Notes on Saramago and Competing Contemporary Regimes of Literacy

I'm trying to read Jose Saramago's History of the Siege of Lisbon (in translation) and it's going terribly. For reasons I will try to figure out here, the great Portuguese novelist of the latter 20th century and I are just not getting along. I'm finding him verbose, inflated, orotund, periphrastic, at times almost comically so. Saramago is finding me unfocused, philistine bordering on savage, and above all an American of a particularly recent vintage—a person of short and shattered attention and out of temper with his timeline.

As far as I can tell, this growing mutual dislike is not the fault of the translator, at least not entirely. The older I get, the less I enjoy reading anything translated. Maybe it's not age, maybe it's that the more energy I put into trying to write decently in my native American, and also—living here in Portugal—the fewer daily encounters I have with the rhythms of the English language, which is to say that the more my life itself takes on the quality of a life lived "in translation," the less patience I have for translations of literary works. Okay, that last sentence turned into a half-spasmodic semi-conscious imitation of some of the things that are driving me up the wall about Saramago.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

The Proof-Reader has a name, he is called Raimundo. It is time that we should know the person about whom we have been talking indiscreetly, if name and surnames could ever add anything useful to the normal identifying features and other statistics, age, height, weight, morphological type, skin tone, color of eyes, whether the hair is smooth, curly or wavy, or has simply disappeared, timbre of voice, clear or harsh, characteristic gestures, manner of walking, since experience of human relationships has shown that, once apprised of these details and sometimes many more, not even this information serves any purpose, nor are we capable of imagining what might be missing.

This is a lot of words deployed in the service of not really saying anything, with the added bonus of elaborate syntax. The passage comes at a moment when the novel is still in its exposition phase—even after two chapters and a preface—and makes me feel like I am watching an enormous contraption being slowly cranked into juddering motion, a mule drawn Ferris wheel. The character is called Raimundo. That doesn't tell us much about him. Even if the author surrendered to conventional standards of realist description, well you wouldn't retain that either. But the author will show that he knows his business and will go ahead anyway and give you an exhaustive (but by no means complete!) list of all the things he is not going to tell you, just so the reader knows that the author knows and the author can really make sure that the reader knows that the author knows.

All of this is before we even get to the poor character's last name and middle name, which are similarly inflated:

…the surname that has never been mentioned, the one that is most esteemed, in this case Silva, his complete name being Raimundo Silva, for that is how he introduces himself when necessary, omitting the Benvindo, which he does not like. No one is satisfied with his lot in life, this is generally true, and Raimundo Silva, who above all else should appreciate being called Benvindo, which says precisely what it means, bem-vindo or welcome to life, my son, but no Sir, he does not like the name, and fortunately says he, the tradition has been lost whereby one's godparents settled the delicate question of proper names, although he recognizes that he is very pleased with Raimundo, a name which somehow conveys the solemnity of another age.

Okay, okay, this thing about “Silva” being most esteemed is a joke. It’s a thoroughly common last name here, like Smith. But please, “when necessary,” I don't have time for this shizzit: masturbatory literary performance art done with a studied formality that includes an 18th century aphoristic element that was old-fashioned even when the novel was written in the mid-1980s! I have three group chats buzzing on my phone, filled with memes and banter. I have a young cat who rarely lets me read three pages of prose without clawing my calves or poking his face into my face, so I have resorted to reading with book in one hand while swishing a plush-toy mouse on a string in the other. I have other deadlines! In the summer!! As a break, I tried taking the novel to the beach. I have delightful memories of a few weeks in Amagansett when I was in college, reading Ulysses to the sound of the Atlantic waves while wrapped up against the sun, but now I just want to lie with my eyes closed, hearing the waves, the cries of gulls and children, as the sun warms the remaining years of my shivering life until the inevitable carcinoma.

If, however, I take a deep breath and step back from my visceral alienation from this type of prose, I can try to make a good case for it, or rather I can make a case for why my feelings are beside the point. Most saliently, in Saramago's defense, is that he spent the better part of his adult life under Portugal's long fascist dictatorship. Literary works were subjected to censorship, citizens could be arrested, interrogated, and tortured for their associations, or for voicing anti-government sentiments. By the time Salazarism was overthrown in 1974, Portugal also had the lowest rate of literacy in Western Europe—as much as a quarter of the population couldn't read, by some estimates, and that fraction would have been higher among the landless, tenant-farming peasantry (Saramago's family background). Saramago himself was a member of the outlawed Communist Party, engaged in clandestine activities, and after a first novel published in 1947, published no fiction until the later 1970s.

Although the novel I'm quoting from, above, was written in the 1980s, the shyness and nervousness around identification, identity, and identifying marks, the idea that a character is being talked about "indiscreetly," the prose's essential defensiveness, the hedge-maze effect of the particular passage I cited that stands adequately for the hedge-maze effect produced by the novel overall, these are holdovers from a police state where descriptions were provided more often by informers than by writers.

The imposed silence of the dictatorship years also inflects both thought and prose in distinctive ways. If a writer is, in essence, locked away in a room, writing for the drawer, talking mostly to him or herself, the purpose of the sentence is changed: it comes to resemble thought or "stream of consciousness," which in turn comes to resemble the private thoughts of a private person condemned to an involuntary privacy, self-revising and auto-concessive, grasping for some kind of anchor in experience but seizing on generalities and clichés ("No one is satisfied with his lot in life"), all while veering between free indirect discourse and the dialogues of the multiple voices inside one's own head. From absence of audience, from a distrust of the existing potential audience (censors, authorities, judges, inquisitors, literary critics), the writing rebounds to actively turn away from its audience, treating them with a kind of contempt, but also with evasiveness. The author is running away from the reader. It's almost flirtatious, but in such a long-winded way that it doesn't even seem like flirting.

In contrast, American fiction from the same period (mid-late 1970s-1980s) adapted to the demands of the crowded market place by trying to seize the reader's attention and not let go. Literature wasn't just competing with itself but with cinema, television, stand-up-comedy, rock and roll and jazz—and developed its own stylistic compensatory neuroses—the lapidary minimalism of Carver, Pynchonian hyperbole (there's compression of a different kind at work when you start naming characters Oedipa), magical realist stunts, whatever you want to call Don Barthelme, and Mark Leyner, and Barry Hannah, and all the various iterations of boisterous "voice-driven" fiction in its pluralist glory that emerged in their wake, in which the writer is always hyper-conscious of "taking up space," of the demands on the reader's time and attention.

The historical and political differences between fiction writing regimes helps account for the mismatch of sympathies between Saramago and me, but only up to a point. On another deeper and more transhistorical level, my ear is reacting against Latin diction and rhetoric in general, but especially in translation and in Giovanni Pontiero's translation in particular (Maybe it is the translator's fault after all.) Latinate diction in English prose just registers differently. "It is time that we should know the person about whom we have been talking indiscreetly"—although the syntax is correct—just sounds foreign. "It is time that" is clearly a literal translation of a more idiomatic expression in Portuguese; "we should know" is also a literal translation, but the verb here really corresponds to "meet"; "about whom" is again correct but clumsy and a result of the failure to handle the Portuguese variant of a common verbal distinction between types of knowing: in this case it's "conhecer" (i.e. to meet or know a person, place, or thing rather than an abstract body of knowledge); "talking indiscreetly" could also be one word in English rather than two. So, in a less formal register, if you don't mind ending a sentence with a preposition: "Time for us to meet the person we've been gossiping about."

That said, for all I know, and here I'm hampered by my basically 4th grade Portuguese, Saramago's register might be excessively formal on purpose and the translator might have chosen to convey this at the cost of easier readability. As I adapt to Portuguese life, I'm beginning to realize that much of Portuguese culture requires an elaborate dance of formality and ironic formality used to signal an awareness that the speaker is both cognizant of and detached from convention. This is after all a language (in its European form) where you still address anyone outside your intimate circle of friends and family in the third person singular.

Unlike in France, where the "tu" that used to be reserved only for the most intimate relations now signifies a general baseline commitment to egalitarianism that holds more or less across the political spectrum, in Portugal, at least among people of a certain age, I get the impression that the formal mode still serves as a comfort and refuge, a necessary social lubricant that is simultaneously a boundary-marker, or a membrane through which many things may pass without the contamination of true intimacy.

Also, higher education here, as in Spain and France, retains the impress of centuries of Catholic scholasticism. There is no "middle style," barely a "conversational style." Literary language, like academic language, forms its own specialized register, signaled by certain tics of diction. I'm at a point where I can fuzzily see the outlines of how Saramago's text plays with these different types of Portuguese formal discourses: police reports, overly precise scholastic hair-splitting, the unnecessary adumbration of quasi-official documents, as well as Iberian ideas of "Literature" itself, trapped inside an inheritance of the Baroque, cut off from more freewheeling, democratic and market-based literary cultures that evolved elsewhere in "The West." I am not yet, however, culturally-assimilated or culturally-literate enough to enjoy it.¹

***

I could end these little reflections here. There's a voice in my head that says 1800 words is more than enough for a substack post, even if it feels like at least a third of them are Saramago's. At the same time, as I've been writing up these notes, I'm aware that there's something much stronger at the root of my impatience and dislike of History of the Siege of The Lisbon. My own default style—when I'm writing more or less automatically—tends toward long sentences, multiple subordinate clauses, lists, backtrackings within the sentence, a need to qualify and concede and oppose itself. I'm digressive but also blindly overconfident. I won't tell you how many times in composing this little piece I have thought "And here is the place where I can wedge in a clause about Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and how Auerbach's methods work not just across time but also synchronically (do I have to explain synchronically?). My writing clots while it tries to flow and its flow is a kind of clotting. Alone with a notebook I can be long-winded and it can take me a long time to figure out what it is that I want to say.

Some of this results from education, some from experience. I used to read a lot of literature in translation at an impressionable age: especially from German, Russian, and Spanish, often in antiquated or utilitarian translations. At the same age, I also read a lot of more latinate English language writers: Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, and later Henry James. Diction, like grammar, isn't something that's usually part of high school or college literature classes, so the wild and untutored ear fastens where it may and sometimes gets stuck there.

Although I never lived in a police state or under an official regime of censorship, a great deal of my early life was spent in isolation and for reasons I've written about elsewhere in an atmosphere of secrecy and paranoia. Writing was betrayal. It wasn't something a person did to make friends, to get approval, to become part of a scene, to enjoy life and receive accolades, money, attention. It was meant to hurt. The only thing I was encouraged to write were academic essays, carried out according to strict if horrifically boring MLA criteria.

My adult life as a writer, beginning really in my late twenties and early thirties, has been a long and unsteady process of unlearning those early lessons, of ridding myself of defensiveness, of the bizarre hope to build gorgeous, baroque word palaces I could hide inside, while ever-so-cautiously permitting a small part of my true self, or my still unformed personality to peek out. I still struggle with this, daily, and with everything I write. I was never American enough, as a writer, linguistically, culturally, possibly spiritually. Most days, in front of a notebook, I feel like a freak outlier product of a dream of European life on the streets of New York that is well past its expiration date.

My impatience with Saramago's novel in English arises from this impatience with this aspect of myself. Especially now, living here, a stranger in a strange land, cut off from the sources and feedback loops of American language and the reward-punishment matrix of American publishing—increasingly solitary and increasingly liking it—I'm aware of the possibility of a tempting reversion to a translated life in a written style that—out of my control—betrays its nowhereness via a clumsy, baroque and latinized English that nobody speaks and nobody wants to read, least of all, right now, myself.

1. The handful of author events I've attended here feature a critic or two delivering a learned (almost clerical) disquisition on the authors’ poems or essays while the author sits "present" like Marina Abramovic and reads no more than a sentence or two. This formality, almost a medieval relic of books put on trial before the Inquisition, obtained even at the ultra Left-Wing anarchist bookshop.