An odd character, this Saramago. He’s eighty-seven and (he says) he has a few infirmities. He’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a distinction that would allow him to stop producing anything at all, because he’s entering the pantheon anyway (the very stingy Harold Bloom called him “the most gifted writer alive in the world today” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre”). And here he is keeping a blog in which he takes a pop at more or less everyone, attracting broadsides and brickbats from many a quarter—not, in most cases, because he says things that shouldn’t be said, but because he doesn’t mince his words. And perhaps he actually infuriates readers on purpose.
Are we talking about the same person? This man who is so careful with punctuation that he makes it disappear altogether, who, when dishing out moral and social criticism in his fiction, never tackles a problem head-on, but poetically sidesteps it in the styles of the fantastical and the allegorical, so that his reader (suspecting that de te fabula narratur) has to invest something of himself in the fable. Is this the same Saramago who—as in the novel Blindness—sends the reader off in a milky mist in which not even proper names, with which he is relatively frugal, provide clearly recognizable signposts, who in Seeing makes a political statement through the casting of enigmatic blank ballots?
And this fantastical and metaphorical writer nonchalantly comes along and pronounces on George W. Bush as a man who “with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communications skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temptation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle,” a man who might be “a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries inside it … a compulsive liar … a liar emeritus … the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.” And this delicate weaver of parables is similarly candid when describing the proprietor of a publishing house that publishes him. And this manifest atheist, for whom God is “the silence of the universe and man the cry that gives meaning to that silence,” puts God on stage just to ask him what he thinks of Ratzinger. And, as a militant Communist (tenaciously, still), he starts shouting at an interviewer that “the left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in” and, when his outburst is published, complains that he never had a response from the left. (What was he expecting? An expulsion or a denunciation at the very least, I suppose.) And he risks being accused of anti-Semitism when criticizing Israeli government politics, simply forgetting, in his heartfelt involvement in the misfortunes of Palestine, to consider—as balanced analysis requires—that some people deny Israel’s right to exist. But no one reflects that when Saramago speaks of Israel he is thinking of Yahweh, “a ferocious and bitter God,” and in this sense he is no more anti-Semitic than he is anti-Aryan or certainly anti-Christian, given that in the case of every religion he is trying to settle his own scores with God—who plainly, call him what you might, gets on Saramago’s nerves. And having God get on your nerves is clearly a reason for furious rage against everyone who uses the Almighty as a shield.
If he always took the pros and cons into account, Saramago would also know that there are ways and ways, even in invective. He quotes (from memory) Borges, who was quoting (perhaps from memory) Dr. Johnson quoting a man who insulted his adversary thus: “Sir, your wife, under the pretext of keeping a brothel, is selling smuggled fabrics.” And in fact Saramago pays no compliments, or rather he speaks his mind, in his work as a daily commentator on the reality that surrounds him. He is taking revenge for all the sinister vagueness of his fables.
Saramago’s militant atheism has been mentioned. In fact his polemic is not against God: once it is admitted that “his eternity is only that of eternal non-being,” Saramago can content himself with that. His rage is directed at religions (and that’s why they attack him from various sides—everyone is allowed to deny God, but polemicizing against religions calls social structures into question).
Once, stimulated, in fact, by one of Saramago’s anti-religious interventions, I reflected on Marx’s famous definition of religion as the opium of the people. Is it true that all religions always have this virtus dormitiva? Several times Saramago has lashed out at religions as hotbeds of conflict: “No religion, without exception, will ever serve to bring men together and reconcile them. They have been and will continue to be a cause of unspeakable sufferings, of carnage, or monstrous physical and spiritual acts of violence that constitute one of the darkest chapters in human history” (La Repubblica, September 20, 2001). Saramago concluded elsewhere that “if we were all atheists we would live in a more peaceful society.” I’m not sure that he was right, and Pope Ratzinger seems to have been responding to him indirectly in his encyclical Spe salvi, where he says that the atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while it presented itself as a protest against the injustices of the world and of universal history, was also responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.
Perhaps Ratzinger was thinking about such godless men as Lenin and Stalin, but he was forgetting that the Nazi banners bore the words Gott mit uns [God is with us], that phalanxes of military chaplains blessed the fascist pennants, that the butcher Francisco Franco was inspired by extremely religious principles and supported by the Warriors of Christ the King (as for the crimes of his adversaries, they were always in reaction to Franco), that the Vendeans were extremely religious in their treatment of the Republicans who had also invented a Goddess of Reason, that Catholics and Protestants have cheerfully massacred one another for years and years, that both the crusaders and their enemies were driven by religious motivations, that to defend paganism the Romans fed Christians to the lions, that many immolations have taken place for religious reasons, that many suicide bombers—among them the attackers of the Twin Towers—have been extremely religious, as are Bin Laden and the Taliban, who bombed the Buddhas, that India and Pakistan are opposed to one another for religious reasons, and that in the end it was with a cry of God bless America that Bush invaded Iraq. Which made me think that perhaps (if religion sometimes is or has been the opium of the people) it has more often been its cocaine. I also think that is Saramago’s opinion, and I give him that definition—and the responsibility that comes with it.
Saramago the blogger is a furious man. But is there really such a gap between this practice of daily indignation about the ephemeral and the activity of writing “little moral works” that are valid for both past and future times? I am writing this preface because I feel I have an experience in common with our friend Saramago, and that is of writing books on the one hand, and on the other of writing moral critiques in a weekly magazine. Since the second type of writing is clearer and more popular than the former, lots of people have asked me if I haven’t decanted into the little articles wider reflections from the bigger books. But no, I reply, experience teaches me (and I think it teaches anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation) that it is the impulse of irritation, the satirical sting, the ruthless criticism written on the spur of the moment that will go on to supply material for an essayistic reflection or a more extended narrative. It is everyday writing that inspires the most committed works, not the other way round.
And there it is. I would say that in these short writings Saramago continues to experience the world as it wretchedly is, before going on to see it again from the more serene perspective of poetic morality (and sometimes to see it as worse than it is—even if going further seems impossible).
But then, is this master of the philippic and the Catiline Oration really always so furious? It seems to me that apart from the people he hates he also has some that he loves, and so we have affectionate pieces dedicated to Fernando Pessoa (Saramago isn’t Portuguese for nothing), or to Jorge Amado, to Carlos Fuentes, to Federico Mayor Zaragoza, to Chico Buarque de Holanda, which show us how little this writer envies his colleagues, and how he is able to weave polite and tender miniatures around them.
Not to mention (and here we return to the great themes of his narrative) those moments when the analysis of everyday life throws up its great metaphysical problems, about reality and appearance, about the nature of hope, about what things are like when we aren’t looking at them.
Then Saramago the philosopher-narrator returns, no longer furious but meditative, and uncertain. But we don’t dislike him even when he loses his temper. He’s congenial company.
1 This is the preface to the Italian edition of The Notebook (Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), translated by Shaun Whiteside and reprinted with permission from Umberto Eco.