Pedro Fernandes, professor at the Department of Literature at UFRN, develops, together with the José Saramago Chair at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), the post-doctoral project “José Saramago and his work outside of books”. The initiative, in addition to research into José Saramago's estate, available at the National Library of Portugal, at the foundation that bears the writer's name and in other archives of the Portuguese cultural press, includes a series of activities, such as the articulation of academic partnerships, the holding of events, the organization of dossiers for academic journals and the publication of books.
Pedro Fernandes' research seeks to map publications of short stories in newspapers and magazines in the first years of José Saramago's dedication to literature. “These are texts that did not make it into books and demonstrate that the commonly held idea that the writer had stopped writing or even publishing in the long time between his failed debut as a novelist, in 1947, and the first moments of his consecration, in 1980, is false,” observes the professor.
"Saramago is located in the exact opposite position of the myth of the inspired type. All his genius was built at the cost of the expensive obsession imposed by literature and the result of extensive work", highlights Pedro Fernandes. Before being recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature — until now, the only one awarded to a Portuguese-speaking writer —, Saramago worked in various professions, from a locksmith mechanic to an editor, from a department employee to a translator, he was also in charge of the newspaper Diário Notícias, but he never stopped building, in a self-taught way, an intellectual formation that included nightly reading at the Biblioteca Municipal Palácio Galveias and the activity of writing.
If the newspapers, magazines and periodicals reveal the writer's various attempts to assert himself among the authors of his time, the estate presents other fronts of this same effort. This is the case, highlights Pedro Fernandes, of texts that did not even pass the editors' scrutiny, either because they were rejected, or because Saramago himself refused to send them for eventual publication.
The professor mentions two cases. “Cheia”, for example, is a text that appears registered as published in the magazine Vértice, a magazine founded in Coimbra and which in the 1940s was a space of resistance to the dictatorship of the Estado Novo, but, in fact, the story appears to have been sent, as recorded in handwriting in the typescript and rejected; The same situation applies to “Death of a Man”, recorded as published in the newspaper Diário de Lisboa.
José Saramago's presence in the press at the beginning of his career was sparse. Smaller than that known and hitherto recorded in biographies. But, it is varied. It goes through several expressions: poetry, essays, literary criticism. And there are unpublished ones that are not among the more than a dozen short stories in his collection dating from the end of the 1950s. This is the case of the short story “Lezíria”, located by Pedro Fernandes and which justifies the initial hypothesis of his project, that of texts existing in the press with which he collaborated that, in addition to being published in books, were left out of the inventories made until now.
These and the collection materials are texts that demonstrate the genesis of several themes dear to Saramaguian literature: “the imperatives of bureaucracy, injustice towards the most humble, the precariousness of life in a country subjected to a regime that kept it isolated for almost half a century; they also demonstrate the formation of its unique style of narration, born, visibly, from the gesture of listening to and recording the stories told by simple people” — records Pedro Fernandes.
In other words, as he uncovers some inconsistencies that passed into the writer's biography as established truths, the professor's study clarifies certain genesis. Also in terms of dates, it is worth highlighting the case of the publication of what was José Saramago's third novel, Manual de painting and calligraphy: "It is the third because, after Terra do Pecado — published with that title because the editorial seal did not see commercial appeal in the original title, The Widow —, he wrote Claraboia, a book that, after being sent to a publisher, was lost until the rediscovery of the typescript, when the writer was already famous. Claraboia is from 1953, but Saramago refused to have it published during his lifetime, and the book only came out a year after his death, in 2011. Well, Manual de Pintura e Caligraphy is the third novel, although there have been several or