O espaço da memória em José Saramago: literatura e autobiografia

Abstract

Critical studies involving the work of José Saramago have mostly favored novels, beginning from Memorial do Convento (1982). Choosing a genre (the novel) and a phase (the writer's maturity) as the main object of its analysis, the literary critique ends up neglecting both its production prior to the 1980s and the autobiographical genre cultivated by the author. The latter assumes in the work of Saramago mainly the forms of diary (Cadernos de Lanzarote, Diaries I to V, 1994-1998) and childhood memories (As Pequenas Memórias, 2006). Considering this production, we intend to confront it with his prose of fiction, especially the novel Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia (1977), to hybrid texts like his chronicles (Deste Mundo e do Outro, 1971 and A Bagagem do Viajante, 1973), besides his poems, works of the first phase of the writer, in which the autobiographical element is more evident. Our intention is to investigate, through this comparison, how the work of Saramago developed in parallel with his personal and aesthetic formation, within a space whose fundamental element is the memory (personal, tradition, history and imaginary) eventually revealing , in any of the genres, an image of the author, deliberately and coherently constructed.