hateful, immoral, expansionist policies? Not at all. Saramago traced Israel's policies to biblical Judaism. He pointed to the story of David and Goliath, which, though commonly pictured as a tale of underdog triumph, is actually the story of a blond person (David's blond hair seemed to catch Saramago's attention) employing a superior technology to kill at a distance a helpless and presumably non-blond person, the unfortunate and oppressed Goliath. Today's events, in Saramago's fanciful interpretation, follow the biblical script precisely, as if in testimony to the Jews' fidelity to tradition. He writes:
The blond David of yesteryear surveys from a helicopter the occupied Palestinian lands and fires missiles at unarmed innocents; the delicate David of yore mans the most powerful tanks in the world and flattens and blows up what he finds in his tread; the lyrical David who sang praise to Bathsheba, incarnated today in the gargantuan figure of a war criminal named Ariel Sharon, hurls the 'poetic' message that first it is necessary to finish off the Palestinians in order later to negotiate with those who remain.
Saramago must have been ablaze, writing these lines.
Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.
Israel, in short, is a racist state by virtue of Judaism's monstrous doctrines — racist not just against the Palestinians, but against the entire world, which it seeks to manipulate and abuse. Israel's struggles with its neighbors, seen in that light, do take on a unique and even metaphysical quality of genuine evil — the quality that distinguishes Israel's struggles from those of all other nations with disputed borders, no matter what the statistics of death and suffering might suggest.
Saramago, shrewder and more sophisticated than the crowds in the Washington streets or the panelist at the Socialist Scholars Conference, did condemn the suicide bombers. He did so in two throwaway sentences at the end of his essay, sneeringly, with his own expressive ellipsis:
Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists.... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb." And so, the deliberate act of murdering random crowds turns out to be the fault of the murdered — or, rather, of the monstrous and racist doctrines of their religion, which is Judaism.
I don't want to leave the impression that El Pais is a newspaper full of editors and writers who share those views. The newspaper right away published a commentary by a philosopher named Reyes Mate, who carefully explained that Nazi analogies tend to downplay the true meaning of Nazism, and a second commentary by the American writer Barbara Probst Solomon, a regular correspondent for El Pais, who skillfully pointed out that Saramago had written an essay not about the actually existing Israel and its policies but about "the Jew that is roiling around in his head." There was, then, a balance in El Pais: one essay that was anti-Semitic, and two that were not.
Still, something was remarkable in seeing, in this day and age, a fulmination against Judaism for its intrinsic hatefulness, written with the savage energy of a Nobel Prize winner, published in one of the world's major newspapers. Surely, this, too, like the crowd in Washington and the panel discussion in New York, marks something new in our present moment.
IV.
You may object that, in pointing to the anti-globalists in the Washington streets and the Socialist Scholars in New York, I have focused on a radical left whose spirit of irresponsibility isn't news. As for Saramago, isn't he renowned for his Stalinist politics, for being a dinosaur from the 1930s? But the new tone that I refer to, the new attitude, is anything but a monopoly of the radical left. In this age of Jean-Marie Le Pen there is no point even mentioning the extreme right. For the new spirit has begun to pop up even in the most respectable of writings, in the middle of the mainstream — not everywhere, to be sure, and not even in most places, but in some places, and not always obscure ones. The new spirit has begun to pop up in a fashion that seems almost unconscious, even among people who would never dream of expressing an extreme or bigoted view, but who end up doing so anyway.
A peculiar example appears in an essay called "Israel: the Road to Nowhere," by the New York University historian Tony Judt, which ran as the lead article in May 9, 2002, issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Judt is a scholar of French intellectual history, well-known and much-praised (by me, for instance, in a review in The New Yorker) for his willingness to examine, among other themes, the moral obtuseness of Jean-Paul Sartre and his followers a half-century ago. In his new essay Judt blames Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for failing to understand that, sooner or later, Israel will have to negotiate with the Palestinians, who cannot be expected to abandon their hope for national independence. Judt despairs of Sharon, but he calls on the United States to play a larger role, and he does hold aloft a hope. Everyone in the Arab-Israeli struggle has suffered over the years, but Judt points out that in recent years the world has seen many examples of enemy populations reconciling and living side by side — the French and the Germans, for instance, or, on a still grander scale, the Poles and the Ukrainians, whose mutual crimes in the 1940s surpassed anything that has taken place between Arabs and Israelis.
That is the gist of his essay, at least ostensibly, and it seems to me unexceptionable, if perhaps a little one-sided.
V.
But the remarkable aspect of Judt's essay is not the ostensible argument. It is the set of images and rhetorical devices and even the precise language that he has chosen to use. His single most emphatic trope is a comparison between Israel and French Algeria, and between the current fighting and the Algerian War. A discussion of French Algeria begins the piece, and French Algeria pops up repeatedly, and its prominence in his argument raises an interesting question, namely, Does Israel have a right to exist? The Algerian War was fought over the proposition that French Algeria, as a colonial outpost of the French imperialists, did not, in fact, have a right to exist. Most of the world eventually came to accept that proposition. But if Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France's imperialism?
That particular question can be answered with a dozen arguments — the nativist argument (Zionism may have been founded to rescue the European Jews, but in the past 50 years it has mostly ended up rescuing the native Jews of the Middle East instead), the social justice argument (the overwhelming majority of Israel's Jews arrived essentially as refugees), the social utility argument (if not for Israel, which country or international agency would have raised a finger on behalf of the supremely oppressed Jews of Ethiopia and many other places?), the democratic argument (democratic states are more legitimate than undemocratic ones) and so forth.
But it has to be recognized that, starting in the 1960s, ever larger portions of the world did begin to gaze at Israel through an Algerian lens. Arafat launched his war against Israel in 1964, in the aftermath of the Algerian War but well before the Israelis had taken over the West Bank and Gaza, and his logic was, so to speak, strictly Algerian — a logic that regarded Israel as illegitimate per se. The comparison between Israel and French Algeria has served as one more basis for regarding Zionism as a doctrine of racial hatred — a doctrine, from this point of view, not much different from the old French notion that France had every right to conquer any African country it chose. Judt cannot share that view of Zionism, given his expressed worry about Israel's survival. Someone who did share the view would regard Israel's demise as desirable.
Still, his essay emphasizes the Algerian analogy. And then, having underlined that comparison, Judt moves along to the argument that in recent times has tended to replace the one about French Algeria, now that the Algerian War has faded into the past. The newer argument compares Israel to the white apartheid Republic of South Africa, where a racist contempt for black Africans was the founding proposition of the state. Back in the days of apartheid, friends of social justice around the world had good reason to regard the white Republic of South Africa as illegitimate.
Judt, on this note, observes that, "following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge." And he asks, "Is the Middle East so different? From the Palestinian point of view, the colonial analogy fits and foreign precedents might apply. Israelis, however, insist otherwise." But are the Israelis right in their insistence? He says, "Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness" — his point being, presumably, that the Israelis are wrong. But then, if Israel does in some profound way resemble apartheid South Africa, would it be right to boycott the Zionist state, just as South Africa was boycotted? One does not boycott a state merely because of some objectionable policy or other. Nobody boycotts Turkey because it mistreats the Kurds, nor Egypt because it drove out nearly its entire Jewish population.
But if a state is racist by nature, if racism is its founding principle, as was the case in apartheid South Africa, then a boycott might well be justified, with the hope of abolishing the state entirely. Now, Judt cannot possibly regard Israel as any more comparable to apartheid South Africa than he does to French Algeria, given his concern that Israel continues to exist. Still, he does note that a new movement is, in fact, afoot to boycott Israel. He writes, "The fear of seeming to show solidarity with Sharon that already inhibits many from visiting Israel, will rapidly extend to the international community at large, making of Israel a pariah state." Do the "many" who feel inhibited from visiting Israel merit applause for their moral consciences? Or should those people be seen as so many José Saramagos, smug in their retrograde bigotries? Judt refrains from comment, but his tone implies that he regards the "many" as more reasonable than not.
He does say about some future resolution of the conflict, "There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one." That is a curious comment, in the context of these other remarks. The Arab "right of return" means the right of Palestinians to return to their original, pre-1948 homes in Israel, a right that, if widely exercised, would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That is why, if Israel is to survive, "there will be no Arab right of return." But what is the Jewish "right of return"? That phrase can only mean what is expressed and guaranteed by Israel's Law of Return, to wit, Israel's commitment to welcome any Jew from around the world who chooses to come.
What would it mean for Israel to abandon that commitment? It would mean abandoning the Zionist mission to build a shelter for oppressed Jews from around the world, which is to say, Zionism itself. It would mean abandoning Israel's autonomy as a state — its right to draw up its own laws on immigration. Judt cannot be in favor of Israel doing any such thing. But those throwaway remarks and his choice of comparisons and analogies make it hard to know for sure.
VI.
His essay, all in all, seems to have been written on two levels. There is an ostensible level that criticizes Israel, although in a friendly fashion, with the criticisms meant to rescue Israel from its own errors and thereby to help everyone else who has been trapped in the conflict; and a second level, consisting of images and random phrases (the level that might attract Freud's attention), which keep hinting that maybe Israel has no right to exist. It is worth looking at the religious images and references in Judt's essay. There are two of these, and they express the two contradictory levels with a painful clarity.
In his very last lines, Judt urges the Israelis to treat the Palestinian public with dignity and to turn quickly from war to peace negotiations. And, in order to give a pungency or fervor to his exhortation, he concludes by quoting a famous rabbinical remark, "And if not now, when?" He ends, that is, on a warm note of Judaism, which is plainly a sympathetic tone to adopt — a call for Israel to adhere to Judaism's highest traditions of morality and good sense. Yet, at another point he strikes a Christian note, and of the weirdest sort.
Judt wonders about Sharon, "Will he send the tanks into the Galilee? Put up electric fences around the Arab districts of Haifa?" Judt complains that Israel's intellectuals are not mounting a suitable opposition to this kind of aggression. He describes the intellectuals and their failure to oppose in these words: "The country's liberal intelligentsia who, Pilate-like, have washed their hands of responsibility." That is, Judt compares Israel's liberal intellectuals to Pontius Pilate, who took no responsibility for killing Jesus. That is a very strange phrase to stumble across in an essay on the Middle East. Freud's eyebrows rise in wonder. The phrase is worth parsing. If Israel's liberal intellectuals are Pontius Pilate, who is Sharon? He must be the Jewish high priest who orders the crucifixion. Who is Jesus? He can only be the people whom the high priest is setting out to kill — namely, the suicide bombers. Surely Judt cannot mean that the Palestinian terrorists are God.
But then, it does seem odd that, a couple of lines down, Judt turns to the word "terrorist" and doubts its usefulness. "'Terrorist,'" he writes, "risks becoming the mantra of our time, like 'Communist,' 'capitalist,' 'bourgeois,' and others before it. Like them, it closes off all further discussion." Words do turn into meaningless slogans. Still, is it so unreasonable, at a moment when the astounding series of mass murders in Israel is still going on, to speak of "terrorists," that is, of people who deliberately set out to kill randomly? The suicide bombers are, in fact, terrorists, by any conventional definition of the term. Judt cannot mean to let those people off the hook, and in one portion of his essay he sternly condemns them. Yet in the passage that follows the remark about Pontius Pilate he ends up commenting, "terror against civilians is the weapon of choice of the weak." Presumably he means that the Palestinian bombers are weak and have had no alternative way to claim their national rights — though he doesn't explain why the "weak" would have turned to their "weapon of choice" precisely in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer to create the Palestinian state in Gaza and on almost all of the West Bank.
About José Saramago, I do believe, on the basis of the essay in El Pais, that the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize has gotten hung up on the Jew roiling in his head, in Barbara Solomon's phrase. Not for one moment do I believe anything of the sort about Tony Judt. I can imagine that Judt chose to write about Pontius Pilate for the simplest and most natural reasons. The notion that the suicide bombers are sacred figures fulfilling a divine function, combined with the notion that Israel's Jews are evil demons, has swept the world in the last few months. Even the notion that the Jews are guilty of deicide, which is Christian in origin, has in recent times spread to the Muslim world. The new young president of Syria expressed that very notion to the Pope, on the occasion of the Pope's visit.
But, once these ideas have been picked up by events and have been sent flyinrough the air like body parts in a terrorist attack, they can easily land anywhere, and a writer whose anger has gotten out of hand can end up making use of those notions, strictly by mistake. Doubtless a main lesson to be drawn from Judt's essay is that even the most brilliant of university professors, lacking training and experience in journalism, may fail to command the most workaday of journalistic skills — the skill that allows a cooler-headed newsroom pro to write to deadline in tense times without losing control of the nuances and hidden meanings of his own copy.
Losing control of his own rhetoric and nothing worse than that was, in Judt's case, surely the error. For just as most people in the anti-globalism movement would never chant in favor of suicide bombers (even if some people did chant in favor), and just as most of the Socialist Scholars would never support the terrorists (even if one of the honored panelists did), and just as a modern, high-minded newspaper like El Pais would not care to publish antisemitic demagoguery (even if it did publish such a work), Judt, I am confident, had no intention of indulging in anti-Zionism and certainly no intention of sacralizing the terrorists or demonizing the Jews (even if that is the inference of what he ended up writing).
Yet it is the unintended inferences that seem to me the most frightening of all. To go out and fight against bigots and racists of all sorts, the anti-Semites and the anti-Arab racists alike, seems to me relatively simple to do, even in these terrible times. It is not so easy to put up a fight against a wind, a tone against an indefinable spirit of hatred that has begun to appear even in the statements of otherwise sensible people.
But that is what we are up against. The little accidents and odd behaviors do add up. The new wind is definitely blowing. A few months ago no one was chanting for murder. In those days it was pretty unusual to stumble across diatribes against Judaism or anti-Semitic phrases in the intellectual press. But look what has happened. Something has changed.
http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/bigotry_in_print.htmThe Nobel Prize in Literature 1998
José Saramago
Autobiography
Written over the author's signature and translated into English by Fernando Rodrigues and Tim Crosfield
This was not, however, the only identity problem to which I was fated at birth. Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.
Maybe because he had served in World War I, in France as an artillery soldier, and had known other surroundings from those of the village, my father decided in 1924 to leave farm work and move with his family to Lisbon, where he started as a policeman, for which job were required no more "literary qualifications" (a common expression then...) than reading, writing and arithmetic.
A few months after settling in the capital my brother Francisco two years older, died. Though our living conditions had improved a little after moving, we were never going to be well off.
I was already 13 or 14 when we moved, at last, to our own - but very tiny - house: till then we had lived in parts of houses, with other families. During all this time, and until I came of age I spent many, and very often quite long, periods in the village with my mother's parents Jerónimo Meirinho and Josefa Caixinha.
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year. Then I was moved up to the grammar school where I stayed two years, with excellent marks in the first year, not so good in the second, but was well liked by classmates and teachers, even being elected (I was then 12...) treasurer of the Students' Union... Meanwhile my parents reached the conclusion that, in the absence of resources, they could not go on keeping me in the grammar school. The only alternative was to go to a technical school. And so it was: for five years I learned to be a mechanic. But surprisingly the syllabus at that time, though obviously technically oriented, included, besides French, a literature subject. As I had no books at home (my own books, bought by myself, however with money borrowed from a friend, I would only have when I was 19) the Portuguese language textbooks, with their "anthological" character, were what opened to me the doors of literary fruition: even today I can recite poetry learnt in that distant era. After finishing the course, I worked for two years as a mechanic at a car repair shop. By that time I had already started to frequent, in its evening opening hours, a public library in Lisbon. And it was there, with no help or guidance except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
When I got married in 1944, I had already changed jobs. I was now working in the Social Welfare Service as an administrative civil servant. My wife, Ilda Reis, then a typist with the Railway Company, was to become, many years later, one of the most important Portuguese engravers. She died in 1998. In 1947, the year of the birth of my only child, Violante, I published my first book, a novel I myself entitled The Widow, but which for editorial reasons appeared as The Land of Sin. I wrote another novel, The Skylight, still unpublished, and started another one, but did not get past the first few pages: its title was to be Honey and Gall, or maybe Louis, son of Tadeus... The matter was settled when I abandoned the project: it was becoming quite clear to me that I had nothing worthwhile to say. For 19 years, till 1966, when I got to publish Possible Poems, I was absent from the Portuguese literary scene, where few people can have noticed my absence.
For political reasons I became unemployed in 1949, but thanks to the goodwill of a former teacher at the technical school, I managed to find work at the metal company where he was a manager.
At the end of the 1950s I started working at a publishing company, Estúdios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before. This new activity allowed me acquaintance and friendship with some of the most important Portuguese writers of the time. In 1955, to improve the family budget, but also because I enjoyed it, I started to spend part of my free time in translation, an activity that would continue till 1981: Colette, Pär Lagerkvist, Jean Cassou, Maupassant, André Bonnard, Tolstoi, Baudelaire, Étienne Balibar, Nikos Poulantzas, Henri Focillon, Jacques Roumain, Hegel, Raymond Bayer were some of the authors I translated. Between May 1967 and November 1968, I had another parallel occupation as a literary critic. Meanwhile, in 1966, I had published Possible Poems, a poetry book that marked my return to literature. After that, in 1970, another book of poems, Probably Joy and shortly after, in 1971 and 1973 respectively, under the titles From this World and the Other and The Traveller's Baggage, two collections of newspaper articles which the critics consider essential to the full understanding of my later work. After my divorce in 1970, I initiated a relationship, which would last till 1986, with the Portuguese writer Isabel da Nóbrega.
After leaving the publisher at the end of 1971, I worked for the following two years at the evening newspaper Diário de Lisboa, as manager of a cultural supplement and as an editor.
Published in 1974 with the title The Opinions the DL Had, those texts represent a very precise "reading" of the last time of the dictatorship, which was to be toppled that April. In April 1975, I became deputy director of the morning paper Diário de Nóticias, a post I filled till that November and from which I was sacked in the aftermath of the changes provoked by the politico-military coup of the 25th November which blocked the revolutionary process. Two books mark this era: The Year of 1993, a long poem published in 1975, which some critics consider a herald of the works that two years later would start to appear with Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, a novel, and, under the title of Notes, the political articles I had published in the newspaper of which I had been a director.
Unemployed again and bearing in mind the political situation we were undergoing, 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. At the beginning of 1976, I settled for some weeks in Lavre, a country village in Alentejo Province. It was that period of study, observation and note-taking that led, in 1980, to the novel Risen from the Ground, where the way of narrating which characterises my novels was born. Meanwhile, in 1978 I had published a collection of short stories, Quasi Object; in 1979 the play The Night, and after that, a few months before Risen from the Ground, a new play, What shall I do with this Book? With the exception of another play, entitled The Second Life of Francis of Assisi, published in 1987, the 1980s were entirely dedicated to the Novel: Baltazar and Blimunda, 1982, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984, The Stone Raft, 1986, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, 1989. In 1986, I met the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. We got married in 1988.
In consequence of the Portuguese government censorship of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), vetoing its presentation for the European Literary Prize under the pretext that the book was offensive to Catholics, my wife and I transferred our residence to the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries. At the beginning of that year I published the play In Nomine Dei, which had been written in Lisbon, from which the libretto for the opera Divara would be taken, with music by the Italian composer Azio Corghi and staged for the first time in Münster, Germany in 1993. This was not the first cooperation with Corghi: his also is the music to the opera Blimunda, from my novel Baltazar and Blimunda, staged in Milan, Italy in 1990. In 1993, I started writing a diary, Cadernos de Lanzarote (Lanzarote Diaries), with five volumes so far. In 1995, I published the novel Blindness and in 1997 All the Names. In 1995, I was awarded the Camões Prize and in 1998 the Nobel Prize for Literature.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1998, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1999
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1998
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/saramago-autobio.html
Saramago's body taken to Portugal for funeral
Saramago's body taken to Portugal for funeral
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José Saramago
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Nobel Prize winning author, José Saramago, has died
une 18, 2010
José Saramago
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | This article is about a person who has recently died. Some information, such as that pertaining to the circumstances of the person's death and surrounding events, may change as more facts become known. |
| José Saramago | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | José de Sousa Saramago 16 November 1922(1922-11-16) Azinhaga, Santarém, Portugal |
| Died | 18 June 2010 (aged 87) Tías, Las Palmas, Spain |
| Occupation | Playwright, novelist |
| Nationality | Portuguese |
| Period | 1947–2010 |
| Notable award(s) | Nobel Prize in Literature 1998 |
| Official website | |
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɡu]; (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor.
Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. His books have been translated into 25 languages.[1] He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In the last years of his life, since 1992, he lived in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain.[2]
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Early and middle life
Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in the province of Ribatejo some hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon.[2] His parents were José de Sousa and Maria de Piedade. "Saramago", a wild herbaceous plant known in English as the wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, and was accidentally incorporated into his name upon registration of his birth.[2] In 1924, Saramago's family moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. He spent vacations with his grandparents in Azinhaga. When his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment, Saramago recalled, "He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees. And he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying good-bye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life," Saramago said, "you have no feeling." Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975.[2] After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer. Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947.[2] From 1988 until his death in June 2010 Saramago was married to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.[2]
[edit] Later life and international acclaim
José Saramago didn't achieve widespread recognition and acclaim until he was in his mid-fifties, when his publication of Baltasar and Blimunda brought him to the attention of an international readership.[2] This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.
He became a member of the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained so until the end of his life.[3] Saramago was also an atheist[4] and self-described pessimist.[5] His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.[6] Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize,[2] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Spanish Canaries.[7]
Saramago learned he was to be made a Nobel Laureate in October 1998 when he was about to fly to Germany ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair.[2] This came as a surprise to him and his Portuguese editor, Zeferino Coelho, recalled: "When he won the Nobel, Saramago said to me, 'I was not born for all this glory.' I told him, 'You may not have been made for this glory, but I was!'".[2] He used his Nobel lecture to call his grandfather Jerónimo "the wisest man [he] ever knew".[2] Despite the award, though, he remained a divisive character in Portugal, both criticised and praised.[2]
During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago signed a statement together with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn, condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation".[8] He was a critic of both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund;[2] however, he stood (unsuccessfully) as a candidate for the European Parliament in the 2009 election.[9]
[edit] Literary themes
Saramago's novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails around the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of "white blindness". In his 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award), Fernando Pessoa's heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his novel Death with Interruptions (also translated as Death at Intervals) revolves around a country in which nobody dies over the course of seven months beginning on New Year's Day, and how the country reacts to the spiritual and political implications of the event.
Using such imaginative themes, Saramago addresses the most serious of subject matters with empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community; and also with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures.
[edit] Style
Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He uses periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialog, which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks; when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns instead choosing to refer to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his use of style to enhance the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.
[edit] Death
Saramago died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life living in Lanzarote.[10] The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",[10] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction".[11] Saramago's translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to him, describing his "wonderful imagination" and calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer".[10] Saramago had continued his writing until his death, his most recent publication, Cain, was published in 2009 with an English translation expected in late 2010. Saramago had suffered pneumonia a year before his death. Having been thought to have made a full recovery, he was scheduled to attend the Edinburgh Festival in August 2010.[10] Saramago, described as a "militant atheist",[11] was outspoken in his political views, having delivered lectures as a Nobel laureate in his later life, once saying the treatment of Palestine by Israel was comparable to The Holocaust.[11]
[edit] Bibliography
| Title | Year | English title | Year | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terra do Pecado | 1947 | |||
| Os Poemas Possíveis | 1966 | |||
| Provavelmente Alegria | 1970 | |||
| Deste Mundo e do Outro | 1971 | |||
| A Bagagem do Viajante | 1973 | |||
| As Opiniões que o DL teve | 1974 | |||
| O Ano de 1993 | 1975 | The Year of 1993 | ||
| Os Apontamentos | 1976 | |||
| Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia | 1977 | Manual of Painting and Calligraphy | 1993 | ISBN 1857540433 |
| Objecto Quase | 1978 | |||
| Levantado do Chão | 1980 | |||
| Viagem a Portugal | 1981 | Journey to Portugal | 2000 | ISBN 0151005877 |
| Memorial do Convento | 1982 | Baltasar and Blimunda | 1987 | ISBN 0151105553 |
| O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis | 1986 | The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis | 1991 | ISBN 0151997357 |
| A Jangada de Pedra | 1986 | The Stone Raft | 1994 | ISBN 0151851980 |
| História do Cerco de Lisboa | 1989 | The History of the Siege of Lisbon | 1996 | ISBN 015100238X |
| O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo | 1991 | The Gospel According to Jesus Christ | 1993 | ISBN 0151367000 |
| Ensaio sobre a Cegueira | 1995 | Blindness | 1997 | ISBN 0151002517 |
| Todos os Nomes | 1997 | All the Names | 1999 | ISBN 0151004218 |
| O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida | 1997 | The Tale of the Unknown Island | 1999 | ISBN 0151005958 |
| A Caverna | 2001 | The Cave | 2002 | ISBN 0151004145 |
| O Homem Duplicado | 2003 | The Double | 2004 | ISBN 0151010404 |
| Ensaio sobre a Lucidez | 2004 | Seeing | 2006 | ISBN 0151012385 |
| Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido | 2005 | |||
| As Intermitências da Morte | 2005 | Death with Interruptions | 2008 | ISBN 1846550203 |
| As Pequenas Memórias | 2006 | Memories of my Youth | ||
| A Viagem do Elefante | 2008 | The Trip of the Elephant | ISBN 9789722120173 | |
| Caim | 2009 | Cain | ISBN 9786071103161 |
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "Nobel Writer, A Communist, Defends Work". The New York Times. 12 October 1998. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/12/world/nobel-writer-a-communist-defends-work.html. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Quoted in: Eberstadt, Fernanda (August 26, 2007). "The Unexpected Fantasist". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/magazine/26saramago-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin. Retrieved August 14, 2009.
- ^ http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1998/bio-bibl.html Nobel Prize citation, 1998
- ^ The God Factor
- ^ Langer, Adam. "José Saramago: Prophet of Doom." Book Magazine November/December 2002.
- ^ Austin, Paige. "Shadows on the Wall." The Yale Review of Books Spring 2004.
- ^ "José Saramago: Autobiography." Nobelprize.org. 1998. Nobelprize.org. 25 September 2007.
- ^ "Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine" statement, July 19, 2006
- ^ "Européennes: les people à l'assaut de Strasbourg", Le Matin, June 6, 2009
- ^ a b c d Lea, Richard (18 June 2010). "Nobel laureate José Saramago dies, aged 87". The Guardian (Guardian Media Group). http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/18/jose-saramago-writer-nobel-dies. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
- ^ a b c Eberstadt, Fernanda (18 June 2010). "José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/books/19saramago.html?src=mv. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
[edit] Bibliography
- Baptista Bastos, José Saramago: Aproximação a um retrato, Dom Quixote, 1996
- T.C. Cerdeira da Silva, Entre a história e aficção: Uma saga de portugueses, Dom Quixote, 1989
- Maria da Conceição Madruga, A paixão segundo José Saramago: a paixão do verbo e o verbo da paixão, Campos das Letras, Porto, 1998
- Horácio Costa, José Saramago: O Período Formativo, Ed. Caminho, 1998
- Helena I. Kaufman, Ficção histórica portuguesa da pós-revolução, Madison, 1991
- O. Lopes, Os sinais e os sentidos: Literatura portuguesa do século XX, Lisboa, 1986
- B. Losada, Eine iberische Stimme, Liber, 2, 1, 1990, 3
- Carlos Reis, Diálogos com José Saramago, Ed. Caminho, Lisboa, 1998
- M. Maria Seixo, O essential sobre José Saramago, Imprensa Nacional, 1987
- "Saramago, José (1922–2010)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 Sep. 2007.
[edit] External links
- José Saramago Foundation (Portuguese)
- The Unexpected Fantasist, a portrait of José Saramago, written by Fernanda Eberstadt and published August 26, 2007, in The New York Times Magazine
- Introduction and video of Saramago from "Heroes de los dos bandos" – Spanish Civil War –
- Interviews with Saramago in video
- José Saramago from Pegasos
- Translation of interview with Saramago in El País – 12-Nov-2005
- Saramago's Nobel Lecture
- Societies of Mutual Isolation, an essay on Saramago by Benjamin Kunkel from Dissent
- Jose Saramago's blog
| |||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saramago, José de Sousa |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Portuguese Playwright, Novelist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 16 November 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Azinhaga, Ribatejo, Portugal |
| DATE OF DEATH | 18 June 2010 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Tías, Las Palmas, Spain |
Blindness (novel)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Blindness | |
|---|---|
 1999 Harvest paperback edition cover | |
| Author | José Saramago |
| Original title | Ensaio sobre a cegueira |
| Translator | Giovanni Pontiero |
| Country | Portugal |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | The Harvill Press |
| Publication date | 1995 |
| Published in English | October 1997 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, paperback) |
| Pages | Hardcover 288 pp, paperback 326 pp |
| ISBN | 1-86046-297-9 |
| OCLC Number | 38225068 |
| Dewey Decimal | 869.3/42 21 |
| LC Classification | PQ9281.A66 E6813 1997 |
| Followed by | Seeing |
Blindness (Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. It was originally published in Portuguese and then translated into English. It is one of his most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Plot summary
Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. The novel follows the misfortunes of a handful of characters who are among the first to be stricken and centers around a doctor and his wife, several of the doctor's patients, and assorted others, thrown together by chance. This group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the unexplained good fortune that the doctor's wife has escaped the blindness. The sudden onset and unexplained origin and nature of the blindness cause widespread panic, and the social order rapidly unravels as the government attempts to contain the apparent contagion and keep order via increasingly repressive and inept measures.
The first part of the novel follows the experiences of the central characters in the filthy, overcrowded asylum where they and other blind people have been quarantined. Hygiene, living conditions, and morale degrade horrifically in a very short period, mirroring the society outside.
Anxiety over the availability of food, caused by delivery irregularities, act to undermine solidarity; and lack of organization prevents the internees from fairly distributing food or chores. Soldiers assigned to guard the asylum and look after the well-being of the internees become increasingly antipathetic as one soldier after another becomes infected. The military refuse to allow in basic medicines, so that a simple infection becomes deadly. Fearing a break out, soldiers shoot down a crowd of internees waiting upon food delivery.
Conditions degenerate further, as an armed clique gains control over food deliveries, subjugating their fellow internees and exposing them to rape and deprivation. Faced with starvation, internees do battle and burn down the asylum, only to find that the army has abandoned the asylum, after which the protagonists join the throngs of nearly helpless blind people outside who wander the devastated city and fight one another to survive.
The story then follows the doctor and his wife and their impromptu "family" as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor's wife, who still sees (though she must hide this fact at first). The breakdown of society is near total. Law and order, social services, government, schools, etc., no longer function. Families have been separated and cannot find each other. People squat in abandoned buildings and scrounge for food; violence, disease, and despair threaten to overwhelm human coping. The doctor and his wife and their new "family" eventually make a permanent home and are establishing a new order to their lives when the blindness lifts from the city en masse just as suddenly and inexplicably as it struck.
[edit] Character Analysis
The Doctor's Wife A woman in her late forties, and the wife of an ophthalmologist, referred to as "the doctor". When the plague of blindness first devastates the city and the infected are placed into isolation, the doctor's wife feigns the sickness to care for her husband. She constantly expects to lose her vision at any moment, yet somehow she is the only person immune to the contagion of blindness. This ultimately forces her into becoming responsible for the blind inmates, yet she admits that the pressures of caring for a band of helpless people exhausts her, and she even begins to wish she too were blind. She murders two sadistic inmates in the asylum where the blind are contained and helps the others escape the quarantine. She and her husband reappear in the novel's sequel, Seeing, where she is credited as the "Seeing Woman", and is viewed with mistrust and disdain by the other city dwellers, as no one knows how or why she retained her sight when the rest of the country was struck blind.
The Doctor A friendly ophthalmologist who becomes blind after attempting to treat the first handful of people who are infected by the "White Blindness". He too quickly goes blind and is placed into quarantine with his wife, who can still see but together they hide this fact for fear that she may be forced into becoming a slave for the blind inmates. He resents the dependence he has on his wife after he loses his sight. He is elected leader of his ward and does his best to keep order and peace through diplomatic strategies, but quickly finds his compassion does him little or no good amongst the bands of ruthless detainees in the asylum.
Girl with Dark Glasses A beautiful teenage prostitute with a cold and unfeeling demeanor. She is struck blind after entertaining one of her clients in a hotel and is committed to the derelict asylum. Though by nature she is hard-hearted and icy, she develops love and warmth after caring for an orphaned boy with a squint. By the end of the novel she has reformed her uncaring ways and compliments the doctor's wife as being "beautiful", despite having never seen her, claiming that in her (the girl's) dreams, the doctor's wife is always beautiful.
King of Ward 3 A brutal and cruel tyrant who holds the rest of the blind in the asylum at his mercy by threatening them with a gun. He deprives them of food and supplies in exchange for their valuables, but when those assets are exhausted, he demands the women. The doctor's wife murders him with a pair of scissors which she found in her bag when she can stand for his evils no longer. Upon his death his assistant takes his gun and barricades the clique into their ward. This escalation starts a veritable war, which ends in a woman setting fire to the asylum and burning it to the ground, with the King's thugs and that woman perishing in the blaze.
Man with Black Eye Patch A kindly and mysterious old man who reacts calmly to the blindness that is infesting the city, and keeps the inmates of the asylum updated with news of the outside world with his radio. He is very spiritual, and after the blindness lifts from the country, he states that he hopes they have learned a very valuable lesson about human nature.
[edit] Style
Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers' identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader. The lack of proper character names in Blindness is typical of many of Saramago's novels (e.g. All the Names or The Cave). The characters are instead referred to by descriptive appellations such as "the doctor's wife", "the car thief", or "the first blind man". Given the characters' blindness, some of these names seem sharply ironic ("the boy with the squint" or "the girl with the dark glasses").
The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. Some signs hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction which used to exist in English as the now largely archaic pronoun thou).
[edit] Sequel and film adaptation
Saramago wrote a sequel to Blindness in 2004, titled Seeing (Ensaio sobre a lucidez, literal English translation Essay on lucidity), which has also been translated into English. The new novel takes place in the same unnamed country and features several of the same characters.
An English-language film adaptation of Blindness was directed by Fernando Meirelles. Filming began in July 2007 and stars Mark Ruffalo as the doctor and Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife. The film opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
[edit] Criticism
Following the increased notoriety of the novel upon the release of the 2008 film adaptation, the US National Federation of the Blind (NFB) criticized Saramago's work. In a banquet speech at the organization's annual convention on July 4, 2008, in Dallas, Texas, NFB President Dr. Marc Maurer criticized the novel and its film adaptation as negatively portraying the blind.[2]
A novel entitled "The Sight Sickness" by Christine Faltz Grassman, was published by Iuniverse in March, 2009. Written by a blind woman, it is a polemic "anti-sequel" to Saramago's book (ISBN 9780595531561), and contains Grassman's response to the age-old literal and figurative use of blindness in a negative manner in literature and other media.
[edit] See also
- The Day of the Triffids, a 1951 novel also featuring an epidemic of mass blindness
[edit] Notes
 | Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: José Saramago |
- ^ Chang, Justin (2008-05-14). "Blindness Movie Review". Variety. http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=festivals&jump=review&reviewid=VE1117937131&cs=1. Retrieved 2008-05-14.
- ^ Maurer, Marc (2008-07-04). "The Urgency of Optimism". Braille Monitor. http://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm08/bm0808/bm080807.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-08.
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