Forms
of Social Transmission and the Making of the Public Self in Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Khalida Ahmed
Khalida Ahmed is a Research
Scholar at the Department
of English, Gauhati
University, Guwahati.
Abstract
Jose Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of
Ricardo Reis (1984) offers interesting insights into the way the individual
self interacts in and with public space, not through responses alone, but by
means of the exploration of the possibility of relating the heteronymic selves
that the Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) released in the
early twentieth century. The novel also presents different dimensions relating
to the functioning of media in the contemporary world by placing the figure of
Ricardo within that publicly discernible space so as to contextualize the forms
of social transmission that took place. Saramago’s narrative is both playful
and probing in the manner in which the representation moves across the
realistic and the imaginary planes. This paper looks at the nature of this
interaction between the selves and examines the ways of reading how such
configurations are opened up for reception in society.
Keywords: Public Space, Heteronymic Selves, Identity, Social
Transmission, Media.
Situated in the time-track of the 1930s, Jose
Saramago’s The Year of the Death of
Ricardo Reis (1984) takes on the processes of self-making and social
formation through the figure of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) who was one of the
greatest writers to emerge from Portugal in the twentieth century. Pessoa is
known to have experimented with the construction of ‘social selves’, a process
through which he constructed individuals
with clearly defined personal histories – each figure having a specific
background and personality. This was not confined to the individual – Ricardo
Reis is such a ‘construction’ whose visibility in the social media of Portugal
in the 1930s was a reality – and he was programmed by Pessoa to operate
independently with a very different time chart and operative mechanism.
The 1930s also saw a lot of turbulence in Portugal,
which was not merely political, but deeply embedded in the social fabric of the
time. The creation of a figure such as Ricardo was not only an exercise in the
process of making a doppelganger – a
veritable double – but also a simultaneous exercise in exploring ways of
understanding public reception in relation to how one is seen or perceived in
society. We can see this to be part of a normalizing mechanism in today’s
Internet-driven ethos where multiple accounts across different social media
platforms are taken for granted. Having Facebook and Instagram accounts where
the similarity index is authenticated through
the means of difference insofar as
that the same self appears to possess alternative dimensions depending on the
platform one is situated in. The different ‘selves’ that Pessoa created in the
public space were not, in his estimation, unreal
characters, they were people whose situations were independently governed by
who they were. Pessoa refused to submit to the view that the figure of Ricardo
Reis was just another name he adopted: he contended that Ricardo was a wholly
realized individual self with his own history and space in public space and
memory. In the representation of Ricardo, Saramago follows this pattern created
by Pessoa to articulate questions of identity and space. As Mary J. Daniel
points out in her assessment of the narrative design of The Year of the
Death of Ricardo Reis:
Throughout the novel there emerges a pattern of
searching for a definitive sense of place as Ricardo Reis, the wandering
Lusitanian who has at last returned home, readapts to the changing context of
the city he left so many years before. (Daniel 36)
The examination of the circumstances is important
here. Saramago makes Ricardo appear in Lisbon following the ‘biography’ of this
Pessoan figure, but does so in a way that enables him to look at both the
author and the heteronym on the same spatial plane. Ricardo comes to Lisbon to
experience the ways of the city after a period of sixteen years which makes him
conscious of the gaps that exist between his understanding and contemporary
reality. In looking at the various dimensions of this identity equation,
Saramago makes use of the platforms of media to address the circumstances in
which his characters are placed. In this configuration of Reis in the public
space, Saramago draws on the nature of the imagination with which Pessoa
created each of these heteronymic selves. In this context, the elucidation of
George Mahr sheds light on the matter: “Pessoa’s story illustrates the
importance, and even the benefits, dissociation may have for creative
experience....For Pessoa, then, heteronyms solved the problems that modernist
self-awareness posed, by allowing him to write traditional, sensual verse that
was nevertheless ironically self-aware” (Mahr 34). Configured to represent
Ricardo as a man occupying the public imagination, Saramago places him in a
world where he is part of the larger social fabric. Social media in the 1930s
was constituted by the newspaper, and that is where we can find this process
being played out so well.
Of the many challenges that The Year of the Death of Reis pose, perhaps the one most striking
is that of inaccessibility, and it is not quite denial that blunts attempts to
‘know’, it is the configuration scheme where the chain of discourse binds each
one – Ricardo Reis, Fernando Pessoa and Jose Saramago – in a dialogic matrix
where the interpenetration is never completed, something that remains in
process. If the non-materiality of Ricardo as a historical figure is considered
as a frame he cannot free himself from, Saramago does not clarify such
boundaries in water-tight markers. At the height of the European crisis of the
1930s, and the Spanish Civil War impacting the entire Hispanic world, Ricardo
shuts himself off, or rather aspires to, but as Saramago chronicles it, that
does not quite happen: “The world’s threats are universal, like the sun, but
Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow, What I do not wish to know
does not exist, the only real problem is how to play the queen’s knight. But
reading the newspapers, he forces himself to worry a little, Europe is seething
and perhaps will boil over, and there is no place for a poet to rest his head”
(Saramago 319-20).
This act of reading the newspaper is what is used by
Saramago to place the heteronymic conundrum square upon its head early on in
the narrative:
Ricardo Reis goes to the newspaper archives, where
everyone must go to…The unexpected death of Fernando Pessoa caused much sadness
in intellectual circles…In his poetry he was not only Fernando Pessoa but also
Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis. There you are, an error
caused by not paying attention, by writing what one misheard, because we know
very well that Ricardo Reis is this man who is reading the newspaper with his
own open and living eyes, a doctor forty-eight years of age, one year older
than Fernando Pessoa when his eyes were closed, eyes that were dead beyond a
shadow of doubt. (Saramago 24)
The narrator of Saramago takes this long telescopic view of history
addressing both experiences of reading the newspaper with the shadow as a
hovering presence in the scheme of things.
How is this to addressed? One critic has referred to
it as Pessoa’s “theatre of the self” (Zenith 47) so as to accommodate the modes
of understanding the presence of Ricardo in the public world. It is necessary
to see that these figures that Pessoa creates acquire validity through the
process of public documentation in the social media of that time. In a poem
written in 1926, ‘Ricardo’ contends that it is the very process of navigating
the mediated world which creates problems for man in society:
How great a sadness and bitterness
Drowns our tiny lives in chaos
How often adversity
Cruelly overwhelms us!
Happy the animal, anonymous
Which grazes in green fields and enters
Death as if it were home;
Or the learned man who, lost
In science, raises his futile, ascetic
Life above our own, like smoke
Which lifts its disintegrating arms
To the non-existent heavens. (Reis 300)
The circulation of poems like these in the socially inscribed space
creates the possibility of approaching the figure of Ricardo Reis as an
individual. These lines from the poem appropriately draw attention to the difficulty of navigating through social
media with the anonymity of the
animal or the isolation of the recluse. In spite of the fact that the
configuration of Ricardo was done in the 1930s, Pessoa anticipates much of the
activities and interpenetrations of the digitally determined world today where
the idea of the self is under the constant glare of social media.
Helena Kaufman comments on how Ricardo’s situation
suggests a wider paradigm at work, something that addresses vital questions of
identity and social presence in modern Portuguese history. In this context,
Kaufman writes how perceptions “are characterized by an internal logic and
‘realism’ of presentation and constitute alongside myths and legends, also
evoked throughout Saramago’s texts, one more form of recuperating the minor
within history” (Kaufman 178). It is important to situate and contextualize the
figure of Ricardo in the Pessoan scheme for the critical placement of his
priorities. Helena Carvalhao Buescu rightly points out that the orientation of
Ricardo is that of a Classicist: “Reis was a classicist formally trained as a
physician, and all his poems incessantly repeat the typical crossing between
Epicureanism and Stoicism that Horace’s odes, from whom Reis draws so deeply,
displayed” (Buescu 75). The manner in which Ricardo is projected as having
interest in newspapers is fascinatingly evoked in Saramago’s narrative. The
opening pages of the novel shed light on the process of characterization that
Saramago employs in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. When Ricardo
arrives in Lisbon from Brazil after a long gap of sixteen years at the very end
of 1935, the newspaper serves to span out developments that present more than
the previous day’s events.
The narrator’s historically attuned eye traces the
information in print as a visibly tired Ricardo moves across planes of personal
memory and social history to mark out a frame of reference for which the
newspapers serve as the veritable index. In the narrative, the newspaper
facilitates a chain of recollections which cover the social landscape of the
times very well. Saramago’s narrative process encompasses a wide variety of
cultural registers in the course of the representation. The attention given to
history and the lateral placement of contemporary developments alongside
Ricardo’s playful erasure of the self may appear surreal but the frame of
realism is consistently maintained. It is important to consider the opening
sequence of the novel to place the representation of newspapers in the scheme
of things, especially in the way it plays a part in the subsequent
characterization of Ricardo Reis. As he settles down in the hotel room during
his first night in Lisbon on his return from Brazil, Ricardo’s responds to the
newspapers not just as them being documents of events that had taken place the
previous day; he also sees in them the possibility of connecting his experience
of the place and time which enables him to examine the social and cultural
dimensions of Lisbon with fresh eyes:
These are the newspapers of my native Portugal, they
inform me that the Head of State has inaugurated an exhibition in honour of
Mousinho de Albuquerque at the Colonial Office, one is not spared imperial
commemorations or allowed to forget imperial personages...The fifth national
contest for beautiful babies, half a page of photographs of infants, stark
naked, their rolls of puppy fat bulging, nourished on powdered milk. Some of
these babies will grow up to become criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes,
after being photographed like this, at such a tender age, before the lewd eyes
of those who have no respect for innocence….At the Coliseu they are showing The
Last Wonder with Vanise Meireles, a statuesque figure clad in silver, a
Brazilian celebrity. Funny, I must have missed her in Brazil, my fault. Here in
Lisbon one can get a seat in the gallery for three escudos, a seat in the
stalls costs five escudos and up, and there are performances daily and matinees
on Sundays. (Saramago 17-18)
The survey and the sweep of the newspapers by Ricardo
opens up diverse platforms – from photographic displays that document a contest
for babies to the performances that occupy the public imagination at that time.
What is noteworthy here is the attendant commentary that Ricardo places
alongside the news that he faces; he speculates about the nature of the future
that awaits the ‘babies’ as they move ahead in life, imposing upon them the
possibility of following the general pattern of human behaviour and growth. It
is interesting to see that Ricardo takes a long view of things, which may have
to do with his Classical orientation. But Ricardo the poet and the person are
not conceived as being unanimous in the way they perceive things. That is why
this distinction between the two selves of Ricardo becomes so strikingly
apparent. The poet who drew his inspiration from Classical writers such as
Horace in the shaping of his craft was not really objective in
approaching the world. This point is repeatedly made by Saramago in the course
of the novel. The manner in which the newspapers offer the documentary
information about the 1930s in Lisbon is supplemented by Ricardo’s process of
appraisal. This means that Ricardo was aware of the complexities of locating
the nature of information in contemporary media. There is a slant through which
news is presented and filtered, and though this is something that is taken for
granted, it is Ricardo’s observations that make the narrative so interesting.
Saramago does not use quotations of any kind in his narrative to distinguish
between the subjectivity of Ricardo and the reportage that makes up content of
the newspapers. Moreover, the narrator seamlessly moves across the mental
consciousness of Ricardo along with the situations he is placed in without
indicating the transition. This creates an interesting effect which is seen in
the way the flow of the narrative takes the different circumstances, both
personal and public, placing them alongside each other. This does not take away
from the fact that the characterization of Ricardo is done to show his
peculiarity as an individual in the novel.
The mystery surrounding his personality
notwithstanding, Ricardo is presented as someone who is incapable of
cultivating the ‘objective’ point of view. This is very much in keeping with
the figure of Ricardo that Pessoa created in his world of heteronyms. As
Steffen Dix has argued, the element of objectivity was not part of the Pessoan
representation of Ricardo Reis:
Although Reis never explicitly describes what he
himself understood to be the concept of objectivity,
one can presume that it involves a certain inability to form abstract ideas or imagine a ‘whole.’ Reis is fully
aware that this incapacity to form abstract ideas would quickly appear an absurdity given that it is impossible to
think or communicate without abstract
concepts. (Dix 80)
This is an important point in the context of the
novel. The individualization of Ricardo is one of the necessary narrative
strategies that Saramago employs for the purpose of situating him in the world
of 1930s Portugal. Without this process of individualization, Ricardo’s
presence would not have been distinctive in the narrative. Newspapers and
social media, especially the responses of Ricardo to them, occupy an important
part in the novel. As is evident in the opening sequence of the narrative,
Ricardo does not respond equally to all news reports, but picks them in
accordance with his personal preferences. This is not about the news that he
has access to or is familiar with, but it has a bearing on those items that he
feels he would like to comment upon. In Saramago’s configuration, Ricardo’s
responses are not always articulated in words or presented as part of his
stated position regarding the different issues. What happens in the course of
the narrative shows the importance of the interplay of the self with society
with the platforms of different media playing their part in shaping the
readers’ perceptions. In his novel dealing with the play of these multiple
selves in conversation in public space Saramago visits not just the public
memory that presents the social world of Portugal, he also looks at the
contours of cultural life whose continuity is enhanced and marked by the
relationship between the self and society, especially through the social media
of the time.
Works
Cited
Buescu, Helena Caravalhao.
“Pessoa’s Unmodernity: Ricardo Reis”, in Fernando Pessoa’s
Modernity without Frontiers:
Influences, Dialogues and Responses ed. Mariana Gray
de Castro, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2013, pp. 75-86.
de Castro, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2013, pp. 75-86.
Dix, Steffen. “The Plurality of Gods and Man, or ‘The Aesthetic Attitude
in All Its Pagan
Splendor’ in Fernando Pessoa”, in The Pluralist,
Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010, pp. 73-93.
Kaufman, Helena. “Is The
Minor Essential?: Contemporary Portuguese Fiction and
Questions of Identity”, symplokē, Vol. 5, No. 1/2, 1997, pp. 167-182.
Questions of Identity”, symplokē, Vol. 5, No. 1/2, 1997, pp. 167-182.
Mahr, Greg. “Pessoa, Life
Narrative, and the Dissociative Process” Biography,
Vol. 21, No.
1, 1998, pp. 24-35.
1, 1998, pp. 24-35.
Reis, Ricardo. “Don’t Clap
Your Hands Before Beauty” trans. Richard Zenith, The Virginia
Quarterly Review,
Vol. 72, No. 2, 1996, pp. 299-300.
Saramago, Jose. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,
[1984] trans. Giovanni Pontiero,
London: Vintage, 2018.
Zenith, Richard. “Fernando
Pessoa and the Theatre of His Self” Performing
Arts Journal,
Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 47-49.
Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 47-49.