1 of 2
The second half of José Saramago's latest novel—but do you know who José Saramago is? The question is not facetious. Certainly, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, but Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson won it, too, in 1903, and Frans Eemil Sillanpää in 1939, and Dario Fo in 1997, and who's ever actually read a word of any of them?
|
|
The Nobel Prize in Literature is no guarantee of perpetual fame, or even somewhat extended fame, among ordinary readers, and to the extent that Saramago exists at all in the popular imagination these days, ten years after his Nobel Prize, it's mostly as a vaguely familiar name appearing as one of the signatures on some manifesto or another, usually denouncing the existence of Israel, the imperialism of the United States, or the prudery of the Catholic Church, and sometimes all three, on the unlikely occasions when that's possible, and did I mention his prose is notable for its eccentrically punctuated sentences that run on and on for whole paragraphs and often whole pages?
Anyway, the second half of Saramago's latest novel—and yet, novel isn't exactly the word. Death with Interruptions is really more of a fable, or, at least, a fabulism, since the word fable brings to mind Aesop and La Fontaine and something like "The Hare and the Tortoise." The modern writers of fabulisms are willing to employ the conventions of the old fables: talking animals and ghosts and easy metamorphoses, for example, together with personified abstractions—death, for instance, who appears as a character, a woman who writes stern letters in purple ink, midway through Saramago's Death with Interruptions. But modern fabulists also typically reject the concluding morals that define the genre of fables, preferring to end their stories instead with ambiguity and guesswork. Not that these writers aren't highly moralistic, in their way; they tend, with rather too much ease and self-congratulation, to aim their barbs at all the usual targets—that whole Israeli-American-Catholic thing, to take an example not entirely at random—and someday I'm actually going to finish the essay I have half-written somewhere in my computer on "The High Moral Dudgeon of Pretending to Be an Amoralist."
Still, novel or fable or fabulism, call it what you will: The truth is that the second half of José Saramago's latest book—but perhaps we haven't quite said enough about fabulism, which really began in English literature when the Edwardians started writing what is perhaps best described as very odd children's fiction for adults.
Think of G.K. Chesterton's inexplicable The Man Who Was Thursday in 1908, for example, or Ronald Firbank's campy Valmouth in 1918. From there, the peculiar genre passed through the sternly logical illogicality of the Argentinean non-Nobel Prize-winner Jorge Luis Borges, a besotted admirer of Chesterton, and from Borges it went on to become something like the definition of Latin American literature—remember "magic realism"?—through the works of such writers as the Guatemalan Miguel &Aecute;ngel Asturias and the Columbian Gabriel García Márquez (also Nobel laureates).
A hop and a skip back home across the ocean, and you get the pure fabulism of José Saramago. In his 1995 novel Blindness, for example (the basis for the current film directed by Fernando Meirelles), an entire country is stricken blind, with unhappy results. In his 1986 The Stone Raft, Portugal and Spain break lose from Europe and sail aimlessly around the Atlantic. And in his 1984 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, one of the pseudonyms of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa finds itself alive for a year after its creator dies.
RSS Feed
