When Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago died last year, he left behind an impressive array of novels that deserve all the praise they’ve received, and will deserve all the praise they’ll receive in the future. But the nature of Saramago’s approach to the novel form should be scrutinized in light of the current literary culture, which often seems obsessed with two polar opposite modes of writing, leaving a rich middle ground uncultivated.
Saramago’s most famous novel, published in 1995, is Ensaio sobre a Ceguerira, or Essay on Blindness, which was offered to the English reading public in 1997 with the one-word title, Blindness. In it, the citizens of a city that Saramago doesn’t name fall victim to an epidemic of “white blindness,” and the reader follows a group of central characters as the powers that be in the city fail to adequately deal with the situation.
Shades of Albert Camus
Compelling stuff, and in terms of powerful social commentary, comparable to another novel by another Nobel Prize-winner, Albert Camus’s The Plague, and in many ways more wonderfully written. Saramago’s unnaturally long yet masterfully coherent sentences suggest an undercurrent of controlled chaos and a whisper of hope for the stricken central characters.
But wait: mass blindness? Some would say that a literary novel suffers when stricken with science fiction. That’s not to say that science fiction, or anything involving heightened reality, is bad, but that Saramago, in Blindness, seems to be attempting to straddle a less than solid line between parables and fairy tales.
To switch to a broader picture, Blindness represents an enhanced realism that certain readers and publishers expect from serious novelists, while a novel such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which landed him on the cover of Time magazine, represents a straightforward realism that another brand of readers and publishers expect from serious novelists.
Michelangelo's "Double Pleasure"
So what about the ground in between? Of the many subtle or dramatic examples of fiction writers who have staked territory there, American writer Bernard Malamud deserves particular mention. Malamud, who died in 1986, received much recognition during his lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize, but doesn’t seem to be much talked about these days, perhaps because his novels can’t be neatly categorized.
To be sure, some of Malamud’s novels, such as The Assistant and A New Life, share a certain kinship with Franzen’s realism, but all of Malamud’s novels, especially the ones published in his later years, such as The Tenant and Dubin’s Lives, seem to skirt around and ahead of realism with their bursts of stylistic exuberance and sudden plot shifts.
In an essay called “The Contemporary Novel,” collected in Talking Horse—Bernard Malamud On Life and Work, edited by Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco, Malamud speaks of the later statuary of Michelangelo, in which “the figure barely steps out of the stone, and the sense of stone is part of the agonizing drama, the miracle of the “real” and imagined in one,” and goes on to say that “there is no reason why the contemporary writer of fiction should not give his readers the same conscious double pleasure.” (198)
Good fiction is a complex subject. To a large extent, both Blindness and Freedom could be said to swing between straightforward and heightened reality. Still, making such an argument is pretty difficult, whereas the novels of Bernard Malamud have “double pleasure” written all over them.
Source
- Cheuse, Alan, and Nicholas Delbanco, Talking Horse—Bernard Malamud On Life and Work, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996
Douglas Nordfors - Douglas Nordfors grew up in Seattle and graduated from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA). Before going on to ...
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