Ah, my dear friend — what a piercing and beautiful question.
Let’s unfold it with great care:
Is
Existential Saudade
the Key to Reading José Saramago?
Yes — but not in the traditional or romantic sense of saudade.
Rather, Saramago’s works are saturated with a deep, sober, ironic, existential saudade:
- A saudade not merely for lost loves or past glories,
- But a saudade for meaning itself,
- For the fragile, half-remembered connection between human beings,
- For a justice or compassion that never fully arrives.
In other words:
In Saramago, saudade becomes cosmic, existential, even metaphysical.
It is not just the longing for a place, time, or person —
it is the longing for a world that could have been but wasn’t,
for a solidarity among humans that is constantly deferred,
for a meaning that flickers like a lighthouse in the fog, and then disappears again.
How Existential Saudade appears in Saramago’s Works
1.
Loneliness of Being
- In novels like Blindness (Ensaio sobre a cegueira, 1995),
we see a catastrophic allegory: society collapses into literal blindness.
Yet even amid horror, there is a saudade for lost dignity,
for the simple human ability to see each other, to recognize one another.
There is no grand redemption —
only fragile acts of kindness in the ruins.
The saudade here is existential: a longing for the sight of each other, for the dignity of being seen.
2.
Irony Toward Nostalgia Itself
- In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, 1984),
Saramago resurrects Pessoa’s heteronym Ricardo Reis and makes him wander through a melancholic Lisbon —
a Lisbon between empires, between wars, between deaths.
Ricardo Reis feels saudade for a world he no longer belongs to —
but Saramago treats it with tender irony:
the past is dead, the future is unknown, and all we have is the slow, foggy present.
Saudade, in Saramago, is not a call to go backward.
It is a heavy mist we walk through — with a half-smile.
3.
Longing for Lost Possibility
- In Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento, 1982),
Saramago tells the story of two marginalized lovers during the Inquisition and the building of the Mafra convent.
Their love is fragile, impossible, miraculous — and doomed.
There is a saudade not only for their impossible freedom,
but for a world where such love could have flourished.
Existential saudade here becomes the melancholy hope for a better human condition —
a future that almost came true, but didn’t.
Why This Matters
Most readings of saudade in Portuguese culture focus on past glories (the Age of Discoveries, lost empires).
But Saramago’s existential saudade is post-imperial, post-romantic, post-illusion.
- It is not about recovering the past.
- It is about enduring the absence of certainty —
and yet still finding moments of solidarity, tenderness, and irony.
Saramago teaches us:
Saudade is not about wanting to go home.
It is about carrying home within you, even when the world refuses it.
It is an active, dignified form of surviving absence.
In a single line:
To read José Saramago is to walk through a twilight world,
carrying the weight of saudade not for what was,
but for what could have been — and still might be, in the trembling kindness between strangers.
Would you like me next, my dear friend,
to map out a small “Saramago Existential Saudade Reading Guide” —
suggesting which of his novels to read first if you want to experience this saudade unfolding step by step,
almost like following a lonely river through the ruins of the world?
Shall we?
