On Emerging from Hyper-Nation: Saramago's "Historical" Trilogy by Ronald W. Sousa (review)

There has been such plentiful writing over the past twenty-five years on Saramago's historically based novels that it may seem tempting to suggest that there is little room for new angles to be taken on them. This volume provides a challenging and original addition to that list, although some readers may find it to be a source of frustration that it does not fully explore all of the questions that it raises.

The author's intention in discussing the three novels which he includes in Saramago's 'historical' trilogy is initially to understand his own reaction (his 'smile', as he expresses his own response to the breaking of taboos, using Freudian terminology) within the texture of the three novels under discussion (Memorial do convento, O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis and História do cerco de Lisboa). In doing so, the author readily acknowledges his own positionality as a reader of a certain age who grew up in Portugal and had personal experience of the Estado Novo dictatorship which casts such a strong shadow over these three texts; and he offers intelligent and sensitive understanding of why he reacts in the way he does to these texts, which dart backwards and forwards from the historical time explicitly narrated, through allusions to the Salazar dictatorship, and into the post-Revolutionary period in which Saramago wrote them. One of the fundamental theses proposed here is, then, that the power of these works lies at least partly in the variety of cultural and political references which can be communicated meaningfully through them to different readerships and, consequently, in the self-conscious violation by the literary text of norms which it would have been inappropriate to challenge before 1974 in a society where, in fact, the cultural space barely existed to even formulate such challenges from within the nation. In this sense, by way of contrast, it is useful to note the comments offered on how these novels have failed to satisfy fully those foreign readers who do not share the cultural inside knowledge which Sousa himself possesses, particularly with reference to paratexts which choose to foreground the English translation of Baltasar and Blimunda, for example, as a romance rather than as a historical and political satire.

This discussion could be taken further: while Sousa chooses to divide Saramago's Portuguese readership into four categories, relating to age and cultural or educational background, further categorization may also be needed for foreign readerships in terms of experience of reading in translation, specific cultural knowledge relating to Portugal, or potential academic motivations for reading this writer in particular—even if the author is at pains to stress that his project is intended to chart specifically his own process of reading. In terms of Portuguese readers, not even all of Sousa's A1 readers (those who achieved maturity under the Estado Novo) will have done so at the same time or under the same socio-political circumstances: the New State was not the same dictatorship in 1936 (the year referred to in the title of O Ano da morte de Ricardo Reis) as it was in 1973, for example. This is not to reject Sousa's categories as such (for clearly all such divisions require some degree of generalization to function at all), but their specificity does prompt further interrogation: do the all-pervasive nods to recent history and culture not exist equally in other works, such as the Three Marias' Novas cartas portuguesas or some of the novels of António Lobo Antunes? There are perhaps further questions to be answered here, then, on how Saramago has become perceived to be particularly representative of the cultural move from dictatorship to democracy: Is it purely a result of the high sales figures achieved by his novels? Similarly, the construction of Sousa's proposed trilogy also raises serious questions: why does he omit from consideration Levantado do chão whose...