Todos os nomes

a lesson of the nouvelle histoire

Abstract

“The novel facing the essay” could be an alternative subtitle to this work, which proposes to put face to face a critical reading about the novel of José Saramago – All the names – and an essay from the same author, named “The statue and the stone”. In this essay, conceived from a retrospective angle, Saramago comes up with a metaphor to illuminate the structural foundations of his own literary works: the statue and the stone would represent two different moments of his work. Thus, All the names would be placed in the second phase, on “the stone’s side”, and as such it would not be considered as a “historical novel”, a polemic concept that Saramago begun to challenge at that time. Even though a stylistic turning point can indeed be perceived – the last novels are shorter, spatial and temporal frames, which were to a certain extent determinate in the first phase, get a universalizing dimension –, I choose to go against the flow and to propose some counterarguments against what seems to me too radical a cut in the fictional work of José Saramago.