The inside of the stone in characters from Raised from the Ground

Abstract

José Saramago’s novel Raised From the Ground, according to the language used by the author himself to divide his work into two major phases, belongs to the cycle of the description of the “statue,” not to that of the “stone.” Without essentially disagreeing with this division, which is useful for understanding the author’s writing as a whole, I seek to demonstrate how in this novel published in 1980 there is no lack of moments of shared communication between the statue and the stone, that is, between outer, collective, and historical realities, and inner, personal realities. To do so, I focus on characters such as Domingos Mau-Tempo, João Mau-Tempo and José Calmedo, whose moral-ethical properties are the irradiations of an interiority that José Saramago knows how to reveal and evaluate with rare sharpness.