You have to be a little charitable to the Latin world for their misperceptions. They were the Cold War's most obvious collateral damage. Whether controlled by right-wing or left-wing dictators, Africa was always going to be fucked. But the Latin world, both in America and Europe, had a long and illustrious democratic tradition that, so the world might live on to the twenty-first century, America betrayed. Were all those double crosses worth it? Well... the world still exists in the 21st century, and that was far from guaranteed in the 20th. But obviously no one should have to be put in the position of the sacrificial lamb. Try explaining to literally hundreds of millions of people that they had harder lives so that billions of others may have better ones.
The world is what it is: a tragic place where a few people succeed by stepping over the rest of us. All we have left for each other is solidarity in our suffering, and even if it's an incredibly destructive belief, nobody can wonder how millions of people get convinced that the only way out is the universal solidarity of communism any more than the universal brotherhood of Christianity and Islam.
Jose Saramago was literally born to the most abject poverty. His parents had absolutely nothing, he had no means for higher education, yet he became, at least that I've read, one of the half-dozen greatest novelists of the twentieth century's second half; whose books are chocked full of the most detailed recreations of distant historical periods, and also completely comprehensible to the lay reader in a manner that, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is perhaps not. And all this in spite of the fact that he writes in sentences that are often a hundred or more pages long! Such was the power he held over readers that while becoming a great novelist at sixty, he won the Nobel Prize only sixteen years after his first fame.
And yet he was also a terribly vociferous Communist who doubled down ever more as the truth of Communist regimes became ever more impossible to refute. Whatever Western Communists still believed in the Soviet utopia by the late 60s, the Soviet tanks crushing the Prague Spring in '68 put an end to that notion. Yet Saramago joined the Communist party in 1969! And of course, there's this charming bit of op-ed from Saramago:
"Contaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God … the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.’”
What kind of intelligent person comes to conclusions that insane against that much evidence?
Well, you can try telling a clearly imbalanced person of genius that the Portuguese dictator under which he lived thirty-five years was, in fact, the most benign dictator of the twentieth century - but Salazar was still a dictator climbing over his citizens to create what Time Magazine once referred to as the 'perfect autocracy.' In spite of all Salazar's crimes, it was at least bit of a paradise compared to what was going on elsewhere in Europe. Is it any wonder that Saramago might have unwittingly convinced himself that dictatorship itself wasn't so bad, and perhaps the only problem with dictatorship is to whose benefit the dictatorship is directed?
And anyone who's read Baltasar and Blimunda sees that Saramago speaks out at the Inquisition's auto-da-fe's and treatment of Jews in no uncertain terms, which continues in his depiction of Jews' mistreatment by Romans in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - to say nothing of the Jews' mistreatment by God... There's no way a person publishes a quote like the one above and isn't a virulent antisemite, but just as millions of traditional antsemites came to their misdirected points of view by living through their own traumatic oppressions, so too have many far left-wingers even to this day come to their views by trauma (as well as far right-wingers).
Saramago is a different sort of antisemite who often writes about Jewish history with enormous sympathy. Sometimes, antisemitism and racism is a symptom of a larger problem, like the authoritarianism of Wagner and Dostoevsky. Sometimes, antisemitism and racism seems due to the narcissism of small differences, in which the artist stands so close to the subject that they can't help but feel a kind of revulsion to the amount their achievement owes to to a peoplehood that is not theirs, and they come to hate their dependence on the very people to whom they owe the most. Like Saramago, this is the antisemitism of Mussorgsky and Gogol.
It may seem like a paradox, but generally speaking, writers who see the world accurately write mediocre fiction. You need a unique perspective, you need a slant, you need to see things nobody else sees. VS Naipaul, one of the other great novelists of the 20th century's second half, was a native Trinidadian who was completely on the side of the imperialists. Willa Cather, probably my pick for America's best novelist, was a far-right conservative and antisemite, nearly pro-dictatorship, who also happened to be a lesbian. Isaac Bashevis Singer was one of the few born to the world of the Shtetl who survived the Holocaust. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy? Do we really need to elaborate on their uniqueness? Kafka's? George Eliot's? Make your own list... To write greatly, the genius always needs to be there, but so does the uniqueness that makes the writer a little bit loopy. No writer can write convincing non-fiction if their perception of the truth is false, and therefore the best writers of fiction often live in a world that seems like fiction.
And then, of course, there's Blindness, the dark, dark fable of a world literally gone blind, and how quickly the world turns in on itself. It's a modern myth, an extraordinarily dark one, and no one who's ever read it has forgotten it. What, if anything, does the blindness mean? And in our era of pandemic, what lesson have we learned about a world where everybody undergoes the same misfortunes? And are the worst lessons we're to be taught yet to come?
But my favorite of Saramago's novels is one somewhat savaged in the press: The Double, which of course has to compete with Dostoevsky's novella of the same name, and of course, has a somewhat similar plot. A man rents a movie and sees a minor character actor who looks and sounds exactly like him. He finds his double, stalks him, and both characters, in their different ways, go insane.
Saramago's novels, all of them that I've read anyway, seem to be parables as well as straightforward modern folk myths. So what does it mean in this world to find out that you're not unique? I've read it suggested that it's a metaphor for how dictators try to take our unique identities and form us into an indistinct mass. That doesn't strike me as a personal enough interpretation to do most of us much good. If it's about anything at all, I think it's about how the very act of living in the world forces us to confront the similarities between ourselves and others, and we often react to those similarities in disgust - which is, in many ways, Saramago's relationship to Jews.
My relationship to Saramago is ongoing, and there are ten novels in the productivity of his late flowering. I've gotten to exactly four so far, and three of the four are among my favorite books. Sometimes you just want to savor it and put it off, in part because you don't want to reach the end of the series, and in part because the experience is so intense that you only have the emotional capacity for them at certain points in your life. We all have writers like that.
Every lover of art has taboos they embrace in spite of themselves. I've spoken to women who love Philip Roth, gay people who love Hemingway, black people who love Flannery O'Connor. Hatred fuels obsession at least as much as love, and for better or worse, an artist who hates a certain group of people can often be among its most perceptive writers precisely because their negative portrayal can expose facets of our lives we prefer to pretend aren't there, but they are.... Every peoplehood has its ugly side. Part of why I love Saramago is that in spite of being an antisemite, he writes on themes that are so clearly Jewish--and in spite of its critiques, his books are still filled with astonishingly detailed depictions of Jewish history, of Jewish suffering, the Jewish god, and Jews themselves.
This is what we lose when we insist on only reading writers who conform to our preconceptions, and I wouldn't trade the experience of Saramago for all the properly liberal democratic fiction writers in the world.
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