Saramago, between utopia and dystopia (meta-physics)

Abstract

In the case of prominent authors of dystopias like Zamyatin and Orwell, there was a contradiction between their respective political positions and actions, very close to Marxism, and their descriptions of two societies subjected to a dictatorial alienation inspired by totalitarian regimes of opposite signs (communism and fascism), but contemporary. José Saramago never ceased to affirm his Marxist affiliation, although he always opposed any kind of “partisan literature”. He also rightly stated that when he defined himself as an atheist he felt obliged to clarify that he had “a Christian mentality, I can have no other mentality than that”. Both references carry implicitly, as beliefs or ideologies, a utopian and not a dystopian impulse, which explains the singularity of several of his novels as belonging to the contemporary cycle or trend cultivated by the aforementioned Russian and English novelists, seconded, among others, by Aldous Huxley and Wladimir Nabokov. Dystopia, for Saramago, was all the negation of the highest foundation of the liberating humanism that had always guided his worldview. Humanism present par excellence in a fundamental character, the heroine of Essay on Blindness that will reappear as an expiatory victim in Essay on Lucidity.