2009 José Saramago (b. 1922) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, the first Portuguese writer to do so. A proclaimed communist and atheist (his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, 1991, caused uproar in his native country), Saramago is not merely adversarial, but outspoken. His award of the Nobel was probably more warmly received in Stockholm than in Lisbon.
In September 2008, Saramago found a new way of speaking out when, during Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign, he began writing a blog – the first Nobel laureate so to expose himself to the cyber-public. On 6 July 2009, Saramago was stung by a criticism that he was ‘not a real blogger’. He took the opportunity to state his reason for using this new form of literary address, and his personal faith as a writer:
If he is a person of his time, if he is not chained to the past, a writer must know the problems of the age in which he happens to live. And what are these problems today? That we do not live in an acceptable world; on the contrary, we live in a world that is going from bad to worse and that does not function humanely. But please note – do not confuse my complaints with any kind of moralizing; I am not saying that the purpose of literature is to tell people how they ought to behave. I am talking about something else, about the need for ethical content without the least trace of demagoguery. And – this is fundamental – a literature that never holds itself aloof when a critical point of view is needed.
It may not be ‘real blogging’. But the role of the engaged writer in the modern world has rarely been more nobly expressed.