The Necessity of Error: History, Truth and Utopia in the novels of Jose Saramago

The projected book assesses the political philosophy of the 1998 Nobel Literature laureate José Saramago (b.1922) through original readings of his five historiographical novels, informed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Over the last twenty years, Saramago has become the most acclaimed contemporary Portuguese-language novelist, his books translated into over forty languages and his opinions reported by news media worldwide. As a lifelong political activist as well as a creative writer and essayist, Saramago is increasingly recognised as a key contributor to debates regarding literary representation, historiography, cultural identity, popular protest, and radical social and economic reform. Despite this burgeoning global reception, significant gaps exist in the critical bibliography on Saramago's work, and particularly in that part of it available in English. This focuses predominantly on the series of allegorical novels, commencing with _Blindness_ (1995), for which Saramago is best known outside Iberia and Latin America. Therefore, in addressing the growing demand for book-length studies of Saramago, my book foregrounds the sequence of novels that re-examine Portuguese history and that secured his fame in Portugal.
By exploring Saramago's responses to innovations worldwide in literary technique and cultural theory, my book will advance beyond the focus adopted in much existing criticism on historiographical theory and on specifially national literary and political contexts. It will thereby offer a fresh perspective on the seeming paradox that Saramago presents, as a writer who publically espouses a Marxist programme while his books advance a post-modernist interrogation of Marxism's epistemological and sociological premises.
The book will comprise an integrated sequence of close readings of the novels, starting with _Risen from the Ground_ (1980) and concluding with _The History of the Siege of Lisbon_ (1989). It will first identify how Saramago's recasting of the historical novel responds both to Marxist literary theorist's formulation of alternatives to 'socialist realism', and to the experiments of contemporary radical left writers in Europe and Latin America. It will then use contemporary anglophone and francophone cultural and political theory to identify the five novels' continuing international relevance as vehicles for a new philosophy and praxis for radical socialism. In particular, this study will identify Saramago's response to post-structuralist debates regarding the roles of desire and of gender and ethnicity in determining identity and social relations, and how this is central to his quest for an enhanced culture of radical politics.
The book will guide the reader through Saramago's historical, cultural and literary allusions, relating each novel's specifically Portuguese frame of reference to international contexts, and thereby illuminating continuities between them and his later, 'allegorical' fiction. Saramago himself has suggested that each of his novels can be considered a component of a single multi-volume text. My study will work towards a comprehensive reading of his literary project by exploring Saramago's ever more intricate intertextual allusion to his earlier works in each of his novels to demonstrate how each individual novel amplifies and refracts the political messages of the others. While primarily aimed at scholars of Portuguese and world literature, the book will thus also be of interest to specialists in political and cultural theory, by revealing how Saramago's ostensive focus on the past, and on the aspirations of a nation rediscovering its history and identity after decades of authoritarian rule, offers a nuanced and challenging contribution to contemporary radical left analyses and responses to the impact of neo-liberal economics and globalisation on cultural identity, civic and employment rights, democratic participation, self-Other relations, and ecology.