As I already stated in the Diário de Notícias article of March 31st, and as I had the opportunity to emphasize in a comment to SIC, the fundamental question that the controversy over Saramago in the 12th year should raise has to do with the way we think about Education – and the teaching of Portuguese, specifically – in this country. The general attack that, in the USA and also in Europe, has been made on everything related to cultural memory, consolidation of cultural policies that provide citizens with a civic education worthy of the name, cannot be separated from the actual work policies that are underway.
Trumpism, as well as the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism in Europe and the world, the totalitarian temptation, the dictatorial tics of so-called democratic governments — this insidious way of placing and disposing, of commanding and dismantling that, increasingly, characterizes the actions of rulers —none of this can be ignored. If Sousa Lara, at the beginning of the 1990s, under the pretext of Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ greatly conditioned José Saramago’s recognition in what, years later, would be inevitable for him — the Nobel Prize for Literature —it is certain that the coexistence of this master of the Portuguese language with political powers was never peaceful. This is precisely the role of literature and, in the rare cases of authors who live it and give themselves to it body and soul, well-behaved literature will never make any sense.
But the discomfort that José Saramago can cause to political powers, whether because his novels are satires of Portuguese obscurantism (the caricature of D. João V in Convent Memorial and the censorious role of the Church and its historical responsibility in what we are as a people), either because they are deep and demanding probes into cultural and political eras, where the combat between art and politics is the backdrop of this or that intrigue (The Year of Ricardo Reis’ Death and Pessoa’s world of fiction vs. the eve of the Spanish Civil War, the suffocation of Portuguese fascism, the terror of Nazism in Germany), all of this that is — as in Essay on Blindness — an extensive allegory of the human world, where the only logic there is is that of the dialectical struggle between explorers and exploited, all of this is even more uncomfortable because it is sketched out and sublimated in novels where work with the Portuguese language reaches an extraordinary aesthetic level.
And this is the question that, in my opinion, we will have to debate, because José Saramago, like so many other great writers of our 20th century Literature, is a difficult author, a novelist who demands that each teacher have a special education. — far beyond degrees and vocational training in Teaching — scientific made rigor and awareness. Rigor regarding the ways in which a Saramago novel can and should be taught. Awareness of the fact that, in the act of reading Saramago, a teacher must have a wealth of essayistic readings on style, ideology, sources, in short, literary historicity itself, which, truth be told, is increasingly rare to have. And that is the crux of the matter: teacher training, in general, and Portuguese teacher training, in particular. Or, if you want: the Gordian knot of Education in Portugal lies in the merely instrumental, functionalist conception of the teaching profession.
The Portuguese teacher, faced with the challenge of teaching José Saramago, as well as any other content of a demanding curriculum that crosses troubadourism, passes through the theater of Gil Vicente, does not forget the chronicle of Fernão Lopes, places Camões as the axis of the canon, together with Pessoa and reaches authors such as Antero and Cesário, and, with this new curriculum review, calls upon Pascoaes, Natália Correia, Fiama, Luís Filipe Castro Mendes, among many other poets of the century XX; A teacher, he said, faced with the fair demand (in theory) of such a curriculum to be taught, what does he need? In addition to training in which there are trainers with a solid background in specialized essays, time is needed. Time to read essays by Maria Alzira Seixo, Óscar Lopes, Carlos Reis, Helena Buescu, Manuel Gusmão, David Mourão-Ferreira, António Ramos Rosa, Gastão Cruz, among many others, without whom it is not possible to read, with rigor and seduction, with the power of communication and with knowledge, whatever the work or author.
The teacher needs what successive teaching reforms have stolen from him: time to, in addition to reading the active bibliography of this or that author, read the passive bibliography. Time and freedom. Debureaucratize Teaching and invest in truly formative teacher training – how to read and why, how to teach Saramago, or Pessoa, Camões or Fiama, Natália Correia, Luís Filipe Castro Mendes, in short, how to teach Literature.
Now, the attack on an Education where time and knowledge, freedom and thought are the basic conditions – along with robust salaries, so that teachers can access cultural assets, primarily books! -, this is what is equally at stake when this curriculum review is left to public consultation
When it comes to reforming or revising issues in medicine, are these changes offered for general consideration? The same ministry that puts up for public discussion the option of teaching, or not, Saramago is the same ministry that does not consult high school teachers and asks for “technical assessments” from those who, most likely, have never taught in high school – and with current students, brutalized by the digital, orphans of any and all civic and cultural awareness.
Here is, as far as I am concerned, the final question and that Saramago — and his work — asks us: who are we?
Fernando Alexandre can even argue that there are many other writers besides Saramago. You can even use the cunning strategy of considering another author — Mario de Carvalho —who is also left-wing. But the question remains: José Saramago is a heritage that the school must teach because, in addition to the Nobel Prize, his art of language (“Literature is language loaded with meaning”, said Ezra Pound, who was not a leftist) and the fictional universes he proposes to us do what only great literature does: inquire about who we are.
Saramago’s novels – like those of Vergílio Ferreira, and which Apparition It was one of the most beautiful moments in the Portuguese discipline — cannot be optional for a simple reason: just as Camões condemns the elites for their ignorance and vampirism (stanzas 78-87, C. VII), just as Pessoa condemns the absurdity of Nothing in many of his orthonymous and heteronymous poems, Saramago is one of those very rare writers where memory, the arts, the condition that is both more Portuguese and human, is a matter of reflection at a time when the decapitation of language, insensitivity and bestial rudeness makes its way.
The ministry cannot order and dismantle — teachers should have been listened to. And the students, those who are illiterate due to two decades of official stupidity in exams that measure nothing about reading and writing, also deserve to read Saramago and learn how much literature is a world full of meaning.
The school needs memory, not cultural dilution. It needs to reduce bureaucracy, it urgently needs the teacher as a culture multiplier agent. What this Government wants: AI in classes and, ultimately, dismissing teachers, destroying schools, preparing the children of the poor to only know how to press keys, but never read and write, imagine and question. Saramago was well aware of this danger — That’s why he created uncomfortable literature.
Write without applying the new Orthographic Agreement.
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