When I was a lad and had not yet learned to beware the faux amis lying in wait for me in the playground of the French language, I imagined that the term la nouvelle vague meant not "the new wave" but something like "the new vagueness." La nouvelle vague was the term used for the new young cin?tes, Truffaut, Resnais, Godard, and the rest, but in my mind, presumably because of the faux-homophony between nouvelle and novel, it came to apply also to practitioners of the nouveau roman such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, and Nathalie Sarraute, those bright but distant stars in my slowly expanding literary firmament. "The new vagueness" seemed to me to describe very well the work of these writers, with its wilfully jaded dynamics, its studied aversion to specifics, its degree-zero style.
I acquired an image of the quintessential postmodern European novel. There would be a faceless anti-hero, trudging the avenues and squalid back alleys of a nameless city, following some mysteriously ordained quest which he knows he can neither complete nor abandon, and which is, anyway, merely a metaphor for the real task in which he is engaged-the search for an identity. Even the pages of this ur-roman would have a characteristic look: high and narrow and somehow tottery, with squeezed margins, few paragraph breaks, and no passages of dialogue where in more conventional tales the weary reader could pause to paddle in the shallows.
All very earnest, all very enigmatic, and all maddeningly vague. This kind of novel is still being written in mainland Europe. Every year it wins one of those little-known but highly lucrative literary prizes offered by this or that foundation with affiliations to the EU. Some of these novels even deserve a prize. Some of them are even read, or at least bought, by surprisingly large numbers of people. But it is all a far, far cry from the glory days of the European novel, when a new work by Thomas Mann or Alberto Moravia or G?ter Grass would set the Sunday supplements humming with excitement.
Fiction in Europe is now generally an etiolated, unassuming, apologetic affair, a tired voice out of what seem exhausted cisterns. Opening José Saramago's All the Names, with its severe, oddly punctuated pages, each one tall and almost as black as the monolith in 2001, one might be forgiven a small sigh of foreboding. Despite the many graces of All the Names, such an initial response to it would be not entirely unjustified.
Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. He left school early and worked as a mechanic, a draughtsman, a civil servant, and in publishing. When he was 25 he published a novel, without success, and his literary career did not begin in earnest until he was in his mid-forties. He produced three volumes of poetry, he was a journalist and translator, and then he published his second novel, the wonderfully titled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (imagine the confusion in bookshops and libraries). In 1988, his novel Baltasar and Blimunda appeared in English, and the following year he had a modest success in the English-speaking world with what is perhaps his best-known, if not his best, novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Other works have followed, including The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and the extraordinary Blindness. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998.
The finest of these books are The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis and Blindness. The former is a sort of Portuguese Ulysses, and it can probably only be fully appreciated, as Saramago himself has suggested, by readers who are themselves Portuguese; it calls for considerable knowledge of Portugal's history. Ricardo Reis was one of the many pen-names-or better say, one of the many identities assumed by the elusive Portuguese poet and aphorist Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Much of the novel is an account of meetings and conversations in Lisbon in the 1930s between Reis and his creator, who, when the narrative opens, has recently died.
Yes, it is that kind of book. But Saramago here avoids the risible portentousness of so much fantastical fiction which has emerged in recent years from South America and, especially, from the Indian subcontinent. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis bubbles with underground laughter, and despite the absurdity of its central premise-a deceased writer conversing at length with an invented version of himself, which would have been unbearably whimsical in the hands of a lesser writer, it keeps its feet firmly set on that mundane ground where the novel is at its strongest.
Saramago has a light, graceful, ironical touch, and he maintains a welcome restraint in his use of the paraphernalia of magical realism. He is well aware that, contrary to popular notions, one of the novelist's primary duties is to keep his imagination under tight control. In fantastic fictions, what is presented as exuberance is often merely unruliness. The rule of magical realism is that there are no rules. When you can say anything, however, the danger is that you will do exactly that-say anything. The inventor of magical realism did produce a masterpiece, but the judicious critic might say of One Hundred Years of Solitude what TS Eliot said of Finnegans Wake: one book like this is enough.
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is moving, wise and in places slyly funny. But there is not much fun to be had in Blindness, a dystopian account of what happens when everyone in the world suddenly goes blind, with the exception of one woman: suitably enough, the wife of an ophthalmologist. There is an awful inevitability to the descent into anarchy and internecine warfare which the book traces, but Saramago resists the temptation to indulge in Burroughs-esque grotesqueries. Here are perfectly ordinary people struggling to cope with total catastrophe-or, at the other end of the human scale, seizing the opportunity to indulge their basest urgings.
Saramago's latest novel, All the Names, is the story (if that is the word) of a lowly clerk working in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths who embarks on a search to locate a woman whose birth certificate finds its way by accident into "his extensive collection of news items about people in his country who, for good reasons and bad, had becomes famous." The clerk's name is Senhor José. We are assured that he also has surnames, but everyone, including his creator, knows him simply as Senhor José. In fact, he is the only character in the novel who is given any kind of name; all the others are identified simply by what they are or what they do. One supposes this is meant to Mean Something. Are we back to the quest for identity?
Senhor José lives in a small, shabby house attached to the central registry, to which he has direct access through his back door. In the registry there is a strict hierarchy of command: at the bottom are Senhor José and his fellow drudges, at the top is the remote and Olympian registrar, "who knows all there is to know about the kingdoms of the visible and the invisible." Under the withering and all-seeing eye of this potentate, Senhor José goes in search of the "unknown woman." He identifies the school where she was a pupil, and breaks into it at night in search of her records-a mournfully funny episode-and from there he goes on to discover where she lived, learns that she married and then divorced, and that she was a teacher at her old school. At last, at a genuinely startling juncture in the narrative, he learns that she is dead, and by her own hand. This does not deter Senhor José - a hapless Orpheus who will follow his unknown Eurydice even into the land of the dead.
All the Names is a curious mixture of the portentous and the absurd. It has echoes of Borges, Beckett, and, of course, Kafka; but its voice is distinctive and thoroughly its own. Despite the reticence of tone and the lugubrious nature of the action, the reader will have an unflagging sense of something profound going on just beyond the limits of comprehension. The book is modernist rather than postmodernist-or humanist rather than post-humanist. Saramago, for all his elusiveness and sly humour, is concerned that we should understand and appreciate the deadly seriousness of the quest on which his protagonist has embarked, and which, it seems, will never be brought to an end except by death.
In the course of a long address to his staff, the registrar provides a motto that his clerk might carry with him on his errantry: "Just as definitive death is the ultimate fruit of the will to forget, so the will to remember will perpetuate our lives." I do not know exactly what this pronouncement, and many like it, may signify, but they seem to signify something worth knowing. When Senhor José finally gains access to the unknown woman's empty apartment, the narrative delivers what seems both a valediction and a validation: "Here lived a woman who committed suicide for unknown reasons, who had been married and got divorced ... who, like all women, was once a child and a girl, but who even then, in a certain indefinable way, was already the woman she was going to be, a mathematics teacher whose name while she was alive was in the central registry, along with the names of all the people alive in this city, a woman whose dead name returned to the living world because Senhor José went to rescue her from the dead world, just her name, not her, a clerk can only do so much."
What can any of us do, Saramago seems to be saying, except-like the unknown woman, like Senhor José himself - leave a few scribbled signs for those who come after us to read as best they can? But if this is so, then surely it must also be our duty to make the meaning of our signs as tangible as possible for those who come after us. Otherwise, all we will have done is put impediments in the way of the blind. Vagueness may be fashionable, but clarity is timeless.
Adapted from a piece in "The New Republic" ©2001 www.tnr.com
