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Friday, August 15th, 2008
 Sorry about the lack of updates recently... someday soon I will start thinking about posting blog entries! I am loving Ricardo Reis, I think I will finish it this weekend, not sure what I will read next.
I am nearly done fixing READIN to be compatible with HostMonster, still just a couple of things to do -- like I can't post "What's of Interest" items on the sidebar, or update the blogroll, at least not consistently.* Timeline for finishing this is Tuesday, when I will have some free time and Internet access.
We are going away for a long weekend, to a place without Internet or even much of a cellular network -- and yet it is nearby! in northern Bucks County, PA -- and spend a few days relaxing. See you Tuesday!
 * If I could do these things, I would have: Added A History of New York to the blogroll, under "Literati"; updated Matthew Yglesias' link to point to his new site; posted an "of Interest" item that today is the anniversary of the Beatles' Shea Stadium concert. Without arena rock, we would not have Kansas, Styx, REO Speedwagon! Also, I would add a link under "Comix" to Bad Gods, which I see is publishing again.
↻...done
posted morning of August 15th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, August 14th, 2008
For several minutes he watched his courage desert him, it was like watching sand run through an hourglass, an overworked metaphor which nevertheless keeps recurring. One day, when we live two hundred years and ourselves become the hourglass observing the sand inside it, we will not need the metaphor, but life is too short to indulge in such thoughts...
This chapter, in which Ricardo's relationship with Marcenda moves a little closer to passion and Ricardo's relationship with Lydia moves a little closer to being taken for granted, has me wondering, why are all of the characters' actions so clearly marked as male or as female. Ricardo walking around Lisbon and around his room is identified as male -- "It is indeed true that a man on his own is useless" -- Lydia is identified as having a woman's eye (more specifically a female domestic servant's eye) for what needs to be cleaned up in Ricardo's room -- the nameless people in the rooms and buildings around them are doing things as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers.I've been noticing all along that gender plays a very important role in this narrative; fortuitously I read a post today at Is there no sin in it? which touched on the subject of "gender performance," how characters on TV shows act out their genders. I'd heard the term before but this was a very useful reminder -- it gives me a name for the way the characters in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are being depicted. I believe tentatively that gender performance, possibly interlocking with performance of Portuguese identity and of social class, is a major part of the meaning of this novel.
There are things we do automatically, our body, acting on its own, avoids inconvenience whenever possible, that is why we sleep on the eve of battle or execution, and why ultimately we die when we can no longer bear the harsh light of existence.
(Well, and to be sure there is a lot more going on than just gender or just gender and class and ethnicity.)
posted evening of August 14th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 11th, 2008
I'm seeing a lot of tropes in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis that will be repeated and magnified in Saramago's later work. For instance about halfway through the book Reis and Lydia (who are having an affair) have been talking for a little while, and Reis says,
...All I know about you is that you live here in the hotel, that you go out on your days off, that you are single and unattached as far as one can see, What could be better, Lydia retorted, and with these four words she wrung the heart of Ricardo Reis. It is banal to say so, but that is precisely how they affected him... We could go on in this manner multiplying words, adding them to the four already spoken, What could be better.... Lydia is about to leave, a clear indication of not having spoken at random. Certain phrases may seem spontaneous, a thing of the moment, but God alone knows what millstone ground them, what invisible sieve filtered them, so that when pronounced they ring like judgements of Solomon. The best one could hope for now is silence, or that one of the two interlocutors should depart, but people usually go on talking and talking, until what was for a moment definitive and irrefutable is completely lost.
-- And from here the conversation goes on, until what was definitive is lost. This seems to me to speak to Randolph's observations about the dialog in The Cave, that its realism stems from its fallibility and lack of direction. Saramago is laying out his thoughts about how conversation works, which will support his constructions of conversations in his later work.
 I am curious about where Saramago is going with the developing conflict within Reis, opposing Lydia and his earthy affection for her to Marcenda and his more cerebral attraction to her. The archetypal nature of this conflict is pretty superficially clear -- the narrator even mentions at one point, Marcenda is understood to be a virgin, and has Reis wondering whether he should pay Lydia -- but it's hard for me to see how it will add to the story and to the characters Saramago is describing. (As I write "more cerebral" I think Hm, that's not quite what I mean -- the distinction is not really between "earthy" and "cerebral" but rather class-based. Reis is socially above Lydia but in the same class as Marcenda. Lydia is attainable but not an appropriate match. I was trying to think of Reis' attraction to Marcenda as similar to Dante's attraction to Beatrice, but that is probably not going to be a productive line of thought.)
posted morning of August 11th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, August 10th, 2008
Midway through The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis I find Saramago stating his manifesto: ...Marcenda simply said, I am going up to put these things in my room and will come right down for a little chat, if you have the patience to bear with me and don't have more important things to do. We should not be surprised that Salvador is smiling, he likes to see his clients strike up friendships... Ricardo Reis also smiled, and speaking slowly, assured her, I would be delighted, or words to that effect, for there are many other expressions equally commonplace, although to our shame we never stop to analyze them. We should remember them, empty and colorless as they are, as they were spoken and heard for the first time, It will be a pleasure, I am entirely at your service, little declarations of such daring that they cause the person making them to hesitate, and cause the person to whom they are addressed to tremble, because that was a time when words were pristine and feelings came to life. [emphasis added]
This is, well, just delightful. This is written approximately 15 years before the comment in The Cave about stock phrases which I referenced last month, and it does not have the same tone of anger, but it's direction is most similar. The thought just crossed my mind, I wonder if the anger in the second passage is frustration at writing the same prescription for 15 years and fearing that it will never be followed... But I think probably not. Mainly this is giving me context for Saramago's habit of deconstructing cliché, which I had been thinking of as a fun and interesting verbal tic, that besides just having fun he is maybe practicing a sort of linguistic evangelism, trying to persuade people to listen to language as a quasi-religious experience. (That last sentence is pretty poorly formed, I'm not totally clear on what I'm trying to say. Look for me to try and clarify this a bit in the coming weeks.)
posted evening of August 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, August 4th, 2008
He thought that good literature is common enough, that there is scarce a dialogue on the street that does not achieve it. He also thought that the æsthetic act cannot be carried out without some element of astonishment, and that to be astonished by rote is difficult.
In the interests of understanding The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I pulled down Borges' Ficciones this evening to reread "An Examination of the Works of Herbert Quain" -- one of Quain's works is the misleading detective story The God of the Labyrinth, which Reis is reading early in the novel.I'm finding this, well, a lot of fun -- the degree of layering of fiction on fiction is really astonishing. (Particularly when Borges admits to having adapted one of his own stories, "The Circular Ruins," from a manuscript by Quain.) I'm waiting for personalities to emerge, but am confident they will; for the time being I'm just enjoying the technical beauty of the composition. It has been several years since I read any of Borges' stories; his mastery of language is washing over me again. I'm reacting to his voice in a way I never did before, which is to feel like Borges is a control freak who wants me to react to every word of his in a particular way, and is leaving no room for my own reading; not sure how valid this is, it's just a spur-of-the-moment thought.
 (According to The Modern Word, Saramago is not the only author to make use of The God of the Labyrinth. In Philip K. Dick's notes for a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, there is mention of Joseph Goebbels reading Quain's book.)
posted evening of August 4th, 2008: 2 responses
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Sunday, August third, 2008
How little they must have known him, to address him and speak of him in this way. They take advantage of his death, his feet and hands are bound. They call him a despoiled lily, a lily like a girl stricken by typhoid fever, and use the adjective gentle. Such banality, dear God. Since gentle means noble, chivalrous, gallant, elegant, pleasing, and ubane, which of these would the poet have chosen as he lay in his Christian bed in the Hospital of São Luís. May the gods grant that it be pleasing, for with death one should lose only life.
Starting The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis so soon after I finished The Cave I am really noticing something about Saramago's pacing; the last half of the book really pulls you along in a rush, where the first half is much slower and more open to stopping, starting, jumping back to a few pages previous. I think I have had similar experiences with Blindness and Seeing, as well.
posted evening of August third, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, August second, 2008
Meanwhile the guest returns to the reception desk, somewhat out of breath after all that effort. He takes the pen and enters the essential details about himself in the register of arrivals, so that it might be known who he claims to be, in the appropriate box on the lined page. Name, Ricardo Reis, age, forty-eight, place of birth, Oporto, marital status, bachelor, profession, doctor, last place of residence, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whence he has arrived aboard the Highland Brigade. It reads like the beginning of a confession, an intimate autobiography, all that is hidden is contained in these handwritten lines, the only problem is to interpret them.
The three books I have read so far by Saramago are all quite recent; now I am going back much further, to 1986's Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, one of the earliest of his major works. But it is instantly recognizable as the work of the same author based on his distinctive style and on his manner of expression -- I can't picture the construction "so that it might be known who he claims to be" coming out precisely that way from any other author's pen. This book is not translated by Margaret Jull Costa but by Giovanni Pontiero -- the similarity of voice gives me confidence in the abilities of both translators.I see Saramago's habit of deconstructing commonplace expressions coming through here, although the two examples I've noted in the opening pages -- "pay the fare" and another that I'm not finding now -- are not arresting in the way that I've found his later work. This book is set explicitly in Portugal, in Lisbon, unlike the anonymous countries and cities of his later books. I find that I have no preconceived image of Portugal! So I guess I will acquire one here.
Oh! I see now that Blindness was also translated by Pontiero; I had forgotten.
posted evening of August second, 2008: Respond
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Monday, July 28th, 2008
I was meaning to ask, what lessons can I take from The Cave? It is very clearly written with a pedagogical slant; it seems to me like Saramago intends for me to apply it to my own life. And I want, instinctively, to do so. But how? I guess I wouldn't say the lesson of Thelma & Louise is, running away and driving your car off a cliff is the appropriate response to an abusive relationship; but then I don't recall thinking of Thelma & Louise as a movie with a moral; and also an abusive relationship is not a problem that I have to deal with. Whereas here, it would be easy to say that the moral is, running away without plans, without regard for how you're going to support yourself or lead your life, is the appropriate response to alienation from the natural world caused by capitalistic expropriation of our experience of life, by the replacement of dreams with advertisements; and there is certainly room for the claim that this type of alienation is exactly the problem that I have to deal with. So where does that lead me except to running away, a solution that I've not found to be reliable in the past? The answer, I think, is that I should not focus on the final chapter of the book so much -- that I should look at Cipriano's style of living throughout the book as worthy of emulation, and treat the conclusion as a promise that if I live my life with this sort of honor and self-respect, I'll find connection and happiness. Which is at least a worthwhile self-deception.
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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No amount of sweetness today can diminish the bitterness of tomorrow.
Saramago has been telegraphing the lesson of the book -- that the public who resign themselves to the easy, isolated world of The Center, who choose for themselves/allow to be chosen for them mass-produced plastic dinnerware over Cipriano Algor's pottery, are blinding themselves to the beauty of reality in the same way as Plato's troglodytes -- pretty clearly and strongly, beginning early in the book and getting quite explicit toward the end. And that's not even a particularly new point -- it would be difficult for me to come up with names of books where I've read this kind of thing before but it seems pretty commonplace to me. So in a way, the book should seem sort of like a train wreck, grinding inexorably toward a conclusion you already know.And yet: somehow that is not at all what the experience of reading the book is like. It is not only beautifully written, it is also surprising for all you have a pretty good idea going in, what the general structure will be. When Cipriano says, "Those people are us," my impulse was to say "Well duh" -- but when he says a few sentences later, "You must decide what to do with your own lives, but I'm leaving," my reaction was one of palpable relief. Saramago has crafted his story well enough that I am included in its ups and downs almost despite myself. I'm a little torn about the ending. It has a certain Thelma & Louise quality to it that feels like it might be less true to the characters than is the rest of the novel. I see Saramago called deeply pessimistic, and there is a lot of darkness in the world of his books; but this ending is so optimistic that I would call it romantic.* And, well, in a way I guess I'm grateful to him for that. I'm glad my memory of the novel will be of Cipriano's and Marta's and Marçal's rebellion from The Center, of Cipriano's and Isaura's tears of reunion rather than of Cipriano's bleak, lonely tears. I'm not sure how this affects the philosophical message of the book though -- if the only way you can rebel from The Center is to turn to romantic fancy, how much real hope is there?
 * The ending of Blindness is also, certainly, hugely optimistic; but the darkness of Seeing keeps me from thinking of the first book as romantic.
posted evening of July 28th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, July 25th, 2008
It is not worth describing what Cipriano Algor thought about because he had thought it on so many other occasions and we have supplied more than enough information on the subject already. The only new thing here is that he allowed a few painful tears to run down his cheeks, tears that had been dammed up for a long, long time, always just about to be shed, but, as it turned out, they were being reserved for this sad hour, for this moonless night, for this solitude that has not yet resigned itself to being solitude. What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in the history of fables and in the history of the marvels of the canine race, was that Found went over to Cipriano Algor to lick his tears, a gesture of supreme consolation which, however touching it might seem to us, capable of touching hearts normally not given to displays of emotion, should not make us forget the crude reality that the salty taste of tears is greatly appreciated by most dogs. One thing, however, does not detract from the other, were we to ask Found if it was because of the salt that he licked Cipriano Algor's face, he would probably have replied that we do not deserve the bread that we eat, that we are incapable of seeing beyond the end of our own nose.
A dog licking tears from the face of a crying human is a central image in Saramago's work, as much as I've read of it so far anyway. And it is touching -- the other times I've read sequences like this, they have touched me as symbolizing the depth of connection between the dog and his master. But another way of looking at it that is occurring to me now, is how painfully lonely, to be weeping in a place where there is no other person present.
(The clause after "truly not a novelty" strikes me as funny in a sort of self-referential way -- it could be rendered, "What was truly not a novelty, because it had happened before in books I have written,...")
posted evening of July 25th, 2008: 4 responses
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