Travels, landscapes, languages: the greatness of the ephemeral in Saramago’s essays

Abstract

There is in Jose Saramago’s work a search for understanding the world toward the involvement of the Man with the Word. In his chronicles, produced over eight years (1968-1975), this relation is explored in several ways, since this genre oscillates from the everyday acts to the transcen­dental, from laughter to melancholy, from the subtle to the pamphlete­ering, becoming a kind of “style laboratory” for the future Nobel. Thus, the chronicles are a fundamental element in his formation, constructing several aspects of the author’s persona. In this article, three main axes are established: Travel, Landscape and Language; and it is from them that we can observe Saramago’s literary game composition. The first presents Jose Saramago as a homo viator, i. e., as someone in a continuous search to understand himself and the time and place in which he lives. The second visualizes a field that expands, and that encompasses several perspecti­ves to the chronicler does not be a mere observer of the “spectacle of the world”. The third, having the word as a central element, shows the chro­nicler as a reader of the tradition and as a questioning and ironic writer.