Abstract
The novels that gave fame to Saramago in the 1980s are often deemed “historical novels” and read and interpreted by critics as “postmodernist” metafiction. This chapter argues instead that Saramago’s trajectory inserts itself within a certain tradition of an emancipative (re)reading of history and shares some fundamental traits—the view of history as catastrophe, the anti-utopianism, the vindication of the history of the vanquished, the simultaneist perspective, the feeling of living on the verge of an epochal change—with a vision of history that spans from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben and is known as “messianic.” Against this background, the essay reads the clash of different historical perspectives and visions in Saramago’s work, with a particular attention to the play In Nomine Dei.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
He said, for example, in a 1994 interview that “[w]hen they ask me if I write historical novels, I answer no …. My intention is to seek out what was forgotten in History” (qtd. in Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 273). And in a 1986 interview insisted: “I like history books very much. What always annoyed me is the historical novel” (qtd. in ibid., p. 76).
- 2.
This postmodernist interpretation is best represented by the very informative essay by Adriana Martins (2001).
- 3.
Postmodernism cannot of course be considered as a granitic and compact movement, with one and one only consistent poetic and political agenda; however, for the purpose of this essay, the coherence and consistency of its various streams suffice to justify this simplification—especially because it is as a simplified analytical tool that it has been used in interpreting Saramago’s fiction.
- 4.
- 5.
In this brief chapter, I will not be able to propose a deep and articulate presentation of Benjamin’s and Agamben’s philosophy of history but will be compelled to reduce it to a few salient though vague and ultimately insufficient traits. I am convinced, however, that even such a sketchy and incomplete outline will provide a sense of the relevance of this philosophy in relation to—or in a constellation with—Saramago’s oeuvre and thought.
- 6.
Rhian Atkin (2014, p. 66) aptly compares Raimundo Silva to Benjamin’s ragpicker, a scavenger of the city’s historical literary past and therefore a figure for the materialist historian (cf., e.g., Benjamin 1999, pp. 349–50, 368). To my knowledge, Atkin is one of the few scholars who use Benjamin’s philosophy to read Saramago’s oeuvre.
- 7.
In his diaries Saramago wrote on February 10, 1995: “Now, since History is the territory of doubt par excellence, and mendacity the field of the most risky battles of the human being with him- or herself, what I proposed in The History of the Siege of Lisbon , for example, was a direct confrontation between the individual and History, a clash in which an ordinary person, forced by the circumstances to question both the untruth and the alternatives of History, faces his own lies, those he addresses to others as well as those he organises with himself. When looking for an alternative—in this case, a playful one—for a certain lesson of History, he is confronted by the necessity—no longer just playful, but essential—to identify in himself the possible alternative to what-has-been, that is, to become other by remaining the same” (CL 2:45).
- 8.
Almost 20 years later, he consistently repeated: “When I used the expression ‘correcting history’ I knew that correcting is entirely impossible, but what is possible is to introduce little explosive charges which with their effect can change the order of the facts of an epoch and modify their meaning. What if this or that hadn’t been so, what if this or that had been different? what could have happened? This doesn’t mean to simply and gratuitously invent a situation. It means, in contemplating what has been, to see in it a different path, because there are plenty of forces that appear together to determine a certain outcome, but if the relation between these forces had been different, it was possible to also have a different outcome” (Céu e Silva 2009, p. 368).
- 9.
It is mostly on this point—the emphasis on interruptions—that rests the Marxist unorthodoxy of Benjamin and Saramago: as Benjamin famously wrote, in fact, “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (2003, p. 402).
- 10.
In History as the Story of Liberty (1938), for instance, Croce wrote: “The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all history the character of ‘contemporary history’ because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate” (1941, p. 19). In a 1994 interview, Saramago claimed that “if I had to choose a motto to mark the orientation of my life, it would be this phrase by Croce ” (qtd. in Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 273).
- 11.
Benjamin’s dialectical image is a very complex notion, which cannot possibly be explored here in depth. The following is, however, its most cited definition: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language” (Benjamin 1999, p. 462).
- 12.
In another fragment Benjamin writes: “For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live in. And so, for him, there can be no appearance of repetition in history, since precisely those moments in the course of history which matter most to him, by virtue of their index as ‘fore-history,’ become moments of the present day and change their specific character according to the catastrophic or triumphant nature of that day” (Benjamin 1999, p. 474).
- 13.
When Saramago said that “I am an atheist produced by Christianity” (qtd. in Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 128), it is also in this sense that we can interpret it.
- 14.
It is fragment 80 of the Athenäums-Fragmente (1798).
- 15.
Communism, he argued, is not utopia, it is a possibility (qtd. in Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 388).
- 16.
Saramago’s anti-utopianism is certainly in tone wit Marx and Engels’ own “scientific socialism,” opposed to the delusional and ultimately defeatist reveries of Saint-Simon , Fourier and Owen’s “utopian socialism.” Just like Marx and Engels , Benjamin too accused the Social Democracy of his time of a defeatist “faith” is progress as such (2003, pp. 394–95), and Saramago accused the political left of his time of hiding its impotence behind utopian promises.
- 17.
In a 2008 interview, he said about the US presidential elections and the great expectations raised by Barack Obama: “there is something we have to defend ourselves against, and this is messianism” (qtd. in Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 500).
- 18.
“The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced” (Agamben 2012, pp. 4–5).
- 19.
- 20.
Historically, Gertrud von Utrecht had been first the wife of Jan Matthys, with whom she emigrated to Münster from the Netherlands, and married Jan van Leiden only after the death of Matthys. In the historical and fictional literature on the Anabaptist revolt, her portrait is much more ambiguous—and sometimes thoroughly negative—than in Saramago’s play.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2012. The Church and the Kingdom. Trans. Leland de la Durantaye. London: Seagull Books.
Amorim, Silvia. 2010. José Saramago. Art, théorie et éthique du roman. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Atkin, Rhian. 2014. Lisbon Revisited: Urban Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Portuguese Fiction. Cambridge: Legenda.
Baltrusch, Burghard, ed. 2014. “O que transforma o mundo é a necessidade e não a utopia”: Estudos sobre a utopia e a ficção em José Saramago. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
———. 2003. “On the Concept of History” and “Prolegomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”. In Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400 and 401–411. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Blissett, Luther. 2003 (2000). Q. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Heinemann.
Bloch, Ernst. 1969 (1921). Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. In Gesamtausgabe: Band 2. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
Céu e Silva, João. 2009. Uma longa viagem com José Saramago. Oporto: Porto Editora.
Croce, Benedetto. 1941. History as the Story of Liberty. Trans. Sylvia Sprigge. London: Allen and Unwin.
Duby, Georges. 1984. L’Europe au Moyen Âge. Paris: Flammarion.
Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. 1998a (1947). Es steht geschrieben /Der Blinde. Frühe Stücke. Zürich: Diogenes.
———. 1998b (1967). Die Wiedertäufer. Eine Komödie in zwei Teilen. Zürich: Diogenes.
Engels, Friedrich. 1978 (1850). The Peasant War in Germany. In The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 10, 397–482. New York: International Publishers.
Forrest, Gene Steven. 2005. The Dialectics of History in Two Dramas of José Saramago. In José Saramago, ed. Harold Bloom, 25–34. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Frier, David. 2007. The Novels of José Saramago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gómez Aguilera, Fernando, ed. 2010. José Saramago. Nas Suas Palavras. Lisbon: Caminho.
Grossegesse, Orlando. 1999. Saramago lesen: Werk, Leben, Bibliographie. Berlin: Tranvía Verlag.
Kautsky, Karl. 1897. Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation. Trans. J.L and E.G. Mulliken. London: Fisher Unwin.
Lopes, Óscar. 1996. A busca de sentido: questões de literatura portuguesa. 2nd ed. Lisboa: Caminho.
Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Trans. Mario Vukić. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martins, Adriana Alves de Paula. 2001. José Saramago’s Historical Fiction. Trans. Elena Zagar Galvão. Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 6, pp. 49–72.
Oliveira Lopes, João de. 1998. O crepúsculo de deus nas guerras dos homens. Uma leitura do In Nomine Dei de José Saramago. Humanitas 50: 1025–1040.
Orejudo, Antonio. 2005. Reconstrucción. Barcelona: Tusquets.
Ornelas, José N. 2007. Articulações da História na Obra de José Saramago. In Da Possibilidade do Impossível: Leituras de Saramago, ed. Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas, 211–230. Utrecht: Portuguese Studies Center.
Reis, Carlos. 1998. Diálogos com José Saramago. Lisbon: Caminho.
———. 2002. En nombre de Divara. Insula: Revista de letras y ciencias humanas 663: 32–34.
Sabine, Mark J.L. 2005. ‘Once but no longer the prow of Europe’: National Identity and Portuguese Destiny in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft. In José Saramago, ed. Harold Bloom, 75–94. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
———. 2016. José Saramago: History, Utopia, and the Necessity of Error. Cambridge: Legenda.
Saramago, José. 1990. História e ficção. Journal de Letras, Artes & Ideias, ano X 400: 17–19.
———. 2005. “Pensar, pensar y pensar”: An Event with José Saramago in the Che Guevara Room of the Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba, June 18, 2006. http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/noticias/2005/06/18/pensar-pensar-y-pensar/. Accessed 15 Aug 2016.
———. 2013. Da Estátua à Pedra e Discursos de Estocolmo. Belém: ed.ufpa.
Schneider, Robert. 2004. Kristus: Das unerhörte Leben des Jan Beukels. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.
Sousa, Ronald W. 2007. José Saramago and the Modalities of History, or Dragging Their Telos Behind Him. In Da Possibilidade do Impossível: Leituras de Saramago, ed. Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas, 315–323. Portuguese Studies Center: Utrecht.
———. 2014. On Emerging From Hyper-Nation: Saramago’s “Historical” Trilogy. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1981 (1968). The Abyss. Trans. Grace Frick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Salzani, C. (2018). Correcting History: Apocalypticism, Messianism and Saramago’s Philosophy of History. In: Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91922-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91923-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)