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55 Chapter Two The Politics of Agency in Saramago Reviving the Female and Building Relational and Phenomenological Ethics in Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis) Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis revolves around the life, love life, ontological and epistemological search of Ricardo Reis, a doctor by profession and also a poet. Ricardo Reis is not a real person: he is merely one of the several heteronyms of the famous Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. Thus, in this sense, the novel is metafictional ; it is fiction about fiction and it has a subtext that refers to Pessoa's own poetry, life style and poetic multiple personas, even though it concerns itself more directly with Ricardo Reis. Pessoa's own subtext runs parallel to Saramago's own narrative . In the novel, Ricardo Reis is much alike the original Pessoan Reis: he is the detached, aloof, fatalistic, neoclassical poet, the politically unengaged figure who lives mostly recoiled within himself and makes little or no real effort to participate actively in life or to connect with people. Although a general medical practitioner by profession, Reis is for the most part unemployed while living in Lisbon, working only part-time for a few months as a cardiologist—a very ironic situation—considering the fact that he is a man who does not know very much about matters of the heart and tends to minimize the importance of the senses. The novel starts with Reis's return to Lisbon, after a long exile of sixteen years in Brazil. Being a lover of tradition and conservative political forms (i.e., the monarchy), Reis had left Portugal around 1910, when the Portuguese monarchy was abolished and the first Republic installed, and exiled himself in Brazil. It is now 1936 and Pessoa has just died. Having heard about the death of his creator (whom he considers a friend), Saramago's Reis decides to return to Lisbon, even though he is not quite sure why and if such a move is a good one. The Portugal that Reis encounters is not a very pleasant one, for Salazar is now in power, and the country is living under a very oppressive fascist regime. The general mood of the novel is dark, gloomy, and pessimist. Due to the highly internalized nature of the novel, where the voice 56 Chapter Two of the author often becomes indistinguishable from that of the protagonist, we often feel enmeshed in Reis's internal thoughts and way of being and seeing the world: his extreme (almost desperate) loneliness, his lack of personal initiative, his egocentric personality, his doubtful and schizoidlike identity and existential nihilist view. The city of Lisbon appears to us as a phantomlike place, silenced and closed off from the rest of the world. It is a city where is rains a lot and which is often enveloped in fog, a city where the sky is often cloudy and grey, as if pointing to the intellectual inebriation (cloudy vision) of the Portuguese people who are now controlled by the highly repressive, fascist political machinery of Salazar's regime—a regime constantly at work to control people's thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas (see de Oliveira 7-8). As I will demonstrate later, the constant reference to the cloudy sky, the fog, and the rain can also be seen as a narrative technique to point to the fact that the Portuguese people are believers of a God that does not exist, a God that is blind, as Saramago would say in Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness). Apart from the oppressive negative climate in Portugal, the world is also at this moment experiencing the most dramatic political events and oppressive regimes of the twentieth century: the rise of Nazism in Germany, the success of fascism in Italy and its war with Ethiopia, and the Civil War in neighbouring Spain. Thus, if Reis was looking for peace of mind and ways of escaping historical reality, he chose the wrong country and century to live in. It is precisely because of the tumultuous political situation of this time that we can suggest that Saramago brings such Pessoan heteronym back to life. Placing Reis in the midst of a society afflicted with so many sociopolitical concerns and evils allows Saramago to raise some questions regarding Reis's life philosophy, his extreme intellectualism, and his aloofness and disengagement . How can Reis escape material reality and social responsibility...

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