José Saramago
“People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.” – Albert Camus
José Saramago is one of the most important contemporary novelists. In 1998, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his most famous novel Blindness. He also wrote many novels that create worlds and characters facing unique events. Though this may be an incomplete or unfair introduction of Saramago, who died in 2010: “After my death they may mention in the newspapers that I was a writer and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but if they can add to this information that I contributed in some way to the promotion of peace on this earth, I hope they will quote this sentence before mentioning my Nobel Prize.”
In this article, I try to provide an analytical reading of Saramago’s novel The Cave, and the extent to which it is related to Plato’s Allegory of the cave. The connection does not lie in the novel’s title alone, but in the ideas and narrative structures provided by the novel about the world of Cipriano Algor and his small family that lives in the countryside of a city. As usual, Saramago did not name a specific city for the setting; instead, he constructed a general image that could apply to any of the largest cities of our day and age, especially some of the most famous cities in Europe, and North America.
About Saramago’s Novels and Style
Before you start reading José Saramago’s work, consider his writing style. It is noticeable in Saramago’s writings that they are continuous, whether the sentence ends at the end of the line or earlier. The writer does not start from the new line except at the beginning of chapters that do not have numbers or titles. This may make the first experience of reading his works a bit difficult, but you will get used to it after a few pages of the novel by knowing the reason behind this style of writing.
Another aspect in the writer’s style is that he does not use exclamation or question marks or any distinctive signs for embedded clauses, explanatory sentences, or signs indicating quotation and embedding, so he does not use punctuation marks other than a period and comma. To be honest, this style in writing makes more sense in the Latin language, as the writer usually begins the speech of the interlocutor with capital letters, but because of the impossibility of translating such linguistic behaviors into Arabic, the translators preferred to put a period to indicate the beginning of the interlocutor’s speech or to separate the interventions of the interlocutors. The following dialogue between Cipriano Algor, the main character of The Cave, and the assistant director at the center portrays a clear example of the style:
“And when that happens, what do you do, asked Cipriano Algor simply in order to say something, and the assistant head of department replied in patronizing tones, My dear sir, surely you’re not expecting me to reveal to you, here and now, the secret of the bee, But I’ve always understood that the secret of the bee doesn’t actually exist, that it’s a mystification, a false mystery, an unfinished fable, a tale that might have been but wasn’t, Yes, you’re quite right, the secret of the bee doesn’t exist, but we know what it is. Cipriano Algor recoiled as if he had been the victim of an unexpected attack.”
This style is mainly characterized by its “transparency of writing”, as the translator Ali Abdul Raouf Al-Bembi calls it: “It is written for a storyteller or vocalist to hear the people around him, whether in a market or a public square, similar to what the Minstrels (Juglares) did in Western societies during the Middle Ages, and similar to what was written by the first lyricist in the Spanish language, Juan Ruiz, or Juan Goytisolo in our time.”
This type of narration— in addition to ignoring the punctuation and intonation that falls on the shoulders of the storyteller or narrator— would stop in the story at the point of climax and return to it later. It also gives the writer the absolute freedom to use the actual tenses and switch from one tense to another in the same sentence. In addition, the open end in this type of narration leaves the reader – or listener – room for personal interpretation of the novel.
One of Saramago’s most important reoccurring ideas in his narrative works is the inevitability of the fragility of the modern city developed by modern man. It is susceptible to destruction due to a simple disruption in the usual state, such as the outbreak of blindness among people which disrupts life directly in his novel Blindness, or the sudden cessation of death that puzzles the city’s leaders and changes the balance of life in his novel Death with Interruptions. Or even when he complains about this development that erases the uniqueness and individuality of cities, he talks about Lisbon, where he spent most of his life: “In recent years Lisbon has transformed, it has succeeded in reviving in the consciences of its citizens the power that lifted it out of the quagmire into which it fell. In the name of modernity, concrete walls were raised over old walls, distorted the contours of the hills, and modified the lines of sight. But the spirit of Lisbon is still alive, and it is the spirit that makes the city immortal.”
In The Cave, he insists that the current human civilization is contesting and nearing its end; “The history of humanity is a series of civilizations that begin and die. This is not the first civilization to disappear, and it will not be the last; many civilizations and empires have disappeared over time,” Saramago said of the novel in an interview, “It does not mean that we are heading towards a moment, apocalyptic moment, things are not so radical. The values of our civilization, the civilization of human radiation, are disappearing forever. I am not talking here about the Middle East or Africa, but specifically about the values of the West. We are entering a materialistic time in which the values of personal interest, gain, buying and selling prevail.” Of course, the values of trade, buying, and bartering have always existed since the dawn of history, as error and harm are not in the process of trading for itself, “but we have reached a stage where buying and selling has become the ultimate and only goal of life. We live to trade; we no longer trade to live. In my opinion, this will have strong effects on the way we think and live in the future.”
Cipriano Algor: Between Fear and Anxiety
The Cave revolves around three main characters: Cipriano Algor, his daughter Marta, and his son-in-law Marçal Gacho. Not to forget, the stray dog that the family took in. Saragamo introduces them in the opening of his story: “The man driving the truck is called Cipriano Algor, he is a potter by profession, and is sixty-four years old, although he certainly does not look his age. The man sitting beside him is his son-in-law law, Marçal Gacho, and he is not yet thirty. Nevertheless, from his face too, you would think him much younger. As you will have notices, attached to their first names both these men have unusual family names, whose origin, meaning and reason they do not know.”
The story talks about this small family living outside the large city that bears the name “Center” in the novel, and Saramago described its ugliness compared to the surrounding nature: “Cipriano Algor tried to look at the landscape outside, he did so out of sheer desperation because he knew perfectly well that he would find no solace in the depressing sight of plastic greenhouses stretching out on either side, as far as the horizon, which he could see even more clearly from the top of the small hill the van was climbing.” Saramago’s critique of modern cities is not limited to their ugliness and distance from the landscapes of the earth. However, during Cipriano Algor’s reliance on the center to buy his clay pottery, the center asked him to stop supplying them with these pots due to the increasing reliance of customers on plastic pots instead.
Perhaps one of the main benefits of art is to draw the attention of modern man to those areas that do not require his attention during the fast-paced days, or as the poet Sargon Boulus says: “The writer is a witness to his time, and he must be aware, in the midst of all this chaos and madness, wars and massacres, and be aware of those faint voices that talk to us about the past time, about other lives buried in the belly of the whale called history”. In this novel, Saramago embarks on an anxious journey with Cipriano after the modern city had dispensed with his services, as he had no skill other than pottery, which in turn was no longer sufficient to support him at a later age: “a lot of professions have completely disappeared, and no one nowadays has a clue what those people did, what purpose they served.”
“it’s the changing times, it’s the old who age a day for every hour, it’s the work which isn’t what it used to be, and we, who can only be what we were, suddenly realize that we’re not needed in the world, always assuming we ever were, of course, but believing that we were seemed to be enough, seemed sufficient, and that belief was, in a sense, eternal for as long as we remained alive, which is, after all, what eternity is.” This novel was published in 2000 to acknowledge the suffering of those who were unable to catch up with the speed of life, from the beginning of the last century through the period of the invention of the personal computer in 1997, and its great spread in all fields of work, especially after the Internet became necessary for the conduct of business starting in 1997. Then a new era of technology began that brought us to this development that we are witnessing nowadays.
Cipriano Algor is a very simple man. In his last day as a potter, he, along with his daughter and son-in-law await the news of the latter’s promotion to obtain a house in the Center where they would spend the next stage of their lives. The news of the center dispensing with his services had a strong impact on Cipriano due to his old age, or as he says to his son-in-law when he promised to move with him and Marta to the center as soon as he received the promised promotion: “I’m too old for hopes, Marçal, I need certainties, immediate certainties, ones that don’t pin their hopes on a tomorrow that might not even come for me.” This indicates Cipriano’s awareness of his old age and his fear of being a burden on his daughter and son-in-law in the future, as well as his feeling that he would be marginal in the coming days of life after all he knows has changed. All of this caused him to enter a state of constant anxiety and questioning about his life, its value and meaning, the basic values that he defends and his small dreams that he picked up throughout his life. This is what was evident during the story, “as if he were dreaming that he was trying to break free from himself but kept stumbling over his own body.”
This was evident even in his conversations with his daughter and son-in-law, which more than once seemed like a case of postponing an imminent explosion. His age was beginning to have negative effects on his physical strength, which he could not tolerate; he is fully aware that “the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability.” Saramago’s mental state was turbulent and required many sacrifices from those who lived with him, such as his daughter Marta, who sympathized with him and tried to imagine what her father suffers as a result of suddenly being left unemployed, being away from home, from the pottery factory, from the kiln and all the life he knows. This is also what Cipriano acknowledges: “folly and illogicality may be a duty to the young, but the old have a perfectly respectable right to them too.”
Though Saramago says: “it is always better to take a risk and climb the fig tree in order to pick the fig, than to lie down in the shade of the tree and wait for the fig to fall into your mouth.” What man misses in cases of shock and anxiety is that “however numerous the possible sequences, they are not infinite. As with all things in life, it is just a question of time and patience” and that the result after overcoming what we face will be satisfactory, no matter how difficult it is to our imagination now. This is what the story reveals in its narrative developments after that, but I shall dismiss all of this to go deeper into discovery about why Saramago settled on The Cave as the novel’s title.
Plato’s Allegory of The Cave
“We have never been as close to Plato’s cave as we are today,” Saramago says of the novel The Cave in an interview, “Plato described this cave of ours about 2,300 or 2,400 years ago, as if he was a prophet, and here we are now, having come to it; we live in it.” The title of the novel goes back to the main scene of conflict in its plot, which is the entry of Cipriano Algor into the cave, which he inferred in a way explained by the events, to find inside it several stone benches with some faded fabrics, and six human bodies sitting upright as if an iron stake had tied them in their seating on the benches, “The smooth rear wall of the cave was about ten handspans away from their hollow eye sockets, in which the eyeballs had been reduced to mere grains of dust.” It should be noted that this is the image depicted by Plato’s Republic in the so-called Allegory of the cave, as Plato says through Socrates learnings:
“Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”
Cipriano also found the remains of cords that seem to have been used to stabilize their necks and prevent them from moving, and other cords hanging from their legs as well in compliance with the imagined image in Plato’s dialogue, and this is what Cipriano realizes in his discussion with his son-in-law afterwards: “Then he asked, Do you know what that is, Yes, I remember reading something about it once, replied Marçal, And do you know that, since that’s what it is, what we saw there has no reality, cannot be real, Yes, I do, And yet I touched the forehead of one of those women with my own hand, it wasn’t an illusion, it wasn’t a dream, if I went back there now, I would find the same three men and the same three women, the same cords binding them, the same stone bench, the same wall in front of them,”
The scene of life inside the cave is explained by Plato’s allegory. The people living there only see a small portion of the vast life outside the cave in the form of images and shadows cast by the fire on the wall facing them. This limited view of life also shapes their consciousness and ideas about life in general.
Going further into Plato’s dialogue, Socrates assumes that one of them somehow escapes the chains, and suddenly emerged from that strange situation inside the cave to be free to move his head as he wished, free to walk inside the cave as he wished, and even out into the light.
Naturally, the individual will experience excruciating pain at first from abrupt and unfamiliar movements in his body. He may also experience headaches, anxiety, and severe discomfort from the intense brightness of life outside the cave. However, he will be most fascinated by life in its broadest and most expansive sense, and it is possible that these newfound discoveries will drive him insane. On the other hand, upon his return to the cave to tell his five companions what he had discovered, and about the truth of the shadows that the fire reflected on the wall in front of them being false illusions, confusion will often be their only reaction, and perhaps even their constant belief that the shadows painted by the fire in front of them are ‘closer to the truth’ than those of their colleague, and perhaps their reaction extends to mocking him: They say that he did not ascend to the top, except to spoil their sight, and that reaching the heights is not worth the trouble.
History has documented the horrors faced by those who reached the intellectual world and tried to change the world of sight into what they reasoned. It is sufficient to recall that Socrates did not abandon his philosophy until he breathed his last when he was sentenced to death in 404 BC, and that Johann Friedrich Struensee was also executed at the age of thirty-four as a result of his attempts to carry out several large-scale reforms in Denmark in 1772. “So often with the ingenuous and the innocent, the malignant root of all the other reasons,” as mentioned by Saramago in his novel. It is also evident that good intentions do not necessarily mean reaching our goals, the road to hell is fraught with good intentions. It is worth noting that Saramago also had some early ideas and works of fiction caused him a lot of trouble in several jobs he held during his career. This theory or example is a condition for Plato in the conduct and path of seeking wisdom, whether in our private lives or in public affairs: “the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world.”
Plato’s theory is based on the distinction between the visible world or the physical material world in which we live, known to us through our sensations, and the intellectual world or the real world in which all the real things that are perfect exist, and these things are similar or not fully reproduced in our perceptible world. “In the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual ; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.”
Saramago’s intellectual system tends to have a state of intellectual world, in Plato’s words, that can be applied to the tangible world and be more equal among human beings. Unfortunately, he did not have a more integrated model to present as a way out or a solution to the dilemma, but he only pointed out the mistake: “Economic globalization and human rights are two incompatible elements, even incompatible to the extreme,” says Saramago. “We live in an era where, from the official point of view, human rights seem solid, respected, demanded and defended, but the reality is different. This may lead us to a dictatorship of a new kind, different from the previous one in that it is not like it clear, easy to monitor, allowing us to fight against it. Rather, it is hidden as a malignant cancer whose devastation we are unable to detect until it is too late.”
Despite the pessimistic outlook and Saramago’s statement that he sees this view as the chance to save us from the ominous world in which optimism indicates the absence of any sense or logic, he also admits to his own pessimism: “pessimism based on this idea; because reality is so bad, I will try within the framework of my ability to change it”, and if it is unchanged, at least he can point his finger and say: “Look, this is bad!” as he does with globalization and the contemporary economic system. He concedes that “non-stupid optimists are as good as non-desperate optimists, and that these two groups must come together to try to take our reality to a better place.”
Generally speaking, the most significant aspect of Plato’s allegory of the cave and Saramago’s cave experience, regardless of one’s preference of optimism or pessimism, is the realistic metaphor of life and the influence of reality on our perception of things that may be incomplete and limited. The fundamental idea in the cave is that what we see or are used to seeing may not be the truth but just deceptive shadows of the truth and assumptions depicted by one’s mind for what one does not perceive, just like Cipriano Algor was deceived by the limited options in his life, and his struggle and perseverance to survive and hold on after he was forced to quit pottery. We must wonder… Were our own ideas the product of the limited environment in which we grew up? Have we resorted to unreal assumptions because of this? Or is it an integral part of Plato’s journey in the search for truth, and in Cipriano Algor’s dignified life in the world that Saramago constructed?
References:
- José Saramago (1996) The History of the Siege of Lisbon.
- José Saramago (1976) The Notes.
- José Saramago (2000) The Cave.
- Plato’s Republic.
- Joumana Haddad (2007), Ṣuḥbat luṣūṣ al-nār (In the company of the fire thieves), Lebanon, An-Nahar Newspaper.
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