CEGUEIRA E LUCIDEZ: OS ENSAIOS DE SARAMAGO

Abstract

The Portuguese Jose Saramago wrote two novels whose headings point towards a dialogue between themselves. Essay on the blindness (or Blindness) (1995) and Essay on the lucidity (or Seeing) (2004), were written and published at different times, they distinguish from the set of the workmanship of this author about the title and the relation that they establish between themselves. These two novels are taken as the object of study of this work, that was executed through bibliographical research and using the methodology of comparative literature. The essay like a literary genre became known in Sixteenth Century, with Michel de Montaigne. The brevity is one of the characteristics of this text, which presents a discussion based in freedom of criticism, expressing the author´s point of view that the main target to instigate a new reflection on something that the reader already knows. It is composed with a level of language next to the colloquial, as it is itself a dialogue between the writer and its imaginary reader. These two essays of Saramago present a non-dramatized narrator who places himself physically in the space of the narrative. In Essay on the blindness, the narrator tells the events, in the middle of longs and constants digressions. In the second novel, Essay on the lucidity, the narrator restricts to show the events, limiting to the minimum use of commentaries. The narrator`s attitude establishes a deep distinction between the two Essays: it is this distinction that establishes the essayistic tone in Essay on the blindness and it distances Essay on the lucidity of the essayistic format. There is, between these two novels, a relation of intratextuality: Essay on the lucidity brings some elements of the first novel (the white color as symbol, the characters and the epidemic of blindness), and it constitutes a prolongation of the first narrative. Moreover, the terms blindness and lucidity, subject of each one of the novel, establish a semantic dialogue, that brings to the point the association between seeing, knowing and the main use of the reason. Saramago puts in dialogue the ideas of Plato, with his myth of the cave, and Descartes. The blindness is presented as the incapacity and/or impossibility of the human being contemporary in developing a full vision of proper itself around his environment. The author explores the lucidity as the capacity to reflect about the events and to react to modify what he does not consider satisfactory. Blindness and lucidity are situations that oppose and distance themselves. The lucidity would be the way to end up the blindness.