The Lisbon Story Of Contingent Identity: Part I
According to many critics, Jose Saramago is arguably the most inventive and original novelist writing today. I myself lack the mandatory faith in my own critical abilities to announce with such authority the supreme hierarchy of novelistic greatness, especially in a time that is also blessed with the truly wonderful works of Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis. One also understands that the judgments on the singular greatness of Saramago is made based on a chronological compartmentalization where the generation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Mario Vargas Llosa or Carlos Fuentes precedes the current generation. Without getting lost in the details of the controversy that such an yardstick for aesthetic comparisons might incite, one would also like to point out that as far as chronology of a writer's life is concerned Saramago belongs more to the generation of Marquez and Grass. Like them, he was born in the 1920s. But unlike them, he has been writing his best works in the last twenty five or so years. And going by his last couple of novels, he is only getting better.
Saramago became known outside the Portuguese speaking world with the translation of his 'Baltasar and Blimunda' in 1987 -- originally published in 1982. This extraordinary novel, set in 18'th century Portugal of excessive religiosity and colonial expansion, subverts the academic history by colliding historical characters (Scarlatti) and events (building a convent in Mafra) with his protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda and their indestructible love. He is historically accurate on the surface but at the same time he seems to indicate that in face of stark human drama history as a force is not so much irrelevant but a mis-constructed entity. This skepticism and the ardent desire to reconstruct history or myth with a penetratingly profound insight into human heart are also at the center of some of his other successes like 'The History of the Siege of Lisbon' or the controversial 'The Gospel According to Jesus Christ'. There is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind about the achievements of these works and I have greatly enjoyed reading them -- for Saramago, once one gets used to his idiosyncratic punctuations and setence structures, writes a prose that is as wise as it is addictive -- but the novels I like most are the ones where his powers are concentrated on the eternal quest for identity: who (or what) am I? There are three that I have in mind -- 'Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis', 'All The Names' and what in my humble opinion his most accomplished novel (even considering 'Blindness'), 'The Double'.
After pontificating about the futility of employing superlative degree in comparing artistic achievements, it is now time to succumb to the temptation of self-contradiction: Saramago truly is the most unique prose-stylist of our time. He records human frailty like a stoic but sometimes laughs at it with the rest of the bawdy crowds; his chiseled cynicism cuts through the superficiality of human vanity, egoism and the futility of our mundane preoccupations but he lacks no generosity in praising the occasional burst of authenticity, integrity and the redemptive possibilities of love. He is one of those rare writers who first makes you cherish the pleasures of your solitude, and then using the black magic of his prose forces you to look at yourself from a neutral point where you have arrived with the trappings of identify left behind, and you realize the force of the anguish that you have tried to mask with the indulgence of solitude. Finishing a novel like The Double you find yourself in that indescribable state of mind that one has after a long meditation: you sense more, you see more, you realize more, you are more alert to the subterranean currents of self-deception and violence, but you are no more quite sure of yourself. Your existence now equates to a question that you yourself cannot articulate.
In 'The Double' Saramago uses the technique of literal enactment of human psychology he so perfectly employs in 'Blindness' where a whole population is plagued by the psychosis of agnosia. In 'The Double', the sacred inner drama of identity is played out in the external world. The strongest human attachment is the attachment to the sense of an inviolable and irreducible self that is unique by the sheer fact of its existence. That is, an unique identity that is a priori. I already am and I already am different from the rest. The protagonist of 'The Double', a history teacher named Tertuliano Maximo Alfonso -- Saramago is never short on thesis about the methods and relevance of teaching history -- finds, quite accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally but that is a dilemma Saramago leaves intentionally unresolved to heighten the effects of the startling, almost sinister, last chapter) that he has an exact replica. A stable movie actor of modest success, Antonio Claro, resembles him in every respect, down to those marks of suffering and pleasure that time leaves behind, when they stand in their naked skin. Their voices are identical. Though their professional and personal lives are very much different and they live in two different ends of the city of Lisbon, once they become cognizant of each others' existence their actions mirror each other. Somewhat unconsciously they play out an atavistic war game of social revenges that ends in tragedy, delivered in the guise of another accident. Tertuliano survives, but just only. A new life seems to invite him with open arms and there is the possibility that this time around he will fulfill the human promise of his soul that he till now has just only had a glimpse of, but there also seems to be the possibility that he is going to make the same mistakes once again.
It is very hard to resist the temptation of bringing up the strikingly similar notion of 'I'-ness and its ephemeral quality in Buddhist thought. But I will resist it nonetheless and will suggest that The Double is read within the tradition of Stoicism but not overly so. Saramago is a novelist and comparing him to Epictetus or Marucs Aurelius will serve no purpose. And to be absolutely balanced in our approach, Saramago, the great novelist he is, is neither in favor nor in against of detachment. And moreover, he is not at all oblivious to the possibilities and pleasures of genuine human love and affection. But the omnipresent, omniscient and incorporeal narrator of 'The Double' shows the wisdom of the Stoic thought in the words he says as much in how he says them.
'The Double' can also be read as a not-so-obvious homage to the heteronyms of the finest Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Along with T.S.Eliot and Rilke, Pessoa is my favorite poet. But beyond his physical existence, Pessoa is not really a single poet. He wrote under many names, whom he called his heteronyms, and for all of these heteronyms he created elaborate biographies, endowed them with characters and adventures. In his own mental universe, he lived the lives of those heteronyms. In the external world these poets and writers played out an elaborate drama of writing letters to each other, writing about each other or debating with each other on newspapers. They all, of course, wrote in different styles and some of the heteronyms themselves went through the typical stylistic evolutions in different phases of their careers. Saramago earlier had written a novel -- 'Year Of the Death of Ricard Reis' -- dedicated to one of these heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, who in Saramago's version returns to Lisbon from Brazil and dies exactly an year after Fernando Pessoa, the real poet, dies. Ricardo Reis is, of course, one of Pessoa's heteronyms and along with Alberto Caeiro and Alvaro De Campos is among the most well-known ones. Pessoa also had what he called -- half grudgingly, half lovingly -- a semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, who wrote that magnificent factless autobiography 'The Book Of Disquiet' I am in the process of slowly assimilating.
Tertuliano Maximo, the history teacher from 'The Double', suggests that we should be teaching and learning history from present to past, in the reverse chronological order. An excellent idea, and I would like to continue my humble exposition on the history of contingent identity among the writings of Saramago and Fernando Pessoa(s) in the reverse chronological order. Here ends the part 1.
Saramago became known outside the Portuguese speaking world with the translation of his 'Baltasar and Blimunda' in 1987 -- originally published in 1982. This extraordinary novel, set in 18'th century Portugal of excessive religiosity and colonial expansion, subverts the academic history by colliding historical characters (Scarlatti) and events (building a convent in Mafra) with his protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda and their indestructible love. He is historically accurate on the surface but at the same time he seems to indicate that in face of stark human drama history as a force is not so much irrelevant but a mis-constructed entity. This skepticism and the ardent desire to reconstruct history or myth with a penetratingly profound insight into human heart are also at the center of some of his other successes like 'The History of the Siege of Lisbon' or the controversial 'The Gospel According to Jesus Christ'. There is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind about the achievements of these works and I have greatly enjoyed reading them -- for Saramago, once one gets used to his idiosyncratic punctuations and setence structures, writes a prose that is as wise as it is addictive -- but the novels I like most are the ones where his powers are concentrated on the eternal quest for identity: who (or what) am I? There are three that I have in mind -- 'Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis', 'All The Names' and what in my humble opinion his most accomplished novel (even considering 'Blindness'), 'The Double'.
After pontificating about the futility of employing superlative degree in comparing artistic achievements, it is now time to succumb to the temptation of self-contradiction: Saramago truly is the most unique prose-stylist of our time. He records human frailty like a stoic but sometimes laughs at it with the rest of the bawdy crowds; his chiseled cynicism cuts through the superficiality of human vanity, egoism and the futility of our mundane preoccupations but he lacks no generosity in praising the occasional burst of authenticity, integrity and the redemptive possibilities of love. He is one of those rare writers who first makes you cherish the pleasures of your solitude, and then using the black magic of his prose forces you to look at yourself from a neutral point where you have arrived with the trappings of identify left behind, and you realize the force of the anguish that you have tried to mask with the indulgence of solitude. Finishing a novel like The Double you find yourself in that indescribable state of mind that one has after a long meditation: you sense more, you see more, you realize more, you are more alert to the subterranean currents of self-deception and violence, but you are no more quite sure of yourself. Your existence now equates to a question that you yourself cannot articulate.
In 'The Double' Saramago uses the technique of literal enactment of human psychology he so perfectly employs in 'Blindness' where a whole population is plagued by the psychosis of agnosia. In 'The Double', the sacred inner drama of identity is played out in the external world. The strongest human attachment is the attachment to the sense of an inviolable and irreducible self that is unique by the sheer fact of its existence. That is, an unique identity that is a priori. I already am and I already am different from the rest. The protagonist of 'The Double', a history teacher named Tertuliano Maximo Alfonso -- Saramago is never short on thesis about the methods and relevance of teaching history -- finds, quite accidentally (or maybe not so accidentally but that is a dilemma Saramago leaves intentionally unresolved to heighten the effects of the startling, almost sinister, last chapter) that he has an exact replica. A stable movie actor of modest success, Antonio Claro, resembles him in every respect, down to those marks of suffering and pleasure that time leaves behind, when they stand in their naked skin. Their voices are identical. Though their professional and personal lives are very much different and they live in two different ends of the city of Lisbon, once they become cognizant of each others' existence their actions mirror each other. Somewhat unconsciously they play out an atavistic war game of social revenges that ends in tragedy, delivered in the guise of another accident. Tertuliano survives, but just only. A new life seems to invite him with open arms and there is the possibility that this time around he will fulfill the human promise of his soul that he till now has just only had a glimpse of, but there also seems to be the possibility that he is going to make the same mistakes once again.
It is very hard to resist the temptation of bringing up the strikingly similar notion of 'I'-ness and its ephemeral quality in Buddhist thought. But I will resist it nonetheless and will suggest that The Double is read within the tradition of Stoicism but not overly so. Saramago is a novelist and comparing him to Epictetus or Marucs Aurelius will serve no purpose. And to be absolutely balanced in our approach, Saramago, the great novelist he is, is neither in favor nor in against of detachment. And moreover, he is not at all oblivious to the possibilities and pleasures of genuine human love and affection. But the omnipresent, omniscient and incorporeal narrator of 'The Double' shows the wisdom of the Stoic thought in the words he says as much in how he says them.
'The Double' can also be read as a not-so-obvious homage to the heteronyms of the finest Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Along with T.S.Eliot and Rilke, Pessoa is my favorite poet. But beyond his physical existence, Pessoa is not really a single poet. He wrote under many names, whom he called his heteronyms, and for all of these heteronyms he created elaborate biographies, endowed them with characters and adventures. In his own mental universe, he lived the lives of those heteronyms. In the external world these poets and writers played out an elaborate drama of writing letters to each other, writing about each other or debating with each other on newspapers. They all, of course, wrote in different styles and some of the heteronyms themselves went through the typical stylistic evolutions in different phases of their careers. Saramago earlier had written a novel -- 'Year Of the Death of Ricard Reis' -- dedicated to one of these heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, who in Saramago's version returns to Lisbon from Brazil and dies exactly an year after Fernando Pessoa, the real poet, dies. Ricardo Reis is, of course, one of Pessoa's heteronyms and along with Alberto Caeiro and Alvaro De Campos is among the most well-known ones. Pessoa also had what he called -- half grudgingly, half lovingly -- a semi-heteronym, Bernardo Soares, who wrote that magnificent factless autobiography 'The Book Of Disquiet' I am in the process of slowly assimilating.
Tertuliano Maximo, the history teacher from 'The Double', suggests that we should be teaching and learning history from present to past, in the reverse chronological order. An excellent idea, and I would like to continue my humble exposition on the history of contingent identity among the writings of Saramago and Fernando Pessoa(s) in the reverse chronological order. Here ends the part 1.
posted by Atanu Neogi at 11:24 PM
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