Saramago’s Dire Specter

a review by Morten Høi Jensen

There can be little doubt that the Portuguese writer José Saramago, who died this summer at the age of 87, will be counted among the foremost novelists of our time. Like that of his forebear Borges and many of his postmodernist contemporaries, Saramago’s writing was characterized by the exploration of elaborate conceits: what would my life be like if I discovered my doppelgänger? Would a simple epidemic of blindness rupture the thin veneer of civilization? What if death ceased to apply its final, terminal touch? Ideas titillated with frightening unease, animated by the exasperating stamina of his sentences and the subtlety of his narration. Saramago’s prose was recognizable at a glance. As the critic James Wood once remarked, no one sounds quite like Saramago.

It is a shame, though, that at the time of his death The Notebook (Verso, $23.95) should be the most recent of Saramago’s books to arrive in English. A collection of blog entries written between August 2008 and August 2009, The Notebook is a sampling of reflections on world events, literature, philosophy, history, etc. There are moving tributes to colleagues and friends, reflections on the work of writers like Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka, musings on religion and the possibility of atheism. His thoughts on Portuguese literature and history are of particular interest. But the most striking passages in this book are Saramago’s reflections on the state of the planet, and his troubling political, facile commentary.

In Cultural Amnesia, the critic Clive James suggests that Saramago’s notebooks should come with a health warning. Encountering the hyperbole of Saramago’s indignation for the first time, one sees James’ point: “George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place . . . the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past years.” From such conspiratorial notions, Saramago moves deftly into the application of puerile insults: “Bush, that malignant product of Nature at one of her worst moments.” And though one hardly objects to Saramago’s loathing of Silvio Berlusconi, there doesn’t appear to be much edification in this characterization of the Italian Prime Minister: “this thing, this disease, this virus that threatens moral death to the land of Verdi is a deep sickness that needs to be wrested from the Italian consciousness before its venom ends up running through the veins and destroying the heart of one of the richest of European cultures.”

This unchecked cacophony is typical of what The Notebook has to offer; all the more characteristic is Saramago’s complete, almost willful abandonment of nuance. These traits should not be altogether surprising. Saramago enlisted in the Communist Party in 1969 and remained a lifelong stalwart. He clung recklessly to a political ideology that disappointed its followers at every turn. He appeared frequently in public alongside Fidel Castro until their late falling out in 2003, and rose to any occasion that called for an attack on American democracy — a “misnamed” democracy, guilty of supposedly egregious crimes:

Crimes against humanity are not limited to genocide, ethnocide, death camps, torture, targeted assassins, deliberately provoked famines, massive pollution, the repressing of victim’s identities through humiliation. A crime against humanity is what the financial and economic powers of the United States, with the actual or tacit complicity of their government, have been perpetuating in cold blood against millions of people all over the world, who are threatened with losing whatever money they have left, after many of them — I don’t doubt there are millions — have already lost their only, often inadequate, source of income: work.

Here, as elsewhere, the situation consists of a clear and unambiguous villain, in this case America, perpetrating vicious crimes against the rest of the world with impunity. Fortunately, “honest people” (such as Saramago himself, presumably) are demanding a new world order. “We are trying out an infallible whiteness test on the United States, and this is what we have ascertained: it is not merely dirty, it is absolutely filthy.”

It is probably unfair to dismiss Saramago as a serious political thinker on the basis of his ideological incantations. His fiction, after all, suggests a profound understanding of human behavior and the fragility of civilization — and there are moments in The Notebook when this shines through. Yet, how does one reconcile this with the man who never ceased to accuse America and Israel of crimes against humanity, while remaining wedded to an ideology responsible for the murder of millions? Saramago constantly warned us of the moral crisis humanity faces — but what of the moral crisis of his own political affinities? “Marx was never so right as he is today,” Saramago claims — but he doesn’t attempt to qualify his statement or its implications. “There is no reason to think,” Clive James writes, “that Saramago has ever especially admired the coercion exercised by all Communist regimes, without exceptions, against the common people they claim to champion. He just seems never to have heard of it.”

What may be most troubling about The Notebook, however, is not Saramago’s stubborn demagoguery but his evident hatred (there really is no other word for it) for the state of Israel. About President Obama’s promise to maintain a special relationship with Israel, Saramago intones, “if Barack Obama isn’t disgusted by the idea of taking tea with executioners and war criminals, bon appetite to him, but then he cannot count on the approval of honest people.” (Ah, the honest people!) For Saramago the case is clear: there are good guys (Palestinians) and bad guys (Israelis). The conflict is an unambiguous case of Israeli aggression and murder. That there exist people and governments in the region that desire the annihilation of Israel is not a point Saramago is willing to concede. Quite the contrary. Hamas, for instance, is of no concern. Their rockets “have achieved little more than damaging a few houses and knocking down a few walls.” No mention is ever made of the group’s declared anti-Semitism or its repeated crimes against Israelis and Palestinians both. The view from Lanzarote was one in which an unfettered Israeli state launches continuous, malicious attacks on the embattled Palestinian people.

More worrisome about this particular narrative is the extent to which Saramago pursues its perverse logic. He quotes the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz in accusing the Israeli army of having “a Judeo-Nazi mentality” and of “faithfully following the genocidal doctrine of the people who tortured, gassed and burned their ancestors.” Saramago qualifies this with the alarming offhand remark: “It is even fair to say that in some respects the disciples have surpassed their masters.” Here, the thin layers of ice that Saramago so precariously treads begin to crack. That the Israeli army, cast as the “disciples” of the Third Reich (disturbingly, Saramago promotes the Jewish state from the status of slaves to disciples; the Third Reich, however, remains the master), should in any way have surpassed the inhumanly efficient Nazi killing machine is less an argument than an expression of lurid prejudice.

A few pages on, Saramago explains that, far from denying the Holocaust or its magnitude, he wishes only to “extend the concept to the outrage, humiliation, and violation of every kind to which the Palestinian people have been subjected.” This may ring of noble humanism, but Saramago never makes the case in full. It is not an even-handed and empathetic approach to the conflict: rather, it seems to be a case of noble rhetoric disguising racism. It is also characteristic of Saramago’s aversion to the consequences of his own ideas. For all the complexities of his fiction, his political thinking favors simplicity over nuance, totality over individuality. In this regard his Marxism is a refuge, a leap towards a total worldview that promises an ideal (one is tempted to say final) solution to the world’s ills. Yet, Saramago somehow imagines his Marxism as being divorced from dogma and the risk of totalitarianism. Early on in The Notebook, he makes an impassioned plea for a “Marxist re-reading of Marx:”

What is bad is the transformation into dogma of a secular system or theory that never aspired to be a dogma at all. Marx, for example, was not dogmatic, but straightaway there was no shortage of pseudo-Marxists to convert Das Kapital into a new Bible, exchanging active thought for sterile commentary or perverse interpretation. And you saw what happened. One day, if we are able to break free of ancient iron molds, to slough off an old skin that doesn’t allow us to grow, we will meet Marx again.

Saramago believes Marxism proper has yet to be realized; the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were merely the result of, presumably, misinterpretations. But at what point does this unwavering belief in unrealized potential of Marxism degenerate into empty gestures that conceal a dangerous illusion?

  Saramago is a self-professed atheist, yet his politics are distressingly religious. Note, for instance, the profoundly religious overtones of the idea that we will someday be able to “meet Marx again.” Substitute Jesus for Marx and we are in familiar landscape. Throughout The Notebook, we are likewise treated to outraged condemnations of the time in which we live, a time characterized by dirt, filth, and lies: “we live in a world that is going from bad to worse and that does not function humanely”; “we are reaching the end of a civilization and I don’t welcome its final trumpet.” Saramago’s Marxism appears to be a fundamentally religious ideal, promising moral superiority over the apocalyptic immorality of our time. As with other great writers who disappointed us in their political affiliations (Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Jean-Paul Sartre), Saramago leaves us famished, hungry for the negative capabilities of fiction. The full damage of that malnourishment is left for the individual reader to decide.