Portolani for Our Times
AN IGNOBLE NOBEL
The Strange Story of a Literary Humanist
Portolani New
Patrícia Lança's Web Site
|
B O O K S
Links to
other articles
in this section
NEXT
An Ignoble Nobel
or the strange story of a literary humanist
Patricia Lança
Some weeks after the announcement of this year’s Nobel prize-
winner for literature a normally very well-informed friend rang me
from London to ask me about José Saramago. My friend is a
frequent visitor to Portugal, interested in its people and politics,
and she had been intrigued to see British book-shops full of
translations of the latest Nobel prize-winner’s works. Was he worth
reading? she wanted to know. Now, I am hardly qualified to answer
this particular question. Although I am a voracious reader I have,
like most of my Portuguese friends, been quite unable to get beyond
the first twenty pages of any book by this particular Nobel laureate.
I am perfectly willing to admit that our reactions may be due to
prejudice—if prejudice means pre-judgement.
Perhaps it is true that literary quality is unconnected with a writer’s
private life or political opinions. However, the intellectual Left
usually holds the opposite opinion, at any rate when it comes to
political views, and has all too often consigned to Limbo many a fine
writer while raising to fame mediocre ones, because of this
particular approach to literature. I am inclined to absolve myself of
prejudice because I have read and enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez
despite disliking his politics. Because of his penchant for the
supernatural, Saramago is often compared with Garcia Marquez and
Latin American magical realism. But for me, at least, the latter
writes well and Saramago does not: he leaves me and many others
with the impression that his contempt for conventional punctuation
and verb tenses owes itself rather to incompetence than deliberate
experimentalism. And these latter faults are not always apparent in
translation.
These, of course, are simply personal opinions, so I will say no more
about Saramago, the writer. What I believe is worth saying is
something about Saramago, the political thinker, because he
provides impressive proof not only that communism still lives (in
the person of the writer), but also that Lenin’s useful idiots are also
still around (in the persons of his admirers). His case is indeed a
supreme example of what Ferdinand Mount called the ‘asymmetry of
indulgence.’ After all, one can scarcely imagine the elders of
Stockholm attributing the Nobel Prize for literature to a writer,
whatever his artistic merits, who notoriously denied the holocaust
or was guilty of pro-Nazi militancy. And yet, if we replace the words
‘holocaust’ and ‘Nazi’ by ‘gulag’ and ‘Stalinist’, we will find that
Saramago is far guiltier than the shame-faced Heidegger, who at
least had the grace to give up his rather pallid militancy and, once
Nazism was discredited, to feel uncomfortable about his past. But
Heidegger was an intelligent and cultivated man. Whether
Saramago is either of these is, on the evidence, open to doubt—and
perhaps the only excuse for his abject politics.
It would scarcely be worth dissecting his past, and present, were it
not that, even before the Nobel award, Saramago had become
something of an icon on the literary Left world-wide with his works
translated into some thirty languages and over 600,000 copies
sold. Since the prize, this figure must have been far exceeded. So
that with the roughly one million dollars in prize money and soaring
royalties, Saramago is now rich indeed. In his own country he
remained top of the best-seller list for weeks on end and his were
the most-bought books to be given as presents during the 1998
Christmas season. Schools, libraries, streets and even a bridge
have been named after him. Local councils and other institutions in
his own country invite the writer to address sessions of ‘literary
homage’, while abroad he enjoys similar VIP treatment. On these
occasions and in his numerous television and Press interviews
Saramago has little to say about literature: instead he is, in his own
peculiar way, remarkably frank about his political views. Not for him
the contortions of a Heidegger. He is, at least, fairly loyal to his past
and continues uncompromising in the present. Whether his life-
style has been altered, ‘bourgeoisified’, by the wealth of recent
years we do not know, for this summit of Portuguese letters has
been a voluntary exile from his homeland for a number of years and
lives some distance away in Lanzarote in the Canary Isles.
This does not, however, keep him from taking a keen interest in
national politics: he is now on the Portuguese Communist Party list
for election to the European Parliament. Way down on that list,
certainly, in an ineligible tenth position, for the communists are
unlikely to obtain more than three seats at the very most. But,
explains Saramago, it is not because he wants to be a Euro-deputy
that he has accepted nomination. He knows he won’t be elected and
would not want to be. ‘I accepted,’ he declared, ‘as a matter of
militancy.’ He will campaign for the Party which wanted his name on
their lists to give them much-needed prestige (and perhaps a few
votes), and the artist agreed. We can have no doubt that much as
communists denigrated the value of Nobel awards when they went
to such as Sakharov or Solzhenitzyn, communist euro-campaigning
will make a lot of the Nobel this time round.
So just who is José Saramago? Is he just another ‘useful idiot’? An
anguished upper-middle-class intellectual with a conscience whose
guilt is as deep as his ignorance of the party machine? Or is he
perhaps like one of those disgraced unpolluted true believers whose
first thought after release from years of the Gulag was to hasten to
Party headquarters to renew their cards? Saramago is none of
these.
He is no fellow-travelling ‘useful idiot’, for he has been a self-
confessed card-carrying party militant since 1969, and it wasn’t
pleasant to be a communist under the dictatorship, even though its
rigour was waning by that year. He is no upper-middle-class
intellectual: as he told his Swedish audience at the prize-giving
ceremony, he was born and reared in rural poverty, has little formal
education and his early employment was as a welder in a motor
workshop. Nor is he ignorant of the workings of the Party machine
as we shall presently see. And. as we shall also see, he is not one of
those unpolluted militants, subjected to disgrace and subsequent
rehabilitation, because of some act of human decency. On the
contrary, his standing in the party can be gauged by the words of
its leader Carlos Carvalhas. ‘As a member of our party,’ he said,
‘Saramago makes a great contribution to our ideals and to the
struggle for social change.’
José Saramago, who was born in 1922, first attained national
notoriety in the turbulent years following the 1974 military coup
which overthrew the Portuguese right-wing dictatorship. Prior to
that he had one small novel to his credit, which helped him out of
the working class and into jobs on literary journals. But he did not
produce another book for many years. In 1974 with the
Communist Party and its armed forces allies prominent in the
government, and the Press taken over, Saramago was named Editor
of the Lisbon Diário de Notícias, the country’s leading national daily
newspaper. There he proceeded to do what communists in most of
the country’s institutions were busy at: summarily purging them of
‘reactionaries’. Saramago arbitrarily dismissed many of the paper’s
staff, journalists of long-standing whose only crime was that of not
aligning themselves with the country’s new masters. These people,
many with families to support, were consigned to unemployment,
for nowhere else in the Press was there room at that time for the
politically incorrect. The DN became one of the CP’s chief sounding
boards, a Portuguese Pravda, supporting and publicizing the Party
line at home and abroad. Not as narrow as Pravda, of course, for
in that confused year-and-a-half of the Portuguese revolution some
space was given to the antics of the less extreme of the ‘loonie Left’
—something a Soviet paper would not have tolerated. Nevertheless
Saramago’s DN enthusiastically promoted the land occupations
which helped to destroy Portuguese agriculture, the wholesale
nationalization of the economy which brought it to ruins and the
disastrous kind of decolonization whose fruits are so apparent in
present-day Angola.
Saramago’s career at the DN was a short one—it lasted nineteen
months—as short as that of the communists in government, for they
suffered an ambiguous defeat when more moderate Leftists gained
power in November 1975. After that he dedicated himself to his
budding career as a novelist. He did not, however, abandon his
militancy and for a decade and a half thereafter was to be seen
regularly on the campus of Lisbon’s classical university, especially on
a Saturday morning, plying the Party Press to unwary students.
What he was doing less publicly among the Party’s intellectuals only
they know. Wave after wave of disenchanted dissidents left the
Party during those years, but Saramago’s name was never among
them. His name, however, was always present among the
signatories of those regular manifestos, petitions and open letters
beloved of semi-skilled intellectuals. His following solidified and
grew as his literary output increased. As the years went by and
memories began to fade most people outside intellectual and
university circles had forgotten Saramago’s role in the 1974-75
purges.
His name really became known outside literary circles with the
publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a book
condemned by the Catholic Church as blasphemous because of its
portrayal of Jesus as the innocent victim of a nasty God whose real
purpose was to found a persecutory Church guilty of the
inhumanities of the Inquisition. The book was greeted with glee by
Portugal’s powerful anti-clerical lobby and the Socialist Party then in
opposition. It met with hostility from conservatives (centrist Cavaco
Silva was Prime Minister) and an under-secretary of State for
culture refused to allow Saramago’s name to go forward for a 1992
European literary prize. A conservative mayor turned Saramago
down for a local honour. Prelates and priests denounced the book
from the pulpit. Deserved or not, this hostility proved a gift for
Saramago and made him a hero of the Left. Democratic socialists,
always eager to attack the Church and recall its not always tacit
support for the dictatorship, promptly forgot the author’s
communist affiliations: Saramago became a martyr for anti-clericals,
both inside Portugal and abroad. His name was now made and
nobody on either side of the barricades thought of discussing
literary merit. From that moment onwards he began to be
mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel. It was rumoured that his
communism was a thing of the past. So much so that in the
immediate aftermath of the Nobel announcement the first comments
in the New York Times referred to Saramago as ‘then (in 1975) a
committed communist’, but now ‘an outspoken nonconformist who
has a soft spot for the common man’; and someone who ‘reflects
views that are always inspired by his deep concern for his fellow
man.’
In interviews, Saramago frequently and simplistically exhibits this
concern. Describing his novel Blindness, the tale of how an
inexplicable blindness sweeps through society, he said ‘this isn´t a
real blindness, it’s a blindness of rationality. We’re rational beings
but we don’t behave rationally. If we did there’d be no starvation
in the world.’ All this is, of course, very consoling for the orthodox
Left and youthful idealists. And, if he had been shrewder, Saramago
might have stopped just there.
But the Nobel prize went to his head. To the dismay of many of his
admirers Saramago’s mask suddenly dropped. It happened that not
long after the Nobel prize was announced there took place in the
north Portuguese city of Oporto a meeting of Ibero-American heads
of State, including that well-known defender of the common man,
Fidel Castro. The Nobel laureate could not resist the opportunity of
meeting the Cuban caudillo. A near-hysterical street demonstration
of some ten thousand was organized by the communists and
addressed by Castro from a balcony. Saramago stood beside Fidel,
each with arms lovingly around the other’s shoulders. Castro
repeatedly referred to his new friend as ‘a comrade whose views
are identical with my own.’ Saramago himself was prolix in his
words of praise for the Cuban tyrant. These were not well received
in the Press and because the scene was shown on TV, everybody
heard them. Apart from the communists, whose share of the
electorate is now well below ten percent, and a rump of discredited
socialists, the Portuguese do not have a good opinion of Fidel.
Indeed Cubamania has largely died and it is rare to see a Che
Guevara T-shirt these days. But Saramago remains impenitent when
the question of his support for Fidel now repeatedly comes up in
interviews as well as inconvenient questions about communism.
In his last interview on television in February, Saramago presented
a very different image from the triumphant humanitarian laureate of
a few weeks earlier. Questioned about political prisoners in Cuba,
which he had just visited, he declared there were none. ‘Those in
prison are counter-revolutionaries,’ he declared without a blush.
Then he counter-attacked. ‘Why are you always picking on the
errors of communism as crimes,’ he declared, ‘why do you never
mention the far worse crimes of capitalism.’ All this has been too
much, even for some of Saramago’s admirers and Press comments
have become increasingly hostile. However, now that he is a Euro-
candidate he does have the consolation of knowing one
constituency to be secure: that of his permanent patron, the
Communist Party.
Has any of this much importance? After all, Portugal is a small
country nobody knows much about. Nor does anybody know much
about its communist party although it is probably the strongest old-
time unrepentant Stalinist party in Europe. It has been unable to
control the Press for years and nowadays its own publications are
meagre and it has no theoretical journal worth mentioning. But
Saramago continues to be an icon. The first official act of the new
Portuguese emissary to Indonesia was to visit the Timorese
resistance leader Xanana Gusmão, now released from jail and living
in a private residence under surveillance. She proudly displayed to
the TV cameras the two books she had brought as a present: one of
them was a book by Saramago.
Soon, it is said, he will be compulsory reading on the secondary
school curriculum in Portugal. Despite hostile comment from more
intelligent columnists, he is now consecrated by all of officialdom as
the doyen of Portuguese letters, invited to State functions and a
visitor at the presidential palace. Even centrist politicians pay him
tribute, considering their attitude to his book on Jesus an
unfortunate mistake. It has now become part of ‘political
correctness’ to venerate Saramago and express pride in what he has
done for Portugal and the Portuguese language. It appears that he
is particularly beloved in Brazil and words of praise have been
coming from former Portuguese Africa.
To judge by Press reports of his reception outside the Luso world,
things are probably even worse there, where scarcely anybody
knows who the Nobel prize-winner really is. So the Saramago
phenomenon is not to be dismissed lightly. There are a number of
lessons it has to offer. First, that the literary judgement of elderly
Swedes is as little to be trusted nowadays as when their
grandfathers flunked Tolstoy in 1901. Second, that communism, a
decade after its fall, is now quite respectable and not to be held
against its adepts. This means that at least in one way things are
worse than they were before the fall, when the daily publicized
testimony of dissidents had made it decidedly unrespectable.
Third, that the international news media, so well-informed when it
comes to things lubricious, can be remarkably ill-informed on
important matters. Fourth, that there are still a huge number of
‘useful idiots’ around. Indeed there are probably more of them
today in consequence of 1968 and its heirs helping to destroy
educational standards. Finally, that strange things happening in ‘far-
away, unknown countries’ should not be dismissed lightly. The
Luso world of Portugal, Angola and Brazil occupies a sizeable
mileage of the Atlantic coastline and is not to be ignored when it
comes to strategic considerations. Which, of course, is why Cuban
and Russian military advisers are once again appearing in war-torn
Angola. But that is another story which has even less to do with
literature than has Saramago.
* Published in The Salisbury Review, Summer, 1999
So just who is José Saramago? Is he just
another ‘useful idiot’? An anguished upper-
middle-class intellectual with a conscience
whose guilt is as deep as his ignorance of
the party machine? Or is he perhaps like
one of those disgraced unpolluted true
believers whose first thought after release
from years of the Gulag was to hasten to
Party headquarters to renew their cards?
Saramago is none of these.
A Gender-
neutral
Society?
Evolution,
Hayek and
Scientific
Progress
David Stove
Against
Darwin and
Popper
Ayaan, the
great fighter