Girish Mishra on Jose Saramago’s Candid Comments
It is quite often said in India that a person loses his enthusiasm and vigour and the capacity to struggle against odds and acts of injustice as he becomes older. This, however, never applied to the Portuguese literary giant, Jose Saramago. Born in a poor landless family on November 16, 1922, he actively participated in struggles against dictatorship and oppression in his own country and lent his voice to resistance against injustice wherever he saw it. He never, for once, wavered till his death on June 18, 2010.
At a very early age, he joined the Portuguese Communist Party and remained with it till his last breath. He suffered all kinds of difficulties and odds during the Salazar regime but never wavered. With great determination and perse-verance he educated himself while earning his livelihood. He established himself as a great literary figure, not only in Portugal, but also at the international level. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his novel Blindness. His other novels such as Seeing, Cave, Death with Interruptions, etc., too, were acclaimed internationally. His books have been translated into more than 25 foreign languages. One of his novels has been rendered into Hindi also. In his own country alone, more than two million copies of his books have been sold.
In 1992, he left Portugal to make Spanish island of Lanzarote as his abode in protest against the Portuguese Government’s ban on the submission of his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, for the European Literature Prize on the pretext that it was offensive to the Catholics. In September 2008, he began writing blogs at the instance of his wife, Pilar, that continued till November 2009. In the process, he commented on various topics. These comments in their English translation were published as The Notebook by Verso in 2010. It carried a Foreword by the Italian writer, Umberto Eco. In Eco’s words, “An odd character, this Saramago. He’s eightyseven…. He’s won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a distinction that would allow him to stop producing anything at all, because he’s entering the pantheon anyway.” He went on to term him as “the most gifted writer alive today” and “one of the last titans of an expiring literary gene”.
Coming to The Notebook, without mincing words Saramago asks: “Why it is that the United States, a country so great in all things, has so often had such small Presidents. George W. Bush is perhaps the smallest of them all. This man, with his mediocre intelligence, abysmal ignorance, confused communication skills, and constant succumbing to the irresistible temp-tation of pure nonsense, has presented himself to humanity in the grotesque pose of a cowboy who has inherited the world and mistaken it for a herd of cattle. We don’t know what he really thinks, we don’t even know if he does think (in the noble sense of the word), we don’t know whether he might not be just a badly programmed robot that constantly confuses and switches around the messages it carries around inside it. But to give the man some credit for once in his life, there is one programme in the robot George Bush, President of the United States, that works to perfection: lying. He knows he’s lying, he knows we know he’s lying, but seeing a compulsive liar, he will keep on lying even when he has the most naked truth right there before his eyes—he will keep on lying even after the truth has exploded in his face. He lied to justify waging war in Iraq just as he lied about the stormy and questionable past, and with just the same shamelessness. With Bush, the lies come from very deep down; they are in his blood. A liar emeritus, he is the high priest of all the other liars who have surrounded him, applauded him, and served him over the past few years.
“George Bush expelled truth from the world, establishing the age of lies that now flourishes in its place. Human society today is contaminated by lies, the worst sort of moral contamination, and he is among those chiefly responsible. The lie circulates everywhere with impunity, and has turned into a kind of other truth… a few years ago, a Portuguese Prime Minister… stated that ‘politics is the art of not telling the truth’, …. For Bush, politics is simply one of the levers of business, and perhaps the best one of all—the lie as a weapon, the lie as the advance guard of tanks and cannons, the lie told over the ruins, over the corpses, over humanity’s wretched and perpetually frustrated hopes….”
He does not take kindly even to the Left, especially the Communists with whom he has been associated all his life. He refers to an interview to a newspaper from Argentina, sometime in 2004 or 2005, wherein he had stated: “The Left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in.” He had expected that the Left would be provoked to respond, but “The Left responded to my deliberate challenge with the iciest of silences. No Communist Party, for instance, beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I had said or simply to argue about the propriety or the lack of propriety of my language. Even more to the point, nor did any of the Socialist Parties then in government in their respective countries… consider it necessary to demand a clarification from the impudent writer who had dared to throw a stone into a fetid swamp of indifference. Nothing of anything at all, absolute silence, as if there were nothing but dust and spiders in the ideological tombs where they had taken refuge, or nothing more than an ancient bone that was no longer solid enough for a relic…. It was clear that they didn’t think my opinions worthy of their consideration... Read more:
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3284.html
