José Saramago: An Appreciation

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Baltasar & Blimunda, by José Saramago.

Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. The Harvill Press, 1998 (current UK edition).

In Portuguese, Memorial do convento, 1982. Available in many languages and editions.

By N. F.

Blimunda is an uncommon name, even in the Portuguese language, and it is an uncommon woman that the name designates in this novel by José Saramago, a writer who is already well known for the unusual names of his characters. Through Blimunda and her companion Baltasar, we are told two intertwined stories in this work, which unfolds in eighteenth-century Portugal after the establishment of the maritime routes to India and Brazil.

The novel describes a time of savage oppression, an era when the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and King João V worked in close collusion. Lisbon was the capital of a colonial empire stretching from Brazil to India, via Africa, Macao and Timor. It was a city of narrow, stinking and insalubrious streets where poor Portuguese and Black slaves lived miserable lives. Nevertheless, it was also a time when the Portuguese royal family and the clergy, whom the king showered with lavish benefits, dined at tables stocked with the spoils of the Portuguese colonial empire, even while the various groups within the ruling class were locked in internecine strife over their share of the wealth brought from the territories the colonists were occupying and plundering.

It is in the context of this panorama, after an auto-da-fe (burning at the stake) performed by the Inquisition, that we meet Baltasar and Blimunda. He is then 26 years old and had lost his left hand in the war against Spain. In its place, he skilfully uses an iron hook held by belts. Blimunda is 19 years old when they meet. When she goes without eating - for instance, if she opens her eyes in the morning before eating breakfast - she has the strange faculty of being able to peer through people's bodies into their very souls, or in other words, to see what is hidden inside men and women. The Inquisition had accused her mother of witchcraft and condemned her to be deported to Angola. This couple, in which Blimunda's extra ability compensates for what Baltasar lacks, gives us the intersection of two stories. One is the story of the construction of the convent at Mafra. The other is the story of a flying device named Passarola that will conquer the skies.

After some years of marriage, King João was desperate to see the birth of an heir to give continuity to the royal family. Lured by the Church, which used the queen as its marionette - vulnerable, submissive and easily manipulated due to her double condition of gender subalternity (inferior status) and being a frail foreign woman - the king promises to raise a convent in Mafra, 40 km northwest of Lisbon, if god grants him an heir. The novel makes it clear that it is an heir and not a son that he seeks. This king used to slip into the convents regularly, and there is a reference to the bastards born from his relationships with nuns and novices.

Saramago skilfully describes the queen's role as receiver of the royal semen. A member of the ruling class, she is nonetheless manipulated and subalternised by the clergy and by her husband, as is the case for the women of her class as a whole. The submission that results from the construction of the feminine gender condition within the ruling class, the social place that makes her a marionette of a negotiated marriage, her manipulation by the Church, and the understanding of her functions as confined to reproduction, all contrast with Blimunda's situation. In the former, a blindness toward what surrounds her, due to the hold of religion; in the latter, a capacity to see where the eyes of others don't want to or cannot see. In one, the exclusiveness of the reproductive role and a sacrificial sexuality; in the other, the ecstasy of passion, due to the absence of material interests. In one, the absence of choices in the construction of her own life, always delineated by a third party, while the other chooses, delineates, creates and rebels - even using forbidden violence when a friar tries to rape her.

We are told, then, the story of the construction of the convent, from the intrigues of the court and the cassocks that surround it to the sacrifice and cost in human lives involved in its construction. The novel shows the dark side of the history of the construction of great edifices, that of the men who build them. This project of unprecedented grandeur was meant to glorify the power of the king and the Church, and was to be inaugurated in 1830. But the king fears he may die without inaugurating the basilica, and calls for the work to be speeded up by using the forced labour of people brought from the whole country. Eventually 30,000 workers are brought to a place that was once a small village. There is an emblematic episode in which 600 men transport a great marble stone using ox carts along a sinuous and uneven path. Some of them die in this stupendous effort, due to the whim of the person in charge of construction. Intending to signify the magnificence of the king's power through the greatness of the monument, this person decrees that the convent's balcony will be made of one huge, uncut, man-killing slab.

We follow also, with Baltasar and Blimunda, the story of the flying Passarola of Bartolomeu de Gusmão, a conflicted visionary priest eventually driven to madness and death by the Inquisition. He is based on a real historical figure. Gusmão tested an aerostat (balloon) in 1709 and experimented with several flying machines, at a time when the unknown - such as the capacity to fly - was seen as a divine manifestation. For this the Holy Office persecuted him until he fled the country and took refuge in Spain, where he died in 1724. This character, who believes that people have both soul and will conjugated within them, is shown to us as entrapped in that contradiction. If we see him kneeling when he watches the passing of a religious procession for a dying man with the purpose of saving his soul, he also metaphorically shows us the stages that humanity confronts in its journey: first he trips, later he walks, then he runs, and one day he will fly. Using Blimunda's insight and her ability to capture "wills" - the wishes that people carry inside them and that disappear with their deaths - it becomes possible to defy gravity and cause a ship to rise into the air, in an era where the mere enunciation of such a dream was heresy. With Blimunda, Baltasar and the priest Gusmão, we watch the creation of the flying machine and the materialisation of this dream of ascent and flight.

The novel begins with an auto-da-fe, and it also ends with one. The couple have been separated and searching for one another for nine years. When Blimunda finds Baltasar once again, he is among a group of people tortured by the Holy Office and already half burned. Saramago gives the identity of another real historical figure to one of those victims. He is António José da Silva, a Jewish Portuguese playwright burned by the Inquisition in 1739 after a long persecution and the banning of his writings.

The author harshly castigates the Catholic Church by painting a vivid picture of the hierarchy's corruption, hypocrisy and stupidity. The Inquisition, with full powers and thoroughly supported by the secular power, persecuted those it accused of Judaism, heresy, or witchcraft. From top to bottom, the whole rottenness of the religious institution is exposed, from the inquisitorial bishop - with his power games and his sumptuous meals - to the friar of the low clergy, institutionally forced to deny his sexuality, who tries to rape Blimunda. The convents, where upper class women unable or unwilling to marry took shelter, became recreational palaces for the noblemen. (The real convent at Mafra contained royal living quarters.) The reproductive form within the ruling class concentrated the inheritance on a unique son, relegating the other sons to an ecclesiastical life so as to prevent them from marrying and producing legal heirs among whom the family property would be dispersed. The celibacy to which these family members were condemned by purely material considerations is doubly denounced in this novel. The hypocrisy of the religious hierarchy in this respect is brought out through the friar's attempted rape of Blimunda - she kills him without hesitation - and the recurring comparison of convents to brothels.

But Saramago goes beyond attacking the agents of the Church. His novel also demolishes Catholic religious doctrine by bringing to life its internal contradictions, its different application to different classes, and its contribution to the maintenance of the situation in ideological terms. An ally of the secular power throughout the process of colonisation, the Church contends for the primacy of the soul above all because it has enough surplus to console the body of those who act in its name. While the only character who escapes alive in Saramago's narrative is the priest Bartolomeu, we are told that he will end up persecuted by his peers, without being exempted in any way from the inherent contradictions of the position he occupies.

The royal family, through whose elements - fragile or perverse - the context of the ruling class is presented, shamelessly squanders the wealth shipped back from the plunder of the colonies. The violent exploitation and dispossession of the inhabitants of the colonial territories and the traffic in slave labour had, in other countries, a significant function in the primitive accumulation of capital. In the case of Portugal, the Crown's ostentation and exuberant spending simply wasted the plundered goods. This trade and colonialisation brought the people in the colonising countries few advantages, the book tells us. The poor have to buy everything; nothing comes to them from the colonies, which for them are mainly places where they can be deported.

The Author and his Works

The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Saramago in 1998. He has remained a non-consensual voice, one that has caused some annoyance to the ruling class of various countries.

Saramago was born in 1922 to a landless peasant family in a small village in the centre of Portugal. As he explained in a short autobiographical essay he wrote when he won the Nobel Prize, Saramago, his father's nickname, "is a wild herbaceous plant whose leaves served in those times as nourishment for the poor." His family moved to Lisbon when he was a few months old, and he was raised there, though he spent long periods in the village. Portugal came under a ferocious military regime in 1926. Although a good student in secondary school, he was barred, due to his class origins, from entering the university, which was then limited to an elite of ruling class children. The fall of the fascist Salazar regime through a coup d'état on 25 April 1974 was followed by a revolutionary upsurge and a chaotic period of bourgeois democracy that deceived a Portuguese working class and people who had only known a few months of it in their history, after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1910. The nearly half century of Portuguese fascism was characterised by a stifling repression and a suffocating atmosphere created by the threat of long years in prison, torture and murder, the prohibition of organisations of the urban working class and rural workers, and a skilful management of the interests of the different capitalist sectors under a paternalistic cover. For most of his life Saramago was a member of the illegal and thoroughly revisionist Communist Party of Portugal.

He worked at many different occupations, including the printing trades. To supplement his family's income and for pleasure, he took up translation at night, bringing into Portuguese the work of rebellious authors such as Mongo Beti and Nazim Hikmet. Although he published his first novel in 1947, he put out nothing more and had no connection to the literary scene for several decades. In the early 1970s he became a journalist and returned to fiction later in the decade. Baltasar & Blimunda was the most notable of a series of novels that began flowing from his pen late in life when he was finally able to devote himself to writing. He moved to Spain in 1991 after the Portuguese government labelled his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ "offensive to Catholics" and took action against him. His literary work has won countless prizes in many places around the globe. Baltasar & Blimunda was made into the opera Blimunda by Azio Corghi. Some of his other novels have been adapted for films. Although winning a reputation in Portuguese and Spanish, he was not well known in English until after his Nobel Prize. Now his major books have been translated into more than 20 languages, making him one of the world's most influential novelists.

In 1998, when he visited Mexico, a government official aware of his interventionist reputation urged him to confine himself to addressing "the specific issues of literature". Saramago publicly retorted that the government was silencing him because he was a writer and a foreigner, but it didn't apply the same criteria to the International Monetary Fund, which could interfere as much as it liked without offending any law. In Chiapas, where he visited a refugee camp and went to a military base near an indigenous village, he denounced the Acteal massacre, in which a military commando slaughtered 45 Indian peasants sympathetic to the Zapatistas as they attended mass on the previous Christmas Eve.

Saramago is especially good at creating living portraits of his protagonists. They are unique and sometimes unusual individuals, and also completely believable, typifying characteristics of different social classes. He clearly knows people very well, in all their richness and complexity. His descriptions of the common people are clear-eyed - sometimes to the point of sarcasm at their weaknesses - but not condescending or superficial. He is most definitely writing about ideas and employs a signature style in which sentences run for many pages and the punctuation hinders a too literal interpretation. Many of his scenes and subjects are more than a little surreal. But his characters are real, complex and unforgettable, whether he is writing about the exploitation of southern Portugal's rural workers and their struggle against exploitation during Salazar's fascist regime, or the imaginary eighteenth-century labourer and peasant Baltasar and Blimunda, or lyrically celebrating Jesus' passionate love for the honest prostitute Mary Magdalene and their defiance of what would later be called Christian morality in the resolutely atheist and hilarious Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

He is also brilliant in the unmasking of contexts and of institutions, from the Church to Portugal itself, which is sometimes all but openly his subject. In The Stone Raft, the entire Iberian peninsula breaks off from Europe and drifts through the Atlantic. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis revisits the eponymous character created by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa wrote poems under the name Reis, creating him as a character and using him as a persona through which he could speak indirectly. Saramago imagines that Reis lived on for a year after the author who invented him died. He narrates an anguished relationship between an intellectual cut-off from the world around him, including the people high and low, and a hotel maid whose communist brother is organising an uprising among the sailors. By borrowing Reis' persona, Saramago can both identify with and distance himself from him, while the spectre of the country's national poet tells us Saramago is writing about all of Portugal. The novel is filled with ghosts and fantastical occurrences, but it is a strongly realistic portrait of Lisbon and Portuguese society as well, and of course his descriptions of the 1920s, like his descriptions of the eighteenth century and the time of Christ, are written with today's world in mind.

In Blindness, sometimes described as science fiction, all of the inhabitants of a city and, as far as they know, the world, are suddenly struck blind, except for the wife of a no less sightless ophthalmologist. Through her eyes we see society descend into chaos and violence, where old hierarchies fall and very different notions of what kind of new world to build contend. Just as Blimunda sees more deeply than others, in Blindness this woman sees and begins to understand when everyone around her becomes blind. This indicates Saramago's fascination with and ability to portray strong women characters, a central feature in his work. But Saramago is also concerned about the effect of self-awareness on those who posses it (this woman contrasts with Reis, who is paralysed by it) and their relationships with those around them and society as a whole. A reviewer once wrote that Saramago seems to be speaking to us from another reality, one that only he can see. Actually, he may consider that like Blimunda and the nameless woman protagonist in Blindness, imagination can pierce social conventions and see the underlying realities on which they are based. At any rate, even at his most imaginative, his allegiance is to what he considers a coldly realistic view of the world. As an aside in his latest book, The Double, he reminds us that the imagination is a "mysterious, enigmatic skill it took us human beings so much hard work to invent". In a 2002 interview about the book he published that year, The Cave, he said, "We invent a sort of reality for its own sake. We think this so-called reality we invent is not only the only reality that exists, but the only reality we want."

Different people have written different things about what Saramago is getting at. Is he saying that people can awaken and change this reality that weighs so heavily on them and so often crushes them? In Baltasar & Blimunda, as in some of Saramago's other novels, a pessimistic note and a hint of romanticism contend. His protagonists are crushed by history, but they also dream of soaring above it. In The Cave, he revisits Plato's allegory of the cave (in this case, a combination shopping centre and headquarters for an evil empire), sketching a critique of the way the capitalist machine grinds up individuals who don't fit in. Here there seems to be a certain despair and perhaps the idea that humanity can at best return to previous practices and not overcome today's conditions through a passage to higher stages. But Saramago is clear on two things: that the world people live in, with all the awful things in it, is not inevitable, but one people have made, and that people, especially those oppressed by this world, are not reconciled to it and long for another one, even though they don't always know it. Whether or not that world changes is up to nobody but them.

Baltasar & Blimunda - Excerpt

They were not afraid, they were simply astounded at their own daring. The priest laughed and shouted. He had already abandoned the safety of the handrail and was running back and forth across the deck of the machine in order to catch a glimpse of the land below, north, south, east, and west, the earth looked so vast, now that they were so far away from it, Baltasar and Blimunda finally scrambled to their feet, nervously holding on to the cords, then to the handrail, dazed by the light and the wind, suddenly no longer frightened, Ah, and Baltasar shouted, We've done it, he embraced Blimunda and burst into tears, he was like a lost child, this soldier who had been to war, who had killed a man in Pegões with his spike, and was now weeping for joy as he clung to Blimunda, who kissed his dirty face. The priest came up to them and joined in their embrace, suddenly perturbed by the analogy the Italian had drawn when he had suggested that the priest himself was God, Baltasar his son, and Blimunda the holy ghost, and now all three of them were up there in the skies together, There is only one God, he shouted, but the wind snatched the words from his mouth. Then Blimunda said, Unless we open the sail, we shall go on climbing, and we might even collide with the sun.